“Why you here wanting to know about Roy Hurst?” she asked, giving Kayra and Nolan deeply suspicious looks.
“Because Martha Hurst is about to be put to death for killing him, and we thought you might have remembered something after all these years,” they explained. “Something that could help her.”
“I don’t remember nothing.” The woman was so bone thin that her shoulder blades were sharply outlined beneath the dark red uniform shirt she wore, but she wielded the heavy mop and bucket with surprising strength. Kayra found it impossible to guess her age. There was no visible gray in her lanky brown hair, but from the wear and tear on her face, she could have been anywhere from thirty to sixty.
“Did you see him at all that Saturday?” Kayra persisted. “Y’all were together back then, right?”
“No.”
“We heard you were going to have his baby.”
“You heard wrong.”
“He didn’t get you pregnant?”
“You people cops or something?”
She sloshed her mop up and down in the bucket of disinfectant, then plopped it out on the tiles. Nolan had to step back smartly to avoid getting his sneakers wet as she pushed it back and forth.
“We’re not cops,” he said. “My mom was a friend of Martha’s. We heard she was your friend, too.”
“I got nothing against Martha,” said Deenie Gates, and her mouth tightened in a grim line. “But I don’t know nothing about her killing Roy and that’s all I got to say. I got work to do.”
Again the passive aggression of her dripping wet mop threatened their shoes and they retreated.
That afternoon, Dwight had Daniel Ruiz brought into an interrogation room. Ruiz was early thirties, with a chubby face and brown eyes that, at first glance, appeared sleepy and relaxed. It was only later that one noticed how wary and alert they were beneath those drooping eyelids. His English was good and, unlike other Latinos caught in this situation, he did not pretend he needed an interpreter. Nevertheless, for all the comprehension he showed to Dwight’s questions, Dwight might as well have been speaking Russian.
No, he hadn’t been offered a deal. How could there be a deal when he was innocent? Oh, and he was truly sorry to hear about the beautiful ADA’s death, but there had been no understanding between them.
Missing drugs and money? But he’d known nothing about the drugs and money in that car. It wasn’t even his car, merely one he was driving down to Florida as a personal favor to an elderly friend who was spending the winter there.
Don Whitley? Was that the officer who shot the lady DA? Sorry. He had been treated courteously by the officers who arrested and booked him, but they hadn’t exchanged business cards and he didn’t know their names.
“Yeah, right,” said Dwight and signaled to the bailiff to take Ruiz back to his cell.
He hadn’t been back in his own office ten minutes when Doug Woodall appeared in his doorway.
“I thought you were down in Makely.”
“Miss Helen said you called about the Ruiz case? I hope to hell you’ve got something we can use on that slick bastard.”
“Sorry,” said Dwight and told him about Whitley and the deal it appeared that Tracy was making with Ruiz. “Did you authorize it?”
“Hell, no! Not that I wouldn’t have if she’d asked me. A dirty officer’s worth ten Ruizes and you know it, Bryant. Damn!” Doug Woodall was far too political not to consider the lost enhancement for his tough-on-all-crime reputation.
“Well, well, well,” he said as he continued to put all the pieces together. “Little Tracy was fixing to grab herself some headlines, wasn’t she? Taking down a crooked officer? Puts her name right out there as the defender of truth, justice, and the American way.”
“Worked for you, didn’t it?” Dwight asked sardonically. “Getting the death penalty for a white woman?”
Doug grinned. “Martha Hurst? Hell yes. And if I decide not to run for DA next time, Tracy would’ve been nicely positioned for the job. Nobody else on my staff has her combination of smarts and ambition.”
“Maybe she planned to run next election no matter what you decided,” Dwight said.
Doug’s face relaxed into a confident smile. “She try that and I’d’ve had her for breakfast.”
“Yeah? Seems to me that prosecutorial misconduct’s as good an issue to run on as crooked officers skimming drug money. How’d you feel about her looking into the Hurst trial?”
“Didn’t bother me a bit. That was an open-and-shut case based on solid facts provided by this office and the SBI. She could look from now to election day and not find a damn thing.” But as he considered Tracy’s ulterior motives for questioning the Hurst trial, his indignation grew. “Well, damn! You think she was going to try to take
After Woodall left, Dwight called a meeting of the detective and drug interdiction squads and they exchanged reports of the day’s findings, from the slug that Jones had picked up this morning to the notes on Tracy Johnson’s legal pad.
“Hey, no fuckin’ way!” said Eddie Lloyd when told that Whitley had been pocketing cash and drugs from some of the stops. His brown eyes flashed angrily. “He kill her because she was going to dump him, that’s one thing. But kill her and the baby because one scumbag said he was dirty? Shit, Major. That don’t fly.”
Mike Castleman sat silently with the same sick look on his handsome face that he got every time he was forcibly reminded of little Mei’s death.
“Mike?”
