Rituals of the Season

Book 11: A Deborah Knott Mystery

by Margaret Maron

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

Best-selling author Margaret Maron shows the form that has won her the Edgar and Agatha Awards, among many others, in this riveting mystery.

Judge Deborah Knott and Deputy Sheriff Dwight Bryant are due to marry in a week. But all plans are put on hold when an assistant district attorney is killed, and the clues compel Judge Knott to investigate an earlier double murder that may be connected.

Release date: August 25, 2005

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 320

Sample

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 10

The white sedan was later than expected, so late that the driver of the nondescript car parked on the shoulder was beginning to wonder if something had already happened to her. Then suddenly, there she was, zipping along in the fast lane of the interstate, her usual ten miles an hour over the speed limit, as if North Carolina’s traffic laws did not apply to her.

You’d think somebody in her position would be a little more observant of the law, the driver thought wryly, pulling back onto the highway. After all, she’s sent people to jail for stuff not much more serious than speeding.

In half an hour, the daily reverse flow from Raleigh would start to clog this stretch of highway, but right now traffic was still light, and in less than a minute both cars were side by side, traveling at the same speed.

The thirty-something woman appeared to be singing along with her radio when the second car pulled even. She glanced over casually, then her eyes widened in recognition and she smiled as she powered down her side window with a motion for the other to do the same.

“Hey!” she called cheerfully, her eyes flicking back and forth from the road ahead to the car beside her. “How’s it going?”

“Going good right now.”

The revolver came up to shoulder level and the woman’s eyes widened in disbelief. Before she could flinch or dodge, a single shot pierced her jugular just above the small green-and-red cloisonné Christmas wreath pinned to the collar of her white cashmere sweater.

There was one quick glimpse of jetting blood, the sound of screeching brakes, then her car swerved away and crashed headlong into an overpass abutment.

The other driver touched the accelerator and sped on through the early twilight without a single look back in the rearview mirror.

Traveling north on the interstate in his unmarked sedan, Colleton County Sheriff’s Deputy Mike Castleman had his eye out for Judge Deborah Knott’s car. Word had come through the dispatcher from Major Bryant that the judge was unaccountably late and not answering her cell phone, so if anyone should happen to spot her . . .

No sign of the judge’s car, but up ahead Castleman did see one that matched the profile of the more brazen drug traffickers who frequented this stretch of interstate through North Carolina. Only one person in the car, so he didn’t bother calling for the usual backup. He had just switched on the blue lights hidden behind his radiator grille when a second call came through that a white Lexus had crashed into the abutment where Possum Creek Road crossed over I-95.

He immediately thumbed his mike. “I’ll catch it, Faye.”

The suspect car ahead had obediently pulled over, but with his blue lights still flashing and his siren now wailing as well, Castleman gave a go-ahead wave to the sullen-looking Hispanic inside, made a U-turn across the grassy median, and headed south.

At the crash site, several civilian cars had stopped. Their passengers milled around, trying to keep warm while they waited for professionals to arrive and take charge. A tall man strode forward when he spotted the badge on Castleman’s heavy leather jacket.

“I was a medic in Iraq,” he told the deputy. His warm breath made little puffs of steam in the chilled air. “The driver’s dead but there’s a baby girl in the backseat that looks to be hanging on by her toenails.”

Baby girl? Oh, Jeeze! thought Castleman, who had not noticed the car seat until that moment. The bottom fell out of his stomach. His own daughter was nineteen, but he never came upon a situation like this without immediately thinking of her, and he was stricken by the sight of that lolling head.

More sirens and flashing lights lit up the darkening evening as an ambulance and a patrol car swerved to a stop. Red and blue strobes flashed over the car’s bloody interior and made the white leather seats and steering wheel look as if they had been splashed with chocolate syrup then dusted with powdered sugar when the air bag popped open.

In the backseat, several gaily wrapped Christmas packages lay jumbled by the impact. The medic pointed to a small one about six inches square.

“I don’t know what’s in it, but it’s heavy as hell and it was on the kid’s chest when I got here. Probably what knocked her out.”

A large bruise had begun to darken the forehead of the baby girl buckled into the car seat. Otherwise, she did not move.

The driver’s face was obscured by the deflated air bag and the front end of the car was so badly smashed that the baby was already on an ambulance to the hospital before they could get the car pried open enough to get her out.

“Oh dear God!” said one of the deputies when the dead driver’s face came into view. “Y’all see who this is?”

