Two grown children, both educators. An elder at the Simerly Creek Church of Christ. A Cub Scout troop leader. Past president of the Kiwanis Club.
And this is how it ends? Blindfolded and gagged in the middle of nowhere, wearing my underwear, tied to a tree like a dog?
They’d arrived at his house less than an hour ago. He had no idea what time it was; he didn’t get a chance to put on his glasses and look at the clock. All he knew was that he’d gone to bed at midnight while a storm raged outside his window. He’d been asleep in his twin bed upstairs, across the hall from Gladys, a retired mathematics teacher and his wife of forty years. Cheeky, his teacup poodle, hadn’t made a sound until they came into the room. Cheeky had barked meekly, twice, then fallen silent.
That was when he sat up, or at least tried to.
He’d seen a bright flash as something struck him above the left eye, felt himself being rolled roughly onto his stomach. Felt the warm blood oozing from the wound and creeping down the side of his face. Then the blindfold went over his eyes, the gag went into his mouth, and his hands were bound with tape.
He wasn’t sure how many there were, but it seemed like a small army. Hushed voices, both male and female. Short, sharp commands.
They’d grabbed him up by his arms and walked him out the door, down the hall, and down the steps. They’d stuffed him into the trunk of what he guessed was a compact car of some sort, a compact car with a coughing engine and a faulty muffler. He’d ridden, tangled like a cord, in the trunk for maybe half an hour, the last minutes over extremely bumpy terrain.
Then they’d stopped. He heard the trunk lid open and was pulled out, once again by his arms. His joints shrieked as he was half guided, half dragged twenty steps or so. The ground beneath his bare feet was cold and wet, the air dead still. He smelled the clean scents of a mountain forest after a hard rain. They’d straightened him up and backed him against something hard. He knew now it was a tree.
A rope had been wrapped around him at least a dozen times, from waist to shoulders. He strained to see through the blindfold.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil … Gladys. What did they do to Gladys?
He listened. They were close to him now, in front of him. He could hear them breathing.
A female voice said, “Take off the blindfold and take the gag out.”
Footsteps approached. Fingers reached behind his head. And then it was off. Moonlight filtered through the canopy above, casting long shadows among the trees. The car engine was still running; the lights were on. The gag was removed and he filled his lungs. The smell of exhaust reached his nostrils.
Jesus Christ! Lord God help me! Jesus, Mother Mary, and Joseph! What the … ?
There were three of them, fanned out in front of him less than ten feet away, facing him. They were … What were they? Ghouls? Vampires? Two of them appeared to be wearing black clothing and had long black hair. But their faces were bright white, even in the dim light. One of them, in the middle, was different. Was it a woman? Was this a nightmare? Please, God, let this be a nightmare!
“Who are you?” Norman Brockwell cried. “Who are you?”
The female at the center turned to her left.
“You picked him,” she said to the lanky figure standing next to her. “Tell him who you are.”
The tallest of them stepped forward. “Remember me, Mr. Brockwell?”
He could feel the boy’s breath on his face, smell the acrid aroma of stale beer. He squinted, studying the figure before him, listening to the voice. He’d heard it before. Suddenly he made the connection.
Boyer. Samuel Boyer. A freak. A rabble-rouser. One of the worst he’d ever encountered. He’d disciplined him, suspended him, and eventually expelled him when he brought a gun to school. What else could he do? There were hundreds of other students in that school who were good people. They didn’t deserve to be terrorized by the likes of …
“I brought a gun along,” Boyer said. Norman Brockwell saw Boyer’s lips curl into a half smile, half snarl. “How do you like it, Mr. Brockwell? How do you like feeling powerless? How do you like being humiliated?”
“Please, Samuel, I’m sorry,” he said. “What can I do to make it up to you? What can I do to make this right?”
Boyer stepped back abruptly.
“Blow for blow, scorn for scorn, doom for doom,” the girl said coldly. “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth. The vengeance of Satan is upon thee.”
The principal watched helplessly as the two on the outside raised pistols, their shiny surfaces glimmering in the moonlight.
“No! Wait, please!”
“Do it!” the girl said, turning her back. “Do it now!”
Norman Brockwell’s eyes glazed over and his chin dropped to his chest. “What did you do to my Gladys?” he asked softly.
And the night roared.
