Justice Lost

by Scott Pratt

  “I’ve always heard that all is fair in love and politics,” I said. “Do you mind telling me what you didn’t want to put on a billboard?”

  “Our people had tape and video and photos of Morris giving her drugs. She had a habit before they met that escalated. She wound up getting busted by the Knoxville cops. She asked him to use his influence to get her out of the jam, but these cops wanted money. So Morris apparently got the sheriff to start sending a fairly large amount of pills his way each month, and he gave them to Leslie Saban. She sold them and gave two vice cops a cut. Her charges were dropped.”

  “You just can’t make this stuff up,” I said.

  “How did you know about her, come to think of it?” Claire said.

  “I might have followed Morris one day and just sort of stumbled across her.”

  “And why would you have been following him?”

  “No particular reason. I was just curious about how he went about his day.”

  “What else did you know about her?”

  “Not much. The paper said she was a third-year law student at the University of Tennessee.”

  “She’d done an internship at the district attorney’s office,” Claire said. “That’s how they met.”

  I remembered thinking she was probably a law student, but I didn’t say anything to Claire about it. And I thought about the shoe box Morris was carrying the day I saw him go into her apartment. The box must have been full of drugs.

  “Has anyone from the sheriff’s department been in contact with you?” Claire said.

  “No, not a peep.”

  “I guess no news is good news as far as they’re concerned.”

  “I just hope they don’t try to pin any of these killings on me.”

  “There’s no way they could, is there?”

  “I don’t think so, but it’s happened to me before. So what now? Who takes over at the district attorney’s office?”

  “Generally, if an elected official dies in office, someone is appointed to replace him until the next election. But since the next election is only two days away and you’re obviously going to win because you’re now unopposed, there won’t be any point in putting someone else in the office. Normally, you wouldn’t take over until the first day of January, but under these circumstances, I think my grandfather will call the governor and persuade him to appoint you to replace Morris immediately.”

  “So I’ll start when? Wednesday?”

  “They’ll have a criminal court judge swear you in first thing Wednesday morning.”

  “Are you serious? I don’t think I’m ready.”

  I wasn’t ready. I’d never done anything remotely similar.

  “You don’t have any choice. You wanted to be the district attorney general, and now you’ve gotten what you wanted. It’s time to hit the ground running.”

  CHAPTER 31

  The cops finally did show up, around three o’clock in the afternoon. There were two of them, both men, one younger and one older. I didn’t recognize either of them as they flashed their badges at me, but there was a sleaze factor about them I noticed immediately. One introduced himself as Detective Henry Scott. He was a black man, about forty-five, with a potbelly and a closely trimmed goatee. He was wearing a brown leather jacket and tinted wire-framed glasses. He also smelled like a teenager on his way to the prom, the result of entirely too much repugnant cologne. The guy reminded me of someone straight out of the seventies. The other man was early thirties, an acne-scarred kid named Josh Pence with long, scraggly, sandy-blond hair, a beard, and a screw-you attitude. I’d cross-examined guys like them dozens of times in court and had learned that to them, lying was a second language. I knew before they put their badges away they were vice, most likely narcotics.

  I invited them in, which seemed to surprise them, and offered them bottles of water. We sat down at my kitchen counter, and I said, “What can I do for you gentlemen?”

  “Looks like you might be the new district attorney,” Henry Scott said.

  “Wednesday morning, from what I’m told.”

  “Heard about the murders last night?”

  “Is that a rhetorical question? Of course I’ve heard. Does this place look like a cave to you? I hated to hear it, too. I didn’t like Morris, but I didn’t want him dead. I was looking forward to putting him in jail after I beat him.”

  “That’s funny,” the young detective said, and he let out a short chuckle. “The thought of you putting people in jail.”

  The smirk he wore on his face was something that definitely needed to go, and I was in just the right mood to remove it.

  “Oh yeah, Pence? Was that your name, Pence? Why would you say that?”

  I already knew the answer, but I just wanted to bait him.

  “Because everybody and his brother knows you should be under the damned jail if not on death row.”

  “That right, wiseass? You got proof of that?”

  “You got some stones, man,” Pence said. “Everybody’s talking about it. I mean, running for district attorney after all the shit you’ve pulled and gotten away with? You’re a legend in your own mind.”

  “And you’re a punk with a smart mouth. I’d be careful about who I judge, especially when you’re nothing but a phony who goes out on the street, does drugs with people, gets them to trust you, and then busts them for trusting you. You’re worse than most of the criminals out there, as far as I’m concerned. You’re a professional snitch. A rat with a badge.”

  “Fuck you, man,” Pence said. “Maybe me and you should step outside.”

  “You go outside if you want. If you talk me into coming with you, you’ll just wind up in the hospital. You also might want to keep in mind that it won’t be long before you’re going to be bringing cases to my office for me to present to the grand jury. I’m sure you know the district attorney makes all the calls on all those cases. So before you open that piehole of yours again, you might want to try thinking things through a little.”

  “Whoa, now, whoa,” Scott said. “We’re getting off on the wrong foot here.”

  They were definitely getting off on the wrong foot. All I’d done, as far as I was concerned, was let them into my home. I was beginning to regret that decision, and they were extremely close to being rudely ejected.

