A Crime of Passion

by Scott Pratt

  “I think you’re wrong about that. The last thing you need is a DUI conviction. They’ll toss you out of school for that, won’t they?”

  “They could. I mean, I’ve seen them do it, but I’m not planning on pleading guilty, and I’m not planning on being found guilty. I’ll get out of this clean.”

  “Really?” I said. “Exactly how are you planning to do that?”

  “I’m going to hire this lawyer out of Knoxville named Charles Freeze. Ever heard of him?”

  I nodded. Charlie Freeze was probably the best DUI defense lawyer in the state of Tennessee. I’d talked to him several times over the years. He’d written a treatise on DUI defense that I’d read half a dozen times, and he was on the board of directors of the Tennessee Trial Lawyers Association. He was also one of the most expensive DUI lawyers in the Southeastern United States. DUI was a misdemeanor, but I’d heard Charlie charged in excess of $15,000 to take on a case.

  “Why are you hiring Charlie Freeze when I’m perfectly willing to handle this for you for free?” I said.

  “I’m sorry, Joe. I don’t mean to hurt your feelings or anything, but I just think you’re maybe a little too close. I’m afraid your relationship with Lilly and me might cloud your judgment. I obviously need somebody that’s good, but I also want it to be somebody who can deal with it at arm’s length. No emotion involved in the decision-making process. Pure analytics, the same thing they teach us over at the med school.”

  “Have you talked to him?”

  “I was in his office in Knoxville at seven thirty this morning. We talked for an hour and I drove back.”

  “How much is he going to charge you?”

  “Seventeen five.”

  “What? Did you just say $17,500?”

  “Yeah. He says if I can pay, he’ll get me out of it.”

  “He made you a guarantee?”

  “Not exactly a guarantee, but he said he can handle it. My blood alcohol level was point zero five, which is below the legal limit. I tested positive for opioids, but it was just a tox screen and they didn’t quantify the amount of opioids I had in my system. Since I was unconscious, they didn’t talk to me at the scene, and they don’t have any kind of field sobriety tests on video. They won’t be able to prove intoxication. At least that’s what he says.”

  The waitress brought our lunches, and I waited for her to get out of earshot before I resumed the conversation.

  “So $17,500,” I said. “Do you have that kind of money?”

  Randy wiped his mouth with a napkin and took a drink from his water.

  “I was kind of hoping you might help us out with that,” he said. “Since you just got this new case and everything I was hoping you might loan me the money. I’m going to be a doctor in a couple years. It’s not like I won’t be able to pay you back.”

  “You’re not going to be a doctor if you don’t clean up your act,” I said.

  “Please, Joe,” he said. “I’ll take care of that end of it. I promise. Can you help me out with Freeze?”

  I leaned forward on my elbows and sat there looking at him. The image that immediately came into my mind was of Lilly saying, “Please, Daddy, he’s trying so hard. Everybody makes mistakes.” I reached down and picked up a forkful of shrimp and rice and shoved it into my mouth.

  “Sure,” I said after I swallowed. “You want me to write the check to you or to Freeze?”

  After I left Randy, I had this nagging sense that he wasn’t being completely honest with me. He’d had difficulty maintaining eye contact during lunch, and he’d seemed distracted and irritable. I supposed those things could have been perfectly natural under the circumstances, but I felt as though he was hiding something. I decided to take a little side trip down to Jonesborough to the clerk’s office of the General Sessions Court, which was where all the misdemeanor criminal cases in the county were filed. The records were open to public inspection, and I knew there would be a copy of Randy’s arrest warrant and a copy of the sworn affidavit the police officer filed in support of the warrant. I walked into the justice center—the ugly, expensive architectural disaster that had replaced the old but perfectly serviceable courthouse several years earlier—a little after twelve thirty, exchanged greetings with the deputies manning the security checkpoints, and made my way down the hall to the clerk’s office. An attractive, gray-haired woman named Lynn Weber whom I’d known for a couple decades walked up and said hello. I asked her for a copy of the warrant and affidavit. She handed them to me in just a couple minutes, and I walked back out to the hall and sat down on a wooden bench.

