Long Upon the Land (8 page)

She shook her head sadly. “Poor Vick.”

“Rosalee?”

Unnoticed by them, an attractive woman had emerged from the bushes behind the tool shed. Her red hair, styled in a pixie cut, blazed like polished copper in the morning sun and she wore a short-sleeved coral jacket over a black dress that seemed a little formal for walking through bushes. She hesitated as she took in the badge dangling from Dwight’s belt. “Is everything all right?”

“Not really, Rusty.” Mrs. Earp stood to motion her forward. “This is my neighbor,” she told them. “Rusty Reynolds.”

“What’s wrong?” the woman asked.

“It’s Vick,” Mrs. Earp said, tearing up again. “He’s dead. Somebody killed him.”

“Killed? Oh, Rosalee, how awful! Who? When?”

Dwight stood and introduced himself and Ray. “Where exactly do you live, ma’am?”

“Over there. Our yards back up on each other.” She gestured to the trees and bushes behind the tool shed before turning back to Mrs. Earp. “What can I do, Rosalee? Let me take Diesel back to my house. Get him out of your way.”

“Diesel?” Mrs. Earp looked around helplessly. “He must be inside.”

“Who’s Diesel?” asked Dwight.

“My cat,” both women said, which made Mrs. Earp smile for the first time.

It lit up her thin face and hinted at the youthful beauty she must have had. “He was a stray,” she said, “and we both adopted him. Or rather he adopted us. For a long time we didn’t know that he was splitting his time between us and we were both feeding him.”

“My son named him Diesel,” said Rusty Reynolds.

“Because he’s got a purr like a diesel truck,” Mrs. Earp said, reaching for the knob on the back door. “Built like one, too. The poor baby must be scared and hungry if he’s been shut in the house all weekend.”

As soon as she walked inside they could hear her calling the cat with coaxing noises. Rusty Reynolds followed.

The two-bedroom house was too small and too compulsively tidy to offer many hiding places for even the smallest of cats. “And Diesel’s pretty big,” the women told Dwight.

They looked under the beds, behind the couch, and inside all the closets and base cabinets.

No Diesel.

Back out on the porch, Mrs. Earp checked the bowls on the wooden table. A light skim of dust and pollen covered the water and a steady stream of ants was working on the few bits of kibble. “I fed him Friday when I got home from work, but I don’t think he’s touched this bowl since,” she said and dumped the remains over the edge of the porch onto the grass. “When did you feed him, Rusty?”

“Not since Friday morning.” She gave a wry smile. “Do you suppose he’s somebody else’s cat, too? No wonder he’s so fat.”

Dwight knew how concern for a pet or a child could ease the enormity of murder, but there were still questions that needed answering. Before he could tactfully ease Rusty Reynolds back across the yard, though, she glanced at her watch. “Rosalee, I’m so sorry, but I have to go back to work. I only came home to see about Diesel, but if there’s anything I can do—anything at all…”

“Thanks, Rusty,” said Mrs. Earp.

While Ray followed Mrs. Reynolds out into the yard to get her work address, Dwight turned back to Mrs. Earp and her cousin.

“You say he had no enemies, Mrs. Earp, yet someone put a bullet through the windshield of his truck.”

“On the passenger side,” she murmured.

“To scare him, not hit him?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Who did he think did that?”

She shook her head. “He never said. Just that whoever did it was going to pay for it. It wasn’t going to go on his insurance.”

“Let me rephrase that. Who do
you
think it was?”

“Maybe Tyler?” She looked at her cousin for confirmation. “His brother?”

Miss Young nodded. “Probably. Tyler’s a good shot.”

“So it was to scare your husband, not hurt him? Why?”

Mrs. Earp looked away, shamefaced. “He owed Tyler money for painting the house but he wasn’t going to pay it because Tyler did such a sloppy job. Vick was always real particular about how things ought to be done and Tyler didn’t take the shutters off, so white paint got on them and then some green paint dripped on the siding. He didn’t caulk around the doors and window frames and he didn’t tape the windows, so they had to be scraped with a razor blade.”

“And guess who got
that
job in ninety-five-degree weather,” Marisa Young muttered.

“Your husband’s pockets were empty when we found him,” said Dwight. “Did he have a phone?”

Mrs. Earp nodded and gave him the number.

“And I believe you mentioned an uncle?”

