Part 12 (1/2)

”Come here a minute,” he said and took me off to the far side of the small house, out of earshot of his officers. His brown eyes were troubled as he looked deeply into mine. ”Now listen, Deb'rah, and don't mouth off at me, 'cause this is for real. You sure this is the way you want to tell it?”

”What?”

”Well, think about it. If Annie Sue was the one who bashed his head in, it seems to me it'd be a clear-cut case of self-defense. The doctor can attest to her bruises and that blow on her head. She might not even have realized what she was doing. Fighting him off and all, what if she just grabbed the hammer and flailed away?”

”And then carried the hammer out to the living room for me to trip over and came back in here to pa.s.s out close to his body?”

”People with concussions do crazy things,” he said stubbornly.

”True. But then wouldn't her hand be even bloodier than mine was?” I asked.

”Did she wash or-”

I was shaking my head. ”No, no, and no. That's why I took her straight to the hospital instead of home. I wanted every sc.r.a.p of physical evidence to remain on her body until it was doc.u.mented. You and I both know that the first thing rape victims want to do is take a long hot shower, get clean again.”

He nodded.

”I didn't want her near a bathroom till a nurse with a rape kit had gone over her body with a fine tooth comb.” I winced at the cliche, suddenly remembering that it wasn't a trite figure of speech: Annie Sue's pubic area would indeed have been combed for foreign hairs.

”Bambi probably took fingernail sc.r.a.pings, too,” I said. ”Even if Annie Sue'd rinsed her hands in the rain, his blood would still be there.”

”I'll check,” said Dwight. ”But if Annie Sue didn't do it...” His voice trailed off and his face got even gloomier.

I was incredulous.

”You think I killed him?”

”Your fingerprints will be on the hammer. That's probably his blood on your skirt,” Dwight said. ”Say you came back and found Bannerman in the act of raping your niece. Say you had a hammer in your hand. Wouldn't you have smacked him over the head with it?”

”d.a.m.n straight!” I agreed. ”But it didn't happen that way.”

”You're sure.”

”Dwight!”

”Okay, okay. If you say you didn't, you didn't. One more thing though.” He seemed to be picking his words carefully. ”You hear where they found Herman?”

My heart started to sink. ”No.”

”On Troop Road.”

That was less than a mile from here and not on any beeline between his office and his house. ”Going which direction?”

”Toward his house,” said Dwight. ”Away from here. It was like he wasn't going too fast when he pa.s.sed out. The truck sort of coasted to a stop on the sidewalk, but he did bang his head. His face was b.l.o.o.d.y. And the time's about right.”

Dwight thrust a big hand into his off-duty jeans and rattled his pocket change as he gazed at me speculatively. ”So if you're sure that hammer was already sticky when you picked it up, guess I'd better have my techs take samples of the bloodstains in Herman's truck.”

”I'm sure.” I hated this scenario just as much as Dwight's first two, but if it were true...

”No jury in Colleton County ever convicted a man who killed his daughter's rapist.”

”Even if he ran away and left his daughter behind, half-naked?”

”If he did that, it's because he was sick,” I argued. ”Not thinking clearly.”

”Well, we'll worry about that down the road,” Dwight said. ”Right now, I want you to let Richards drive you first to Annie Sue's and then take you home.”

”I'm perfectly capable of driving myself and- He huffed at me in exasperation, just like one of my brothers. ”You always got to argue, don't you? I swear I don't know why you gave up being a lawyer and took up the one job where you're supposed to listen to what people say and not fly off the handle before they finish talking.”

”So finish,” I snapped.

”I want Richards to collect the clothes Annie Sue was wearing tonight and I want that skirt and blouse you have on, too.”

Before I could bristle, he gave me a sardonic look. ”Preacher's wife, okay?”

He was right. And if I hadn't been so tired, he wouldn't have had to spell it out for me. As a judge, I not only had to appear above suspicion, I had to be able to prove it, too. Better to let them run my clothes through the system and verify that the bloodstains were wipes, not splatters, than to have awkward questions raised after the garments were cleaned.

Deputy Mayleen Richards and I got to Annie Sue's clothes just seconds before Seth's Jessica tossed them in the washer. The whole house seemed to swarm with energetic young women and every single one of them had grown up watching their mothers so they knew how southern women were supposed to behave in a crisis.

Some were in the kitchen to load the dishwasher and put away the food Nadine had cooked before she'd rushed off to the hospital. Others had tidied the house, including cleaning up the bathroom behind Annie Sue. In fact, Jessica was only waiting for the last damp towel before starting the washer. Had I stayed to argue with Dwight, we'd have been too late.

The girls hadn't heard about Bannerman's death until we arrived, and they were wide-eyed as Richards scooped the clothes from Jessica's hands and put them in a brown paper sack.

”Carver Bannerman got his head smashed in?”

Some of my eye-for-an-eye nieces immediately declared he got what he deserved. Andrew's Ruth looked apprehensive though. When Reese rushed out of the hospital to look for Bannerman with violence in his eyes, her brother A. K. had gone with him. I squeezed her hand and told her not to worry, that Bannerman was probably dead before I carried Annie Sue to the hospital.

Paige Byrd and Cindy McGee were also there at the house. Paige kept saying, ”If only we hadn't left when we did!”

Cindy's face was splotched and her eyes were red and swollen. When she heard that Bannerman was dead, fresh tears rolled down her cheeks, but at least she didn't moan and shriek and overdramatize like some of my nieces would have.

Amazingly, they didn't seem to notice, and Annie Sue had loyally kept her mouth shut about Cindy.

Knowing what I did, Cindy's misery seemed palpable, but I honestly couldn't tell whether it was (1) because her erstwhile lover was dead, (2) because he'd tried to rape her best friend, or (3) because, like Paige, she was blaming herself for leaving Annie Sue when Herman's tongue-las.h.i.+ng made them too uncomfortable.

Maybe it was (4)-all of the above.

Despite all the evening's shocks and a mild concussion that would have me in bed sound asleep by now, Annie Sue seemed to be bouncing back okay. As soon as she'd realized that all her injuries were external, she'd become giddy with relief. Before she'd had time to come down from that, she'd been sucker-punched with her father's collapse, which sent her into a crying jag, terrified that Herman might die.

Now, just as abruptly, her attacker was dead.

”It's so weird,” she told Jessica and me as we helped her pack Nadine's cosmetics and night clothes. ”I don't know whether to laugh or cry or just throw my head back and simply howl. It's like that time when I was little out at the farm, remember? When I almost stepped on a copperhead and started screaming and Granddaddy came and chopped his head off?”

Jess and I nodded. More of Annie Sue's dramatics, but it had become family lore. First she'd screamed from fright and then she'd bawled for an hour because the snake, though poisonous, had been killed.