  As soon as I started reading, I felt the pulsing in my temples that told me my blood pressure was rising. It became obvious very quickly why Randy didn’t want me to handle the case and why he had traveled all the way to Knoxville to hire a lawyer. The fact that he had asked me to loan him the money to pay the lawyer made me even angrier.

  The officer who wrote the affidavit, a Johnson City patrol officer named Jon Grady, said he was notified by an emergency dispatcher of an accident with injuries at approximately 11:03 p.m. on Tuesday night. When Officer Grady arrived, he was met by a young woman who identified herself as Tiffany Hill. Miss Hill told the officer that the driver of the vehicle, Randy Lowe, had just picked her up from her apartment and that they were “just talking and riding around.” Miss Hill said a car coming toward them in the opposite lane crossed the centerline and forced them off the road. Randy’s car went through a roadside ditch and hit a small tree. Miss Hill was uninjured, but Randy’s head hit the steering wheel and he was knocked unconscious. He regained consciousness after the emergency medical people arrived, but they took him directly to the emergency room.

  Officer Grady tried to talk with him at the emergency room, but Randy refused. Grady said he smelled alcohol on Randy when he got close to him and said there was an empty, thirty-two-ounce beer bottle in plain view on the floorboard of the backseat of Randy’s car. Officer Grady said he asked Miss Hill whether Randy had been drinking, and she replied, “I don’t know. Maybe. He didn’t seem drunk.”

  Based on his observations at the accident scene, the odor of alcohol on Randy, and the empty beer bottle, Officer Grady applied for and was granted a search warrant for the results of Randy’s blood toxicity screen that emergency rooms across the country give to nearly every patient that walks in the door. When he saw that Randy had opioids mixed with the .05 blood alcohol level, he got an arrest warrant.

  Randy was probably right about one thing: Officer Grady didn’t have much of a case. Without quantifying the opioids, it would be extremely difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Randy was operating the vehicle while under the influence.

  But the greater issue for me was this: who in the hell was Tiffany Hill, and what was she doing in my daughter’s husband’s car? I took my cell phone out of my pocket and dialed the number of an old friend.

  CHAPTER 18

  Kasey Cartwright lived—before someone killed her, of course—in an idyllic spot. A two-story, white farmhouse, perfectly maintained, sat on a small hill overlooking a pond, a barn, a large corral and pasture land that stretched to the horizon in every direction. Kasey had graduated from Daniel Boone High School in Gray—the same high school my kids attended—just months before her death, even though she was already a star in the country music industry. She hadn’t been home-schooled, hadn’t moved to Nashville. She had toured only in the summer. From everything I’d been able to gather, she’d wanted to stay as grounded and as close to home as she could for as long as she could.

  Kasey had been raised by her grandparents, Mike and Sandra Cartwright, on a dairy farm near the Sulphur Springs community in Washington County. Kasey’s parents had been killed by a woman who fell asleep at the wheel early one morning when Kasey and her brother, James, were both very young. Kasey’s mother and father were both schoolteachers and were riding to work together when the woman hit them. They had just dropped Kasey and James off at a daycare center. Th
e woman wasn’t injured and wasn’t charged with a crime. It was simply a terrible, tragic accident that left two children orphaned.

  I knocked on the farmhouse door around two o’clock, about two hours after I’d left Randy. The afternoon was cold and dreary. Caroline had arranged the visit while I was in Nashville and had told me that Sandra Cartwright was cordial and respectful on the phone, but I was anxious about how I would be received. I was, after all, defending the man accused of killing their grandchild.

  Sandra Cartwright was a sturdy, handsome woman who looked to be in her late fifties. Her hair was long and gray and pulled neatly into a ponytail that traveled the length of her back. Her eyes were light blue and soft, her skin pale and gracefully aging. She shook my hand firmly and invited me into a clean, comfortable den that was dominated by a brick fireplace. A row of framed photographs were arranged across the mantle. I noticed Kasey smiling in two of them.

