He smiled and said, “So how come you’re sitting way over there?”
I immediately slid over to his side of the truck and tucked myself under his arm.
“You really didn’t tell her?”
“I really didn’t. I wanted to, but didn’t.”
He slid his hand inside my sweater and I laid my head on his shoulder.
“Did Whitley shoot her, Dwight? Because of the baby?”
“I don’t know, shug. We don’t even know he’s the father. Or that he and Tracy were hooked up.”
“Portland doesn’t think they were. She thinks Tracy was too much of a snob to go out with a sheriff’s deputy.”
The instant I said it, I wished I could take it back. Dwight and I had never discussed this aspect of our relationship.
“Officers don’t fraternize with enlisted?”
“I guess.”
“She think you were slumming?”
I pulled back indignantly, but his arm still curved around me.
“Oh, c’mon, Deb’rah. You know it’s crossed a lot of minds. A college-educated judge marrying a dumb ex-Army cop?”
I heard the confident chuckle in his voice and relaxed against him again. “So you finally admit that I’m smarter than you?” I teased.
“Nope, just got more book learning. Take Andrew and April. She’s a teacher, he dropped out of high school at sixteen, and look how good their marriage is. Look at my dad and mom. Hell, your own dad and mom.”
“Mother didn’t go to college.”
“No, but she came from a solid middle-class family full of relatives who did, yet turned around and married a man who quit school in the sixth grade. If our mothers had been hung up on college degrees, you and I wouldn’t be here.”
Straight ahead of us, through the windshield, the new moon gleamed in the western sky like a shallow silver bowl. Dwight and I would be married before the bowl was full again.
The Christmas moon.
A honey-sweet moon, even if we weren’t taking a proper wedding trip.
“Poor Tracy,” I said. “And poor Don Whitley, too, if he loved her.”
“If,” Dwight said.
He and Portland could have their doubts. I kept remembering Sunday night and Whitley’s sad eyes.
“I know you always say he’s a good officer—all the arrests he’s made, all the drug money he’s confiscated—but he really doesn’t seem like a cold-blooded killer.”
“Not every killer’s cold-blooded,” he reminded me. “He may not look the type, but he sure was out working alone Friday night. No alibi. And taking off like this doesn’t look good. We’ve searched his trailer. Doesn’t look like he packed a bag or anything. Plus he hasn’t used a credit card since Sunday morning. We’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
“You think he’s gone somewhere to kill himself?”
Dwight took a long deep breath. “He wouldn’t be the first lawman to shoot his woman and then turn the gun on himself.”
I put my hand on his leg and patted it consolingly. “If he killed Tracy and Mei, then maybe that’s the best way out of this mess. Save the state a trial.”
Kayra Stewart and Nolan Capps arrived as I finished freshening up for the shower. They were immediately followed by Dwight’s younger brother, Rob.
Even looking closely, it would be hard for a stranger to tell that Rob and Dwight were related. He’s a couple of inches shorter, thin and wiry, with their mother’s bright red hair, grass green eyes, and pointed, almost foxlike features, while Dwight has their father’s solid muscular build, thick brown hair, open face, and brown eyes.
Rob set a shopping bag filled with Tupperware boxes on the table. “Kate and Mother kicked me out, but Kayra and I managed to snitch this much food on our way out the back door.”
“He lies,” said Kayra. “Grandma and Miss Emily fixed this for us.”
Dwight grinned. “All lawyers are liars, honey. Look at his nose. Yours’ll start growing, too, the minute you pass the bar exam.”
“We thought he could help us go through the files,” said Nolan.
“I tried to tell them I know damn all about criminal law,” Rob said. His was a wills and trusts practice in Raleigh’s Cameron Village. “I haven’t seen the inside of a courtroom in four or five years.”
As they peeled off their jackets and sweaters, Kayra and Nolan reported on their day’s activities and what they’d learned from a former neighbor of Martha Hurst’s, a Mrs. Apple.
“You remember that anonymous phone call?”
“What about it?” asked Dwight.
“It came from her friend who lived next door. She noticed the guy’s car parked behind the trailer after Martha
