Wilmington, off I-40. “But there’s nothing on this paper to indicate he was ever further into North Carolina than right here. Nowhere near the Triad. So unless Jeffreys came down here and royally pissed him off…”
He broke off in frustration and finished his ham and eggs.
“If it really was Kyle, wouldn’t one of the other waiters notice if he wasn’t on the floor?”
“They say not. He might not have been gone that long. Less than five minutes, ten at the most, to follow Jeffreys out to the parking lot, slip the leash around his neck as he was unlocking his car, then roll him over the edge of the bank and into the river.”
“What about the other people in Jonah’s that night?” I asked. “We weren’t the only ones there.”
“I know and I’ve got officers checking out the names we got off the credit card receipts to see if any of them noticed Jeffreys and Armstrong together. It’s probably a waste of time. Once we get Armstrong and his car, we’ve got him on the hit-and-run and that should be enough to pry the rest of it out of him.”
All the time we’d been there, he had kept glancing past me to the door.
“Guess she decided to go somewhere else to eat,” he said as he called for our checks.
I glanced at my watch. Still thirty-five minutes till the next session was due to start.
“Sorry,” I said.
He gave a fatalistic shrug. “I’m just spinning my wheels with her, aren’t I?”
It was my turn to shrug. “I don’t know. Honestly. She likes you. She just doesn’t see much future if she’s going back to Raleigh on Thursday.”
“Raleigh’s not so far.”
“That’s what I told her.”
“Yeah?” He brightened. “Thanks.”
We took our checks over to the cash register. When I opened my wallet to pay, I saw that I had nothing left but three fives and a few ones. Time to find an ATM.
It was a short drive back to the hotel, with the rain still coming down heavily enough to make potholes and low spots a real hazard. We saw two fender benders on the way.
I was still trying to work out the sequence of events. “Okay. Let’s say Kyle recognizes Pete Jeffreys and he’s there in the vestibule when Jeffreys comes out of the restroom and leaves through the front door. Kyle follows him out to the parking lot, kills him, and then comes back inside before he’s missed.”
Edwards nodded as he swerved to miss a deep puddle and turned the windshield wipers up a notch.
“He may have noticed Fitz, but he didn’t know his name till you and I were talking about it at Jonah’s when I was there to look for my earring. Oh, God!” I said, suddenly stricken. “That’s how he knew. It’s my fault Fitz was run down. If I’d kept my mouth shut, he never would have known.”
“Not necessarily,” Edwards said kindly. “He worked your table. The Fitzhumes paid with a credit card, so he had to have seen it.”
I could not excuse myself so easily. “Maybe so, but my telling you that Fitz was the last of our group to see Jeffreys put a big red bull’s-eye on his back.”
As he pulled up under the SandCastle’s portico, Edwards said, “What I keep wondering is how someone other than you judges would have known that Judge Fitzhume would be walking across the parking lot when he was.”
I had been wondering that myself and I thought I had the answer.
“Come on inside and I’ll show you.”
CHAPTER
21
DETECTIVE GARY EDWARDS (TUESDAY MIDDAY, JUNE
17)
People had begun to filter back from lunch as Edwards followed Deborah Knott through the SandCastle’s lobby to the registration table set up at the archway that led to the meeting rooms. At the near end stood an easel with a whiteboard where judges could leave each other messages. The schedules for each day’s events were clipped to the top of the easel, and yesterday’s schedule was still there. She pointed to the bottom of the sheet where large letters proclaimed that a reception honoring Judge Fitzhume would take place at 6:30 at a clubhouse on the other side of the island.
“That’s been posted here all weekend,” she said. “I don’t suppose you have a picture of him?”
“Actually, I do,” said Edwards. When Andy Wall had joined him at Jonah’s, he had brought along an extra copy of the photo South Carolina’s DMV had sent them.
He listened as the judge showed it to the women working the table and asked if they had seen him hanging around the whiteboard on Sunday or Monday.
Blank looks.
She described Kyle Armstrong’s slender build and tentative manner in more detail and added, “He may be the one who ran Judge Fitzhume down,” which made them look at the picture even more closely.
“Poor Judge Fitz!” said the woman who seemed to be in charge of handing out the conference packets and
