“Windy Raines’s Bowler Roller,” I said. “Remember last night when we were talking to Tally? Those strobe lights and the siren? How we all stopped and stared over there and it seemed to go on forever? Even people playing the Dozer went around to that side to watch till the siren stopped. That must have been when she did it. The Bowler Roller’s another one that’s hard to win, but it does happen three or four times an evening. All she’d have to do is wait till it went off, then take advantage of all the lights and noise and people looking there instead of at the Dozer.”

“Makes about as much sense as anything we’ve been able to come up with,” Dwight said, pulling around a tractor and flatbed loaded with irrigation pipes. “The ME couldn’t tell if the injury to the back of his head was before or during the actual stomping. Mayleen thinks she either hit him over the head or got him to lie down by telling him it would stop his nosebleed. She says her grandmother used to put a cold spoon on the roof of her mouth or cold metal across the bridge of her nose to stop the bleeding.”

“Cold quarters?” I wondered.

CHAPTER 19

TUESDAY AFTERNOON

I convened court at precisely one o’clock. Janice Needham was clerking for me again. The courthouse grapevine had learned of my relationship to Tally Ames and her murdered son, and Janice leaned in to me solicitously to say, “Bradley and I are so sorry, Judge. We had no idea he was kin to y’all.”

“Thank you, Janice,” I said. “I do appreciate you and Brad thinking of us.”

She looked expectant, hoping for some direct-from-the-horse’s-mouth tidbit that she could pass around at the next break, but I glanced over to Tracy Johnson, who was prosecuting this afternoon, and nodded for her to call her first case.

“People versus Martin Samuelson, Your Honor.”

To my surprise, it was the same elderly black man who’d recently stood before me charged with DWI. I’d suspended his license. Now here he was back with heavier charges.

“Mr. Samuelson,” I said, “didn’t I suspend your license just two weeks ago?”

The old man nodded.

“And didn’t you promise me that you wouldn’t ever drive again when you’d been drinking.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“But you did. And you drove with a suspended license.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Why, Mr. Samuelson?”

“See now, I didn’t want to drive,” he said, “but I couldn’t just leave my car on the side of the road. I had to get it home, didn’t I?”

“But your car should have been at home,” I told him. “A suspended license means you can’t drive even if you’re completely sober.”

“Yes, ma’am, I know that, and that’s why I got my nephew to drive me to the ABC store. But on the way home, there was this roadblock up ahead, and Leon, he didn’t want to go through it. I don’t know why, so he just drove in the tobacco field and left me setting there. Well, it was only a half mile from my house and I had to get my car home, didn’t I? And I won’t going to drive on the highway. I was figuring to go through the fields once I got turned around.”