JD04 - Reasonable Fear

by Scott Pratt

  I was struck by the tenderness in Erlene’s voice when she spoke of them. In Northeast Tennessee, which is often referred to as the buckle of the Bible belt, most people would have regarded three strippers who moonlighted occasionally as hookers the same way they would regard a crackhead or a burglar. But Erlene spoke of them as though they were her children. She was proud of Krystal, fond of Lisa, sometimes frustrated by Kerrie. It took almost two hours to get basic information from her, because she broke down and sobbed time and time again. The guilt she felt was palpable, almost visceral. It was obvious that she blamed herself for their deaths.

  When I pulled into the parking lot at the marina, I saw Bates leaning against the black BMW he’d confiscated from a drug dealer a little over a year ago. His cowboy hat was perched atop his head at a slight angle and he was talking on his cell phone. I parked, got out of the truck, and looked out over the marina. There were at least a hundred and fifty water craft tied to the docks, everything from jet skis to huge house boats. A small, pale-blue building with an attached deck housed a grill and a bait shop, and there were two gasoline pumps on a dock below the deck. A short, heavy-set man wearing cut-off jeans, a wide-brimmed straw hat, and a loud Hawaiian shirt was pumping gas into a ski boat that was filled with young men that looked to be about my son’s age.

  I knew neither Bates nor I could board the boat if it was there. We’d have to have a search warrant for that, but there was nothing preventing us from taking a look around the outside. If we saw something that might be of evidentiary value to us, the “plain view” doctrine would apply and we’d be able to get a search warrant. I knew we might be able to get a warrant based solely on an affidavit from Erlene, but I preferred to have more evidence before I went to a judge.

  “That’s got to be him,” Bates said as he came off the car and stuck his cell phone in his shirt pocket. “A couple of my investigators do a lot of fishing out here. They said if it happens on the lake, Turtle knows about it. Said he’s a chubby guy who always wears a straw hat.”

  Bates and I stepped onto the dock just as the man was hanging the nozzle back on the gas pump. He turned to face us and grinned.

  “Well I’ll be,” he said. “If it ain’t the two most famous law men in the county. You’re both uglier in person than you are on TV.”

  He offered a meaty hand, and I took it.

  “Joe Dillard,” I said, “and this is Leon Bates.”

  “Jasper T. Yates,” he said. “Folks call me Turtle on account of I don’t move too fast.”

  Turtle’s face was covered with dark stubble and the bridge of his nose bent sharply to the right. He peered out from under the straw hat with bright eyes. In his jaw was a wad of chewing tobacco about the size of a golf ball.

  “We’re looking for a boat,” Bates said.

  “Which one?” Turtle said.

  “It’s called the Laura Mae. I believe it’s one of the big house boats.”

  “Be happy to show her to you if she was here, but she ain’t. She’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “As in adios, sayonara, bye-bye. Somebody took her out late yesterday evening and I ain’t seen her since.”

  “Who took her out?”

  “Some young feller. Never seen him before.”

  “Any idea where he went?”

  “One of the fishermen told me he saw her being pulled out of the water over at the Winged Deer Park ramp.”

  “Does that happen often?” I said.

  “It happens once a year. They take her out and store her until springtime, but they don’t usually come get her until mid-September. Follow me, fellers. I need to get outta this heat and back into the air conditioning.”

  We started walking, very slowly, back up the dock toward the building. Turtle wasn’t joking about not moving too fast. The steps he took were less than a foot long.

  “Were you working Saturday night?” Bates asked.

  “Of course I was working Saturday night,” he said over his shoulder. “It’s our busiest night of the year.”

  “Did you happen to see whether the Laura Mae went out?”

  “I filled her up with gas around five that afternoon. She went out around nine that night. I didn’t see her come back in, though. I was out here ‘til almost two in the morning, but even ol’ Turtle has to get a little shut eye now and then.”

  “Any idea who was on the boat Saturday night?” Bates said.

