Closer Than You Know

by Brad Parks

  Amy had scheduled the first “strategy session” for Friday morning at 9:30 a.m.

  “Here’s the list of questions for Kempe,” Amy began, pulling a stapled piece of paper from a folder she was carrying and handing it to Dansby. “You want to start by going over them?”

  Dansby scanned it for a moment. “Not really,” he said.

  Amy huffed at him melodramatically. “Aaron, we really have to—”

  “Look, Kempe’s going to be solid. He always is. Let’s not waste our time with that,” Dansby said. “What I want to know is: What’s Coke Mom’s lawyer going to do? Her whole thing is that the drugs aren’t really hers, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. How’s she going to convince the judge of that? That’s what I was trying to think about while I was coming in this morning: If I were her attorney, what would I be doing?”

  Amy sat up a little straighter. Maybe the last three-plus years hadn’t been completely lost on Dansby after all.

  “Well, that’s a great question,” she said. “I actually haven’t checked if there are any subpoenas yet. Hang on.”

  In Virginia, neither side was required to submit a witness list as part of discovery. The only way the defense tipped its hand as to who it might call is if it has to ask the court to issue a subpoena, which it often did if it was afraid a witness wouldn’t show up. Any requests for subpoenas had to be issued within ten days of trial—and trial was now exactly ten days away.

  Amy picked up the phone on Dansby’s desk and dialed the extension for Judge Robbins’s clerk. After the woman answered, Amy bantered with her for a moment or two, then moved to the reason for her call: “Has the defense asked for any subpoenas in C-R-1800015700?” she asked, referencing Commonwealth v. Barrick by its case number.

  “Hang on,” the clerk said.

  She clacked her keyboard for a little bit. Then the woman came back with: “Yeah, a request came in yesterday. Let’s see . . . They asked us to serve Bobby Ray Walters of 102 Desper Hollow Road in Staunton.”

  Amy recognized the address from having recently pinned it on her map. It made him Melanie Barrick’s neighbor. He was probably being called to testify that he had never seen any undue amount of traffic in and out of the neighborhood.

  Which was fine. The commonwealth didn’t have to prove where Barrick did her selling, just that she possessed more drugs than any one human being needed for personal consumption.

  There was more keyboard clacking. Then the clerk said, “Oh, and you’re going to love this. They asked us to serve Demetrius Myers at the Haynesville Correctional Center.”

  “Mookie Myers!” Amy blurted, causing Dansby’s face to furrow.

  “To know him is to love him,” the clerk said.

  “Okay,” Amy said. “Anyone else?”

  “Nope. But I’ll give you a call if anything else comes in.”

  “Thanks,” Amy said.

  Dansby had his arms crossed. “Did I hear that right? The defense is subpoenaing Mookie Myers?”

  “Yep.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “No idea. The sheriff’s theory was that Barrick had taken over Myers’s operation. She was selling the same brand and had the same customers. But whether that’s true or not, it really doesn’t have a lot of bearing on the case.”

  Dansby drummed his fingers for a moment.

  “What if Mookie comes in and says, ‘No way I let this cracker lady take over my turf,’” Dansby asked, making Amy cringe with his attempted imitation of Myers’s voice.

  “First, I doubt he would do that. He’d be screwing up his own appeal. Second, so what? She was caught with the drugs. That’s the only thing that counts.”

  “I realize that, but . . . I’m worried this means there’s something going on we haven’t thought of.”

  “Yeah,” Amy said. “Me too.”

  “So what do we do about it?” Dansby asked, already sounding a little panicky about it.

  Amy stared at the desk for a moment. “We just have to make sure we don’t open the door.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean under no circumstances do we mention the name Mookie Myers when we present our case. We don’t talk about him during our opening. We don’t ask Kempe about him. Then if the defense tries to start talking about Mookie Myers, we object and say it’s not relevant. Normally, it’s the prosecution that has to work to build a foundation for certain evidence and it’s the defense that’s trying to tear it down. We’ll just turn the tables on them.”

  “Think that’ll work?”

  “Maybe,” Amy said. “I guess we’ll find out.”

  FIFTY

  Roughly a week and a half into my stay—and it was getting hard to keep track of the days when every one of them was the same—I was doing the important work that was lying on my bed, staring up at the ceiling. Then my meal slot opened.

  It was after lunch and not quite time for dinner, so I knew what that meant. I was already swinging my feet onto the floor.

  “Come on, Barrick. Yard time,” I heard.

  Through the door’s square window, I saw the tightly wound braids and ample body of Officer Brown, my perhaps-acquaintance from some time I couldn’t remember.

  I got myself to my feet and, like the obedient chattel I was, shoved my hands through the slot.

  “Are you going to give me any trouble, Barrick?” she asked.

  “No, Officer Brown. Of course not.”

  “Then I think we can skip this step,” she said.

  It had been so long since anyone had shown me even minimal kindness, I was actually suspicious. Was this some kind of a trick? Was I being set up for something? She had been nice to me before, but that was just softening me up for . . . what?

