True Crime Fiction
Page 42
Dad and I both nod.
“What do you think will happen to him?” she says.
“We’ll make sure he’s taken care of,” Dad says. “Get him in a good, safe place that specializes in . . . this sort of thing. You’ll be able to visit.”
“I’ll be in prison,” she says.
I try to process everything Verna has said, trying to suss out the truth, trying to empathize and understand.
“Do you believe her?” I ask.
Dad nods. “I do.”
We are standing out in front of the house so we can talk in private.
Dad looks far older and far more frail than I ever thought I’d see. He looks conflicted too, his demeanor a complex mixture of relief and sadness.
“I get it,” he adds. “I really do. I’d do the same for any of you.”
I knew he meant me, Jake, and Nancy.
I nod. “But . . . what she did with the tractor to the poor girl at the monument,” I say.
He nods. “I know. But she did that to a corpse, a . . . to someone it was too late for. I know Verna, know her . . . heart. Two times in her life she’s covered up what were tragic accidents for her only living child—an impaired child she has to do everything for. Think about how much easier her life would’ve been if she’d’ve let him be arrested.”
I think about it.
“I love her,” he says. “Never stopped. Love her even more now. I want to be with her. Plan to be . . . for whatever time either of us has left—even if it’s just a few hours each weekend during visitation in whatever prison she’s in, but . . . I . . . wish it wouldn’t come to that. Can you think of a way it doesn’t have to?”
I think about it.
“Are you absolutely sure?” I ask. “You have no reservations? No—”
“None. I’m sure. Please help her, please help us. Can you think of a way we can . . .”
I think I have an idea, and though I’m less certain about everything than he is, I trust him, his judgement, his integrity. And even if I didn’t, or even if I question the clarity of his thinking on this, how can I not do all I can for the man who has done so much for me, for the woman he loves, and for the short future they have together after too many decades of lives far less fulfilled and happy than they might have been?
Eventually, Glenn, his lead investigator, his crime scene officer, and other deputies arrive.
I pull him aside and explain everything to him.
“I’ve got a favor to ask and a deal to make,” I say.
“I’m listening,” he says.
“First, there’s no way Ralphie is competent to stand trial.”
“True.”
“I’m assuming your facility can’t accommodate someone in his condition and that he’ll be sent to Florida State Hospital in Chattahoochee for a period of evaluation.”
He nods.
“Would you recommend probation to the state’s attorney’s office for Verna? Since Ralphie can’t stand trial, I don’t want to see her treated more harshly than she should. She’s lost so much, suffered so much. All she did was try to protect her son, to keep him with her.”
“She committed at least three felonies, John.”
“Sure. Accessory after the fact. Perjury. Aiding and abetting. Probably others, but . . . given the circumstances . . . given her motivations.”
“I don’t know,” he says. “We’re talking a lot of wasted law enforcement time and taxpayer money. Think about the other cases we might have solved, the other services we could have provided. I have to think about all sides of . . . everything.”
Everything, I wondered, or mainly just what voters will think?
“Here’s the deal I’ll offer,” I say. “If you recommend probation for Verna, she will cooperate, give a full statement—without that you have nothing. You can’t get anything from Ralphie. She’s all you have. She’ll give you a full confession and Dad and I will not say anything to anyone. Not the media. Not FDLE. Not the state’s attorney. Our involvement will be invisible. You and your department will get all the credit for closing a very old cold case. I’ll say it again. Verna will cooperate fully, make it easy on you, on everybody. Otherwise you have no case. And we won’t press charges or make public your brother’s two assaults on Dad.”
The other parts of the deal may or may not have been swaying him, but this last one gets him. His expression and posture and entire demeanor change.
“You worry too much, John,” he says. “I got this. Leave it with me. I’ll take care of everything. We’re talkin’ an old lady and a retard after all. I’ve got to arrest them and take them into custody tonight. He’ll be sent to Florida State Hospital. She’ll spend one night in jail and have First Appearance in the morning at nine and bond out shortly after that. My guess is she’ll get ten years of probation, but she can ask to have it dropped after five if she has no violations. She’ll be able to visit Ralphie in Chattahoochee. It’s all gonna be okay.”
106
Days pass. Then a few more.
It takes a few weeks for everything to settle down and get worked out, but nearly everything worked out as we hoped it would.
The sun is setting on the backside of the cypress and pines across Lake Julia, afternoon receding, evening expanding.
The smell of charcoal and smoked food fills the air.
Dad and Verna sit on one side of our back porch, Anna and I on the other. Johanna is asleep in Dad’s lap, Taylor in Verna’s.
“We can put them down,” Anna offers again. “Are you sure they’re not too much—”
“Just a little longer,” Verna says. “Please.”
