JD04 - Reasonable Fear

by Scott Pratt

  “We’ll wind up dead,” Andres said. “People in Colombia have been killing each other for years because of the drug trade. If we don’t get killed, we’ll probably go to jail.”

  “Stop being such a pussy. We’re not going to wind up dead and we’re not going to jail. This is the best chance we’re ever going to have to make it big right out of the blocks. We make a few trips, get a stake together, and then use it to start up a business when we graduate from college.”

  “I don’t know. It just seems like a line I don’t want to cross.”

  John straightened up and stretched his arms over his head.

  “I’m not taking no for an answer, amigo,” he said. “Just do me a favor. You’re good at math. Sit down with a pencil and a piece of paper and do the math. Or better still, make one phone call to your family in Colombia. Find out how much a kilogram would cost us, then do the math. If you’re still not interested, I’ll find another way.”

  John turned and walked back toward the veranda door. He stopped just short and faced his friend.

  “We’ve been together a long time,” he said. “We make a good team. If you don’t do this with me, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Three days after the near disaster in the grocery store parking lot, we got a break. Jasper T. Yates, the Boone Lake busybody known as Turtle, called me on a Friday morning.

  “I got somebody y’all need to talk to,” he said.

  “About what?”

  “Them girls. He seen it.”

  An hour later, Bates and I were cruising slowly down a rough, muddy driveway that led to a small lot that bordered the lake. A cold front had moved into the area, and a thick, hard-gray sky hung low overhead. It was nearly dark, even though it was mid-afternoon, and slivery raindrops passed through the beams of Bates’s headlights in a fine mist.

  The man we were going to see was named Zachary Woods. I knew him as Zack. I’d defended him on an aggravated assault charge ten years earlier and remembered him as a tragic figure, tortured by memories of extreme childhood poverty and unspeakable cruelty at the hands of a perverted and violent grandfather. During the time I’d represented Zack, he’d come to trust me, and I hadn’t forgotten the stories he’d told me of the beatings, the sexual assaults and the constant hunger he endured while growing up in an isolated section of Grainger County. He’d spent much of his youth in the woods, left home when he was fourteen, and had eventually made his way to Washington County where he lived alone and had a reputation as the best stone mason in the area.

  The incident that resulted in his arrest happened during a dispute over firewood. Zack, who was in his mid-thirties at the time and had never been in trouble with the law, lived in the same tiny trailer where he now lived. He had a neighbor named Tilman who kept stealing his firewood, which was Zack’s only source of fuel in the trailer. Zack knew Tilman was the thief, because he’d tracked him through the trees back to his home. After the third theft, Zack decided to put a stop to it. He set up a blind near his wood pile and waited in the cold darkness for Tilman to show up. Three nights later, close to midnight, Tilman came creeping through the woods. As soon as Tilman loaded his arms with firewood, Zack stepped out and confronted him. But rather than drop the wood and run, Tilman, who was much bigger than Zack, dropped the wood and pulled a knife. Zack had a knife of his own, and unfortunately for Tilman, he knew how to use it. Tilman wound up in the hospital with over two hundred stitches in his arms, chest and back, and Zack wound up in jail. Tilman showed up for the preliminary hearing and lied through his teeth, but when we went to trial, he just couldn’t explain why he was on Zack’s property in the middle of the night, why the firewood was dropped exactly the way Zack explained it, why a knife with his fingerprints all over it was lying on the ground near the firewood, and why his blood alcohol level was more than twice the legal limit. The jury acquitted Zack in less than an hour.

  As soon as we parked, I saw the trailer door open and Zack stepped out. A massive, brindle pit bull was barking fiercely and straining against a logging chain that had been fastened to a steel pole in the ground. Zack didn’t have a telephone and didn’t know we were coming. People who wanted him to do stone work for them had to leave their name and number on a corkboard at the marina where Turtle worked, and Zack would call them from there. He was a medium height and wiry, all muscle, sinew and bone, wearing a camouflage cap. He had a prominent chin, eyes that always seemed to be moving, and he was wearing work pants, combat boots and a sleeveless, white T-shirt. He was looking at the car suspiciously.

