by D. L. Wood
Silence filled the tiny room. Finally, Sims broke it. “Okay. Okay, I’ll try,” he grumbled. “So what happens next? How long will I be in here?”
“Your preliminary hearing’s been set for Wednesday. The prosecution will gather its evidence and present just enough to convince the judge there is probable cause to have your case bound over to the Circuit Court. If that happens, the Grand Jury will hear it as soon as possible after that. If they deliver a true bill—”
“A what?”
“A true bill—meaning if they find there’s enough evidence to justify trying you—then an indictment will be issued. You’ll enter a plea and then the case will proceed to a jury trial unless a deal is made.”
“A deal? I’m not making any deal for something I didn’t do!” His tone was intense, his voice beginning to shake at the reality Holt was laying out. “Look, you have to help me. I swear I didn’t do any of it.”
Holt glossed over Sims’s plea, pressing on. “The police also confiscated something listed as ‘unknown red particles’ from your house? What is that?”
Sims looked bemused, his eyebrows wrinkled together almost to a point. “No idea. Look,” he continued, “if they say my gun is involved, then I’m being framed. That’s the only explanation.”
“Who would want to do that? Who would want to kill Donner and blame you for it?”
Sims fidgeted restlessly in his chair. “There’s got to be a long list of people who hate Donner. He made a lot of enemies in his time. He’s ruthless in business. I’m just an easy target because of what happened with me hitting him with that sign and the lawsuit and all, but if you dig a little, there’s got to be somebody else. Because I know it’s not me.”
Holt exhaled laboriously. “Reese’s attacker left a message warning Reese to stop doing something, but for some reason the attacker didn’t specify what that something was. Maybe he thought it was obvious, but it’s not to any of us. It might be completely unrelated to your situation, but with the timing, it seems possible that someone left that message because they don’t want us to continue helping you. Do you have any ideas about who that might be?”
“Yeah, whoever’s framing me.”
“I meant a name, a lead, or something.”
“No, man. I don’t have a name. But I know where you might find one.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Chloe gazed outside the passenger window of Holt’s car as they motored towards Sims’s house on the southwest side of Franklin, about ten minutes from the courthouse. She watched the oak-lined streets zip by while Holt was on the phone, trading “hmms” and “uh-huhs” with Cecilia Tucker on the other end of the line. After about five minutes, he dropped the cell phone onto the car’s center console cup holder.
“So, Cecilia’s going to send us the discovery materials Donner’s attorneys produced to her in the lawsuit. Apparently it’s too massive to copy—too expensive since neither one of us may ever get paid—but she was fine with us looking through the originals.” Back at the courthouse, Sims had explained that after months of legal wrangling and a hearing to force the issue, multiple boxes of papers had finally been delivered to Cecilia in response to their discovery requests in the civil suit. Sims believed that the materials might contain clues as to who was involved in Donner’s killing and the explosion at the site. “You go through that,” Sims had said, “and you may find something that can help.”
“She actually sounded glad about it,” Holt remarked, turning onto Sims’s street. “The boxes only came last Friday and she hasn’t even started sifting through them. I told her we’d give her a heads up if we found anything useful.”
Sims’s house was a little orangish-red brick rancher that looked like it was built in the 1950s. The firehouse red shutters stood in contrast to the Kelly green artificial turf that had been applied to the front steps and landing. The house had a kept feel about it, the yard mowed and bushes trimmed, but with a minimalist approach. There was no landscaping to speak of along the front of the house itself, no pots with flowers, no personalization of any sort. It gave the impression that Sims exerted only the minimum amount of effort necessary to keep it clean, and no more.
“So what are you hoping to find?” Chloe asked as they got out.
“No idea,” Holt replied, heading over to the bush Sims had indicated and retrieving the key beneath it. “But I just want to take a look around. You never know. Maybe we get lucky and find the gun stashed somewhere else in the closet.”
“You really think that could happen?”
“No,” Holt replied, unlocking the door and swinging it open. “But I have to check. After you,” he told Chloe, waving an arm to usher her in.
The inside of the house was a completely different story from the outside. It was clean, yes, but monumentally cluttered. The place looked like an episode of Hoarders. Magazines, newspapers, and books of all sorts occupied almost every free square inch, most of them related to either history or politics. In the living room, the walls boasted thumbtacked posters of dozens of historical sites around the south, a few in the north, and photos of Sims at what appeared to be multiple demonstrations related to proposed demolitions. A strong, musty odor, like an old basement or stacks of old books, assaulted them.
“Whoa,” Chloe remarked.
“Yeah, I know,” Holt agreed, following behind and closing the door. “Come on, his room’s down here,” he said, heading down a hallway to the right.
The same level of clutter continued through the rest of the house, with the exception of Jacob’s room, which was excessively tidy for a teenage boy—no clothes on the floor, no trash, no used dishes—adorned sparingly with his sports trophies for football and basketball. Several team photos were pinned to a bulletin board that hung over a small desk in one corner.
“Acorn fell far from the tree,” Holt remarked as they walked past Jacob’s room to the last door on the left.
