Injustice for all jd-3

by Scott Pratt

  “Tell him to come on in,” Pickering says.

  Mo Rider walks through the door, and Pickering introduces us. The first thing I notice is the prominent cleft in his chin. He’s fifty or so, wearing khaki pants and a brown button-down shirt. His hair, which he wears closely clipped, has already gone gray. His eyes are green, and he has the rugged look of a man who spends a lot of time outdoors. He takes a seat at the small conference table where Pickering and I have been working.

  “I have a little story to tell you,” Rider says after we get past the preliminaries and he’s satisfied I’m not a shill for a drug cartel. “It starts about fourteen, fifteen years ago, when this young girl and her aunt came to my office. The girl’s a hiker. Name’s Katie, Katie Dean. She lives outside of Gatlinburg and spends a lot of time in the national forest. Sweet little gal, scared shitless the day she comes in.

  “So she goes out on this overnight hike, gets way back off the beaten path, and runs across a huge patch of marijuana. Biggest we’d ever seen in that area at the time. Her aunt brings her into the office, she shows me exactly where the patch is, and a few days later we go in and burn it.”

  “Sounds like a happy ending for you guys,” I say, “but what does this have to do with Hannah?”

  “It was anything but a happy ending,” Rider says. “This kid, Katie, was only eighteen years old then. Like I said, she and her aunt were both scared about talking to us, but I assured them nobody would ever know outside of our office. Somebody leaked it, though. We had one guy from the county sheriff’s department on the task force, and he must have found out who she was and leaked the information. We never could prove it, but I know he had to leak it. Corrupt bastard. The whole damned sheriff’s department was in the grower’s pocket. He was making millions, and he spread enough of it around to buy some loyalty.

  “So anyway, a couple of days after we burned the field, the girl’s house was firebombed. Katie and another woman-a black woman who lived there with them-got out, but the fire killed her aunt and a young invalid boy, the aunt’s son, even the family dog.”

  Rider stops for a minute and shakes his head. The incident he’s describing may have happened more than a decade ago, but I can see that the guilt he feels still weighs heavily on his soul.

  “The group that did the firebombing was Mexican, run by a guy named Rudy Mejia,” Rider says. He looks me directly in the eye. “Mejia was murdered about a month later by another grower who was trying to lock up the marijuana business for himself. The other grower’s name was Rafael Ramirez. I think you have him in your jail up there, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. I’ve got him on a not-so-strong murder charge. As a matter of fact, he reached out to me yesterday. Said he knows what happened to Hannah, the girl who’s gone missing from our office, but he wants a free pass in exchange for the information.”

  “Doesn’t surprise me,” Rider says. “He’s branched out over the years into contract killing and kidnapping. He’s a real peach.”

  “So what does all of this have to do with Hannah?”

  “After the bombing, I felt like I had to do whatever I could to protect Katie, so I arranged for her to go into witness protection. She didn’t fit the program, but I talked the suits into letting her in anyway. Gave her a new name, new social, the whole bit. The aunt had stashed a bunch of money, and the girl wound up inheriting half of it, plus the farm where they lived. Katie hated witness protection, though. She spent a couple of months in Utah and then split, but at least she kept the alias. She moved back down here, sold the farm, and got a college degree from UT. She wound up working in the DA’s office in Knoxville until a few months ago. Do you see what I’m saying?”

  “I think so. I think you’re telling me I don’t know Hannah Mills as well as I think.”

  “That’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Rider says. “Did she ever tell you that her father murdered her mother and her brothers and sister? Happened up in Michigan, when she was twelve, thirteen, something like that. That’s why she moved down here in the first place.”

  “She never mentioned it. So what you’re telling me is that the girl I know as Hannah Mills is really this Katie?”

  “That’s right,” Rider says. “Katie Dean’s her name. One of the sweetest girls I ever met.”

