An Absence of Principal

by Jimmy Patterson

  “No, I suppose he hadn’t. Very good, Tony, thank you.”

  Trask paused and looked at his notes as Nail made his way back to the defense table. Trask leaned over and whispered something in Nail’s ear. Nail showed a hint of a smile and it was clear Trask was happy with the way his questioning had gone.

  “Your honor, I’d like to call Robert Simms to the stand, please,” Trask said.

  Simms was Texas’ most renowned ballistics expert, and Trask no doubt spent the highest dollar to bring him to Midland to help his friend. After twenty years in law enforcement, Simms was able to now make his living simply by flying throughout Texas and the Southwest testifying at high-profile and occasionally not-so-high-profile trials.

  “Mr. Simms, can you tell the court what you do for a living?” Trask asked him.

  “I’m an independent ballistics consultant, based in Dallas,” Simms said.

  “What exactly does an independent ballistics consultant do, Mr. Simms?”

  “Basically what I’m doing here today,” Simms said. He was in his 50s and had seen more than most cops, having worked the barrios in East Dallas for his entire career. He spent 19 of his 25 years in a patrol car dealing with the toughest gangs and baddest dudes Dallas had to offer. Simms came from a mixed marriage; his mother was an immigrant from Mexico and so when he rolled up on the scene of the crime, he might have been a cop, but he also didn’t look out of place in East Dallas. He spoke fluent Spanish, and when he went undercover after 19 years, he grew his hair long and didn’t shave for six months, inked an Eastside barrio tattoo on his neck, changed out of his patrol uniform into a pair of ratty blue jeans and a wife beater pullover, and he fit right in. After three years of living and working in the East Dallas streets as “one of them,” Simms was able to parlay his information into one of the most historic drug arrests in Dallas history.

  When his undercover work was done, Simms slipped back into respectability mode in a sort of mini witness protection program. The suits at Dallas PD transferred him into ballistics, a subject about which he knew quite little at the time. But Simms’ sharp intellect and his uncanny knack to retain everything he ever read quickly moved him to the top of the department. For the last five years of his DPD career, he improved the department at lightning speed and transformed it into the top performing ballistics unit in the region. When Simms decided he was tired of working for the man, as he liked to call it, he went out on his own, becoming a sort of witness for hire. He was paid handsomely and testifying at even just one trial a month or every two months was all he needed to maintain his upscale lifestyle in a stylish North Dallas home.

  “You testify on matters pertaining to bullets, their caliber, the kinds of gun used, things like that, correct?” Trask asked.

  “That is correct, sir,” Simms said.

  “And you have studied the evidence in the case against my client?” Trask asked.

  “I have,” he said.

  “What conclusions have you drawn about the entry wound that ultimately proved fatal to Junior Walker?” Trask asked. He looked at Midkiff and found him chomping on the end of his pen nervously, fairly certain of what was about to go down.

  “The shot that killed Junior Walker came at close range. It tore through his heart at an angle from the lower left quadrant to the upper right quadrant, and it appeared to have a trajectory that was unsteady.”

  “Unsteady?”

  “Yes. A magnetic resonance image of the mortally wounded organ showed the bullet’s path was inconsistent, almost jerky or unsteady.”

  “And, putting that in layman’s terms, it would then mean what?”

  “The gun was likely fired by someone with an unsteady hand.”

  “How are you able to determine that?”

  “Many things lead us to that sort of conclusion, first of all the path of the bullet being not straight on. As I mentioned, it was a sort of diagonal, entering low left and exiting upper right. That’s the first indication.”

  “What does such a trajectory and unsteady path indicate to you about the shooter?” Trask asked.

  “The first thing we are told by the ballistics report is that whoever the shooter was likely had a poor grip on the gun.”

  “What kind of a poor grip?” Trask asked.

  “The shooter likely did not have a firm grasp on the weapon,” Simms said.

  “And, Mr. Simms, what kind of person, in your experience, are you likely to find that demonstrates such a poor grip on a weapon like the one in Junior Walker’s murder?”

  “Nine times out of ten, Mr. Trask, such a messy wound and sloppy bullet trajectory comes from a bullet fired from a gun held by a person who has rarely, if ever, fired a weapon.”

  Midkiff appeared unmoved at Simms’ expert opinion. He had his head buried in paperwork, as if to suggest to the jury that what was transpiring here was really not important. But Midkiff was listening. He was listening very well.

  Trask looked at Midkiff and saw the poker face he knew so well. Juries were rarely able to get a read on the lawyer who had been an assistant D.A. in Midland for 17 years, a lifetime to be in one US Attorney’s office.

  Trask passed the witness, and Midkiff was quick to pick up on the opportunity to run a few expert questions by Robert Simms.

  “Nine times out of ten. Pretty good odds,” Midkiff noted. “Let’s play devil’s advocate. Say your numbers are accurate. That one time out of ten, what are the reasons that one person out of ten is unable to grasp a gun firmly during a kill shot?”

  “Any number of reasons, sir. Mostly impaired judgment. Sometimes lack of motor skills, even emotional instability,” Simms said.

  “Do your reports show you which one of the maladies Junior Walker’s shooter was suffering from?”

