P Deutermann: Nightwalkers

"Which was?"

"Called the Manceford County Sheriff's Office. They gave me your business number. I looked up the number on the Web, and Grandma Google told me everything else I needed to know. Your company. Your bio. Home number and address. Old news stories. A picture even. They call it progress, Lieutenant."

"Yeah, really," I said. "Well, I appreciate the heads-up. Maybe I should just wait out in the parking lot and mash him with my pickup truck when he comes through the gates."

"Then you'd take his place in here, Lieutenant. Trust me, you wouldn't like it."

I thanked him again, hung up, and went to get some coffee. All cops, especially retired cops, lived with this possibility. Bad guys locked up for years on end had plenty of time to stew up notions of revenge on the cop who'd put them away. Their being in prison was, of course, never their own fault, and, once out, they usually had nothing else to do, life having passed them by in terms of skills or capability. That meant they could be very dangerous.

I briefed my guys, who were all ex-cops. Tony Martinelli, Pardee Bell, and Horace Stackpole had all served on the MCAT with me back in the day. Now we worked court papers, found witnesses, and tagged the occasional philandering husband. I owned the company, and we all worked as much or as little as we wanted to. I didn't need the money, and the other guys were mostly filling up 401(k)s and staying out of their respective wives' hair.

"No problem, boss," Tony said. "You tell us who his PO is and we'll find a way to violate his ass right back to Alex."

Sounded like a plan to me.

I went out the next day to walk the property again, this time without the Realtor. I did take my two operational German shepherds, Frick and Kitty. Both were sable females. Frick was older and a bit smaller than Kitty, but they complemented each other nicely in the field. Frick was a busybody with an excellent nose who tended to scout ahead, while Kitty, with her strong sense of duty, stayed back with me at all times. The third member of my shepherd family, Frack, was a stay-at-home dog now, after losing a leg and an eye in the moonpool case. He was even older than Frick, and the role of senior citizen seemed to suit him just fine. As with too many aging German shepherds, his back end wasn't going to last much longer anyway. I dreaded that day, because when their wheels fall off, you have to do your duty.

The plantation's main driveway was a mixture of gravel and truly determined weeds. There were two brick gate pillars leaning at odd angles just inside the turnoff from the main road. One had a date inscribed, 1838, and the other the plantation's name, Glory's End. The numerals, antique characters partly obscured by ivy, were only faintly visible. The name's lettering, however, looked newer, which matched with the story of the name change at the end of the Civil War. As I turned into the drive I caught a glimpse of an even bigger house across the road behind its own aisle of oaks. David Oatley had told me that the neighboring plantation was called Laurel Grove and that the people who had built Glory's End had been related to the people across the road. I couldn't tell whether anyone was home, but the grounds did look maintained. Mr. Oatley had said the folks were eccentric, devoted to the past, and reclusive.

I drove almost a half mile to get to the house. The road was bumpy and needed crowning. The fields on either side were mostly overgrown with waist-high winter weeds. There were two tree-lined creeks running under the road and through the fields. It looked like someone had replaced the original wooden beam bridges with concrete culvert structures. As I got closer to the main house, a line of oaks began to flank the road, their overhanging branches creating a hazy green tunnel of spring foliage overhead. The road divided about a quarter mile from the front of the house, with the left branch headed down along the base of the homestead hill toward some barns and other farm structures behind the house. I took the right branch and drove up toward the house itself.

The building was well proportioned, with two stories built over another level that was half underground, half above. At the front there was a large white staircase leading up to the main level's columned front porch. Three tall windows bounded either side of double doors. There was a somewhat narrower sleeping porch above the columns. The semisubmerged ground level had smaller windows across its entire front, except where the twenty-foot-wide staircase obscured them. The bricks were obviously handmade, but some of the mortar had that floury look that indicated I'd need the services of a mason.

I let the two shepherds out and gave them a minute to desecrate the grounds. Then all three of us went up the staircase to the front doors, which were ten to twelve feet high and made of some heavily painted wood. The original nineteenth-century hardware was long gone. The doors were secured by a modern, brass-plated doorknob, to which I had a key. Except now the doors were partially ajar, and the shepherds were staring at the opening as if someone might be lurking in there. I tried to remember if we'd gone inside on the last visit, but we hadn't. So who was in there?

I stood on the porch and listened. It was a pleasant spring morning, with birds twittering in the nearby oak trees. The sound of insects rising in the unkempt grass provided a quiet hum in the background. There were no other vehicles in sight, so if someone was inside, he'd walked in. Kitty's ears went up, and then one door opened all the way.

A woman stood in the doorway, and for a moment I thought I'd fallen into a time warp. She was dressed in one of those black southern gowns I'd only seen in museums and movies, full length to the floor, flaring skirts, and full sleeves ending in white lace. She was handsome rather than beautiful, with dark hair done up in one of those Gone with the Wind hairdos, pulled back from her forehead in a tight bun that ended in long, luxurious, shoulder length curls clamped by an ornate ivory comb. She had brown eyes, under imperiously arched eyebrows, and a small, thin-lipped mouth. I could not guess her age. The shepherds sat down on either side of me to await developments.

"Good morning to you, sir," she said, inclining her head in the tiniest of nods. "Are you perchance the new owner?"

"Not yet," I said, "but we're working on it. And you are?"

"Valeria Marion Lee," she announced. "My mother, Hester Lowndes Lee, owns Laurel Grove plantation, across the road." She looked at me expectantly as if all those names should mean something, and I supposed that they did in some southern pantheon.

"I'm Cameron Richter, and these are my helpers, Frick and Kitty."

She glanced at each dog in turn. "Kitty?" she asked.

"The folks who bred her did it as a joke. The guy's wife wanted to be able to call, 'Here, Kitty, Kitty,' if she thought she needed protection."

A very faint smile crossed her face. "How droll," she said. "I suppose you wonder what I'm doing here."

"Mostly how you got in. The Realtor told me the place was locked up."

She fished in a pocket and produced a brass key that looked identical to mine. She stepped out of the house, skirts swishing, and handed it to me. "We've had a key ever since Mrs. Tarrant became incapacitated by her advancing age. No need of that now, I suppose."

Standing closer, she was nearly my own height, although some of that was the Scarlett O'Hara hairdo. Her clothes smelled of lilacs.

"Thank you," I said. "Since you're here, though, would you care to give me a tour of the house? I suspect you know it better than Mr. Oatley."

She cocked her head for a moment, considering it, and then agreed. I left the shepherds on the front porch. She led me back into the house. She described the house's stylistic elements-heart-pine floors, plaster and lath walls, fireplaces-and its basic history. The downstairs layout was similar to many large plantation houses of the prewar period: A central hall was flanked by withdrawing rooms on either side; a large, ornate staircase circled up both sides of the hall to the second floor, where there were four bedrooms giving onto a long hallway. What had become the master bedroom in more modern times now had a bathroom, which was a very obvious addition to the original layout.