“Christ almighty!” swore Castleman, peering over his shoulder. “I was in court with her just this morning.”

CHAPTER 1

Punctuality is the mark of politeness.

Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, 1873

I had adjourned court a little early that bleak December afternoon after taking care of everything I could without a prosecutor (the assistant DA had a late doctor’s appointment), but I’d heard that the party outlet in Makely sold inexpensive wedding favors and, yeah, yeah, with less than two weeks till the big day, you’d think I would have already taken care of every detail worth mentioning.

Wrong.

Having avoided it for this long, I was now so hooked on this whole wedding thing that I was like a junkie who needs just one more fix. Although my sisters-in-law didn’t know it, what I planned to wear was already hidden in an empty closet at Aunt Zell’s house, along with my shoes, gloves, and the dark red velvet cloak that would ward off December’s chilly winds going to and from the First Baptist Church over in Dobbs. (That the hooded cloak flattered the hell out of my dark blond coloring was purely incidental.) My bouquet had been ordered. The country club had been booked for a simple champagne reception, the gold band I would place on Dwight Bryant’s finger had been engraved and entrusted to Portland Brewer, my matron of honor, and when I left home that morning, I was completely caught up on all my thank-you notes. (One good thing about a Christmas wedding is that greeting cards can do double duty.)

The only item lacking was the little bride and groom for the cake. And trust me, I do know they’re tacky and not exactly cutting edge, but my bossy, opinionated family wouldn’t feel it was a real wedding cake if I only had rosebuds and ribbon icing. I’d ordered a cake topper off the Internet—one in which the groom was dressed in a formal blue police uniform—but it still hadn’t come. Kate Bryant, Dwight’s artistic sister-in-law, had volunteered to paint the uniform brown like the one Dwight would be wearing and to change the bridal gown, too, but she was going to need a couple of days to work her magic and one of my own sisters-in-law had suggested I might could find something suitable at the Makely store.

“Sorry,” said the clerk. “You should have tried us back in the spring.”

“Back in the spring, I didn’t know I was going to need one,” I told her.

At that point, I should have walked out of the store and headed straight back to Dobbs, but I saw so many cool stocking stuffers for my numerous nieces and nephews that I completely lost track of the time. It didn’t help that traffic on the interstate was so backed up by an accident or something that I got off at the next exit and had to negotiate unfamiliar back roads.

“Dammit, Deb’rah, where’ve you been?” growled my groom-to-be when I pulled into a slot in front of his apartment well after dark and nearly ninety minutes later than I’d promised when we talked at noon.

Dwight Bryant and I first met on the day I was born—he remembers it; I don’t—but until three months ago I’d always thought of him as just another of my eleven older brothers. Surprised the hell out of me when pragmatic lust abruptly morphed into a romantic love as fiery and all-consuming as a Nora Roberts novel, especially when Dwight confessed that he’d been hiding his true feelings for me behind his honorary-brother role for years.

Doesn’t stop him from still yelling at me like one of my brothers, though. Bareheaded, no jacket, he was pacing back and forth on the windswept landing in front of his second-floor apartment when I got there, and he made it down the steps before I could get my keys out of the ignition.

I tried to explain about court finishing early and how I then got sidetracked by Christmas shopping and after that, the traffic so that—

He didn’t want to hear it. “And you couldn’t call? Or remember to switch your phone on so I could call you?”

I admitted that I’d absentmindedly left my phone in the pocket of my robe, which was now hanging in an office at the Makely courthouse, but he caught me in his arms and held me tightly against him as if to make sure that I was whole and unharmed. For such a big guy, he can be surprisingly gentle. His hands and cheeks were like ice. Felt good, though, and my body started to throb and buzz until I realized that part of the vibration came from the cell phone hooked on his belt.

With one arm still around me, he unclipped the phone, checked to see who it was, and said, “Yeah, Faye?”

I didn’t hear what the dispatcher was saying, but there was nothing ambiguous about his reply. “Tell them to disregard that BOLO. She’s here now.”

I couldn’t believe it. He’d done a be-on-the-lookout for me?

I twisted away from his arm, grabbed the small bag of groceries from the front seat of my car, and stormed up the stairs to his apartment.

“That was totally uncalled for,” I said angrily, when Dwight finally followed me inside. I had flung my coat across the back of his couch and now I was slamming cupboard doors as I pulled out pots and pans.

