Justice Burning (Darren Street Book 2)

by Scott Pratt

  “I know what you want,” Routh said as he poured Grimes a cup of coffee. “Cream or sugar?”

  Grimes shook his head. He was surprised at how clean and orderly the place was. Lester Routh might be a thief, but at least he was a clean thief.

  “How could you possibly know what I want?” Grimes said. “Have you become a mind reader?”

  Lester sat down heavily in a chair across the kitchen table from Grimes. He had a scruffy three-day beard that was salt and pepper. Grimes knew Routh kept his head shaved, but there was stubble across the dome this morning. His face was pockmarked from acne, and his cheeks were sunken. When he smiled, which wasn’t often, his teeth were gapped and yellow.

  “You want to know if I know anything about that shooting at Sammy’s a while back,” Routh said. “You ain’t arrested nobody, which means you either ain’t got nothing or you ain’t got enough. You want my help.”

  “Well, you’re a damned psychic, Lester,” Grimes said. “So? Have you heard anything?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Then let’s hear it.”

  “How much?”

  “Depends on what you tell me and how much it helps me.”

  “I want five hundred.”

  “For five hundred, you better hand me the killer’s ass on a platter,” Grimes said.

  “That’d cost you five thousand.”

  “What do you have?” Grimes said.

  Routh laid his hand down on the table, palm up, and started wiggling his fingers. “Five hundred,” he said.

  “Not a chance until I hear what you have to say.”

  “Let me see the money,” Routh said. “Put it on the table.”

  Grimes had known what he was getting into before he came. He’d had to argue for an hour to get approval from his supervisor for $1,000 in cash for the informant. He didn’t know whether Routh would have any information, but he’d used Routh in the past, and he’d always been reliable. He seemed to know everyone and everything that was going on in the criminal underworld in and around Cowen. Grimes reached into his wallet and laid five hundred-dollar bills on the table. He put his hand over them and held them in place. “Talk.”

  “There was a guy asking around a few weeks before your boys got popped,” Routh said.

  “What guy?”

  “He was a messenger boy, a representative of another guy who was representing a third guy.”

  “You’re off to a terrible start,” Grimes said as he peeled two of the hundreds off and stuck them in his pocket.

  “He was asking about Frazier on behalf of this other guy. He wanted to know if Frazier had made any noise about killing this dude in Knoxville, Tennessee, because the dude had something to do with Frazier’s brother getting his throat cut in prison.”

  “Names, Lester. I need names.”

  “The guy that was doing all the asking was a biker named Jimmy Baker. Known him his whole life. Young and cocky, a punk, did a two-year bit on a burglary charge and thinks he’s a badass. He was asking on behalf of this dude named Rex Fairchild out of Charleston. Baker said Fairchild moved some blow back in the day, and Fairchild and Baker’s stepdaddy knew each other. That’s how Baker and Fairchild hooked up, through Baker’s stepdaddy. Fairchild wanted the information for a friend of his that he was in the coke business with, some heavyweight they call Big Pappy Donovan. Fairchild and Big Pappy both got busted, but neither of them would roll on anybody so they both went to prison. Fairchild wound up doing about seven years, I believe. But Big Pappy got a lot more time. The word I got was that Big Pappy was a shot caller at the same prison where this Darren Street was serving his time. You know what a shot caller is, right?”

  “Yeah, I know what a shot caller is.”

  “So Big Pappy was one of the most respected shot callers in the federal system. Hurt some guards pretty bad, did a bunch of time in the hole, even wound up at Marion for a while from what people say. So when Baker comes asking and mentioning Big Pappy’s name, people start talking. And what he was asking about was whether Donnie Frazier may have blown up a house in Tennessee and whether he had any help. And the answer he got was yeah, Frazier and Tommy Beane stole some dynamite from Archland Coal Company and went down to Knoxville, Tennessee, and blew up a house. He was trying to kill Darren Street, but Street wasn’t there. When I first heard about it, all I did was shake my head. Donnie and Tommy were two of the meanest, dumbest crackers I ever knew. So once Baker finds out they were the ones that killed Street’s mother, he starts wanting addresses and what kind of vehicle they drive and where they hang out and all that.”

