"Could we speak to Mr. Bell?" McLamb asked.

"Well, you can," she said doubtfully, "but he's had another little stroke since then and his mind's even fuzzier than it was at Christmas."

She led them into the lounge where several men and women-mostly black, but some white-sat in rockers or wheelchairs to watch television, something on the Discovery Channel, judging by the brightly colored fish that swam across the screen. In earlier years, Mr. Bell had probably been strongly built with a full head of hair and shrewd blue eyes. Now he was like a half-collapsed balloon with most of the air gone. His muscles sagged, his shoulders slumped, his head was round and shiny with a few scattered wisps of white hair, his blue eyes were pale and rheumy. Large brown liver spots splotched his face and scalp.

This is what ninety-four looks like, Sam Dalton told himself. Pity and dread mingled in his a.s.sessment as Mr. Bell struggled to his feet at Mrs. Franks's urging. We all want to live to be old, but, please, G.o.d! Not like this! Not me!

The old man steadied himself on his walker and obediently went with them to the dining room where the deputies could question him without the distraction of the television.

While Dalton steadied one of the straight chairs, McLamb and Mrs. Franks helped him lower himself down. He kept one hand on the walker though and looked at them with incurious eyes as Mrs. Franks tried to explain that these two men were sheriff's deputies.

"They need you to tell them about Fred Mitchiner," she said, enunciating each word clearly.

"Who?"

"Fred Mitchiner. Your roommate."

"Fred? He's gone."

"I know, sweetie, but did you see him go?"

"Who?"

"Remember Fred? He had the bed next to you."

Mr. Bell frowned. "Jack?"

"No, sweetie. Before Jack. Fred. Fred Mitchiner."

Silence, then unexpected laughter shook the frail body. "My cousin."

"That's right." Mrs. Franks beamed. "That was Fred."

"Where'd he go, anyhow? I ain't seen him lately."

Raeford McLamb leaned in close. "When did you last see him, Mr. Bell? Your cousin Fred?"

"He ain't really my cousin, you know. Crazy ol' man. He's blacker'n you are." He paused and looked up at Mrs. Franks. "Idn't anybody else gonna eat today?"

Mrs. Franks sighed. "It's only nine-thirty, sweetie. Dinner won't be ready till twelve."

McLamb sat back in frustration and Dalton pulled his chair around so that his face was level with Mr. Bell's.

"Mr. Bell? Tom?"

"Thomas," Mrs. Franks murmured.

"Thomas? Tell us about the last time you saw Fred."

The old man stared at him, then reached out with a shaky hand to cup Dalton's smooth cheek. Sudden tears filled his eyes. "Jimmy?" His voice cracked with remembered grief. "Jimmy, boy! They told me you was dead."

In the end, Sam Dalton had to help Mr. Bell to his room. The confused nonagenarian would not let go of his arm until they persuaded him to lie down on the bed and rest. Eventually, he calmed down enough to close his eyes and release his unexpectedly strong grip on Dalton's arm.

"Who's Jimmy?" Dalton asked as he walked back down the hall with Mrs. Franks to rejoin McLamb.

"His son. He got killed in a car wreck when he was thirty-one. I don't think Mr. Bell ever got over it."

Back in the lobby, at the central desk, McLamb was interviewing Mary Rowe, the LPN who oversaw the medication schedules. A brisk, middle-aged blonde who was going gray naturally, Rowe wore a white lab coat over black slacks and sweater. She shook her head when told that Mitchiner's death might not have been as accidental as they first thought, but she was no more help than Mr. Bell.

"I'm sorry, Officers, but like I said back when he walked away, I gave him his meds right after breakfast and I think I saw him in the lounge a little later, but there was nothing new on his chart so I didn't take any special notice of him."

It was the same story with the housekeeping staff who cleaned, did laundry, and helped serve the plates at mealtimes.

