Injustice for all jd-3

by Scott Pratt

  Another witness, named Deakins, had called 911 at 5:26 a.m. to report that a white compact car had swerved across the center line on Highway 36 near Boones Creek and nearly hit her head-on. The witness said the car was traveling south, toward Boones Creek. It disappeared before a sheriff’s deputy could respond to the call.

  It had taken Anita less than fifteen minutes to determine that one of her primary suspects in the case, Thomas Raymond Miller, age twenty, son of dead lawyer Ray Miller, owned a white 1995 Honda Civic.

  Anita pulled the Crown Victoria into the driveway at 1411 Park Drive, the address she’d been provided for Tommy Miller. The large house, stained a deep red, had a cedar shake roof. She felt awkward about showing up less than twenty-four hours after Ray Miller was buried, but this was a murder investigation, and time was important. The fact that Norcross was with her was comforting. The big man was more than a good agent; he was intimidating without having to try. Witnesses tended to talk when Norcross was around. Sometimes he didn’t have to say a word.

  Anita stopped the car and looked at her watch. Ten thirty; probably about five and a half hours since the murder. If Tommy Miller killed the judge, he’d certainly be surprised to see them so soon.

  As the agents walked toward the front door, Anita saw there was no Honda in the driveway. She peered into the garage through the windows as she passed. A midsized black Toyota sedan was parked inside. Anita followed a concrete sidewalk to the front door, rang the bell, and waited.

  After a minute, a red-haired woman opened the door, wearing a pair of pink sweatpants and a white T-shirt. The woman was pretty, but she looked disheveled. Her hair was unbrushed, she wasn’t wearing makeup, and the skin around her blue eyes was puffy. She looked as though she’d been crying.

  “Mrs. Miller?” Anita said. She and Norcross displayed their identification. “I’m Special Agent White, and this is Special Agent Norcross. We’re with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. May we come in, ma’am?”

  “What do you want?” Her demeanor was not one of compliance and cooperation.

  “We’d just like to ask you a few questions,” Anita said.

  “About what?”

  “Please, Mrs. Miller, it shouldn’t take long.”

  “Don’t you know I just buried my husband? Can’t this wait?”

  “I’m sorry to have come at such a difficult time, but it’s extremely important.”

  “Tell me what you want.” It was obvious she wasn’t going to let them in, so Anita decided to forge ahead.

  “Actually, we were hoping to speak to your son, ma’am.”

  “Why?”

  “We’d prefer to discuss that with him. Is he here?”

  “I don’t think that’s any of your business.”

  “It’s a yes or no question, Mrs. Miller. Is your son here or not?”

  “I prefer not to answer the question.”

  Anita noticed a tremble in Toni Miller’s voice. Her face was stern and emotionless, but she was obviously frightened. She’d moved behind the open door so that only her head was visible. Perhaps she’d heard about the judge’s death and drawn her own conclusions.

  “Is there any particular reason why you’re being so difficult?” Anita said. Norcross stepped back off the porch and began to wander away toward the back of the house.

  “ Me? I’m being difficult? You come to my home unannounced less than a day after my husband’s funeral, you try to barge in, you’re asking me questions about my son, and you won’t even tell me why you’re here.” She pointed toward Norcross. “And now he is trespassing on my property!”

  “We can come back with a warrant,” Anita said.

  “For what? Are you going to arrest me for something? Have you forgotten what my husband did for a living, Agent… what was your name?”

  “White.”

  “He was a lawyer. I know my rights.”

  “All right, Mrs. Miller. I’ll tell you why we’re here. We’re investigating a crime, and we think your son may have some information that could help us.”

  “My son doesn’t know anything about any crime.”

  “We’d like to hear that from him.”

  “Well, good luck with that,” Toni Miller said, and she slammed the door in Anita’s face.