Dad smiles and nods.
He looks tired and weak but as happy as I’ve seen him since . . . I can’t ever remember seeing him this happy before.
He is undergoing treatment for leukemia and it’s going well. His chances are good for a complete recovery—a safe bet given the way Verna takes care of him.
The state’s attorney’s office agreed to probation, but she only got five years, and it will probably drop off in two. She moved out of Marianna, leaving behind all the bad memories and ghosts there, and now lives with Dad in Pottersville. They visit Ralphie twice a week and Janet’s grave at least that many, and life for both of them is better than it has been in many decades.
“This is so nice,” Verna says. “Thanks for having us over as often as y’all do. Nothing in the world beats holding these little girls.”
“Our pleasure,” Anna says. “We love having you.”
When Anna sips her drink or talks with her hands, her new engagement ring catches the light, its glinting presence a source of utter happiness and a reminder that we need to set a date.
“It’s ironic,” Verna adds, looking out over the lake. “But I feel exonerated. I feel like y’all’s investigation and my guilt that it uncovered actually released me from a prison I had been in for a very long time.”
“I know the feeling well,” Dad says.
“We all do in one way or another,” Anna says, reaching over and taking my hand.
As I take her hand I rub her ring, as I often do these days, touching the unending circle, the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.
As good as things are in this moment, and they are very, very good, they’re about to get better. In a few minutes the food will be ready and Merrill and his new girlfriend, who to Anna’s disappointment is not Zadie Smith, will arrive with his mom’s special banana pudding for desert, and we will break bread and fellowship and share far more than just a meal. We will participate in a sacred, ancient ritual that is nothing less than a celebration of life itself. For even in all its complexities and difficulties, its small triumphs and devastating tragedies, its scarcity and brevity, life remains worthy of appreciating and celebrating.
Copyright © 2017 by Michael Lister
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Written by Michael Lister.
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
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(John Jordan Novels)
Power in the Blood
Blood of the Lamb
Flesh and Blood
(Special Introduction by Margaret Coel)
The Body and the Blood
Double Exposure
Blood Sacrifice
Rivers to Blood
Burnt Offerings
Innocent Blood
(Special Introduction by Michael Connelly)
Separation Anxiety
Blood Money
Blood Moon
Thunder Beach
Blood Cries
A Certain Retribution
Blood Oath
Blood Work
Cold Blood
Blood Betrayal
Blood Shot
Blood Ties
Blood Stone
Blood Trail
(Jimmy “Soldier” Riley Novels)
The Big Goodbye
The Big Beyond
The Big Hello
The Big Bout
The Big Blast
In a Spider’s Web (short story)
The Big Book of Noir
(Merrick McKnight / Reggie Summers Novels)
Thunder Beach
A Certain Retribution
Blood Oath
Blood Shot
(Remington James Novels)
Double Exposure
(includes intro by Michael Connelly)
Separation Anxiety
Blood Shot
(Sam Michaels / Daniel Davis Novels)
Burnt Offerings
Blood Oath
Cold Blood
Blood Shot
(Love Stories)
Carrie’s Gift
(Short Story Collections)
North Florida Noir
Florida Heat Wave
Delta Blues
Another Quiet Night in Desperation
(The Meaning Series)
Meaning Every Moment
The Meaning of Life in Movies
That Night
It had rained earlier in the evening and the damp pavement shimmers in the headlights.
Raindrops fall intermittently from the pines lining the road, thudding wetly on the moist earth below.
The quiet night is cloud-shrouded, the desolate coastal highway dark, and the foggy air thick with moisture as particles of water dance in the cylindrical shafts of light.
She is driving far faster than she should.
She wonders why. Why is she being so careless, so reckless? Does her life really matter so little to her? Is this a death wish or something else? An attempt at numbing the numbness? A test of the invincibility she feels?
Something in the road.
Brake. Turn. Avoid.
A gray fox darts out of the sand pine scrub and onto the highway, its long tail trailing behind it.
The speeding car swerves to miss it—and does, but hits a patch of standing water and begins to hydroplane.
Spinning. Sliding. Skidding.
The car slams into a guardrail then careens off it back onto the road, spins again, then comes to rest facing the opposite direction on the other side of the road.
Moments pass.
Then minutes.
She climbs out of the car, not particularly shaken, stands and surveys the damage.
Steam rises from the hot hood of the car. Wipers rub across the mostly dry windshield.
Then from out of the dark, diffused by the fog, approaching headlights appear in the distance, glowing eerily in the mist.
From In Search of Randa Raffield
On Thursday, January 20, 2005, the day of George W. Bush’s second inauguration, twenty-one-year-old Randa Raffield crashed her car on a secluded stretch of Highway 98 near the Gulf of Mexico, not far from Port St. Joe.