  “Coffee?” she said.

  “Thank you. Black.”

  I sat down on a couch while Sandra went into the kitchen. She returned with two cups of steaming coffee, set one down in front of me, and took a seat in a chair across from me.

  “I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs. Cartwright,” I said. “I really am.”

  She nodded slightly in response and said, “What can I do for you, Mr. Dillard?”

  “I just want to talk about Kasey,” I said. “I want to get a sense of what she was like, who she was.”

  “So you can defame her when the trial starts? Isn’t that what defense lawyers do, try to blame the victim? Engage in character assassination?”

  “No, Mrs. Cartwright. I have absolutely no intention of saying anything bad about your granddaughter at the trial. In fact, I give you my word. But I should tell you up front that I don’t believe Paul Milius killed her. She was an up-and-coming star. She was making him a lot of money. He’d spent a lot of time and money and effort building her career over the past three years. It just doesn’t make sense.”

  “The police obviously feel differently.”

  “Speaking of the police, have you talked to them?”

  “We heard from them on the day they found Kasey’s body in the hotel,” she said. “An investigator from the Washington County Sheriff’s Department came out and talked to Mike and me. He told us she’d been killed and asked a few questions and we gave him her diary and a cell phone we found – it wasn’t the one she usually carried – but we didn’t hear another word until Sheriff Bates called and told us they’d made an arrest in Nashville.”

  I had suspected as much. The police had zeroed in on Paul Milius immediately. Once he had admitted to them that he’d been in Kasey’s room that night, they hadn’t bothered to look any further. I could understand it to a point. At trial, they could put Paul at the hotel through his driver’s testimony and through the statement they had taken from him. They had a DNA match between the piece of skin in Kasey’s mouth and Paul. I was sure there would be a couple witnesses to testify about the little rift at the Artists of the Year show. Pennington Frye had mentioned something about an insurance policy during one of my brief conversations with him. If Paul took the witness stand at trial, he would have to admit under oath that he’d been in Kasey’s room because he told the police as much during one of his ill-advised interviews. And it wouldn’t be that difficult for the jury to make the leap from assault to murder. It wasn’t an ironclad case, but I’d seen convictions on less evidence.

  “Well, like I said, Mrs. Cartwright, I don’t think Paul Milius did this,” I said. “Besides the fact that Kasey was making him so much money, he seems genuine when he expresses his feelings of affection for her. I’ve interviewed his wife and all his household staff —there are fifteen of them—and they all speak highly of him. None of them has ever seen him act violently or heard him raise his voice.”

  “He slapped Kasey in the mouth, didn’t he?” Mrs. Cartwright said.

  I nodded. “He apparently did, and he won’t tell me, or anyone else, why. He and Kasey had some kind of disagreement at the CMT show earlier in the evening, and Kasey threw a glass of tea on him—”

  “She wasn’t supposed to sing that song,” Mrs. Cartwright said as a small smile crossed her lips. “I knew it as soon as she started singing. She felt very strongly about her music. She wanted to stay true to it, if you can understand that. She’d talked to me many times about how they wanted her to sing songs that had commercial appeal to young people, songs about smoking dope and drinking and partying around bonfires all night and having promiscuous sex. But that just wasn’t Kasey. She wasn’t like that at all. I’ll bet that’s what they were arguing about.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said, “but it doesn’t seem like a reason to kill her. I simply can’t come up with a reason why Paul Milius would have killed your granddaughter, and my experience when it comes to murder has been that the why is inseparable from the who. My job now is to find out who really killed her, and while I’m at it, to find out why she was killed. I think the police jumped to conclusions early on and maybe rushed things a little. I don’t think they were as thorough as they might have been. And that’s one of the reasons I’m here. If there’s anything you can tell me about Kasey—or anything you can show me—that might help me find out why she was killed, then maybe I can figure out who did it. Did she have a boyfriend, Mrs. Cartwright?”

  She shook her head, almost imperceptibly, and sighed.

