Death's Half Acre

betrayed her. “She thought the only reason I called was because I wanted something. Money or clothes.”

“Be fair, Dee,” Bradshaw said softly.

“You know it’s true, Dad.” Her voice was sulky, but she dropped her eyes and stretched out the top of her bandeau to tug it up, inadvertently giving Terry a view of her firm young breasts.

“So she never mentioned that a gun had been fired into her bedroom floor?”

“Huh?”

“A gun?” asked Bradshaw.

“One of my deputies dug a bullet out of the floor just now,” Dwight told them. “Did she own a gun?”

“Absolutely not! She was completely opposed to handguns, even though she’s never said it in public. Her constituents, you see.”

“Then that might be how she was forced to write that note,” said Terry. “Her killer could have fired into the floor as a warning threat that he’d shoot her if she didn’t do as she was told.”

Dee looked up at him. “So the letter was a lie? She wasn’t doing anything wrong after all?”

“Hard to say. We might still learn that something illegal was going on and the killer wanted to set her up as the fall guy. We haven’t talked to any of the commissioners and she seems to have kept files on them. On some of the more prominent business leaders in the county as well, but we can’t find them.”

“Files?” asked Bradshaw. “What sort of files?”

“We don’t know, but we get the impression that some things were too personal—and maybe too candid—to leave lying around for anyone to read. We don’t know if it’s papers or a CD or a flash drive.”

“What’s a flash drive?” he asked.

“Thinner than a Bic lighter but about the same shape,” Dee explained to him. “Plugs into your computer and has a ton of memory.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m pretty much a Luddite when it comes to computers. I read The London Times and The New York Review of Books online, and I can do e-mail or look up information, but as far as understanding the mechanical side of it?” He gave a hands-up gesture of ignorance.

“What about you, Dee?”

“Yeah, she used flash drives for her personal sh—” She caught herself. “Her personal stuff. See, there was this story on the news. About some crooked politician or one of those sleazy corporations? And how they got nailed by their computers because even if you delete or erase, it’s still there on your hard drive? For some reason, that really freaked Mom, so I told her that if she’d get herself a memory stick and work from that and never save anything to the hard drive, she ought to be safe from most snoopers. That’s when she bought her laptop. I showed her how to download to the flash drive and then transfer the files to her new computer. I even told her how to disable the automatic backup on her word processing program. She bought an extra stick, so I know she used at least one for her private stuff.

“Next time I came home, I told her about digital shredders that even get rid of cache files. She said she wished she’d known about that before she took apart her old computer and smashed the insides with a hammer. I thought that was a little over the top. I mean, what did she have that was so damn secret? A formula to blow up the world? She laughed and said I was closer to the truth than I knew.”

“And how did you interpret that?”

Dee gave a dismissive shrug of her bare shoulder. “I thought she was just trying to sound important.”

“When was this?”

“Last fall. Before she moved into the new place.”

“It’s an expensive house,” Dwight observed. “She must have been doing very well with the business.”

Cameron Bradshaw looked uncomfortable at that, and Dwight made a mental note to look into the financing of that house.

“I’m sorry, Officers,” Bradshaw said, clearly trying to cover his lapse. “I never offered you anything to drink. Tea? Or I could make coffee?”

“Would you, Dad?” Dee asked, deliberately widening her clear green eyes to coax him. “Dad grinds his own beans and I’m absolutely addicted to his coffee.”

“Flatterer,” Bradshaw said with an indulgent smile, but he was already rising from his chair. “Officers?”

“Yes, please,” Terry said before Dwight could decline. “Let me help you, sir. I know how Major Bryant likes his.” He gave Dwight a significant wink as he followed Bradshaw.

As soon as they were clear of the room, Dee turned to Dwight and in a low and urgent voice said, “You’re right, Major Bryant. Dad’s in denial, but Mom was doing very well. She bought a new car last spring even though her old one was only two years old. She just gave it away to her cousin in Georgia, a cousin she didn’t even like all that much.” Unforgotten resentment darkened her pretty face. “He came through with a load of peaches and a hard-luck story and she just handed him the damn keys. Paid cash for a new one the very next day. Same with the house. She paid cash for it, too. I mean, I guess when she sold our old house, she must’ve got a nice chunk of money, but the new house probably cost half a million and she just wrote a check.”

“Where do you think the extra money came from?” Dwight asked her.

“I’m sure she was skimming from the company. Dad thinks because he hired his own accountant that the books are straight, but I know Mom. There was never a man she couldn’t get around once she set her mind to it and Roger Flackman’s a real weenie.”

“Any other man in particular?”

She shrugged. “Look, you asked if Mom and I were close? We used to be. Not maybe when I was a little kid