Beverly Connor - Dust to Dust

Diane saw the second-story garage apartment right away. The garage sat a few feet away from the main house, with a dogtrot between the structures. A steep stairway on the side away from the house led up to the apartment. It was a short distance, maybe thirty feet, from the stairs to the road.

“He’s expecting us,” said Ross as he drove up the short drive and stopped in front of the closed garage.

They got out of the car and looked a moment at the single-story home. It was a white house in need of paint. On one end was a porch with square wooden columns and a swing. Two mailboxes attached to the side of the house next to the door were numbered 118 and 118½, one for Mr. Dance and one for his daughter.

“I’m going to start a ground survey of the property outside,” said Jin. “I’m wondering. You think we can go into that empty house?”

“We’ll talk about that later,” said Diane.

“Sure, Boss,” said Jin. With the carrying case containing his evidence bags slung over his shoulder, he left them on the porch and started a perimeter search of the area.

Diane missed having Jin along with her doing crime scene work. Since his focus was now on the DNA lab, it had been a while.

Kingsley knocked on the front door of the house. After only a few seconds, the door opened and Harmon Dance appeared. He stood in the threshold for a moment, nodded at Kingsley, and looked at Diane.

Harmon Dance had a rugged, deeply lined face. Creases around his mouth gave him a perpetual frown. Diane wondered whether he would ever smile again.

“Hello, Mr. Dance,” said Kingsley. “This is Dr. Diane Fallon, the forensic specialist I told you about.”

Dance nodded. “Thanks for coming.” He held the door open for them to enter, stopped, and looked beyond the two of them. “Not now,” he said under his breath.

Diane followed his gaze. A woman was walking with determination across the street toward them, her arms swinging in her hurry to get across ahead of an approaching car. She was middle-aged, portly, and had thinning, frizzy brown hair. Her jaw was set in a determined clinch.

“What is it, Mrs. Pate?” Dance said.

Mrs. Pate stopped at the foot of the steps with her hands on her hips and glared at the three of them. The skirt of her blue flowered housedress moved gently in the light breeze; her square-lens frameless glasses slipped on her nose.

“You gonna rent your girl’s apartment to that China-man?” she said. She nodded her head toward where Jin had walked into the woods.

“How is that your business?” Dance said, his own face settling deeper into granite.

“I won’t have it. Things are bad enough. Who are these people?” She looked as if she also disapproved of Diane and Ross standing on the porch. You real estate people? I want you to know this is a nice neighborhood, or it used to be before people started losing their homes. She glanced over at the empty house.

Diane saw that Kingsley was holding back a laugh. For herself, Diane felt a little irritated at the woman’s racism. Diane had to dig deep to find her compassion. The woman was probably scared. She was getting older and her neighborhood was changing… and there had been an untimely death just across the street. Trying to have some control in what must have felt like an out-of-control world probably bedeviled the poor woman and a belligerent demeanor was her only shield against it. But, then again, Diane was probably overanalyzing.

“These are not real estate people and I’m not renting out Stacy’s apartment. You can go back home now, Mrs. Pate.”

As irritating as Mrs. Pate was, she was a gem for investigators-a person who was always on the lookout.

“Mrs. Pate,” said Diane, “I’m Diane Fallon. May I ask you a few questions about the day Stacy died?”

The woman suddenly looked startled, as if a loud noise had gone off beside her. Her paranoia had focused on the possibility of new neighbors, not an investigation.

“What kind of questions?” she said, her hands suddenly clasped against her stomach.

“Where I live, in Rosewood, we have a Neighborhood Watch. Do you have one here?” asked Diane. She wanted to start out by making sure Mrs. Pate knew she was going to be judged well on her nosiness.

“Police ain’t much good here,” she said. “No use getting them to put up signs. We have to keep an eye out ourselves.”

“Did you see any suspicious people here that day?” said Diane.

“You people here to investigate her death?” Mrs. Pate darted a look at Mr. Dance. “I thought it was something else that killed her.”

“Did you see anything that made you uneasy?” asked Diane.

“That was a month ago… ”

“Mrs. Pate,” said Harmon Dance, his voice raspy, “Stacy was good to you. She was good to everybody here in the neighborhood.”

“Yes, she was,” said Mrs. Pate. “You think somebody kilt her?”

“We’re looking into the possibility,” said Kingsley.

The woman was quiet for several moments. Diane thought she was trying to remember. Mrs. Pate scratched the back of her hand and put a palm on her cheek.

“Not that day, but one or two days before, there was a car, an SUV kind of car. I noticed it ’cause it circled the block a couple of times”-she gestured with her hand, moving it in a circle-“and slowed down here when it went by. It stopped for a time-maybe a few minutes-on the cross street there above your house,” she said, nodding to Dance. “The windows were dark and I couldn’t see inside. It was a black car. No good comes from a black car with dark windows like that.”

“Did you see a license plate or a window sticker?” asked Diane. “Anything that might help to track down the vehicle?”

“No. I tried to get a fix on the license, but couldn’t. You think it was them? Somebody in that car did something to poor Stacy?”

She looked alarmed. Diane guessed that the thought of perhaps having laid eyes on a murderer-or his vehicle-was frightening to her.

“Have you seen it since?” asked Diane.

She shook her head. “No, I haven’t.”

“Why didn’t you tell the police?” said Dance.

“They never come talk to me, did they?” she said.

“Thank you, Mrs. Pate,” said Kingsley. He handed her a card. “Please call me if you remember anything more.”

She studied the card a moment and looked up at him. She put the card in the pocket of her dress and nodded her head sharply. “Glad you ain’t renting to that Chinese guy.”

They watched her cross the street and go back into her house.

Dance invited them inside. His home was sparse, neat, and smelled like vegetable soup. Diane sat down on a blue corduroy sofa. Kingsley sat beside her. Harmon Dance sat in a mission-style rocking chair with matching blue cushions opposite them. It creaked with his weight as he rocked.

“So you think my little girl was murdered by somebody?” he asked.

“We don’t know,” said Kingsley. “But Dr. Fallon has examined the photographs and thinks it may be a possibility.”

Dance nodded his head up and down and seemed to shiver. “I told the detective. He had this idiotic idea that because Stacy wasn’t a beauty queen, nobody would fool with killing her, or some such notion. I’m not sure what he thought; he kept changing his mind. He said she did this shameful thing to herself. Well, Stacy may not have been Miss Georgia, but she was a good girl and lots of people liked her. You could go up and down this street and find a lot of older folks who liked her. She was good to them. Took them shopping if they needed to go. Stacy was a decent girl, not what he tried to make her out to be.”

“Mr. Dance,” said Kingsley, “we would like your permission to have her exhumed. I know that’s painful to think about, but we need to have someone else look at her.”