  I got out of the car, and he recognized me immediately. His face seemed to relax as he walked past the dog. I felt something unusual under my feet and looked down. The driveway near the trailer was covered with flattened, aluminum cans.

  “Poor man’s asphalt,” Zack said, approaching the car. “I ain’t seen you in a coon’s age, Joe Dillard. What brings you out here?”

  I introduced Bates. “We need to talk to you about something,” I said. “It’s important.”

  “That damned gravy eater,” he said.

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “Turtle. I oughta know better than to open my mouth around him. Might as well write it on a billboard.”

  “Mind if we come in out of the rain?”

  “There’s barely enough room in there for me. How about I sit in the back of this fine automobile the sheriff’s driving? As long as you promise not to arrest me.”

  “Promise,” I said. “Hop in.”

  As soon as Zack was settled in the back seat, I turned around.

  “No point in beating around the bush, Zack. Turtle says you saw something on the lake Saturday night.”

  “I didn’t want no part of it,” he said, “but it’s been eating at me. In my sleep, you know? I keep seeing it in my sleep. That’s probably the reason I told the gravy eater. I knew he wouldn’t be able to keep it to himself, and I figured y’all would be coming around sooner or later.”

  “What did you see?”

  “I saw a man dropping a body into the lake off the back of a big house boat.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I dropped me a few catfish jugs near the bank in this little cove not far from my place around midnight. There were still some crazies out on the lake, but it had thinned out quite a bit. Right around five in the morning, I headed back out to check on them. The house boat was anchored in the cove, but I didn’t think nothing about it. I picked up the first jug, and then I heard some bumping and banging on the boat, so I looked over, and I saw a man dragging something. Couldn’t much tell what it was at first, but then he hoisted it overboard and it splashed into the water. It was a body. A woman’s body. She was naked.”

  “How close were you?”

  “Maybe ten feet. I was in my canoe. I just sat there and stared. I didn’t really know what to do. The man didn’t notice me. He went back inside, and then somebody fired up the engine and the boat pulled out of the cove. I paddled over to where the girl went in, poked around a little with my paddle, and found her a foot or so below the surface. I pulled her up, but she was already dead. There wasn’t nothing I could do for her, so I just let her slide back into the water. When I started to paddle out of there, something bumped my boat. It was another girl. She was dead, too.”

  “Why didn’t you report it?” Bates asked.

  “I don’t exactly have fond memories of dealing with the law,” he said. “And if I’d reported finding those bodies in the lake at five in the morning, who would’ve been your first suspect?”

  Bates nodded, but didn’t answer.

  “Did you get a good look at the man?” I said.

  “It was dark, but the moon was shining off the water and the running lights were on. I could see him.”

  “Would you recognize him again?”

  “I reckon I would.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Gravy eater like turtle,
only this one eats his gravy by the bucket. Lard ass. Dark-haired.”

  I looked over at Bates. “Show them to him.”

  “Let me ask you a question,” Bates said. “You ever heard of John Lipscomb?”

  “Don’t reckon I have.”

  “Nelson Lipscomb?”

  “Not that I can say.”

  “Andres Pinzon?”

  “Nope. Why?”

  I’d called Bates as soon as I heard from Turtle, and he’d had his investigators put together three separate photo lineups: one that included John Lipscomb, one that included Nelson Lipscomb, and one that included Andres Pinzon. Bates pulled a manila envelope from the glove compartment and handed the line-up that included Nelson over the seat to Zack.

  “Recognize anybody?” Bates said.

  Zack pored over the photos for a couple of minutes.

  “Never seen any of them,” he said, handing the lineup back to Bates.

  Bates repeated the process with the line up that included Andres Pinzon. Nothing. Finally, he passed the line up that included a photo of John Lipscomb to Zack. It took less than ten seconds.

  “That’s him,” Zack said, tapping the sheet with a thick, calloused finger. “That’s the gravy eater I saw.”