  “How did you find all of this out?” Grimes said.

  “Baker comes by here once in a while. We sit out back and burn wood and drink liquor. He flaps his gums when he’s drinking.”

  “Who killed Frazier and Beane?” Grimes said.

  “I don’t know,” Routh said. “I swear I don’t know. Nobody’s said a word. Information flowed out of here, but apparently none has flowed back. Maybe Big Pappy came in and did it, or maybe he had somebody else do it, or maybe he just passed the information on to Street and Street did it himself or hired somebody. No way to know for sure.”

  “Where is Big Pappy Donovan now?” Grimes said. “He still in prison?”

  “No. He’s out. Street’s a lawyer, right? The word is that while they were in prison, Street won Pappy’s appeal and got him out. But during the time between Street winning the appeal and Pappy actually being released, Pappy helped Street escape, and Street ended up going back to Tennessee and getting his case dismissed. Those two dudes are legends inside the walls all over the country.”

  “That’s great, good for them,” Grimes said. “Do you know where Big Pappy is?”

  “Runs a trucking company out of Dalton, Georgia.”

  “And this Rex Fairchild, you say he’s in Charleston?”

  “Charleston, West Virginia. He owns a used car lot there, from what I hear.”

  “You hear a lot,” Grimes said.

  “I don’t talk much unless I’m getting paid for it,” Routh said. “Learn a lot more that way.”

  Grimes took the hundreds back out of his pocket and put them on the table.

  “I’ll probably be back,” he said.

  “Be sure to call before you come so I can get the wife out of here,” Routh said. “She talks a lot. Wouldn’t want to ruin my reputation.”

  CHAPTER 35

  I hadn’t seen Dan Reid since I was tried and convicted of murder, but I knew the former Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Knoxville office had retired shortly after Ben Clancy was arrested and had opened his own private investigative agency. I called and asked whether he would come to my office to talk about doing some work for me, and to my surprise, he agreed. He walked in the day after I spoke with Katherine Davis, and I went to the lobby to greet him.

  Reid was fifty-two, an inch taller than I was, and had thick, short, salt-and-pepper hair and penetrating robin-egg-blue eyes. He was trim and appeared to be fit, one of those guys who was so lean you could see the muscles in his jaws.

  “Is this awkward?” I said when he walked into my office and sat down across from me.

  He shook his head. “No reason for it to be awkward. I did my job back then. I didn’t think you were guilty, but there wasn’t anything I could do.”

  “Did you know Clancy was framing me?”

  “I suspected. What do you think about him disappearing?”

  “I think he hurt a lot of people during his career, which means there are a lot of possibilities.”

  “Some people think you’re one of those possibilities, from what I understand.”

  Again, the rumors. I seemed to be a constant topic of conversation among law enforcement agencies, lawyers, judges, clerks, and reporters. I smiled and shook my head. “You’re talking about your former colleagues at the FBI, I assume.”

  Reid nodded. “Along with some Knoxville cops and the United States Attorney.”

  “Th
ey’re mistaken,” I said. “I haven’t done a thing.”

  “The feds don’t really matter,” Reid said. “It isn’t their case. No jurisdiction.”

  “Did you call Grace the night before my trial started and tell her I wasn’t guilty?” I asked.

  “I’m going to take the Fifth on that one.”

  “I knew it was you. Well, for what it’s worth, thank you.”

  “Didn’t do much good, did it?”

  “No, but thanks just the same. So how is the private-eye thing going?”

  “I like it,” Reid said. “I get to cherry-pick because I don’t really need money, and I get to do investigative work, which is something I’ve always enjoyed. And it gets me out of the house.”

  “What do you charge?”

  “A hundred and fifty an hour plus expenses.”