  “I saw three young ladies get out of a white limo just before dark. They got on the boat with Nelson Lipscomb. I’m guessing they’re the three y’all fished out of the lake the next morning.”

  “What makes you say that?” Bates said.

  “You’re here, ain’t ya?”

  “Did you get a good look at the girls?”

  “Yeah, but I wasn’t looking at their faces. They was all blondes, though, ‘cause when I saw ‘em I started singing, ‘Three blonde mice, three blonde mice, see how they bounce, see how they bounce.’”

  “Say they were with somebody named Nelson Lipscomb?” Bates said.

  “That’s right.”

  “How well do you know him?”

  “Well enough to know that he’s an uppity, rich punk who ain’t got sense enough to get in outta the rain. What do y’all know about him?”

  Bates looked at me, and I shrugged my shoulders. “Never heard of him,” I said.

  “Me either,” Bates said. He looked back at Turtle. “Should we have heard of him?”

  Turtle began to laugh, a high-pitched hee hee hee that sounded like a bird in distress. He spat a long stream of tobacco juice toward the water and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “You boys ain’t got a clue what you’re getting yourselves into. I’m sure you’ve heard of John Jacob Lipscomb, ain’t you?”

  Bates and I both stopped cold. John Jacob Lipscomb was a legend in the community. He was born and raised in Johnson City and had started an investment company in Nashville called Equicorp back in the late eighties. Equicorp grew quickly and went public a short time later, making Lipscomb an extremely wealthy man in the process. The rumors around town were that he was worth more than half-a-billion dollars, and judging by the amount of money he gave away, I tended to believe it. John J. Lipscomb had funded two libraries, a cancer research center, a pre-natal clinic, a Little League complex, a Pop Warner football field, and dozens of college scholarships. He was the university’s most important benefactor, and donated liberally to every politician in Northeast Tennessee.

  “What does he have to do with this?” I said.

  “Maybe nothing. Maybe everything,” Turtle said. “It’s his boat.”

  “Was he on it Saturday night?” Bates said.

  “Couldn’t say, but I’ve heard it told that he comes up here every year at Labor Day and goes out for a little rest and relaxation with a few young ladies. Recharging the batteries, I reckon. Pretty sleazy, though, if you ask me, since he named the boat after his wife.”

  We finally made it to the building. Turtle stopped just outside the door and began wiping the sweat from his neck and face with a bandana he’d pulled from his pocket.

  “Anything else I can do for you boys?” he said.

  “You’re absolutely certain you saw Nelson Lipscomb get on that boat with three blonde girls?” Bates said.

  Turtle put his hand over his heart. “God as my witness, it was him.” He began wringing the sweat out of the bandana. “Y’all be careful out there, ya hear?” He turned and disappeared through the door.

  As Bates and I walked back toward our vehicles, I felt the breeze pick up. It was coming out of the north, no doubt bringing a cold front along with it. A break in the temperature would be nice, but along with the cool air would come the violent storms of early September.

  “I got a bad feeling about this one,” Bates said as I opened the door of my pickup.

  “It’s just another murder case,” I said. “We get our proof together and send somebody to prison.�
��

  “It ain’t gonna be that simple.” He took his cowboy hat off and began rubbing his fingers through his hair. “We better put together an airtight case and we better do it quick, because as soon as we start sniffing around John Lipscomb, there’ll be hell to pay. I reckon you better get me some help from the TBI.”

  My cell phone rang and I looked at the ID.

  “It’s Rita calling from the office,” I said. “Probably a matter of some grave importance. I’ll bet you a hundred bucks it’s about somebody who wants me to help their grandson or nephew or brother get out of a DUI, or maybe one of the toilets in the office has stopped up.”

  “Getting a little cynical, are we?” Bates said.

  “Where are you going right now?”

  “Thought I’d get me a search warrant and pay a visit to Nelson Lipscomb. We’ve got enough for a warrant, don’t we?”

  “We need signed affidavits from Erlene and Turtle, but that should be enough.”

