Every Dark Place

by Craig Smith

  I pulled my notebook out and checked my watch for the date and time. I had been getting cases ready for lawyers long enough to know sixty days was tight. Most real law is practiced before the voir dire, so toarrt Iady fm">o all the legal research and the motions that mean very much.

  According to my quick calculations, sixty days meant I should have finished my investigation a couple of months ago. Normally such a situation would constitute a serious interruption in my drinking schedule, but I knew about Will Booker and his crimes. As far as I was concerned we could be ready for trial in twenty minutes. What evidence we had ten years ago was all manufactured by Sheriff Nathan Hall or it was so tainted it would never get into court a second time. As for witnesses, I could round up friends and relatives of the victims with a single phone call. The only critical witness, the only evidence at all against William Booker, was a gal named Missy Worth. Missy I could find anytime I wanted in a little drinking palace she managed called the Dog Daze End. As for her testimony, ten years ago it had been just what the prosecutor ordered. It was anyone’s guess what she would pull out of her bonnet these days.

  ‘What are you going to do about it?’ I asked. I kept my head tipped in the direction of my little notepad. I was scribbling nothing furiously.

  ‘Appeal.’ I looked up from my notepad and studied her face. She meant stall. ‘Same as we’re appealing his release,’ she added.

  ‘He’s out?’ I asked incredulously. It is standard procedure in the American judicial

  system for mass murderers, serial killers, and homicidal maniacs to stay locked up while their lawyers make mischief. It took an incredibly lazy, stupid, or angry federal judge to turn one of them loose on the issue of habeas corpus. Federal Circuit Judge Buford Lynch was neither lazy nor stupid.

  ‘As of noon tomorrow,’ Massey grunted.

  ‘What are the chances for an appeal on the release?’ I pressed. I could not believe Will Booker was going to be walking around Shiloh Springs as a free man.

  Garrat shook her head. ‘I doubt an appellate judge will even listen to an argument, but I intend to go over to the capital tomorrow and get some help from the attorney general.’

  ‘Sixty days is not a lot of time to get ready for a murder trial,’ I offered blandly.

  ‘The problem isn’t time,’ Garrat answered. ‘The problem is we now have no evidence.’

  ‘You still have an eyewitness,’ I told her.

  ‘With public opinion about her where it is,’ Massey interjected, ‘I’ll be laughed out of court if Missy Worth is all I can produce.’

  I gave Garrat a quick look, but she was not answering looks at the moment. She had assigned Steve Massey to the case because there was no hope of winning it. I knew it as well as the lawyers did, but I could not condone the idea of surrender – not to a man who had murdered five kids and left the sixth for dead. ‘The story Missy Worth will tell,’ I said, ‘is nothing to laugh at, Steve.’

  Massey slapped his pen down. ‘ Lynn Griswold is his lawyer, Rick!’

  ‘Missy Worth spent thirteen days locked up in Will Booker’s hell.Wort to he

  ‘When Griswold is done with his cross-examination of Missy Worth, the jury won’t believe she could ID her own mother!’

  ‘Her mother didn’t do it,’ Garrat answered. ‘Will Booker did.’

  ‘Give Will Booker the benefit of the doubt for a minute,’ Massey said with relative calmness.

  ‘I prefer not to,’ she answered.

  ‘Say Missy Worth was indoctrinated with misinformation.’

  ‘She wasn’t,’ Garrat answered flatly. I gave Garrat a quick, admiring look. She had been sitting quietly on her opinion about the innocence or guilt of Will Booker for over a year – trusting the legal procedures that were in place to take care of such matters. It was an approach that had allowed her to crush her opponent six months ago in a county election, but now she had to pick a side. In my opinion she had chosen the right one.

  ‘You mean she didn’t see Booker in the hallway in handcuffs before the line up?’ Massey

  asked. This was a standard tactic for some police agencies. It tended to get solid, irrefutable IDs. It was also one of the better ways for appellate attorneys to afford their summer homes.

  ‘That’s substantiated,’ Garrat admitted.

  ‘And the photo spread?’

  Garrat smiled bitterly. Sheriff Hall had possessed the knack for getting the right picture

  picked out of a photo spread. ‘Bernie Samples was right about that much,’ she said. Samples had been the newspaper writer whose articles had first generated public interest in Will Booker’s appeal. ‘But we are not talking about a quick look at the man and a shaky identification.’

  ‘So why did Missy Worth tell Nat Hall when they first talked that she never got a good look at the guy?’ Massey asked.

  Garrat looked at me with a suddenness that took my breath away. ‘That’s what Rick is going to find out for us.’

  Chapter 3

  Wednesday 2:00 p.m., March 17.

  IT HAD BEEN A PRETTY GOOD meeting up to the point that the entire case got shoved down my throat. The rest of it involved Pat Garrat fighting off the look of having to put a favourite old pet to sleep. I could not help feeling set-up.