Randa was a student-athlete at the University of West Florida in Pensacola, a champion swimmer. She was five feet seven inches tall with dark auburn-tinted hair, pale white skin, and large green eyes.
Nineteen days before, at a little after midnight on New Year’s Eve, Randa’s boyfriend, Josh Douglas, proposed to her at the Pensacola Pelican Drop, the New Year’s Eve event in downtown Pensacola. She said yes. The proposal was captured by both local TV news stations and attendees with their cellphones, and has now been shared millions of times online.
The location of the wreck was hundreds of miles from where she was supposed to be.
She was on the phone with her mom at the time.
Moments after the accident, Roger Lamott, a truck driver hauling fuel, came upon the scene. Randa refused his help, asked him not to call the police, and said she preferred to wait alone for the towing service she had already called.
After pulling away, Lamott called the police anyway.
It was later discovered that Randa hadn’t called the police or a towing service and her car was drivable.
Both her mom and Roger Lamott gave statements indicating Randa wasn’t injured or particularly upset by the incident.
Seven minutes later when the first Gulf County Sheriff’s Deputy arrived, Randa was gone, vanished without a trace.
She was never seen again.
107
“I know you’ve worked a lot of baffling cases,” Merrick says, “but I guarantee you’ve never seen anything like this.”
Merrick McKnight and I are sitting on the deck at the Dockside Café on the marina in Port St. Joe on a warm September day, waiting for our lunch to arrive. The marina is just across the way from where St. Joe Paper Company’s old paper mill used to stand, but all that remains of it now is the lasting environmental damage it did.
We’re here to talk about the possibility of me helping with his investigation into the Randa Raffield case.
“Tell me,” I say.
“What’s that phrase . . . It’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”
“Russia,” I say.
“Huh?”
“It’s what Churchill said about Russia.”
“Well, he could’ve been talking about this case. It’s the same thing. Every time I think I have a handle on it, I learn something else or learn that the thing I thought I had learned a while back was wrong. It keeps changing, keeps turning and twisting. It’s all blind alleyways and dead-end streets.”
I nod. Nearly every case feels like that at some point or another. But from the little I know about the disappearance of Randa Raffield, it might be even more like that than others.
“And this whole thing’s exploding,” he says. “Gotten way out of control.”
“The investigation? Your podcast? What?”
He nods. “Both. Everything. It’s all blown up in ways we never could’ve imagined . . . and we really need your help.”
Some six months ago, he and Daniel Davis began a true crime podcast to investigate the disappearance of Randa Raffield.
Merrick is a reporter and the partner of Reggie Summers, the sheriff of Gulf County and my boss. Daniel is a retired religion professor and the husband of Sam Michaels, an FDLE agent I worked a case with back in the spring. Though I know their partners far better, I like and respect both men—and think they’re particularly good at podcasting.
“When we started we had no idea what it would become,” he says. “What it would stir up, or how many crazies it’d cause to crawl out of their holes.”
“Reggie mentioned how well the show’s doing,” I say.
Though true crime has long been a popular genre for books and documentaries, its popularity has exploded in the age of new media. Begin
ning with Sarah Koenig’s podcast Serial and continuing with Netflix’s Making a Murderer, HBO’s documentary miniseries The Jinx, and Sundance’s series The Staircase, true crime content is experiencing a renaissance and gaining a following unlike anything since In Cold Blood, Helter Skelter, and The Thin Blue Line.
A young woman with skin tanned bronze in short shorts and a pink Dockside T-shirt delivers our grouper baskets and we begin to eat.
The day is bright and clear, the bay behind the marina peaceful and picturesque, and the bay breeze the gulls and swallow-tailed kites glide on and that blows through the open restaurant has just a hint of fall in it.
Tim Munn, the manager, stops by the table to check on us and to give us samples of a special gumbo he’s been working on with the kitchen.
Merrick samples the gumbo before I do and gushes over it to such a degree that I give him mine.
As Tim moves on to hand out samples to other customers, a massive yacht slowly eases into the marina.
“What do you attribute the show’s popularity to?” I ask. “Both with the general public and to deranged internet trolls.”
“I think we do a decent job with our production, but it’s the case itself that compels people. The mystery is so . . . maddening. There are so many clues, so many possibilities, and the window of opportunity for something to happen to her was so small. Less than seven minutes for her to vanish off the face of the earth—and stay that way for nearly twelve years now. Plus she was so pretty and popular and . . . It’s easy to get obsessed with it. Daniel and I have gone to some pretty dark places, jumped down more than a few rabbit holes. But we’re not just popular. We’re controversial too. We’ve made mistakes.”