“I see. And Whitley’s prints?”
“One perfect set. It’s like he picked up this pristine bottle one time and never changed the position of his fingers.”
“So somebody got cute.”
“Not cute enough. That little strip of plastic off the cap that we found under the seat? There’s a partial thumbprint and it’s not Whitley’s. I don’t know if there’s enough to get a hit, but I’ll run it through AFIS.”
After Denning left, Dwight placed a call to Chapel Hill. As he hung up, Bo Poole came back from lunch and did an exaggerated double take upon seeing him behind the desk. “I thought I told you not to come back till you were married.”
“Sorry, Bo, but we’ve got a little problem.”
“Let me get this straight,” said the sheriff when Dwight finished explaining. “A bullet that was fired the same night Tracy Johnson died, a bullet that may have killed her if that’s her fleck of blood, wound up in a car headed to Georgia?”
“That’s right.”
“It’s from the same gun Don Whitley used to shoot himself Sunday night?”
“That’s what Denning says.”
“And the slug Silas Lee found on Wednesday morning? It’s from the same damn gun?”
“Denning says it wasn’t even messed up much, so it was easy to match it up.”
“Real convenient, won’t it?” said Bo. The faster his mind worked, the slower his folksy drawl. “Wanted to make sure we’d tie the gun to both deaths, didn’ he?”
Dwight nodded. “We’ve talked about how Tracy was backtracking on the Martha Hurst case and we all know that Silas Lee was in charge of that investigation. Tracy gets shot and when the metal detectors don’t turn up the slug right away, guess who just happens to finds it?”
“A little extra insurance,” said Bo. “Slick.”
“Not really,” Dwight said and told him about the extremely clean bourbon bottle. “No prints from the ABC clerk that sold it to him and bagged it up. None of Whitley’s prints when he took it out of the bag or put it in his car or picked it up more than once when he was working up the nerve to shoot himself. I just talked to the ME who did his autopsy. They found a huge amount of sleeping pills in his bloodstream.”
“In the bourbon?”
“Maybe. Denning’s going to check it.”
“How you want to handle it?” asked Bo when they had discussed all the probabilities.
“First I need to make one more phone call and then I thought I’d get the whole search team in here, see if any of them saw him plant the slug.”
Eddie Lloyd and Mike Castleman were out on the interstate, Silas Lee was in court upstairs, and both uniforms were on patrol. It took a good hour to call them all back in, and Dwight used that hour to put some pressure on Daniel Ruiz’s attorney, who blustered and squirmed and talked about client confidentiality and eventually told him what he needed to know.
“Let’s go into the conference room,” said Dwight when Mayleen Richards came to tell him they were all there. “Leave your guns out here.”
That startled them into uneasiness. Except for Denning, they were unaware of why they’d been summoned for this meeting, and they looked at one anther in puzzlement, but did as ordered, then filed into the conference room and took chairs around the table.
Richards remained standing by the open door with her own weapon visible.
Dwight quickly laid it out for them, beginning with the discovery of a third matching bullet less than two hours earlier. “Except that it appears to be the first one, the one that killed Tracy Johnson and caused the car crash that then killed her little girl. The third slug is what killed Don Whitley. The second one is the one that you found in the road bank, Jones.”
“Yeah,” said Sheriff Poole. “Want to tell us again exactly how that happened, Detective Jones?” His tone made a sarcasm out of Silas Lee’s title.
Jones might not have been the sharpest detective on the squad, but he was not a complete idiot either. “Hey, you saying I planted it? That I killed Whitley? That’s crazy! I wasn’t even the one that laid off that part of the grid.”
“Who was?” asked Dwight.
“It was Castleman. And he kept bugging me to go slower, be more careful.”
All eyes turned to Mike Castleman.
The deputy brushed back a black curl from his forehead and gave a deprecating smile. “Hey, now, guys. Wait just a damn minute here. Yeah, I may have gridded off where the trajectory could have gone, but Denning and Lloyd were the ones who figured out the perimeters.”
“But we didn’t work that part of the bank at all,” Denning said quietly. “Only you and Jones here.”
Silas Lee Jones was still working it out on his fingers. “One of us killed Ms. Johnson and then shot Whitley, too? Why?”
“Yeah, why?” asked Eddie Lloyd, leaning in on Castleman, his wiry body as tight as a coiled spring.
“Not you, too, Eddie? Why would I shoot him?” said Castleman. “We were partners, friends.”
