Bad To The Bone (10 page)

The lawyer stared at the cameras with a
sympathetic expression on his face. "I can testify that my client
is in genuine fear of her estranged husband," he added. "And I can
only repeat her plea. Do not grant Robert Price bail."

What a load of happy horseshit— no judge
would grant Price bail under the circumstances anyway. This was
grandstanding at its worst.

"That's two strikes against her," I told
Bobby angrily. "She lied about the court order. She lied about her
bruises. One more strike and I'm taking her out."

Bobby shrugged philosophically. "What's
next?" he asked, cheeks packed with food. "Any chance you can get
her to make good on her bad check?"

"First, I'm going to track down some guy
named Joe Scurlock and find out what the hell he knows about Tawny
that keeps her in line."

Bobby was not interested. He had his mind on
other things. "Maybe we could sue her for nonpayment," he
suggested.

"Thanks for your concern," I muttered and
walked away.

I didn't need his help anyway. Thanks to the
miracle of the Internet, within five minutes I had found fourteen
Scurlocks listed within a twenty-mile radius of Raleigh. There were
no Joes or Josephs, but two had the initial J. When I called the
first one, an answering machine picked up and announced that Jane
and Shelia were not available at the moment. I hung up and stared
at the second listing. The address was in Boylan Heights, less than
half a mile from my office. I'd be better off just dropping by— it
was harder to hang up on me that way.

J. Scurlock lived in a ramshackle Victorian
in the center of a downtown residential area that for years had
been a run-down reminder of former turn-of-the-century glory. But
in the last two decades, new owners had moved in to restore the
neighborhood. Some of the nicest homes in Raleigh now graced the
blocks of Boylan Heights. J. Scurlock’s house was not one of
them.

Its white-painted facade had turned gray,
the shutters sagged from the windows and the front porch was badly
in need of shoring up. No one had bothered to rake the leaves since
autumn, and a bin of recycled jars had tipped over at the curb to
spill out into the street. There were no cars parked in the
driveway or out front, so I pulled into the parking lot of a church
across the street and waited for signs of life to appear.

About half an hour later, a tired-looking
woman wrapped in a sweater too thin for the weather pulled up in a
battered station wagon and began to unload groceries from the
trunk. I waited until she was halfway done, then joined her.

"Let me help," I said, reaching for the bag
in her arms.

She gripped her groceries tighter. "Who are
you?" she asked sharply.

I explained who I was and that I was looking
for Joe Scurlock.

"That's my husband. Why do you want to talk
to him?" She had a clipped voice and a suspicious attitude that
made me think she'd been raised a lot farther north than the
Mason-Dixon line.

"I need to talk to him about Tawny
Bledsoe."

She stared at me for a moment, then balanced
a grocery bag on one hip and reached for another. "What's she done
now?" she muttered.

"Your husband knows her?" I asked
eagerly.

"He ought to." She thrust both bags into my
arms and reached inside the car for more. "He was married to her at
one time."

"Oh shit," I answered, the words coming out
before I could stop them.

The woman stared at me over an armload of
groceries. "You have no idea," she said.

An hour later, I was sitting at a kitchen
table across from Joe Scurlock, cups of coffee between us. He was a
shy man of medium build with thinning brown hair and a diffident
demeanor. Tawny must have chewed him up and spit him out on a daily
basis. He wore a yellow jumpsuit smeared with grease, meaning his
job was blue-collar at best. Which explained why Tawny had moved
on.

Scurlock had left work early to talk to me,
but he was having trouble getting started. The clock on the wall
ticked loudly in the silence of the house. His wife had tactfully
disappeared.

"So you think she had something to do with
that man's murder?" he finally asked, avoiding my eyes. He was
uneducated, if you went by his voice, but I had a feeling that
Tawny had taught him plenty he never wanted to know.

"I think she might be involved," I said. "Do
you think she's capable of it?"

"I think she's capable of anything," he
answered.

"Have you seen her lately?"