  “No, sir, but as I say, — “

  “Thank you, Mr. Simms, that’ll be all.”

  Trask rose quickly and recalled Tony Nail to the stand. He had been writing notes furiously during Simms’ cross. Trask, who often wore his emotions on his sleeve during his trials, was looking fairly confident as he approached his client.

  “Tony, have you ever had an emotional breakdown?” Trask asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “Ever have a problem with your motor skills? Any sort of loss of control over your arm or finger or hand movements?” Trask asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “When is the last time a substance, legal or illegal, ever served to impair your judgment because of abuse?”

  “I had a run with cocaine about 10 years ago. Only time I’ve ever used drugs or alcohol,” Nail said.

  “And tell the court one more time how many times you guesstimate that you shot a gun during that year your father trained you and your brother and sister at the firing range following your mother’s attack?”

  “By your estimation, thousands,” Nail said.

  “As many as two-thousand or three thousand practice rounds, as I think we discussed,” Trask noted.

  “Easily that amount, yes, sir,” Nail confirmed.

  “Nothing further, your honor,” Trask said.

  Eight hours after Ben bolted out of Fredericksburg, there was a knock on the front door of Velma Doggett’s in Tulsa. It was five in the morning and Velma was up brewing her first pot of coffee of the day, a fifty-three year routine in which she had been thoroughly entrenched since Ben’s father, Gavin, had had the habit of rolling out of bed before the sun came up.

  Still, the sound of a knock at such an hour was unsettling. Velma jumped at the sound of it. She opened the door to find Ben. He looked different than when she had seen him the last time, when he had stashed the gun in his bureau drawer two months earlier. Something had changed. There seemed to be a dim ray of optimism emanating from somewhere within him.

  “Ben?”

&
nbsp; “It’s me, Mama,” he said.

  “What on earth?” she said, opening the door to let him in.

  “I’m OK, Ma. I’m all right now,” he said, embracing his mother as a sea of emotions overcame him.

  CHAPTER 18

  Alex found herself in as dark and hot a place as she had ever been. There was no light. She could not see her hand in front of her. Everywhere she turned there was darkness. There didn’t even appear to be a crack of light at the bottom of a door. It could have been night but something told her it was the middle of the day. There were muffled voices all speaking Spanish.

  How did I get here? Wherever here is, she thought to herself.

  Every inch of her body ached. She could barely move and her arms felt broken. The pain coming from her forearms was intense. She didn’t know what her captors had done to her while she was unconscious. She hoped she never knew. Gradually, the longer time she spent regaining the feeling in her body, the more apparent it became to her that wherever she was, she was in motion. She heard the sound of a car or a truck. The muffled voices she suddenly realized were coming from the cab of the vehicle in which she was apparently a passenger. She then realized her arms were bound behind her back. No bones were broken, but she had been atop them for as long as she had been wherever she was, and her body weight had cut off her circulation. She felt the truck come to a stop and heard the sound of an air brake as they came to rest. She had gained enough sense in waking to know that whatever vehicle she was in had just traveled down a dirt road — maybe it was a road — filled with holes.

  The voices that seemed to be coming from the cab of the truck moved. They came close, then grew more distant again. Her captors had moved to the back of the vehicle. She panicked. She heard keys being pulled out and rattled, a lock being moved, and laughter. She didn’t know how they left her when they threw her in the back of the truck, and she was sure that whatever position she chose now would lead them to know that she was awake, or even alive.

  The door slid open and the voices grew louder. She could still see nothing. It was as pitch black on the outside as it was inside. She fell to the ground below, probably a good three feet, and grimaced as she hit the desert floor, her body writhing in pain.

  One of the men grabbed her arm, which brought more pain the more he pulled at her. Another man grabbed her feet, a third pulled her by the hair.

  “Open your eyes,” one of the men demanded. “Now!” They felt open to her but she couldn’t see. She did not speak and could barely make out the figures of the three men in front of her.

  The man had a voice that she thought was vaguely familiar but she was still too confused over everything to know for sure. She saw the three of them, their backs bathed by the bright truck lights behind them. She glimpsed at the license plate and caught the letters OXZ15. She couldn’t make out the rest of it, but the plate also contained the word Chihuahua. She knew when she saw the name that she was probably somewhere in Northern Mexico. It was impossible to say what with the darkness encompassing everything except the 15 feet directly in front of her.

  “Stand up! Get up, now!”

  Alex stumbled to her feet, barely making the transition to her knees and finally to a standing position.

  “What do you want with me?” she asked.

  “Shut up. We talk. You no talk!”

  Her emotions bubbled to the top. She didn’t know what the next few minutes held. But she didn’t like her odds. Not at all. The voice of the man demanding her silence was another that was familiar to her. She had heard it in the garage several days earlier when she had witnessed the horrific murders of the men who had apparently made a tactical error the cartel lieutenants had deemed serious enough to kill for.

  It was the same man she had seen in the garage carrying out the murders. When she realized who it was, her knees went weak.

  “Turn around,” the man barked.

  Alex turned and faced the darkness. Beyond the beam of the headlights she could see nothing. She stood, waiting for her end.