  “I reckon you’re headed back to the office to do some administrating.”

  Bates gave me a wry smile. I turned the cell phone off. It felt good to be out, doing some real work for a change.

  “To hell with the toilets and the DUIs,” I said. “I’m going with you.”

  PART II

  Chapter Seven

  I reluctantly punched the number of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation’s local Special Agent in Charge into my cell phone as I drove to Bates’s office. Over the years, I’d come to regard Tennessee’s most respected law enforcement agency with a sense of trepidation. The agents were largely well-trained and committed, but many of them were egotistical and competitive, they regarded local cops with an air of disdain, and the upper echelon of the TBI seemed to be more interested in political standing than law enforcement.

  Ralph Harmon, the SAIC at the Johnson City field office, was not my idea of a good cop, let alone a cop who should be serving in a supervisory capacity. Harmon was abrasive and cocky around his agents, but I’d also seen his brown-nosing act when the TBI brass came to town. He was a pot-bellied bully whose office walls were covered with photos of a much younger version of him in various military garb, which was something that grated on my nerves. I’d served in the army as a Ranger, had killed men in Grenada, and had seen one of my buddies killed by a rocket-propelled grenade. The memories had haunted me for more than two decades, to the point that I’d gotten rid of every object or photograph that might remind me of my military service. I wasn’t ashamed of it; I just didn’t want to re-live it, and the fact that Harmon surrounded himself with his own military memorabilia told me that he’d never seen what I’d seen. He simply wanted visitors to his office to admire him because he’d been a soldier, which was fine until I asked him about the photos one day.

  I learned that Harmon’s father had been a helicopter pilot in Vietnam and had taught Ralph to fly when Ralph was a just a teenager. At the age of eighteen, he joined the army reserves, became a warrant officer, and spent four years as a weekend warrior. He’d never seen active duty, although the photographs would lead one, especially the unindoctrinated, to conclude otherwise. When I mentioned that the photos might tend to present a false impression, he became angry and ordered me out of his office. As a result, Harmon and I weren’t exactly close. But as the district attorney general, I was responsible for “requesting” the TBI’s assistance when a city or county police force needed help with an investigation.

  “I figured you’d be calling,” Harmon said in his clipped tenor when he answered the phone. “I suppose you need some help with your homicides.”

  “Yeah, we do.”

  “Bates can’t handle it?”

  “It might be a little different than he’s used to.”

  “Different? What do you mean?”

  “The suspects are wealthy. Extremely wealthy. They’re also pretty well-connected from what I understand.”

  “You mean mob-connected or politically connected?”

  “Politically connected.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Ever heard of John J. Lipscomb?”

  There was a long pause, which meant Harmon had, indeed, heard of Lipscomb. I knew Harmon was considering his options, trying to decide how he might best manage the situation to either benefit himself or insure that if there was future political fallout, it would be directed at someone besides him.

  “You’re sure he’s involved?” Harmon said when he finally spoke.

  “Not positive, but it looks that way.”

  “How solid is your case?”

  “We don’t have a case yet. That’s why I’m calling you.”

  “How many people do you need?”

  “As many as you can spare.”

  “When do you need them?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “We’re pretty busy, but I’ll see what I can do. Somebody will get back to you within the hour.”

  I started to reply, but the line went dead. We’re pretty busy? Somebody will get back to you? I’d never before heard of, let alone experienced, a TBI supervisor telling a district attorney that the agency might be too busy to help with a homicide investigation. My first thought was to start making phone calls to Nashville and go over Harmon’s head, but the more I considered it, the more the idea struck me as juvenile. It would be like tattling, and it would be certain to do more harm than good. I closed the phone, dropped it on the seat next to me, and drove to Bates’s office. When I arrived, the place looked like a beehive.

  “Called in the cavalry,” Bates said from behind his desk when I walked in. “I’ve got danged near every cop in the department working. The overtime’s gonna bust my budget.”