He shook his head. "I spend most of my time
making sure I never see her again. That woman scares me. She ain't
right in the head."

"That bad?"

"That bad."

A silence descended between us. I thought
about how best to approach the subject, then decided that since he
was a plainspoken man, I ought to just come right out and say it.
"I heard you showed up at the custody hearing for her daughter
Tiffany last year," I said. "On Robert Price's behalf."

He nodded. "He was having trouble convincing
the judge of Tawny's real character, I guess you could say. He
wanted me to tell the judge what I knew. I wanted to help him. I
don't care what color he is. He don't deserve what Tawny can dish
out and neither do that little girl. So I was happy to oblige."

"And what did you know?"

He looked up at the clock, as if he were
waiting for someone to arrive. "I knew that if Tawny got custody of
her daughter, the poor kid wouldn't stand a snowball's chance in
hell. That woman don't have a maternal bone in her entire body. If
she ever did, she starved it out."

"How could you know what kind of mother she
was? Some of the worst people on the planet turn out to be good
parents."

"Not Tawny," he said emphatically. He wiped
his brow and glanced at the clock again. "She ain't seen her other
kids in over six years."

"Other kids?" I asked, suddenly remembering
that Robert Price had mentioned other children while in my office.
"She doesn't have any."

He looked offended. "The hell she don't. She
got two of 'em. A daughter and a son. I ought to know. They live
with me."

"You're their father?" I asked, a stupid
question if ever there was one.

But he surprised me. "No, I ain't. I'm just
the sucker who loves 'em."

I looked confused and he explained. "She was
married before she met me, but it didn't last. That husband was
smart. He lit out for the hills. Me, I ain't stupid, but it took me
a while to see that Tawny just married me to have someone to take
care of her and her kids. But I didn't mind at first because they
wanted so hard to be good kids. So I was their stepdaddy for maybe
two years until our marriage busted up. Since their real father was
long gone, Tawny got custody of them after our divorce, her being
the natural parent and all. But she kept leaving them with me for
longer and longer periods of time. First a weekend. Then a week.
Finally, a month. And one day, she just never come back for them at
all. Poor little things. So I kept 'em. And no one ever said a word
to me about it. I don't know what Tawny told her parents, but we
ain't never seen the grandparents neither."

"You mean you and your wife have been
raising them as your own?"

"That's right," he said, nodding. "We're
gonna file to adopt them legally. That lawyer who helped Robert
Price last year is helping us do it. For free. Can you believe
that? The lady judge said we would have no problem. She was right
nice about it. She said we was good people."

I looked around the shabby kitchen. The
linoleum floor was worn with black spots gouged out near the
doorways. The appliances were outdated, the cabinets badly needed
painting and the plumbing was pre-World War II. But the counters
and tablecloth were clean and there was a platter of homemade Rice
Krispy treats piled on a plate near the stove. No one had bothered
to offer me any and I didn't want to ask. For all I knew, it was
their dinner.

"What do you do for a living?"

"I'm a mechanic down at Lee's Auto House,"
he said. "I'm lucky to still have my job there, especially after
what Tawny done."

"What did Tawny do?" I asked slowly, aware
that it was a question I was probably going to repeat over and over
in the days ahead.

"She went and had an affair with Lee when we
were married," he explained, his voice flat. "Busted up my boss's
marriage, made a fool of me, and then dumped us both and run away
with some guy who sells advertising space or something like that.
Married him, but it didn't even last as long as our marriage."

"Married him, too?" I asked, trying to do
the math. "That means she's been married four times."

"At least." He took a sip of his coffee.
"That woman would just as soon lie as breathe. I only know about
one marriage before me. Could be there were others. And who knows
how many since? That woman can reel you down the aisle, then clean
you out in a heartbeat. She'd make a hell of a fisherman, let me
tell you."

"She sounds like a troubled woman," I
said.

