by Scott Pratt
“And now Ben Clancy is gone, and the police think you killed him, too. Why didn’t you want to have sex with me after you killed him, Darren?”
She was freaking me out by that point. She knew it all. My primary concern was that she was going to pick up her phone and start dialing the police. Had she done that, she would have witnessed my suicide, the same way I’d witnessed James Tipton’s. But she didn’t call the police, and I simply thought about the criminal defense lawyer’s mantra: Deny everything.
“I didn’t kill him. I haven’t killed anyone.”
“You’re lying. I’m not going to help the police. I’m not going to tell them a thing, because at some level, I understand why you’ve done what you’ve done. But I can’t live with a murderer. I can’t love a killer. I’m going into my bedroom now. When I come back out, I expect you to be gone.”
She turned away from me and walked down the hall. I heard her bedroom door close, and I started gathering my things.
CHAPTER 41
A light snow was falling as Big Pappy Donovan pulled off the interstate and into the parking lot of the TravelCenters of America truck stop in Hurricane, West Virginia. The trip had been facilitated by a cryptic phone call from an old friend and business partner, Rex Fairchild. Fairchild had said it was urgent that they talk in person, as soon as possible. Pappy was running a load of windows from a plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Chicago, Illinois, and decided to take a detour and meet Fairchild in Hurricane.
Pappy had known Fairchild for about fifteen years but hadn’t seen him in more than a decade. They’d been introduced by a mutual friend who knew Pappy was moving large amounts of powder cocaine up and down the eastern part of the United States, that Fairchild had plenty of connections in and around Charleston, West Virginia, and that he was looking to get into the business, albeit on a far smaller scale than Pappy. Pappy would supply Fairchild with five ounces a month, either through the mail, a courier, or in person, and Fairchild would triple the volume by cutting it with vitamin B12 or baby laxative. He’d then sell grams and eight balls—or occasionally a half ounce—mostly in the bars around Charleston, and he made a good deal of money. When the feds finally lowered the boom, Pappy refused to acknowledge that he even knew Fairchild, and Fairchild did the same. The feds couldn’t prove they’d done business together, because their snitches had never actually seen Pappy, or heard Pappy and Fairchild do business. They were mentioned in the same indictment, but ultimately Fairchild pleaded to a distribution charge and agreed to a seven-year sentence. Pappy went to trial in Georgia on charges of selling crack, was found guilty, and wound up with thirty-five years, but Darren Street had gotten his case overturned on appeal while they were both at the same maximum security federal pen in California.
Pappy rolled to a stop a couple of hundred yards from the gas pumps out back of the truck stop, and Fairchild climbed in. Pappy put the truck in neutral and pulled the emergency brake. He left the engine running and the heater on. The man sitting in the passenger seat looked far different from the man he’d known earlier.
“What the hell, Rex?” Pappy said as Fairchild reached out to shake his hand. “You sick?”
“No, man. I’m not sick. I’m just scared.”
“You sounded pretty upset on the phone,” Pappy said.
“A West Virginia state trooper, an investigator named Grimes, came to see me,” Fairchild said. He spoke in a quick, choppy manner, and Pappy noticed immediately that the pupils of Fairchild’s eyes were dilated and his nose was running.
“You high?” Pappy said.
“What? Me? No, man.”
“Bullshit,” Pappy said. “I know a geeker when I see one. Your teeth are rotten. When did you start using?”
Fairchild looked down at the floor and then out the window.
“After I got out, man. I don’t know why. I never used before I went in, but after I got out I was drinking too much, and then I started trying it out some, and before I knew it I was using all the time.”
“You better get off that shit in a hurry. Every cokehead I’ve ever known has died a miserable death or wound up in prison for a long time. Now pull your shit together and tell me about this cop.”