  “She dated a boy named Ricky Church for two years,” she said. “What a mess that was.”

  “Ricky Church?” I said, writing the name down on a small pad I carried in my pocket. “Is he from here?”

  “Lives about three miles up the road. Same age as Kasey, went to the same school. He’s a musician, too, or at least he thinks he is. Plays the guitar, but I can’t listen to it. Kasey liked his music, but I didn’t.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “It was just so different,” she said. “They let him play a song at a school concert in the spring, and I thought my head was going to explode. Loud guitars and all this electric synthesizer going on. I couldn’t understand a word he sang. When Kasey made fun of him—which wasn’t often and never when he was around—she called him Ricky Emo. He was just so melodramatic about everything.”

  “Was he violent?” I asked.

  “Not toward Kasey, but I know he’d been in several fights at school.”

  “Drugs?”

  “I wouldn’t know about that.”

  I heard a noise outside, and Mrs. Carpenter got up from the chair she’d been sitting in and looked out the front window.

  “Oh, my,” she said. “Oh, no.”

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, turning to look at her.

  “My husband. He isn’t supposed to…he won’t like this—you being here. He’s…he’s just…he’s very hot-tempered, Mr. Dillard, and he was devastated by what happened to Kasey. We all were, but Mike is a…he’s a hard man.”

  “So you didn’t tell him about our visit?”

  “I was afraid. He’s supposed to be in Greeneville at a cattle auction all afternoon.”

  She walked past me again as heavy steps echoed on the front steps. I stood and waited for the front door to open. When it did, the space was filled by a large, rugged-looking man with a long face and strong nose. His eyes were dark and liquid, almost smoldering. He was wearing a heavy denim coat, a gray cowboy hat, and work boots, and he wasn’t smiling.

  “Who’re you?” he said as he stepped through the door.

  “My name is Dillard,” I said. “Joe Dillard.” The look on his face told me not to offer my hand, and I didn’t.

  “Dillard. You’re that lawyer.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What are you doing in my house?”

  “I was hoping we could talk.”

  “’Bout what?”

  “Kasey.”

  He walked straight past me and disappeared into another room. Sandra lingered for a few secon
ds and then followed him. I could hear her muffled voice coming through the house, urgency in its tone. Then the heavy steps began again. He was coming back. The next thing I knew I was looking straight down the barrel of a shotgun. He had shouldered it and was aiming it at my forehead. It looked like a railroad tunnel.

  “Easy, Mr. Cartwright,” I said, holding up my hands. “Just go easy. All I want to do is talk.”

  “You ever come near my house again, you’ll find yourself talkin’ to the devil,” he said. “Don’t come around me or none of mine, including my wife. You understand me, mister?”

  I started backing up. When I got to the door, I turned my back on him, waiting for the blast and the darkness that would follow. He’d left the interior door open, but the storm door was closed, and my hand was trembling as I reached down to turn the knob and push it open.

  “Paul Milius is gonna burn in hell!” I heard him yell as I cleared the door and started down the steps. “And I hope you go with him!”

  CHAPTER 19

  While I was in northeast Tennessee looking down the barrel of a shotgun, Charlie Story was interviewing our client, Paul Milius. I asked her to secretly record and videotape the meeting for a couple reasons. First of all, I wanted to be able to see and hear the meeting and gauge Milius’s reactions for myself rather than rely on Charlie’s handwritten notes and recollections, and secondly, I wanted to cover our butts in case Milius made any baseless claims later on. As much as I hated it, I simply couldn’t trust my own clients.

  Milius walked in at the appointed time wearing a dark suit and tie. His driver remained in the lobby. Charlie was wearing a black and white, three-button jacket that looked almost like tweed and a black skirt. From the camera angle Charlie had chosen, I could see Milius’s eyes light up when he saw her.

  “My, my,” Milius said as he took her hand, “Mr. Dillard didn’t tell me you were so beautiful. Were you at the arraignment?”

  “I was driving here from Johnson City,” Charlie said.