It crossed my mind that if Pete did have some connection to Karl’s murder, Henry Carrell would be pretty pissed off if cops showed up at his place of business without his lawyers warning him. And if I gave him a call, maybe he’d tell me more about Pete.
I headed back to my desk.
He picked right up. We shot the breeze, and then I got to the point: “I just wanted to give you a heads-up, an old contractor of yours might have some information about Karl’s murder. I didn’t want cops showing up at your door out of the blue—”
“Good Lord,” he said. “Are you serious? Who?”
“Your waste-hauler guy. Name of Pete Dupree.”
“Damn. He gave us enough trouble already. This past spring he flaked out on his contract, right before high season. You ever tried to get a reliable company to haul half a ton of waste per week, on three days’ notice?”
I laughed. “That seems mighty ungrateful of him, after you and Roy helped get him out of those trespassing charges.”
“The what, now?”
“Oh, that thing up in Charleston. He got himself arrested along with Karl and another Blue Seas guy by the name of Luis Garza, and Roy got the charges dropped after you vouched for them. Speaking of which, they might want to talk with Garza too. Any idea where to find either of them?”
He didn’t say anything. I couldn’t tell if he was thinking or had gotten distracted. Then he said, “Oh, yeah. I tell you what, so much shit hits the fan here sometimes, I have trouble recalling each specific turd. But that does ring a bell. Garza was one of my Dominicans, the D-visa crew. I let him go after the trespassing thing. Couldn’t say where he is now. In theory, he should’ve gone back home.”
He also had no idea where Pete might be. When we hung up, I yanked open my desk drawer for some Tylenol. Chasing leads that went nowhere was giving me a headache.
For dinner, I brought an extra-large pizza home. Noah ate half of it in about ten minutes and took another piece back to his room to power him through some online gaming. I looked out at the setting sun, thinking it might be time I went back to the Broke Spoke. I could swing past and check the lot for Dunk’s obnoxious red Hummer and Cheryl’s little light-blue Kia, or Hyundai, or whatever it was.
I checked my wallet. I had ten bucks left, enough for some sparkling water and a ridiculous tip. If Cheryl was there and Dunk wasn’t, maybe I could find out a little more about Pete Dupree.
Saturday night, it turned out, was not a good time to go investigating at a strip club. The angry little White-supremacist bartender glared at me for occupying the last available barstool, and Cheryl was run off her feet. I nursed my expensive water, left her a tip that I hoped would buy a future conversation, and headed back to my car. I’d parked half a block down, across the street. I never wanted to have to tell Roy I’d damaged his car by leaving it in a strip club lot for some drunk idiot to dent.
The night air was pleasantly cool, and the streetlight by my car was shining through oak leaves and Spanish moss. I took a deep breath; even here, I could smell the salt tang of the ocean. For all the problems this place had, I thought, heading diagonally across the street, it truly was home.
A revving engine snapped me out of my reverie. I broke into a jog to get across the street, but a headlight beam lit my hands and then the asphalt in front of me. Some Saturday-night driver, probably drunk, was veering toward me. I burst into a sprint, praying he wouldn’t swerve onto the sidewalk, and went airborne over the curb. As brakes squealed, I hit the ground hard. The engine revved again, and I looked back to see a black truck peeling away. It shot down the street, took the first corner, and disappeared.
As I scrambled to my feet, I saw blood on my hands and down the front of my suit. I had to get out of there—the hairs on the back of my neck told me that—so I ran to my car without even trying to clean up, turned the key, and took off.
At a stoplight six or eight blocks later, holding napkins to my bloody nose and feeling glad that the Malibu’s upholstery was black, I realized what had me on edge. A drunk driver could easily veer toward a pedestrian; that happened all too often. But there’d been nothing erratic about that truck. A drunk driver wouldn’t have shot down the rest of the block as straight as a bullet and taken the corner so tightly.
And if it wasn’t some drunk, that meant he’d been aiming for me.
