“Oh?” said Haywood Knott from his perch atop a large green tractor hitched to a set of gang disks. A big friendly man who had never seen a stranger, he was less suspicious than Robert and always ready to be entertained. He pushed his porkpie hat to the back of his head and said, “How’s that?”
“I moved into Grayson Village about three weeks ago and I’ve spent the past few days driving around this neck of the woods to get my bearings. One thing I noticed right off the bat. This looks like prime hunting land, but every square foot of it seems to be posted.”
Haywood nodded while Robert kept a stolid silence.
“The signs say the land’s leased by the Possum Creek Hunt Club. That right?”
Haywood grinned. “That’s right, Mr. W’kowski.”
“Witkowski,” he said, emphasizing the t, “but call me Trevor. Please.”
“So what can we do for you, Trevor?” Robert asked bluntly.
“Well, I couldn’t find the club listed in the phone book and people tell me that you Knotts are the ones to see about joining. I went over to the Kezzie Knott house, but he wasn’t there and his black servant gal sent me here.”
The brothers glanced at each other and Trevor Witkowski was perceptive enough to catch it. “Did I say something wrong?”
“Naw,” said Haywood. “It’s just that we don’t never think of Maidie Holt as a servant gal.”
“Oh. Sorry. Anyhow, I was wondering what sort of game your club hunts here?”
“Deer, squirrel, rabbits,” said Robert. “Sometimes possums.”
“Any birds?”
“Bobwhites and doves in the fall.”
“Pheasants?”
“ ’Fraid not,” said Haywood. “You more a bird hunter than a meat man, huh?”
“I wouldn’t mind getting a nice big buck for my office,” Witkowski said, “but mostly, I find the birds more challenging. Now can you tell me how I’d go about joining?”
“It’s a thousand-dollar initiation fee,” Haywood said promptly, “but we’d have to put you on the waiting list and they’s about twenty-five ahead of you.”
“I see. So how often do memberships open up?”
Both men shrugged and Robert said, “I gotta be honest with you, Trevor. That don’t happen very often. Last one was more’n a year ago, back when—when was it Jap Stancil died, Haywood?”
“Been at least two years ago, ain’t it?”
“Tell you what,” Witkowski said as he pulled out a wallet thick with credit cards and greenbacks. “How about I make it worth your while to jump me up to the front of your waiting list?”
Sitting high above him on the tractor, Haywood could see into the small man’s wallet without really trying and he looked with interest at the hundred-dollar bills Witkowski was fingering.
“Well now, we couldn’t put you at the very front,” he said, but before he could decide how much it was safe to ask the man for, his brother stiffened and shook his head.
“Sorry, Trevor,” Robert said. He glared at Haywood, who gave a sheepish grin. “Our club president knows every name on that list and he’d have our hides if we took money to jump up a stranger.”
“Tell you what though,” Haywood said to Witkowski. “They’s a hunt club over in Johnston County that might have room for you.”
“But—”
“We’d like to stay and talk, but we got right much plowing to do today,” Robert said firmly.
Haywood pulled his hat back down to shade his eyes and gave the stranger a cheerful wave. “Been real nice talking to you,” he said and turned the key in the tractor’s ignition.
At the house where Candace Bradshaw died, Deputy Detectives Mayleen Richards and Sam Dalton walked through the public rooms, giving them only cursory glances. Everything was coordinated around a color scheme of dark rose and white, with touches of green. Natural light flooded through the many windows and skylights, and the place looked like an illustration out of a magazine, not a home where real people lived and relaxed and littered every surface with newspapers and dirty dishes. Even the kitchen was immaculate.
“She must have dumped her old furniture,” Dalton said. “All of this looks brand-new.”
He was very much aware that his promotion to detective was provisional and he tried not to sound too much of an eager beaver newbie.
Richards nodded. Sam Dalton was about five years younger than the deputy she had partnered most often before he signed up with a civilian company to work in Iraq—and every time a car bomb exploded in Baghdad, she worried until Jack Jamison’s wife dropped a casual mention of something he’d e-mailed her about. But Dalton had the same chunky build and the same willingness to carry his share of the load. Much as she missed Jamison, she had to admit that Dalton was shaping into a competent detective who could be trusted to do a thorough search.
At the master bedroom where the body had been found, she said, “You take this room. Maybe you’ll get lucky and find a diary full of names.”
He gave a lopsided grin. “You think?”
“Nope. But at least it cuts down on what we have to go through. Anything she kept must have significance to her, so keep an eye out for any personal papers.”
At the other end of the house were two more bedrooms, one of which finally had a lived-in look. From the clothes strewn across the unmade bed and on the floor, this had to be the daughter’s. A sloppy daughter’s, thought Richards. Her own mother would never have let her leave her room like this.
Immediately, her mind shied away from thoughts of her mother. Things were so strained between them these days that they had not spoken in weeks. Her family could not accept that she loved a Latino and had given her a him-or-us ultimatum. Mike Diaz kept reassuring her that all would be fine once they were actually married and the babies started coming. “If the president of the USA can accept some ‘little brown ones’ in his family, your family will, too, mi querida. You’ll see.”
Reminding herself that Major Bryant had warned her about letting her personal life interfere with her work, she willed herself to stop thinking about the conflicting loyalties that were tearing her apart and to concentrate on the job at hand.
This third bedroom had been furnished as a home office. Or rather, thought Richards as she paused in the doorway to get an overall impression, it was furnished as someone’s idea of what a home office should look like. Except for bathrooms and kitchen, the entire house was carpeted in an off-white wall-to-wall Berber. In this room, a pseudo-Oriental rug with a dusty rose background lay atop that. White enameled bookshelves bloomed with a collection of porcelain flowers. No books. In a niche below the shelves, a three-story dollhouse built to look like an antebellum plantation faced outward. Complete with white columns and tiny pots of artificial flowers on the porch, it sat on casters and rolled out smoothly when Richards touched it. Instead of having period furniture, though, the interior rooms were all modern.
She pushed it back into place and turned her attention to the adult toys. A thin laptop computer sat on the pullout counter of a cherry table desk beneath a window swathed in dark rose drapes and sheer white under-curtains. A flower-sprigged mug that held scissors, a silver letter opener, and an assortment of colorful pens sat next to the laptop between a bottle of rose-tinted nail polish and a porcelain angel with bowed head. A locked three-drawer file cabinet beside the desk was also made of cherry. A vanity wall above the cabinet had been hung with a few plaques and awards from local civic groups. Several silver-framed photographs of Candace Bradshaw with various elected men sat atop the cabinet itself. No other women in the pictures. No picture of her daughter or ex-husband.
A sturdily built five-foot-ten redhead with freckled face and arms and a slight unease whenever surrounded by so much blatant femininity, Richards doubted that much real work was done here. Nevertheless, it was a place to start collecting names. When the SBI reinforcements arrived, they would take a stethoscope and tongue depressor to this room and to the computer, but it wouldn’t hurt for a CCSD deputy to check it out first.