The Buzzard Table (21 page)

Colleton County Sheriff’s Department—
Tuesday afternoon

T
he Todds were angry and apprehensive when they arrived at the sheriff’s department.

“She came in her own truck, too,” Mayleen Richards told Dwight when she let him know that the Todds had been put in separate interview rooms.

“Check to see if the search warrant we used before can be stretched to cover all company vehicles and put Denning on it,” Dwight said. “We’ll start with the husband first.”

“What the hell’s going on?” Wesley Todd asked belligerently when Dwight and Sigrid entered the room. He included Sigrid in his glare, but seemed to assume she was another deputy. “You said you wouldn’t tell my wife.”

“And you said you were telling me the truth about Saturday night,” Dwight said.

“I did! Ask the Applewhites. They called me around six-thirty and I was out there by seven. Left around eight-thirty and got home a little after nine. Ask Ginger.”

“She said she took y’all’s children over to her parents’ house and stayed to visit awhile. Was she really home when you got back or is she just saying that to give you an alibi?”

“She was there! Ask her. Hell, ask her parents.”

“We will,” Dwight promised. “And it was a legitimate call-out? You did find rats in your trap when you went back next morning?”

“Absolutely.” He glanced up and met Sigrid’s clear, steady-eyed gaze. It made him hesitate. “Well, actually, Ginger did. She’s an early riser and she lets me sleep in on Sundays if the kids are with her parents or mine. Long as she was up, she went out to check.”

Again, he seemed to need to explain why his wife had done what most people would consider a man’s job. “Rats don’t bother her, see? Just don’t ask her to do snakes. She said there were rats in four of the traps, so she set new ones and plugged a hole in the crawl space that I had missed. Monday morning I found one more, so I left the traps in place for the rest of the week. But that was the end of them. Applewhite’s happy and so is his daughter, so what else you need to know?”

“She drive your truck?”

“Hell, no! Mine’s a gearshift with four-wheel drive. She won’t drive anything but an automatic. Why? Y’all find something on my truck when you searched it Thursday?”

Dwight stood. “Sit tight for a few minutes while we talk to your wife and we’ll get back to you.”

“You’re not going to tell her, are you?”

“Are you a hundred percent sure she doesn’t already know?”

“I know she doesn’t.” He shot Sigrid an apologetic look. “I don’t mean to talk dirty in front of a lady, ma’am, but last time, she said if it ever happened again, she’d squeeze my balls till I wouldn’t have a penny left by the time she finished with me, but hell, when a woman hot as Becca Jowett comes on to you, what’re you supposed to do? But Ginger doesn’t have a clue about this. It’s over and Becca’s dead, so why cause trouble for me, okay?”

Dwight didn’t answer and Sigrid, who still had not spoken, followed him from the room.

Denning and Richards met them in the hallway and Denning did not have a happy look on his face. “Either she’s the neatest workman you ever met, Major, or the truck’s been detailed in the last week. Looks like the cab was vacuumed, the bed’s been hosed down, and I can’t spot a thing that looks connected with the victim.”

“What about the tires?” Dwight said. “Does the tread match the one you found when the boy was dropped?”

“Same tread, and I can see where a roofing nail might have been, but it must’ve worked its way out. One thing, though,” Denning said. “No plastic sheeting in her truck. She may not ever have had any, but both trucks seem to carry the same equipment, so…”

“Where’s Wes?” Ginger Todd asked when they opened the door and joined her at the interview table. She had pulled off her ball cap, and under the fluorescent lights her orange hair looked even brighter, while her pale skin was almost without color at all. “Why can’t he be here?”

“It’ll be fine,” Dwight said soothingly. “We needed to ask him some questions, and if you give the same answers, this will all be cleared up.”

“What questions??”

“About Saturday night and where you both were.”

“We told you. Wes had to go see about some rats and the children and I visited with my parents.”

“Did you both leave the house at the same time?”

She shook her head and her long ponytail swung against the shoulders of her brown work clothes. “No, Wes left first. Around six-thirty. I finished giving the children their supper and then drove them over to my mom’s. She loves to have them spend the night and it gives us a chance to sleep in on Sunday morning.”

“Except that you didn’t sleep in,” Dwight said.

“Is that camera on?” Ginger Todd asked abruptly.

Dwight nodded. “That’s okay, isn’t it?”

She frowned. “I guess.”

“Wes says you got up early Sunday morning and went and picked up the rat traps he set the night before. Is that true?”