"I made his bed same as always while he be having breakfast," said one young woman, "and somebody did lay on it and pull up the blanket between then and when they did the bed check, but I can't swear it was him. Some of our residents, they're right bad for just laying down on any bed that's empty, whether it's their own or somebody else's."

CHAPTER 23.

It takes time to revolutionize the habits of thought and action into which a people have crystallized by the practice of generations.

-Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890 TUESDAY MORNING (CONTINUED).

"What took you so long?" Mayleen Richards asked when Jack Jamison finally slid in beside her in the unmarked car they were using this morning.

"Handing in my resignation," he said tersely.

She laughed as she turned on the windshield wipers and shifted from park to drive, but the laughter died after taking a second look at his face.

"Jeeze! You're not joking, are you?"

"Serious as a gunshot to the chest," he said, in a grimmer tone than she had ever heard him use.

"So where're you going? Raleigh? Charlotte?"

"Texas first, then Iraq if I pa.s.s the physical."

Richards was appalled. "Are you out of your gourd?" She had seen the flyers, had even visited the web sites. "You're going to become a hired mercenary?"

He flushed and said defensively, "I'm not signing up for security. I'm signing up to help train Iraqis to become good police officers. And in case you haven't noticed, you and I are already hired mercenaries if that means keeping the peace and putting bad guys out of business."

"We don't have a license to kill over here," she snapped. "And the bad guys aren't lying in wait to ambush us for no reason. I can't believe you're going to do this."

"Believe it," he said. "I'm just lucky I can go as a hired hand. I can quit and come home. Soldiers can't and they get paid squat."

Richards did not respond. Just kept the car moving westward through the rain.

Eventually her silence got to Jamison. "Look, in two years, I'll have a quarter-million dollars. Enough for Cindy and me to pay off all our bills and build a house. And it's not like Jay'll even know I'm gone. I'll be back before he's walking and talking good."

"Be sure you get one of those life-size pictures of yourself before you go," she said angrily. "Cindy can glue it to foam board and cut it out and Jay can have his own Flat Daddy for when you get blown up by a car bomb."

"That's not very d.a.m.n funny, Mayleen."

"I didn't mean for it to be."

"Easy for you to talk," he said resentfully. "No kids, your dad and mom both well and working. You've even got brothers and a sister to help out if one of them gets sick or dies."

His words cut her more than he could ever realize, Mayleen thought. No kids. No red-haired, brown-skinned babies. Because if she did have kids, then she would have no brothers and sister. No mother or father either. They had made that very clear.

She had gone down to Black Creek last night expecting to celebrate a brother's birthday and they had been waiting, primed and ready to pounce. No nieces or nephews, no in-laws around the birthday table, just her parents, her two brothers, and her sister, Shirlee. Her mother had been crying.

"What's wrong?" she had asked, immediately alarmed, wondering who was hurt, who might be dying.

"There's been talk," her father said, his face even more somber than when she had told them nine years ago that she was divorcing a man they had known and liked since childhood, a hard-working, steady man who didn't use drugs, didn't get drunk, didn't hit her or run around on her. That had been rough on them. There had never been a divorce in their family, they reminded her. Leave her husband? Leave a good town job that had air-conditioning and medical benefits after growing up in the tobacco fields where her father and brothers still labored? Ask Sheriff Poole to give her a job where she'd carry a gun and wear an ugly uniform instead of ladylike dresses and pretty shoes?

"You ain't gay, are you?" her brother Steve had asked bluntly.

She had slapped his freckled face for that. Hard.

"What kind of talk, Dad?"

"Somebody saw you at a movie house in Raleigh," he said. "They say you was with a Mexican and he had his arm around you. Is it true?"

"Is he Mexican?" Steve demanded.

"Would that make a difference?" she said coldly.

"d.a.m.n straight it would!" said her brother Tom.

"I'm thirty-three years old. I'm divorced. I'm a sheriff's deputy. Who I choose to see is my own business."

"Oh dear Jesus!" her mother wailed, bursting into tears again. "It is true!"

