by Mark Hall
hadn’t been cut in weeks. There was a small fishing boat in the back corner of the yard that Chris walked over to for a closer look. In the other corner there was a dog pen by a chinaberry tree and the front door of the pen was standing open. There was bare dirt all around the tree and a long rope was tied to it. It looked as though the dog from the cage was occasionally tied to the tree. All around the tree were pawprints in the dirt that appeared to be the same as the bushy dog or bush dog, whatever Viv called it.
Also in the dirt were boot prints and the same shoe prints that we saw over at Rozar Park. Only this time, they were together. On the other side of the dog pen, the grass lay flat to the ground and a lot of dark brown drying blood had pooled on the ground. This must be the spot where Tim Cooper died.
The lot next to the house was overgrown and past it was Thomson Middle School. As I scanned the field of overgrown sage brush and weeds, I caught the bearded face of a man looking right back at me.
Six
“Hold it!” I yelled as I put my hand on my gun and started walking toward the bearded man in the weeds. He had been down on his knees looking over into the yard when I caught his face. He jumped up and took off running toward the school.
“Hold it”! I yelled again and drew my gun and started running after him. Chris took off after him also and I could hear Richard on the radio calling for help.
Running through an overgrown lot of weeds slowed us down as the briars and sandspurs grabbed at our pants legs. We chased the man through the rest of the lot and around the Leland cypress trees into the side parking lot of the school. I was glad it was a Saturday and no one was there. He had a good lead on us but I thought we might be able to catch up to him. I sure didn’t want him getting into the Eagle Springs neighborhood.
He ran around the back of the school past the circular driveway there and once he got about halfway down the back of the school toward the football field and track, he stopped and leaned against and facing the wall with his hands up. I pulled my gun up and told him to turn around.
“Hold on, Mark” he said.
We had reached him by now. “How do you know my name? Turn around so I can see you.”
He turned around and I saw the face of a friend. “Dwayne”? I asked.
“Yeah, Mark. How’ve you been?”
“Dad gum it, Dwayne. You didn’t have to run like that. I’m going to be picking sandspurs out of my bootlaces for a week. Chris, this is Dwayne Padgett who used to be from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation” I said as I holstered my gun.
“Still GBI and still undercover which is why I ran. I don’t need anybody looking in on Tim Cooper’s place to see me talking to a U.S. Marshal”.
I radioed Richard to tell him to call off whoever he called to assist. I also told him we’d be back at the house in a minute. “What do you know about this Tim Cooper guy?”
“I have been working on a deal for a couple months now. The guy whose house you were walking through heads up a dog fighting ring. This guy was getting big and had a whole network of dogs and fights. I have been watching the house off and on since he went missing yesterday. I thought I recognized you and stuck my head up too far”.
“He isn’t missing any more. His body was found down in Perry”.
Dwayne’s head snapped up. He started pacing as he thought about what Tim Cooper’s death might mean and said, “I guess that’s it, then. This whole thing will fall apart without this guy in the lead. I had just found out where the fights were and the trick to getting back there. This guy has a cabin back in the woods with lights and dog kennels and a big pit they use to dispose of the dead animals. It is pretty smart too, how they drive back in the woods to get there.”
“How’s that?”
“You know we’d notice when a few dozen vehicles all get off the highway and drive around a field, you’d see all the tire tracks. This guy has a cow pasture on either side of the highway. Under the highway and between the two pastures is a huge concrete culvert the cows use to go back and forth between the pastures. A pickup can fit right in that concrete culvert. The people going to the dog fights come into the pasture through three separate cattle gates, the ones you drive across. There is a sandy bottomed ditch that runs through the pasture and through the culvert and out the other side. After each truck passes through, they have a guy on a four-wheeler drag the sand on either side of the pipe, like you do a baseball field before a game. That way, you don’t see any tire tracks anywhere near the culvert. About a mile through the pasture there’s another cattle gate that leads out and into the swamp where the cabin is”.
