by Paul Heald
She looked up. The judge was nodding and seemed satisfied with what he was hearing. As her subordinate returned from the bench with a confident wink, Melanie nodded, pointed to the phone cupped carefully in her hand, and went out into the hallway to make a call to Clarkeston.
She leaned against the wall outside the courtroom and listened to Murphy’s story. The reporter had obtained the personal records of a priest he suspected had shielded the murderer of Diana Cavendish, only to have them and his computer stolen from his house the following day. She asked him where the papers came from and who knew he had them, but he insisted that no one who knew had any motive to break into his house. Before Murphy could say anything more, the police arrived and he hung up abruptly to talk with Sheriff Johnson, leaving Melanie staring at her phone. None of it made a whole lot of sense.
First of all, who would have any interest in a bunch of boxes stored in a church closet for years? And why would the sheriff come out to the house for an ordinary burglary? It could just be a random crime, but Murphy said nothing else had been taken. His wife’s jewelry collection was still intact and their new fifty-two-inch HD television was still sitting in the living room. She cracked open the door to the courtroom. The young attorney seemed comfortable sitting alone at the table, shuffling papers in response to a new round of questions by the judge. Melanie shut the door carefully. No one had held her hand during her first plea proceeding. Satisfied that her help was not needed, she walked briskly over the marble floor to a bank of elevators, which took her up to the twentieth floor.
She nodded absentmindedly at a colleague, who stepped in as she exited, and walked down the hall to her office. Although the message light on her landline was blinking, she ignored it, walked over to the window, and scowled at the parking lot. An unsettled feeling had begun roiling in her stomach as soon as she got Murphy’s text, and hearing his brief synopsis of events in Clarkeston had intensified the sensation. She was proud of her hard-headed approach to investigations and prosecutions, but she had also come to trust her instincts. And right now something was tickling her Spidey-sense.
All journalists had enemies, but a daylight burglary was an unusual operation. Could it have been prompted by Murphy’s renewed investigation of a five-year-old murder? As unlikely as it seemed, the connection could not be dismissed. She texted the reporter and asked him to call her back as soon as the cops left. Three exclamation points. In the meantime, she called and left a message for Professor Stanley Hopkins in Los Angeles to get an update on his search for Sweaty Palm Productions, the registered owner of Mygirlfriendsbikini.com.
She fidgeted in her chair, trying to decide what to do next. The draft of an appellate brief in a search-and-seizure case sat on her desk waiting to be proofread, but it was not due to be filed for another week, and the attorney she was supervising on the case was a good writer. She gave the first couple of pages a quick scan. She had tried the case herself two years earlier, an anonymous tip and a questionable wiretap leading to a huge drug bust. Now the defendants were challenging the FBI investigation that led to their convictions. She stopped in the middle of the recitation of facts at the beginning of the brief and impulsively checked her email. Nothing of interest. Back to the brief. She was so distracted that she found her own distractibility annoying.
She kicked back from the desk and stared out the window, dying to ask James Murphy exactly who knew that he had taken the boxes home from his church. She forced herself back to the FBI drug appeal and was scribbling a comment in the margin of the brief when the phone finally rang.
“So, who knew that you had the boxes?” She slid over a yellow pad and doodled to make sure her pen was working.
“No one except the priest and the church choir director,” he explained. “Father Carter helped me carry them to my car.” He paused for a moment. “I’ve been thinking about this. Carter had permission to open the boxes from Mrs. Rodgers—that’s the widow—but she wouldn’t have known that I had them. I don’t even know if Carter told her about me at all—I rather doubt it.”
“What about your wife? She must have known.” The question was met with dead air. “Are you still there?”
“Yeah,” he sighed, “I’m still here, but she’s not. She’s staying at her sister’s for a while.”
“All right,” she replied, ignoring the family drama. “Anyone else? Cleaning lady? Coworker you talked to?”
“No one.” His voice evidenced his frustration. “This must have something to do with the murder and cover-up, but I don’t have a clue who could have known I had the freakin’ papers.”
“How did Sheriff Johnson behave when he came over?” She changed directions, curious about the cop who had given her the brush-off during her brief visit to Clarkeston the week before.
“I don’t know. Porter’s always been a little self-important.”
“Did you tell him what was in the boxes?”
“No.” He paused. “Not that he asked. I told the first cop who arrived that the boxes just contained a bunch of personal papers. Maybe he told the sheriff. Oh, and one of my neighbors came over when she saw the cruisers in the driveway and told the cops that she’d seen a UPS truck parked in front of my house while I was gone. I figure that’s who did it, unless UPS dropped off a package and the guy who broke in stole it too.”
She advised the reporter to install a burglar alarm in his house and to continue to think about who might have an interest in the stolen papers. When they hung up, she reached over her desk and grabbed her cell phone.
Whoever took the papers and Murphy’s computer had probably waited until the reporter went to work and then broken in. Was it just random or had he been targeted deliberately? She slapped a palm down on her desk and cursed. She had alerted the anonymous woman in Arkansas. That bitch knew Murphy had been asking questions, because Melanie herself had ratted him out.
