by Scott Pratt
“Nathaniel Mitchell. They’ve already served the petition on Roscoe.”
“Then the son has money. Mitchell is the most expensive lawyer in Northeast Tennessee.”
“Zane is a developer,” Charlie said. “Builds big houses in the mountains for the nouveaux riche. Maybe he’s struggling because of the economic downturn in the housing industry, but I still don’t understand why he would go after his own father’s property.”
“You should get an affidavit from an expert that says Roscoe is competent and file a motion to have the petition dismissed,” I said. “Try to take them out of the game before it gets started. Once the discovery process gets underway, Mitchell will try to bury you in paper and he’ll make things as expensive as possible hoping your client will run out of money and give them what they want.”
“Roscoe won’t give them anything. He’s a stubborn old bird.”
“I want to meet him and talk to him,” I said. “If I’m going to help you out on a case, I want to know our client. Early Monday morning would be best for me.”
Her eyes brightened.
“You’ll do it, then? You’ll supervise me?”
I nodded again. “We’ll work something out as far as finding some space for you here.”
“How much of the five thousand do you want?”
“Keep it. You need it more than I do.”
Before I could say another word, she was on her feet and around the desk.
“Please let me hug your neck,” she said.
I stood, bent over, and opened my arms. She squeezed me so tightly and for so long I started to feel light-headed.
“Whoa, whoa,” I said. “I can’t help you if you strangle me to death.”
“Thank you, Mr. Dillard,” she said when she finally let me go. “You won’t regret this.”
A minute later, she’d picked up her pocketbook and was walking toward the door. Just before she walked out she turned.
“By the way,” she said. “The answer is no.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Tell Jack I said no. I don’t have a boyfriend.”
Chapter 2
LATER that afternoon, my cell phone rang. I looked down at the caller ID and smiled. It was my wife, Caroline, probably calling about where she wanted to eat for lunch.
“You need to go over to the Sullivan County jail,” she said when I answered, “and talk to a young man named Jordan Scott. I just got off the phone with his father. He’s been arrested for murder.”
“Murder? What murder?”
“It apparently happened this morning,” she said.
“I don’t want to get involved in a murder case, Caroline. I thought we talked about—”
“I know, I know,” she said, “but this one is different. You need to get over there right away. He needs help.”
The tone of her voice was urgent, which was uncharacteristic.
“Who did he supposedly murder?” I asked.
“A cop. He’s black, Joe. Just a kid, and he shot a white police officer. I think it’s going to be a bad one.”
“Then why do you want me to get involved?”
“Trust me,” she said. “I’ve been talking to his father for the past forty minutes. He’s a good kid from a good family. There are circumstances, Joe. This is something you need to do.”
“What circumstances?”
“I heard them from his father. If I tell you, then you’ll be getting your information third-hand. It’s better if you get it straight from him. If you aren’t comfortable representing him after you talk to him, then fine, don’t do it. But if half of what his father told me is true, you’ll take the case.”
“Which means I’ll probably get caught up in another firestorm.”
“Firestorms are what you do best, baby.”
The door buzzed and clanged, and I walked into a small interview room walled by concrete blocks of gunmetal gray and floored in gray linoleum. The sights, sounds and smells of county jails were routine to me, but the nagging feeling of claustrophobia never quite left me once I walked through the first, locked door.
The young man sitting at the round, steel table was wiry and strong, with a long neck and a pair of the biggest hands I’d ever seen. His ebony skin seemed to have been stretched tightly over his body like shiny, black cellophane. His kinky hair was thick and cropped close, his jaws square, sturdy and muscled. His physical presence reminded me of my son – all muscle and sinew, nothing extraneous. His eyes were the brown of chocolate syrup and he had deep dimples in his cheeks. He was handcuffed, shackled and waist-chained, wearing the green and white, striped jumpsuit and rubber flip flops that were standard issue at the Sullivan County Jail. Of the many jails I’d visited over the years, Sullivan County was one of the worst. It was overcrowded and filthy. Toilets and showers were stopped up, wiring was corroded and exposed, and the guards were cynical and abusive. If you believed what Winston Churchill once wrote – that you could judge a society by the way it treats its prisoners – then Sullivan County was a cruel and unforgiving place.
I set my briefcase down on the table and took out a legal pad and a pen.
“My name is Joe Dillard,” I said. “I’m a lawyer. Your father called and asked me to talk to you. Anything you say to me is strictly confidential, but I want you to know up front that I’m not your lawyer, at least not yet. I want to hear what you have to say before I decide whether I’m going to represent you. Are you okay with that?”
He nodded.
“Your name is Jordan Scott?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you know what you’re charged with, Jordan?”
“Murder.”
“Did you kill someone?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you know who you killed?”
“His name was Todd Raleigh. He was a deputy for the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Department.”
“Do you want to tell me why you killed him?”
“Because he deserved to die.”
