JD05 - Conflict of Interest

by Scott Pratt

  “I don’t know. Just as a good man, I guess.”

  “And what is your definition of a good man?”

  “A man who values life, who values family and friends and hard work and dedication and honesty.”

  “So you value life?”

  “Very much.”

  “As do I.”

  “But you’ve taken life,” I said. “Sixteen times.”

  I looked down at the table in front of me, hoping he hadn’t somehow heard of the shootout last year. If he had, he’d simply come back with, “So have you.” I looked back into his eyes. They were like slate chalkboards, dark and dull and void.

  “Can we talk about why I’m here?” I said.

  Shanks shifted on the stool. “You’re here because a young girl has gone missing in the town where you live. You’ve been hired by the girl’s family to help find her, and you’ve come to me in an ill-conceived attempt to gather information that might be helpful in saving her life. You think because I’m about to be executed, I may attempt to atone for my sins by assisting you.”

  “You learned this from the guards?”

  “Who learned it from the warden, who learned it from the Department of Corrections, who learned it from one of their shrinks, who learned it from the psychiatrist in Tennessee that requested this interview.”

  “Will you help me? Can you help me?”

  “I probably could if I was so inclined, but I’m not.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I understand him. I identify with him. I don’t want him caught.”

  “Her name is Lindsay Monroe. She takes dance and plays the violin. She’s just a child, an innocent.”

  “Pity, isn’t it? You’re mistaken to think of her in that way, though, if you truly want to understand him. He doesn’t think of her as an innocent child. He thinks of her very much the way an adolescent boy thinks of the girl he’s groping in the back seat of his mother’s car. She’s nothing more than a vehicle for the release of sexual tension. Admittedly, most teenage boys don’t kill the girl after they achieve orgasm, but then, the boy isn’t doing anything that is condemned by society, is he? He’s just doing something that comes natural to him. It’s accepted.”

  Shanks paused for a few seconds, still looking directly into my eyes. I held the gaze.

  “This man you’re looking for, this young man, he won’t kill the girl because he wants to,” Shanks continued. “He’ll take no pleasure in the actual killing. It’s merely a necessary step, something he has to do to avoid detection so he can move on to the next one, so he can evolve. This actually brings back such memories, memories of when I was first gathering my courage, making my plans. I envy him in so many ways. The urges he feels are more powerful than anything you can imagine. They drive him day and night. I liked to dress them up, you know. Pretty dresses, little nightclothes, sportswear, whatever caught my fancy at the time. It enhanced the experience for me.”

  I raised my hand and shook my head. “Stop. I didn’t—”

  “These urges he’s feeling, these images he’s seeing in his head, they consume him. He’s living, don’t you see? He’s experiencing life at a level that few can fathom. Now that he has one, now that he’s taken her, every fiber of his being is alive and tingling with anticipation of the things he’ll do to her and, and, and, oh my god—”

  “Enough!” I pounded my fist on the table and glared at him. “I didn’t come here to give you some kind of vicarious thrill.”

  He stood up and looked down at himself. His pants were stained around the bulge of an erection. “Too late,” he said. “I haven’t been this hard in years.”

  I stood and pushed the button on the wall so the hacks that were monitoring the room would release the door lock and let me out. The guards on the other side of the partition had already flanked Shanks and were starting to guide him toward the exit. I could hear him laughing.

  “Tick-tock, Joe Dillard,” Shanks called. “Best get on back to Tennessee now. The rose bloom is wilting.”

  CHAPTER 22

  The drive back to Tennessee seemed interminable. I spent some time telling myself how stupid I’d been, wasting an entire day on such a hare-brained scheme. Botts had been right. How could I have thought that Ernest Shanks would help me, even if he could? The idea was even worse than the one I’d had the night before, meeting Blaire Reed at Pappy’s bar hoping that she might somehow assist me in balancing the news coverage surrounding Lindsay Monroe’s disappearance. Did what the reporters wrote or said really matter? I knew it did, because what reporters wrote or said often swayed public opinion, and public opinion often swayed decision-makers. If enough public pressure was brought to bear, even the feds, supposedly insulated by layer upon layer of bureaucracy, would react. I kept telling myself that I’d wanted to meet with Blaire Reed to try to convince her there were two sides of this story, not just the side the police were feeding her. But I’d blown the opportunity and gotten in a fistfight, now publicized, to boot. I shook my head at the thought of it. Maybe I was losing my edge, or maybe I never had an edge. Thinking back, I knew I’d made a lot of decisions in my life based on anger, and most of them were bad decisions. Caroline was right. What was a forty-five-year-old man doing fighting in a honky tonk? It was stupid, plain and simple. I should have just walked away.

