that yes, Portland knew he was good in bed. “Just as I know that Avery is. But if he’s ever had performance anxieties, Por never mentioned it. That would be off-limits. Same for anything to do with your job, okay?”
For some reason, though, he finds it hard to believe that we really don’t tell each other every single thing.
We were sitting adjacent to each other at the table and I put my hand on his knee under the table. “Performance anxieties?”
“Okay, okay.” He covered my hand with his. “I get it.”
I smiled and took another bite of my salad. The spinach leaves were young and tender and so flavorful that they could have come out of Cletus and Daddy’s garden. The croutons had a homemade herb-and-onion flavor and offered a crunchy contrast to the greens and sliced hard-boiled eggs. “Have the Ginsburgs come up with anything solid against Danny Creedmore?”
Dwight swallowed a bite of chicken and shook his head. “If Candace kept any records, she’s covered her tracks well. There’s nothing incriminating on her hard drive and they still can’t find the flash drive she’s supposed to have used. By the way, they told Terry to tell you thanks for Linsey Thomas’s files. They seem to think they’re going to find pure gold there.”
As we ate, several people had stopped by the table to speak to us—attorneys, various county department heads, and Jamie Jacobson, who leaned in close to murmur, “You were asking if Danny Creedmore had a connection to Sassy Solutions? I mentioned it to my husband and he told me that Sassy is owned by Danny’s brother-in-law. We definitely need to talk tomorrow.”
“What was that about?” Dwight asked as she moved toward the door.
“She and a Raleigh advertising agency were asked to submit proposals for the ads for Grayson Village last year. The other company got the job.”
“So?”
“So one of Linsey’s diagrams linked that agency to Grayson Village through Danny and Candace. You might want to point that out to the Ginsburgs.”
He made a note of it and signaled our waitress that he was ready to pay. As we walked back to the courthouse, he offered to pick up a pizza for our supper. “I suppose you’ll want a side of those disgusting anchovies?”
“Yes, but I always keep a jar on hand, so don’t bother getting more.” One quick kiss in the momentarily deserted atrium, then we parted at the stairs, I to the courtroom upstairs, he to his office down below.
“I’ll try not to be late,” I promised.
In the end though, it was Dwight who was late. Cal and I had to settle for scrambled eggs instead of pizza.
The reason Dee Bradshaw wasn’t answering her phone today was because someone had shot her the night before.
Once in the back, once in the head.
CHAPTER 17
Mid-afternoon on Monday and Deputy Percy Denning turned to Major Bryant. “You remember that slug I dug out of the rug here on Friday?” He had photographed the crime scene from one end of the room to the other. Now he gingerly pried a new slug from the wall. “This looks like the same size. A .22, I’d say. What do you want to bet that when I get them under a microscope they’ll both match the two in her?”
“No bet,” Dwight said, as he tried to reconstruct the shooting. Dee’s body lay facedown in the living room, on a line with the hole in the wall, a hole that was almost chest-high to Denning.
“She was running away from the shooter,” he theorized. “The first bullet missed, the other got her square in the back. Or the first bullet took her down before the second one arrived.”
From behind him, Deputy Richards said, “Then to make sure she was dead, he stood over her and fired again through the side of her head.”
Three days ago, she had been vibrant and sexy and looking forward to her inheritance, thought Dwight. A spoiled slacker, Stevie had called her. The daughter of a woman who didn’t know how to be a mother, according to Gracie Farmer. From his own observation, she had been a conflicted young woman who had not finished growing up.
Now she never would.
“Did she surprise an intruder or was the shooter someone she let in herself?” Dwight wondered aloud.
“I think she let him in.” Richards pointed to the dead girl’s bare feet. “Looks like she kicked off her shoes there by the couch. There’s her wineglass, the cork, and the opener. Her glass is still half full, but the bottle’s almost empty. She might have drunk it all herself, but someone else could have had a glass with her.”
“Make a note of it for the ME,” Dwight told Denning. “You check the kitchen, Richards?”
“Yessir, and there are dirty dishes and fast-food cartons but no used wineglass. Either he washed it clean and put it back on the shelf or else took it with him. Seems like everybody’s heard of DNA these days.”
Her rueful tone reminded him of something Bo Poole had said about one of the county’s high sheriffs. “I heard that a sheriff back in the nineteen-twenties tried to keep Linsey Thomas’s granddaddy from describing fingerprint technology in the