  17

  Anita White knew she was being stonewalled, but she wasn’t the kind to sit on her hands and wait for something to happen. With the sound of the slamming door reverberating in her ears, she walked to the neighbors on the east side of the Millers’ home and sent Norcross to the neighbors on the west side. Both agents worked their way down and across the street. An hour later they were back in the car.

  “There’s always somebody in a neighborhood like this who can’t keep their nose in their own business,” Anita said as she pulled back out onto the rain-soaked street and headed for the TBI offices on Boone Street. “It never fails. This one is priceless. She lives right across the street, but she still uses binoculars. Her name’s Goodin. Trudy Goodin.”

  “And what did Trudy Goodin have to say?” Norcross asked.

  “Tommy didn’t come home last night. Showed up here about a half hour before we did and left about fifteen minutes later. We didn’t miss him by much.”

  “Would this nosy neighbor have any idea where he might be?”

  “She said he was in a hurry. Made a couple of trips in and out of the house, threw a bunch of stuff into his car, and took off. She thinks he probably went back to school.”

  “And where’s school?”

  “Durham, North Carolina. He goes to Duke.”

  “So let’s lay this out,” Norcross said. “Our suspect’s father commits suicide in Judge Green’s courtroom less than a week ago after publicly blaming the judge for his legal and financial problems. They bury the father yesterday. Our suspect doesn’t stay at home and mourn like a normal person. He doesn’t stay home to comfort his mother or look out for her in her time of grief. He spends the night out. The judge is killed sometime during the night or early this morning. We go to our suspect’s home, and his mother is totally uncooperative, almost confrontational. She even shuts the door on us. So we canvass, and we find out from a neighbor that our suspect has arrived home this morning not long before we arrived, hurriedly thrown his belongings into his car, and left. What do you think? Enough for a warrant?”

  “Not an arrest warrant, but maybe a search warrant. Especially when you add the fact that we have two sightings of a white car in or near the vicinity of the murder, around the same time as the murder, our suspect owns a white car, and our victim is a judge.”

  “So we search the mother’s house? The kid’s car?”

  “The house for sure. But the car could be a problem. We’ll go ahead and list the car on our warrant here, but if he’s gone back to school, he’s out of state. We’ll have to hook up with the cops over there and get a judge in North Carolina to issue a warrant.”

  Anita turned to Norcross.

  “How well do you know Joe Dillard?”

  “Not that well on a personal level, but I’ve worked with him. The Natasha Davis case, the one where Fraley got killed. Fraley loved him. Why do you ask?”

  “Just wondering what you think of him.”

  “I think a lot of him. He’s always been straight with me. Good lawyer. Tough guy, honest. I hear he was a Ranger in the army.”

  “Know anything about his son?”

  “All-American boy. Almost too good to be true. I saw him play baseball a couple of times when he was a senior in high school. He can flat-out crush it. Why are you asking about Dillard?”

  “I got a weird vibe from him this morning,” Anita said. “And the nosy neighbor said Tommy Miller was wearing a bright red T-shirt with ‘Tiger Baseball’ on the front and a name and the number thirty- five on the back. Guess what the name was.”

  “No clue.”

  “Dillard.”

  18

  I leave Jack some very simple instructions. I tell him t
o pack his bags immediately and go back to Nashville. I tell him to avoid the police at all costs. I tell him if they try to contact him, to get ahold of me immediately. I don’t know what Caroline said to Toni Miller. I don’t want to know.

  I take my time going back to the office. I stop for lunch at Dixie Barbecue, one of my favorite spots, and spend a little time shooting the breeze with the owner, a genuinely pleasant man named Alan Wyatt. Afterward, I take the long way to Jonesborough. I’m not looking forward to listening to what I know I’ll hear from Mooney when I get there-a whiny diatribe about the terrible misfortune of having a judge whacked in his district. I sneak past Rita Jones, the receptionist, and I’m just about to immerse myself in work when Mooney buzzes me on the intercom.

  “I need you to come in here,” he says.

  I walk reluctantly back to his office and stand in the doorway, unwilling to go inside and subject myself to the inevitable.