“Apparently,” Chloe replied. She bit her lip, weighing her next comment, before sharing. “He’s a bit unlikable isn’t he? Sims, I mean?”
“A bit?” Holt replied sarcastically, nearing the last door on the left, which was pulled shut. “Wait till you’ve spent more time around him. But Sims was never the reason Reese was helping out in the situation.” Holt put a hand on the knob. “Reese likes Jacob. He’s a good kid and good for Emma. So Reese wanted to do what he could,” he explained.
“What about Sims’s wife? Jacob’s mom?”
Holt shook his head. “Jacob’s mom passed away about three years ago. Leukemia, adult onset.”
“That’s awful.”
“Yeah. But even so, Jacob seems to have it together. Definitely more than his dad does. From the little Emma’s told me, he’s killing it at school and on the field. He’s a running back on the varsity football team,” Holt explained, opening the door and stepping through with Chloe on his heels. “UT is already looking at him.”
Sims’s bedroom was more of the same, if not worse than the rest of the house. Dozens of white office boxes filled the room in haphazardly stacked columns of various heights, all of which looked as though a good breeze would topple them like dominoes. Papers crammed inside jutted out from beneath crooked lids, some spilling to the floor. Labels like “Mobile plantation demo” and “Briarwood sit-in” were scrawled across the sides in permanent marker.
“Yikes,” Holt said.
“At least they cleared a path to the closet,” she said, eyeing the gaps between the boxes.
“Yeah,” Holt said, stepping over a stack of Time magazines on the floor, and reaching for the knob to the accordion-door closet. “So, let’s see if—”
Suddenly Holt flew backwards as a black-clad figure leapt out of the closet, ramming Holt into Chloe, sending them both sprawling into the piles of papers, books, and random mess collected in the center of the room. Chloe fell into one of the teetering box stacks which crashed down around her.
“What—hey!” Holt shouted, scrambling up and over Chloe
to charge after the intruder already sprinting out the door.
“Holt! Don’t! Wait!” Chloe yelled, shoving off a box that had fallen on her leg. Jumping up, she hurtled after them just in time to see the intruder speed out the front door with Holt in pursuit. She skidded to a stop on the front porch, where she saw the tail of Holt’s jacket whip around the house. She bolted after them, intending to follow, but when she turned the corner, both of them were gone.
* * * * *
Stupid, stupid, stupid!
He panted, trying to catch his breath as he continued running between houses, darting amongst trees and bushes in the hopes of staying hidden. He hadn’t heard anyone following him for at least a couple of backyards now, but he wasn’t slowing down. He wasn’t taking any chances.
Why did I try in the middle of the day?
And why were they there?
His heart pounded like racehorse hooves against a track as he turned another corner and jumped a fence. He landed to the sound of angry barking from a German shepherd charging towards him from the back porch. Ignoring another wave of panic, he turned on the speed, pulling himself up and over the next fence just in time to avoid the dog tearing into his leg.
The message he had left at the McConnaughey house hadn’t worked.
Clearly it was going to take something even more serious to get them to pay attention.
* * * * *
Chloe was sitting on the turf-covered steps of the front porch, legs-crossed and an elbow propped up on one knee when Holt reappeared around the corner, his chest heaving as he sucked in labored breaths.
“Lost him,” he replied, walking towards her, his suit rumpled and shirttail pulled loose.
“You all right?” Chloe asked, concern evident in her voice.
“Yeah, yeah,” Holt said, leaning against one of the wrought iron supports that propped up the small porch awning. “That sucker was fast.”
“That was pretty stupid,” Chloe chastised, standing up.
Holt eyebrows arched at the unexpected admonishment. “What was I supposed to do?”
“Umm, maybe not chase after him? Call 911? Wait for the police?” She eyed him sarcastically. “Stop me when I get to something that sounds good.”
“Yeah, well, it doesn’t matter. He took off.”
“What do you think he was after?”
“I don’t know,” he said, pulling out his cell and dialing. “But it can’t be good.”
“Who are you calling?”
“Who do you think I’m calling?” he quipped, a plucky smile behind his eyes. “I’m taking your advice.”
TWENTY-FIVE
After an hour long detour with the Franklin police, Holt and Chloe made it back to his law office, where Sims’s discovery boxes had already been delivered.
Holt’s shoulders drooped as they stared at a half dozen of the things. “She wasn’t kidding,” Holt groaned. “Cecilia said it was too much to copy. There’s probably several thousand pieces of paper in each one of those.”
“So what now?”
“We start going through them,” he said, rubbing his forehead, as if warding off a headache. “I can do a little bit this morning, but I’ve got hearings later this afternoon and a trial in two days. It will just have to wait.”
“I can do it.”
He swiveled towards her, a look of amused skepticism on his face. “You don’t want to do that.”
“You said that as your ‘intern’ it would be good if I did some actual work, right? And I want to help. If sifting through all this,” she waved a hand at the boxes, “will move this along, then it’s what I want to do.”
“It’ll take hours. Hours upon hours.”
“So? I’ve got time to kill now that Reese is in the hospital and I’m staying with the kids. I’ve already called my editor and taken some family leave.”