"She's not troubled," Scurlock answered
quickly, his voice sharp. "She's just plain trouble. It don't
bother her to be that way. She don't even know she's that way. She
don't care who she hurts, long as she gets what she wants. I'm
still paying off the debts she run up when we was married." He ran
a finger around his collar and looked at the clock again. "I got
taken for a fool, but not as bad as that poor man in jail right
now. She really did a number on him."

I was about to ask him more, but the front
door slammed. Scurlock waited stiffly as the sounds of footsteps
echoed through the house. A pudgy girl around thirteen or fourteen
burst into the kitchen and made a beeline for the Rice Krispy
treats. She jammed one in her mouth before she even put her books
down.

"All right," she mumbled through the goo.
"My favorites." She was in the middle of reaching for a second one
when she noticed me.

"Who are you?" she asked in a voice that
bordered on snotty. She was just being a teenager, but I have to
admit I dislike teenagers even more than I dislike small children.
At least rugrats are sometimes cute.

"This here lady came to see me about some
work on her car," Scurlock interrupted, his hand brushing mine in
warning. "I'm gonna get me some extra money to buy you that
ten-speed you want."

The child stared at me belligerently, as if
doubting that anyone as hopelessly outmoded as moi could possibly
be the source of her latest dream coming true.

"I'm Casey," I said brightly. "What's your
name?"

"Ashley," she admitted in a sullen voice,
crossing her arms and glaring.

I tried hard to like her, but failed. She
was pale, and her soft body was squeezed into too-tight blue jeans.
Her shirt gaped open at the buttons and her stringy brown hair fell
in greasy waves to her shoulders. Her features may have been
pretty, but it was hard to tell because of her perpetually sullen
expression and acne problems. Tiny red scabs dotted her chin and
forehead where she had picked at the sores. She was about the
unhappiest-looking kid I had ever seen—and the opposite of her
mother in looks. I doubted that was a coincidence.

"Where's Roger?" the girl asked her father
in a challenging voice.

"Not home yet," he said. "He's got
basketball practice."

The girl rolled her eyes and reached for
another treat. "Roger is my perfect brother," she told me in a
much-practiced suffering tone of voice. "He's tall and smart and a
million girls call here each week for him. Roger was a beautiful
baby. Roger walked at nine months. Roger has a penis and I have
a—"

"That's enough," Scurlock said calmly. "You
have homework to do."

The kid didn't argue. She stacked three more
treats in her hand, saw the look her father gave her, put one back,
and marched defiantly from the room.

As she walked past me, I saw that a series
of parallel slashes had been gouged into the flesh of both arms.
The wounds started just below her elbows and curved inward toward
her wrists. The scabs were picked clean, leaving matching pink
trails. Not a suicide attempt. Ritualistic incisions. The girl was
a cutter. I stared at Joe Scurlock in silence.

"Like I said," he explained softly, once the
girl had left the room. “Tawny's done a lot of damage in this
world."

"She could have gotten her claws in me,"
Bobby D. reflected when I told him about Tawny's marital history.
He looked vicariously terrified, like a man who has learned that
the hitchhiker he almost stopped for was really a serial
killer.

"Can you help me out?" I asked him. "I want
to know where Tawny's gone. I haven't found anything to connect her
to the murder, but I want to be able to get my hands on her when I
do."

"Sure, babe. I'll call the moving companies,
rental car joints, airlines, the train station. I'm good at that
shit." Translation: "I can do it while sitting on my ass."

"I also need to know her real name."

"What do you mean?" Bobby asked.

"She's been married so many times, who the
hell knows what her maiden name is. I want to talk to her
family."

"Why?"

"The Bad Seed Theory," I said. "Whenever
someone seems normal on the surface, but is evil inside, there's
one group of people who know the truth—and that's the family. They
watched her ripen. They'll know what she really is."

"Yeah, but will they tell you?" Bobby asked
sensibly.

"Someone in that family will. Who do you
think she sharpened her claws on? Can you track down her maiden
name for me or not?"

"I'll call Rachel over at the N&O. They
must have done background on her."