JD05 - Conflict of Interest

by Scott Pratt

  Caroline stood and moved behind me. She wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me gently on the ear.

  “There’s nothing we can do to change the past,” she said. “All we can do is try to manage the present as best we can. So you have a father now. The children have a grandfather. I have a father-in-law. He’s family, Joe, and I can understand a young man running away from certain death or capture in the jungle thousands of miles from home. I can understand the shame it must have caused him, especially if he’s anything like you. I say we forgive him and open our hearts to him. Do you think you can do that?”

  “I don’t know, baby. I guess I can try.”

  CHAPTER 19

  After Caroline went to bed at midnight, I went downstairs to my study, turned the computer on, and spent the next two hours doing research on people who had kidnapped, abused and killed children. It turned out to be one of the most sickening experiences I’d ever put myself through. People like Albert Fish and Westley Allan Dodd and Robert Black and Wayne Williams committed acts so utterly void of humanity that I found myself thinking of them the same way they thought of their victims – as objects. How a human being could do such vile things to a child was beyond my understanding. I suppose I thought that by reading about them I might be able to gain some insight into the person who took Lindsay Monroe, but the more I read, the more I found myself simply hating them. I didn’t want to understand them or their psyches or their sexual proclivities. I just wanted them out of the gene pool.

  The worst of it, though, was the knowledge that while I was reading, Lindsay Monroe was most likely being held by someone like them. She was probably being kept in a closet or a trunk or a basement or a barn somewhere, terrified and alone, deprived of the basics of human dignity, while her captor fantasized about what he would do to her next. How long did she have? How long before his fantasies ran their course and he strangled her or stabbed her or beat her to death and then disposed of her like the weekend trash?

  One name kept popping up on the searches, a Virginian named Ernest Shanks, who had terrorized the city of Norfolk from 2000 to 2002. Unlike many child predators that are caught, Shanks had made a full confession to the police, and his descriptions of how he stalked and kidnapped young girls and what he did to them before he killed them made my stomach churn. Shanks killed sixteen girls, all between the ages of five and nine. He kept them chained to a pole in a sound-proof room he’d built in the basement of his house. Thirteen lived for two weeks, two lived for three weeks, and one made it a month. When he tired of them, he strangled them and dumped their bodies into the bays, coves, inlets, rivers and lakes around Norfolk. The police finally caught him the same way they caught Wayne Williams in Atlanta a couple of decades earlier. They staked out the bridges and stopped his car after they saw him dump something into the water off a bridge. They found an eight-year-old girl who had been missing for two weeks the next morning about a mile downstream, and eventually Shanks confessed. He told the investigators that if they ever let him go, he’d do it again, and again, and again. They tried him and convicted him of all sixteen murders and sentenced him to death. He’d gone through the lengthy appeals process and was scheduled to be executed in two weeks.

  As I sat there reading, an idea kept tugging at the fringes of my mind. It would wriggle its way into my consciousness and I’d push it away, only to have it return a few minutes later. Ernest Shanks was what Lindsay Monroe’s kidnapper aspired to be. Ernest Shanks was the master while the unknown white male Tom Short had described was a neophyte. I reached for my cell phone and called Tom.

  “Do you think you could get us in to see a convicted child killer who’s on death row in Virginia?” I said when he answered.

  “Are you familiar with the concept of sleep?”

  “I can’t sleep.”

  “I can. As a matter of fact, that’s what I was doing until about ten seconds ago.”

  “Can you get us in? I want to talk to this guy.”

  “Who is it? Shanks?”

  “So you’ve heard of him.”

  “Of course I’ve heard of him. Everyone in the field of forensic psychiatry who has studied pedophilia has heard of him.”

  “I’d like to see him tomorrow.”

  “I’m leaving for the Outer Banks tomorrow, Joe. I’ll be gone for a week.”

  “Then I’ll go alone.”

  “I don’t think I can set it up that fast, and even if I could, he doesn’t have to talk to you if he doesn’t want to.”

  “Check into it, would you? There’s a little girl out there somewhere. Maybe he can help us find her.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Call me back.”

  “In the morning. I’ll call you in the morning. People in Virginia probably sleep sometimes too, you know.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Charles Russell called me at six the next morning and asked me to come to his hotel room. When I walked in, I noticed a large room service tray covered with bagels and cream cheese and fruit and oatmeal and juice. Earl Botts was sitting at a table next to the tray staring at an iPad and sipping on a cup of coffee.

  “Help yourself,” Russell said.

  I poured myself a cup of coffee and picked up an apple. Russell, who had taken a seat at the table next to Botts, motioned to a chair across from him and I sat down. There was an open laptop on the table in front of Russell. He glanced at it and back at me.

  “I like to keep up with the news,” he said. “Check it every morning, usually the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. I read the Nashville paper once in awhile if there’s some local news I’m interested in. But since this happened with Lindsay, I’ve been forced to expand my horizons just a bit. What do you think of the tabloids, Mr. Dillard?”

  “Probably about the same thing you think of them.”