27
Friday, October 11, Morning
I was back in Judge Chambliss’s courtroom for the short proceeding known as a second appearance, when folks charged with crimes had their lawyers show up to let the judge know if they were pleading guilty or going to trial. Chambliss held these things every other Friday, so what looked like half the defense attorneys in the county were sitting in the courtroom’s wooden pews waiting their turns. I joined them and spent an hour watching Ruiz do his thing at the prosecution table. I couldn’t help but notice that of the five cases handled in that hour, four of them got plea bargains. That was normal. I still hadn’t figured out why Jackson’s case wasn’t normal to Ruiz. Or, rather, to his boss.
When my case was called, I stepped over to the defense table, nodding to Ruiz as I passed. Judge Chambliss finished conferring with his clerk and said, “Well, counsel? You got this taken care of?”
Chambliss and I both looked at Ruiz. He moved some papers around on his desk, looking down at them like there might be an answer printed there, and said, “Your Honor, uh, it appears this case is going to trial. According to whatever schedule you impose, of course.”
Judge Chambliss looked at me. I could tell he was puzzled.
I said, “Morning, Your Honor. Mr. Ruiz and I have conferred, but his office has not offered my client any type of plea. And my client maintains his innocence, so yes, we’re proceeding to trial.”
Chambliss turned to him. “Mr. Ruiz, I trust your office is aware of what I told you at the preliminary hearing? About, uh, the manslaughter jury instruction that I said, if the weight of the evidence still looked pretty much like it did then, I’d offer if asked?”
“Yes, Your Honor. Of course, Your Honor. I’m well aware, and I informed my superior.”
“Okay. And, for the record, are you confirming you folks haven’t offered a plea?”
“Yes, Your Honor. The solicitor general believes this case should go to trial.”
“Well, okay then.” He beckoned to his clerk, said something to her, and handed her a page from his desk. She sat back down and flipped a couple of pages over in her calendar.
“Mr. Munroe,” Chambliss said, “as I recall, Mr. Ruiz had asked to fast-track this. And you were not opposed?”
“No, Your Honor. My client’s been in jail since June, and he’s eager to get this over with.”
He nodded. “Okay, then.” His clerk walked back to the bench and handed him the piece of paper. He looked at it and said, “Mr. Ruiz, you free in the last half of December?”
“Uh, let me… One moment, Your Honor.” He fumbled for his phone and started scrolling. “Uh, you mean Christmas, Your Honor?”
“Courts are closed on Christmas Day, Mr. Ruiz.”
“Yes, of course, Your Honor.” I could see him deflate. He was a family man, and a trial was a twenty-four seven job. With four little kids, I knew, it would kill him to spend Christmas that way.
Chambliss said, “Monday, December 16 work for y’all?”
Ruiz nodded. “Uh, one week, Your Honor?”
“Let’s make it two. If we don’t need that much time, fine, but I’d rather schedule that so nobody ends up having to cancel holiday plans if we run long.”
Ruiz deflated even more. When I picked my files up and headed out, he barely looked at me.
After work, I met up with Terri outside Mazie’s house so we could retrace Jackson’s steps on the night of the murder. Mazie was at work. Our plan was to see how long it took to walk to the marina, and to take some photos along the way that we might use in trial exhibits. Terri took a few shots from Mazie’s porch and the sidewalk in fr
ont. The sun was starting to head down the sky and turn gold, making the neighborhood look prettier than it normally did. For trial exhibits, I liked that. Juries tended to make assumptions about people from bad-looking neighborhoods.
“You know,” I said, “I’ve only ever driven through this part of town. It feels different walking.”
“What I notice is how many windows there are. All these people, and they mostly would’ve been home at night. And the convenience store, the laundromat… The streetlights work, right?”
“We’ll see when we get back. I never thought it was dark driving through here, though.”
She paused on the sidewalk, hit the stopwatch she was using to get an accurate measure on the length of the walk, and took photos of the convenience store and a house whose front window faced the sun. You could see the whole living room through it, and several members of the family inside.