  34

  Anita White was growing angrier by the minute. She felt like a schoolgirl who’d been called into the office by the principal, who was allowing her to stew before he came in to berate her. Ralph Harmon was the special agent in charge of the TBI office in Johnson City, a title Anita always found amusingly quaint. He wasn’t the captain or the lieutenant or the commander. He was in charge. She allowed herself a brief moment to wonder what bureaucratic sycophant had come up with such a lame title.

  She’d been sitting in Harmon’s office for twenty minutes. He’d called her on the phone as she left Toni Miller’s, asked for an update on the case, and then requested a meeting as soon as she arrived. The minute Anita walked in, Harmon walked out, saying he’d be right back. She could hear him through the open door, laughing and talking with one of the secretaries. He wasn’t attending to any important business; he was insulting her in his uniquely inimical way.

  Harmon had been In Charge for less than two years before Anita arrived. During her initial meeting with Harmon, she found him to be a transparent man who couldn’t hide the bigotry that lurked beneath his phony smile. He’d made reference to the lack of “people of color” who were field agents in the TBI and had compounded the insult by expressing the opinion that the job was much more suited to men. He’d virtually ignored her since that first day, with the exception of assigning her cases that none of the other agents wanted.

  Anita glanced around the room. The wall was plastered with certificates and photographs. She’d never looked at them closely before, but one section of the display caught her eye. There were several photographs of Harmon in military garb: a dress uniform, camouflage, a flight suit. He was smiling broadly in all of them, posing with other soldiers. In one photo, he was wearing a helmet and sitting in the cockpit of a helicopter. The photos surrounded a small, framed display of three medals backed by navy blue velvet. It was obvious that Harmon wanted everyone to know that he was in the military. Anita remembered what her daddy had said about men who displayed the memories of their military careers for all to see.

  “Men like that are pretenders, Neets,” her daddy had said. “Soldiers who’ve been in combat, those who have seen the true face of war, aren’t going to put up a bunch of pictures on the wall. They don’t even like to think about it, let alone be reminded of it all the time.”

  She smiled to herself. Thinking of her father always made her smile, and thinking of Harmon as a pretender would make easier what was undoubtedly going to be a difficult conversation.

  Harmon came in a few minutes later and closed the door behind him. Anita had always thought he carried himself like one of the wise guys she’d seen in the movies. A few years older than she, he was medium height with a potbelly. His suits were always a bit too tight, and he wore his dark hair combed straight back from his forehead and held in place with hair spray or mousse.

  “Do you know how many phone calls I’ve received about this investigation in the past twenty-four hours?” Harmon began.

  “Several, I’d imagine.”

  “Dozens. The brass in Nashville are so far up my ass, I can feel them tickling my tonsils. They want to know what we’re doing about this.”

  “We’re doing all we can.”

  “But we’re not getting any results. People want results when a judge is murdered, Agent White. They want somebody arrested. They want somebody punished. They figure, hell, if somebody can kill a judge and get away with it, none of us are safe. People call their congressmen and ask them why nobody’s been arrested yet. They ask them what kind of outfit we’re running up here.”

  “But it’s only been a day and a half,” Anita said.

  “Doesn’t matter.
When people around here call the politicians, the politicians call the brass in Nashville and ask them why nobody’s been arrested yet. And then guess who the brass call? Me. They ask me what we’re doing. They ask me who I put in charge of the investigation. They ask me whether we have a suspect in custody, and if not, why not? And you know what I have to tell them? Lies, that’s what. I tell them I’ve got my best agent in charge of the investigation. I tell them she’s an up-and-comer, a real go-getter. I tell them she already has a suspect and she’s already gotten a search warrant. I tell them she’ll have someone locked up by the end of the day. And then I call her, and she tells me she doesn’t have a damned thing. Not only that; she tells me her only suspect has disappeared like a goddamned fart in a hurricane. I called you in here now because I want you to explain yourself to me so I can explain myself to them. And it had better be good.”