“Of course it’s true. You trying to say he didn’t actually set any traps?”

“No, ma’am. Just trying to get a full picture here.”

“Well, he did. Ask Mr. Applewhite. He thought his daughter was exaggerating about the noise the rats were making. He thought they were going to be just little field mice. He couldn’t believe it when he saw the traps next morning. He met me in the yard and couldn’t wait for me to get rid of them.”

“What do you do with the rats you catch?” Sigrid asked.

“Depends. We keep a barrel of water out back. Sometimes we drown them. Sometimes, if we’re out in the country, we just let them go. Lots of foxes and hawks and stray cats around.”

“Which did you do Sunday morning?”

Sigrid’s tone held only friendly curiosity, but Ginger Todd visibly froze.

“I—um…where Old Forty-Eight crosses Possum Creek? I dumped them into the creek. There’s no houses near there, so I figured something would eat them.”

“Really?” said Dwight. “You sure you didn’t dump them in the woods beside Grayson Village?”

“No! I’d never turn them loose near anybody’s house.”

“But you do know about those woods?”

Ginger Todd stared at them without answering.

“Where’s your plastic sheeting, Mrs. Todd?”

“What plastic sheeting?”

“The sheeting you and your husband both carry in your trucks.”

“He tell you that?”

When they didn’t answer, she said, “I don’t know. It’s still there, isn’t it?”

“When did you have your truck detailed?”

She seemed to shrink back into her heavy brown work jacket. “I don’t know. Monday? Tuesday? It was getting pretty dirty, so one of our workers took it over to the Handi-Wash to get it cleaned up.”

“What’s his name?”

“Tito. Tito Morales.” She brightened. “You know something? If my roll of sheeting’s gone, I bet someone there took it. We’re always losing stuff off the trucks.”

“When did you last see Becca Jowett, Mrs. Todd?”

The abrupt change of subject made her hesitate. “Saturday morning,” she said after a short pause. “When she showed Wes and me the house for the last time.”

“You sure you didn’t see her Saturday night when you were driving home alone? You didn’t swing past that house and see her out jogging?”

“No!”

“You saw that mark on her neck Saturday morning and you knew that your husband was attracted to her.”

“Todd wouldn’t—”

“Wouldn’t he?”

“And even if he did, why would he kill her?”

“He wouldn’t but you might. You’d had all day to stew about it, and when you saw her there by the house, alone? What did you do? Tell her you wanted to take another look? Check on one of the features? Ask her how many times she’d had sex with your husband on that couch?”

“No!” Ginger Todd stood up. “Turn off that camera. I’m not going to stay here and be talked to like this. Am I under arrest?”

When Dwight didn’t answer, she said, “I know my rights and I’m leaving.”

She stalked from the room and Mayleen gave her boss a wry smile. “Her husband did say she watches a lot of crime programs.”

“
CSI
has a lot to answer for,” Sigrid said.

Dwight sighed. “Go tell Todd he’s free to go, too.”

“Do I tell him his wife knows?” Richards asked.

“Let’s let it be a surprise,” Dwight said sourly.

Colleton County Sheriff’s Department—
Tuesday afternoon (continued)

S
orry, Dwight,” Sigrid said when they were back in his office. “What will you do now that there’s no physical evidence to link her to the murder?”

“The usual slog. We’ll talk to her parents, see exactly how long she was there Saturday evening. Canvass the neighborhood again. Talk to the guy who washed her truck. Hope we get lucky and that someone will’ve noticed her truck around seven or seven-thirty. The owner of the real estate agency told me that one of the selling points of that house was that it was nearer Ginger Todd’s parents. That’s the same neighborhood Becca Jowett used to run in, so it’s only logical that Ginger saw her and one thing led to another, but right now there’s not enough to get a warrant to search their house for bloody clothes.”

“You couldn’t get Deborah to sign one for you?”

He gave a half smile. “Forbidden under our separation of powers agreement.”

“I was wondering how that works,” Sigrid admitted.

“Besides, if she had the truck cleaned, I doubt if she kept any bloody clothes. Everybody knows about DNA these days.” Dwight picked up the mug on his desk and contemplated the cold coffee inside. “What’s interesting to me is that Wesley Todd swaggers around like an alpha male and she acts like the submissive little wife with him and yet she seems to hold the balance of power.”

“Confirming Deborah’s take on divorce?”

“Either that or she’s hell on wheels when she gets fired up.”

