Injustice for all jd-3

by Scott Pratt

  “Why are you so late?” Aunt Mary said. “We’ve been worried sick about you.”

  Katie couldn’t bring herself to lie.

  “I had to take a detour. A big one. It took a lot longer than I thought it would.”

  “What kind of detour? Why?”

  “I ran across something I wasn’t supposed to see. I was hiking cross-country toward Laurel Top. I came to a clearing in a cove and it was full of marijuana plants. There were some men there, and they chased me.”

  “Oh my Lord!” It was Lottie, who had just walked into the kitchen. “Chased you? You mean they saw you, child?”

  “I think they may have seen me from a distance,” Katie said. “They chased me on four-wheelers, but I ran and hid in some deadfall, and they didn’t see me again.”

  “Thank God you’re all right,” Aunt Mary said. “I’ve told you to be careful in those woods.”

  “I’m sorry,” Katie said. “I wasn’t looking for them or anything. I just sort of stumbled across them.”

  “How big was the field?” Aunt Mary said.

  “Big. Really big.”

  The three of them were silent for several seconds. Katie wondered what her aunt and Lottie were thinking.

  “How’s Luke?” Katie said, hoping to get the focus off her ordeal.

  “He’s sleeping like a little angel,” Lottie said. “He missed watching cartoons with you yesterday.”

  “I missed him, too,” Katie said. She began to pull her pack off.

  “Katie,” Aunt Mary said, “do you know where this marijuana field is? I mean, could you tell someone how to find it?”

  “Sure, I know exactly where it is.”

  “Miss Mary, I want you to slow down just a bit now,” Lottie said. “We don’t need to be getting involved in something like this. You know they got the sheriff in their pocket.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about the sheriff,” Aunt Mary said. “I was thinking about maybe the DEA. They’re always on the news making big drug busts. I’ll bet they have an office in Knoxville. Maybe they’d be interested. It’s time somebody put a stop to this nonsense.”

  “I don’t know,” Lottie said. “I don’t believe in meddling in other folks’ business. Nothing good ever comes of it.”

  On Monday afternoon, as soon as Aunt Mary got home from work, she and Katie drove to Knoxville. The DEA offices were housed in the rear of a nondescript shopping center off Kingston Pike. Aunt Mary told Katie that she’d called that morning and spoken to an agent. He asked her if she could come in immediately and bring Katie with her.

  There was a security keypad on the door and a dead bolt lock. Aunt Mary knocked on the door, and a few seconds later it opened. A young man with short dark hair was standing on the other side. He was medium height, muscular, and wearing a shoulder holster that carried a pistol. Katie immediately noticed a deep cleft in his chin. “Butt chin” was what the kids at school called it.

  “I’m Mary Clinton,” Aunt Mary said, “and this is my niece, Katie. She’s the one I told you about on the phone.”

  The man introduced himself as Agent Rider and led them through a large, open room filled with desks. There was no carpet on the floor, and the steel beams that framed the building were exposed. The space was very much like a warehouse, with several people milling about, talking on telephones, talking to one another. Most of them were men, and nearly all of them were armed. They passed a cabinet filled with rifles and came to a small office with paneled walls and a fake fern in the corner. On the wall behind the desk was a map of East Tennessee. Agent Rider motioned for them to sit down.

  “So, Katie, right?” Agent Rider said. “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen.”

  Agent Rider folded his hands in front of him on the desk. His fingers were thick and leathery, and the veins running down his arms looked like rivers and streams on a map.

  “Your aunt tells me you may have some in formation.”

  “Before we get into that,” Aunt Mary said, “I want assurances that there is no way this will ever come back on us. I don’t know whether you know it or not, but the sheriff protects these people. He knows what’s going on. If you tell him where your information came from, he’ll tell them. I don’t know what they might do, but I don’t care to find out.”

  “The sheriff doesn’t have anything to do with this operation,” the agent said. “We’re a federal agency. We have people from state and local agencies on our task force, but we share information on a need-to-know basis only. The sheriff certainly doesn’t need to know. We’ve been aware of his activities for quite some time now. We just haven’t been able to make a case against him yet. But I assure you, if we make any kind of move based on information you or your niece provides, we won’t be talking to the sheriff about it.”

  “You’re positive,” Aunt Mary said.

  “It takes a lot of courage for people to do what you’re doing right now, Ms. Clinton,” Agent Rider said. “We need people like you, and we take great care to protect our witnesses.”

  “Witnesses? You’re not saying that Katie will have to testify in court, are you?”

  “No, ma’am. You indicated over the phone that your niece has information regarding a large field of marijuana. The chance of our actually catching someone during the raid is minimal. What will most likely happen is that we’ll cut down the marijuana that’s there and burn it on-site. If it’s as big as you indicated, it’ll cost the grower hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars. We’ll be hitting them where it really hurts. Right in the pocket.”

  “Do you know who this grower is?” Aunt Mary asked.

  “I have a pretty good idea, but the less you know, the better.”

  “All right, Katie,” Aunt Mary said, “tell him what you saw.”

