by Tom Lowe
Cooter Johnson quickly turned into the lane the beer distributing truck had followed. I turned right at the traffic light and stayed within the speed limit, driving toward the coffee shop. I parked in front of the shop’s main window so I could have a view of my Jeep. And I sat there, listening to the ticking engine cooling, the sound of church bells in the distance. I watched all three mirrors. There was no sign of the yellow truck. I shoved my Glock under my belt in the center of my back and got out of the Jeep.
Caroline Harper tried to smile, waiting for me at one of the nine tables in the shop. The smell of fresh ground coffee met me at the door. The place was quaint—hardwood floors decades old that groaned under my shoes, coffee themed prints on the wall, and dozens of ceramic cups for sale on the shelves. Two college kids were sitting at the same table, laptops open, ear-buds wedged into their hearing canals. A middle-aged woman, a barista—maybe Ruby, worked the counter, cutting an apple pie while waiting for a cappuccino to finish pouring from the machine.
I took a seat next to Caroline with a view out the window of my Jeep. “I wish I could have been here earlier, but I had to follow a lead that happened as I was driving. What did Jeremiah Franklin’s niece show you?”
Caroline leaned closer, her body language stiff, tense. “It’s here, in a paper bag. She was going to throw it in the trash.” She reached under the table and lifted a grocery bag. “It’s a noose fashioned from a small rope.”
“You mean a hangman’s noose?” I took the bag and peered inside.
“Somebody hung it during the night from a cottonwood tree in her grandmother’s yard. Her Uncle Jeremiah was in the house at the time. He cut it from the tree when he saw it this morning. I have no idea where he is now, not after this.”
“Maybe he’s still at his mother’s home. Do you have the address?”
“No, but I can find it for you. I’m afraid for Jesse. And what Mr. Franklin and his family were exposed to…it’s unthinkable. We told Sonia to go to the police, but she feels that’ll do nothing. She may be right. But I have to believe there are good and decent law enforcement people in the city and county.”
I thought back to the night at Shorty’s Billiards when one of the deputies told Detective Lee that maybe the Miranda rights weren’t read to Jesse. “Detective Lee, sir, I think he’s correct—”
“Shut up, Parker! When and if you become a detective, your opinion matters.”
“Caroline, the night Jesse was arrested at Shorty’s, I watched a deputy, his name was Parker—he questioned a detective when Jesse was arrested. This deputy told the detective that the Miranda rights were never read. I believe Parker will do an honest investigation.”
“What can we do?”
“I’ll call him.” I used my phone to find the number to the sheriff’s office and hit dial.
A female dispatcher answered the phone. I asked, “Is Deputy Parker in today.”
“Hold on.” She was gone for a few seconds. “He’s on a call. Can I take a message?”
“Yes, please have him call Sean O’Brien. It’s in reference to some evidence he’s looking for.” I gave her my number and disconnected.
Caroline said, “I hope he’s fair. You think he’ll call you?”
“I think so.”
“Maybe he’ll investigate. Sean, Jesse was so upset when he left here. He feels guilty and wants to do what’s right, to make up for his mistake to Jeremiah. He said if he knows who murdered Andy, that knowledge will take some of the threat off of Jeremiah.”
“In the eyes of the law it means nothing. All that counts is the person who actually witnessed the killing. And that was one man, Jeremiah Franklin.”
“I don’t believe Jesse was thinking about that. He’s pretty discouraged about the law. I believe he wants the killer’s name for one reason, and that reason is to personally go after him.”
“That would be suicide or the death penalty. Either way, the outcome is the same.”
“I don’t think Jesse cares anymore—at least not about himself or his problems. And that’s because, for the first time in a long time, he has something bigger to care about: justice for Andy and the rest of the boys.”
