Rituals of the Season

“And it’s because you were friends that you could get him to meet you at Ryder Creek after you read that e- mail he sent you Sunday night,” Dwight said inexorably. “That wasn’t a suicide note. That was a heads-up from a colleague who was going to turn you in. What’d you do? Tell him you could show him proof that it was Lloyd who was dirty and that he was the one shot Tracy?”

Castleman’s handsome face had gone pasty.

“You were in court with her that morning. Something she said about Ruiz must have tipped you off that there was a deal in the works and what it was. You heard her say she was driving back early, so you waited out there on the interstate for her, shot her, and then pretended you were on a regular patrol. Immediately after the crash, her cell phone was seen in its holder, yet by the time Denning got there, it had disappeared. It and her Palm Pilot, too. And you were first officer on the scene.”

“You were skimming the take?” Eddie Lloyd exclaimed.

Dwight nodded. “I talked to Ruiz’s defense attorney. We thought it was Whitley he was going to finger. It wasn’t. It was you, Castleman.”

“No!” Mike Castleman stood up so abruptly that Richards’s hand went for her gun as his chair crashed to the floor behind him.

“I’m a father.” He looked at them beseechingly. “I have a daughter. I wouldn’t have killed a little girl. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t.”

“Maybe not if you’d known she was in the car,” Dwight said. “That’s what you said at Jerry’s Sunday night. You didn’t notice the car seat. You were concentrating on the driver.”

“Michael Castleman,” said Bo Poole, “you’re under arrest for the murders of Tracy Johnson, Mei Johnson, and Donald Whitley.”

As they slipped the handcuffs on, Dwight motioned to Richards. “You and Jamison. Get a search warrant and turn his place inside out. Look for her cell phone and Palm Pilot and find out what he did with the money.”

“We’ll look,” said Richards, “but I bet he was using it to pay his daughter’s tuition. And he said he was getting her a new car for Christmas.”

Dwight reached for his phone and dialed Deborah’s number. When she answered, he said, “Ready to go home?”

“I’m at the hospital,” she told him.

“Huh?”

“It’s okay. Nobody’s hurt, but see if you can find Kayra and Nolan and tell them to meet us in your office. His mother was right. Martha Hurst didn’t kill her stepson.”

“What’s the matter?” asked Bo, who’d been watching his face. “She’s not leaving you at the altar, is she?”

CHAPTER 25

A lady who has children, or one accustomed to perform for herself light household duties, will soon find the advantage of wearing materials that will wash.

Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, 1873

Told by an impatient Mary Pat that he needed to choose between dinosaurs and footballs now! , Cal picked a dark blue set printed in stars and planets, only to learn that kid prints didn’t come queen size. Happily, almost as soon as we got to the larger sizes, he spotted white wolves howling to a midnight Arctic sky. “Look at the paw prints on the sheets,” he told Jake and Mary Pat.

We bought sheets, pillowcases, and comforter and a couple of goose-down pillows for Cal, and as we passed a machine on the way out of the store, I gave them quarters for jawbreaker bubble gum.

After linens came toys. We crossed the half-mile-long parking lot to the other side of the outlet mall and descended upon Mertz’s, one of those big-box chain stores that sell everything from shoes and clothes to upholstered furniture and garden supplies. The kids looked at bicycles and skateboards and I made mental notes of the things that seemed to interest Cal so that I could tell Dwight.

When she turns twenty-five, Mary Pat is due to inherit an enormous trust fund, but for now, she was anxiously worried that her allowance wouldn’t stretch to cover a stuffed dog she wanted to get for Kate’s new baby next month.

“Everybody have all your Christmas presents wrapped and hidden?” I asked.

“I don’t,” said Cal. “I don’t know what to get you and Dad.”

“Me? I’m easy. Anything chocolate works for me. When I was a little girl, Santa Claus always brought me a box of chocolate-covered cherries. The dark ones. Not milk chocolate. It hasn’t felt like a real Christmas since I grew up because nobody ever gives them to me anymore and I can’t buy them for myself.”

“You can’t?” They were intrigued by the notion of forbidden sweets.

“Well, I could, I suppose, but that would be like cheating. No, I guess I’ll have to spend the rest of my Christmases without them. Besides, they probably don’t even make the bittersweet kind these days.” I gave a dramatic sigh as Mary Pat and Cal exchanged significant glances. “But for your dad? He’s really hard. Let me think.”

“Not clothes.”

“Not clothes,” I agreed, thinking of the beautiful brown sweater I’d bought Dwight when I held court up in the mountains in October. Normally I wait till the last minute to go Christmas shopping. I love the crowds, the decorated stores, the sales. This year, though, as soon as I knew what our Christmas was going to entail, I’d begun picking up gifts. Now they were squirreled away in my garage like a stash of acorns against a winter storm. “So how much were you thinking to spend?”

“Well, I have twenty-seven dollars and eighty-nine cents, but I still need to get something for Grandma.” Cal looked up at me in hopeful earnestness and I wanted so badly to hug him. He was going to be built like Dwight and he had Dwight’s brown eyes, with a light sprinkle of Rob and Beth’s freckles across his little nose.