“You try calling him?”
“Of course I did,” she said impatiently. “That’s why I
drove up to Wilkesboro. The lodge is in an area where
reception is spotty and he never answers a land line. I
thought sure that’s where he’d be.”
“When did you last speak to him, Ms. Smith?”
“Sunday before last. He was all riled up about the set-
tlement and said he was going to be too busy to come
down to Wilmington, but we set it up for me to come
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here. He said the divorce would be final by then and we
could name our wedding date.”
“You didn’t worry when he didn’t call?”
“I give my men a long leash,” she said with a rueful
smile. “Buck hates to talk on the phone and I don’t
push it.”
“What about you?” Dwight asked Reid.
Reid shrugged. “As she said, Mr. Harris doesn’t like
to talk on the phone. I left messages on all his answer-
ing machines and at his office. When Ms. Smith came
in today, I checked with my secretary. According to our
records, the last time he actually spoke to me was Friday
the seventeenth. I told him that the judge was running
out of patience and he promised to be in court this past
Wednesday.”
Dwight turned back to Flame Smith. “Do you know
if Mr. Harris ever broke his arm?”
“No, but I just remembered. He has a tiny little mole,
right about here.” One coral-tipped finger touched an
area of her jeans halfway below her waist. “Oh, and he’s
an ‘outie,’ too,” she added with an electric smile.
Dwight reached for a notepad. “Tell me the name of
his housekeeper out at the Buckley place.” He glanced
at Reid. “And maybe you’d better give me his wife’s
contact numbers, as well.”
“Oh God!” Flame Smith moaned. Her peaches-and-
cream complexion had turned to ivory. “It is Buck,
isn’t it?”
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16
City folks eat their meals more from habit than hunger, but
country folks love to hear the horn blow.
—Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890
Deborah Knott
Monday Morning, March 6
% Monday morning and my turn to handle felony
first appearances. The State of North Carolina is
obligated to bring an accused person before a judge
within ninety-six hours of arrest and incarceration in the
county jail or at the next session of district court, which-
ever occurs first. First appearance is where the judge in-
forms the accused of the charges, sets the bond if bail is
deemed appropriate, appoints an attorney if so re-
quested, and calendars a trial date. Innocence or guilt is
irrelevant. Neither plea can be accepted. This is just to
get the case into the system and onto a calendar so that
it can be moved along in a judicious manner.
When I first came on the bench, Monday mornings
might bring me twenty or thirty people—forty after a
real hot August weekend if it followed a week of unre-
mitting heat. (Heat and humidity cause tempers to flare
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MARGARET MARON
and differences are too often settled with baseball bats,
knives, handguns, and the occasional frying pan.)
Between the building boom, and Colleton County’s
exploding population growth, fifty’s no longer an un-
usual number, even on a Monday morning after some
beautiful early spring weather. Here were the hungover
drunks, the druggies coming down from their various
highs, the incompetent burglars, the belligerent citizens
and aliens alike, with attitudes that hadn’t softened after
a night or two on a jail cot.
Coping with all this is one judge and one clerk. If
we’re lucky, we may have a fairly skillful translator on
hand for the whole session, but that’s about it.
North Carolina is forty-eighth in the country in its
funding of the whole court system, so take a guess
where that leaves its district court? Last year 239 dis-
trict court judges like me disposed of 2,770,951 cases.
While upper court judges are plowing through their
lighter load in air-conditioned tractors equipped with
cell phones, iPods, and hydraulic lifts, district court
judges are out in the hot sun, barefooted, following the
back end of a mule.
I worked straight through the morning without even
a bathroom break. Around 10:30, a clerk handed me a
note from Dwight. “Lunch here in my office?”
I sent word back that I’d be down at noon and man-
aged to gear it so that I actually recessed at 12:07.
Lunch in Dwight’s office when he’s buying tends not
to be soup or a healthy salad, so it was no surprise to
smell chopped onions and Texas Pete chili sauce as I
turned into his hallway.
Detectives Mayleen Richards and Jack Jamison were
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HARD ROW
on their way out and we paused to speak to each other.
Like Kate, Richards had a new haircut, too. Her cinnamon-
colored hair still brushed her shoulders, but there was a
softer, more feminine look to the cut.
“Looks great,” I told her. “You didn’t get something
that uptown here in Dobbs, did you?”
“As a matter of fact I did,” she said. “There’s a new
stylist at the Cut ’n’ Curl.”
I made a face. “Too bad. That’s where I go when I
need a quick fix. Ethelene would kill me if I went to
someone else in the same shop.”
