“So tell me about Miz Ames being Andrew’s daughter,” Dwight said. “And what’s with Andrew?”

“You off duty now?” I asked.

He nodded, leaned across his desk, and hooked his jacket off the back of the chair with one finger.

“Then come ride over to the carnival with me and we’ll talk on the way.”

By the time we got out to the festival grounds, I’d told him all I knew about Tally and how Andrew and April had reacted to the news. In return, he told me about the unexpectedly big bank account that Braz had secretly squirreled away and how hurt Tally had seemed over the discovery. He also shared what Mayleen Richards had learned while backtracking on Braz’s storage-locker buys. There was a Georgia woman who’d bought back some of her mother’s furniture, which would seem to do away with any motive. Besides, Mayleen had talked to a couple of people down there in the transportation department who had gone out to dinner with the woman in Atlanta Friday evening.

The owner of the other furniture buy, a massive set of oak bedroom furniture, had been located as well.

“It was part of his ex-wife’s divorce settlement, but after they sold the house, she didn’t have any place to put it, so he stored it for her, paid the first three months’ rent and after that, forwarded all the notices on to her. Mayleen said he sounded sorta happy it’d been forfeited. Said he never had a good night’s sleep on that bed from the minute she bought it.”

That left the negligees as the only other buy in North Carolina.

“And it looks like your guess that she was keeping it secret from her husband might be on the money,” Dwight told me as I pulled into the parking lot beside the Agricultural Hall. “She sent a brother to try to save the stuff, not her husband. And she seems to have let it drop rather than making an issue out of it that might would get back to him.”

“She had the locker six years? That’s some affair,” I said. “Sounds like a divorce would’ve been easier.”

“What would be easier is if you’d get a bigger car,” he said in exasperation, untangling himself from the seat belt.

Even with the seat pushed back as far as it would go, Dwight has trouble getting his long legs in and out of my Firebird and he mouths off about it every time he rides with me. (There’s a reason so many law officers favor Crown Victorias and pickup trucks. Most of those men are as big as Dwight.)

Although the sun had set, it wasn’t completely dark yet, but the carnival was in full swing. Toe-tapping country-western music poured from the loudspeakers. The Ferris wheel was turning and the Tilt-A-Whirl held shrieking teenagers, but there seemed fewer people on the midway than on Friday night. It was still early, though.