Sigrid took her phone from the pocket of her parka. “And you’re still no closer to finding the Harper boy’s attacker?”

“No. I told Crawford I’d be back out today. You reckon he’s still with your mother?”

“I was about to call her and ask that myself. Get out of your hair.” She touched the buttons, waited for Anne to answer, then asked if Martin was still there. “
What?
”

She looked at Dwight in dismay. “When? Why didn’t you call us?”

“What?” Dwight asked.

“Mother’s on her way home from the Raleigh-Durham Airport. She dropped Martin off there about a half hour ago. His plane leaves this afternoon. Mother? I’m going to put you on speakerphone.”

Dwight heard her protest, but overrode it. “What airline, Anne? What time?”

As soon as she told him, he grabbed his hat and jacket and headed for the door. It was now 4:42, Crawford’s plane was scheduled to leave at 6:00, and the airport was west of Raleigh.

“I’ll come, too,” Sigrid said, and before he could decide whether or not this was a good idea, they were out in the parking lot and he was sliding a key into the ignition switch of a prowl car.

With blue lights flashing and sirens wailing, he dug out of the parking lot and headed for I-40.

As a rule, Dwight liked to amble along no more than a mile or two above the speed limit, but when expediting, he turned into Richard Petty, expertly weaving in and out of the westbound rush hour traffic, zipping past the cars and trucks that slowed and moved over.

Sigrid, who appreciated competence wherever it was found, realized that there was more to this big, slow-talking lawman than his laid-back surface implied.

Like Martin, she thought. Kate had once mentioned a military intelligence background, but it hadn’t fully registered till now.

No wonder he so quickly tagged Martin as MI6. Like calling to like? He cut between two cars with only inches to spare, but she didn’t flinch, so confident was she now that he knew exactly what he was doing. Despite the traffic, they pulled up in front of the international terminal with almost a half hour to spare.

They flashed their badges at security and checked the board for the flight to Gatwick, then raced down the concourse, dodging luggage and passengers, to the proper gate.

And there sat Martin Crawford, neatly groomed and looking like an ordinary tourist in his tailored black suit with his carry-on roller bag by his feet. Sigrid noted that he wore the old-fashioned black onyx signet ring that she and Anne had brought home from Mrs. Lattimore’s bank, a heavy gold ring that had belonged to Martin’s grandfather. He seemed engrossed by the screen of his laptop, yet appeared unsurprised to look up and see them approach.

“Ah, Bryant. Sigrid. Come to arrest me?”

A woman seated in the next row turned and stared at them.

Dwight looked around as the loudspeaker called flight numbers and destinations and arriving passengers streamed toward the exit. Opposite this waiting area was an unlit, vacant gate where no one was seated. “Let’s move to where we can talk,” he said.

“If you wish.” Crawford closed his laptop, slid it into a side pocket of his carry-on, and followed them over.

“Why the hurry to leave the country?” Dwight asked him.

“Hurry? No hurry.” Crawford sat down and looked up at Dwight calmly. “I booked this flight Friday morning.”

Dwight and Sigrid took seats across from him and Dwight said, “After killing Frank Alexander the night before? You didn’t waste any time.”

“Frank Alexander? Was that his name?”

“Or did you know him as Alexander Franklin?”

“I repeat: are you here to arrest me?”

Dwight glanced at Sigrid. Her neutral look told him nothing.

“Shall I assume then that you haven’t told the FBI about me?”

Dwight gave an impatient wave of his hand. “All I want to know is what was in that file the Harper boy copied.”

Crawford made a show of looking at his watch. “They’ll be calling my flight soon. Will I be on it?”

“Yes,” Sigrid said, even though she and Dwight had not discussed this.

Her cousin lifted an eyebrow. “Thank you.”

He turned back to Dwight. “I believe there’s enough time to tell you a story. Let’s say there were once two little boys who met in Egypt. One was from Islamabad, the other from London. Both were lonely and both liked to watch birds. They bonded over a wounded Egyptian vulture that they nursed back to health. They met again at Cambridge and took rooms together. After leaving university, they were recruited by an agency that thought their language skills would be useful. They were still young and idealistic and they believed they could help make the world a better, safer place even if, as time went on, they were repelled by some of the things that agency occasionally condoned.”

Across the way, a flight clerk had arrived at the departure desk and the passengers there were gathering up their belongings, stashing them in their carry-on bags, and starting to move restlessly.