  As the evening progressed, we were able to establish without any doubt that Nelson Lipscomb had been seen with the girls before their deaths. Erlene didn’t actually witness Lipscomb picking the girls up at the club, but one of her bouncers, a thick-necked country boy named Henry Willis, saw them walk out the front door of the Mouse’s Tail and get into a white limo a little before 9:00 p.m. with a stocky, dark-haired man. Bates found a booking photo of Nelson Lipscomb on the computer, and Erlene and Willis both positively identified him as “Mr. Smith,” the man who had paid Erlene for the girls’ services. Turtle signed an affidavit saying that he saw Lipscomb and three blondes get out of a white limo at the marina about 9:15 p.m. and all four of them boarded the Laura Mae. The boat pulled out shortly thereafter and didn’t return until sometime early the next morning. A few hours after the girls were found, a young man Turtle didn’t recognize came to the marina and drove the boat away. It hadn’t been seen since. We still couldn’t prove that Nelson had killed anyone, but it was enough to get a search warrant for his condo.

  While I was working on the affidavits for the warrant in Bates’s office, he and his people set about finding out everything they could about Nelson Lipscomb. Nelson was forty years old. His parents were Dr. Jonathan David Lipscomb, a vascular surgeon, and Gloria Ann Pickens-Lipscomb, a housewife who was also the president of the local Monday Club and the arts council. He had one brother, the ultra-wealthy John Jacob Lipscomb.

  Nelson was a ne’er do well. He’d dropped out of University High School at the age of seventeen, had never filed a tax return, and apparently had never held a job. He’d been arrested twice for public intoxication, once for misdemeanor drug possession, and once for punching a girlfriend, but each charge had been dismissed. After his first arrest, he’d asked a Sessions Court judge to appoint a public defender to represent him, but when the judge asked him how he supported himself, Nelson confessed that he lived off of a trust fund – five thousand a month – that had been set up for him by his grandparents. His request for a public defender was denied. He’d been sued twice for child support, apparently having fathered two illegitimate children.

  It was almost six o’clock when Bates and I, along with two investigators from the sheriff’s department and two patrol deputies, pulled into the Lakeview Terrace condom
inium complex and knocked on Lipscomb’s door. It took a full five minutes before Lipscomb, wearing only a pair of boxer shorts and looking haggard, answered.

  “Nelson Lipscomb?” Bates said, holding his badge and ID in front of Lipscomb’s face.

  “Yeah.”

  “We have a search warrant. Step aside.”

  Bates handed Lipscomb a copy of the warrant and started moving forward. The rest of us followed him inside. Lipscomb, surprised and bewildered, stepped away from the door and let us pass.

  Lipscomb was around five-feet-six and looked to weigh in the neighborhood of a hundred and eighty pounds or so. He was thick, but he looked soft. The prominent ridge across his eyebrows reminded me of a Neanderthal, and his chest and abdomen were covered in dark hair. His brown eyes were small and close set, and his black hair rose from his scalp in tight curls. Around his neck were three thick, gold chains of varying lengths.

  “Late night?” Bates said. It was obvious that Lipscomb had been asleep.

  “What’re y’all doin’ up in here?” Lipscomb said. As soon as he opened his mouth, I knew what Turtle and Erlene had been talking about. Lipscomb, a white man from a rich family in the hills of Tennessee, talked like a black gangster.

  “Ain’t you got a robe or something?” Bates said. “I can’t stand looking at all that fur.”

  Lipscomb grunted and walked off through the den into a bedroom with Bates right behind him. I looked around the condo. It could have been a nice place, but it was filthy. Dishes were piled in the kitchen sink and flies were buzzing around a plastic trash container that was overflowing. Empty beer bottles were scattered all over the place, along with pizza boxes and ash trays full of cigarette butts. It smelled as bad as it looked, a putrid mixture of stale cigarette smoke, spilled beer, and rotting food. The malaise reflected in the condition of the apartment told me as much about Nelson Lipscomb as any of the information Bates had gathered that afternoon.