  After the session of mental self-flagellation, I started thinking again about the case I was working. All the evidence I was aware of pointed to an unknown intruder. The cut screen, the ransom note, the text messages and phone calls Richard had received. But the police apparently suspected Richard and Mary of being involved somehow. What could either or both of them possibly hope to gain by concocting a scheme to kidnap their own child? Had one of them killed Lindsay in a fit of rage or by accident and the other was covering? Was Lindsay in a shallow grave somewhere, placed there by her own parents who were now desperately trying to escape responsibility? Based upon the limited contact I’d had with them, the notion that either of them would harm or take the child seemed beyond reason, but was there something I didn’t know? Something I couldn’t know? The more I thought about it, the more I believed that the police were grasping at straws and that the only logical explanation for Lindsay’s disappearance was that she’d been kidnapped by a stranger, and like Ernest Shanks said earlier, the clock was ticking.

  I called Charles Russell and asked about the interviews Botts and his associates were conducting.

  “We’ve been able to contact twenty-five more people,” Russell said, “and we’ve eliminated every one of them as a suspect.”

  “That’s fifty-five people in two days,” I said. “How many people does he have working for him?”

  “Enough. They’ll work until midnight and then we’ll start again in the morning. And how about your trip to Virginia? Any progress?”

  “No. I’m on my way back.”

  “Mr. Shanks was uncooperative?”

  “You might say that. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  I hung up and went back over the conversation with Shanks in my mind. There was one thing he said that kept surfacing: “I liked to dress them up.” I dialed Caroline.

  “How did it go?” she said.

  “Not good.”

  “He won’t help you?”

  “Not intentionally, but he may have helped inadvertently. Would you consider it unusual for a man to buy little girls clothing?”

  “I’ve never really thought about it,” Caroline said, “but yes, I guess it would be unusual. Did you ever buy clothes for Lilly?”

  “A couple of times when she was a teenager and she was with me telling me exactly what she wanted. But never when she was small. That was one of your departments.”

  “Why are you asking?”

  “Something Shanks mentioned while he was going psychotic on me. He said he liked to dress up the girls he kidnapped in frilly dresses and different outfits. I was wondering where he might have gotten frilly dresses. He must have bought them himsel
f. I don’t see him risking having someone do it for him.”

  “And you think the man who took Lindsay might have done the same?”

  “It’s possible isn’t it? Right now, possible is about all I have. Where would a man go to buy little girls’ clothing?”

  “It depends. Expensive or inexpensive?”

  “I don’t know. The sick jerk would want the stuff to be nice, but probably not too expensive.”

  “He’d probably need some help picking things out, don’t you think? If you go into one of the big box stores, you’re pretty much on your own. But stores that specialize in clothing usually have clerks that will help you.”

  “How many stores like that in the area?”

  “A bunch.”

  “Make me a list, would you? We’ll go over it when I get back.”

  “What time will that be?”

  “Around midnight.”

  “How much sleep did you get last night?”

  “Not much, but I’m okay.”

  “I hate to worry you with this, but I got a call from the diner this morning. Sarah didn’t make it in to work. I’ve tried to call her at least thirty times. I went by her house, but nobody was home. Maybe you should stop by there on your way in.”

  My hands tightened on the steering wheel. I knew Sarah was upset about meeting Jack Dillard, the man who called himself our father, but she seemed to have control of herself when she left the day before. Or maybe I just wanted to believe she was in control. Maybe I didn’t want to be bothered.

  “What about Grace?” I asked Caroline.

  “Sarah dropped her off at Lilly’s apartment last night and said she’d be back in an hour. Nobody’s heard from her since. Grace is with me.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Sarah has always had an affinity for Ford Mustangs. The one she owned was a five-year-old, red convertible with a black rag top. She’d bought a vanity plate that said “BADGIRL” several years earlier and had kept it. It wasn’t exactly inconspicuous.

  I started with the old drug haunts that I knew about – three crack houses in Johnson City – but they’d all either been abandoned by the dealers or shut down by the police. I was relieved they were closed, not so much because they were a plague to any community in which they operated, but because I knew if I found her at a crack house, I’d wind up doing something that would afford Caroline another opportunity to harangue me about judgment and self-control. After checking the old crack houses, I cruised through the parking lots of several bars with no luck and was about to give up and go home when I remembered a motel where I’d found her ten years earlier. It was called The Bradley Motel, an old, family-owned place that had evolved over the years into a seedy flop joint. It was located about halfway between Johnson City and Jonesborough on the 11-E highway. I saw the Mustang parked in front of the door to Room 6 as soon as I pulled in. I turned off the lights, shut down the engine, and sat in the cab of my truck for a few minutes, trying to anticipate what I was about to encounter. She would most likely be drunk, high, foul-mouthed and irrational. I’d dealt with her in that state many times in the past. It was never pleasant.

  I walked up to the door and knocked lightly at first, then harder. I finally found the sense to turn the doorknob and was surprised to find it unlocked. The door swung open.

  Sarah was sitting on the bed with her knees pulled up to her chest, wearing the same clothes she’d been wearing when she left my office the day before, staring at the television screen. The television was turned on and was the only light in the room, but the sound was turned down completely. The room was rank with cigarette smoke, and on a table next to the bed I could see an ashtray full of butts and a full, 750-milliliter bottle of Ketel One vodka. I closed the door and walked to a chair that was in the corner a few feet from the bed. I sat down and leaned forward. She didn’t move.

