Death's Half Acre

“One of those grocery deli salads.”

“What kind?”

“Spinach.”

“With hard-boiled eggs?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Depending on how far along digestion was, it helps us establish a time of death.”

“Oh gross!” the girl said, making a face.

“And you’re sure that program was on?”

“Yeah, they were showing pictures of the jewelry and Mom was like drooling over the diamond necklaces.”

After Dee Bradshaw had departed with extra makeup and clean clothes, leaving her dirty ones still piled in a heap on her bed, Richards called to Ginsburg, “You hear that?”

“Already on it,” the SBI agent said, busily searching the Internet. “Here we go. Unsolved Mysteries: The Nicholas Radzinsky Case. You remember him?”

“Sorry, I was too young, but I read the article in the N&O a couple of weeks back about it. Guy stole his employer’s plane one night, along with a gym bag full of jewelry worth millions, put the plane on automatic, and parachuted out somewhere between Washington and the Great Smokies, right?”

“Yeah. I was eleven at the time. My friends and I figured he must have flown right over us up there in Lynchburg. We spent that whole damn spring hiking the woods, absolutely convinced he must have dropped the bag and we were going to find it and get that big reward. All we got were chiggers and poison oak.”

Richards laughed. “So what time did the program air in this area?”

Sabrina Ginsburg ran a beautifully manicured, pink-tipped finger down the screen. “According to this, it was a half-hour segment that ran from one-thirty to two.”

“So if she finished eating by two, that would put our TOD somewhere around four-thirty to five o’clock, give or take a half-hour.”

Ginsburg nodded. “Rush hour. Wouldn’t you know it?”

“Between four and five-thirty, hm?” Dwight said when Richards called him to report. “Good work, Mayleen. Denning should be there any minute now with the van to take another look at her bedroom. I can’t believe he’ll find anything, but we have to jump through the hoops. Any progress with her laptop?”

“No, sir. Ginsburg’s going to take it back to Garner with her and put some of her techies to work scanning every file, but it turns out that she had a CD that’s a digital shredder, so she’s not very optimistic.”

“Yeah. I’m over at Bradshaw Management and our twin’s downloading everything to flash drives for a page- by-page examination, too.”

“What about the house, sir? The daughter’s pushing to move back in.”

“You’ve done a thorough search for any papers?”

“And for CDs and flash drives. Ginsburg and I talked about those ‘fd’ notations on her paper files. Could stand for flash drive. I’m not gonna say she doesn’t have a secret hidey-hole somewhere in the house, but if she does, we haven’t found it and we’ve sure looked.”

“Clothes pockets in her closet? Plastic bags in her refrigerator? Books?”

“No books, almost nothing in the refrigerator. No flour or sugar canisters. Cupboards almost bare except for a couple of cereal boxes that only hold cereal. I guess she didn’t cook much either.”

At that slip of her tongue, Mayleen Richards felt herself flushing a bright red. When Mike didn’t cook, they usually ate takeout, but she had tried to make a rice dish last night and had wound up cooking it to mush. She was mortified, but he had laughed and called in an order for Chinese. “They say it will be twenty minutes,” he had said, pulling her to him.

She flushed again at the memory. If Major Bryant picked up on that “either,” though, he didn’t mention it.

“It helps that the house is so new,” she said hastily. “Her daughter says she was pretty ruthless about throwing out the old and starting fresh, so there’s not a ton of stuff to go through. Here’s Denning now.” She gave the department’s crime scene specialist a come-on-in wave of her hand. “I’ll search again while he’s working, but if she used a flash drive, we’re talking something about the size of a lipstick.”

“I know,” her boss said with an audible sigh. “But we can’t hold things up forever. Did you tell the daughter that Candace was murdered?”

“No, sir.”

“Good. Wilson and I’ll go speak with her and her dad and tell them we’re finished with the house.”

“Hey, Percy,” Agent Sabrina Ginsburg said, automatically fluffing her shoulder-length blond hair.

“Blondie! My lucky day,” the department’s crime scene specialist said with a big grin. “I’d’ve gotten here quicker if I’d known you were working the house.”

As if, thought Mayleen, sliding her cell phone back into the holder on her belt. Percy Denning was nice, but nerdy. Ginsburg was sweet, though. She talked enough flirty trash with him to send him on down to the master bedroom with a silly grin on his face.

“Damn flash drives,” Agent Sabrina Ginsburg said when Richards said she was going to make another search. “If she used one for the illegal stuff and never saved anything to hard drive, we may never find anything if she ran her digital shredder periodically. You look in all her purses? In her lipstick cases? What about drugstore magnifying glasses that come in those pretty little metal cases?”