“Are we likely to find that in Wake County?” I asked anxiously.
Bobby nodded. He knew the score. “Yep. Unless the officer was involved solely as a witness, it would have to be in Wake County. If a case involves a police officer as a defendant or victim, it gets transferred from Durham County to Wake to avoid conflicts of interest.”
I tried not to look impressed. It’s easy to forget that, beneath Bobby’s bad toupee, there lurks a pretty damned-good brain. “When can she have the information ready?” I asked.
“She’s going in tomorrow morning while the coast is clear. Expenses are on you, right? She’s gonna have to miss church. It’s a disappointment.”
No doubt. With Bobby in her life, she probably had an awful lot of repenting to do. But I nodded eagerly. Expenses were no problem. Nanny Honeycutt could easily afford to pay a few hundred and to bankroll an intimate candlelit dinner for the two of them when this was all over, even if one of the diners was Bobby D.
“Thanks, babe,” Bobby told the outraged mummy as he cradled her phone. He patted her bed-bound foot for emphasis, and a groan escaped through the mouth slit. “She’s tryi wi “She’sng to say, ‘You’re welcome,’” he translated confidently.
“I don’t think so,” I told him, eyeing her angry foot movements. “I sure hope those restraints hold.”
Bobby let out a giant yawn, looking as satisfied and sleepy as a lion after a wildebeest feast. “I’m gonna go catch me some shut-eye,” he declared. “All this detecting has left me exhausted.”
“Thanks for the help,” I told him. “Come back soon. We’ll do lunch.”
I shouldn’t have reminded him of food. He was off, wheeling out the door and complaining about the hospital meals yet again.
I ignored my roommate’s angry hisses, and shut my eyes to think. There was no way in hell I was going to waste two days lying here next to Queen Tut while someone drove around Raleigh running innocent people off the road and gloating about Gail’s upcoming execution. Nor was I anxious to lie in wait for the Raleigh Police Department to show up to question me. I gave it a good twenty minutes, and then I crept from my bed, disconnecting the IV drip after checking to make sure I wasn’t wasting a good supply of painkillers. It was only an antibiotic, and I was willing to take that chance. The front of my dress was caked with dried blood, but at least all my clothes were present and accounted for in the bottom of my closet. I gathered them in a bundle and tiptoed from the room.
The hospital was filled with visitors of all ages since it was a weekend. No one gave a crap about the woman with two black eyes whose arse hung out the back of her hospital gown. I rode the elevator down two floors to Bobby’s wing. I could hear his snores as soon as I turned the corner. God, but I pitied his hall mates. I slipped into his room unnoticed and crept to the narrow closet that held his personal belongings. His key ring was in one pocket of his pants. It had enough keys on it to make the janitor of an apartment complex proud. I could identify his car and house keys, but what the hell did the rest of them open? Lord, I did not want to know. I stole the key ring, along with a pack of breath mints. He never missed a beat of sleep.
I changed in his bathroom. Looking in the mirror was a mistake. I looked like Rocky Raccoon on a very bad day. My right eye was a blotched mess of purple, blue and black bruises that overlapped like running watercolors. The left eye had a mouse the size of a football-chalk smudge beneath it, and there was an attractive streak of red running through the cornea. My lips were swollen, and there were rings of caked blood around each nostril. Very attractive, for a crust.
I cleaned up as best I could, then prayed that my industrial-strength foundation would come through once I reached home. By the time I left Bobby’s room, he was still asleep, and, although I barely resembled a human, at least I was wearing human clothes instead of a gown that had a window for a back door.
I had l atext”>Ia few close encounters with hospital personnel in the corridors on the way down to civilization and even had to hide briefly in the elevator behind a family of hearty eaters when a doctor I recognized got on at one floor. But no one stopped me, and I was able to stash myself behind a large potted palm in the waiting room while I muttered impatiently for a good half hour until the cab I had called arrived at the
visitors’ entrance. Soon enough I was on my way to new wheels and more legwork.