“How long since you were last there?” Richards said.
“I think the new girl might be her replacement.”
“Really? Thanks.”
New hairdo? New air of confidence? Heretofore she
could barely look me in the eye without turning brick
red.
“You give Richards a promotion or has she got a new
boyfriend?” I asked Dwight as soon as the door was
closed behind me.
He popped the tops on a couple of drink cans. “No
promotion.”
“Boyfriend, then,” I said. “Somebody here in the
courthouse?”
“Don’t ask me, shug. That’s Faye Myers’s depart-
ment. Dispatchers seem to keep up with that stuff.”
He handed over the sack from our local sandwich
shop. “I got extra napkins.”
“Thanks.” I took the chair beside his desk and un-
wrapped a hot dog, being careful not to let it drip on
my white wool skirt.
I know it’s full of nitrates and artificial coloring and
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MARGARET MARON
probably a dozen other coronary-inducing additives,
but a frankfurter tucked into a soft roll with onions,
chili, and coleslaw is difficult to resist and I didn’t try.
“Cheers,” Dwight said, touching his can to mine.
“So how come you didn’t tell me that Buck Harris is
missing?”
“Huh?”
&nbs
p; “Or did the sight of Dent Lee in your courtroom run
it right out of your head?” he asked sardonically.
I groaned. “Do you remember every comment I ever
made about every guy I ever lusted after?”
The corner of his lips twitched.
“If I’d realized I was going to wind up married to
you, I’d’ve kept my mouth shut when we used to hang
out together. You’ve never heard me say a single word
about Belle Byrd, have you? Or Claudia Ward or Mary
Nell Lee? Or Loretta Sawyer or—”
His grin was so wide at that point that I had to laugh,
too. He’d suckered me again. “You must have been
talking to Reid.”
“Yep.”
“Guess he’s in no hurry to have his client show up.
Have you seen the client’s girlfriend? Anyhow, why
should I have told you how some self-important mil-
lionaire keeps ditching his court dates? I will tell you
this, though. If he doesn’t come to court next week,
I’m going to hear the case without him and he can
whistle down the wind if he thinks I’ve acted unfairly.
Until then—”
I looked at him in sudden dismay as the last dime
finally dropped.
“Those body parts. Buck Harris?”
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HARD ROW
He gave a grim nod. “It’s not a hundred percent pos-
itive, but it’s on up there in the nineties.” He finished
his first hot dog and started on the second. “Nobody
seems to have seen your missing Buck Harris since those
legs were found last week. He had a mole just below
his navel; so does the torso we found Friday night. His
navel was an outie and so is this.”
“His girlfriend—Flame Smith—does she know?”
“She’s the one told me about the mole and the ‘pro-
trusive umbilicus,’ as the ME put it. She contacted Reid
and they were both in this morning. We’re getting a
search warrant for the old Buckley place. That seems to
be the last place he was seen.”
“The old Buckley place,” I said slowly. “It’s on Ward
Dairy Road.”
“Yeah,” said Dwight.
That big bull of a man reduced to chunks of hacked-
off arms and legs? My hot dog suddenly turned to ashes.
I set it back on the paper plate and took a long swallow
from the drink can.
“You know this Smith woman?” he asked.
“Not really. Portland’s the one who introduced us
the other day. They used to work together down at the
beach. She was surprised to see Por here and I think
they were going to get in touch with each other, have
dinner or something.”
“How far along was Harris’s divorce?”
“It was final last month, but we’re still working on
the ED. There’s a lot of money, property, and real estate
to divide. That’s why Dent was there to testify.”
“Was it going amicably?”
“Not particularly. Mediation didn’t work for them.
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MARGARET MARON
That’s why their case came to me. I can’t quote you
chapter and verse but the one time they were in court
together, you’d’ve needed a chainsaw to cut the hostil-
ity. They split hairs and argued every point. But what do
Pete and Reid care? If their clients want to waste time
sniping at each other and not cooperating, that’s just
more billable hours. Wednesday, though, Mrs. Harris
was furious that Flame was even there at all. Whether or
not she’s the primary reason they split, I get the impres-
sion that Mrs. Harris blames her for the divorce. You’ve
seen her.”
“Oh yes indeed,” said Dwight with just a little more
enthusiasm than I might have preferred.
“Mrs. Harris is fifty-two and wears every year on her
face. Flame Smith doesn’t look much over forty, does
she? Buck Harris wouldn’t be the first man to trade in
an old wife for a new model and try to give the back of
his hand to the old one.”