  “I think you should dismiss the charges against Rafael Ramirez,” he says.

  “Beg your pardon?” I can’t believe he’s even thinking about Ramirez. “I seem to remember your busting my balls just a little while ago about the public’s perception of the office.”

  “The case is weak. Stinnett is representing him. You’re going to wind up embarrassing us again, just like you did with Carver. We’ll put out a press release that says the evidence is insufficient to proceed to trial, but that we’ll continue the investigation. Maybe we’ll come up with something more.”

  I shake my head in disbelief. Rafael Ramirez is a career criminal, and a dangerous one at that. He’s been on the regional drug task force’s radar for several years, but because he’s stayed on the move and has killed anyone he thought might be a snitch, the task force hasn’t been able to make a case on him. They’ve told me he’s a Mexican national who, in the country illegally, began his drug career working for a farmer outside of Pigeon Forge sometime in the early 1980s. According to the drug task force, the farmer, a man named Duncan who was found shot to death in his barn twenty years ago, taught Ramirez the intricacies of raising marijuana in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park near Gatlinburg. Once Ramirez learned to grow, conceal, harvest, and cure the crop, he realized he could wholesale the drug to his Mexican connections. They, in turn, distribute it all over the country. Ramirez is a multimillionaire who lives like a pauper, often sleeping for months in the woods near his vast patches. He’s apparently content to smuggle his cash back to his family in Mexico. The drug task force says the Ramirez family lives like royalty on a five-thousand-acre ranch outside Guadalajara, while Rafael lives primarily in the woods and does all the work.

  Ramirez controls a group of around twenty fanatical followers who help him with the crops each year and help him maintain his wholesale network. He’s also dabbling in contract killing, according to the drug task force’s informants, none of whom are willing to say anything on the record or testify. I can’t blame them. Ramirez’s record regarding betrayal is straightforward and consistent. If anyone within the organization gets out of line, they wind up dead. If anyone outside the organization tries to screw Ramirez, they wind up tortured and dead.

  About four months earlier, Ramirez made the first big mistake of his illustrious career. Based on information the task force had gathered from informants, we knew that Ramirez’s young nephew, Ramon, had come up last year from Guadalajara to learn the marijuana production and wholesale business at the elbow of Uncle Rafael. Maybe Rafael was growing tired and thinking of retirement, or maybe his business enterprise had grown so much that he needed a family member he could trust to help him run it. Either way, Ramon was chosen.

  During the winter months, when business was slow, nephew Ramon had taken up residence at an apartment complex in Johnson City and had decided to take advantage of the local party scene. At a college bar called Plato’s, Ramon ran into a cocaine dealer named Roberto Sanchez. Sanchez was flashy-he drove a Porsche, tossed cash around like candy, and had a small stable of women who followed him everywhere he went. The more Ramon drank, the more jealous of Sanchez he became. When Sanchez went to the bathroom late that night, Ramon followed him and ambushed him with a pool cue.

  As soon as Sanchez was released from the hospital, he set up a little ambush of his own. He waited outside Ramon’s apartment building until three in the morning, and when Ramon showed up after another night at the bar, Sanchez shot him twice. The first bullet went through Ramon’s jaw. The second one hit him as he tried to run away. It went in under his scapula and out beneath his right arm. Ramon didn’t go the hospital. Instead, he called his uncle Rafael.

  It took Rafael two months to set Sanchez up. He summoned another family member from Mexico, who started hitting the bars and convinced Sanchez he was a high-level cocaine dealer. He offered Sanchez two kilos for the bargain-basement price of seventeen thousand dollars. When Sanchez went to a rural road in Washington County to buy his coke, the fake dealer was waiting for him, along with Rafael and Ramon Ramirez. Their plan was simple. They intended to kill Sanchez and take his seventeen thousand dollars. They didn’t need the money. It was the principle of the thing. Sanchez had shown great disrespect to Ramon when he shot him in the back.