“Joby. He and Earla raised Vick and Tyler. She’s sweet, but Joby…” Her voice trailed off. “Vick blamed him for losing their land. I forget how it happened, but Joby’s got a mean temper and he used to beat on the boys till they got big enough to hit back.”

“Apples didn’t roll far from that tree,” said Miss Young.

Mrs. Earp just sighed.

Dwight took down both names and told her that they would be in touch.

“What about the funeral?” Mrs. Earp said. “Where is he now?”

Ray handed her a card with the ME’s number. “If you’ll call here, they’ll tell you when they can release the body to a funeral home.”

“Cremate him,” said Miss Young.

N
o one was home in the houses on either side of the Earp house. Mrs. Earp had told them that most people in this neighborhood worked full-time jobs, so Dwight and Ray were not surprised that no one came to the door when they tried the houses across the street.

“Guess we’ll have to come back later,” Dwight said. “Right now, let’s hear what the Reynolds woman can tell us and go from there.”

As they walked back to their vehicles, Dwight’s phone rang and the ME’s name popped up on the screen.

“What’s the game, Major?” Dr. Singh sounded amused. “Stump the chump?”

“What do you mean?” Dwight asked.

“That blood sample you sent me. It’s feline, not human.”

“
Cat
blood?”

“Unless you’ve got a tiger out there. Tigers have the same blood type as
felis domesticus
. Did you know that? And for what it’s worth, the blood on your victim’s pants and shoes came from a cat, too.”

“The hell you say!”

“Was the cat black?”

“Yeah, how’d you know?”

“A black hair in the blood and more black hair under his nails.”

When Dwight relayed what Dr. Singh had found, Ray said, “Diesel?”

“Probably.”

Ray shook his head. “Poor lady. First her husband, now her cat. Want me to check around the edge of the yard? See if it crawled off to die under a bush? That much blood, it couldn’t have gone far.”

“Okay, but make it quick.”

While Ray walked down the row of azaleas and dogwoods that lined the backyard, Dwight called Melanie Ashworth and brought her up to speed on the murder.

“I’m glad you called,” she said. “I’m getting questions about how and why Vick Earp’s body wound up on your father-in-law’s farm.”

“Did you release that location?”

“I did not,” she said crisply.

Melanie Ashworth was the department’s recently hired public information officer. She had an associate degree in communications from Colleton Community College and had worked for several years as an off-screen reporter at one of the Raleigh television stations before coming to them. That experience made her well aware of the dangers of disengaging tongue from brain when briefing the media.

“Must have been one of the EMTs,” Dwight said.

“The thing is,” said Ashworth, “I think the
Clarion
’s implying that Mr. Knott—Mr. Kezzie Knott—had something to do with the murder, but will probably get a pass on a real investigation because his daughter is a judge and his son-in-law is Sheriff Poole’s chief deputy. Now the
News and Observer
wants a statement about that aspect.”

The
Cotton Grove Clarion
was a small local weekly whose editor had supported Bo Poole’s opponent in the last election. It was barely read outside the county, but the
News and Observer
was read statewide.

Dwight groaned. “Keeps coming down to politics, doesn’t it?”

“I’m afraid so, Major.”

“Thanks for the heads-up,” he said.

Ray McLamb joined him a few minutes later and reported no sign of the missing and now presumed dead cat. “No sign of fresh digging for a grave either,” he said.

They drove over to the bank on Market Street where Rusty Reynolds was a loan officer.

She was just stepping out of the restroom off the lobby as they entered and when she recognized them, she showed them into her office. Her eyes were almost as red as her hair, the tip of her small nose was bright pink, and her voice had a slight wobble. “Diesel’s dead, isn’t he?”

“What makes you say that?” Dwight asked.

“I just remembered the blood on the steps. Vick finally did it, didn’t he? He kept threatening to, but Rosalee was sure it was just his temper talking. And it’s all my fault.” She reached for the box of tissues in her desk drawer and blotted her eyes. “I forgot that I was going to get home late Friday and I didn’t leave any food out for him, which means he would’ve gone back to Rosalee’s and if Vick had been drinking—” She reached for a fresh tissue.

“He’d threatened to kill the cat before?” asked Dwight.