Chapter 3
THIS is what I learned during my first conversation with Jordan Scott, who was well-mannered, articulate and intelligent:
Jordan had grown up in a middle-class home in Kingsport. His father worked as a machinist at Tennessee Eastman in Kingsport and his mother was a speech pathologist in the Sullivan County school system. Jordan had a sister named Della who was one year older and a brother named David who was three years younger and who suffered enough brain damage during a traumatic birth to be classified by those who make such determinations as “borderline mentally incapacitated.”
Jordan said he was a straight-A student at Dobyns-Bennett High School and an all-state athlete. He was an all-state running back in football, an all-state shooting guard in basketball, and won the state championship in the two-hundred meter hurdles in track his senior year. He had athletic and academic scholarship offers from Division I college programs all over the country, including the University of Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina and Duke.
But Jordan decided to stay close to home. He didn’t want to leave David, and although he was big, strong and fast enough to compete at the Division I level, he knew he wasn’t – and never would be – quite big enough, quite strong enough, or quite fast enough to compete with the freaks of nature in the NBA or the NFL. East Tennessee State University in Johnson City was only a thirty-minute drive from home. It was a Division I school with a decent basketball team, and it offered something else that appealed to Jordan – a medical school. There were only a handful of African-American doctors in the region, and Jordan believed he could be of some value to his community in that regard, so he chose ETSU over all the others and enrolled. His parents bought him a used car when he graduated from high school, and between the academic and athletic scholarship money he received, he was able to pay all of his school expenses, split an apartment with a teammate, and stick some money in his pocket each semester. Life was good.
During his freshman year, J
ordan maintained a 4.0 grade point average and led the basketball team in scoring and assists. He was named to the Atlantic Sun All-Conference team and was selected as Freshman of the Year. He also fell in love with a green-eyed, brown-skinned, Tara Banks look-alike named Holly Ross. Holly was from Ooltewah, a small town near Chattanooga. She was a volleyball player, a long, lean, reserved beauty who was studying biology and believed she was destined to help save the planet.
In May of Jordan’s sophomore year, after a season in which Jordan struggled with hamstring and ankle injuries and still put up even better numbers than his freshman year, Holly went out for a jog alone. As she ran along a path through a stretch of woods at the Mountain Home Veterans Administration Center across the street from the ETSU campus, she was attacked, brutally beaten and raped at knifepoint, thus becoming the third victim of a serial rapist who terrorized the region for the next several months. The police had not released information about the first two rapes to the public, hoping to catch the rapist without causing a panic, but after Holly was attacked, they changed their plan and sounded the public alarm. Three women had been raped in three different counties: one in Sullivan County, one in Carter County, and Holly in Washington County. Over the summer, three more women, all younger than twenty-five, suffered the same fate as Holly. A multi-county task force was formed as the police searched desperately for the rapist.
Holly spent two weeks in the hospital following the rape, and Jordan was there every day and night. She went home for the summer and fell into a deep depression. Jordan drove to Ooltewah twice a week to offer whatever love, care and support that Holly would accept. He went with her to some of her rape counseling sessions, and, little by little, she seemed to come back from the abyss. By the end of August, when classes at ETSU resumed, she’d decided to go back to school and rejoin her teammates on the volleyball team, despite the fact that the rapist was still on the loose and still attacking young women. Jordan was inspired by her courage. He proposed to her on the fifth day of September and gave her a ring. It would be a long engagement – they planned to marry the day after they graduated – but Jordan said he knew he’d found his soul mate.
Nine months later, with the rapist still on the loose and still committing rapes, Jordan was stopped for speeding in Sullivan County as he and Holly were returning to ETSU from dinner at his parents’ home. A Sullivan County deputy named Todd Raleigh walked up to the passenger window and leaned down. He recognized Jordan, and after giving him a short lecture on careless behavior, let him go. But as Raleigh spoke through the window, Jordan watched in horror as Holly broke down. Tears began to stream down her face and mucous ran from her nose. Her jaw muscles started to spasm involuntarily. She looked as though she’d come face-to-face with death. As soon as Raleigh went back to his cruiser, Jordan noticed the smell of urine. Holly had wet herself.
It took Jordan an hour to calm her down enough to speak. It was him, she said. The voice, the eyes, the smell. She was certain. Todd Raleigh was the man who had raped her.
What followed was a nightmare worthy of Dante. They called Holly’s parents, and the four of them went to the sheriff’s department together. They spoke to an investigator who immediately bumped them to the head of the investigative division, who bumped them to the chief deputy. What they were insinuating was ridiculous, they were told. Todd Raleigh was a dedicated officer with an impeccable service record. Holly’s attacker had worn a ski mask, so she’d been unable to provide police with a detailed description. She knew he was white, she knew approximately how tall he was and approximately how much he weighed. He’d left semen in her, though. Why didn’t they just get a DNA sample from Raleigh and either arrest him or eliminate him based on the results?
Not possible, she was told. To request a DNA sample from Raleigh would be akin to accusing him of rape. Besides, he had the same rights as anyone else. Without more evidence, they couldn’t force him to give a sample. In fact, if it came down to it, they would advise him against giving a voluntary sample. The chief deputy, a fat, red-faced, bellicose, belligerent individual named Matthew Bacon, blatantly accused Holly of lying. Quite the lawsuit she’d have, he said, if a white cop was accused of raping a young black woman. A college woman, at that. Sensational lawsuit. Was she trying to get rich at this innocent officer’s expense?
