Dead River

by Fredric M. Ham

  “All right you two, that’s enough. Mr. Buckwald, Mr. Jacobson, approach the bench.”

  The judge activated the white noise generator so no one in the courtroom could overhear the conversation. Jacobson practically ran to the judge’s bench. Harley strolled to the pecan-wood structure and stood to the right of the prosecutor, purposefully drawing uncomfortably near to Jacobson.

  The judge examined both men with stone-cold eyes. His head didn’t move, only his eyes. “This applies to both of you: no outbursts in my courtroom. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.” Harley said. He knew the comment didn’t actually apply to him.

  There was a pause. “Yes, Your Honor,” Jacobson muttered.

  The judge looked first at Harley and then at Jacobson. “I’m going to allow the preliminary hearing to be conducted with the understanding that the two of you will conduct yourselves in a professional manner. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.” Harley said. He was overjoyed but couldn’t display it outwardly.

  “Yes, Your Honor,” replied Jacobson as he stared at the judge.

  The two men did an about-face and returned to their respective tables. The judge flipped off the noise generator. Jacobson glared at Harley. He displayed his trademarked clenched teeth, and the left side of his upper lip was slightly raised. When the attorneys were finally seated, the judge resumed.

  “The court grants the defense’s motion for an adversarial preliminary hearing, set for October 29 at 9:00 am,” Judge Vetter announced.

  Warren Wesley Vetter, Warren Vetter, the Honorable Warren Vetter, Your Honor, Your Holiness, Your Eminence, anything flattering was what Vetter wanted to be called. Vetter was small in stature but big on bullshit. He threw the law around in court like he had written every word of it. He reminded Harley of Larry from The Three Stooges after a three-day drinking binge. He had dark, hanging bags under his eyes that seemed to grow larger every day. Framing the judge’s beady, baggy eyes were gold, wire-rimmed glasses likely purchased in the fifties. Vetter was truly a sight to behold. But he could be a problem for Harley.

  The initial hearing was over quickly. Harley peered at Sikes and saw rage staring back at him. Only three days had passed since the arrest, but Harley knew his client wasn’t handling jail very well. General population in Brevard County lockup wasn’t much better than being in a Florida state prison, and that included Starke, the most notorious of all, Florida’s hard-core penitentiary. In recent months, there had been several suicides among prisoners at the county jail, something that likely weighed heavily on Sikes.

  “Son, you’re going to have to trust me, and stay calm,” Harley said.

  “That’s easy for you to say, goddamn it. You aren’t the one in jail, eating food that’s not even fit for a dog.” Sikes’s body stiffened, and he clenched his fists. “I’m also being harassed and threatened.”

  Harley glanced around the courtroom then leaned closer to his client. “Hold your voice down,” he whispered.

  “I can’t stand it in there,” Sikes snapped. “It smells like puke and shit.”

  “You need to keep a low profile, son. Anything that happens while you’re in jail, anything you say to someone could be detrimental to your case.”

  “Fuck it, I don’t care.”

  “You’d better care.” Harley tried a different tactic. “Hey, we had a victory here today. We have a preliminary hearing coming up soon.”

  Now Sikes leaned in closer to Harley and spoke in a teeth-clenched whisper. His face tightened and turned a deep crimson. “I don’t fucking care. Understand? Get me out of here.”

  “Okay, Sikes, let’s go,” the court deputy ordered.

  Harley looked up at the deputy, but Sikes continued staring at Harley.

  “Stand up, Sikes,” the deputy ordered. “You’re going back to county.”

  Sikes looked up at the deputy. “Back to my shithole, you mean.”

  The deputy smirked as he latched onto Sikes’s arm to lift him out of the chair.