  I should not have been surprised by it really. It’s how things work. Rising political stars are only as good as their glimmer. It never pays to look too closely or worry about the substance behind the light. Will Booker’s case threatened Pat Garrat’s political future. There was no easy way out from under it, so Garrat was sending her lone investigator out to find a lead on a trail ten years cold. And when he came up empty, which was only to be expected, she would have her scapegoat. I gave Linda Sutherlin a quick, calculating glance, wondering if I could get her to take some of the blame, but it was uselesby tostifyr lone is. Nothing at all sticks to twenty-four. I was the heir apparent for this one.

  Every politician knows how to play the game. I had seen Garrat’s daddy do it a few times, though not with me. It is the nature of politics. No one ever seems to worry about the staff members who come and go as long as they are loyal and quiet on the way out. What I minded was Pat Garrat with that coy I-know-you-can-do-it-big-guy look as the meeting broke apart.

  I went to my office hoping Garrat would call me back or slip down to see me once she had pampered Massey’s fragile ego. I wanted her to tell me straight out this might turn nasty, maybe cost both of us our jobs. Something kind and wise: an intimate little shrug and that pretty smile of hers. If nothing else, some sweet nothing to let me forget I was about to take that long and certain road to nowhere. When she didn’t show up, I flipped a coin a couple of times, best out of five, actually, to see if I should drink or work, and finally getting it right went off to get started on an early, long, and very wet lunch.

  AROUND TWO O’CLOCK, FACING the prospect of never going back to the office or making some gesture at finding out the truth about William Booker, I called Max Dunn’s cell phone.

  Max answered with a voice as raw as wet hay. ‘Sheriff.’

  ‘Rick Trueblood, Max. I’ve got a favour to ask.’

  ‘What do I get out of it?’

  I had my answer ready, ‘Not a damn thing.’ Max had always appreciated me for my honesty with him, but he told me I could go to hell with an offer like that. ‘How about I don’t tell your wife everything I know?’

  After a thoughtful pause Max said, ‘Do you think she’d leave me any money, Rick?’

  ‘Not a penny.’

  ‘So what do you need, buddy?’

  An hour later, pushing it to make the appointment since I’d downed a couple-three more beers before taking off, I pulled into the Stuckey’s parking lot on South 641 and found an army brown sedan with black wall tires waiting for me. Max Dunn sat in the front seat with the patience of a man who’s been on too many stakeouts over the years. He lifted his chin, which is country for hello and pretty much the way we tell folks to go to hell too. ‘R
ain ever going to stop?’ he asked. Settling into his cruiser, I told Max the rain helped the crops grow. It was like cranking the handle on an old toy. ‘Who gives a damn?’ Max snapped. ‘That’s what I want to know! They got corporations growing things now, Rick. There’s not a man on a tractor anymore that owns the land he’s working!’

  Max Dunn was a big man, about six-three and a good fifteen pounds heavier than I was.

  His chest was long and square, and when he got in a huff, like he always did when he got on the subject of corporate farms devouring the small farmer, you would swear he was wearing an armoured vest. He had black hair with a bit of grey to soften the effect, flinty eyes that were quick and mean. Like a lot of men with a physical presence it was second nature for Max to turn his opinions into pronouncements. And not always with a lot of concern for the f sin facts. For a politician on the stump such habits win votes. In the electronic age it was a style that could get you in trouble. The painful truth was the subtleties of political double talk escaped him. Max Dunn said what he thought and paid for it. He had managed to succeed his corrupt boss Nathan Hall as sheriff only because he had been second-in-command when Nat ate his own bullet. Even as an incumbent the election last fall had almost gone the other way. What saved Max was the fact that he was in the same party as Pat Garrat, who had swept into power on a wave of sentiment that pulled a lot of lesser political talents into office with her.

  We pushed past the remnants of a farm that was turning into another makeshift suburb and Max shook his head like a man who has seen paradise, then drops by the local dump for a comparison. ‘Another farm gone to hell, Rick. You can’t make a living farming!’ It was a canned speech, but I still loved it. Part of my innate appreciation for a criminal’s ability to justify himself. About twenty-five years ago Max had climbed off his family tractor and answered a sheriff’s advertisement for deputies. Unlike a lot of farmers going out of business, Max held onto his land though it cost him the luxuries the rest of us think we can’t do without.

  A few years later, using the acres to leverage a healthy loan with a friendly banker, Max joined in with Sheriff Nathan Hall and his cronies to form a company that bought up options on choice spots of real estate just ahead of public announcements of land use. It was as illegal as bank robbery but all the watchdogs were in on it, including Herm Hammer, the former county prosecutor, and a couple of local judges. These days the Dunn family farm was fenced in with white board, and Max raised some of the finest quarter horses in the country.

  Max took us into a countryside spotted with tiny ponds and rough low gravel mounds held together with scrub pines. It was a land that had been raped and pretty much lay useless these days, too raw and rough even for another housing development in the middle of nowhere.

  ‘Here,’ Max announced, pulling his cruiser to a halt on the rutted gravel road.