Her father's shoulders had slumped and for the first time, she realized that he was getting old. Suddenly there was more white than red in his hair and the lines in his face seemed to have deepened overnight without her noticing.

While her brothers fumed and her sister and mother twittered, he held up his hand for silence.

"Mayleen, honey, you know we're not prejudiced. If you're seeing this man, then he's probably a good person."

"All men are created equal, Dad. That's what you always told us."

He nodded. "And they've got an equal right to everything anybody else does. But there's a reason G.o.d created people different, honey. If He intended us to be just one color, with one kind of skin and one kind of hair, then that's how He would have made us. He meant for each of us to keep our differences and stay with our own."

"So how come you didn't marry another redhead, Dad?"

It was an old family joke, but no one laughed tonight.

"That ain't the same, and you know it, honey."

"It is the same," she said hotly. "Mike's skin's a little darker than ours and his hair is black, but it's no different from Steve and Tom and Shirlee being freckled all over and marrying people with no freckles."

"We're white!" Steve snarled. "And we married white people. White Americans. I bet he's not even here legally, is he? He probably wants to marry you so he can get his citizenship."

"He's been a citizen for years," she snarled back. "And believe it or not, b.u.t.thead, he wants to marry me because he loves me. He even thinks I'm beautiful. So maybe you're right. Maybe there is something wrong with him. Maybe he's loco."

But all they heard was marry.

"Oh Mayleen, baby, you can't marry him!" her mother sobbed.

"You do and you'n forget about ever setting foot in my house again!" Steve had shouted.

"Shirlee?"

Her sister's eyes dropped, but then her chin came up. "Steve's right, Mayleen. I'd be ashamed to call you my sister."

"Daddy?"

She saw the pain in his face. "I'm sorry, honey, but that's the way it is."

"Fine," she had said and immediately turned on her heel and walked out.

With each absorbed by personal problems, Richards and Jamison drove the rest of the way in silence, a silence underlined by the back-and-forth swish of their windshield wipers. Just before they reached the westernmost of the Harris Farms, they met a camera truck from one of the Raleigh stations. A long shot of the shed was all they could have gotten though because Major Bryant had posted a uniformed officer there to keep the site secured from gawkers. With rain still pouring from the charcoal gray sky, they pa.s.sed the main house and went first to the white frame bungalow occupied by the farm manager. Richards stopped near the back door, and at the sound of their horn, Sid Lomax walked out on the porch and motioned for them to drive under the car shelter, a set of iron posts set in a concrete slab and topped by long sheets of corrugated tin.

"I was afraid you might be those reporters back," he said as Percy Denning pulled in right beside them with his field kit in the trunk.

"We need a list of everybody on the place," Richards told Lomax when the courtesies were out of the way. "And Deputy Denning's here to take everybody's fingerprints."

"He was dumb enough to leave prints on the axe handle?" Lomax asked.

"And on the padlock, too," Denning said with grim satisfaction.

"If you want to start with the names, come on in to my office," Lomax said and led the way back into the house.

The deep screened porch held a few straight wooden chairs. A couple of clean metal ashtrays sat on the ledges. No swing, no rockers, no cheery welcome mat by either of the two doors. The one on the left was half gla.s.s and no curtains blocked a view of a kitchen so spartan and uncluttered, so lacking in soft touches of color or superfluous knickknacks, that Richards instantly knew that no woman lived here.

The door on the right opened into a large and equally tidy office. More straight wooden chairs stood in front of a wide desk where an open laptop and some manila file folders lay. The top angled around to the side to hold a sleek combination printer, fax, and copier. A lamp sat on a low file cabinet beneath the side window to complete the office's furnishings. Both the desk and the worn leather chair behind it were positioned so that Lomax could work with his back to the rear wall and see someone at the door before they knocked.

He sat, pulled the laptop closer and tapped on the keys. "I'm a.s.suming you're only interested in the people working here now? Not the ones who moved to the other farms?"

"Everybody here on that last Sunday you saw your boss," said Richards.

"Right."