  She heard the sound of a slamming door from behind. She glanced back and saw that the three men had gotten into the truck. She heard the motor drop into gear, the sluggishness of the truck pulling away. But it wasn’t pulling away. Not exactly. The driver lurched the truck forward. And it was coming straight toward her.

  Alex took a few steps to her left, unable to see anything but blackness bathed in the 18-wheeler’s headlights. For the first time she could see that twenty or thirty feet ahead of her there was nothing; a steep drop off that reached downward, who knew how far. The sound of the truck motor grew louder. She looked behind her: it was maybe twenty feet behind her and coming fast. She cut suddenly to her right, something the men had not prepared for. What would she do other than run straight ahead and plummet to her death? they must have thought. But her hard right turn caused the truck to turn sharply and violently and head her direction. It closed to within 10 feet of her.

  Her foot slipped and caught on a mesquite bush. She tumbled forward. Thoughts of whether these were her last few seconds of life streamed through her mind, and her adrenaline kicked in like never before. She began to fall, but almost as soon as she did, she hit ground again, thudding against what had to be a ledge that her would-be murderers did not foresee when they drove her toward what they figured to be her certain doom. She landed with such a force that her breath was taken from her. She was not dead but neither could she breathe. She looked up and saw the eerie sight of the undercarriage of a massive 18-wheeler airborne and not 10 feet above her head. She hunkered down on the ledge, covering her face, trying to shake the sound of a flying, falling six-ton truck that was so close she could almost reach out and touch it.

  When it finally became apparent to her that the threat of imminent danger was over, her body became less rigid. She lay still for several seconds wondering what had happened to the truck and the murderers inside.

  A deafening boom followed by a flash of light and finally a cloud of smoke wafted past her, and she knew that at least for now, she was out of danger. Even if she didn’t know where she was or how far she had fallen. In the distance, Alex thought she saw a glimmer of dim light cut through the darkness. But even so, she was still an hour from being able to tell if she would be forced to stay where she was until the elements killed her, or if she would somehow be able to scramble back to safety.

  She sat quietly in the pre-dawn still, perched on the edge of what might have been the rest of her life. The only noise came from the uncontrollable shaking of her hands and legs. For the first time in years Alex was thankful she had a “rest of her life” to ponder, and found herself thankful to be alive.

  There was a vibration first, and then her George Strait ringtone sounded. It sounded unexpectedly, muffled inside her pocket. It scared her like few things had before. She didn’t recognize the number and so she let it go to voice mail.

  “To the curious law enforcement officer who retrieves Miss Wallace’s voice mail,” the message began. “By now you are no doubt wondering why we would choose to kill her. Why she is at the bottom of Panther Canyon.” There was a slight pause on the voice mail. “Good luck with your investigation. I wish you well.”

  Another pause, and then, “Unless you want to meet with the same fate, cease all of your attempts to discover Junior Walker’s murderer. Be happy you have someone like Tony Nail to pin it on. He will make a fine inmate in your prison system. He will ask few questions, be of help to others and he will accept the fate his good Lord has dealt him.”

  The voice mail brought a flood of emotions to Alex. Clearly there had been a larger attempt to murder her. Where it started was anybody’s guess, but two things were for certain: Tony Nail was an innocent man. And the voice on the message left on her cell phone could only belong to one person. It was unmistakable. It was Pierce Wallace, her husband.

 
Doggett slept on his mother’s living room couch. It had been a long day. A long week. And an especially long last three months. As he laid his head on a pillow that his mother had taken from his bedroom, he sank into it, recalling a simpler time. He felt his troubles would soon be over. Twenty minutes later, Ben was asleep. He was sober for the first time in two weeks, and he felt a comfort in his boyhood home that he was unable to feel in any other place he had been since his troubles had begun. He drifted off and slept soundly for fifteen hours. Velma Doggett awoke again at her normal five a.m. She paced the house not knowing what to do about her son, who looked helpless and almost childlike. She was concerned how he would be when he woke up, whenever that would be.

  Mrs. Doggett decided the only way to deal with her uncertainty about her son was to go to Mass and say a few prayers. Few things comforted her as much. When Mass was over she slipped into the confessional to try to further free her conscience.

  “Forgive me, father, for I have sinned,” Velma told Father Dan, the pastor at her parish for almost thirty years. Father Dan had been a young priest at the parish when Ben was a high school boy.

  “Velma, tell me about it,” Father Dan said, using his opening line in the confessionals, and to many people he sounded more like a friend and a therapist than he did a priest.

  “I have betrayed my son,” she said.

  And that would be all she would say before she opened the curtain and headed for her car; Father Dan followed after her but decided to allow her some space for now. He would finish the conversation with her later.

  When she returned to her home, she found three police cars, one parked in her driveway, one in the street and one in her front yard. They had evidently arrived in a hurry. The cars’ lights remained on, the engines were running, and the flashing blue and red spinning bulbs on top of the squad cars turned quickly and unevenly.

  Velma walked into her home as quickly as she could and found her son shackled at the wrists and ankles. When he saw his mother, he cried and told her he was sorry for what he had done to himself.