Justice Lost

by Scott Pratt

  There was something I wanted to talk to Granny about, though, and I was worried about how she would react. The Tiptons had made a great deal of money selling prescription drugs over the years. The market was huge and growing by the day. I didn’t know exactly how their operation worked, but Granny had obviously figured out a way to secure a reliable supplier because I hadn’t seen any signs that they were manufacturing the drugs. I figured the Tiptons then sold the pills to distributors, who sold to dealers, who sold to users. That was the way other operations I’d seen throughout my career worked, and they were probably the same. Granny had mentioned moving into Knox County when I was elected, but I didn’t want her dealing drugs in the county where I was the DA.

  When I was doing the rubber-chicken circuit, I’d heard of all the devastation prescription pills were causing: the suicides, the overdoses, the breaking up of marriages and alienation of extended families, the extremely ugly damage the drugs had inflicted on innocent children. I’d decided I couldn’t condone it. I wanted to spend time and resources going after the people who brought drugs into the county and ruined people’s lives. I wanted to shut down doctors who operated pill mills. District attorneys around the country were banding together and beginning to file lawsuits against the drug manufacturers who made billions and didn’t give a damn about the carnage their products caused. I could handle the gambling, but I didn’t want to stand idly by and look the other way while Granny and her family imported drugs into Knox County.

  I walked over to Granny, who was standing by the fire wrapped in a heavy coat and wearing a stocking cap on her head.

  “Can we talk for a little while?” I said.

  “Sure, let’s take a walk.”

  There was no snow on the ground, but it was in the thirties, with a slight, damp breeze blowing. The ground was firm beneath my feet, and the fire cast a warm glow and caused shadows to jump along the ridges and trees that looked like ancient spirits who had come out to dance at the edge of the forest.

  “Have you gotten started at your new job?” Granny said.

  “I have. Didn’t have any choice, really, and I haven’t gotten much done. But I went in Wednesday and have been pretty much nonstop ever since. We even met with a bunch of employees for most of the day today.”

  “Terrible what happened to Morris,” she said. “I suppose I could understand if they thought Morris would turn rat on them, but his wife? That wasn’t right.”

  “They didn’t just kill his wife. They killed his girlfriend, too.”

  “That young girl that was in the news that got murdered the same night? That was Morris’s girlfriend?”

  “Yeah. Morris apparently gave her drugs to sell and to take. Talk about dating the wrong guy at the wrong time. And the lawyer who got shot in his car was Morris’s bagman. They definitely wanted to shut everybody up.”

  “You got any ideas on who might have done it?” Granny said.

  “I have suspicions. I was hoping you might help me out.”

  “It was probably Roby Penn,” Granny said.

  “Could have been,” I said. “I’ve been hearing about him for months, and none of it has been good.”

  I didn’t know why, but I was uncomfortable sharing what I’d seen when I was sitting on the water the night Morris was killed. I didn’t want to tell her about the pearl-handled pistols. Besides, I couldn’t positively identify anyone. I hadn’t gotten a look at a single face.

  “From everything I know about Roby Penn,” Granny said, “he’s a bad hombre and getting worse by the minute. He has to go, and soon.”

  “How?” I said.

  “We’re counting on you, Darren. You’ll figure something out.”

  I was beginning to wonder whether I really could do anything about Roby Penn. He seemed so deeply ingrained in what was going on in the county, and he was so violent, that I didn’t know whether I could take him on. I decided I’d worry about it later. “Do you by any chance have any idea what happened to that marine? You’ve heard about him, right?”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard, and I think I know what happened. There’s a big network of men who attend those bare-knuckle fights in counties all over the Appalachians. They send out mass text messages when the fights are going to happen. Eugene and Ronnie know more about it than I do, but they’ve told me some things. The mass text seems like a stupid way to operate because it seems to me the cops could come in, grab up one phone, and they’d have everybody on the list. But the police just aren’t interested in what they’re doing, because they do it in counties where they know they can pay people off.”

  “Right, but back to the question. Do you know who killed Gary Brewer?”

  “The word I got is that when the fight started, the marine knocked the boy he was fighting—name’s Harley Shaker out of Cocke County—knocked him down and spat on him. Now I don’t know Harley Shaker personally, but I know some of the Shaker family, and I would think that if you spit on one of them, even during a fight, you would do so at your peril. It’d be looked at the same as pissing on him.”

  “So Brewer spit on this Harley Shaker, and Shaker beat him to death?”

  “That’s what people who ain’t supposed to be saying anything are saying.”

  “Heard anything about what happened to his body?”

  Granny shook her head. “When something like that happens, everybody runs. So I haven’t heard anybody say what happened to the body. My guess, though, is that Roby Penn would have had to take care of it. It happened at his place, from what I hear. He would have cleaned up the mess.”

  I was wearing gloves, but my fingers were beginning to tingle so I shoved my hands in my jacket pocket.

  “What else do you know about Roby Penn?” I said.