  Katie spent the next half hour telling Agent Rider about her experience hiking in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and how she happened to come upon the marijuana field. Then, using a map of the park she’d brought along with her, she showed him the exact location of the field.

  “Five acres? Are you sure?” Agent Rider said when she’d finished.

  “Pretty sure. Maybe a little smaller, maybe a little bigger,” Katie said.

  “This is impressive. Looks like we’ll have to go in by helicopter because of the terrain, which means they’ll hear us coming, but this will be one of the largest marijuana seizures we’ve ever made around here.”

  A few minutes later, Agent Rider led Katie and Aunt Mary back through the room full of desks and people and to the door. Katie could feel eyes on her, and as the agent thanked them one last time at the door and said good-bye, she couldn’t help but wonder who was looking at her, what they might find out about her, and what they might do.

  26

  I wanted to check on what was happening with my son and Tommy Miller, but after my meeting with Ramirez, my first phone call is to Sheriff Bates.

  “We need to meet,” I say. “Someplace private.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Just leaving the jail.”

  “You know Highland Church?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Parking lot. Ten minutes.”

  He’s waiting when I pull in. I get out of my truck and climb into the BMW. I tell him about the meeting with Ramirez.

  “He said it was a girl who works in our office,” I say. “He knew how long she’d been missing. Before I left, he said somebody wants her dead. He said he might know who it is.”

  Bates considers the information silently for a minute.

  “I reckon the first question we gotta ask ourselves is how,” he says. “How does Ramirez know? It ain’t like it’s been in the papers. Hell, we just found out about it a few hours ago. So since he knows she’s gone, and he says he knows where she is, he has to be involved somehow, right?”

  “I’m thinking maybe he had some of his guys kidnap her and he’s holding her for ransom. We let him out; he lets her go. That’s the deal he wants
.”

  “Is that what he said? Did he say he’d let her go?”

  “No. He said he’d tell me what he knows. But he did say, ‘Ticktock,’ which makes me think she’s still alive.”

  “Wishful thinking, Brother Dillard.”

  “Do you really think she’s dead? I can’t imagine anyone wanting to hurt her.”

  “It ain’t good.”

  “How do you think Ramirez is getting his information? He’d have to get it either over the phone or through a visitor. I don’t think Ramirez would take a chance on them listening to his phone conversations at the jail, and it’d be risky to talk to a visitor about something like this.”

  “For a smart hombre, you sure can be naive sometimes,” Bates says. “Open your eyes.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Who’s the only person he can he talk to without having to worry about anybody listening?”

  It hits me. Stinnett. His lawyer. Stinnett is his information courier. That’s why he was acting so strangely.

  “Son of a bitch,” I say.

  “Don’t act so surprised. You used to do the same thing.”

  “If I did, I didn’t do it intentionally.”

  We sit for a moment while I ponder this latest possibility. Stinnett probably took a phone call from someone and relayed a message to Ramirez. Maybe Stinnett didn’t even know what the message meant; at least that’s what I’d like to think. Then again…

  I ask Bates what he’s learned thus far.

  “A little,” he says. “Whoever drove her car last was a man or a damned tall woman. When I asked you to look at the driver’s seat, I was trying to get you to notice that it was pushed all the way back. Hannah’s a short gal. And I noticed something else. She got her oil changed Friday afternoon. It was on the little sticker in the windshield, along with the mileage. When I looked at the odometer, more than a hundred miles had been put on that car since the oil change, so either she took a quick trip before she disappeared or somebody hauled her away in her own car, dumped the body, and then brought the car back.”

  “You were right,” I say. “It’s a good thing I’m not a cop.”

  “The key to her car had been wiped clean-not a print on it, not even hers. The inside of the car had been wiped down, too, but we lifted a partial from the exterior of the door. There was quite a bit of clay on the floor around the gas pedal, along with something else. My guys say they’re not sure yet, but they think it might be lime. Same stuff in the carpet on the passenger side. We lifted some hair and fiber from the car, and we’re still going through the house. There might be something in there, too.”

  “Damn, Leon, you don’t mess around, do you?”

  “Trail gets cold in a hurry. I’m gonna stay on this one until I find out what happened to her or we fall flat. The sheriff’s department doesn’t get that many murders, you know. It’s kinda fun.”

  Fun. Alternate flashes of Hannah run through my mind. Flashes of her beautiful smile. The pain behind her eyes. The way her hair flipped when she turned her head. Her battered body dumped somewhere, slowly decomposing, covered by insects. I let out a long sigh.

  “Sorry, brother,” Bates says. “You knew her better than I did. I guess this ain’t exactly your idea of fun, is it?”

  “Not exactly. So what do you think about Ramirez? Should I make some kind of deal with him?”

  “That’d be between you and your boss, wouldn’t it?”

  “My boss tried to get me to dismiss the murder case against him this morning.”

  Bates is silent for several seconds. He begins scratching his head, which I know is his way of manifesting confusion.

  “Why would he want you to do that?”

  “He said it’s a weak case, and he doesn’t want the office to be embarrassed if I lose at trial.”

  “How strong is your case?”