“I haven’t accounted to anyone since I was eighteen,” I told him, “and I’ll be damned if I’m going to start toeing some imaginary mark now just because we’re getting married.”

He closed the door quietly against the chill December night and stood there white-faced, staring at me, until I finally realized that he had probably spent the past hour remembering how close I came to dying the last time I didn’t answer my cell phone for five hours.

I let go of my anger and went to him.

“Hey,” I said softly, standing on tiptoe to brush his lips with mine. “Nothing’s going to happen to me ever again. I’m going to be here safe and sound for the rest of your life, but not if you try to keep me in bubble wrap, okay?”

“I wish to God I could,” he said and kissed me with such vehemence that I knew something bad had happened.

“What is it?” I asked. “What else did Faye tell you?”

“That traffic backup you ran into on the interstate just now? It was Tracy Johnson. She smashed into an overpass.”

“What? Is she okay?”

He shook his head. “Sounds like she died instantly.”

I stood there with my mouth open. Brisk, efficient Tracy Johnson? The tall and slender ADA who loves high heels as much as I do and who tries to hide her beauty and brains behind the ugliest pair of horn-rim glasses in eastern North Carolina?

Impossible!

“I just saw her,” I protested. “She prosecuted today’s calendar.”

“I’m sorry, shug,” he said.

“What about Mei?” I asked. “Tracy left court early because Mei had a doctor’s appointment for an ear infection.”

“She was in the car, too. They’re going to air-vac her to Chapel Hill, but it doesn’t sound good.”

Three years ago, Tracy got tired of waiting around for a man who wasn’t intimidated by her height or her mind and decided to adopt from China. It had taken her two years to complete all the paperwork, and she was utterly besotted by the baby, who was just beginning to walk and talk. Portland and I and some of the women from the DA’s office had given her a shower once the adoption went through.

She was a few years younger and we were never hugely close, but I did respect her. She was an excellent prosecutor, efficient, prepared, and fairer than most who just want the win, no matter what.

“Does Doug know?” I asked. Doug Woodall is our district attorney and Tracy’s boss.

“Doubt it,” Dwight said. “They just ID’d her and family takes precedence. Did she have any?”

“I’m not sure. I know her parents are dead, but I think she has a sister or brother over in Widdington. Or maybe it was a cousin that came to her shower when she brought Mei home from China this spring.”

Tears spilled down my cheeks and my heart was sore just thinking about that poor little baby. Unwanted by her birth mother, now she’d lost the adoptive mother who adored her. What would happen to her?

Dwight’s cell phone buzzed again. “Yeah, Faye?”

His face went even grimmer as he listened, then he said, “Give me the coordinates again. And call Jamison and Denning. Tell them to meet me there.”

Jack Jamison’s one of the new detectives he’s training and Percy Denning is Colleton County’s crime scene specialist.

“What now?” I asked as he holstered his gun and reached for the heavy winter jacket hanging on a peg by the door.

“The wreck wasn’t an accident,” he said. “The EMTs say Tracy was shot.”

“Shot?” All sorts of wild possibilities tumbled through my mind. I tried to think what was in season now. “Tracy died because some dumb hunter wasn’t paying attention?”

Dwight shrugged. “The ROs say it looks like a deliberate act.”

ROs—responding officers.

“Why?”

“Won’t know till I get there, shug.” He zipped his jacket, gave me a quick kiss and was gone.

CHAPTER 2

At these smaller dinner companies, avoid apologizing for anything, either in the viands or the arrangement of them. You have provided the best your purse will allow, prepared as faultlessly as possible; and you will only gain credit for mock modesty if you apologize for a well-prepared, well-spread dinner.

Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, 1873

After Dwight left, I changed into jeans, pulled one of his old sweatshirts over my red silk turtleneck, and tuned the radio to a station playing Christmas carols. While the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sang of peace on earth, good will to men, I browned the chuck that I had picked up at a grocery store in Makely. I’ll never be a gourmet cook, but I do okay with the basics and Dwight’s not likely to starve to death, no matter what some people think.

The smells of well-browned onions and carrots soon filled the efficiency apartment. Beef stew is good cold-weather comfort food, and if Dwight was going to be late, prolonged simmering would only enhance the flavors.

The simple act of cooking usually mellows me out. Not tonight, though. Not even with the seasonal music and the stiff Jack Daniel’s I had poured myself. As I sliced and browned and stirred, I kept picturing Tracy slumped over her steering wheel on some frozen stretch of I-95.

Not a hunting accident, the first officers on the scene had told Dwight. So who?

