MARGARET MARON
I closed his door. “Did Mayleen Richards learn much
from those migrants yesterday?”
He shook his head. “She couldn’t pry a thing out of
them except that the two women did see Mrs. Harris
take that tumble into the mud. They didn’t tell before
because they respect her and thought she would be hu-
miliated if they did. Why?”
“I think I know who butchered Buck Harris,” I told
him bleakly. “Ernesto Palmeiro.”
“Who?”
“The tractor guy that I had in court Friday.” I opened
his file and pointed to Palmeiro’s name on the list of
workers living on Harris Farm #1 in January. It was fol-
lowed by a Maria Palmeiro. Neither name was on the
current list the farm manager had given them.
Then I showed him the file I’d had the clerk pull for
me. “When Palmeiro was arrested in January, his ad-
dress was Ward Dairy Road. See? But that was before
you knew it was Harris’s body so it didn’t really register.
Everyone said he was loco for taking the tractor because
his wife had left him after they lost their baby. But he
was heading east, not south. I think he was trying to
get to New Bern to find Buck Harris. If he had, Harris
would have been chopped up at least a month and a half
sooner.”
“But why?”
“You said the blowup between the Harrises was last
spring. That’s when the tomato fields would have been
sprayed with a pesticide. Eight or nine months later—in
January—the Palmeiro baby was born. Stillborn. With
no arms or legs.” I couldn’t keep my voice from shak-
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HARD ROW
ing. “No arms and no legs, Dwight. Just like that torso
you found.”
“Jesus H!” he murmured as he began to connect the
dots. He opened his door and shouted, “All detectives!
In my office. Now!”
Five or six deputies came hurrying in, including
Mayleen Richards.
“Tell them,” Dwight said.
While I repeated my conjectures, Dwight took Percy
Denning aside and sent him to pull the fingerprint card
on Palmeiro. A copy of the prints had been sent to the
state’s central crime lab, but like most crime labs around
the country, ours is so underfunded and understaffed
that the fingerprints connected to a misdemeanor theft
would not have been entered into their computers yet.
As I went back upstairs to a courtroom where I was