  “You pay yourself a little better than the FBI paid you.”

  “A lot better.”

  “Staying busy?”

  “I’ve got all I want.”

  “Interested in taking a look at a case for me?”

  “Maybe. What do you have?”

  Katherine Davis had been bothering me. It all just seemed somehow contrived. And the fact that she was in the criminal justice program and wanted to be a prosecutor meant she might be close to some cops. The more I thought about it, the way she’d hit on me didn’t make sense. She was too young and too gorgeous to be interested in a semisuccessful, hack criminal defense lawyer like me. The thing that bothered me the most, though, was that she hadn’t mentioned my conviction and exoneration, and she hadn’t said a word about my mother. Perhaps it was just paranoia, but I wanted to be sure she was what she said she was.

  “Beautiful young girl who says she took an Ambien and did some sleep-driving. Wound up getting arrested for DUI. She came in yesterday and told me about the case, but by the time she left, she was hitting on me. I told her I was too old for her and I was engaged, but she kept on.”

  “Maybe you’re just irresistible,” Reid said.

  “I’d love to think so, but this woman could have anybody she wants. I think I smell a rat. It might just be paranoia because I’m constantly hearing rumors about being suspected of murder, but then again, it might not.”

  “A rat? You think she’s working for the cops?”

  “They think I killed two guys in West Virginia, and now they think I may have had something to do with Clancy going missing. I guess they think I’m some kind of serial killer now. I wouldn’t put it past them to send some pretty young thing in here to try and get an admission out of me.”

  “Do you have anything to admit?” Reid said.

  “Like I said, I haven’t done a thing. Haven’t killed anybody. I just don’t have it in me.”

  “Do you have her date of birth and Social Security number?”

  “Everything you need is on the intake form she filled out yesterday. Got her driver’s license number, too, if you need it.”

  “Every little bit helps,” Reid said. “So what exactly do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to be discreet and find out everything there is to know about her. Where she grew up, her circumstances. Follow her. She says she’s a grad student in criminal justice at UT and has been accepted to the law school here in the fall. I’d like to know if that’s really true.”

  “And what if it turns out she’s working for the Knoxville PD?”

  “I hope she isn’t. I really do. I’d like to think she’s just a beautiful young woman who finds me attractive. But if she’s working for them, I’ll tell her to go play rat somewhere else. I hate informants.”

  “Do you have a time frame?” Reid said.

  “As soon as possible. Can you get on it immediately?”

  “I need to tie a couple of things up first. Give me three days, and then I’ll get started.”

  “Excellent. Thank you.”

  “For what it’s worth, I’m really sorry about your mother,” Reid said.

  “Thank you. It’s been tough.”

  “I’ll tell you something else,” he said. “If somebody murdered my mother, you can bet your ass I’d be looking to put a bullet in them.”

  “The law frowns on vigilantes,” I said. Once again, paranoia began to overtake me. Was Reid trying to get me to admit something? He’d been an FBI agent his entire adult life. If I admitted something to him, his instinct would have probably been to go straight to the Knoxville PD.

  “Right,” Reid said, “and sometimes that’s just a damned shame. Are you still with Grace Alexander?”

  “I am.”

  “Tell her I said hello. And tell her I had a little too much to drink that night I called her.”

  “Will do,” I said.

  As Reid got up and walked out of the room, I leaned back in my chair and let out a deep breath. Reid seemed okay, but I couldn’t help but wonder whether he’d stab me in the back if I gave him half a chance. I’d have to be careful around him.

  It was getting to the point where I couldn’t trust anyone.

  CHAPTER 36

  That same afternoon, I had to go to Criminal Court for a motion hearing on an arson case I was handling. In the motion, I was asking the judge to disqualify the prosecution’s “expert” fire investigator on the grounds that his education, training, and experience did not meet the legal criteria for an expert under the current, controlling case law in Tennessee. My client, a thirty-five-year-old sleazebag named Eddie Burton, had more likely than not burned his girlfriend’s house down so he could bleed her for the insurance money, but the prosecution’s case was thin and their expert simply wasn’t qualified. I had no idea why they had chosen to use this particular expert, but he had very little training, very little experience, a limited education, and he simply wasn’t very bright.