“He knew all about me getting my man to ask about those crackers in Cowen. I don’t know how he knew, but he did. He also knew about you. He said I was gathering information for you and passing it on to you, and he said you passed it on to Street and that Street did the killing. I’m not sure what he can really prove, but he said he had a witness who can identify Street. He was also talking about charging me with conspiracy to commit murder, and if he charges me, he’ll charge you. I’m not sure what we need to do, if anything, but I gotta admit I’m scared shitless right now.”
“Staying high won’t help anything,” Pappy said. “It has to be the bartender.”
“Bartender?”
“The guy who owns that little bar where Darren shot those boys, Sammy whatever his name is. He let Darren do it. He walked into the bathroom and stayed in there while Darren blew them away. I told Darren he should have killed the dude. You don’t leave a witness like that hanging after you’ve just committed a double murder.”
“So what do we do?”
“I’m afraid Darren might be hanging by a pretty thin thread right now,” Pappy said. “I talked to him on my way here, and he said his girlfriend kicked him out yesterday. He said she thinks he did the killings up here plus another one down there.”
“Shit,” Fairchild said. “Woman scorned. That’s a bad deal. Is she going to rat him out to the cops?”
“He doesn’t think so.”
“Maybe he needs to off her, too.”
Pappy shook his massive head. “Not gonna happen. Who did you talk to up there that might have gone to the police?”
“Nobody. I only talked to one guy, and he’s rock solid. He asked around for me, or at least he said he did. Maybe he got somebody else to do it, I just don’t know. I’ll get in touch with him and see if he has any idea who’s talking to the cops about us.”
“Do it today,” Pappy said. “If I go up there and take care of this bartender, which I think I’ll probably wind up doing, then I want to take care of the rat at the same time. Find out who he is, and I’ll shut his mouth permanently. And stay away from that nose candy. I can’t trust you if you’re doing that shit.”
“You’re not planning to kill me, too, are you?” Fairchild said.
“We’re good for now,” Pappy said. “But I’m serious about you getting off the coke. People run their mouths when they’re doing that stuff. Now get on out of here and find out about the rat in Cowen. I need to get back on the road.”
CHAPTER 42
Rocky Skidmore popped the top off a can of Keystone Light beer and rolled his wheelchair into the living room of the trailer he’d been living in for ten years just outside Cowen, West Virginia. The place was a wreck: holes in the interior walls, one toilet that didn’t work, and no hot water, but Skidmore didn’t care. He had a roof over his head, and he wasn’t paying the rent.
At one time, Skidmore had been a bad dude. He’d been the president of the Grave Diggers, an outlaw motorcycle gang that drew its membership from all over northern and central West Virginia and that dealt primarily in drugs and guns. The club’s headquarters was a bar called Snake Eyes on the outskirts of Charleston. It was in that bar that Skidmore had first met Rex Fairchild and had nearly killed him.
Fairchild had been early in his cocaine-selling days and had wandered into the Grave Diggers’ headquarters, not knowing what he was getting himself into. Skidmore remembered it well. Fairchild had sat at the bar for a little while, and then had walked around, past the jukebox and over to the pinball machines and pool tables. Before long, he started passing the word that he had some coke to sell if anybody was interested. At first Skidmore thought Fairchild must be crazy, then he thought he might just be ballsy. Either way, an outsider coming into a Grave Digger bar and trying to move cok
e was a huge insult. Within ten minutes of learning what Fairchild was trying to do, he had him on his knees in the walk-in cooler off the kitchen with a gun to his head. Fairchild pissed himself and begged for his life, but what saved him was that he blurted out that he had a source who could get Skidmore all the coke he could move. High-quality coke. Large quantities.
Skidmore bit, and within a week, he was introduced to a huge trucker they called Big Pappy Donovan. For the next several years, until Fairchild and Big Pappy were both busted, Skidmore and his gang had moved hundreds of kilos of coke through West Virginia, Virginia, and Pennsylvania that he had obtained from Big Pappy.
