The older woman put her hand to her throat. “A warrant?”
“Yes, ma’am.” She held it out.
“It’s so late. I was about to get ready for bed. Can’t you come back in the morning?”
“I’m afraid not, ma’am.”
“But you can’t just come in here and stomp around my 32 house and go through my things,” she said, her temper flaring. “This is America. What gives you the right?”
“This search warrant,” Richards said, offering it to her again.
Mrs. Harper snatched it from her hand and read it through from first sentence to last signature while the deputies waited outside in the chilled night air. It had begun to rain and the rain was predicted to turn into sleet by morning.
“I want to call an attorney,” said Mrs. Harper.
“Fine,” said Richards, “but we’re going to start our search now. You can make this easy or you can make it hard. It’s up to you.” Struck by sudden inspiration, she added, “Besides, what would the Colonel say? It was his gun, wasn’t it?”
Mrs. Harper stiffened, and then, in another of the sudden mood swings they had seen before, she crumbled.
Tears flooded her eyes. “I didn’t mean to kill him. I just wanted to scare him. Make him stop throwing his beer cans on the Colonel’s road. Every day, another Bud Light can. I yelled at him once and he just gave me the finger and kept on going like he was king of the world and everybody else could clean up his mess. It got to the point that he’d wait till he saw me to toss a can because some days, if I went early, there might not be any Bud Lights. But if I was there, he’d slow down and throw out three or four cans at a time, like he’d saved them up just to spit on the Colonel’s good name. But I never meant to kill him. I just wanted to shoot out his window. Let
Mayleen Richards shook her head. Not marksmanship, after all. Just an unlucky shot. And here they’d been fig- uring trajectories and angles, trying to work out how Overholt or Miguel Diaz’s brother-in-law could have known when and where to be, when all along it was just a little old lady with a bee in her bonnet about honoring her father’s memory.
The gun was in Colonel Frampton’s dresser drawer. It appeared to have been cleaned and oiled since its last firing, but that was not too surprising for a woman who was so obsessively neat that even her coffee-table magazines were stacked in a graduated pile with the edges precisely aligned to the edge of the table.
As they came back down the hallway with the gun, McLamb stopped to look at the medals and commendations that were framed and hung on the wall alongside certificates for proficiency and meritorious service.
Richards started to pass by and then her eye was snagged by the name on one of the marksmanship certificates: it was signed by a Captain John Forlines and it had been issued to Lydia Frampton Harper for scoring a 98% at a Fort Benning target range. The certificate was dated fifteen years earlier.
They had gone to bed early themselves and were almost asleep when the call came through. Deborah gave a sleepy protest, but she rolled over to listen to Dwight’s end of the conversation. When Dwight snapped his phone back into the charger on the nightstand and said,
“Can you believe it?” she replied, “Believe that Mrs.
Harper shot J.D.? Sure.”
“Not that she shot him, but that she kept her marksmanship certificate hanging on the wall.”
“Rack another one up for pride,” Deborah murmured as she fitted herself back into the curve of his arms.
“Pride? I’d call it arrogance.”
“Close enough,” she said and her lips found his while the cold winter rain beat against their windows.
Document Outline
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