Back in the office, I sat in the silence of what had been our happy, noisy home away from home and waited for the office phone messages to rewind. Someone would pay for disrupting our lives, I decided. This case had turned personal a long time ago.
There were two messages for me. The first was from Bill Butler, left just past midnight the night before, according to the time stamp. He didn’t sound happy.
“I thought we were supposed to have dinner tonight,” he said. “It’s not like you to play these stupid games, and I don’t appreciate it.” He hung up without saying good-bye.
It was too bad he had his jockstrap in a wringer about it, but I had bigger things to worry about. The next message was from Dolly Porter, Gail’s prison chum. She talked nervously, her hillbilly twang trampling all over itself in her haste. “I can’t talk long,” she said. “I got in trouble for smoking after lights out and I ain’t supposed to be on the phone at all. I talked to Gail through the window last night. The men who visited her were police officers who worked with her husband. One was named George Washington something, he was easy to remember, and the other two were Pete and Steve. Gail’s confused about their last names and she was talking funny. I think she’s really doped up. She don’t sound too good. Please help her. Please.” She hung up, leaving nothing but a flat dial tone.
It was better than nothing. Now I had a few names to go on. I remembered a George Washington Carter from the court transcripts. He had testified about Roy Taylor’s final hours. The other names were less familiar. But if a Pete or a Steve popped up in any Peyton Tillman court case, maybe I’d have a lead. In the meantime, I needed a change of clothes and, hopefully, a change of face. Not to mention a little painkiller for my wrenched shoulder and sore kneecaps. I was scheduled to interview Gail’s little girl that afternoon, and I didn’t want to scare the kid any more than I had to.
Bobby D.‘s 1978 Olds Cutlass was big by necessity—I don’t think he could fit in any other car—and its huge body made me feel as if I were maneuvering the Titanic through the streets of Durham. This was a car for cruising the moonlit streets of Tijuana. It was not a car I’d care to have anyone I knew see me occupy. Which was why I was driving so fast.
Despite its size, that car could rock: Bobby had chosen the deluxe five-speed manual transmission model with a 350- cubic-inch engine and a four-barrel carburetor. I made it home quickly, showeredpolly, sho and changed in record time, slapped on enough pancake makeup to make Lon Chaney jealous, then high-tailed it back to Garner for my afternoon appointment with Brittany Taylor.
The child was everything I had never been: a country princess, slim and pretty, with strawberry blond hair falling in curls to her shoulders. She was wearing a matching denim skirt and rhinestone-studded vest with real leather cowboy boots and playing in the front yard of the small farm she called home when I pulled up in Bobby’s car. I saw movement in one window and a curtain flickered, but no one else appeared to greet me.
She watched me with a wary expression as I approached. I had a feeling she could see right through the layers of Ben Nye theatrical foundation to the bruises and scratches underneath. “You’re the lady Nanny Honeycutt told me about,” she said. She was peeking into a large cardboard box. Tiny mews floated across the yard in the spring breeze, and I inched closer for a better look. A mother cat sprawled lazily on her side, while eight kittens nursed noisily at her nipples. They sounded like a washing machine. “Don’t touch them,” the girl warned me. “They’re only a few days old.”
I kept a respectful distance from the furry little critters as requested, though I longed to cuddle one or two. Even a hard-boiled cynic like me finds it impossible to resist a bright-eyed kitten on a spring day.
Brittany seemed extremely innocent for her age. Most eleven-year-old girls around these parts—even in rural Garner—were far more sophisticated. They cruised the local shopping mall, wore blue eye shadow and picked up Fort Bragg servicemen in cyberspace. Damn few were cuddling fuzzy kittens while wearing a matching cowgirl outfit. Brittany was too clean as well, I thought, not a hair out of place, not a dab of mud on her outfit, not a blemish on her pretty heart-shaped face. Her hands and fingernails were immaculate, and she lived on a farm? I wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or a bad sign. I preferred a genuinely sullen pre-teen over a Stepford kid any day.