She sat down, opened up the FBI database on her computer, and dialed the Arkansas number. This time she would be asking the questions, starting with the answerer’s name, location, the name of her superior, and whether she knew anything about a UPS truck picking up boxes without permission in Clarkeston, Georgia. Maybe the number was connected to an FBI office, maybe not. Just because the FBI database indicated that all inquiries about Jacob Granville be directed to a particular number did not mean that the bureau was directly involved. It could be a number at the Justice Department, another US attorney’s office, a state law-enforcement office, or even a private contractor. But whoever answered had some explaining to do. After three rings, a recorded voice announced that the number had been disconnected. Swearing aloud, she called it again and got the same metallic voice on the end of the line.
She stared at the phone for a second and then slammed it back down in its cradle. Really? Did people really think it was that easy to evade a US attorney? Did they not know that she was a fuckin’ Mountie? She always got her man, or woman as the case may be. Of course, the anonymous voice on the end of the Arkansas phone line might be utterly unconnected to the break-in. The woman had certainly not killed Diana Cavendish, but Melanie didn’t care. No one was going to treat her like a school-yard snitch and then presume to magically vanish. Not when there were questions to be answered.
Melanie was not a conspiracy theorist. Usually she reveled in ripping conspiracy theories to shreds. She loved prosecuting paranoid tax objectors for the IRS. All of them had some sort of theory why the government, or possibly the Trilateral Commission, was out to get them, but in the end they all turned out to be drug dealers, child pornographers, slumlords, or dog fighters trying to hide their earnings. But even a conspiracy skeptic would find it hard to ignore the possibility that her prior contact with the Arkansas number was related to the break-in at Murphy’s house.
In any event, she was not just going to forget and let go of Murphy’s little mystery. She picked up her cell phone and placed a call to Clarkeston. “We’ve got to talk,” she said, interrupting the reporter’s gree
ting. “Could I come down on Saturday?”
He hesitated for a moment. “I was planning on visiting Jacob Granville’s parents in Vidalia.”
“I’ll come with you,” she volunteered impulsively. “We can talk in the car.” They solidified the time and place of their rendezvous and soon she was back on the phone with another man, someone she had not spoken to for six months.
Samuel “Slammin’ Sammy” Goodson III had been her lover and off-and-on fiancé for almost five years, but the two had never really been friends. Even so, she knew that he would pick up when she called. She had been the one to end their relationship, but he would probably be amenable to doing a little snooping on her behalf. As the head of a large FBI field office in Minnesota, he had access to databases and information that she did not. If anyone could quickly uncover the people behind the disconnected Arkansas number, he could.
“Baby!” He exclaimed with genuine enthusiasm when he heard her voice. “Long time, no hear! How’s everything in Hotlanta?” His enthusiasm sounded genuine despite the fact that in their last conversation, she had not sugarcoated the conclusion that she had wasted almost half a decade on a handsome, charming, intelligent, insincere, self-absorbed man-whore who was incapable of truly caring for anyone or anything other than his obsessively waxed ’67 Corvette. The length of their relationship had been a testament to how seventy-hour workweeks, frequent travel, and pent-up sex drive could keep even the most doomed couple together.
“It’s fine, Sammy,” she replied. “Still too many drug cases, but we did have an interesting human-smuggling case last month.” She cut the small talk and got right to the point of her call. “Speaking of interesting cases, I was hoping that you could help me with a bit of research. I was looking into an old kidnapping that happened about five years ago and when I ran the victim’s name through the general FBI database, all I got was a notation to call a phone number with an Arkansas area code. I talked to a woman there, but when I called back today to get more information, the phone was disconnected.” Her voice was as nonchalant as she could make it. If he sensed that she was desperate, he might want something in return. “Is there any way you could track down the origin of the number for me?”
“Can’t you just get a court order?” Despite her efforts to sound breezy, he was already on guard.
“Not yet.” She scrambled for an explanation. “It’s really early stages, and we don’t have any probable cause. In fact, it may even be an FBI number, in which case we don’t want to waste our time.”
He hummed into the phone for a moment. “I’ll tell you what. I’m coming to Atlanta in two weeks to do some recruitment interviews.” She knew what was coming even before he spoke. “When you have dinner with me, I’ll tell you what I’ve found.”
She failed to stifle a groan.
“For chrissakes, Mel, I’m not fucking Hitler or something. It’s just dinner.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she mumbled into the phone. “You’re right. We’re grown-ups. We should be able to have a meal together.”
“Excellent!” he said. “It’s a date!”
No, it was not a date, Melanie told herself, but Sammy could think whatever the hell he wanted to.
“Great,” she said, “and let me know when you’ve got something on that number.” When she hung up, she felt vaguely slimy, as if a mucilaginous tentacle had reached out across space and time to caress her. The worst thing wasn’t the memory of him, but rather the incomprehensible span of years when she had lacked the will to walk away, like the gormless meth-head who can’t figure out that leaving the trailer lab is the right move.