  Anita thought back on what Norcross had said to her in the car yesterday. How the boss had been the first agent at the crime scene; how he must have known how tough it was going to be.

  “Why did you assign this case to me?” Anita asked.

  Harmon looked surprised. He laced his fingers together and rested his elbows on the desk.

  “I just told you. You’re my up-and-comer. My go-getter. I thought you were the right person for the job.”

  “Do you know what I think? I think instead of assigning this case to me, you draped it around my neck like a yoke. You were at the crime scene. You knew it was outdoors. You knew the weather was about to turn. Fire and water are two of the worst things that can happen to a crime scene, and this one had both. What evidence the fire didn’t consume, the water washed away. So you dumped it on me. When the brass call, why don’t you just tell them the truth? Tell them you knew it was going to be an impossible case, so you dumped it on the agent whose very existence offends you. Why don’t you tell them you knew you might need a sacrificial lamb, so you dumped it on the agent you’d most like to blame if everything goes to hell in a handbasket?”

  Anita took a breath. She’d stopped short of saying what was really on her mind. Why don’t you tell them you can all blame it on the woman? The black woman! She refused to toss that card on the table. It was a card her daddy had warned her never to play. “You make your way on hard work and dedication,” he’d said. “You outwork and outthink the bigots, even though you know they hate you and would do anything to destroy you. You stay true to yourself and your principles. You adapt and you overcome. That’s how you do it.”

  Harmon’s face flushed. His laced fingers became pink as he squeezed them tightly together.

  “Are you accusing me of sexual discrimination and racism, Agent White? Are you suggesting that my decision to assign this case to you was motivated by your gender or the color of your skin?”

  Anita knew she was on thin ice. She didn’t want to back down, but she loved the job and wanted to keep it. She chose her words carefully.

  “What I’m saying is that you’ve treated me like an outcast since the first day I walked through this door. I find it hard to believe that you’ve suddenly decided I’m some kind of wonder woman.”

  Harmon leaned back in his chair and began rocking back and forth. He closed his eyes and massaged his temples for a full thirty seconds before he spoke.

  “I hope you understand that we’re both in a world of shit here,” he said. “I thought that since this judge had the reputation of being a first-class son of a bitch, nobody would pay much attention. I underestimated the political fallout. And you’re right. I assigned this murder investigation to you because I knew it was a shit case and I don’t like you. You’re cold, Agent White, and you think your shit doesn’t stink. But we’re stuck with each other. We’re grown-ups. We can agree to disagree.”

  “Is that all? Can I go now?”

  “You can go as soon as you tell me how you plan to nail the bastard who did this.”

  “Honestly? Right now I have no idea. Perhaps you have some suggestions.”

  “As a matter of fact, I do have a suggestion-one that might allow both of us to keep our jobs.”

  35

  I spend another half hour talking to Rider about Hannah Mills/Katie Dean, her background, and her tenuous connection to Ramirez. After an extra ten minutes of arguing, I finally talk him into sharing what he knows with Sheriff Bates. As I drive back to Jonesborough, I try several times to get ahold of Bates to let him know what I’ve found out and that he needs to talk to Rider, but he’s still not answering his cell. I stop and eat a quick lunch at a little diner called the Mountain View and get back to the office around twelve thirty. Rita’s out to lunch, along with everyone else, it seems, but as I walk past her desk and down the hall, I hear voices coming from Mooney’s office. One of them sounds like Anita White, so I decide to walk back and see what’s going on.

  “Joe, come in, come in,” Mooney says when I appear in the doorway. He’s smiling broadly, which immediately makes me think he’s going to ask me for a favor. Anita is sitting across the desk from Mooney to his right, and Mike Norcross is across the desk and to his left. “We’re just having a little strategy session.”

  “Making any progress on the judge?” I say to Anita.

  “Doing what we can.”

  “Any solid leads?”

  “That’s what we were talking about,” Mooney interrupts. “We’d like to present some evidence to the grand jury, and you’re just the man to do it.”