Jordan left the police department angry and frustrated. Holly was a mess. She retreated somewhere inside herself, into a psychological bunker where no one was allowed. He couldn’t even get her to speak. That night, while Jordan lay on the couch in Holly’s apartment, she went into the bathroom and slit her wrists with a razor blade. On the day she was buried, another young woman was raped.
Jordan became filled with a simmering rage. He also became obsessed with Todd Raleigh. He stopped going to class, didn’t take his finals, and stopped going to basketball workouts. He believed what Holly had said about Raleigh and was consumed with the idea of making Raleigh pay for what he’d done. But he did so in a measured, calculating fashion. He began stalking Raleigh the way a lion stalks a wildebeest, patiently, hiding in the shadows. He borrowed cars from friends and teammates who were too concerned about his well-being to question. The cars served as both camouflage and shelter during long hours of surveillance. He bought a pair of binoculars, took a shotgun from his father’s closet and kept it with him every time he followed or watched Raleigh. Within a week, he knew Raleigh’s routines, and on the fourth day of the second week, he got what he wanted.
Raleigh left his apartment at 5:30 a.m. and appeared to be going for a run. Nothing unusual. Raleigh went for a run every day, but he never ran at the same place and the times varied depending on the shift he was working. On this day, he drove to the parking lot of an abandoned bakery about a mile from a park near the Holston River just outside the Kingsport city limits. The morning was gray and misty, the sun not yet up. Jordan hung back, watching as Raleigh got out of his car and jogged off toward the park. He waited ten minutes and drove past the park. He didn’t see Raleigh, so he parked a couple of hundred yards down the road. He retrieved the shotgun from the trunk and slipped into a field adjacent to the park, moving low and slowly through the tall fescue. Jordan knew the park well – he’d run there many times in high school – so he worked his way to fence line on a rise that overlooked the southern end. Raleigh was nowhere in sight, and neither was anyone else. Jordan put his back against a poplar tree, laid the shotgun across his thighs, and waited. Just as the sun began to peek over the trees behind him, Jordan saw a small car pull into the parking lot. A solitary figure got out, walked to the rear of the car, and pulled a bicycle off a rack. It appeared to be a woman, though Jordan couldn’t quite tell from where he was. The rider guided the bike onto the asphalt path that wound through the park and started pedaling.
The attack happened in an instant.
The biker had circled the far end of the park and had just started along the western border when a figure emerged, seemingly from nowhere, throwing a shoulder into the biker like a linebacker. The biker went flying, and a second later was being dragged toward the bushes. Jordan sprinted from his hiding place to the spot where he saw the biker disappear. He listened, and above his own breathing, could hear muffled sounds of struggle among the leaves and the underbrush. He flipped the shotgun’s safety off and moved toward the sound.
The first thing Jordan saw were two sets of feet. Raleigh was grunting and cursing.
“Stop!” Jordan yelled, aiming the shotgun at the back of Raleigh’s head. “Get off of her!”
The ski-masked man turned and locked predatory eyes onto Jordan, who was less than ten feet away. The girl – Jordan didn’t even know her name – was bleeding from the nose and appeared to be half-conscious. Raleigh jumped up and tried to run, but the double-ought buckshot Jordan fired from the twelve-gauge blew half of his head off before he got ten feet.
Raleigh was dead.
Holly was avenged.
Jordan called the police and calmly waited for
them to arrive.
After listening to what he had to say, I sat back and folded my arms.
“How much of this did you tell the police?” I asked.
“I didn’t tell them anything other than I shot the man because he was raping the girl.”
“They didn’t question you?”
“They tried. I told them I wanted to speak to a lawyer.”
“Do they have the gun?”
“Yes.”
“Did the girl say anything to you before the police got there?”
“She was crying. I asked her if she was all right but she seemed to be afraid of me. I guess I can’t blame her since she saw me shoot the man. Am I going to spend the rest of my life in jail?”
“I don’t know, Jordan. It’s possible. I have a pretty good idea how they’ll come at you. They’ll say you went vigilante, and there’s no place for vigilantes in a civilized society. They’ll say Raleigh was running away when you pulled the trigger, so the danger to the girl had passed and there was no danger to you. They’ll say the amount of force you used was unreasonable, excessive under the circumstances. They’ll talk to people at the sheriff’s department and they’ll find out about the accusation Holly made against Raleigh. Then they’ll go back and talk to everybody you know and they’ll find out you’ve been skipping school and basketball practice. They’ll put it together, and when they do, they’ll start screaming pre-meditation, especially since you were carrying the shotgun with you in a city park on a Monday morning. They’ll say you were hunting Raleigh. They’ll play up the pre-meditation to try to get a first-degree murder conviction. They probably won’t ask for the death penalty, but you never know. If they convict you of first-degree murder, you won’t be eligible for parole for fifty-one years. Did you see a weapon on Raleigh, by the way?”
“He had a knife.”
“Did he make a move toward you? Were you afraid he was going to kill you?”