Hard Row Part 19

"How long?" said Santos. "We'll go to the grocery store and come back."

"Fifteen or twenty minutes for me, if he cooperates," Dwight said. "What about you, King?"

"Fifteen minutes, tops."

"Bueno," Santos said.

Sanaugustin's wife protested sharply, but the crew chief herded them both out of the office and the jailer brought Sanaugustin down to the interview room.

When the migrant worker came strolling in, he was obviously surprised to see two Anglos instead of his friends. According to his booking sheet, Sanaugustin was five-eight and thirty-three years old. He had straight black hair, wary dark eyes, a prominent nose, and a small scar on his left cheek. His jeans, black sweats.h.i.+rt, and the unb.u.t.toned plaid wool lumberjack s.h.i.+rt that topped them were all a little worse for the wear after three nights in jail. He hesitated in the doorway, but the jailer nudged him inside and closed the door behind him.

Dwight gestured for him to take a seat and waited while Millard King explained that he was the attorney the judge had appointed to represent him yesterday and that he was here to discuss those charges, but first this officer, Major Bryant, had some questions for him.

Dwight had procured a tape recorder from the front desk and as he set it up, King frowned. "What's this about, Bryant?"

"Ask him to state his name and address, please," Dwight said pleasantly.

Both men complied and Dwight added the date and the names of those present.

"How long has he worked for Harris Farms?"

"Two years."

"How did he know that Buck Harris was dead?"

They had released the ident.i.ty of the mutilated body last night, so it had been all over the morning news. Nevertheless, Millard King drew himself up and said, "What? Wait a minute, here, Bryant. You accusing my client of murder?"

"I have witnesses who can testify that he suspected that Harris was dead before it was public knowledge. All I'm asking is how did he know it before the rest of us?"

"Okay, but I'm going to warn him that he doesn't have to answer if it self-incriminates."

"Fine, but remind him that we now have his fingerprints on file."

"You have the killer's fingerprints?"

Dwight gave a pointed look to his watch. "Once his people come back, he's free to go, you know."

Annoyed, King translated Dwight's questions and it was soon apparent that the farmworker was denying knowledge of anything, anywhere, any time. But when King pressed him and rubbed his thumbs across his own fingerprints, Sanaugustin went mute.

Then, hesitantly, he framed a question and King looked at Dwight. "He wants to know if fingerprints show up on everything."

"Like what?"

King gave a hands-up gesture of futility. "He won't say."

Dwight considered for a long moment, his brown eyes fixed on the Mexican, who dropped his own eyes. Dwight had never thought of himself as intuitive. He put more faith in connecting the dots than in leaping over them. But Deborah had been a judge for four years. Hundreds of liars and con artists had stood before her. If it was her opinion that Sanaugustin's question was to get confirmation of something suspected but not positively known, surely that counted for something. But if that were the case, why was this guy worried about fingerprints? Unless-?

"Tell him that yes, we can lift fingerprints off of wooden doors," he said, hoping to G.o.d that Denning had indeed dusted the doors of that b.l.o.o.d.y abattoir. "And if he touched the car, his prints will be there as well."

When translated, his words unleashed such a torrent of Spanish that even King was taken aback. He motioned for his client to slow down. At least twice in the narrative, the man crossed himself.

Eventually, he ran out of words, crossed himself a final time, and waited for King to turn to Dwight and repeat what had been said.

Everyone at the camp had heard about the body parts that were appearing along the length of their road, he had told King. They had even, may G.o.d forgive them, joked about it. But no one connected it with their farm. How should they? It was an Anglo thing, nothing to do with them. As for him, yes, he had once been a heavy user, but now he was trying to stay clean for the sake of the children. That's why he gave most of his money to his wife to save for them. But on Sat.u.r.day Juan had sent him over to the sheds to get a tractor hitch and he went to the wrong shed by mistake. Inside was the big boss's car and that made him curious. Why was the car there? Then when he got closer, he heard the flies and smelled the stench of blood. Lots of blood. b.l.o.o.d.y chains lay on the floor. Nearby, a b.l.o.o.d.y axe.

He had panicked, slammed the door shut, then found the tractor hitch he'd been sent for. As soon as he could get away, he had made his wife give him money and had come into town to buy something that would take away the sight and the smell. That was the truth. On his mother's grave he would swear it.

Ever since a killer had suckered him with a convincing show of grief and bewilderment over the death of a spouse, Dwight no longer trusted his instincts as to whether someone was lying or telling the truth, but there was something about the man's show of exaggerated wide-eyed innocence at the end that made him wonder if they were hearing the whole story.

"Who did he tell?"

"He says n.o.body."

"Ask him who hated his boss enough to do that?"