  I felt my heart accelerate. “Let me see, Zack.”

  His finger was resting on the photo of John Lipscomb. I looked at Bates, who appeared to be more worried than excited.

  “Are you absolutely sure?” I asked. “No doubt in your mind?”

  “Not a bit. That’s him.”

  Bates handed him a pen. “Circle the photo and put your initials on it,” he said.

  “Would you be willing to get up on a witness stand and repeat this in front of a jury?” I said.

  Zack hesitated. “You think it’ll come to that?”

  “It might.”

  He took a long breath. “Well sir, that’s the man I saw. If I have to, I’d swear an oath on it.”

  A few minutes later, after Zack had gotten out of the car, we were driving back down the muddy driveway. Bates broke the silence.

  “What do we do now, Mr. District Attorney?”

  The decision I was about to make was by far the most important of my brief career as district attorney general. While it was true that we now had an eyewitness who said he saw John Lipscomb dumping a body into the lake, it had been my experience that eyewitness testimony was often unreliable and easily assailable at trial on cross-examination. And even if Zack had seen Lipscomb dumping a body, we had no idea which body. Was it Lisa, who died of an overdose? If it was, then Lipscomb was guilty only of illegally disposing of a corpse, a misdemeanor, unless we could prove that he’d provided the drugs that killed her. It was certainly easy enough to assume that the act of dumping a body and the act of murder were connected, but we still had no way of proving it.

  I asked myself what seemed to be a simple question: what was the right thing to do? When I was younger, I tended to view the world in terms of right and wrong, black and white. The distinction between the two came naturally to me then, or at least I thought it did. But as I grew older, witnessed more, experienced more, the line between right and wrong, at least in terms of morality, began to dissolve and the two concepts began to bleed over into each other until a river of gray separated them, a seemingly unfathomable river with swirling tides that pulled me in different directions.

  We could keep investigating, hope to find the boat, hope that another witness would come forward, hope that Nelson Lipscomb would crack under the pressure of the drug charge and turn on his brother, but I believed there was little chance of any of those things happening. We could attempt to make a deal with Nelson, offer him a walk on the drug and weapons charges in exchange for information regarding the murders. But the truth was that we really didn’t have much leverage with Nelson. He’d been arrested in the past, but he’d never been convicted. Given the standing of his family in the community and the very real possibility that powerful people would make influential calls and/or visits to the judge on Nelson’s behalf, the worst punishment Nelson was likely to receive was probation. Finally, I could set up a meeting with Pinzon, John Lipscomb’s lawyer, and tell him that we had a new witness, someone who actually saw Lipscomb dumping one of the bodies, and attempt to negotiate some kind of deal with him. But that would be like showing your hole cards before the flop in a game of Texas hold ‘em. The defense would know what we had much too early, and they could adjust their strategy accordingly.

  When I was practicing criminal defense, I’d been highly critical of prosecutors who indicted people prematurely, before their case was locked up, in an attempt to play one defendant against the other. The old “first one to the prosecutor’s office gets the deal” strategy almost invariably resulted in a perversion of the truth, and I’d told myself that I would never use it.

  I went back over the facts as I knew them: three dead young women. Erlene’s identification of the bodies and her story about “Mr. Smith” hiring the girls every year. Erlene’s identification of Nelson Lipscomb as Mr. Smith. The bouncer’s testimony that he saw the girls get into a white limo. Turtle’s testimony that he saw Nelson get out of a white limo with three blond girls at the marina, get onto the Laura Mae, and drive away. The limo driver’s statement that he dropped Nelson and the girls off at the marina. The caretaker’s testimony that he saw John Lipscomb and Andres Pinzon get onto the same boat a short time later and then leave unexpectedly early in the morning. The fact that the boat belonged to John Lipscomb’s corporation and was nowhere to be found. And now Zack’s testimony that he had seen John Lipscomb dump the body of a young woman over the side of the boat that morning.