“Was she mad enough to do something about it?”
“You mean kill him and then butcher him like a
hog?”
“More people are killed by their loved ones than by
total strangers,” he reminded me.
“I only saw him the one time he came to court, but
yeah, her anger was pretty obvious. He was big, but she
is too. They say that in the early years, she was out on
the tractors, plowing and spraying and hoisting boxes
of vegetables right alongside him till they were making
enough to hire migrant labor for all the physical stuff,
so I imagine there’s a lot of muscle underneath those
extra pounds of fat.”
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HARD ROW
“Kill him and she would get the whole company,”
Dwight said.
“Kill him before the divorce is final and then take
a dismissal of her ED claim, she would,” I corrected.
“Assuming rights of survival. At this point, though, the
ED will proceed as if he were still alive.”
“Really?”
“I’ll have to look it up. There’s a similar case on ap-
peal to the state supreme court but I’m pretty sure that’s
how it would work. But since they’re divorced—”
“When was it final?” he interrupted.
“Sometime within the last two weeks or so. I’d have
to check the files. I’m pretty sure it was a summary
judgment, so neither of them came to court. Reid just
handed me the judgment and I signed it, so it’s a done
deal.”
“Today’s March sixth. What with the cold weather
and no insect damage, the best guesstimate we have
for time of death is sometime between the morning of
last spoke to him, and Wednesday the twenty-second,
two days before we found the legs. You gonna eat the
rest of that?”
I shook my head and the last third of my hot dog fol-
lowed his first two.
“Tonight we stop somewhere for something healthy,”
I warned.
He gave me a blank look.
“You haven’t forgotten have you? The Hurricanes?
You and me?”
“Is that tonight?”
“It is. Jessie and Emma are going to pick Cal up after
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MARGARET MARON
school and keep him till we get home, so no getting
sidetracked, okay? You’ve got good people, darling.
Trust them. What’s the point of being a boss if you’re
going to roll out for every call?”
I finished my drink and stood to go. He stood, too.
“Wait, there’s a spot of chili on your tie.”
I tipped the carafe on his desk to wet a napkin and
sponged it off before it had a chance to stain.
“I’ll be finished by five or five-thirty,” I said. “That
gives you an extra ninety minutes. My car or your
truck?”
“You’ll come in early with me tomorrow?”
“Sure.” I laced my hands behind his neck and pulled
&n
bsp; him down to my level. He smelled of mustard and chili
and Old Spice. “I’d come to Madagascar with you.”
“What’s in Madagascar?”
“Who cares? You want to go, I’ll go with you. As long
as you come with me to tonight’s game.”
He laughed and kissed me. “My truck. Five-thirty.
And don’t forget to find me that divorce date.”
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C H A P T E R
17
Horace argued both sides, and wound up by saying “the city
is the best place for a rich man to live in; the country is the
best place for a poor man to die in.”
—Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890
Mayleen Richards
Monday Afternoon, March 6
% On the drive out to the farmhouse that Buck Harris
had inherited from his maternal grandfather, Jack
Jamison was unusually silent. Normally, the chubby-faced
detective would be throwing out a dozen theories, cheer-
fully speculating as to what they would find at the house,
formulating possible motives. For the last few days
though, he had seemed a million miles away and worry
lines had begun to settle between his eyebrows.
“Everything okay at home?” Mayleen Richards asked
him.
“Yeah, sure.”
“Baby okay?”
As a rule, the mere mention of Jack Junior, now called
Jay, was enough to get her colleague talking non-stop.
Today, all it got was an “Um.”
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MARGARET MARON
“Guess Cindy’s got her hands full now that he’s start-
ing to crawl.”
“Yeah.”
It was a sour response and Mayleen backed off. If
Jack and Cindy were having marital problems, best she
stay out of it. She turned the heater down a notch and
concentrated on keeping up with Percy Denning, who
was in the car ahead of them.
“Her sister’s husband got a big raise back around
Christmas,” Jamison burst out suddenly. “They bought
a new house. New car. And now she’s told Cindy that
they’re going to have an in-ground swimming pool put
in this summer.”
He did not have to say more. Cindy and Jack lived
in a doublewide next door to his widowed mother.
Although Jack had never specifically said so, Mayleen
was fairly sure that he gave Mrs. Jamison some financial
help with her utility bills and car repairs in return for
using her well and septic tank.
“She knew what the county pays when she married
me.”
Knowing it’s one thing, Mayleen thought. Living on