Again the negative shrug and a refusal to speculate.

"Juan Santos? Sid Lomax?"

But Rafael Sanaugustin continued to swear that this was the full extent of his knowledge and beyond that they could not budge him.

Dwight switched off the tape recorder and carried it back out to the desk, leaving Millard King to discuss the possession charges with his client.

When Juan Santos and the two women returned, he had them go around to his office with him. According to the jailer's log, no one had visited Sanaugustin since he was locked up Sat.u.r.day night, so the likelihood of their having conferred was minimal but not wholly out of the question because he'd used his one phone call to tell Santos where he was. When Dwight first asked about Sanaugustin's movements on Sat.u.r.day, Santos did not immediately mention sending him for a tractor hitch. That detail was sandwiched in between their problems with one of the tractors and how they were falling behind schedule with the spring plowing, and it seemed to come almost as an afterthought, as if it were something of little importance. Despite rigorous questioning, all three denied knowing what Sanaugustin had seen on Sat.u.r.day and all declared that they had first learned of it and of Buck Harris's death when Dwight was out there on the farm yesterday.

Dwight stared at them in frustration. Impossible to know who really knew what, but he was willing to bet that Senora Sanaugustin knew more than she was willing to admit. Wives usually did. True to his word, though, he turned them all loose at two o'clock and reached for his phone to call Richards and bring her up to date on what he'd learned.

She sounded equally dispirited when she reported that they had come up pretty dry as well. "But we did learn that Mrs. Harris was out here on the farm that Monday," she said. "And at least it's stopped raining."

CHAPTER 25.

The employer who treats his help fairly and reasonably in all respects is the one who will, as a general rule, secure the best results from their service.

-Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890 No sooner did Juan Santos and the two women leave, than Dwight's phone rang. It was Pete Taylor.

"Sorry, Bryant, but Mrs. Harris's daughter is flying in this afternoon and she can't make it up to Dobbs today. What about tomorrow morning?"

"Fine," said Dwight. "Nine o'clock?"

"That'll work for her. And ... uh ... this is a little gruesome, but she was asking me about funeral arrangements for Harris. The daughter's going to want to know. But his head's still missing, isn't it?"

"'Fraid so, Taylor," he said, seeing no need for the daughter to know what else was missing. "I know it's weird for her, but we may not find it for months. If ever. The ME's probably ready to release what we do have, though."

"I'll get back to you on that," said Taylor. "See you in the morning. Nine o'clock."

With his afternoon unexpectedly clear, Dwight called McLamb and got an update on the Mitchiner case. Because the two deputies would not be speaking to the old man's daughter till five, Dwight sent them to question some witnesses about a violent home invasion that had taken place in Black Creek over the weekend. "While you're in that neighborhood, try dropping the name of Mitchiner's daughter. See if she has any enemies who might have thought that they'd hurt her if they hurt him."

After attending to a few more administrative details, Dwight called Richards to say that he was coming out to the Buckley place. "Tell Mrs. Samuelson we want to speak to her again."

"Should I try questioning Sanaugustin's wife when she gets here?"

"Not if the men are around. If she's going to talk at all, it'll probably be when they're not there."

Despite the gory murder and the puzzle of Mitchiner's hand, Dwight felt almost lighthearted as he drove out along Ward Dairy Road. The sun was breaking through the clouds, trees were beginning to bud and more than one yard sported bright bursts of yellow forsythia bushes. The rains would have settled the dirt around the roots of the trees they had planted this weekend, and whatever the problems with Cal, Deborah seemed to be taking them in stride.

He was not particularly superst.i.tious but he caught himself checking the cab of the truck for some wood to touch.

Just to be on the safe side.

After years of wanting what he thought he could never have, these last few months had been so good that he was almost afraid he was going to jinx his luck by even acknowledging it. He told himself to concentrate instead on the cases at hand.

Start with Mitchiner. An old man with a fading grasp on reality. Had he wandered away on his own or had someone taken him? The hand proved that someone knew where his body was because it had been cut loose and carried from that isolated spot on Black Creek downstream to a more frequented place on Apple Creek. Why?

Because they wanted the hand to be found? Because they knew it would lead back to the body further upstream?

Deborah was fond of asking "Who profits?" but on the face of it, no one. Yes, Mitchiner's daughter was suing the rest home, but that was almost reflexive these days even though most such cases no longer generated large settlements. Besides, everyone said that she and her son were devoted to the old man. Before he got his driver's license, the kid rode his bicycle over there after school almost every afternoon to play checkers with him; after he turned sixteen, he came as regularly to take his grandfather out for a drive around town. The daughter was there a couple of nights a week and again on the weekends. On Sat.u.r.days, she had seen to his physical well-being, tr.i.m.m.i.n.g his hair and toenails and seeing that he bathed properly. On Sundays, she had taken him to church for his spiritual well-being.