  Outside the courthouse there were four news trucks and a swarm of reporters. They were all shouting questions, talking over each other. Sikes tried to ignore it all, but a few words made it through the chaos anyway. He remained silent, tucking in his chin and slightly bending forward from the waist. Microphone booms and cameras swarmed around, trying to gain advantage over the others. Two deputies moved Sikes toward a sheriff’s car with their arms locked under his, pulling him upright with each stride. Sikes twisted his hands behind his back, trying to relieve the pain from the handcuffs digging into his skin.

  The cameramen were able to capture every expression Sikes made as he swung his head from side to side to avoid exposure. It was a futile effort; there were cameras following him on both sides.

  Then Sikes stopped. The two deputies jerked on his arms, but he resisted. Sikes raised his head and stared into the Channel 6 CBS camera.

  “Why don’t you bring your cameras inside the county jail? See the pigsty I live in. It’s a real shithole.”

  Together the two deputies thrust Sikes’s arms up and moved him toward the car.

  “It’s a shithole,” Sikes shouted.

  68

  THERE WERE TEN mourners at the funeral. David was the only family member. The rest were elderly churchgoers that would attend anything just to get out of their houses.

  The eulogy, presented by the minister of the Magee Baptist Church, was more of a statement of facts than praises for a good Christian woman. Clara Sikes wasn’t a good woman. She didn’t interact with people much, and when she did, it was usually confrontational. If it wasn’t a complaint at Tulliver’s drug store for their high prices, it was telling old man McCracken to keep his German shepherd out of her yard or she’d poison it. She’d preach to the heathens of God’s earth about why they would go to hell if they didn’t repent their sins.

  David Sikes left the funeral service feeling alone and confused. Over the years his mother never had contact with any of David’s relatives, except his Uncle Hollis. For the past two years no one had heard from Hollis. David wasn’t even certain where most of his other uncles, aunts, and cousins lived. He wasn’t sure what to do.

  He was eighteen years old when his mother died. Four weeks after high school graduation, on a Saturday night, the police were at his house questioning him. He sullenly told the story of walking into the bathroom after hearing his mother cry out. He recalled the scream, the flickering lights, and then darkness. He had to go to his bedroom to find his flashlight. He stumbled into the bathroom, pointing the flashlight in the direction of the toilet and then over to the bathtub. There was his mother, floating lifeless in the bathtub, bubbles surfacing from the submerged radio still plugged into the wall. He tried to wake her but couldn’t. She’d stopped breathing.

  The police questioned David for at least an hour and got no less than three versions of his story. But they agreed among themselves that David was so traumatized that the inconsistencies in his story were understandable. Clara Sikes’s death was later ruled an accident by the county medical examiner, electrocution caused by the radio accidentally falling into the bathtub. David took three days off from his job at Ketchum Electric the following week to make the funeral arrangements.

  The evening of his mother’s funeral, David sat at the kitchen table. He looked down at the worn brown leather belt under the table and reached for it. Folding the belt in half he jumped up from the old chair he sat in, sending it crashing to the linoleum floor. He raised the belt high in the air and whipped the tabletop repeatedly until the muscles in his right arm ached. He stood and stared at the belt for several moments.

  “She got what she deserved.”

  69

  THE LARGE, FLAT-SCREEN Sony in the Rileys’ master bedroom, resting on the replica Empire console table, was blaring out the voice of Matt Lauer on the Today show. Adam Riley was running late for work and paid little attention.

  As he searched his closet for a pair of slack
s for work, a special report interrupted the normal broadcast. The jolting news stopped him in mid-stride.

  “At 8:46 this morning, American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center,” the NBC correspondent said.

  Adam froze in place, his eyes glued to the screen. A second plane that took off from Boston, United Flight 175, had impacted the south tower. A chill ran through his body. He grasped for an explanation as to how this could possibly happen. How could two planes crash into two different towers within minutes of each other? This is no accident. Then he recalled the ending of a Tom Clancy book, Debt of Honor. Terrorists.

  The events of this day would always remain in Adam’s mind, but always remained second to what had happened to Sara Ann in August.