  “What do you want?” I said.

  “Mind if I ask you where you were last night?” Scott said.

  “Yeah, I mind. I don’t talk to cops. I exercise my right to remain silent as a matter of principle. Why do you want to know?”

  “We’re investigating the death of Leslie Saban.”

  I thought about it for a second. Morris and his wife were killed in the county, which made the case Sheriff Corker’s jurisdiction. Harrison was killed at an abandoned warehouse in the county. Also Corker’s jurisdiction. But Saban lived in an apartment in the city.

  “You guys are vice,” I said. “I think we’ve already established that. You’re not homicide, so why are you out investigating a murder?”

  “We do double duty when one of our informants gets popped,” Scott said.

  Shit. The cops Claire had told me about were sitting in my kitchen. Two dirty cops, having taken advantage of both Leslie Saban and Stephen Morris. I couldn’t resist having a little fun at their expense.

  “Leslie Saban was an informant? So you know she was sleeping with Morris.”

  Scott’s eyebrows raised, and his mouth dropped open a little. He looked over at his partner, then back at me. “What makes you think she was sleeping with Morris?”

  My patience was running thinner by the second, but I really wanted to mess with their heads. Instead, Scott had apparently decided to play some mind games of his own.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “She was sleeping with him. You know it and I know it.”

  “We didn’t know she was sleeping with him,” Scott said.

  “Man, you guys are in way over your heads,” I said. “Was everything Stephen Morris touched cor
rupt? The way I understand it, you two got lucky and popped Leslie Saban on a possession with intent to resell, a felony, and she got her boyfriend, Stephen Morris, to ask you to back off. But you guys had no doubt heard that Morris is a corrupt prick, so you decided to shake him down a little. In exchange for agreeing to drop the charges, you got Morris to agree to get yet another member of the law enforcement community to provide Leslie with enough pills so that she could sell them and make a good profit. You two took a percentage of that profit. Ring a bell? I know what you’re wondering right now. Where is this man getting his information? Especially because the information is accurate. Am I right? Do you feel like you’ve taken a hit of LSD right now? Are your minds absolutely blown?”

  Both of them looked like they were about to vomit.

  “You, Detective Scott, probably needed a new leather jacket or a nice car for your girlfriend. Detective Pence probably has a really serious Viagra addiction. So you set it up, and you probably let the other dealers around know that Leslie was protected so nobody robbed her or killed her. But somebody obviously didn’t get the message. I swear, this whole town is a cesspool. The county is bad, but I didn’t know until recently that Morris had scams in the city, too. So why did you come by here, really? Why would you even think I killed Morris’s girlfriend?”

  “Because it’s what you do, man,” Pence said. “You wiped out your competition, his wife, his girl, and his best friend all in one night, and we intend to prove it.”

  He was trying to act tough, but the bravado wasn’t working.

  “Yeah, well, good luck with that one,” I said. “You can go now. In the meantime, I suggest you both resign before I get settled into the office Wednesday and start looking around at corruption in the city’s narcotics division. You might even want to leave the state.”

  CHAPTER 32

  I hit the ground running just a few days later. There were thirty-five lawyers in the office besides me—thirty-six until Jim Harrison was murdered. There was a support staff of thirty-six that included receptionists, victim-witness coordinators, a legislative liaison, three investigators, grant writers, and several others who performed a variety of jobs.

  The first couple of days I was in office, courts were in session all over the county so I couldn’t just shut everything down and meet with everyone. I had a secretary call Morris’s father and ask where his family wanted the things from his office moved. Then I asked her to hire a moving company to take Morris’s things where his father directed. I know it must have appeared hard-hearted to those in the office, but the space was already tight and there really wasn’t anything else I could have done. Meanwhile, I watched the news reports very closely. Sheriff Tree Corker said they were all over this investigation, that they would find the killer or killers of Stephen Morris and his wife and Jim Harrison if they had to chase them to the gates of hell.

  All you have to do is chase yourself into the bathroom and look in the mirror, I thought.

  That Saturday morning, a week after the murders, at seven, I rented a banquet room at a hotel in Knoxville out of my own pocket and made sure everyone in the office knew that attendance was mandatory. Claire came with me. I’d asked her to stay on a couple of extra weeks to help me get things organized, and she’d agreed. She already had an organizational chart for the office prepared. All we had to do was fill in the boxes with real people.

  I also rented a suite in the motel where I could interview people privately while Claire talked to the group. She outlined the organizational chart and informed them how things would be run in the future. The dockets would be tightened up. Cases wouldn’t be continued without a legitimate reason. If a police officer was subpoenaed to court and didn’t show up for his or her case, it would be dismissed and his shift commander and the police chief would be notified immediately. It was the same with the sheriff’s department. If officers were going to arrest people and bring cases, they had to show up for court.

  I started interviewing the lawyers who had been with the DA’s office the longest, and I asked them four questions: What did they think about Morris? What did they think about Jim Harrison? What did they think about Ben Clancy when he was the district attorney? And what did they think about the job the investigators in the office were doing? I encouraged them to be open and honest and promised their answers would remain confidential. They were leery of me, of course, but one of them, a salt-and-pepper-haired, fifteen-year veteran named Tom Masoner who prosecuted violent crime in criminal court and didn’t seem to care much about what anybody thought of him, spoke right up.

