JD05 - Conflict of Interest

by Scott Pratt

  “That isn’t good, Richard.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t do it on purpose.”

  “Dedrick is going to think you destroyed it.”

  “Screw Dedrick. I’m tired of his accusations and innuendo.”

  “Why do you think he wants your phone so badly?”

  Richard shook his head and frowned. “I don’t have a clue. Honestly. I have no idea.”

  “Is there anything you haven’t told me? Anything I should know about?”

  “Not a thing. I’ve told you everything you need to know.”

  “What about things I don’t need to know? Are there any of those?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Listen to me, Richard. I don’t think you fully understand what you’re up against. The FBI apparently thinks you’ve done something wrong. I need to know what it is. Is there anything you haven’t told me about the interview? Anything they said or harped on that you haven’t mentioned? Because if there is, I need to know about it right now. These guys are relentless. They’ll take your entire life, put it on a slide, and look at it under a microscope if they think you’re lying to them. They’ll talk to your kindergarten teacher and your college professors, your high school buddies and old girlfriends. They’ll find every enemy you’ve ever had and they’ll talk to them, too. They’ll know what you eat for breakfast, your favorite color, what kind of music you listen to. You can’t keep secrets from these guys, Richard.”

  “I don’t have secrets! I’ve tried to cooperate with them from the beginning. Look right here.” He pointed at a space on his desk. “I had a computer sitting right there. I let them take it! I let them search my homes, my vehicles! I gave them blood, for god’s sake!”

  It was the first time since I met him that I’d heard Richard raise his voice.

  “Calm down,” I said. “There has to be something you’re not telling me. Why do they want the phone?”

  “I don’t know! Unless it’s… unless maybe…”

  “What? Spit it out.”

  “They think I lied to them about where I was the night before Lindsay was taken. I told them I went to the Peerless with a business colleague for dinner and they said nobody at the restaurant remembered me being there. They looked at the security tapes and apparently I’m not on them.”

  “So where were you?”

  “That’s none of your business! It’s none of their business! But I wasn’t doing anything wrong and I didn’t have anything to do with Lindsay’s disappearance!”

  He was yelling now. The veins in his neck and forehead were popping out and his complexion had darkened.

  “Are you having an affair?”

  “Good god! You sound just like Dedrick!”

  “Richard, talk to me. Are you having an affair?”

  “No! And what if I was? What would that have to do with Lindsay being taken?”

  At that moment, I heard commotion behind me. Richard’s eyes widened and his mouth dropped open. I turned to see what was going on just as Ross Dedrick walked past me. He was followed by three other men: Mike Norcross of the TBI, Mitchell Royston of the Jonesborough police, and Washington County Sheriff Leon Bates. Dedrick walked straight to Richard.

  “Richard Monroe, you’re under arrest for the murder of Lindsay Monroe,” Dedrick said. He grabbed Richard’s arms, pulled them behind his back, and slapped a pair of cuffs on him. He didn’t acknowledge my presence and started pushing Richard toward the door. As they were walking out of the room, I heard Dedrick say, “You have the right to keep your mouth shut. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to a scumbag lawyer.”

  The door slammed shut, and they were gone.

  CHAPTER 29

  I waited a couple of hours before I called Leon Bates. He and I had become close friends during my time at the district attorney’s office and had worked several cases together, including the John Lipscomb case that culminated in the gun battle at my house. Leon saved my life that night, and he backed me up unfailingly during the brief but intense political and media firestorm that followed. He even hand-delivered my resignation as district attorney general to the governor of Tennessee.

  I respected Leon. He was a decent human being, first and foremost, and beyond that, he was the best cop I’d ever met. He was astute and intelligent behind his charming, good old boy persona, he was an obsessive organizer and planner, and he lived by a complex, self-imposed code of morality that allowed him to walk the greasy tightrope between right and wrong and legal and illegal without ever seeming to slip. Leon was elected sheriff about the same time I started work as an assistant district attorney, so this was the first time he and I were on opposite sides of a case. As I drove to meet him, I wondered how it would play out.

  He was sitting in a red Hummer in the cemetery behind Highland Church of Christ outside of Jonesborough. It was a place we’d met several times before when we wanted our conversation to be private. Leon couldn’t have a private conversation in a diner over a cup of coffee because everybody knew who he was and they wouldn’t leave him alone. I’d even seen him sign an occasional autograph. He was wearing what he always wore, a khaki uniform with brown epaulets, a cowboy hat and cowboy boots.

  “I see you got yourself a new vehicle,” I said as I climbed into the passenger seat. “You get tired of the BMW?”

  “I put a lot of miles on that Beemer,” he said. “Thought it was time for a change. Took this off a coke dealer in Gray.” He chuckled and shook his head. “Them boys just never learn. We took his house, his land, his livestock, his money, his vehicles, everything. He ain’t got a pot left to piss in. Course he ain’t gonna need his own pot for at least fifteen years. His living quarters are now provided and paid for by the great state of Tennessee.”

  I smiled and reached over to shake his hand.

  “How you been, Leon?”