She nodded. “Poor ol’ Diesel thought everybody loved him. But every time he twined around Vick’s legs, Vick would…well…not flat-out kick him, but the next thing to a kick if he’d been drinking. Diesel never seemed to learn. Vick kept saying he was going to stomp the daylights out of him.” She sniffed and looked at them sadly. “So he finally did it, didn’t he?”

“We’re not sure what happened, but yes, that was cat blood on the steps.”

As more tears welled up in her eyes, Dwight said, “Did you see either of the Earps Friday afternoon?”

His routine question seemed to steady her. She blew her nose, then took a deep breath. “No. I told you. I came home late. Around eight-thirty. I called for Diesel, but he never came.”

Dwight looked at his notes. Mrs. Earp had said, and her cousin confirmed, that she had fled the house around six. “There’s still plenty of daylight at eight-thirty. Did you happen to look over their way and notice his truck? Hear any voices?”

“The trees and bushes are so thick back there that I can’t see through them even in the dead of winter. I did go out to water my flower beds, but I didn’t hear anything.”

“You mentioned your son. Was he there that evening?”

Mrs. Reynolds shook her head. “He and my husband have gone down to visit relatives in South Carolina. They left Friday morning and won’t be back till this evening.”

After more pointed questions, she admitted that the Earp marriage was violent. “When you’ve been neighbors this long, you can’t help knowing about each other. Not that Rosalee would ever say, but I could see the bruises and she did call the cops on him last year and got a restraining order, but then he talked her into coming back. Except for Marisa, she doesn’t have any family to go to. They’re like sisters, though. Both of them are only children. Their parents are dead, Marisa doesn’t have kids, and as for Rosalee’s daughters, they live up near Washington. On the Maryland side, I believe.”

“Did Earp hit them, too?”

“Rosalee always put herself between him and the girls.” She sighed. “But it’s not like it happened every day or even every month, Major, and to be fair, he was a hard worker. You saw what their place looked like. Neatness was almost compulsion for him. He detailed her car and his truck every Saturday morning, kept the grass cut and the leaves raked. On the other hand, he was always finding fault. Cutting her down, criticizing her. If he was at home and she let Diesel in, he complained the whole time about cat hair and he wouldn’t hear of keeping a litter box. He just couldn’t stand any kind of mess or anything out of place.”

“And yet he didn’t put away the lettuce and mayonnaise and he left most of that mess on the kitchen floor,” Dwight said when he and Ray were back in the parking lot. “Why?”

“The cat?” Ray suggested. “Or maybe he was interrupted. If we do find different prints on one of those beer cans, we’ll know somebody else was there, somebody who maybe asked him to step outside so they could bash his head in.”

“Either one’s possible,” Dwight agreed dryly. “See if you can run down his brother and get a statement. And while you’re at it, see if he’s ever registered a gun and ask if he’s the one that put a bullet through Earp’s windshield. I’ll go talk to the uncle.”

Back in the fifties, before the county got serious about zoning, any landowner could dig a well, put in septic tanks, and start renting spaces for mobile homes. The address Dwight had for Joby Earp was located in Rolling Vista, one of those informal trailer parks a few miles out from Cotton Grove. Rolling Vista might have seemed an appropriate name for a treeless field fifty years ago. Today, tall oaks and maples spread deep shade over a cluster of older singlewides and all the vistas were blocked out by overgrown azaleas and privet. A bank of mailboxes stood at the entrance of an unpaved U-shaped drive that led in from the highway, curved past the mobile homes, and exited back out a few hundred feet further down the road. There was no rental office, only a homemade sign that gave the name and phone number of a management agency. The trailers themselves were weathered and shabby but the grounds were neatly kept and summer zinnias and tubs of petunias brightened more than one dooryard.

Dwight slowed to a stop by one of them and called through the window of his truck to two old men who sat on an old wooden bench under a magnolia tree in full bloom. “Can you tell me where Joby Earp lives?”

Both pointed to a faded green trailer two doors down. “He ain’t home, though. Saw him drive out about an hour ago. Him and his wife, too.”

“Either of you know his nephew Vick Earp?”

One man shrugged, the other said, “Didn’t know he had one.”

“Didn’t they use to have two boys living with ’em?” asked the first.

“So they did,” said the second. “Ain’t seen ’em around in years, though. Sorry, mister.”

Dwight thanked them and circled past the green trailer to get back on the road. He called Deputy Mayleen Richards, gave her the number for Earp’s cell phone, and asked her to see what information his phone company could provide about his recent calls. “Any word on his truck yet?”