  While I was sitting at the defense table waiting for my case to be called, I looked up, and in walked my old client Rupert Lattimore, the man who had engineered the kidnapping, rapes, and murders of two college kids. I’d been appointed to represent Rupert, but the judge had taken me off the case after Rupert and I took turns threatening to kill each other.

  Rupert, who was handcuffed, chained at the waist, and shackled, shuffled straight to the defense table accompanied by two sheriff’s deputies. I looked up and smirked at him.

  “Well, if it ain’t the murdering, motherfucking lawyer,” Rupert said quietly.

  “Go fuck yourself, Rupert,” I said.

  “Man, I been hearing what you did up there in West Virginia. I hope they catch you and give you the damned death penalty. From what I hear, you walked into a bar and ambushed them two boys, shot the shit out of them. It was a coward killing from what I hear.”

  “Really? Kind of like how you stuck a broomstick up Stephen Whitfield’s ass after you and your boys had him hog-tied? And didn’t you eventually shoot him in the back? And then you went in and raped that poor defenseless girl for two days and then poured bleach down her throat before you covered her in trash bags, stuffed her in a trash can, and let her suffocate? That took a real man, Rupert.”

  “Damn shame about your momma,” Rupert said. “How much of her did they find? A couple of little pieces? I’m surprised she wasn’t fucking somebody and got him blown up, too. All I’ve heard about her was that she was a whore.”

  I felt heat rise in my stomach, and every muscle in my body tensed. I had a pretty thick skin when it came to the courtroom and clients and some of the things they’d say. But I hated Rupert, and hearing him call my dead mother a whore pushed me over the edge. My vision tunneled. I stood up and looked him dead in the eye.

  “You’re gonna pay for that,” I said.

  “Yeah? What are you gonna do?”

  I turned my back on him and walked out the side door into the hallway. I was seething. I paced up and down the hall for a few minutes and then went outside. I’d gotten into the habit of carrying two phones with me—my regular cell and a throwaway. The throwaway was in my car, and I jogged t
o the parking garage and retrieved it from the glove compartment. Big Pappy had texted me his most recent burner number, and I dialed it.

  “What’s up, my man?” he said cheerfully.

  “I have a problem. How much would it cost me to reach out and touch somebody in jail?” I said.

  All I could hear was Lattimore’s voice: “All I’ve ever heard about her was that she was a whore.” The indignity of what had happened to her was bad enough, but for Lattimore to remind me of it so blatantly and in such a vulgar manner had thrown me once again into a mental and emotional rage. And he’d been so smug about it. He genuinely didn’t think there was anything I could do about what he’d said, so I could tell he took great pleasure in taunting me. I didn’t just want to fuck him up, I wanted to fuck him up badly. I knew what I was planning could be risky, that it could cause me problems, especially with everything else that was going on, but at that point, with the taunts still burning in my ears, I just didn’t give a shit.

  “Depends on which jail and what you mean by touch,” Pappy said. “You want the person dead or beaten or what?”

  “The jail is right here in Knoxville,” I said. “The city jail. And I want him oiled up. I don’t want him to have a face.”

  “Damn, this dude must have really pissed you off.”

  “How much?” I said.

  “I can probably get it done for about two thousand.”

  “Set it up for me, will you? Just put it on my tab. And make sure you get somebody who will do it right.”

  “What did the guy do?”

  I told Pappy of my history with Rupert Lattimore, and then I told him what he’d said about my mom.

  “Disrespecting a man’s dead mother is not a good idea,” he said. “I can handle it. Take a few days.”

  “As soon as possible,” I said, “but do it right. I don’t need any more heat on me.”