  “This dumbing down of the American culture is a pity, isn’t it? The print tabloids have been around for a long time, but now we have tabloid television and reality television and online news organizations. There seems to be an endless supply of meaninglessness and sensationalism that has turned out to be quite profitable for the purveyors. It doesn’t say much for us as consumers, does it?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Some of the tabloid television shows are just a notch above snuff films and truth seems to be more of an inconvenience than a goal for these tabloid journalists. Have you seen this morning’s tabloids, Mr. Dillard?”

  “I don’t read them.”

  “There’s one in particular I thought you might be interested in. There’s a story written by a woman named Blaire Reed. Do you know her?”

  I nearly choked on the apple I was chewing.

  “I met her last night.”

  “Yes. You made quite an impression.”

  He turned the laptop around so I could see the screen. The headline screamed at me: “Suspect Parents Hire Brawling Lawyer.” There was a grainy photograph of me being shoved out the front door of Pappy’s by three large men. One of them was pointing his finger at me and saying something I’m certain was both unpleasant and profane. Beneath the headline was a story.

  “Would you like me to read it to you?” Russell said.

  “I was there. I know what happened.”

  “It isn’t very flattering.”

  “Some things are ugly. Is this a deal breaker?”

  “A deal breaker? Do you mean are you fired?”

  “Am I?”

  “That decision would be up to Mary and Richard, but I doubt they’ll want to fire you. As for me, I admire your pluck. I will require an explanation, however.”

  “I don’t usually make a habit of explaining myself to strangers.”

  “Surely you can set aside your principles for a moment. Humor me.”

  I looked over at Botts, who was stone faced, then back at Russell. I silently cursed myself for being so stupid and gave Russell the nuts and bolts version of my history with Phil Landers an
d the altercation at the bar. He asked a few questions and I answered them honestly. When he was satisfied, he said, “There’s another story in this particular tabloid that was written yesterday. One about Mary and Richard being suspects.”

  “I know. That story was the reason I met with her in the first place. I wanted to talk to her about how damaging those kinds of stories can be to defendants, how they can corrupt the judicial process, but Landers interrupted us and things went down hill from there.”

  “I have a question for you,” Botts said without looking away from his computer. “How could you have failed to notice the false bottom in the trash can yesterday? Did you even bother to look inside the can before you dumped three million dollars of Mr. Russell’s money into it?”

  I took another bite of the apple and chewed it slowly while I looked at Botts.

  “I know a lot about some things,” I said, “but I have to confess that the appearance of the inside of garbage containers isn’t one of my areas of expertise. I admit I didn’t examine it carefully, but even if I had, I doubt I would have noticed anything. Are you trying to assign blame for your failure, Mr. Botts?”

  He looked up and gazed at me with those strange, golden eyes.

  “I don’t fail,” he said.

  “So what happened yesterday was a success?”

  “I’d advise you to mind your tone, Mr. Dillard.”

  “Gentlemen, please,” Russell said. “Let’s not lose sight of our ultimate goal, which is finding my granddaughter and getting her back safely. Mr. Dillard, I asked you to come here this morning so we can formulate some kind of strategy for getting Lindsay back. I assume you’ve given the matter some thought. Mr. Botts and I have some experience – not a great deal, but some – dealing with kidnappers, which is why I was comfortable with leaving the police out of the equation. But we underestimated our adversary yesterday, which is something we’ve rarely done in the past and certainly don’t intend to do again. You’re from this area. You know the people here. You’ve dealt with the local criminal community, for lack of a better term, for two decades as both a defense attorney and as a prosecutor. I’d like to know what your thoughts are as far as who you think may have taken Lindsay and how we might best go about finding her.”

  I looked at Botts again. He was fiddling with a fork, twirling it between his fingers.

  “Do you have any solid leads?” I said to him.

  He switched the fork from his right hand to his left and kept twirling. He didn’t even acknowledge the question.

  “We have some ideas,” Russell said, “but nothing concrete as yet.”

  “Richard and I went over a list of contacts from his cell phone yesterday.”

  “I know,” Russell said. “I spoke to Richard after you met with him. He came here and we covered the same territory. Earl and his associates have already begun interviewing people.”

  “Good,” I said. “How many have you talked to?”

  “Thirty-two as of midnight last night, but we haven’t found anything of particular interest. We’ll start again at 8:00 a.m.”

  “Are you keeping a record of the interviews?”

  “We are.”

  “Will you share them with me?”

  “Of course.”

  “I spoke with a forensic psychiatrist yesterday evening, a man I’ve known for a long time and who has worked with pedophiles. He helped me narrow it down a bit.”

  “We’re looking for a white male, early-to-mid twenties, social misfit, probably narcissistic,” Botts said in a monotone. “He’s physically strong, relatively intelligent, and probably local. He most likely works some kind of trade that requires a ladder and a truck or a van. Probably dropped out of high school. He lives alone and he works alone. He has a substance abuse problem, probably alcohol. He’s keeping Lindsay in his home or an outbuilding on his property and he’s using her to satisfy his sexual fantasies. He’ll kill her and dispose of her body if we don’t find her soon.”

  “Did you find out I was going to see Tom Short and bug his office?”

  “It isn’t astrophysics,” Botts said. “It’s criminal profiling.”