* * *
The Saturday morning traffic leaving Atlanta was blissfully clear, and Melanie cruised at eighty miles per hour into the Georgia countryside, sipping a double latte and rocking to the soundtrack to Legally Blonde: The Musical. Early summer was still touching the landscape with a light hand. She had the air conditioning on, but only because the sky was cloudless and the interstate was bathed in sunlight. In the shade it was still spring, and the hay fields and pine plantations she passed on the way to Clarkeston were swathed in shades of living green.
She arrived in Clarkeston twenty minutes early and decided to gas up at a crusty old station not too far from the historic center of downtown. Twenty years earlier, her co-clerk, Arthur Hughes, had introduced her to this wreck of a business, which sat on a prime corner, surrounded by upscale modern buildings. The station itself was brick, with a swooping roofline that made it look like a house. A battered green dinosaur on a sign out front declared it to be a Sinclair station, even though the brand had been defunct in Georgia since the late sixties.
Arthur had the widest nostalgia streak of any young man that she had ever met, and he refused to gas up anywhere else during their time together in Clarkeston. She had been less charmed by the place, but occasionally she had stopped by for a childhood treat that Arthur had discovered in the far corner of the station, an old-fashioned red soda machine shaped like a small freezer and filled with ice-cold bottles of orange and grape Nehi. After she paid the attendant for her gas—there were no self-serve pumps—she went in and found the machine still humming quietly next to a rack of Little Debbie treats. She slid a bottle of grape soda from the rack and cracked off the top against an opener screwed to the side. The cap dropped down into a metal box with a satisfying clink, and she stepped out into the sunshine to savor her fizzy madeleine.
What if she, like Arthur, had never left Clarkeston? Could she have been happy prosecuting smaller cases and maybe teaching criminal law at the college? She took a sip and coughed when the carbonation tickled its way up her nose. It was a stupid question. Arthur had married Suzanne, and hanging around would have been an act of self-flagellation. Leaving had been the right thing to do, but that didn’t mean that she was immune to the charm of a quieter life amid the warm red brick and spreading trees of Clarkeston.
She looked at her watch. If she wanted, she had time to drive past Arthur’s house and say hello. She turned onto Oak Street and slowed as she approached the familiar old house. Why was her heart suddenly pounding? She saw a beautiful young woman water the plants on the spacious porch that wrapped around two sides of a two-story Queen Anne. For a moment, she thought it was Arthur’s wife, but that was impossible. The girl bore a strong resemblance to her, but she looked barely in her twenties, younger even than Suzanne had been eighteen years earlier. It must be her daughter, Arthur’s step-daughter, who had been just a sweet little kid during the year she and he clerked together in Clarkeston.
Shit, I’m old, she thought, and the grim conclusion was confirmed when she saw Arthur pull into the driveway and trudge up the steps, bearing a touch of gray in his hair that had not been present at the judge’s funeral five years before. She watched him embrace his daughter and walk with her into the house, leaving the watering can underneath a hanging planter of pansies swaying in the breeze. She stayed in the car, watching the flowers and contemplating a breath-stealing parade of might-have-beens.
James Murphy’s house was also close to downtown, and she arrived five minutes early. She found him outside on his front porch, reading a newspaper and sipping a cup of coffee. He did not live in the grand older neighborhood where Arthur lived, but rather in the pre-WWII subdivision that lay just to the north. Nonetheless, he had a pleasant outside nook with a small swing under the eaves of his little brick bungalow. She pulled up behind his battered Civic and sketched a wave as she got out of the car and walked up the sidewalk.
She cast a glance back at his vehicle. “Do you mind if we take my car? I just gassed it up.”
He agreed with a smile and nodded at the bottle in her hand. “So you know about Cecil’s secret stash, I see.”
She laughed. “I used to clerk for the Judge, remember.”
“No.” He frowned and shook his head. “You never mentioned that before. I would have remembered.” She noted with satisfaction that she did not need to mention her former boss’s nam
e. During the civil rights era, the Judge had run much of the state of Georgia out of his Clarkeston courtroom. He had not only been the best-known federal judge in the state, but the most famous judge in the country not sitting on the Supreme Court.
“What year did you clerk?”
“1988 to ’89.”
The reporter nodded his head in the unspoken understanding that she had missed out on the juiciest civil-rights cases. If he had had a deeper sense of judicial history, he would have understood that those years were the high-water mark of the federal policing of state death-penalty appeals. She had watched in dismay as those cases ate up both of her co-clerks.
“Oh,” Murphy replied, “then you might know Arthur Hughes? I’m pretty sure he would have clerked around then. We sing together in a community choir.”
Although Clarkeston was a town of almost sixty thousand people, she was not surprised that the reporter and her former colleague were acquainted. The professional class in the town was pretty small, and after twenty years they were bound to run into each other.
“We clerked the same year,” she replied, “but I haven’t seen him since the Judge’s funeral. Say hi next time you bump into him.”
The journalist set his cup and saucer down on the concrete floor of his porch, flicked a crumb off his pants as he stood up, and then locked the door to his house. He was taller than she remembered and more athletic. He moved gracefully off the porch and waited for her to walk to the car. He really was a rather handsome guy. Too bad he was married, but whether they learned anything in Vidalia or not, it would be pleasant to spend a day in his company. Maybe there was just something intrinsically attractive about a man without a law degree.