Scott Pratt - [Joe Dillard 02]

by In Good Faith (mobi)

  “Who are you?” he demanded. I knew nearly every cop in the county when I quit practicing law a year ago. I’d already run across two I’d never laid eyes on. The county commission wouldn’t pay them a competitive wage, so a lot of them became disillusioned and moved on.

  “Joe Dillard,” I said, reaching for the identification badge again. He looked at me warily.

  “This is a crime scene,” he said. “You can’t go stomping around in here.”

  “Where’s Lee Mooney? He told me to come.”

  The young officer turned and nodded towards the darkness. I could see beams from flashlights through the leaves on the low tree branches. They appeared to be about a hundred yards down the road. I also noticed brighter flashes of light. Someone was taking photographs.

  “How bad is it?” I said.

  “As bad as it gets. Walk through the trees to the left or the right. Don’t walk on the road. They’re making casts of foot- and tire prints.”

  As I made my way through the trees, I noticed a full moon creeping up behind a hill to the northeast, almost as though it was afraid of what it would see when it cleared the ridge. When I got to within twenty yards of the flashlights, I could hear muffled voices. I yelled out, “Lee Mooney!”

  “Over here,” a voice called in return.

  “Can I walk on the road?”

  “Stop where you are,” Mooney said. “I’ll come to you.”

  I saw the beam of a flashlight making its way towards me. I assumed it was Mooney. I waved my light at him. He stopped about thirty feet away and said, “Walk straight to me.”

  I nearly tripped in a small ditch and came up on the road. It was a little bit gritty and somewhat soft, made of a mixture of soil, sand, clay, and chat.

  “Welcome to hell,” Mooney said. He was wearing an overcoat and gloves and he was shivering. When my flashlight hit his face, he looked as pale as the moon that was coming over the horizon.

  “Do I want to go back there?” I knew perfectly well that I didn’t.

  “Depends on the strength of your stomach. Worst I’ve ever seen.”

  I’d seen dead bodies before, but it was long ago and far away. My experience defending murderers had sometimes required me to examine gruesome photographs, but I knew this would be different. I shrugged my shoulders.

  “We’ve got four shot to pieces,” he said. “Man, woman, and two children. They’re all dead.” His voice had a higher pitch than normal. In the cold darkness, it sounded almost as though it were being piped in over a transistor radio.

  “What can I do?” I said.

  “Just come on back here with me and take a look around. Maybe you’ll spot something we’ve missed.”

  Mooney told me to walk directly behind him. We rounded a slight bend and I could see a man kneeling and gingerly picking up objects from the ground and placing them in an evidence bag. As I got closer I could see that he was picking up shell casings. A lot of shell casings. Another officer with “CSU” on the back of his jacket was pouring liquid plaster into a footprint on the ground. Others were searching the surrounding area with flashlights. A photographer was kneeling over something a few feet away. A light flashed.

  I suddenly noticed two pairs of legs protruding from the ditch onto the road beneath the photographer. One pair of legs was longer than the other and covered with what appeared to be slacks. There were brown shoes on the feet. The shorter pair of legs was bare. The right foot was wearing a black pump. The left foot, like the legs, was bare. I noticed something else: The bottom half of the legs were bent at a grotesque angle.

  I stopped cold.

  Lying across the legs at right angles were the blood-soaked children, both facedown. The smaller child was on top of the longer pair of legs, the larger child on top of the shorter pair. I stared at them, momentarily unable to think.

  “Somebody placed them like that after they were shot,” Mooney was saying. “And there’s something else—you see how the bottoms of the legs are bent? The sonsabitches ran over them when they left. Shot them point-blank and they fell straight back into the ditch. Shot the kids and placed them facedown on top of the parents. Then they ran right over their legs. They’re broken to hell.”

  “Sonsabitches?” I said. “There was more than one?”

  “At least two. Maybe more.”

  “How do you know?”

