sheets waiting to be weighed: my mother picked
385 pounds in one day!
How, I said, could you do that . . .
—Fiddledeedee, by Shelby Stephenson
FRIDAY AFTERNOON
The doorbell pealed through the condo unit and the two lawmen heard Dee Bradshaw call from inside, “I’ll get it, Dad.”
Even though Terry was now in a serious long-term relationship himself, Dwight heard his friend’s sharply indrawn breath when the young woman opened the door and they were confronted by a mass of reddish brown hair, bright green eyes, black skintight biker pants, and a black bandeau top that left almost nothing to the imagination.
Mourning attire for the next generation, thought Dwight, trying not to admit to himself that he was looking, too, and wondering if that top ever slipped all the way down.
“Oh,” she said, obviously disappointed that they weren’t someone else. “I guess you want to see my father?”
“And you, too, Miss Bradshaw,” Dwight said, as she stood back to let them in.
Inside, the place was larger than they expected. The hall was fairly wide. One side opened into the living room, the other into a small formal dining room with an oval table that would seat six. Farther down the hall, they glimpsed the edge of a kitchen and a spacious family room. Bookcases lined several of the walls and the shelves were filled with books that looked worn and well-read.
“If you’ll wait in there,” Dee Bradshaw said, gesturing to the living room, “I’ll tell him you’re here.”
They moved into that room as directed and were surprised by the portrait over the couch.
“Is that the mother or the daughter?” Terry asked.
“The mother,” Dwight said when a closer look made it clear that this vibrant woman had more steel in her face. She was not as beautiful as her daughter, but she radiated a purposefulness that the younger woman lacked. Where Dee looked petulant, Candace was clearly more determined. And yet there was something provocative and sexy in that half-smile and the tilt of her head, almost as if she were saying “Damn straight you’d like to have me, but how much are you willing to pay?”
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
Dwight and Terry turned to see Cameron Bradshaw smiling at them from the doorway with proprietary pride.
“Candace was twenty-five when that was painted. At the separation, this was the only thing she really wanted that I wouldn’t let her have. It’s a Gillian Greber. I paid the artist fifteen hundred to paint it; I turned down fifteen thousand from her gallery last year. Candace thought I kept it only because it was a portrait of her. She had no idea how good it was.”
“Mom’s portrait’s worth fifteen thousand?” Dee Bradshaw was incredulous. “Really?”
“I said that’s how much the gallery offered,” he said. “I imagine they would sell it for at least twenty-five.”
“Whoa!”
“Forget it, honey,” he said.
She started to protest, but then laughed. “That obvious, huh, Dad?”
He turned to his visitors. “Major Bryant, Agent Wilson. Please be seated. What can I do for you?”
“I’m afraid we have more questions,” Dwight said.
“Don’t be afraid,” Bradshaw said with a wry smile for his mild joke. He gestured for Dwight to sit in a tall wingback chair upholstered in deep blue leather and he lowered himself into its nearby twin. The chairs echoed the blue leaves and flowers of the couch and also the blue of the dress in the portrait. His daughter took one end of the couch and smiled at Terry, who sat down at the other end. “We want to help however we can. Have you learned why Candace felt she had to do what she did?”
“I’m sorry, sir, but it wasn’t suicide after all. Your wife was murdered.”
Dee’s mouth dropped open and Bradshaw looked bewildered. “Murdered?”
“It was meant to look like suicide but the medical examiner is positive that she was strangled from behind and the bag put over her head after her death.”
“Strangled? Who?”
“That’s what we’re looking into.”
“But that note. It was her handwriting.”
Terry nodded. “She was probably forced to write it.”
Dwight said, “Miss Bradshaw—”
“Oh for heaven’s sake, call me Dee.”
“Very well, Dee. You told Deputy Richards today that your mother moved into her new house at Christmas and you were at Carolina from Christmas to Easter. Is that right?”
She nodded and slid to the floor, where she could lean back against the couch and tuck her legs beneath her.
“Were you and your mother close?”
She shrugged. “I guess.”
“Did you come home often? Talk on the phone?”
“Not really. She had her life. I had mine. Anyhow, she was pretty busy. Every time I called, she was usually rushing off to a meeting or heading out to check up on one of the cleaning crews.” Her tone was light but her eyes 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.