  “Finer than frog hair, brother Dillard. What’s it like defending the oppressed again?”

  “It pays the bills.”

  “How’s that pretty wife of yours?”

  “She’s good. Thanks for asking.”

  “What’s it been, five years since the cancer hit her? No sign of it?”

  “It’s gone, knock on wood. She beat it.”

  “Good for her. Good for all of you. So what can I do for you? I reckon you’d like to know what’s going on with your boy.”

  “I don’t want to cross any lines, Leon, but I’d appreciate whatever you can tell me.”

  “No lines to cross. You’ll get everything in discovery anyway.”

  “I assume you found a body.”

  Bates shook his head. “No sir, no body, but the arrest wasn’t my call. That came straight from the United States Attorney in Knoxville. But we’ve got plenty of circumstantial evidence and we’ve got DNA evidence.”

  “DNA? How can you have DNA if you don’t have a body?”

  “Two days after Lindsay went missing, a TBI search team found her pajama bottoms and panties in a garbage bag in the bottom of a dumpster out back of Richard’s office. We sent it off to the FBI lab at Quantico. It took them a little longer than I thought it would, but it turns out they found two small blood stains and a large semen stain on the panties. They also found a couple of pubic hairs. We got the results early this morning. The blood stains match Lindsay’s DNA. The semen and the pubic hairs belong to Richard.”

  I felt as though I was deflating. Richard a murderer? Had he killed his own child to cover up a sexual assault? Had he killed her accidentally during a sexual assault and then staged an elaborate ruse to cover it up? It didn’t seem possible. If it was true, it meant that once again, I had completely misread a client. Richard seemed gentle and easy going. I just couldn’t picture him raping and murdering anyone, let alone his own daughter.

  “But the ransom, the kidnapper calling. I saw her picture on his phone, Leon. She was gagged, lying in a box.”

  “You sure it was her?�
�

  “The money. The kidnapper took the money.”

  “We think Richard took the money.”

  “But I was with him that day when the texts and the calls came in. He couldn’t have done it.”

  “He had help, brother Dillard. Three million dollars can buy a little help. We don’t know who helped him yet, but we’ll figure it out eventually.”

  “Why would he steal three million dollars from his father-in-law?”

  “Two possibilities. Number one is that they just don’t like each other. We’ve talked to Charles Russell, and he doesn’t have much good to say about Richard. Maybe Richard just wanted to stick it to him. The other possibility is that Richard is strapped for cash and might wind up losing his company. I don’t know how much he’s told you about this lawsuit he’s involved in, but it could wind up costing him a fortune. The judge in the case held a hearing and listened to some of the proof, and he felt like the case was strong enough to put down an order freezing most all of Richard’s corporate assets until they can get it all sorted out, which could take years. What we’re thinking is that after Richard killed Lindsay, whether he killed her accidentally or on purpose, he decided to make it look like a kidnapping had occurred so he could extort money from his father-in-law. Either that or he planned the whole shebang from the beginning. He’s an awful smart feller from everything we’ve been able to gather. Ruthless, too. You don’t get as rich as he has and be as young as he is without being ruthless.”

  I folded my arms across my chest and started rocking back and forth in the seat. My mind felt like it was going numb, as though it had been injected with some type of anesthetic that would keep it from feeling pain.

  “It gets worse,” Bates said. “The ransom note was written on a computer we took out of Richard’s office.”

  “Stop, Leon. You’re killing me.”

  “We know he lied about where he was on the Friday evening Lindsay went missing. We just haven’t been able to nail it down yet. I figure he met with his accomplice and made his final preparations. He might go a ways toward helping himself if he’d tell us who helped him.”

  “Helping himself? On a kidnapping and a murder? Not to mention extortion and theft and God knows what else. If you can prove all this stuff you’re telling me, he’s dead in the water. He might as well hang himself in his cell.”

  “Maybe he’ll do that,” Bates said. “It’d sure save us all a lot of time and trouble.”

  “What about the mother? What about Mary?”

  “She’s clean as far as we can tell. Don’t believe she had a thing to do with it.”

  “Damn,” I said. “I can’t believe this.”

  “Do me a favor, would ya?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Before Richard commits suicide, see if you can’t get him to tell us what he did with that little girl’s body. She deserves a proper burial.”

  As soon as I got out of Bates’s vehicle, I drove to Jonesborough to the jail. On the way, I kept telling myself not to judge, that it was simply too early to tell, that the things Bates had said to me weren’t proof, they were merely statements. At the same time, I couldn’t help thinking that by allowing myself to be deceived on the front end, I had wound up defending a man who had murdered his own child, covered up her death by staging a kidnapping, and then extorted millions of dollars from his father-in-law. If those things were true, then Richard Monroe was no different than Ernest Shanks. He was a monster, and I was his lawyer.

  Richard had already taken on the look of a man who had been sentenced to death, which was something that had suddenly become a very real possibility. I’d been a staunch opponent of the death penalty early in my career, but as I’d aged, my attitude had changed, largely because I’d come to believe that some of the people I’d represented and prosecuted over the years were both incorrigible and unsalvageable. I’d seen so much violence, so much cruelty and so little regard for basic human decency that I could no longer summon empathy for people like Ernest Shanks. They were like cancer – the only way to effectively deal with them was to eradicate them – and if Richard Monroe had done all of the things he was now accused of doing, he deserved to die.