  “Morris was spineless, and I think he was a criminal,” Masoner said. “I hate to speak ill of the dead, but he had to be skimming money, and a lot of it, from somewhere. Go take a look at his house and how he lived. I knew him when he was an assistant DA, before he beat Clancy, and he lived very frugally. Maybe he inherited a ton or maybe his wife hit the lottery, but he invited me to his house about six weeks ago and I was stunned. Luxury everywhere.”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s one of the things I became aware of during the campaign. What about Jim Harrison? What did you think of him?”

  “A secretive weasel whose only purpose seemed to be to follow Morris around with his nose up his ass.”

  “Clancy?”

  “Don’t get me started. What he did to you was terrifying. If my wife hadn’t just given birth to our second child, I would have quit over that.”

  “What do you think happened to Clancy?”

  Masoner smiled and winked at me. “I think someone he railroaded—and you weren’t the only one he railroaded—removed him from the gene pool. And if someone removed him from the gene pool, that someone did the rest of us a favor.”

  “Do you know the investigators who work in the office?”

  “Of course. Their real names are Colton, Peete, and Dufner, but I call them Wynken, Blynken, and Nod. You know the poem? They’re sleepy children in search of fantasy fish. They never catch a thing. They do nothing. Have you seen them?”

  “As a matter of fact, I haven’t.”

  “They go about nine hundred pounds between the three of them. I guarantee you they’re sleeping through the meeting downstairs right now and they wiped out half the pastry table before the rest of us got near it.”

  “So they don’t get out and investigate? They don’t make cases?”

  “Didn’t you hear me? They eat doughnuts. If you want to find them at nearly anytime during the day, you can go to the break room. There’ll be about a ninety percent shot they’ll be stuffing their faces.”

  I smiled at him, leaned toward him, and reached my hand out. “You’re my guy,” I said.

  He shook the hand and said, “What do you mean?”

  “You’re going to be second in command in the office. I need someone I can trust, and although I’ve known you for only about ten minutes, I think I can trust you. You’re going to decide which lawyers get assigned to the criminal courts. I want aggressive litigators and trial lawyers, not pussies who plea-bargain everything on the docket. If there’s deadwood, figure out a way to get rid of it and recruit some real lawyers. I’ll find a way to get you a raise. You up for that?”

  Masoner nodded and smiled back at me. “Finally, a man who recognizes true talent when he sees it.”

  I thought Masoner might, eventually, come to the realization that I was a man who operated in the gray areas of the law, that things weren’t always rigid. But I also thought he might be okay with it, as long as I was able to keep him from knowing too much. Besides, I wasn’t planning on running a dirty office. It would be clean, and I was sincere about getting aggressive trial lawyers and litigators into the criminal courts. I just hoped he’d be able to deal with my affinity for the Tipton family—and maybe certain other things—if the need arose.

  “I think we’re going to get along well,” I said. “And I’m going to have some stuff coming down the pike I think you’ll enjoy.”

  “What kind of stuff
?”

  “Can’t tell you yet. I think I trust you, but not enough.”

  “Sounds like fun. When do I start this housecleaning?”

  “Monday, but before you do, I need to ask you another question. How well do you know the TBI agents in the Knoxville office?”

  “I know all of them pretty well.”

  “I need an intro. And it needs to be a good one.”

  CHAPTER 33

  At Granny’s request, that Saturday night Claire and I made a trip up the mountain to visit the Tiptons. Granny hadn’t told me she was planning a party, but that’s exactly what it was. A victory party for the new district attorney of Knox County was being held on top of a mountain in Sevier County by a woman who had committed plenty of criminal acts during her lifetime and would no doubt commit more. It was cold on the mountain that night, so the extended Tipton family, several people I didn’t know, Claire, and I ate in Eugene’s house, which was much larger than Granny’s. It was one of those grand-scale log cabins, and it was beautiful. Once we’d eaten and the table was cleared, four guys started pulling musical instruments out of cases, and before I knew it, a full-blown, knee-slapping bluegrass concert was going on in Eugene’s living room. People spilled out onto the wraparound deck, and Eugene and Ronnie built a huge fire about a hundred feet from the cabin. I tried to stick with beer, but when the Tiptons were involved, moonshine inevitably became a part of the party. Even Claire gave in to Granny’s persuasion, and it wasn’t long before I saw her loosen up and look at me in a way that made me think I’d best keep my distance from her or we’d wind up doing something we’d later regret.

  The people at the party were the Tiptons’ friends and employees. A few of them looked vaguely familiar—I’d probably seen them at the last party I’d attended at Granny’s—but for the most part I didn’t know a soul outside of the Tipton family and Claire. Granny had made an impromptu speech before we ate and announced to everyone that I was the new district attorney of Knox County and that some very lucrative new opportunities were going to be opening up for their family “business.” Everybody seemed to be in a fine mood, and I was definitely the guest of honor and the man of the hour.