  “I’m hoping to go to Virginia today to see a man named Ernest Shanks,” I said. “He kidnapped and murdered more than a dozen girls, all of them around Lindsay’s age. I know it’s a long shot, but I might be able to get something from him that will help us.”

  “This isn’t Silence of the Lambs,” Botts said. “This is the real world. You’ll be wasting your time.”

  “Maybe, but it seems a better use of time than sitting around this table twirling a fork or sitting in the woods all day while somebody steals three million dollars from under my nose.”

  I stood to leave while Botts gave me a look that would melt diamonds.

  “You gentlemen have a nice day,” I said. “Mr. Russell, I’ll call you after I talk to Hannibal Lecter.”

  CHAPTER 21

  I’ve always hated the smell of penitentiaries. They all smell the same, a sickening mixture of fear, testosterone and danger. It had taken Tom Short less than two hours to get me permission to talk to Ernest Shanks. He’d called me just before 10:00 a.m., but when I tried to book a commercial flight from the Tri-Cities airport to Richmond, Virginia, I found out I’d have to fly through either Charlotte or Atlanta and I wouldn’t be able to get back until the next day. So I got in my truck and started driving. It took me six hours to get to a speck of a town called Waverly, Virginia. Waverly was home to Sussex I prison, Sussex I was home to Virginia’s death row, and death row was home to Ernest Shanks.

  The warden, an overweight man named Ted Remine, gave me a quick tutorial on Shanks, but I’d already read most of everything he told me on the internet.

  “He’ll probably sit there like a mute,” Remine said as we walked out his office door and started the journey to the belly of the prison. “He’s done it before. Agrees to see people and then sits there and stares at them. Won’t say a word. It unnerves them, which is exactly why he does it. He enjoys messing with people’s minds.”

  We walked through half-a-dozen checkpoints, past concrete walls and chain-link fence and concertina wire and through steel doors that clanked and moaned as though they were in pain. Death row was announced by a painted sign above a steel door that led to an enclosed block of cells. There were twelve men on Virginia’s death row that day. Shanks was next in line for execution.

  The room where we met was a small cube of concrete block painted gray with an unpainted concrete floor. There was one stainless steel stool and a Plexiglas partition framed by steel. In the middle of the partition was a round, perforated steel plate through which sound could pass. I stood there for about five minutes until I heard the whish of an air lock followed by a bolt sliding. Ernest Shanks shuffled into the room on the other side of the glass accompanied by the faint tinkle of the chains on his shackles and two oversized, uniformed guards.

  His head was shaved, which made him look older than I’d expected. From what I’d read, I knew Ernest Shanks had started his killing spree at the ripe young age of twenty-two. It had gone on for two years. They caught him when he was twenty-four, and his appeal process had taken ten years. In the photos I’d seen of him, he had medium-length dark hair, a wispy mustache, pale skin and looked slim. The man sitting on the other side of the glass was wearing blue denim and was clean-shaven and doughy. His cheeks were pink and puffy and there were bags beneath his brown eyes. He didn’t look fierce or cunning; he looked soft and pathetic. He regarded me with a bemused, scornful look, a half-smile on his thin lips. The guards seated him on a steel stool, the same thing I was sitting on, and backed away. Shanks stared at me in silence, which, I admit, made me uneasy.

  “Thank you for seeing me,” I said.

  “I had no choice in the matter, but I have to confess I don’t mind. I have so little contact with people that I get lonely sometimes.” His voice was high-pitched and he spoke with a slight lisp. “They said you’re a lawyer from Te
nnessee.”

  “That’s right. Name’s Joe Dillard.”

  “Are you writing a book?”

  I shook my head. “Don’t have the patience for it.”

  “I wrote a book after I was sentenced to death,” Shanks said. “It took me two years. It was about a serial killer who specialized in young girls. I wrote in graphic detail about this killer’s fantasies and how he made them become real.”

  “How did it end?”

  “He captured three girls at the same time and died during an episode of sexual role-playing that was so exquisitely intense that his heart simply gave out. It was beautiful, but it was stolen from me by a guard. The entire manuscript, four hundred pages, gone just like that. I thought he was going to try to sell it to one of those sleazy smut magazines, but the next day he and a couple of his sadistic buddies brought a metal trash can into my cell. They cuffed me to a chair and forced me to watch while they burned my manuscript a page at a time.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “I detect sarcasm.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “I don’t think I care for you very much, Joe Dillard.”

  “That’s a shame. I like you just fine.”

  He took a deep breath and rolled his head from side to side, stretching his neck.

  “How do you like the haircut?” he asked. “It’s a special haircut, reserved for those who have elected to be executed by electrocution. I could have opted for the lethal injection, but I think the electric chair is so much more dramatic. It allows me to leave an indelible image behind for the people who will witness the execution, especially the guards. They’ll see me with the hood over my head, hear the current buzzing, smell my flesh cooking. I think they’ll remember the smell for a long time to come.”

  “I’m sure they will.”

  “It’s important to me to be remembered. How I’m remembered isn’t important, just the fact that I’m remembered, that I made an impact. What about you, Joe Dillard? How do you hope to be remembered?”