“Maybe I can find Jesse and Jeremiah. If I’m lucky, they’ll be in the same place, and then I can speak with them both. We have to come up with a game plan. And part of that has to include a prosecutor that cares deeply about justice.” Something caught my eye. Outside the window, standing near my Jeep, was a man dressed in a jungle-green camouflaged shirt, matching baseball cap, jeans. He looked directly toward the window of the coffee shop. He held up a key and stepped to the side of my Jeep, face hard as stone. I looked at Caroline and said, “Outside—the man next to my Jeep. Do you know him?”
Her eyes widened. Eyebrows lifting. “That’s Solomon Johnson…Cooter’s father. He has two other sons. Although I don’t personally know him, I’ve heard he’s a man born without a soul.”
FORTY-SIX
It was bait. Pure and simple. Come out into the daylight and let’s see what happens. Solomon Johnson, sporting an attitude along with his hunter’s camouflage, stood next to my Jeep with a key in his hand. He was a man ready to cut a scar into the Jeep’s exterior paint. I didn’t think he’d do it in the light of day, in public, in front of a downtown coffee shop.
So what was his game? Why’d he want me to step outside?
What I didn’t know was who might be standing on either side of the shop’s front door. Or who might be on a rooftop with a rifle, scope, and the skill to send a bullet through my head from a block away. I looked over to the woman grinding a pound of coffee and asked, “Do you have a backdoor?”
She seemed surprised. “Yes, hardly anybody uses it. It’s past the bathroom. Goes into the back parking lot.”
“Thanks.” I turned to Caroline. “Stay here. If something happens, call the deputy I mentioned—Deputy Parker. Maybe he’s off his call by now.”
“What do you think Solomon Johnson wants?”
“I’ll ask him.” I watched the sun come out from behind a cloud. I hoped the light would reflect from the window, making it difficult for Johnson to see deep inside. He lit a cigarette, his eyes looking down. I turned, sprinting down a short hall, past the single restroom, past a small supply closet and out a door into the back lot. I ran about fifty feet to my right, ran by a dumpster that smelled of decaying chicken and shrimp. I reached back and touched my Glock in its holster tucked into the belt under my shirt.
I found an alley and cut down it, stepping over an empty bottle of cheap wine and a Anders beer bottle on its side. When I got to the end of the alley I stopped, warily peering to the left and then the right. There was nothing but a few shoppers. An elderly man sat on a bench next to a barbershop, reading a newspaper. I looked at rooftops. Looked for the yellow pickup truck. Nothing.
I watched Solomon Johnson for a second. He stared into the window. Motionless. A smoldering cigarette wedged in one corner of his mouth. I waited for a propane gas truck to come down the road. As it passed me, I jogged behind it, keeping the truck between Solomon Johnson and me. Then I cut to my left and ran across the street. Johnson was now fifty feet in front of me. I slipped my shoes off, placing them under a park bench, and walked silently across the street. When I got with ten feet of Johnson I said, “If you wanted to talk, you could have come inside.”
He lowered his hand holding the key, slowly turning around to face me. I stood at least a head taller than him, even in my socks. He was about sixty. Lean. Ropey brown arms. He stared at me for a moment. No emotion. Deadpan dark eyes. Mouth small. Cleft chin. He was the member of the Johnson family I’d seen walking from the courthouse steps to join the old man in the car. I could see by the slow rise and fall of his chest that he was not nervous, in control. The sun went behind a cloud. He said, “You did a real bad thing to my boys. Broke Earl’s arm. That ain’t smart.”
“It’s not too smart to send your boys after me either. One of them pointed a shotgun at
me. What would you have done?”
“You started with my oldest boy, Cooter. You stood in a court of law and said you’d testify that Jesse Taylor, a man with some real issues, wasn’t read his fuckin’ Miranda shit. You come into my town. You fuck with my boys. I read that story in the paper. You’re nosing around trying to find dirt about the old reform school, somethin’ nobody gives two shits about, and you do bodily harm to my family. I thought it was time you met me.”
“There are people who do care what happened inside the reform school, what happened to people like Jesse Taylor when he was a boy. If Jesse has issues, it’s because of that. And I’m betting the old man I saw in your car, is probably your father, and he’s most likely one of the men who abused boys when they were in the reform school. And you were spawned from the same deviant seed.”