  “There are footprints all over the place, but it’ll take a while before we can sort it all out. The crime scene guys tell me it looks like they came in one vehicle, a large one, van or truck maybe. They drove down the road a ways and turned around. There are footprints around the tire tracks where the vehicle stopped. They lined them up next to the ditch and executed them.”

  “How’d we find out about it?”

  “Somebody heard gunshots and called it in. Young deputy, only been on the job four weeks, came out here and found them. He’s sitting in a cruiser over there. I tried to talk to him, but he’s too upset right now. He’s just sitting there in a daze.”

  I could smell blood in the air. There was a lot of blood on the children, but I couldn’t quite see the adults. The prurient in me urged me to move closer to the bodies, to take a look at their faces. I hesitated, and Mooney sensed what I was feeling.

  “You don’t want to look,” he said. “The man and the woman were both shot at least six times. Both of them were shot in the right eye. So were the children. I wish I hadn’t seen that little boy… .”

  His voice trailed off. I remembered that Mooney and his wife adopted an infant a few years ago. A little boy. Must be three or four years old now.

  “Do we know who they are?” I asked quietly.

  “We know who the man is. His name is Beck, Bjorn Beck. Thirty years old, Johnson City address. They left his wallet in his pocket. It had thirteen dollars in it.”

  “Nothing on the woman?”

  “Not yet. I’m assuming she’s his wife until somebody tells me otherwise. We’ve got TBI agents in Johnson City checking out the address right now. We should know something soon.”

  I began to rock back and forth and stamp my feet. Even though I couldn’t see my breath, the cold felt as though it had penetrated the marrow in my bones.

  “Cold, isn’t it?” Mooney said. His voice was trembling slightly.

  I didn’t say anything, but I looked at him. When he looked back, I could see fear in his eyes.

  “It wasn’t this cold when I left the house,” he said. “Seems like the temperature dropped twenty degrees when I got here.”

  “Yeah, I felt it, too.”

  “You ever hear or read anything about evil?”

  It was a strange question, one that I pondered briefly. Of course I’d heard of evil. Of course I’d read about evil.

  “Ever read anything about Catholic priests performing exorcisms?” Mooney continued. “They say they experience a sensation of coldness, just like this.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “What happened here was evil. The cold-blooded execution of an entire family. They didn’t take his wallet, so it wasn’t a robbery. All of them shot in the right eye. Running over their legs after they were dead.”

  I looked down at my boots for a moment. I’d noticed the drop in temperature. I’d noticed the reaction of my dog. I felt the presence of something I’d never felt before, but I didn’t want to admit it or discuss it. All I wanted was to get the hell out of there.

  Mooney turned towards me again. His eyes were moist, his voice still shaky. “You have to promise me something,” he said. “You have to promise me that when we find the sick bastards who did this, you’ll see to it that every one of them gets the needle. No screwups. No deals. Whoever shot those two children needs to be removed from the gene pool.”

  The words hit me like scalding water. I’d spent a good portion of my legal career trying to keep the government from executing people, and now there I stood, in the dark, cold woods, listening to a man tell me I must promise to use my n
ewly acquired power to make sure someone died. I looked at Mooney again. He was nearly in tears.

  “I’ll do what’s right, Lee,” I said, “as soon as I figure out what it is.”

  PART II

  Monday, September 15

  Tennessee Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Hank Fraley looked up from his desk to see a man walking through the front door.

  A fucking babysitter. Just what I need. I’ve got a loud-mouthed sheriff running around sticking his nose into everything, and now I have to deal with a goddamned lawyer.

  Fraley had been awake all night, his head was splitting, and the acid in his stomach made him feel as if he were being eaten from the inside out. He couldn’t get the images of the dead family out of his mind. The eyes haunted him. All of them had been shot in the right eye. Thirty years of working homicide cases in Memphis and Nashville—places a lot more violent than this—had steeled Fraley, but nothing could have prepared him for the carnage he saw when he got to the murder scene. Those beautiful, innocent children. The girl was about the same age as Fraley’s granddaughter, the boy just an infant. Who, or what, could do that to a baby?