And why?

Back before I ran for the bench, Tracy and I had been natural antagonists—I as a defense attorney, she a brand-new prosecutor with a something-to-prove chip on her shoulder and the preponderance of the law on her side. But we hung with the same crowd, saw some of the same guys, and occasionally reached for the same pair of shoes when Fancy Footwork held their seasonal sales. She was way too tall for the high heels we both adored and she grumbled about how some male judges will subconsciously let their judgments be colored if a woman towers over them, but when three-inch apple green slingbacks call to you in the spring, it’s hard to react logically.

A boy soprano sang “O Holy Night” in a high pure voice, and memories of Tracy crowded my mind: evenings at Miss Molly’s on South Wilmington Street in Raleigh before she adopted Mei and quit dropping by smoke-filled cop bars on Friday nights. Trading war stories, the drinks, the laughter. I remembered how she’d bought a round for the house the first time she got a death threat from a felon she’d sent to prison. We’d even gone to a concert over in Greensboro together with a couple of SBI agents we’d met at Miss Molly’s. She went out with the good-looking one several times and then he dropped her for a little five-foot-nothing blonde who made him feel big and strong in a way Tracy never could. In fact, now that I thought about it, he was probably the last straw before she decided to adopt.

Back in the spring, after I broke up with a game warden from down east, we sat next to each other at our local district bar association dinner and I was moaning to her about the dearth of good men. She had smiled and said, “But you know what? When you quit looking, suddenly they’re right under your nose.”

“Tell! Tell!” I’d demanded, but she’d just smiled again and kept her own counsel, which made me pretty certain that she was seeing someone. Mutual friends seemed to have the same impression, but since no one had a name and since Tracy always started talking about Mei the minute anybody asked about her love life, I hadn’t pursued it.

Now I wondered. More women are killed by husbands or lovers than total strangers. Could this be a love affair gone horribly wrong? If she’d been in a relationship, though, why keep it secret?

Because he was married?

Not hardly likely, as my Aunt Sister would say. Yes, propinquity can sneak up on you and clobber you over the head when you’re not looking, make you do things you never thought you would, but Tracy had been a levelheaded realist and I’d heard her speak scornfully of such couplings too many times to think she wouldn’t have made propinquity zip its pants the minute it started breathing heavily.

On the other hand, between work and Mei, when would she have had time to get involved with a complete stranger? I thought of the other men in Doug Woodall’s office. Chubby little Chester Nance, who’d run against me my first campaign? He’s at least two inches shorter than Tracy and appears to be happily married.

Certainly not Doug himself. Even though he just turned forty, our DA has a no-nonsense wife who is famous for advising newlywed paralegals, “Sugar, you want to keep him on the straight and narrow, you keep him too dick-sore to even think about getting it up for another woman.”

(Around the courthouse, it’s a given that Mary Jess Woodall effectively practices what she preaches.)

Which brought us to Brandon Frazier. He left a mediocre private practice to work for Doug after Cyl DeGraffenried resigned. Now, he could be a possibility: divorced, no children, lean, intense, dark hair, smoldering navy blue eyes. Hairy as a shag rug, though, judging by his wrists and the back of his hands. Not my taste—except for a few stray hairs in the middle, Dwight’s chest is fairly smooth—but maybe the caveman look was a turn-on for Tracy.

Or was her death something to do with her work as a prosecutor? Doug rotates his staff through both courts, the DWIs and the felony homicides. He’s a political animal—it’s an open secret that he has his eye on the governor’s mansion in Raleigh—and it’s his name on the ballot every four years, but he’s comfortable sharing the spotlight as long as everyone remembers who the star is. Although Tracy often worked district court, she really shone in superior court’s serious criminal cases, and after Cyl went to Washington, Tracy moved up from second chair and handled some of the big cases when Doug was stretched too thin. She enjoyed demolishing the defense and procuring stiff sentences for career felons.

The house phone rang.

“Deborah? How come you’re not answering your cell? I’ve been calling all over for you.”

“Hey, Portland,” I said. Portland Brewer’s an attorney here in Dobbs and we’ve been best friends since childhood. I explained about leaving my phone in the pocket of my robe, “and you don’t have to yell at me about it. Dwight already did.”

But Portland didn’t want to natter about my absentmindedness. “You hear about Tracy Johnson?”

“I was here when Dwight got the call,” I said. “You know anything more?”

“Other than that she and the baby were bot. . .