  “Quite a bit, but probably not as much as I should. They say you should keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Roby’s an enemy and he doesn’t even know it. I should know more about him. I know his family is from around here, that he had kinfolk who served in World War II, and that he enlisted and went to Vietnam. Wound up getting wounded. I know that a couple of years after he got out, the state government came in and wanted a piece of his property to build a highway. He told them to go to hell, so they took it under eminent domain. When they came out with the bulldozers to start the work, Roby started firing at them with a deer rifle. He could have killed several of them, but he didn’t. Still, they gave him six years in prison for it. Then his son got killed in Iraq by his own guys. What do they call that? Friendly fire?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. Friendly fire.”

  “The army tried to cover it up. Roby stayed on them, though, and the truth finally came out. Several years ago, after he’d done the six years in prison, he quit filing income tax returns and quit paying taxes. That cost him another year, but he had to go to a federal pen. So he’s had run-ins with local, state, and federal governments, and he hates them all. He’s in his midsixties now, and these murders tell me he might be going off the deep end.”

  “So you want me to go at Roby the old-fashioned way or the newfangled way? Old-fashioned is figure out a way to get him into a confrontation and kill him. Newfangled is the cop way. Get informants in, do surveillance, and get him on tape. Find out who was with him when he killed Morris and his wife and jumped in the boat. Put all of them on trial and in prison.”

  Granny stopped and looked up at me. “Jumped in the boat? What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing. Just a theory. I’ve already heard around the office that they escaped from Morris’s house on the water.”

  She gave me a look that told me she didn’t necessarily believe me, but she turned and started walking again. “I don’t think you’re going to get him the cop way. Do you know the tie between Roby Penn and the sheriff?”

  “I think I’ve heard they’re related, but I don’t know how exactly.”

  “Roby is Tree Corker’s mother’s oldest brother, which makes him Tree’s uncle.”

  “Nepotism at
its finest,” I said.

  “That’s how it’s usually done. Now what was it you want to talk to me about?”

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  “Must be bad,” she said.

  “Granny, you’ve been so good to me, and I know when I agreed to do this district attorney thing I said you could do whatever you want, but I’ve changed my mind about part of it. I’d like to ask you to please not sell any drugs in Knox County. When I was out campaigning, I talked to so many people whose families had been devastated by drugs, people whose lives had been ruined. You can take on as many gambling rackets as you want, and if you insist on doing the drug trade, I won’t go back on what I said, but would you please consider not selling the drugs in Knox County? It would be a huge favor to me.”

  “We could build that county into a million-dollar-a-year enterprise just with the pills,” she said. “Probably more.”

  “You’ll make twice that off the gambling.”

  “You know the old saying ‘You must be talking out of your butt because your mouth has to know better?’”

  “But the gambling is still good, right? With the other money you’re already pulling in from other counties, how much do you need?”

  “I hate the drugs, Darren. Always have. Eugene and Ronnie handle most of that side of the business because it turns my stomach. The kind of people you have to deal with, the class of people, is just disgusting. That’s why we got out of it for a while. But it’s just so lucrative it’s hard to walk away, especially when you’ve been as poor as we were back in the days when my husband was alive and we went to church and followed the laws and acted like sheep in a herd. He had his little side hustles like the bar and a couple of trailers out back, but when he died, we barely had a pot to piss in, and I had to scratch and claw just to keep this place going and keep food in our bellies and clothes on our backs. That’s when I made up my mind I was going to get rich and wasn’t going to be poor ever again. There just can’t ever be too much money.”

  “So I can’t talk you out of it,” I said.

  She breathed deeply, stopped again, and looked me square in the eye.

  “We can make a deal,” she said. “You becoming the district attorney has been good, Darren. Good for you, good for us. But Roby’s gone off the deep end if he killed Morris and the others. I can’t say it for sure, but I’m usually right about these things. With Morris gone, Roby will dig in deeper than a tick in a dog’s neck and dare you or anybody else to try and stop him. You can try using your informants, you can try making arrests, putting pressure on people. Maybe eventually you’ll get enough to arrest and convict him, but it’s going to take a long time, and if you take your shot and you miss, he’ll come after you.”

  “So what are you saying, Granny?”

  “Kill him, Darren,” she said. “It’ll be just like Clancy. We’ll help you if you need us, and once it’s over, we’ll all be better off. And if you kill him, I promise we won’t sell a single pill in your county.”

  PART III

  CHAPTER 34

  The summons from the governor of the state of Tennessee came early Sunday morning in the form of a telephone call from Senator Roger Tate, negating the need for Tom Masoner, my new best buddy at the DA’s office, to get me some intros at the TBI. Senator Tate said I was to meet the governor, along with several other “heavy hitters,” at the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation’s headquarters in Strawberry Plains Monday at 8:00 a.m. sharp. The senator said neither he nor Claire would be attending.

