skull in a fairly straight line. It looked like a .45-caliber slug, but she would get it officially confirmed.
When she finished reporting on the rest of their investigation, Dwight told her that he probably would not be in the next day and asked if Sheriff Poole was around.
“Sorry, sir. I think he’s gone for the weekend. Anything I can do for you?”
His troubles with Jonna were nothing that he wanted to share with his subordinates. “That’s okay. I’ll catch up with him tomorrow.”
C H A P T E R
6
Friday afternoon, 21 January
Some of Dwight’s deputies spent Friday sifting through the life J.D. Rouse abruptly quit living when someone sent a bullet through his head on Thursday night. Before Mayleen Richards headed over to Chapel Hill for the autopsy, she had asked Jack Jamison and Raeford McLamb to backtrack on Rouse’s last day.
“Well, shit!” Red Bixley had said when they caught up with him on the job Friday morning. A pugnacious white man with a face as weathered as an unpainted fence post, he was the owner of a roofing company that was subcon-tracted to a builder in the northern part of Colleton County. “J.D.’s the fourth worker I’ve lost this week. I thought I was through climbing up on roofs, but if I don’t get lucky this weekend, that’s exactly what I’m going to be doing come Monday morning if I hope to meet the schedule.”
Six men were up on the multiangled roof of the half- built house behind him, and their hammers beat out an uneven rhythm in the frosty air. Another four men scrambled around on top of the adjacent house as a fifth and sixth man hoisted up a fresh bundle of shingles. Both houses were three stories tall and dormers sprouted from jutting angles with no apparent logic.
When asked what kind of employee Rouse had been, Bixley shrugged. “He carried his share of the load. Didn’t bust his ass, but probably did as much as any of the rest.”
“Was he liked?” Deputy Jamison persisted. “Did you like him?”
Again the shrug. “Would I have a beer with him? Sure.
More than that? No, I can’t say as I would. He could have a mean mouth on him, y’know? Not with me, but with some of the others.”
“Anybody in particular?”
As if realizing that naming names might leave him five men short instead of the current four, Bixley denied that Rouse had mixed it up with anybody in particular. “Besides,” he said, “didn’t you say he was shot on his way home? Well, he was always first off the job. In his truck and gone before the last man was down the ladder, so none of my guys could’ve done it.”
“We think he stopped to buy beer on the way,” said Jamison. “That would’ve slowed him down a little.”
They became aware that the hammering had slacked off as the workmen high above them strained to hear what was going on.
“We’re going to need to speak to your men,” McLamb told him. “Who was working with him yesterday?”
Bixley grumbled about getting further behind sched-6 ule, but signaled to one of the men hoisting shingles to come over.
Juan Lunas listened impassively when Bixley introduced the two officers and told him why they were there.
Like his boss, he denied knowing of any serious animosity between Rouse and the rest, a mix of African Americans, Anglos, and Mexicans.
McLamb tried to push him, but Lunas gave him the same shrug his boss had. “He don’ like your people and he don’ like mine. He works with us, but he don’ like us.”
“But his wife is Mexican,” said Jamison.
A wry smile flitted across the man’s face. “Yeah,” he said.
Although they had then questioned the rest of the roofers, no one would admit any serious problems with Rouse. Except for Bixley and Rouse, they rode to work together in twos and threes and could alibi one another.
“Besides,” said one of the black guys, “by the time the rest of us cranked up, he was out of sight.”
From the building site, there were two equally short routes back to Rideout Road where the shooting had occurred. They had no luck along the first route, but when they came to the first convenience store along the second route, the owner looked at the picture and said, “Yeah, I remember him.”
There was a sour note in his voice.
“You see him yesterday?”
“Naw, it was last week. He don’t stop here no more.”
“What happened?”
“Ah, guys like him piss me off. Think they own the world and like you’re gonna go broke if they quit buying from you. If he’s in trouble, you can bet he went looking for it. He comes back here again, I’ll bust his nose.”
Since the guy was at least six feet tall and built like an oak tree, they could believe he was capable of it.
He was still pretty frosted so he did not have to be urged to tell them why. He said Rouse had begun stopping