  “It’s not the strongest I’ve ever had, but I think it’s enough.”

  Bates shoots me a sideways glance and raises his eyebrows. “Anything else you need to tell me?”

  “Nah, it’s probably just a coincidence. There’s just something about Mooney that bothers me. Something isn’t right with him.”

  “You just now figuring that out? He sure does like the ladies. You think he was chasing Hannah?”

  “Nah. Hannah doesn’t seem to be too interested in men. So what about Ramirez?”

  “Give me a little more time. Let me find Hannah’s family and friends, talk to them, see if I can find out who might have wanted to hurt her. If we don’t come up with something in forty-eight hours or so, maybe you should pay Ramirez another visit.”

  Bates’s cell phone begins to chirp the melody of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” He looks down at the phone, then back at me.

  “One of my forensics boys,” he says. “Better take it.”

  Bates speaks quietly on the phone for a few minutes. Finally, he says, “Well, I’ll be,” and closes the phone.

  “You say you know this gal pretty well?” he says.

  “Yeah. We’re friends.”

  “My boys went through her garbage and found something interesting. Did she mention anything to you about being pregnant?”

  27

  I call Caroline and ask her to meet me at the Peerless in Johnson City for dinner. The restaurant is known primarily for great steaks and Greek salads, but I’m more interested in taking advantage of one of the private rooms they offer. Caroline doesn’t mention anything about Hannah’s disappearance over the phone, so I assume she doesn’t know. The news will upset her terribly, so I decide to tell her later at home. I have something else I want to talk about at the restaurant.

  I’m greeted at the door by the owner, an elderly Greek gentleman named Stenopoulos who’s owned the restaurant for forty years and still goes to work every day. He leads me down a hallway to a small, private dining room. I order two beers. Caroline shows up less than five minutes later. She’s wearing a red jacket over a black turtleneck and a short black skirt that shows off her incredible legs. She sits down across the table from me without saying hello and takes a long pull off the beer. No glass for Caroline when she’s drinking a beer; I’ve always liked that.

  A waitress walks in and we order dinner. I’m not hungry-my stomach has been in knots all day-but I order a steak anyway. If I don’t eat it, I’ll take it to Rio.

  “You’re angry,” I say as soon as the waitress leaves the room. No point in fencing. We might as well get down to it.

  “I’m not angry. I’m scared for Tommy,” she replies.

  “What did you say to Toni?”

  “I thought you didn’t want to know.”

  “I changed my mind. What did you say to her?”

  Caroline takes another drink from the beer bottle and reaches for a basket of crackers. She’s avoiding eye contact, a sure sign she’s upset.

  “I told her that TBI agents were probably coming,” Caroline says. “I told her to get Tommy out of there.”

  “Did she?”

  “Yes. He’s gone back to school.”

  “Did they show up?”

  “Two of them. A black woman and a huge white guy.”

  White and Norcross.

  “What did she tell them?”

  “Nothing. She told them to go away. She was married to a lawyer, too, you know. I didn’t have to tell her what to do.”

  “Did they ask about Tommy?”

  “Of course they asked about Tommy.”

  Her tone is edgy, impatient. I find myself wishing we were simply having a pleasant dinner, a civil conversation. But the events of the past twenty-four hours have swept us up. All I can do now is hope no one else gets hurt.

  “Caroline, I need to ask you a few questions, and I’d appreciate it if you’d be honest with me.”

  “I’m always honest with you.”

  She’s right. It was a stupid thing to say.

  “Did you see Tommy this morning?”

  She nods he
r head.

  “Talk to him?”

  “He said he needed to go home. I made him an egg sandwich.”

  “How did he look?”

  “You already went through this with Jack this morning, and I don’t appreciate your asking me to come out to dinner and trying to interrogate me. You said you didn’t want to know anything about my involvement. Why don’t we just keep it that way?”

  “Fine, then let’s try the old lawyer’s cat and mouse game. Let’s talk hypotheticals.”

  “Hypotheticals? What do you mean?”

  “I’ll make a supposition and then ask you a question. It’s sort of like make-believe.”

  “I know what a hypothetical is, Joe. I just don’t understand what you want from me.”

  “Let’s suppose Tommy went to somebody else’s house last night, okay? Another friend’s house. And let’s say that friend’s mother just happened to see Tommy this morning. And maybe she heard him say something about where he went last night, what he did, that kind of thing. Hypothetically speaking, what do you think he might have said to her?”

  I see the slightest upturn at the edge of her lips. She’s willing to play.

  “Hypothetically?” she says.

  I nod.

  “He might have said something to her about not remembering what he did last night. He may have been drinking heavily.”

  “So you don’t think Tommy would have made any admissions to her about being involved in a crime.”

  “No. I don’t think he would have.”

  “And do you think this woman, this friend’s mother, would have noticed any injuries of any kind on him?”

  “I don’t think she would have noticed anything like that, no.”

  “What about his clothing? Do you think she would have noticed anything unusual about his clothing?”

  The waitress walks into the room carrying a tray with two Greek salads and two more beers. Caroline remains silent until she leaves.