  The meals in jail seemed to get worse and worse. On this Wednesday afternoon, less than three weeks before the preliminary hearing, Harley Buckwald and David Sikes sat in the room where they had met on every other occasion.

  “Let me tell you what’s going on,” Harley said.

  Sikes looked at Harley with intense interest.

  “As I told you before, we have a preliminary hearing on Monday, October 29.”

  “Tell me again what it’s for,” Sikes asked.

  “An adversarial preliminary hearing is basically a pretrial hearing, initiated by us, to determine if there’s probable cause to continue holding you.”

  “So I might get out of here after that?” Sikes asked. His fleshy, boyish face brightened as he spoke.

  “No,” Harley answered.

  Sikes’s rosy cheeks turned a chalky hue, his body stiffening. “Then what the hell use is it?” he asked, barely moving his mouth.

  “It can do us a lot of good,” Harley responded quickly. He cuffed his shirt sleeves, left then right, then looked up at Sikes and smiled. “It gives us a chance to file for pretrial discovery.”

  “For what?”

  “Pretrial discovery. It’s our chance to have a look-see at the details of what the state attorney has, as far as evidence and witnesses.”

  “They shouldn’t have any evidence, because I didn’t do anything,” Sikes said, gritting his teeth.

  Harley shifted in his chair. “Okay, but let me explain what’s going to happen during the preliminary hearing.”

  Sikes sat in silence, his eyes darting from side to side, occasionally stopping on Harley, but then only for an instant.

  “The judge will decide if your case should go to a grand jury for a possible indictment, which right now seems certain to happen.”

  Sikes’s eyes stopped circling. He looked straight at Harley. “Why, damn it?” he shouted. “I didn’t do anything!”

  “Son, keep your voice down.” Harley glanced over his shoulder toward the metal door, then back. “The State’s moving forward full steam, so we have to prepare for the worst.”

  “Which is what?” Sikes asked, his teeth clenched.

  “If the grand jury indicts you for the kidnapping and murder of Sara Ann Riley, that’s when we’ll have to enter a plea of guilty or not guilty.”

  Sikes lowered his head and whispered something.

  “What’d you say, son?”

  “I said I didn’t do any of that.”

  “Well, it’s my job to convince the jury during the trial that you didn’t. But I’m going to level with you. Without an alibi, and with the evidence the State has so far, it’s going to be an uphill battle.”

  Harley scratched through his files, trying to find the date on which Sikes’s blood sample was collected. Sikes continued to stare at the table.

  “Let’s see, on Monday, September 17, your blood was drawn and sent in for DNA analysis,” Harley said.

  Sikes looked up. “Yeah, they missed the vein in my right arm the first few times.” He turned over his arm, showing Harley the large bruise that still lingered. “They didn’t care how many times they jammed that needle in me.”

  Harley continued, ignoring the complaint. “It usually takes five to six weeks to get DNA results back from the lab, so the report will probably come in just before the preliminary hearing.”

  Harley sensed Sikes was disturbed about something. “What’s the problem, son?”

  “What happens if the test they do isn’t done right? There’re a lot of incompetent people in the world, people that don’t know what the hell they’re doing.”

  “You shouldn’t concern yourself with that.”

  “Sure I should.” Sikes examined the bruise again, taking a deep breath. “What happens when the tests come back negative? Does it mean I get out of here?”

  “Unfortunately, no. Even if your DNA doesn’t match samples taken from the Riley girl, the prosecution will move forward and get a grand jury indictment. They will still have enough evidence,” Harley explained.

  Sikes’s eyes narrowed and his jaw tightened. “Like what?”

  “The hair strands that were found in the bedroom where you stayed at the McCarthy house. Remember, I told you they matched the hair sample taken from the Riley girl.”

  “Yes, I remember you told me that, but I told you I don’t know how they got there. Someone planted them, because I don’t even know this girl. Goddamn it, this is bullshit! I want out of here!”

  “Quiet down, son. They’ll make me leave if you keep carrying on like that.”