“Fast forward to last spring,” Crawford said. “One of them was anxious to get home to his wife and teenage son, so he hitched a ride on an unscheduled flight even though he’d heard rumors about the copilot’s sadistic practices on powerless…shall we call them passengers?”

“Passengers or prisoners?” Dwight asked.

Crawford ignored his question.

“Both the passenger and the hitchhiker died on that flight, but it was hushed up and the copilot reassigned. When the hitchhiker’s friend tried to learn what had happened, he wound up in front of a bus and was left for dead.”

“Was that hitchhiker the other ‘Arab’ in Somalia?” Sigrid said.

Her cousin nodded and stood up as the departure clerk announced that the six o’clock flight to London was now boarding.

“So that’s why you killed Alexander Franklin,” said Dwight as he and Sigrid stood, too.

Martin Crawford gave an ironic smile. “When a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it. Isn’t that what they say?”

Sigrid was not a demonstrative person, but she put her hand on Crawford’s arm. “Thank you for what you did back then, Martin. For saving my mother’s life.”

He covered her hand with his. “My dear, how could we not?”

As he headed toward the queue now passing through the boarding gate, he turned and said, “Bryant? Do me a favor? Ask your wife’s nephew to sling an occasional squirrel or rabbit onto my vulture table for me?”

Dwight gave him an affirmative salute.

“Oh, and my aunt has something for you.”

The drive back to Dobbs took the full fifty-five minutes. Except for leaving Deborah a message that he would be late getting home and could she pick up Cal, neither Dwight nor Sigrid had much to say and they rode mostly in silence.

“Will Deborah understand why you didn’t call the feds or try to stop him?” she asked as they neared the courthouse where her car was parked.

“I don’t know,” he answered candidly. “But it wasn’t too long ago in this county when a valid defense for some murders was that the victim needed killing.”

He checked by his office, then followed Sigrid back to Cotton Grove in his own truck.

The iron gates had been left open and Anne met them at the door.

“Mother’s asleep,” she said, “but Martin gave her this as he was leaving and said it was for you.”

“This” was a plastic flash drive.

“Let me get my laptop,” Sigrid said.

Minutes later, they were looking at a slide show of turkey buzzards in flight above the concrete slab that Martin had called his vulture table. And there was Martin himself pointing directly at them.

“He’s holding a remote control,” Anne said softly. “He put a miniature camera on the bird’s leg. That’s how he got all those unique shots. He told me he had it rigged to take three pictures at a time.”

Every four seconds as the slide show continued, the perspective widened out. Leaning over Sigrid’s shoulder, Dwight and Anne saw the old house Martin had camped in, the whole pasture and his vulture table, Grayson Village, the surrounding roads, with cars and school buses, and even Reese’s trailer and the house of a brother-in-law. Eventually, they saw the small airstrip where Alexander Franklin had landed. Only one plane, a Gulfstream, had visible numbers. Dwight knew that Franklin had been piloting a Learjet. So what was the significance of this plane? Jeremy had searched the FAA site. Did the Gulfstream belong to someone who shouldn’t have been there? Was that who Jeremy was looking up in the phone directory?

He didn’t realize he’d spoken aloud till Anne shrugged and said, “I don’t get it either, but Martin definitely said this must have been the file the Harper boy stole. It was the only one that had a plane for the identifying picture on the file.”

“Go back to the beginning, please,” Dwight said. “That last frame was time-stamped 10:48 a.m., February seventh.” He checked the calendar on his phone. “That was Monday a week ago. What was the first one?”

A few clicks of the mouse brought them back to the beginning.

“February third, 8:06 a.m.,” Sigrid said.

“A Wednesday.”

“Sit here,” Sigrid said, handing Dwight the mouse as she relinquished her seat in front of the computer screen.

She showed him how to put it on maximum magnification and he started back through the slides manually, one by one, and then he spotted it off to the lower left side of the frame: a beige utility truck parked by the dump between Grayson Village and the Ferrabee pasture. In the first of that three-frame cluster, a foreshortened figure stood on the edge of the embankment and seemed to be tugging at some sort of diaphanous material that half covered a cylindrical shape. The material shone like silver in the early morning sun.

The early morning sun of Sunday, February 6.

The second and third shots showed a body lying atop what Dwight knew to be a rotten mattress. The hat was missing from the head of the person looking down at the exposed body, but the hands held a sheet of plastic that billowed in the wind.

Ginger Todd’s bright orange hair shone as brightly as the plastic sheeting that had encased the body of Rebecca Jowett.