  And now he had to deal with Joe Dillard, the former defense attorney miraculously and suddenly turned prosecutor. Lee Mooney had invited Dillard to the crime scene, and now he was supposed to … What was he supposed to do, anyway? Mooney had called earlier and said he wanted Dillard involved in the investigation. His mission, Mooney said, would be to make sure Fraley didn’t make any mistakes that would come back and bite them on the ass later.

  “What kind of mistakes?” Fraley had asked.

  “Legal mistakes,” Mooney said. “Constitutional mistakes.”

  What a load of horse crap. Fraley was doing homicide work when Dillard was still shitting in his diaper. He’d be as useless as teats on a bull. And besides, Fraley was looking for murderers, the kind of people who shot babies at point-blank range. Fuck legal. Fuck constitutional .

  The secretary buzzed. Fraley snuffed out his cigarette and told her to send Dillard in. He was a big guy, dark-haired, green-eyed, and athletic-looking, at least twenty years younger than Fraley. He hadn’t managed to put on the paunch yet, but his hair was just starting to go gray and the lines in his forehead and around his eyes were starting to run deep. He was wearing a charcoal suit, a nice one, and a blue shirt and tie. Movie-star teeth.

  Fraley had heard a lot about Dillard since being transferred up from Nashville to replace a bad cop named Phil Landers. There’d been a scandal about Landers soliciting false testimony from a jailhouse snitch who turned out to be Dillard’s sister. Then Landers was accused of conducting an illegal search in a big murder case and subsequently lying about it on the witness stand. Dillard was the defense lawyer who finally took Landers down. The bosses in Nashville sent Fraley in to clean up the mess. Said they needed a “stable” force in the office, which Fraley took to mean somebody old. They told him he could ride out his last few years with the TBI in the relative peace of northeast Tennessee. And now this, the worst fucking murder he’d ever seen.

  “What can I do for you?” Fraley said without shaking Dillard’s hand. He didn’t bother to stand. He wasn’t about to make it easy.

  “I’m not really sure,” Dillard said pleasantly. “To tell you the truth, I don’t really know why I’m here. All I know is that Lee Mooney said he called you, and he sent me up here to help.”

  “I don’t need any help, especially from a lawyer.”

  There was an awkward silence.

  “How can I help?” Dillard said, standing in front of Fraley’s desk, still smiling.

  “Go back to your own office. Let me do my job.”

  “I’d love to,” he said. “But my boss sent me up here. First day on the new job and all. Probably wouldn’t be good if I told him to go to hell. So here I am.”

  “I didn’t know a law degree qualified a person to be a homicide investigator.”

  A puzzled look came over Dillard’s face. He stood looking at Fraley for a moment; then he smiled again and said, “Excuse me.”

  Fraley watched the man as he walked back out the front door. He thought he was rid of the lawyer, but about fifteen minutes later Fraley looked up from his desk again to see Dillard walk back through the front door and straight past the secretary. He was carrying a bag in his left hand. He walked into Fraley’s office, grinned, and stuck out his right hand.

  “Hi, I’m Joe Dillard,” he said. “I think maybe we got off to a bad start. I brought you some coffee and a couple of sticky buns from Perkins.”

  Fraley looked at him deadpan, but decided grudgingly to at least shake his hand. “I know who you are,” Fraley said.

  “Mooney told me,” Dillard said.

  “Told you what?”

  “That you can’t resist sticky buns. I called him from the car and he said I should bring you sticky buns.” Dillard opened the bag. “How about it?”

  Fraley wanted to say, Fuck a bunch of sticky buns, but that wasn’t what came out of his mouth. What came out of his mouth was, “So you think you can bribe me with sweets?”

  “Hope so. I don’t have much money.”

  “You’re a lawyer,” Fraley said. “You’ve got more money than God.”

  Dillard reached into the bag, pulled out a Styrofoam cup of coffee, and set it in front of Fraley. He pulled out a paper plate and a plastic fork, set those down, and then plopped a sticky bun on the plate. “You want me to eat it for you, too?” he said, licking the sticky stuff off his fingers.

