“Easy enough to be the favorite if you bring her a But-1 terfinger every week and sweet-talk her for two minutes and then don’t lift your finger to do a damn thing to help out the rest of the time. Nita does more for her than he ever does and she’s a Mexican.”
“Nita?”
“J.D.’s wife.”
“J.D. have anybody gunning for him that you know of?”
“Nita’s brother maybe? He cussed J.D. out in Mexican and said he’d put a beating on him if he ever hit Nita or the kids again. But that was just talk. He’s not even tall as me. J.D. punched him in the face and that was two months ago. Mexicans, they got hot tempers, too, and I don’t know as he’d wait two months and then come after him with a gun, do you? Less’n Nita got him riled up today?”
Dwight sighed and asked for directions to Nita Rouse’s brother’s house.
“What about J.D., Dwight? What’ll I tell Mama when she wants to know where he is?”
Dwight explained the need for an autopsy before the body could be released for burial and promised that someone would notify the family.
Back at the site of the wreck, more people on their way home had stopped to gawk and ask questions. The crime scene van was there now and Percy Denning had set up floodlights to facilitate taking pictures that might one day bolster the State’s case against the shooter. Assuming they could find him.
Or her, thought Dwight with a wry tip of his hat to his wife. Not that he needed Deborah’s opinionated reminder that women are just as capable of murder as men.
He watched as Rouse’s body was moved to the rescue truck to be transported to the medical examiner in Chapel Hill.
Among his officers working the scene was Deputy Mayleen Richards and he motioned to her. “You speak Spanish, don’t you?”
Tall and sturdily built with a face full of freckles inherited from her redheaded father, the younger woman nodded. “A little. I’ve been taking lessons out at Colleton Community.”
“Way the state’s going, I probably ought to join you,”
he said. “How ’bout you come with me to tell his wife she’s a widow now? I understand she’s Mexican.”
“Sure,” said Richards, grateful that darkness hid the hot flush she had felt in her cheeks when he spoke of joining her in Spanish class.
She lifted her head to the cold north wind, grateful for its bite, and started toward the patrol unit she and Jamison had driven out from Dobbs, but her boss gestured toward his truck. “Ride with me and I’ll tell you what we have so far.”
With a flaming red face, Richards did as she was told.
Nevertheless, as he turned the key in the ignition, she could not suppress the surge of happiness she felt sitting there beside him.
C H A P T E R
2
After court adjourned that chilly Thursday evening, I killed time till my meeting with a quick visit to my friend Portland Brewer, who was still on ma-ternity leave from the law practice she shares with her husband, Avery.
Carolyn Deborah Brewer is about eighteen hours younger than my nearly one-month marriage to Dwight Bryant, and I was still enchanted with both of them. She’s twenty-one inches long, has fuzzy little black curls all over her tiny head, and smells of baby powder. He’s six-three, has a head of thick brown hair, and smells of Old Spice. I love kissing both, but only one kisses back, and as soon as my meeting adjourned a little after eight, I phoned to let that one know I was on my way.
“I was just about to call you,” he said. “I’m running late, too. Want me to pick up something for supper?”
“We still have half of that roast chicken and some gravy from yesterday,” I reminded him. “Hot sandwiches and a green salad?”
“Sounds good to me. I’ll be there as soon as I drop Richards off and see if Denning has anything else for us right now.”
I rang off without asking questions. Denning? That meant a crime scene. And if he had Richards with him, that meant at least one other detective on the scene with Denning.
Which all added up to something serious.
I’m as curious as the next person—“Curious?” say my brothers. “Try nosy.”—but a cell phone is not the best place to ask questions. If the incident was something Dwight could tell me about, he would be more open face-to- face over a hot meal.
I’m a district court judge, he’s chief deputy of the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department, which generates a large proportion of the cases that get tried in our judicial district. We had forged a separation of powers treaty shortly after our engagement back in October—he doesn’t talk about things that have a chance of showing up in my courtroom, I don’t ask questions till after they are disposed of, and everyone at the courthouse knows not to schedule me for any district court cases where he has to testify. Fortunately, most of Dwight’s work concerns major felonies that are automatically tried in supe-rior court, so we actually have more freedom of communication than we
