A Southern Promise. Jennifer Lohmann

in.

      Rodriguez saw him approach and was fixin’ to leave her charge when Howie waved her off. By the time he got there, Mrs. Carr was asking the older neighbor what she had seen. The woman opened her mouth, her eyes went wide and then she dropped her face back between her knees, her arms held out in some odd prayer.

      “Ma’am,” Howie said, resting his hand lightly on her shoulder, half-afraid she would collapse if he put any more weight on her. “Officer Rodriguez will stay with you, give you time to collect yourself before a detective comes by to ask you what happened.” He said the words to the woman, with a reassuring squeeze of her shoulder, but he looked at Mrs. Carr.

      Mrs. Carr twitched her lip, cracking her coral lipstick. She’d heard and understood. Yet even if she hadn’t, Rodriguez would make sure no one talked to the woman unless that person had a detective’s badge. The woman’s story would become less and less useful the more it was filtered through other people’s opinions. Opinions were like assholes, everyone had one, and by the time the shit exited, anything valuable was gone. Preserved in the trauma of whatever this woman and her schnauzer had seen might be a clue that solved Mrs. Somerset’s murder.

      “Do you need a paramedic?” he asked.

      “No,” the old woman said into her legs, though Howie heard her well enough. “Just a little faint is all.”

      “I’m sure Mrs. Carr would be happy to get you more tea if you need, or a glass of water.”

      Mrs. Carr twitched her lips again; she would need to reapply her lipstick if she kept that up. The tea had been her excuse to come over to the older woman, and she had no interest in relinquishing her role as comforter—better known as gossip. But she was a good Southern woman and hospitality had been bred into her right along with the accent. “Of course, hon. All you have to do is ask.”

      Howie patted the woman on the shoulder again, smiled at Rodriguez and headed across the lawn to check in with Al and document his conversation with Mrs. Carr. Finally he stepped through the front door into Mrs. Somerset’s house, where Kia, another homicide detective, stood, looking around.

      Mrs. Somerset’s husband had left her a lot of money when he died, though she still lived in the same relatively modest house. Her entryway furniture tended toward the old-fashioned and out of style, but it was clean and welcoming. None of the curls in the wrought iron table had any dust. There were no doilies on the arms of the sofa that he could see through the arch, no plastic floor covering on the carpet up the stairs and both the entry and the living room appeared to have been recently painted. The first time Howie had entered this house, he’d been surprised there hadn’t been a wall of conspiracies like something out of Homeland or that movie with Russell Crowe about the schizophrenic mathematician. Whatever kind of house a crazy lady who called the police station every week with clues was supposed to live in, it wasn’t this kind. But if police work taught a man anything, it was that crazy came in all shapes, and it didn’t care how much money a person had.

      “Nice job handling the old ladies,” Kia said, a smile in her tone. “They oughta put you in charge of all the old-white-lady murders.”

      Howie rolled his eyes. Kia was a great detective and the joker of the unit. “You’re just pissed I didn’t ask you for assistance.”

      “Nah, I know when to sit back and watch a master at work.”

      Kia was a short, delicate African-American woman from a family that had been in Durham since before the Civil War and had been cops for what felt like almost as long, even though the police department hadn’t been desegregated until Mayor Evans a little over fifty years ago. Her fine bone structure hid an ability to stare down punks and drug dealers, a talent she said she’d gotten the old-fashioned way—by staring down five older brothers across the dinner table. While Howie could be TV-detective tough when necessary, between the round glasses and his floppy, wavy hair, old women generally treated him like a favored grandson, stopping just short of pinching his cheeks. Which had its advantages—with people at work all day, retired folks were the only ones who say saw anything.

      Not that Kia was bad at dealing with the older crowd. She had plenty of formidable experience. Her grandfather had been one of Durham’s first African-American cops and her father was also a department legend. Her mother was no slouch, either. The first time Howie had met Mrs. Alston, he’d felt stripped down to his briefs, with every flaw scrutinized. He was pretty sure Kia had married the first man to show up at the Alston house for a date and keep his spine straight under the inspection. Her husband was a soft-spoken accountant at Duke University who’d played football at North Carolina Central University and stood taller than his height implied.

      By unspoken accord, Howie and Kia slowed down under the arch between the entry and the living room to get a better sense of their surroundings.

      “Clean,” Kia said. “A little OCD?”

      “Cleaning service, I think.” Mrs. Somerset had never struck him as nutty in any way other than her phone calls. Her grief had kept too tight a hold on her mind to allow any other neurosis in.

      “Think it will make the job easier or harder?”

      Howie shrugged. “Depends more on the perp than the victim’s cleaning service. It doesn’t matter that the spotless surfaces make for perfect fingerprints if the guy didn’t leave any.”

      They turned their attention from the living room to the sunny dining room at their left and Howie’s next words froze in his throat, choking off any conversation between him and Kia. Neither of them took a step. Howie’s feet were as rooted to the floor as his eyes were to the scene before him.

      Kia regained her composure first. “Fingerprints won’t be our first problem.”

      Durham was a small city and—with notable exceptions, like the Michael Peterson case—had small murders. Robbery attempts. Drug deals gone wrong. A drive-by or two. The occasional murdered wife. Howie had only ever seen a murder scene like this one on episodes of Law & Order.

      The ringing landline—coming from the kitchen, Howie thought—seemed to have startled Kia into speech again. “I’m going to go out on a limb and say our victim was stabbed to death.”

      Howie ignored his impulse to stop Kia’s jokes. She hadn’t had three years of weekly phone conversations to get to know Mrs. Somerset as anything more than the crazy woman who called the station. Plus, the job was hard on the mind—everyone had coping mechanisms. Wisecracks were Kia’s.

      This room might send them all to the bar for some liquid comfort. Blood was splattered everywhere, at odds with the flowered curtains, yellow walls and sunbeams that made up Mrs. Somerset’s idea of decoration. Though forensics would certainly have their say, anyone with an eye for detail could follow Mrs. Somerset’s attempt to escape through the drips, drops and streaks of red all over the room, ending with the blood-soaked woman on the floor in front of them.

      “Sir,” a pimple-faced rookie said from the doorway, the timbre of his voice a giveaway that he was looking everywhere but at Mrs. Somerset, “you’re needed outside.”

      “Mrs. Carr trying to question our witness?” he asked.

      Out of the corner of his eye, Howie saw the rookie cop rock back and forth, then think better of it and plant his feet on the floor. “No, sir. A woman said she wanted to see her aunt. Henson, uh, Henson thought it would be a good idea to let her wait in the back of a patrol car.” The rookie didn’t say how the niece had been escorted into the back of the car and he didn’t need to. Henson’s many good ideas quickly turned into bad ones upon execution. Handcuffing Mrs. Somerset’s niece and shoving her into the back of a patrol car would be an example, and not an atypical one.

      Howie opened his mouth, but Kia spoke first. “Al’s coordinating. Jack’s already been sent back to headquarters for social-media duty. I’ll wait for forensics. That leaves you on soothing-old-lady duty. Plus, this is your case—you get the first crack at the family.” Her long, bony finger was aimed at him, though the smirk on her lips ruined her don’t-mess-with-me stare.