According to the statements given when Mitchiner first went missing, he liked to visit the graveyard where his wife and parents were buried and to walk the old neighborhood, so that's where their first search efforts had been concentrated. How had he wound up in the creek, miles from his childhood haunts?

And Buck Harris.

Everyone said he was a bull of a man, a physical man who still liked to climb on a tractor and stay hands-on with every aspect of his crops, yet always up for s.e.x. Whose ox had he gored?

The possibilities were almost endless. One of the migrants at the camp? Someone he had done business with? Someone whose woman he'd taken? Certainly someone familiar with that empty shed. Mrs. Samuelson had said the killer must be "a hateful and hating man." He couldn't argue with that. To kill and butcher and then strew the parts around for the buzzards?

And yeah, spouses and lovers were usually their best suspects, but surely no woman would have done what was done to Harris? On the other hand, that missing part of his anatomy certainly did seem to suggest a s.e.xual motive. But what in G.o.d's name could he have done to inspire such cruelty? Think of gaining consciousness to find yourself lying there in chains, naked and vulnerable as a killer lifts an axe and swings it down on your bone and flesh. The killer clearly meant for him to know it was coming, otherwise why the chains? Why not just go ahead and kill him quickly and cleanly?

If Harris was lucky, the first blow would have made him black out from the shock to his system. If he wasn't lucky-?

Dwight tried to cleanse the images from his mind.

Mayleen Richards and Jack Jamison were waiting for him near the rear of Buck Harris's homeplace. Two old-fas.h.i.+oned bench swings hung from the limbs of an enormous oak tree and the deputies seemed to be enjoying the warm afternoon suns.h.i.+ne, although Richards's dispirited greeting made Dwight think that Jamison must have told her about his resignation.

"Where's Denning?" he asked.

"He's back at the shed, going over the car with a fine-tooth comb," Jamison said.

"I thought he did that last night."

"He did, but you know Denning."

Dwight nodded. Attention to detail and a willingness to check and recheck were precisely why he'd promoted Percy Denning to the job.

He glanced inquiringly at the shabby, unfamiliar car parked at the edge of the yard.

"Mrs. Samuelson's got those two migrant women helping her give the place a good cleaning. They got here about ten minutes ago," Richards said. "She expects Mrs. Harris and her daughter to stay here tomorrow night. She also seems to think the daughter inherits this place."

"She's right," said Dwight as he rang the back doorbell. "At least, that's what his lawyer told me."

After a minute or two with no answer, he rang again. There was another short wait, then Mrs. Samuelson opened the door with a visible annoyance that was only slightly tempered by seeing him there instead of the two deputies again. Today, her white bib ap.r.o.n covered a short-sleeved maroon dress and it was nowhere near as crisp as the first time she had talked to them. This ap.r.o.n had seen some serious action.

"I'm sorry, Major ... Bryant, is it?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Major Bryant, I'm real busy right now."

"I'm sure you are, ma'am, but we have a few more questions for you."

She started to protest, but then seemed to realize that it would save time in the long run to capitulate and get it over with. She held the door open wide for them, "But please wipe your feet on the mat. We already mopped the kitchen floor."

Feeling six years old again, they did as they were told and followed her into the large kitchen. She invited them to sit down at the old wooden table, but there was no offer of coffee or cinnamon rolls today.

"You know what we found out there in that equipment shed yesterday?" Dwight asked.

She nodded, her lips tight.

"That means he was killed by someone familiar with this place. So I ask you again, Mrs. Samuelson. Who on this farm thought they had a reason to kill Mr. Harris?"

"And I tell you again, Major Bryant, that I don't know. If it's something to do with the farm, you need to ask Sid Lomax. If it's something to do with his personal life, maybe you need to be asking that Smith woman. Maybe she had a boyfriend who didn't like her messing around with him."

"What about Mrs. Harris?"

"What about her? They split up, but that doesn't mean she hated him enough to do something like that."

"When did you last see her?"

"Maybe Christmas?" The housekeeper got up and used a paper towel to clean a smudge on the window gla.s.s over the sink. With her back to them, she said, "She brought some presents for the children here and she always remembers me at Christmas, too."

"She was the one who actually hired you here, wasn't she?"

"That's right." A fingerprint on the front of the stainless-steel refrigerator seemed to need her attention, too.

"Mrs. Samuelson."

"I'm listening. I can listen and work, too."

He got up and went over to look down into her face. "She was here the day he went missing, wasn't she?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."