“We’ll have to blur their faces,” I said.
“Mm-hmm.”
She started her stopwatch again, and we walked on. “So, all these people,” she said, “and all the publicity about this case, but the prosecution doesn’t have anybody other than Blount who saw Jackson walking with a crowbar?”
“That’s a good point. And, I mean, it’s quite the coincidence that the lead detective just happened to see the defendant acting suspicious that night.”
She nodded. I could see her going over something in her mind. “I’m not going to get into specifics,” she said, “but one of the reasons I left the force is that I saw a couple of fellow officers manufacture some real convenient coincidences. And they didn’t get called out. The brass covered for them.”
I shook my head. “I can see that driving out good cops. Sure, you nail the perp in the case right in front of you, but big picture, you end up corrupting the force and destroying public trust.”
She laughed, a bit harshly, and hit her stopwatch again. As she snapped a photo of a crowded gas station, she said, “If you think there’s much public trust left to destroy, your definition of the public must be different than mine.”
“Oh,” I said, realizing what she meant. “Oh, right.” I had a mental image of the entire Black population of South Carolina standing on a corner several blocks ahead, looking at their watches and waiting for folks like me to catch up.
When we started walking again, I said, “Speaking of coincidences, it turns out Pete Dupree did some work for Blue Seas. Did you dig up anything on him?”
“Mm-hmm. Unless there are two truckers called Pete Dupree who spend time in Basking Rock, we’re talking about the same guy. Or the same lowlife, I should say. What’d he do at Blue Seas?”
“Waste haulage. He’s not just a trucker. He drove, but I guess the more lucrative end of his business was that his company got the contract for handling all the garbage from the yacht charters.”
“I wonder how Henry found him. I mean, did he put it out for bids? Did he run a background check on Dupree? Because it wouldn’t have come back clean.”
“Huh. I don’t know.” I wrestled for a moment with myself, wondering if there was any way to rationalize pawing through the Blue Seas files again to see if I could find that out.
As she snapped a photo of a roadside restaurant and then zoomed in on the door to get a picture of the sign—the hours of operation showed it would’ve been open during Jackson’s walk—a problem occurred to me. “Hey,” I said. “I should’ve asked when we started out, but do you need me to be taking notes about exactly where we are at each photo? And how long it took to walk from point A to point B? I mean, so we can reconstruct that in the trial presentation.”
“No. Every photo’s geotagged and date-stamped. And I checked my camera settings this afternoon to make sure it was all up to date and accurate.”
“I remember a guy I worked with up in Charleston talking about something like that.” I tried to recall what he’d said. “I think he needed an expert witness to testify about the accuracy, but the basic gist was every digital photo had all that information hidden in it somewhere.”
We turned onto the causeway. This part of the walk was going to be on the beach, because aside from one small parking area halfway along, the causeway was nothing but road.
“It’s not exactly hidden,” she said. “It’s in what’s called EXIF data. Which is, you know, searchable, viewable, depending on your software.” We stepped into the sand, and she took a long shot of the causeway with the line of palm trees and the strip of beach leading to the other side of town, then put her camera back into its bag. “I don’t want to get sand or spray in it,” she explained. “And anyway, I don’t think anyone driving down the causeway at night would’ve seen him walking on the beach.”
I agreed. We walked without talking for a bit. The sound of the waves a few yards away was soothing. A couple of seagulls were wheeling in the sky. I looked out at the water, imagining Karl’s boat adrift. It was white; it had been found pretty quickly, considering how remote the spot it ran aground was, because it was easy to spot against the wet sand.
I asked her, “That data you’re talking about, can you search for it online? I mean, find photos that were taken at a certain place and time?”
“It depends where you look,” she said. “Sites like Facebook strip that data out when you post photos, to protect privacy. But a lot of sites don’t. Things on the cloud or those photo-storage sites could have it, if the user didn’t tweak their privacy settings. Are you thinking we look for photos of Jackson that night?”