  “Really?” I’m immediately skeptical. He’s talking in his politician voice, a sure sign that reason is being thrown out the window. “What kind of evidence?”

  “Evidence of interstate flight to avoid prosecution, evidence of obstruction of justice, evidence of murder.”

  “I take it you have a suspect.” I wonder what Anita’s found out since yesterday, and I silently curse myself for not being more diligent about getting in touch with her.

  Mooney motions to a chair in the corner. “Pull that chair around here. Let me bring you up to speed.”

  I grab the chair, turn it around, and lean on the backrest. Mooney talks for ten or fifteen minutes, occasionally assisted by Anita. He gives me a detailed description of everything that’s been done in the investigation and the conclusions he’s drawn. By the time he’s finished, I’m quite certain he’s either making a sick joke or he’s gone completely insane.

  “I want you to present all this to the grand jury and then persuade them to issue an indictment for first-degree murder,” Mooney says.

  “You can’t be serious.”

  Mooney seems stunned, as though he would never imagine I might question him.

  “I’m completely serious,” he says, “and I don’t think I appreciate your tone.”

  I look at Anita, then at Norcross.

  “You guys are supportive of this?”

  “We are,” Anita says.

  “Let me tell you a little story,” I say to Anita. “There was a guy in this office a few years back, before you moved up here. His name was Deacon Baker, and he used to do things similar to this. He’d indict people for murder without sufficient evidence, overcharge people, and he filed a death penalty notice on nearly every murder case, intending to use it as leverage. And do you know what I used to do? I used to practice criminal defense, and I made a pretty handsome living taking the tactics he used and shoving them up his stupid, fat ass.”

  Mooney clears his throat.

  “I hope you’re not insinuating that I’m stupid,” he says.

  “What you’re proposing is completely irrational. If I understand your summary of the evidence, you have exactly nothing. Zero. You have a young man who you suspect may be the killer. Your theory of motive is that he killed Judge Green to avenge his father’s suicide. One witness saw a white car in the neighborhood; another saw a white car a mile or two from the neighborhood, but we don’t even know whether it’s the same car. Your suspect owns a white car. So what? Can either of your witnesses identify the car? Did they get a
look at the driver? You have no weapon, no blood, no prints, no hair, no fiber, no witness to the crime, and no incriminating statements from anyone. Like I said, you have nothing.”

  “His mother was totally uncooperative,” Mooney says. “He’s left the state, and he ran from the police in Durham this morning. This is all circumstantial evidence of guilt.”

  “No, it isn’t,” I say curtly. I’m frustrated and beginning to grow angry. I look at Anita and Norcross, both of whom have suddenly taken an intense interest in the floor. “It’s diddly-squat. First of all, he had every right to leave the state. From what you’ve told me, no one has even talked to him. How’s he even supposed to know he’s a suspect?”

  “His mother must have warned him,” Mooney says. “The neighbor saw him come and go in a hurry.”

  “And you think that’s evidence of guilt in a murder? Come on, Lee. You’re not that obtuse. And didn’t you just tell me the police executed a search warrant on the mother’s home this morning and the kid’s apartment in Durham and didn’t find a damned thing? You’ll be lucky if they don’t sue you.”

  “This is what we do,” Mooney says. “You convene the grand jury. You bring Agent White in, and you have her lay everything out: the feud between Judge Green and Ray Miller, the suicide, finding the judge’s body the morning after the funeral, the fact that Tommy Miller didn’t come home that night. She tells them about the mother’s slamming the door in her face, how she won’t give them any information at all. She tells them about the neighbor who saw Tommy come home early that morning and then leave quickly. She tells them about Tommy running from the police in Durham, how his car seems to have disappeared into thin air, and how he’s now a fugitive.”

  He obviously hasn’t listened to a word I’ve said.

  “A fugitive? How can he be a fugitive if you don’t have an arrest warrant?”