“Did Nanny Honeycutt tell you why I was coming here today?” I asked.
“You want to ask me about the night my mom shot my dad,” she said rather matter-of-factly.
“That’s right. I guess you’ve talked to a lot of people about it over the years.”
“Just doctors,” she explained. “And a judge one time. He was nice. I liked him. He had a sad face. He said he was sorry about what had happened to my dad. He promised he wouldn’t make me talk in front of a roomful of strangers. He even let me use his copy machine for fun.”
I felt a pang when I realized she meant Peyton Tillman. I didn’t tell her he was dead. “I know that judge,” I said. “He’s a very nice man. I’ll probably ask you a lot of the same questions he did. Is that okay?”
She sighed, as if I were boring her. “I guess so,” she said. “Are you a judge?”
“No, I’m a private detective,” I said. “I’m trying to help your mom.”
“My mom’s in prison,” the child explained calmly. “People don’t think I know about it. I pretend like I don’t know because it upsets them. And I don’t want the kids at school to know.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Your mother is in prison.”
“Have you seen her?” she asked.
“I visited her last week.”
“Why can’t I go to see her?” the child asked. “I would be good.”
“Your mother is afraid that seeing her will upset you,” I explained. “She says that prison is no place for a little girl.”
Brittany considered this in silence, then shook her head. “I don’t care,” she said. “I still want to see my mother.”
“Okay,” I said. “I can understand that. I’ll talk to her next time I see her.”
She relaxed at my promise. “What did you want to ask me?” she said.
“Do you remember that night?” I asked. “I mean from personal experience, not from what other people said?”
She shrugged. “I guess I remember some things. I was only three.”
“What do you remember most?” I asked, searching her face for clues.
“The noise,” she said promptly, but her voice faltered as if a hidden fear had crept unexpectedly into the sunny afternoon. “I woke up because there was a big boom and I was afraid to get out of bed. I sat up and waited. I kept thinking my mom or dad would come in. Then I heard two more booms right after that.”
She had heard the gunshots. One or two to wake her, two more right after she’d sat up in bed. “What happened then?” I prompted her.
Her unnatural composure began to crumble. Her lower lip trembled. “I waited a long time, and no one came,” she said. “Then there were two more big booms. I hid my head under the pillow and I wet the bed. It got cold, but I was afraid to move. Iht=d to mo was crying for a long time and then the lights in my room came on. Some men in white wanted to know if I was okay. Policemen were there, too. They carried me out a back door and I could hear my mom crying inside the house, and no one would tell me why.”
I sat quietly for a moment, thinking of what she had said. It wasn’t an experience anyone was likely to forget. “When you were lying in bed,” I asked slowly, “and you had the pillows over your head, did you hear anything else besides more booms? Anyone talking? Footsteps? Or even a car?”
She shook her head solemnly. “Just the roaring and lots of light.”
“A roaring?” I asked. “Like a lion roars or like a train roars?”
“Like in that movie about the aliens,” she explained. “When the spaceship gets near and there are lots of bright lights and the air gets full of roars.”
“Did you tell the doctors that?” I asked.
She nodded, her eyes growing wider. “They asked me if I heard the roaring inside of my head or outside of my head.”
“What did you tell them?” God, but shrinks could be goofy.
“Nothing.” She shrugged. “The question didn’t make any sense.”
“Can you tell me anything else?” I asked.
“I wish I could remember more,” she said. “But I was really little and really scared. I’m not that little or scared anymore.”
“You seem very brave to me,” I told her. I smiled at her and she smiled back, a slow upward turning of her mouth.
“Maybe you could hypnotize me?” she suggested. “Like they do on TV?”
“Maybe I should,” I agreed. But I left it at that. She remembered as much as she could bear to remember. I wouldn’t try to force more on her.
She walked me out to my car, her face a blank mask I could not read. “You’ll ask my mom if I can come visit?” she said when we reached the car.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I answered. “But that’s all I can promise. I don’t want you to get your hopes up, okay?”