“But, look,” he said, exhaling uncomfortably. “I can’t pay you. You don’t owe Sims anything. It’s not your problem.”
“I’m not doing it for him. I’m doing it for the kids. If there is something in here that can point us to whoever hurt Reese and threatened Emma and Tyler, then I want to find it. If Sims benefits, so be it.”
Holt surrendered. “All right, but when you go blind from boredom, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“Fair enough.”
Squirreling themselves away in the conference room, they tried to make some headway. After an hour, the table was covered from one end to the other with stacks of papers of varying heights, each one representing a different type of document. The piles were their attempt to bring some sort of organization to the mass of paper Donner’s attorneys had provided.
“It’s a blitzkrieg,” Holt had explained. “There are two ways to go about discovery. Most often attorneys strip a request down and try to produce as little as possible. Unless they go the other way, and produce everything under the sun, even things you didn’t request in order to mask anything that might be relevant, which is what they did here. Now there’s so much that finding anything helpful is like hunting for a needle in a haystack.”
He was right. So far they had not come across anything remotely useful. On top of that, there was no order to it all. It was as if Donner’s attorneys had played “fifty-two card pickup” with the documents, then randomly boxed them up. Consequently, Chloe and Holt had decided to start by sorting the documents into categories as best they could, to be gone through a second time once they had a better handle on what they were looking at.
“Here’s an electric bill for power usage at the construction site. I mean, what good is this?” Chloe fussed.
“Sims’s requests were open-ended and Donner’s attorneys ran with it. I can’t blame them,” he admitted. “It’s a good strategy.” He checked his stainless steel Rolex watch, tossed a final sheet on one of the piles, and pushed back from the table. “I’ve got to get ready for my hearings. Will you be all right here?”
“Definitely. I’ll do what I can. I have to leave by 3:00 to pick up Tyler.”
“Just let Karen know when you go.”
Chloe nodded.
“How about I take you guys out for dinner tonight? All of you. There’s a bar and grill downtown that the kids love. It’s got karaoke. Maybe it’ll cheer them up a bit after you check on Reese.”
“Karaoke?”
A confident grin erupted on his face. “One of my specialties. Tyler loves it.”
“All right, burgers and karaoke it is.”
Chloe spent the rest of the day finishing sorting through the first box, just doing quick scans of documents to determine whether they belonged in the ‘correspondence with city,’ ‘correspondence with seller,’ ‘construction related,’ ‘contract related,’ or any of the other dozen or so piles they had separated the papers into. She had just dipped into the second box, when she realized it was a quarter to three and decided to call it a day. Thinking she might have some time after Tyler went to bed, she grabbed the box and headed for the lobby. After explaining to Karen what she was doing, she put the first box in the car, then went back for one more.
“Okay, this is the last one,” Chloe told Karen as she passed by the mahogany desk where the receptionist sat typing away, her plum-colored nails clacking on the keys. Karen had a round face and amiable smile, and had been very pleasant all afternoon, even bringing Chloe a glass of tea halfway through her time there.
“Two boxes,” Karen noted, her eyebrows rising. “That’s pretty ambitious.”
“Probably,” Chloe admitted. “Thanks again for the tea and everything. I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“No problem,” Karen said, her short brown hair bouncing gently as she spoke. “It was really nice to finally meet you, Chloe. I know Reese is glad you’re here.” She paused and her eyes glistened a bit. “I’m really worried about him. And the kids. Please let me know if there’s anything at all I can do to help you. If you get an update on Reese, would you let me know? Just text or call or whatever,�
� she said, slipping Chloe her number on a yellow sticky note. “Day or night.”
“I definitely will,” Chloe assured her.
It was a short drive to the school, where Tyler hopped in the car and immediately began asking about his father. Chloe assured Tyler that Reese was on the mend and that they would go visit him as soon as Emma got off work, even though her multiple calls to the hospital had only resulted in reports that he was stable—no better and no worse. When Tyler continued to look fretful, Chloe suggested ice cream at Baskin Robbins on the way home as a distraction. This seemed to perk him up, and he chatted the rest of the way about the drama at recess when one of the boys had found a frog on the slide.
Baskin Robbins was housed in a little brick building just off the square. Tyler insisted on one of their signature creations—an upside down cone iced to look like a clown—while Chloe opted for a single scoop of lemon custard. They stepped out onto the little paver patio in front of the store, the shop’s bell jingling as they exited. A light wind ruffled Chloe’s hair, nearly sending it into the sticky sweet cream just before she snatched up the curl and tucked it behind her ear.
“Can we go see Emma?” Tyler asked, jumping on and off a concrete bench on the patio.
“Lead the way,” Chloe answered.
Tyler took her free hand and they walked two blocks down Main Street to Philanthropy, the clothing and gift store where Emma worked after school and on weekends. The windows were beautifully decorated with old trunks, flouncy dresses, and burlap ribbon, lending the shop a sophisticated bohemian air. Burning candles, as wide as salad plates, in rustic tones of orange and russet, beckoned patrons inside.