“I’ve already put it under the microscope,” Denning said. “It came from Whitley’s .44, all right.”
So that was that, thought Dwight as he continued on to his office. Whitley and Johnson and an affair that went sour. Because she was a snob like Deborah thought? Too concerned with class differences to be seen with him openly? Or did the baby she carried complicate things? They would probably never know. But at least it cleared Tracy’s murder off his plate, and if the citizenry would just behave themselves between now and next Wednesday, maybe he and Deborah could get married in peace.
As he approached his office, a uniformed officer passed him in the hall with an armload of brightly colored boxes and a “Joy to the World” smile on his face. “Toy drive’s picking up, Major!”
Every year the department collected toys for needy children, which reminded him that he still hadn’t shopped for Cal. He couldn’t decide between a dirt bike for the farm or a ten-speed for the town up in Virginia. His thoughts were interrupted by Mayleen Richards, who came down the hall with a yellow legal pad in her hand.
“Um, Major Bryant? I think you need to take a look at this.”
She laid the pad on his desk, the pages curled back on themselves to show a page six or eight sheets down. “We found this at Ms. Johnson’s house. That’s her handwriting.”
He studied the figures with a sinking heart. “Shit!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay, Richards. I’ll take it from here,” he said.
She hesitated, then accepted the dismissal.
Dwight lifted his phone and called the DA’s number. “Miss Helen? Dwight Bryant. Is Mr. Woodall in the courthouse today?”
“Sorry, honey,” came the voice of Doug Woodall’s longtime secretary. “He’s in superior court in Makely. Won’t be in till tomorrow morning.”
“Do you know if the Ruiz trial’s still on the calendar for tomorrow?”
“Well, such as it is without that deputy that went and killed himself. Brandon Frazier’s going to handle it best he can, but just between you and me and the doorknob, honey, that guy’s gonna walk.”
Dwight read over Tracy’s notes again. “Time served?” she’d written. Sure looked like she was getting ready to cut a deal with this Danno R. He was evidently claiming that he’d had twelve packets of drugs and a hundred twenty thousand in cash when Don Whitley stopped him. By the time it got to the property clerk, the twelve packets had dwindled to ten and the cash was down to eighty thou. If he was reading her notes correctly, she was willing to deal; to let Ruiz off with time served if he could prove that Don Whitley had skimmed his stash. Which the guy would no doubt be able to do. Civilians were always surprised to hear how often drug runners gave one another countersigned receipts—so many grams received, so much cash to make more buys—like a handshake ought to mean more in that world than it did in the straight world these days.
“12 pkts (1 gm ea) > 10”?
He called the DA’s office and got Brandon Frazier, who told him that the drug found in Ruiz’s car was cocaine. “Why?”
“No reason. Just doing some paperwork over here,” Dwight said, unwilling to let the word out about Whitley just yet.
Had his deputy been a user or had he been dealing on the side himself?
He called the ME’s office, and after the phone rang six times for the doctor doing Whitley’s autopsy, her voice mail kicked in. “Dwight Bryant here,” he said. “Do me a favor and run a tox screen on Whitley. See if he was doing coke.”
After that, he carried Tracy’s legal pad across the hall to show Bo Poole.
“He shot her with the gun he used on himself, but it wasn’t about love or sex,” he told his boss. “She was going to put him in prison.”
“Whitley was dirty?” the sheriff asked.
“How else would you read her notes? It was his testimony that was going to put Ruiz away, so Ruiz decides to take a plea and turn it back on Whitley.”
“Then Tracy tells him what she has planned for him: ‘No more pattycake, buster, you’re going down.’ So he shoots her, hears she’s pregnant, then kills himself in remorse?”
Dwight nodded. “So what do you think, Bo? Do I try to make this Ruiz guy confirm what Tracy knew or do we just let the law play out in the courtroom tomorrow?”
“Either way, he was going to walk, right?”
“If he could help her build a case against Whitley, she was probably going to cut him loose. He’s been a guest in our jail since July. Five months. Almost what he’ll wind up serving if convicted.”
“Which Doug don’t think’s gonna happen if we believe all his pissing and moaning yesterday.” Poole leaned back in his chair. “You can talk with Ruiz, but what the hell’s the point? He’s not going to plead now that Tracy and Whitley are both dead. Not when he can walk out a free man tomorrow with no record. Any chance of recovering the money?”
“I doubt it. Jamison and Richards searched his place when they picked up his DNA samples. They flipped through his bank statements, but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. I’ll have ’em take a closer look. They did find an expensive gold bracelet that he gave Tracy and she gave back to him. What happened to the rest of the money, though . . .” Dwight gave a palms-up shrug. “He told Castleman that money wouldn’t be a problem if he quit the department.”
“Oh, hell, let it go,” said Bo. “Even if you found a pot of cash sitting in his checking account, without Ruiz, you couldn’t prove he didn’t save it clipping grocery coupons out of the
Out at the hospital, Deenie Gates had positioned the folding yellow plastic board beside the door to the second-floor men’s room. It read, CAUTION—WET FLOOR, although she hadn’t yet begun to mop.
