Between Black and White (McMurtrie and Drake Legal Thrillers #2)(67)

“You’re right,” Dabsey agreed, still watching through the window. She was holding a Styrofoam cup of coffee, but she had yet to take a sip.

“You sure you’re OK?” Emma Jean asked.

“I’m fine, Emma Jean,” Dabsey said, drinking from the cup. She took too big a sip and almost cried out as the scalding coffee hit the back of her throat. Coughing, she began to walk toward the door. “I have to get back to the office now.”

Before Emma Jean could say anything more, Dabsey was out the door and on the sidewalk. Dr. Curtis’s practice was on East Jefferson, just a block away, so Emma Jean expected to see the receptionist take off in that direction.

But Dabsey didn’t walk toward Curtis Family Medicine. Instead, she turned down First Street.

Where is she going? Emma Jean wondered. Then, feeling an intuitive nudge, Emma Jean whispered the words she was thinking out loud. “Something is wrong.”



Dabsey Johnson felt her heart beating hard in her chest. Something had been bothering her all weekend, but she hadn’t known what it was until thirty minutes ago. At fifty-eight years old, Dabsey was having more and more senior moments, where she forgot what she was about to say or couldn’t remember what she’d done the day before. Something about last Friday had bothered her, but she hadn’t figured it out until she arrived at work that morning.

When she looked at the sign-in sheets, she noticed that Friday’s page was gone. In fact, it appeared that Dr. Curtis had replaced the entire sign-in booklet with a clean one. Which made no sense. The sign-in booklets contained forty pages and were typically thrown out monthly or when they ran out of pages. There had still been a number of pages left to work with for September, but Dr. Curtis had thrown the whole thing out.

Then it came to her. The walk-in, she thought, remembering the woman who had come to the office Friday morning. Dabsey had written the name down, and something about it had seemed familiar. Martha . . . Martha something. She had forgotten about it then, because the morning had been so busy. It was cold season, which meant Dr. Curtis’s office was crawling with patients, most of them young mothers whose kids were in kindergarten or preschool. Dr. Curtis had said he would work the woman in at lunch, but by the time Dabsey had come back after a sandwich at Reeves Drug Store, she was gone. When she had asked Dr. Curtis about the woman, he had just shrugged and said he didn’t have room for another patient.

So why hadn’t he told her that when she had first walked in the door? Dabsey had figured it was because the woman was attractive. Though Dr. Curtis was a lifelong bachelor, there was never any doubt, at least not for Dabsey, that he was heterosexual. She saw the way he admired women’s backsides when they left the office, or the way he would glance down their cleavage when he was doing an examination. The woman from Friday had been attractive. She could see Dr. Curtis at least wanting to talk to her before he showed her the door. So why had it bothered her all weekend?

Martha . . . Dabsey had thought to herself. Then she had said it out loud. “Martha . . .”

She had tried to forget about it by calling her husband, Steve, about dinner. But when she had reached for the telephone, she had seen the flyer. It was hidden under a bunch of magazines on her desk. Something Officer Springfield had dropped off three weeks earlier. Dabsey had snatched the flyer and looked at the photograph. An old driver’s license picture that had been blown up. The name below the photo had caused her heart to skip a beat. Martha Booher.

“If you see this woman, please call the sheriff’s office immediately,” the flyer had said at the bottom of the page.

Walking down First Street, Dabsey removed the flyer from her purse and looked at the photograph again. Then the name below it. Martha Booher.

That’s her, she knew. That was the woman on Friday. Dabsey knew that she was not a smart woman. But she had been gritty enough to obtain her GED after having to quit high school when she got pregnant. And determined enough to scratch out an LPN degree at Martin Methodist, which allowed her to not just sign patients into Dr. Curtis’s office but also to administer medications, take blood, and obtain histories. She wasn’t smart, but she wasn’t stupid either. Maybe a little slow, but not stupid.

It was her, she knew. The walk-in on Friday had been Martha Booher.

Dabsey took out her cell phone. She felt guilty for not talking with Dr. Curtis first, but he wouldn’t be at the office all week, and she didn’t want to bother him. She knew he didn’t pay attention to those kinds of things anyway. She doubted that he’d ever even seen the flyer.

I’ll tell him when he calls in today, she resolved. Then she dialed the number on the flyer.





49


At 8:45 a.m. the courtroom was quiet as a mouse. There were no cameras. No reporters. And outside of Maggie Walton, who sat in the front row nearest the prosecution table, there were no spectators.

Tom scratched at his beard, still not quite comfortable with facial hair, having been clean shaven most of his career. His bruises had basically healed, but there remained a reddish hue that the beard helped to conceal. Below the counsel table he’d conspicuously placed his cane, which he continued to need for walking, though he was now strong enough to eschew the wheelchair. The knee was not going to get better until he could have it surgically repaired, but he had delayed any procedures until after the trial. For now the cane and a boatload of Advil would have to do.