  Sikes sat in silence, his eyes bulging.

  “Then there’s the phone number imprinted on the paper that the Riley girl wrote her note on. We also talked about that during our first meeting.”

  “Damn it, I told you I don’t know nothin’ about a note!”

  “You have to lower your voice,” Harley whispered. “There’s one final item, and I don’t want to hear an outburst, okay?”

  Sikes stared straight ahead, his bloodshot eyes locked on Harley’s. “What is it? What other lies do you have?”

  “It’s been brought to my attention that the police have voice recordings of the murderer.”

  Harley leaned back in his chair and paused for a moment, waiting for a reaction. Nothing. “They recorded his voice using a wiretap set up at the victim’s house.”

  Again Harley waited for a response but didn’t get one. “Okay, listen. I’m going to be gone for two weeks.”

  “Where are you going?” Sikes asked, suddenly and surprisingly calm.

  “I have to go out of town on business. There isn’t anything to do right now as far as we’re concerned. I have my staff working on several things, but you and I don’t need to meet until a few days before the preliminary hearing.”

  Sikes shrugged his shoulders as if nothing suddenly mattered.

  Harley moved his chair back, the wooden legs shrieking on the shiny concrete floor. “I have one more question before I leave. Do you know a Gabriel?”

  “Why’s everyone so interested in Gabriel?” Sikes asked.

  “So you know him?”

  “No … I mean yes. That FBI guy asked me the same thing. As I told him, the only Gabriel I know is the archangel Gabriel.”

  “What do know about him?”

  “That he’s the second-highest-ranking angel.” Sikes seemed to settle into a comfort zone as he spoke. “And he had the most wings of any of the archangels,” he said proudly, like a schoolboy answering a question that no one expected him to answer.

  “The most wings?” Harley asked.

  “Yeah, he had a hundred and forty wings. Isn’t that something?”

  “Have you ever heard him referred to as the ‘Angel of Death’?”

  Sikes appeared unflappable at the moment. “Yeah, sure, by the Jews. They always look at everything negative.”

  “How do you know all of this, David?”

  “Because my mother made me read the Bible when I was a kid. Anything wrong with that?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “I always had to do as Mother said. Always.”

  70

  TWO MONTHS HAD PASSED since Sara Ann’s disappearance
, and all the Rileys knew of the case against David Allen Sikes was what they had seen on the news. The coverage had dwindled to tidbits of information that occasionally appeared on one of the local stations that liked to cover such news. The reports usually consisted of the state attorney’s office making a statement about how the man responsible for this horrid crime would be brought to justice. Owen Jacobson always appeared before the camera, never passing up a chance for exposure. His delivery was always the same.

  “We want a speedy trial.”

  “We seek the death penalty.”

  “Justice will be served.”

  Study door shut and feet propped up on the desk, Adam skimmed through his evening newspaper, only scanning the headlines of the articles. He reflected on the preliminary hearing to be held in one week, trying to decide whether he should go. Valerie would certainly try to talk him out of attending. Could he sit in the same room with the man who killed his daughter? In a way, the prospect terrified him. Was he losing control? Maybe this isn’t a good time to see Sara Ann’s killer in person, he thought.

  The phone was ringing.

  “Hello.”

  “Mr. Riley?”

  “Yes, this is Adam Riley.”

  “I have some information I believe will be of interest to you.”

  Adam didn’t recognize the man’s voice.

  “Who is this?”

  “Never mind, just listen to me.”

  Adam’s stomach knotted.

  “There’s a good chance the man that killed your daughter will be set free.”

  “What?” Adam shouted.

  The phone went dead. His heart thumped in his chest.

  He sat at his desk, head in hands, trying to think what to do next. Think. Think. Are all of the doors in the house locked? Is the security system armed? Thank God he had taken Peter Carillo’s advice and had an alarm system installed. Adam ran downstairs and checked each door and made sure the security system was armed. After his inspection, he ran up the stairs and back into the study.