  Fraley decided maybe he wasn’t as bad as they’d made him out to be.

  “Sit,” Fraley said.

  Dillard took his jacket off and sat down across from Fraley. He took the lid off of a second cup of coffee.

  “Long night?” Dillard said.

  “The longest.”

  “Me, too. I couldn’t sleep.”

  “So enlighten me,” Fraley said. “What do you think you’re supposed to be doing here?”

  “Extra set of eyes, maybe. Extra set of hands.” Dillard licked some more of the sticky bun goo from a thumb. “After you catch whoever did this, I’ll be the one who handles the case in court, and I think Mooney wants me in from the beginning.”

  “He told me he was sending you up here to make sure I didn’t make any mistakes.”

  “From what I’ve heard about you, you don’t make mistakes.”

  “So you’ve been checking me out.”

  “And you haven’t been doing the same?”

  Fraley shrugged his shoulders.

  “That’s what I thought,” Dillard said. “Listen, I’m not here to watch over you. I’m just here to help any way I can.”

  Fraley took a big bite of the sticky bun. Cinnamon, butter, sugar … Damn, it was good. “So where do you want to start?” Fraley said.

  “Maybe by telling me what kind of evidence you’ve gathered so far.”

  “I got casts of footprints that are useless until I find the feet that match them. I got casts of tire prints that are useless until I find the tires that made them. I got nine-millimeter shell casings that are useless until I find the guns that spit them out. I got a bunch of slugs and I’ll have more after the medical examiner finishes the autopsies. I got two Caucasian adults, a male and a female, shot six times each. Two little kids, one six years old and one seven months, shot three times each. All four of them shot in the right eye. After the adults were shot, someone tucked their arms against their sides and then placed the dead children at right angles across their knees in what appears to be the shape of a cross of some sort. The medical examiner called me a few minutes ago and said that after she cleaned up the father, she discovered that someone had carved a little message in his forehead.”

  “A message?”

  “Yeah. It took her a little while to figure out what it was. I guess whoever carved it wasn’t much of an artist.”

  “What did it say?”

  “ ‘Ah Satan.’ ”

  �
� ‘Ah Satan’? What do you think it means?”

  “Who knows? The father also had an upside-down cross cut into the side of his neck. She decided to check on the others, and it turns out that all four of them have these little upside-down crosses carved into their necks. And take a look at these.”

  Fraley reached for some photographs and set them down on the desk in front of Dillard. The photos were of the bodies at the crime scene, taken from directly above.

  “Does the positioning of the bodies mean anything to you?” Fraley asked.

  The children had been placed across the adults’ thighs. Dillard stared at the photos, then looked up at Fraley.

  “Crosses,” he said.

  “That’s what I was thinking. Maybe upside down, since they’re across the legs instead of the shoulders. Do you know anything about upside-down crosses?”

  “Some kind of satanic symbol maybe. I think they call them inverted crosses.”

  “Looks like devil worshipers.”

  “Either that or somebody wants you to think so. Have you identified all of the victims?”

  “They’re local,” Fraley said, “but they’ve only been here about a year. Bjorn Beck, thirty years old, address is 1401 Poplar Street. Clerk at a hotel over by the mall. His wife, Anna, thirty years old, worked at Starlight Marketing selling vacations over the phone. Else, six years old, just started first grade a few weeks ago. The little boy’s name was Elias, seven months old. One of their neighbors said they went to a Jehovah’s Witness convention in Knoxville yesterday. Haven’t confirmed that yet. They were driving a 2001 Chevrolet van, maroon. We’ve got a nationwide alert out on the van.”

  “No witnesses?”

  “Not that we know of. We canvassed within a mile of the scene. Nobody saw anything unusual. There’s a guy who was checking out a building site about a quarter mile away who heard the shots and called it in, but he didn’t go anywhere near it. As a matter of fact, he said he got cold chills when he heard the shots and headed in the other direction.”

  “What about family?”