  There were no other suspects. The only reasonable conclusion I could draw based upon the evidence we’d gathered was that someone aboard the Laura Mae that night strangled two of the girls and dumped three bodies, and it seemed the only way to find out what really happened was to take a risk. If I was wrong, I knew I would be humiliated far beyond anything I’d ever experienced and that my legal career would most likely be over. Even if I was right, there were no guarantees we would ever convict anyone for the murders.

  I rolled the window down as we crossed the DeVault Bridge near Winged Deer Park. The rain had stopped, but the wind had freshened and the clouds were becoming even darker. It had been five minutes or more since Bates asked me the question. Then I heard a voice inside my head: “I was banging your wife. Didn’t she mention it?”

  “We go to the grand jury,” I said without looking at Bates. “We indict all three of them for second-degree murder, and we let the chips fall where they may.”

  Chapter Twenty

  It didn’t take long for the young Andres Pinzon to come around to John Lipscomb’s way of thinking. I can’t say I was surprised, especially after I heard how much money they made.

  A week after Lipscomb made the suggestion that Pinzon “do the math,” Pinzon got in contact with his uncle Eduardo back in Envigado, Colombia. The conversation was awkward at first – Eduardo and Andres’s father had been estranged for years – but it quickly became cordial. Four days later, Pinzon and Lipscomb flew in the used Cessna 421 Lipscomb had been given as a graduation gift to a three-thousand-acre ranch twenty miles southeast of Miami, a ranch owned by a shell corporation controlled by Eduardo, who flew up from Colombia to meet the boys. He treated them like royalty, intrigued by his nephew’s suggestion during the phone call and anxious to expand his burgeoning cocaine business in the United States.

  Lipscomb and Pinzon took their maiden drug-smuggling voyage to Colombia in June, a month after they graduated from Demeter Prep and nine days after they met with Eduardo Pinzon in Florida. They flew from Elizabethton, Tennessee, to the airstrip on Eduardo’s Florida ranch, refueled, and set out for another small airstrip in the jungle near Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, where they refueled again and rested for a couple of hours. From there, they took off for yet another remote airstrip thirty miles sout
heast of Cartegena in northern Colombia. Eduardo met them again, but this time he had five kilograms of cocaine with him. The price was seventy-five hundred dollars a kilo. Eduardo had agreed to “front” the drugs to his nephew, but just before Andres boarded the plane to return to Tennessee, Eduardo put his arm around him and pulled him off to the side of the runway.

  “If you don’t come back here and pay me in a month,” he said, “you’ll get a visit from my sicarios. Business is business.”

  The sicarios were paid assassins, a different kind of debt collector. Ten years later, in the early nineties, Pablo Escobar’s sicarios terrorized Colombia’s government. They killed dozens of politicians, judges, lawyers and police officers. They wiped out entire families, once even planting a bomb aboard an airplane that killed over a hundred innocent passengers. The target in the bombing, a politician who supported policies detrimental to Escobar’s drug smuggling interests, decided at the last minute not to board the plane, but it didn’t matter. The sicarios shot him to death in his car two days later.

  Pinzon knew that if his uncle sent sicarios to the United States, both he and Lipscomb would be dead, even if they handed over the money. They’d kill him just for the inconvenience of having to travel, and to send a message to anyone else who might think about paying his drug bill late.

  But there were no late payments. Initially, Lipscomb and Pinzon’s biggest problems were keeping up with the insatiable demand of their customers and what to do with all the cash they were making. They sold their product, uncut, for two thousand dollars an ounce to their prep school friends from Demeter, who would dilute the cocaine with baby laxative by as much as a third and sell it by the gram. Lipscomb and Pinzon had customers at prestigious universities all over the country – Yale, Brown, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, USC, UCLA, Duke, – universities where the students had means. Their only shipping expense was the postage charged by the U.S. Postal Service, and they didn’t ship the product until they’d received their money, cash only. After expenses, Lipscomb and Pinzon made just over three hundred and thirty thousand dollars on the first five kilos. Three weeks after their first trip to Colombia, they flew back, paid Eduardo Pinzon in cash, and picked up ten more kilos.