  I walked in the next morning wearing my best suit—the charcoal one Claire had purchased for me before the political rally. When I walked through the door, the governor looked at me in a way that made me feel small and insignificant, and I suppose I was, compared with a couple of the others in the room. The governor—a Republican, Theo Bradbury—sat at the head of the table. He was flanked by the director of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, the commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Safety & Homeland Security, the chief of police of Knoxville, and the high sheriff of Knox County, Tree Corker. Noticeably absent were representatives from the federal government. There wasn’t a US attorney or an FBI agent in sight.

  “Gentlemen,” the governor said after everyone was seated, “I’m here to impress upon you the importance of solving these hideous murders that took place last Saturday. I mean, can you imagine the way the people of this district, and people all over Tennessee, are feeling at this minute? They’re feeling unsafe and wondering whether the people they’ve elected to represent them can protect them. The fact that a person or persons would walk into the home of an elected district attorney general and kill both him and his wife is simply unfathomable to me. The fact that an assistant district attorney general was murdered on the same night—in his car at an abandoned warehouse—is also extremely disturbing. I’ve heard rumors, though no one has been able to confirm them, that the young Saban woman who was killed that night was also involved with General Morris. This case has to be tied off with no loose ends, it has to have palatable explanations for the public, and it has to be done right away. Sheriff Corker, your department has immediate jurisdiction over the case. What can you share with us?”

  Corker looked uncomfortable. Beads of sweat were visible on his forehead, and his face was pinker than usual.

  “I agree, it’s horrible and it’s important,” Corker said. “We’ve put every resource we have into the case.”

  “What do you have? Are there any leads? Anything promising?”

  Corker shook his head. “I’m sorry, Governor, but we have very little right now.”

  “Have you interviewed any suspects?”

  The question came from Hanes Howell III, the director of the TBI, who was sitting to my left. He was in his midfifties, a balding, light-skinned black man who looked more like a superbureaucrat than a superagent. He’d been head of the agency for twelve years and had just been appointed by the governor to another six-year term. I’d heard early in my law career that the director of the TBI answered to no one and had done some research. It was true. He was appointed by the governor, but he had free rein. Nobody looked over his shoulder, which, I believed, was deemed necessary to make him an effective leader.

  “Unfortunately, we don’t have any suspects,” Corker said.

  “No suspects?” Howell said. “You have a man who is about to go up for reelection—and get badly beaten, from what I understand—who is murdered in his home along with his wife. This man is the district attorney and makes roughly a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, yet he lives on twenty acres on the lake in a six-thousand-square-foot home and has a garage full of luxury cars. Have you checked bank accounts, credit card receipts, safe-deposit boxes? Is his family wealthy?”

  “We’re checking into all of those things,” Tree said.

  “You’re checking? It’s been more than a week! What have you found?”

  “I don’t appreciate you talking to me in that tone of voice,” Corker said. “You have no jurisdiction here.”

  “Unless the new district attorney general asks me for help,” Howell said.

  Tennessee law allowed local district attorney generals to ask the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation for help on matters or investigations in which the local resources may not have been adequate.

  “We don’t need your help,” Corker barked. “We’re on it, I’m telling you. All of my investigators are on it, all of my people. We’re checking every lead, every angle.”

  “What about the girlfriend?” Howell said.

  “What about her?”

  “You’ve interviewed friends and family, gone through her financials, correct? Anything significant?”

  “The girlfriend isn’t my case. You’ll have to talk to the chief about her.”

  Howell turned his attention to the Knoxville police chief, a man named Jim Boswell. Boswell was nearing retirement. He looked tired and didn’t seem to want to be involved.

  “What
has your investigation revealed, Chief?” Howell said.

  “Not much other than she was having an affair with Morris. No forensics to speak of. We found a couple of small things and sent them off to the lab, but I’m not too hopeful.”

  I thought briefly about informing Boswell that two of his vice cops knew Leslie Saban well, but I decided to keep it to myself. I’d no doubt have to work with him in the future, and I didn’t think a couple of small-timers like Scott and Pence were worth burning the bridge.

  “What about Jim Harrison?” Howell said, turning his attention back to the sheriff. “Any theory as to why he was murdered?”

  “We’re looking into it,” Corker said.

  I wanted to reach across the table and slap Corker. He’d calmed down some, his complexion had lightened a bit, and he was becoming smug.

  “This absolutely will not stand,” Governor Bradbury said. “What about you, Mr. Street? Or I suppose I should call you General Street now, correct? Do you have any theories on just what is going on in this mess of a district you’ve inherited?”

  Not only did I have theories; I’d seen two of the murders that had been committed. However, that didn’t mean I had cases I could take to court and prove to a jury. But Roby Penn and Tree Corker had ramped things up significantly when they decided to silence their victims in The Election Massacre, as the papers had begun to call the murders.

  “I have some theories,” I said, “but I have to rely on the sheriff here to bring me proof, and so far, I haven’t seen anything. He hasn’t asked us to help with subpoenas or warrants. He hasn’t asked for a thing. So the only thing I can assume is that the sheriff isn’t at a point where he needs those things.”