  I had been expecting something a bit more than a wide spot in the road, but that’s all

  North Shore Point was. Not even a rusty sign to announce you had arrived. The weeds and brush were close by; even in a light mist dust hung in the air out of habit. Off to the side of the road the land plunged down so that we were looking at the tops of a thick grove of trees. Max led me to a narrow path, then down the hill until we came out at the side of a fairly nice-sized pond. It was hardly the lake I had imagined from the lone photograph I had seen in the newspaper about a year ago when it was reporting the injustices committed against William Booker.

  ‘This is it,’ Max told me.

  Chapter 4

  Wednesday 3:25 p.m., March 17.

  ‘YOU INVESTIGATED IT?’ I ASKED. As I figured it would, this got a nervous jerk of the

  head. I had wanted Max to show me the place not because I couldn’t find it, as I had told him, but so I could get a feel for the thinking that had taken place during the original investigatidthroad rk on.

  ‘I looked at it like everyone else. Not much to see.’

  Max did not look comfortable. Whether it was the actual guilt of helping to frame Will Booker or simply the danger of appearing to be part of it, I couldn’t tell. I didn’t really care.

  The Reverend Connie Merriweather, who had spearheaded the drive to free Will Booker, had done enough damage to the local political scene. I couldn’t see how ruining another career for the sake of Will Booker was going to help anyone. ‘So how is the fishing?’ I asked genially, just to soften the air between us.

  Max flashed his big horse teeth. ‘Like as catch a mermaid as an old mud cat, Rick. Least ways, last summer we caught us some. Three girls and one lucky boy naked as the day they were born. Frolicking.’ He thought about it for a time, then explained, ‘They were college.’

  College covered a number of lunacies, including frolicking, and Max Dunn left it at that.

  I kicked around the small shoreline. There was very little space between the water and the heavy undergrowth of bushes and weeds, no shore at all around the rest of the pond. The water itself reached out about thirty yards or so before coming up against a dense grove of pines on the opposite shore. The pond was three times as wide but came into a muddy swamp at either end. ‘I thought the place would be bigger,’ I said.

  ‘Well, it’s plenty deep,’ Max answered. ‘We lost a kid out here three, four years back.

  He came up on his own eventually, but we sure couldn’t find him.’

  ‘Got a question for you,’ I said. Max’s gaze stayed on the water and the spittle of rain that dashed against its surface. ‘How did Will Booker know who was down here?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Max got a flinty look of curiosity about him, but he wouldn’t look at me. I don’t think he especially trusted me at the moment.

  ‘The way I understand it, Will Booker arrives at the top of the hill, and first one boy then the other goes to see who’s up there.’

  ‘That’s right. He shot the first and clubbed the second one to death.’

  ‘Then he comes down the hill here for the girls.’ I pointed at the path we had used. Max nodded. ‘My question,’ I said, ‘is how does he know what’s waiting for him? As far as I can see, it could have been you and me with those boys. And somehow I don’t think Will Booker would have cared for that.’

  The sheriff frowned with a bit of uncertainty. ‘What’s your point, Rick?’

  I looked over the pond and lifted my arm to indicate the far shore. ‘What’s beyond that hill?’

  ‘Another filled-up gravel pit. They’re all over the place. This is lake country, or what passes for it.’

  ‘Down there?’ I pointed at the far end of the lake.

  ‘Hell, I don’t know, and I don’t want to go find out. As far as I can see, it’s just brush and thorns and mud!’

  ‘So the theory goes, Booker, or whoever killed those kids – ’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’ve joined Connie Merriweather’s church!’

  ‘I’m just saying he drove up without seeing who was here and took what he found, a couple of boys and four teenage girls, but it could have been my handsome mug or a deputy sheriff named Max-by-God-Dunn packing his big .45?’

  ‘Yeah, I guess.’

  ‘And nobody had a problem with that?’

  ‘I did some background on Booker down south, Rick. I wasn’t part of this mess, thank God.’

  ‘Nobody’s trying to draw you into it, Max. I’m just asking you if you remember them talking about it?’

  Max gave me a suspicious look. It was too late for any kind of indictment, but if he ended up closer to the case than folks now believed, Max was likely to go the way of Herman Hammer: politically dead-ended. Pat Garrat needed blood if she was going to survive. Maybe she wasn’t too picky whose she got. ‘Nat and a couple of the others handled the whole thing, Rick. If they talked, I didn’t hear it.’

  He was lying. He’s a good liar, too, at least practiced, but I didn’t doubt my judgement on this point. I also didn’t call him on it. In the absence of true friendship, any friendship at
all suffices, and Max Dunn was about as close as it came for me. Instead, I asked about the background on William Booker. He didn’t want to answer that either. ‘It’s been too many years to remember. You can find it in the files, buddy. That’s why I wrote my report!’

  I had tried an old trick, testing a liar’s memory against his last account of the facts, then picking at the discrepancies, but Max had been in this game too long for it to work. He wasn’t talking short of a serious game of Russian roulette.

  At the top of the hill, though, Max stopped and looked around thoughtfully. There was no way to see down to the shore to know who or what waited below. Finally, he nodded. ‘I see what you mean about him not knowing what he was going to find down there, but maybe the cars gave it away. Bumper stickers with school logos, tubes of lipstick on the dash. Teenage girl things, you know?’