  I felt a little unsteady as she opened the door for me and led me down the hallway. I had already become so habituated to slinking along with my wrists bound, I actually put my hands in front of me as I walked. It felt more natural that way.

  Officer Brown loomed behind me until we made it outside. When we reached the cage where I would spend the next hour, she unlocked it for me, swinging open the chain-link door.

  The cage was wedged in the gap between two buildings that were several stories high, so it only received direct sunlight during a few hours in the middle of the day. It was now so late I had already missed my chance. The last rays were at least ten feet over my head, reflecting off the wall nearest the cage.

  It was—unless I was mistaken—April 2. My trial was exactly a week away. The day was warm, and I suppose I was cognizant that the seasons were changing, or had already changed. It would be another lovely spring in the Shenandoah valley, even if that sort of thing was mostly an abstract concept for someone who spent twenty-three hours a day inside.

  Officer Brown still hadn’t locked my cage, which increased my unease. First no handcuffs, now this. Was she trying to make this look like an escape attempt? What was the penalty for that? Was there something worse than ad seg?

  Then Officer Brown asked, “You still don’t remember me, do you?”

  I looked up at her, this imposing woman, and searched my brain one more time. The same nothing came back at me, just like the other few times I had seen her.

  “Sorry,” I said. Then I added: “I wish I did.”

  “I’m Tracee. Tracee Brown. We were together at Miss Agnes.”

  The Miss Agnes Home for Girls was one of the group homes where I had spent time. It had been a stopping-off point for a few months when I was maybe fourteen or fifteen.

  “You used to help me with my math homework,” Officer Brown continued. “You remember that? I was terrible with fractions. No one had ever really taught them to me right. You were the first one to make me cut out a whole circle and say that was one over one. And then you had me cut it in half a
nd say one piece of it was one over two. Everything made sense after that. I know it was a long time ago.”

  A dim memory of a chubby black girl with cornrows came into my head, freed from whatever deep cranial fold it had been hiding in.

  “Oh, right. Tracee Brown!” I said, the recollection growing a bit stronger. “You used to eat Corn Flakes for dinner. We couldn’t get you to even try anything else.”

  “Yeah, and wouldn’t you know I can’t even look at a box of Corn Flakes now,” she said with a little chortle.

  “I have that same thing with Spaghetti-O’s,” I said. “I had this one foster mom that fed them to us, no lie, six days a week. I get chills when I even pass them in a grocery store.”

  She laughed again. It was nice to feel human for the first time in weeks.

  Then the smile went away. “You also told me one time that I had to keep the most important part of myself locked away in here,” she said, tapping her heart, “and to make sure I never let anyone get at that. And to remember it was good, no matter what. You told me that’s how you survived. And that . . . that really helped me get through some tough times.”

  I nodded.

  “That’s pretty good advice for in here too,” she said quietly.

  “Yeah,” I said, looking down at the concrete under my feet. She still hadn’t closed or locked the cage.

  I wanted to ask her a thousand questions. About how long she stayed at Miss Agnes. About whether she had been adopted. About how she had survived and, apparently, thrived well enough to land a good job like this one.

  But she beat me to the next thought: “I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve been keeping track of your case ever since you first came in here. I have a cousin who works in the Sheriff’s Office. Have you . . . have you talked to your lawyer lately?”

  “No, why?”

  “Well, I don’t know if this will help you, but a man came in and tried to confess to killing that guy in the cemetery.”

  For a very brief moment, hope surged in me, until I ran through the sentence in my head again. “What do you mean, ‘tried to’?” I asked.

  “It turned out he was lying. He said he shot the guy. But the guy in the cemetery wasn’t shot.”

  “Who . . . who would do something like that?”

  “My cousin said the guy’s name was Curran. Somethingorother Curran.”

  I slumped against one of the poles that supported the cage, then slid down it until I was sitting in a small ball with my legs pulled up against my chest.

  “You know him?” she asked.

  “He’s my biological father. Estranged, obviously.”

  Tracee brought her hand to her mouth. I didn’t need to fill in any more blanks for a fellow Miss Agnes alumna.

  “Oh, wow,” she said.

  Which nicely summarized my immediate thoughts on the matter.

  “Well,” she said apologetically. “I have to close this now.”

  “I understand.”

  And then, to make sure she knew I was absolving her totally, I smiled. And I meant it.

  * * *

  • • •

  I stayed in my little ball on the concrete for a while after she left. Then, eventually, I stood and looked up at the atmosphere, into the high reaches where the air was thin and the clouds wispy.

  Somewhere underneath that same sky was my father. And for perhaps the first time in my whole life, I felt myself wishing I could talk to him.

  In some ways this was a fitting continuation to our entire relationship, because I never had understood the man. As a little girl I was constantly confused as to why he was so angry all the time. What had I done to displease him? Was I not a good enough little girl? If I cleaned my room or did a better job brushing my teeth, would he finally start loving me?