He raised his left hand, taking a drag from the cigarette, fingernails long, packed with black dirt. He inhaled smoke deep in his lungs, holding it inside, studying me with snake eyes. He finally exhaled, blowing smoke from his nostrils, lifting his chin, leaning toward me, his black eyes undaunted. “You come looking for my daddy, it’ll be your final hunt on earth.”
I said nothing, staring down at him. His breathing unchanged, a speck of brown tobacco in the corner of his mouth. A breeze came from behind him. I could smell old sweat and stale whisky on his T-shirt. He turned, placing the end of his right index finger on the hood of my Jeep. He used the longer fingernail to make a smiley face in the road dust on the hood. Then he strolled down the sidewalk to the waiting yellow pickup truck parked near the intersection. I walked back to the park bench, sat down, and slipped on my shoes.
I looked across the street at the coffee shop. Caroline Harper stood behind the window, her arms folded, face worried. Then the clouds slowly parted and the sunlight returned, reflecting off the shop’s window. Caroline’s troubled face disappeared slowly as if it had been sealed inside a glass time capsule.
FORTY-SEVEN
Jesse Taylor hoped Jeremiah Franklin was still there when he arrived. He thought about the noose and what Jeremiah’s niece Sonia had said. Jesse wasn’t sure what he’d say when he finally found Jeremiah. Couldn’t blame him if he took a swing at me. Maybe knock some damn sense into my head. Jesse looked at his cell phone and then glanced up in the car’s rearview mirror. He watched a police cruiser a half block behind him. He looked down at his speedometer, easing his foot off the gas.
“Just paranoid,” he mumbled, lifting the phone. “Two missed calls.” He played the first one through speakerphone: “Jesse, this is Cory Wilson with the Patriot. I’ve been thinking about what you shared with me. It’s caused me to do some digging in files, talking with a few people. You mentioned that I should talk with Caroline Harper. I’ll do that. Also, there are some things I need to ask you. So give me a call. You have my card and now my number. Thanks.”
Jesse hit the play button for the next message. “Jesse, it’s Sean. Call me when you get this. Caroline told me about Jeremiah finding the noose hanging from a tree at his mother’s house. If you’re trying to speak with Jeremiah, let’s talk with him together. I already spoke with him. We can protect Jeremiah in a couple of ways. One is to have him tell his story to the FBI. The second is to get some national news media interest, and that shouldn’t be hard. That might lead to the attorney general of Florida calling for an investigation. Call me. Don’t do this alone.”
Jesse tossed the phone down on the seat beside him, lit a cigarette and slammed his open palm on his steering wheel. “Shit! You get national news coverage when you start diggin’ up the bodies of kids. We’re not there yet.”
He inhaled from the cigarette, blew smoke out the side window and drove toward the home of Jeremiah Franklin’s mother.
I walked Caroline Harper to her car across the street from the coffee shop. It was quiet in the afternoon lull, except for the blackbirds cackling from the canopy of a live oak. I carried the rope noose in the paper bag. The physical appearance of an iconic noose cut from a tree had left Caroline queasy. She was worried about Jesse. Worried about Jeremiah Franklin. She said, “I’m going home to read my Bible, to pray, and to hope that this nightmare will end. As much as I want to find Andy’s grave and bring him home, to bring people to justice, I can’t stand the thought of bloodshed.”
“Maybe it won’t come to that.”
“I’m not sure I can find solace in what I feel you don’t really believe, Sean.”
“I do believe that sometimes things have to be broken apart to be fixed.”
“What do you mean?”
“Overseas, I once met an elderly Japanese man who could repair broken pottery by using a liquid gold or silver powder. He’d painstakingly put the broken pottery back together again, holding each piece by hand next to the other pieces until each one dried, creating veins of gold or silver. This would give the vase or bowl a different type of beauty and strength. The old man said the new bowl or vase was made better by having been broken.”