  “Whatcha watching?” I said. It was an old war movie that I didn’t recognize. Shells on the screen were silently exploding; soldiers were falling and dying in silence.

  About ten seconds later, she said, “I quit smoking a long time ago, you know.” Her voice was quiet, her eyes still on the screen. I listened for the telltale slur in her speech, but it wasn’t there.

  “Yeah, I know you did. People say it’s one of the hardest things in the world to do.”

  “I knew you’d come. I don’t know why, but you’ve always been there when I needed you, whether I wanted you or not.”

  “I’m sorry it took me so long. I had to go out of town today. It was—”

  “I’ve been telling myself since around midnight last night that if I could just make it another hour without opening that bottle, you’d come and you’d talk me out of it.”

  I looked at the bottle again. “Doesn’t look like it’s been opened.”

  “It hasn’t. Is Grace okay?”

  “She’s with Caroline. She’s fine.”

  “I shouldn’t have left her, but I know what I can be like when I get this way. She’s better off without me.”

  A tear slid from her left eye and down her cheek.

  “She’ll never be better off with out you, Sarah,” I said. “She adores you. She loves you. We all love you. Nobody would be better off without you.”

  “Sometimes I’m glad Raymond raped me when we were little. If he hadn’t, I don’t think you would have come to my rescue so many times.”

  “If Raymond hadn’t raped you, I wouldn’t have had to rescue you.”

  “You’d think I’d get over it at some point, wouldn’t you?”

  I nodded toward the bottle. “Looks to me like you have.”

  “What’s it like, Joe?”

  “What’s what like?”

  She pointed with an index finger at the television screen. “What those men, those boys, are doing. Trying to blow each other up. Trying to kill each other. You’ve done that. What’s it like?”

  I got up and moved to the side of the bed. “Scoot over a little,” I said, and I sat down next to her and pulled my knees up the same way she had.

  “It’s terrifying at first, at least it was for me. Different guys react to it in different ways. I’ve seen guys freeze up and not be able to move, I’ve seen guys curl up on the ground and cry, and I’ve seen guys strut around with their chests puffed out like it wasn’t even happening. But for me, once the initial shock of the explosions and the gunfire and the screaming and yelling wore off, it just sort of became something I knew I had to do. I volunteered for it, if you can believe that. But we trained so much it became almost instinctive. Does that make any sense?”

  “Were you angry when it was happening? Did you feel… what do they call it? Blood lust?”

  “Not really. Full of adrenaline, but as far as blood lust goes, that isn’t really the way it works. You have a mission, you complete the mission. If the enemy gets in the way, you take him out.”

  “Did you ever run away? Like he did?”

  There it was, the cause behind the effect. I knew this was about Jack Dillard. It was just a matter of time until she got to it.

  “No, Sarah, I never ran away, but honestly, I can understand why he did it, especially when I think about some of the things he said about so many of his team members being killed and wounded and how his best friend was blown up right next to him.”

  “So you’ve forgiven him for abandoning us?”

  “I don’t think forgiven is the right word. Who am I to judge or to forgive? I wasn’t there. I don’t know what I would have done under the same circumstances. Besides, he was what, nineteen years old? He was younger than Jack is now. And what he said about not knowing why he was there, why he was killing or trying to keep from being killed, I understand that to a certain extent. World War I and World War II, we needed to be there, I suppose. But all these little wars in between: Korea, Vietnam, twice in Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, even Grenada. Were those places we really needed to be? Old men keep sending young men off to kill or be killed in foreign lands while they
spew their platitudes about duty and honor and freedom and loyalty, and all the while the gap between the rich and the poor in our own country continues to widen and jobs get shipped overseas and education continues to falter and it seems to me that all of this killing and being killed comes down to one thing. Greed. It’s all about greed. It’s ultimately meaningless for everyone except the ones who make money off the bloodshed.”

  She turned her head and looked at me, a slight smile forming at the corners of her mouth.

  “Did you lubricate your jaw before you came in here?” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say that many words without stopping in my entire life.”

  “I take back everything I said about loving you. I don’t even like you. You aren’t worth all the worry you cause me.”

  She reached over and patted my knee with her left hand, but she quickly withdrew it and the melancholy look returned. “Let me rephrase the question, as you lawyers say. Are you willing to accept him?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t think I can accept him as a father. He wasn’t there, he’s missed everything. But I can probably accept him as a sick, lonely old man who needs a friend right now.”

  “So many things could have been different,” Sarah said, her eyes still misting. “If he’d been around, I mean. Ma would have been so much different, so much happier. We wouldn’t have been alone all the time. We would have been—”

  “You’re torturing yourself. We can’t change a thing. Besides, we’re doing okay, aren’t we? I have Caroline and the kids, you have Grace. We have each other. We’re healthy. The diner is doing great, Caroline survived cancer and loves her dance school, and I’m still practicing law. Things could be a lot worse.”

  She gave me a sidelong glance and said, “I never took you for a Pollyanna.”

  “I know. I think this whole getting old thing is affecting my brain. And speaking of old, I’m also exhausted. Since you’re not going to go on a drinking binge, can we get out of this dump?”