  Now he was even more of an enigma to me. The Billy Curran I had known—the wife beater and child abuser who thought nothing of fondling his stepdaughter—was a total stranger to altruism. He was, in fact, the living embodiment of the opposite of it.

  Was there some angle to this I wasn’t seeing? Was he getting something out of this?

  But for however much I flipped it around in my mind, I couldn’t see how he could turn this into an advantage for himself. He had tried to take my place in prison, perhaps even on death row. He had failed, yes; but it was the epitome of an unselfish act.

  Especially from a man who knew exactly what he was getting into. Some people, those who have never been incarcerated, have this deluded belief prison is not all that bad—three hots and a cot for free, all this time to do whatever you want, nonsense like that.

  My father would have had no such illusions. He had spent five years being subjected to its horrors, serving time as a convicted child sex offender, the lowest of the low in the prison pecking order. He knew what it meant to suffer the loss of one’s liberty.

  And he was willing to go back, to take all of it on. For me.

  Had he really changed? Had prison and sobriety and Jesus and twenty years of reflecting on all his mistakes turned him into something other than the abomination I had known as a girl?

  Maybe my mother was right. Maybe there always had been something good in him.

  And maybe, just maybe—and this was quite a thing to consider after twenty-nine years of having every reason to doubt it—he loved me after all.

  FIFTY-ONE

  The call came just before lunchtime on Friday. Not that Amy Kaye was planning to take lunch that day.

  She was still only midway through all she needed to get done by the end of the week—a list that was particularly pressing, given that Monday would be consumed by the Melanie Barrick drug trial.

  Amy frowned at the caller ID. If it was Aaron Dansby, calling from his back porch, having already started his weekend, she was going to let it slip through to voicemail. Then she recognized the main number for the state lab in Roanoke and quickly grabbed at the phone.

  “Amy Kaye.”

  “Chap Burleson,” came the response.

  Hearing his name brought back the lingering embarrassment she still felt about Warren Plotz. She was glad the man couldn’t see the slight flush in her face.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Thought you’d appreciate an update on Richard Coduri,” he said. “We’re not ready with our full report yet, but there are a couple things we can tell you right now. Got a minute?”

  “Absolutely. Thank you,” Amy said, pulling out the legal pad where she was keeping her notes on that case.

  “The first part won’t surprise you. Coduri was lit up on cocaine when he was killed. There was enough of it in his blood to make an elephant high.”

  “Not surprising. What’s the second part?”

  “Well, that’s the real reason I’m calling. I read in the paper your sheriff arrested a woman for this crime, right?”

  “Yes. Melanie Barrick.”

  “Well, I don’t know who your perpetrator is, but it’s sure not a woman.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The victim’s right forefinger had a fair amount of someone else’s skin cells under it. The medical examiner concluded Coduri had scratched the perpetrator. We got a nice sample of it. Being a murder case, we prioritized it, so one of our guys just started testing it today. He told me it clearly belonged to a man.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “That Y chromosome is pretty hard to miss.”

  “Got it. So if it’s not Melanie Barrick, who is it?”

  “Haven’t gotten that far,” Burleson said. “We probably won’t be able to run it through for matches for another week or two. But if you have a woman in jail for this, you might want to consider a different theory of the crime.”

  “Like murder-for-hire,” Amy said.

  “Like that,” Burleson said. “But that’s your dep
artment, not mine. I just do the science.”

  They soon ended the call. As she settled the phone back into the cradle, Amy let out a long breath. Murder-for-hire was a trickier thing to prosecute. The first component was proving some kind of consideration had been exchanged, most likely monetary—though a drug dealer could also pay in product.

  Amy hadn’t yet bothered prying into Melanie Barrick’s financial situation. All she knew was that the Sheriff’s Office had seized nearly $4,000 in cash during its raid.

  There had to be more. It was just a question of where Barrick kept it. The Sheriff’s Office was generally pretty thorough when it executed a warrant, so Amy didn’t think Barrick had more cash lying around.

  But a bank was always a possibility. A clever dealer could easily find ways to make ill-gotten gains look legitimate.

  Amy looked down at the list of to-dos she had been steadily working through. She already knew she wasn’t going to get it done before the weekend after all.

  In the cop shows, someone barks out “pull her financials” and, within minutes, a detective has a full list of every banking transaction the defendant has made since childhood, including the large cash withdrawal the day before the crime in question was committed.

  Reality wasn’t quite as easy. Amy could issue a subpoena that would give her access to Melanie Barrick’s banking records, yes. But first, Amy had to figure out where Melanie Barrick banked. And she couldn’t just subpoena every bank in the area and hope to get lucky. That would be considered fishing, and judges didn’t like it. She had to know for sure where Barrick had accounts.

  There were two ways to go about that. Subpoenaing the IRS would allow Amy to see if Barrick reported interest income from any financial institutions in her most recent tax return. It would also take a minimum of ten weeks to get a result.

  Or . . .

  Amy was soon lifting herself from behind her desk and moving toward the parking lot. Desper Hollow Road was less than ten minutes away. She didn’t even need to look up the address.