She was quiet a second. “Are you suggesting we should wear our scars with pride?”
“Something like that.” I smiled, looking down at her anxious face. “And even if all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could never put Humpty together again. But at least ol’ Hump ventured to the edge of the wall. You just have to learn balance.”
She smiled and got in her car, hands gripping the wheel, face reflective. I watched her drive away, walking to my Jeep. I looked at the smiley face Solomon Johnson had left on the hood. I went back inside the coffee shop, bought a bottle of water, returned to the Jeep and poured the water into the center of the smiley face. The image dissolved, the dirt running down the side of the Jeep, tracking toward the curb and vanishing through the grate of a sewer drain.
I sat in my Jeep and picked up my phone to call Lana Halley just as the phone buzzed in my hand. The caller ID indicated it came from the same place I called earlier, the sheriff’s office. I answered and the voice said, “This is Deputy Ivan Parker returning a call to this number.”
“Thanks for returning my call. This is Sean O’Brien. I was there the night that Jesse Taylor was arrested in Shorty’s parking lot.”
“You’re the guy who told the detective you’d worked homicide with Miami-Dade.”
“And you’re the deputy who told the detective Miranda wasn’t read. I admire your attention to investigative protocol.”
“Thank you. How can I help you? You told the dispatcher something about evidence. What is that?”
“You ever see a professionally tied hangman’s noose?”
“Can’t say I have, at least not in person. TV and the movies, maybe. Where’d you find this noose?”
“I didn’t. A young black woman, Sonia Acker, and her family found it. And they found it in their front yard—the yard of Sonia’s elderly grandmother. ”
“Why didn’t they call it in?”
“They’re afraid. I have their address and phone numbers. And I have the noose. It’s in a paper grocery sack. Just as the girl delivered it.”
“What’s your location, Mr. O’Brien?”
“I’m parked in front of Ruby’s Coffee Shop. Black Jeep. Are you with a partner? Can you come alone?”
“I can come alone. I’ll be there in a few minutes. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you not to touch the evidence inside that bag.”
FORTY-EIGHT
When he looked inside the paper bag his eyes widened. I stood with Deputy Ivan Parker under the shade of a canvas awning in front of the coffee shop. I guessed his age at about thirty. He had short-cropped dark hair, rawboned face, inquisitive and skeptical hazel eyes. The same eyes I’d seen in dozens of law enforcement officers. Their guard always up. Everyone’s a liar. And it’s your job to cut to the chase and figure out who might be telling the truth. And just maybe, peel the onion of lies back far enough, there’s an honest person in there. The perpetrators wear camouflage. The real truth is the real victim.
As a for
mer detective, I had Deputy Parker’s attention. Maybe I could gain his respect. I provided him with some of the information that I had. He closed the paper bag and asked, “Did Sonia say who she thinks might have done this?”
“According to Caroline Harper, she didn’t. Sonia’s a scared kid. Who knows where her Uncle Jeremiah is right now.”
“This hate tactic won’t fly in Jackson County. I grew up here. My son and daughter are growing up here. This sort of thing ought to be long buried in the past. I’ll ride out there and speak with Mrs. Franklin. I know her. She’s a fine lady. I’ll try to locate her granddaughter, Sonia and Jeremiah, too, if I can find him. Maybe we can piece this thing together.”
“How long have you been with the sheriff’s department?”
“I’m coming up on my ninth year. I’m applying for detective. I graduated from Florida State with a degree in criminology.”
“Put that degree and your experience to good use looking at a cold case.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Dozier School for boys…there are people who are convinced murdered kids are buried in hidden graves there.”
“I’ve heard those rumors. Somehow, they don’t seem to gain much traction here.”
I reached in my shirt pocket and pulled out the photo of Andy Cope. “This isn’t a rumor. It’s a picture of a boy who was held at the old school. His name is Andy Cope. He went missing fifty years ago.” I told him the story and added, “If you want to make detective, investigate that. Unlock the biggest criminal secret in the county, maybe the entire state. I’ll help you.”