  Richard had already been booked and issued his jail uniform, an orange, cotton jumpsuit that was far too large for him. He was now handcuffed, the cuffs were attached to a chain around his waist, and steel rings shackled his ankles. I stared at him in silence for a while, feeling as awkward as I’d felt the first day I met him, with one important difference. The awkwardness the first day was grounded in sympathy. Now it was grounded in anger and disbelief.

  “I’m going to need for you to explain a few things to me, Richard,” I finally said.

  He’d been staring down at the table top. His eyes slowly came up to meet mine.

  “There isn’t any point in beating around the bush. You need to answer this question for me, right now, and you need to answer it truthfully. How in the hell did your sperm manage to find its way onto a pair of your daughter’s panties?”

  His answer was a silent look of confusion.

  “Now is not the time to go stupid on me, Richard. This pair of panties I’m talking about? It was found in a dumpster behind your office building along with the pajama bottoms Lindsay was wearing the night she disappeared.”

  He flinched slightly, and tears began to stream down both of his cheeks. Within seconds, his face morphed into an unrecognizable form and he began sobbing uncontrollably. I watched him without emotion, waiting for him to stop. If he’d done what they were accusing him of, the tears were nothing more than him feeling sorry for himself, remorse for having been caught and imprisoned. His head dropped onto the table and he started wailing in a loud, tortured cry.

  “Get a hold of yourself,” I said. “Richard! Richard!”

  But he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, stop. It was unlike anything I’d ever heard or witnessed, a mournful lamentation worthy of a backwoods funeral procession. At one point he cried, “My baby’s gone,” but after that, he went back to moaning and wailing and crying. After almost twenty minutes, two guards came through the door. They pulled him up from the table and half-carried, half-dragged Richard out of the room.

  I watched them without saying anything.

  There simply wasn’t anything to say.

  CHAPTER 30

  After witnessing Richard’s meltdown at the jail, I decided to drive to Johnson City and talk to the man who called himself Jack Dillard. Despite everything else that had been going on, I’d been unable to keep him from creeping into my thoughts. I had no idea what I would say to him, but I felt a strange sense of responsibility toward him now that he’d thrust himself into our lives. He was sick, he was old, and he was apparently my father. I couldn’t just turn my back on him.

  I heard the television through the door of the room number he’d left with me, so I knocked. It was a little after one in the afternoon. He opened it immediately and a broad smile came across his face.

  “I’m so glad to see you, Joseph,” he said. “Come in. Come in.”

  I walked in and looked around. It was a suite, clean and orderly, the bed made, clothes hanging neatly in a closet near the door.

  “Have a seat,” he said. “Just let me turn this off.”

  He motioned to a small couch and I sat down. He picked up a remote control from a table and the television went dark. Watching him move around the room was eerie. He was wearing what looked like a brand new, orange hoodie with a University of Tennessee logo on the front and a pair of blue jeans. It was as though I was looking through a portal into the future, watching myself. He sat down in a chair across from me and rested his elbows on his knees.

  “I’ve been watching the news and reading about your case,” he said. “They’ve arrested the father? You must live an interesting and exciting life.”

  “Tell me again why you’re here,” I said.

  “You’re very direct, Joseph. I like that. Let me turn the question, though. Wh
y are you here? I’ve been hoping you’d come, but to be honest, I didn’t think you would. Why did you?”

  “Mostly because my wife is a kind and loving person and she thinks it’s the right thing for me to do.”

  “Her name is Caroline, right? How long have you been married?”

  “A long time.”

  “Are you still in love with her?”

  “Very much.”

  “That’s wonderful. I think life is much more fulfilling when it’s anchored by love.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” I said.

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “You said you came here to die. You look sick. What’s wrong with you?”

  He started wringing his liver-spotted hands. “Started out as cirrhosis,” he said. “Cancer now. In the liver.”

  “Caused by alcohol?”

  He nodded.

  “Still drink?”

  He shook his head.

  “How long’s it been?”

  “A couple of months.”

  “So that’s how you dealt with it? You medicated with alcohol?”

  “It’s how I slept,” he said. “I worked every day, all my life. I took good care of my family. But at the end of the day, when night was coming on and I knew I’d have to lay down and close my eyes, I turned to the bottle. I’d drink myself into a stupor and pass out. I tried quitting a hundred times, but I couldn’t sleep. I’d be awake for two, three days, or if I did manage to go to sleep, I had nightmares so terrible I can’t even begin to describe them to you. So I always wound up going back to it. I knew it would catch up with me one day, and now it has.”

  “How did you make a living?”

  “My wife’s father owned a bar in downtown Kuala Lumpur,” he said. “I bartended, cooked, bounced people out of the place, whatever he needed, for twenty years. He was good to me. He turned the bar over to me when he turned sixty – just gave it to me – and I ran it until last year when Adilah died.”