  But Sanchez didn’t go down without a fight. He managed to squeeze off close to thirty rounds from a Mac-9 machine pistol before he was hit twice in the head. Three of those rounds hit Rafael Ramirez: one in the neck, another in the left thigh, and a third lodged against a kidney. The fake drug dealer, who remains unidentified, was shot through the heart and died at the scene. Young Ramon was also hit, although we don’t know how many times. He left a blood trail from the passenger side of the car, where he was firing from near the front fender, to the driver’s side, where he got into the vehicle and fled. He must have been in a panic, because he left his uncle behind, along with the seventeen thousand dollars.

  Uncle Rafael survived his wounds. A benevolent God and a skilled surgeon made it possible for him to continue to share his talents and his bountiful spirit with the rest of us. After convalescing in the hospital at state expense for two weeks, he was transported to the Washington County Detention Center. I’d convinced a grand jury to indict him for felony murder based on the evidence the police found at the scene.

  “We’ve got enough to convict him,” I finally say to Mooney. “We’ve got a ballistics match from the slugs in Sanchez’s head to the gun that was lying next to Ramirez when the police found him. We’ve got Ramirez’s fingerprints all over the gun, and he had gunshot residue all over him. We’ve got the money from the trunk of Sanchez’s car. Some of it’s circumstantial, but it’s enough.”

  “I disagree,” Mooney says, but he’s interrupted once again by his intercom. He talks for a minute and then looks up at me.

  “It isn’t like her.”

  “What?”

  “Hannah,” he says. “It isn’t like her.”

  “Hannah Mills?”

  “She didn’t show up for work this morning, and she hasn’t called. How about going out to her house and checking on her?”

  As if I don’t have anything else to do. Mooney is strangely dependent on me sometimes, but this seems a little over-the-top, even for him.

  “Why me?” I say. “Am I a trial lawyer or an errand boy? If you think something might be wrong, why don’t you call the sheriff’s department and ask them to send a deputy?”

  “Just go by and take a look around, will you? Maybe she just overslept.”

  “Until one in the afternoon?”

  “Just go. I’ve got enough on my mind right now.”

  I sigh and start to walk out the door.

  “What’s the address?”

  “How the hell am I supposed to know?” Mooney snaps. “I’ve never been to her house. Get it from Rita. And dismiss on Ramirez!”

  19

  Hannah Mills is the victim/witness coordinator for the district attorney’s office. As the title suggests, she deals with victims of crime and their familie
s, offering comfort and reassurance, helping them through the difficult experience of dealing with the criminal justice system. She keeps them up-to-date on the prosecution, lets them know when they need to show up for court, helps them file paperwork for the victim’s relief fund if they’re eligible, and sits with them in the courtroom.

  Hannah has been with us only a few months. Mooney hired her away from a similar job in the Knoxville district attorney’s office after he met her at a conference in Nashville. She’s thirty-one years old, holds a master’s degree in sociology, and is compassionate and dedicated. She’s also drop-dead gorgeous, with stunning blue eyes, a trim, athletic body, and a head of long, wavy sandy blond hair that seems to have a mind of its own.

  When I first met Hannah, I sensed we had something in common. She was friendly and outgoing, but there was pain behind her blue eyes, the same kind of pain I’ve seen in the mirror. She must have sensed the same thing, because we hit it off immediately. A week after I met her, I invited her out to the house to meet Caroline. The two of them have become shopping buddies. One thing Caroline and I have both noticed about Hannah is that she never speaks of her childhood. Life for her seems to have begun after college.

  The address the receptionist gives me is off Bugaboo Springs Road, a couple of miles outside of Jonesborough. It’s a small brick house surrounded by poplar trees, set about a hundred feet back from the road. The yard is neatly trimmed, and the gravel driveway is lined with red and yellow tulips. It’s an idyllic setting, especially since the storm has cleared out and the sun is shining brightly. I park my truck behind the blue Toyota Camry that belongs to Hannah and walk to the front door.