A year after Fairchild and Big Pappy were busted, Skidmore had been paralyzed from the waist down when he crashed his motorcycle into a guardrail on a rainy night and was thrown into a rocky hillside. The gang eventually pushed him out. He was paralyzed and without means, so he wound up moving to Cowen to stay with his sister and her husband, who was a coal miner. They kicked him out after a year because of his drinking and belligerence, but not before he had managed to win the heart of a lonely woman named Bea Baker. Baker had an illegitimate teenage son named Jimmy, and the three of them became a family. Skidmore was often drunk and abusive, but he would also tell the boy stories about his glory days as president of the biker gang and the various crimes they committed. He even told the kid about a couple of murders of rival gang members. Jimmy idolized him.
When he received word through a couple of old gang members that Rex Fairchild was wanting to talk to him, he gave them his phone number. A day later, Fairchild called him and told him Big Pappy needed some information on a guy who had recently been released from prison. His name was Donnie Frazier. Fairchild wanted to know whether Frazier had anything to do with a bombing that happened in Knoxville, Tennessee. Skidmore was too proud to tell Fairchild that he wasn’t really capable of getting out and gathering the information, so he’d farmed the task out to his stepson, Jimmy Baker. Jimmy had actually done a pretty good job, too. He’d found out everything Fairchild wanted to know, and Skidmore passed the information along.
But Fairchild had called him that morning, obviously upset, and said that somebody in Cowen was a rat. He said the state police knew everything, even the name of the person who had gathered the information, and that everybody could be looking at conspiracy-to-commit-murder charges. Skidmore called his stepson as soon as he got off the phone with Fairchild and told him to come to the trailer at four in the afternoon. Bea wouldn’t be home from her job as a bookkeeper at a sawmill, and they could talk in private.
Skidmore heard Jimmy’s motorcycle pull up outside and waited for him to walk in. Jimmy had a trailer of his own about two miles away, but he didn’t have a job. He lived primarily off his girlfriend’s income as a hair stylist, but he also stole car stereos and broke into houses in and around Webster Springs and Elkins. He’d been caught a few times and sent off to prison once, but he kept on stealing. He just didn’t know any other way to get by. Jimmy walked in and mumbled a greeting. He went straight to the refrigerator and grabbed a Keystone Light, then walked back and sat on the couch near Skidmore. He was wearing a black leather jacket, leather chaps, boots, and had taken off his leather gloves. He had a bushy, brown beard and had a wide, black bandana tied around his head. His cheeks were pink and puffy.
“Little cold to be on that hog, ain’t it?” Skidmore said.
“Got nothing else to drive,” Jimmy said. “The Toyota threw a rod two days ago. Gonna be a while before I can get it fixed.”
“We got a little problem,” Skidmore said. “Actually, it’s a big problem, and I got a feeling you’re the cause of it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know that information I had you gather a little while back?”
“Yeah, what about it?”
“You told somebody about it, and that somebody told the state police. Now the state police are talking about coming at us with conspiracy-to-commit-murder charges. So don’t bullshit me. Who in the hell did you tell?”
“I ain’t told nobody, I swear it,” Jimmy said.
Skidmore lifted a .38-caliber revolver and pointed it at his stepson’s head. “Say that again and I’m gonna splatter your brains all over the wall.”
“Jesus, Rocky! Take it easy!”
“You been hanging around Lester Routh any? You know that worthless son of a bitch is a paid informant for the state police, don’t you?”
“Nah, Lester’s all right.”
“You don’t know he’s an informant? Because everybody else in this cracker-box town knows it.”
“If he’s an informant, I didn’t know it,” Jimmy said. “I swear it.”
Skidmore cocked the pistol. “What did you tell him?”
Jimmy put his hands up. “Please don’t kill me, Rocky. Please put that gun down.”
“Not until you tell me what you told Lester.”
“We were drinkin’. I may have told him about it.”
“About what?”
“Everything, I reckon. I think maybe I told him about you asking me to gather up some information on Donnie Frazier for you, and how everybody I talked to opened right up and told me Donnie and Tommy had bombed that lawyer’s momma’s house and killed her.”
“And you told him you passed it along to me?”