“Who would have killed him”?
“Mark, at the last fight I got to, there was a $10,000 bet on just one fight. There must be upwards of ninety to a hundred thousand dollars at a fight every time he has one. These aren’t just gang members and bums at these things. This is big business and big money and if there’s big money there’s a reason to want to run the operation”.
“Where are the dogs? There was only one pen in the yard and nothing that looked like dog training or anything like that” I asked, then kneeled down to start picking out sandspurs off my pants legs and boots.
“He didn’t have any dogs himself, he just set up the fights and I have only been able to get to two of them and I was only able to get to them through a guy I met”.
“Hey, do you have that list of Craigslist postings?” Chris asked. I handed it over to him and he started looking over the listing in one hand and his phone in the other.
“Dwayne, did you go to a fight in March or April?” he asked.
“I went to the second one in March and one in April. But I never knew when they were supposed to be – my guy would tell me when the next one was and we’d go”.
“What do you mean second one in March?” I asked, “How many a month did he have?”
“I don’t know, Mark. I was set to go to one fight but it got cancelled or my informant got scared so we went to one the next week”.
Chris looked up from his phone, “You were heading to one on March 3rd which was a Thursday and it got rescheduled for the following Thursday the 10th”.
Dwayne turned at me and looked very mad, “You been following me, Mark? You ought to tell somebody if you think something is going on like that. Why watch after me?”
“No joke, I haven’t been watching after you,” I turned to Chris, “how’d you figure that out? That the fights were on a Thursday?”
Chris grinned at me, “The same way I figured out we need to post on Craigslist under Jewelry that we have a Jitterbug for sale at a reduced price of $630.”
Seven
“What are you talking about? I mean, I know what you are talking about but what are you talking about that I don’t know you are talking about?” What I said made sense at least to me.
Dwayne jumped in, “Who is this guy, Mark, and what is going on?”
Chris was still grinning. “Look at the postings again. The first one was in Jewelry and it said there was a jon boat for sale for $125. J in Jewelry and J in jon boat and one then twenty-five all mean January 25th. The next one, in the Free category had a fishing pole for sale for $225. That would have been February 25th. Then the rest: in Materials, a mag light for $303, March 7th, in Materials again, there was the same mag light for sale reduced up to $310, meaning a change of the fight date to March 10th”.
Dwayne looked stunned. “That is absolutely right. In April, the fight was on the 13th. What was listed then?”
I replied,” It was in Antiques and it was an anchor for $413.”
Chris picked back up, “and the one in May was Motorcycles and it is a Mercury outboard for sale for $510. That leads us to a Jitterbug for $623”
“That’s this Thursday,” I said,” so yes, we can post a new listing reducing it to the 30th.”
Chris added, “And what is sitting in Cooper’s back yard? A jon boat with a Mercury outboard motor”.
We quickly worked with Dwayne on deciding our plan. We would post a listing on Craigslist reducing the price while he supported the idea of the fight with his informant and to whomever they could let it leak out. But the plan was absolutely thin. Hopefully the murderer would come to the fight looking for the person that posted the listing and appeared to be trying to take over. Since the body was only found today there was a good chance the word was not out yet. And since the dog was gone from his house we thought that it might be with whoever killed him. Find the dog and maybe we find the person who did it.
I would try several times over the next few days to decide if I wanted to dig into Chris or not. I know everyone is smart in their own way but he had shown an absolute knack for detection. Or maybe his previous training was showing through.
Dwayne got the word out and we posted the listing on Craigslist and made sure that the IT guys at Craigslist knew what was going on in case someone tried to contact the poster’s email address repeatedly.
Later that afternoon we got word that it was absolutely a murder case. Turns out the tree was laying across a real stab wound that started almost on top of his breast bone in the middle of his chest then angled in toward the heart.
That Thursday morning we hiked into the dog fight location from the south. It was located just off Big Indian Creek near Macon County and we slugged through three or four miles of thick, old