“Oh, that too,” I said. Her idea was brilliant, but it hadn’t crossed my mind. “I was just looking at the water and thinking about Karl’s boat.”
“Oh.” She squinted out at the water. I could almost see the math she was doing in her head. “Well, the problem there is you’re looking at a huge amount of possible coordinates. We don’t know what path his boat followed, so we got a whole bay and part of the ocean to search.”
I could tell by her expression that she wasn’t giving up because of that. She was trying to figure out how to make it work.
“There’s also accuracy issues,” she said. “If people’s phone settings are off, or their time zone didn’t update or whatever, we’ll get some results that aren’t right and we’ll miss some that are.”
“I guess that’s why my guy up in Charleston needed an expert witness.”
“Mm-hmm. And if we did find anything useful, you’d need one too.”
“I’m going to need a lottery win to get this case done right.”
She laughed.
I sighed and shook my head. “I guess we cross that bridge when we come to it. If we come to it.”
“You got me curious now, though. I want to figure out how to make this work.”
“You like doing the impossible, don’t you.”
She smiled. “I already know I can do what’s possible. What’s the point in just doing more of that?”
“That seems like a good motto. If—” Before I could finish, I felt my phone vibrate. I pulled it out. Henry had texted me.
“Huh,” I said. “Henry says he found a current address for Pete Dupree.”
“Good,” she said. “If your case doesn’t give prosecutors what they need to put him behind bars, I am going to bring that man down myself. He’s hurt too many women in this town.”
“You got a hell of a to-do list.”
She said, “I am not here on this earth to waste my time.”
28
Sunday, October 27, Morning
Terri dropped by with Buster so we could get some dog walking done at a little park near my house while discussing Jackson’s case. I kept pace with Squatter, picking him up a few times to give him a rest, while her dog barreled off after thrown sticks and balls. It was a strangely wholesome thing to be doing while we discussed the sordid criminal record of Pete Dupree. Or “Lowlife,” as she called him. We used nicknames when talking about the case in public, to keep from being understood by anyone who might overhear, but
most of them were less colorful.
According to the mug shot she’d texted me, Lowlife Dupree was about six one and heavyset, with thinning hair gone mostly gray. He looked like I’d expect a guy who ran a waste-haulage business to look: nothing fancy, a regular guy. I wouldn’t have looked at him twice if I saw him on the street. I certainly wouldn’t have figured he had a rap sheet almost three pages long from states up and down the east coast. Various drug crimes, aiding and abetting prostitution, assault. There was even a human trafficking charge from last year, which got dismissed. Terri had forwarded me his record, along with a list of the original charges he’d faced each time, and I found myself wondering how his defense lawyer had worked the miracle of keeping this guy mostly outside of prison. Everything had been tossed out or pled down.
“Goddammit,” I said. “To think Lowlife here is still walking around despite all this, but my guy’s been in jail since June.”
“Lowlife has money,” she said, leaning down to give her dog a treat. He wolfed it and vibrated with joy. “Good boy,” she said. “You’re a good boy. If you and your dog friends ran this world, it’d be a much better place.”
I laughed and agreed. Then, getting back to the task at hand, I said, “I guess there’s not much point my warning Polly about this guy.” We’d started referring to Henry as Polly, short for politician. “I mean, Lowlife doesn’t work for him anymore, and he left on bad terms anyway.”
She looked at me. “You don’t think he already knows?”
I hadn’t seen anything in the Blue Seas file about Dupree’s record, but I didn’t want to tell her I’d been looking there. “Well, you know,” I said, with a shrug. “Folks sometimes don’t do all the due diligence that they ought to. And I can’t see an upstanding churchgoer like him doing business with somebody if he knew about that.”
She nodded, but she looked doubtful. “Some of those churchgoer types, though,” she said, “they go a little overboard on forgiveness. Some crook says he’s found Jesus, they forget all about the people he hurt.”
Defending Innocence (Small Town Lawyer Book 1) Page 19