Jimmy was nodding. “I’m sorry.”
“Did you mention Fairchild or Big Pappy?”
“I may have,” Jimmy said. “Please, please don’t kill me. I didn’t know about Lester. I swear I didn’t know. And I was drunk.”
“You’re dumber than a damn bag of hammers,” Rocky said as he lowered the pistol. “And if it weren’t for your momma, you’d be a dead bag of hammers right now. Get out of here. I need to start trying to see if we can fix what you fucked up.”
CHAPTER 43
I rented a motel room off Interstate 40 and started looking for apartments after Grace kicked me out. I called her at least a dozen times the next day, left her messages, but she wouldn’t talk to me. I probably should have been feeling things like sorrow and pain and panic and confusion, but I was pretty much just numb, almost zombielike. I told Pappy about Grace giving me the boot. His primary concern was whether she would tell the police. I told him she’d told the police I was home with her the night I killed Frazier and Beane, and that I didn’t think she would betray me. He seemed to accept it, but Pappy was hard to read sometimes.
It was strange, though. My mind kept flashing back to standing in her kitchen, listening to her tell me she couldn’t live with a murderer, couldn’t love a killer. I hadn’t really thought of myself in those terms, but I knew if I got down to the core of what I’d done and didn’t try to whitewash the facts with emotion, she was exactly right. I’d put fifteen hollow-point bullets into Donnie Frazier and Tommy Beane and then didn’t want to wash their blood from my face. I’d drunk moonshine while Ben Clancy was swinging from a rope in Granny Tipton’s barn. I’d arranged to have scalding baby oil poured onto a man’s face. And I didn’t feel a bit of remorse for any of those things. I had no plans to kill or maim anyone else, but I knew I was certainly capable. I supposed many people would find that kind of self-awareness unhealthy, even terrifying, but I found it liberating. Did that make me a psychopath, I wondered? Had what Ben Clancy and the criminal justice system had done to me, combined with the murder of my mother, and Katie taking my son half a world away, turned me from a troubled but relatively healthy person into a psychopath? I didn’t think so, but I didn’t know for sure.
On Christmas Eve, just after noon, I called Dan Reid.
“Have you found out anything about Katherine Davis?” I said when he answered his cell.
“Merry Christmas, Darren.”
“Sorry. Merry Christmas to you.”
“I haven’t really had enough time to check her out completely, but she seems to be what she says she is,” Dan said. “She lives in an apartment about three blocks from the UT campus. The
y’re on Christmas break so I haven’t actually seen her go into a classroom, but I have a couple of friends on the faculty in the criminal justice department, and they tell me she’s a grad student, and a damned good one. One of them told me she’s been accepted to law school, so she’s telling the truth about that. I went to the Sessions Court clerk’s office and the affidavit is on file from her DUI arrest, so that’s legitimate unless they’re going to a great deal of trouble to try to sting you. I’ve followed her a couple of times, and she hasn’t met with anybody that appears to be a cop. She went to lunch and to the grocery store the first time I followed her. The second time she went to the West Towne Mall and did some Christmas shopping.”
“Any boyfriends? Seen any men around?”
“Haven’t seen any. Why?”
“Just wondering. If she has a boyfriend, I’d be concerned because of the way she hit on me at the office.”
“You’re not thinking about calling her or going out with her, are you?” Dan said.
I was thinking about calling her. I’d thought about it a dozen times since Grace had booted me, but I wasn’t about to tell Reid. “No, of course not. I’m still with Grace.”
“I’ll let you know if anything changes, but from what I’ve seen so far, she doesn’t appear to be working for the police.”
“Thanks, Dan,” I said. “Have a nice Christmas.”
CHAPTER 44
As soon as I hung up, I left the motel and drove to the office, which was closed for the holidays, and found Katherine Davis’s file. In it was her cell phone number. I’d had trouble getting her off my mind, I was lonely, and since Grace had made it clear she didn’t want me around and Dan Reid said Katherine wasn’t a rat, I decided to call her.