“Sorry, Major.”

“Tell Sheriff Poole I’m on my way in,” he said.

Sheriff Bo Poole reminded Dwight of a bantam cock. His small body radiated confident energy and he walked as if there were springs on the soles of his feet. Six inches shorter than Dwight, he had an outsized personality and a good ol’ boy folksiness, which hid a shrewdness that would probably keep him in office as long as he wanted to run because the citizens of Colleton County kept crossing party lines to vote for him. But the whole country was becoming more and more polarized and he knew such loyalty could no longer be taken for granted.

“Any leads in this murder?” he asked when Dwight tapped on his open door.

“Too early,” Dwight said.

“You talk to Ashworth?”

“About the
Clarion
’s insinuations? Yeah.”

“You know I got to ask, Dwight. Anything to it?”

“Did my wife conspire with her father, a man pushing ninety, to murder a stranger, dump him on his own land, and then lead us to his body?”

Bo leaned back in his big leather chair and laughed. “Well, yeah, put like that…”

“So far, the only connection to Mr. Kezzie is where the body was found, Bo. It’s been a lover’s lane for years and Earp’s wife says he used to take her there back when they were courting.”

“So is this somebody’s idea of a joke? Who else would know him and know that place, too? What about Mrs. Earp herself? She do it?”

“I don’t see how. She got to the cousin’s house around six Friday evening, all beat up. Miss Young doctored her face and put her right to bed. Both of them say she never stirred from the house all night, which is probably when it happened. Not that Dr. Singh can tell us when the blow that killed him was actually delivered. But they were together all day Saturday and she was still there Sunday when I went to tell her Earp was dead. I’ve got people out talking to his co-workers and his brother. Sure would help if we could find his truck, though.”

They batted it around for a few more minutes, then moved on to other incidents and lower-level crimes from the weekend. A house near Dobbs had mysteriously caught fire Friday night. It had been on the market for over a year. A spontaneous electrical fire or an owner looking to get out from under a mortgage?

“My money’s on the owner,” said Dwight.

Bo handed him the fire chief’s report. “It seems to have started near the fuse box, so maybe the owner just got lucky.”

“Or maybe the owner knows enough about electricity to rig a hot wire,” Dwight said cynically.

A hit-and-run out at the soccer field Saturday morning had resulted in an arrest before sundown. They agreed that it was not a good idea to paint bright yellow flames on your equally bright red van if you’re going to use it like a tank. At least six witnesses had described it to the responding officers.

A home invasion Saturday night in a Hispanic neighborhood would probably bring an arrest once Mayleen Richards had a chance to interview the terrified older woman who had been knocked around and was still in the hospital.

Also in the hospital getting checked out for any immediate harm was a four-year-old boy who’d been found in a meth house their drug team had busted the night before. DHS was hoping there would be no permanent brain damage.

The rest were routine brawls and disorderly conduct in the county’s various clubs and bars.

“Let me know when Earp’s truck turns up,” Bo said.

Dexter Oil and Gas was located at the western edge of Cotton Grove, where Merchant Street petered out into industrial service yards. Cement blocks, rusty pipes, and piles of salvaged bricks were protected by chain-link fences overgrown with kudzu and honeysuckle. The smell of spent motor oil lingered on the warm humid air.

Earp’s co-workers had heard about his death and none of them seemed particularly saddened that he’d been murdered. Nor could they offer a lead on who might have hated or feared him enough to do it.

Mrs. Dexter, his white-haired no-nonsense boss, was no help either.

“He didn’t go out of his way to make friends,” she told the detectives who questioned her. “I don’t think he particularly liked it when I took over after my husband’s stroke, but this isn’t a touchy-feely place to work anyhow, and my employees don’t have to like me as long as they do the work they’re paid to do. I don’t keep a pot of coffee going here in the office, and I don’t encourage them to stand around and chitchat. My drivers get their route assignments every morning. They fill their trucks, they go out and deliver the fuel, and they hand in their invoices at the end of the day. Nine years Vick worked here and I couldn’t tell you if he took cream or sugar in his coffee or if he even drank coffee. He was a good worker, though, and I’m sorry to lose him. He was first out the door in the morning and usually finished thirty-five or forty minutes before the others.”