Sunday, September 28
By Sunday, our family and friends had all been told about Caroline’s cancer and the rallying had begun. I thought the telephone call I made to our son, Jack, would be one of the most difficult things I’d ever done, but Jack didn’t panic. He took the news quietly and said he was driving home immediately from Vanderbilt. I tried to talk him out of it—there was nothing he could do—but he insisted. He just wanted to see her, he said. He wanted to hug her. The call to Lilly was more emotional, but the result was the same. She, too, headed straight home.
I woke up a little after five in the morning and couldn’t go back to sleep. Caroline was sleeping soundly, so I decided to wait until six thirty and then roust the kids. I wanted to take them to breakfast. I knew they’d rather sleep in, but we hadn’t had a chance to be alone and talk about what was going on with Caroline.
We got settled into a booth at the Sitting Bull Café in Gray. Both were sleepy-eyed and wearing hoodies. Sitting there looking at them, I couldn’t help thinking how lucky I was. Their appearances were opposite—Lilly was blond, green-eyed, and feminine, while Jack was dark-haired, brown-eyed, and rugged. They’d both grown into young adults I admired and respected.They both worked hard at the things they enjoyed, they treated other people with respect, they followed their conscience, and they loved to laugh. They’d had their share of problems and made their share of mistakes, but neither had managed to do anything dumb enough to have any lingering effects. I was grateful for them.
“I want to talk to you about your mom,” I said.
“What is there to talk about?” Jack said. “It is what it is.”
“She’s looking at a long, hard road.”
Both of them nodded without looking up from their menus.
“So how do you feel about it?” I said. “How are you doing?”
Lilly set the menu down and looked at me. “I’m scared,” she said. “It’s hard to think about her having cancer. It’s hard to think about her dying.”
“She’s not going to die,” Jack said.
“She could.”
“But she won’t. She’s too tough. She’ll probably outlive all of us.”
“I’ve been doing some reading,” I said. The truth was that I hadn’t done nearly as much reading as I could have, or should have. The nurses had loaded us down with pamphlets and the Internet was full of information, but once I understood the basics, I didn’t want to read any more. It wasn’t as though I could gain any control by gaining knowledge. Like Jack said, it was what it was.
“There’s been a lot of progress in the past twenty years,” I said. “Her chances of surviving are excellent, but she’s going to go through some rough times, and she’s going to go through some changes.”
“What do you mean?” Lilly said.
“Hormonal changes. Physical changes. She’ll have to go through chemotherapy. It’ll make her sick and she won’t feel like doing much some days. She’ll probably be cranky and irritable. It might even trigger early menopause. She’ll lose her appetite. She’ll lose all of her hair. She’ll probably lose the
breast.”
“Better than the alternative,” Jack said.
“Yeah, it is. But I don’t want you guys feeling sorry for her; at least, I don’t want you showing her that you feel sorry for her. We have to treat her like we’ve always treated her. We have to keep her laughing. And I don’t want either one of you using this as an excuse to feel sorry for yourselves. Your friends will be coming around asking, ‘Are you okay? I’m so sorry about your mother.’ Especially your melodramatic girlfriends, Lilly. Remember, you’re not sick. She is. I don’t want to see any Lilly pity parties going on. We’re here to help any way we can. The more we help, the easier this will be on her. The best thing you guys can do for her is to keep on doing what you’ve always done. That makes her proud. That makes her happy.”
I waited for one of them to say, “Okay, Dad, we’re with you,” or “Don’t worry, Dad, we can handle this.” Instead, Jack looked over at Lilly and said, “What’d you think of it?”
She looked back at him, puzzled. “Think of what?”
“Dad’s speech.”
She grinned. “I thought the reference to my melodramatic friends and the pity party was uncalled-for, but other than that, it wasn’t too bad.”
“A little on the corny side,” Jack said.
The waitress was approaching.
“If you two are finished busting my balls, it’s time to order,” I said.
We spent the rest of the meal talking about other things, primarily the Beck murder case, which was no closer to being solved despite the intense pressure being applied by the media and every opportunistic politician within a hundred miles. We got back to the house around eight. Caroline was still asleep. Jack and Lilly wasted no time heading back towards their own beds.
I took Rio and went for a run, washed my truck, read the newspaper, and puttered around the house until noon. I helped Caroline get lunch ready while Jack and Lilly rode into town to pick up a book Lilly needed for school. After lunch, we decided we’d drive up to Red Fork Falls in Unicoi County and do a little hiking. We were just pulling out of the driveway when my cell phone rang.
It was Lee Mooney, and the news wasn’t good.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Caroline. “I have to go.”
Another gruesome trip, first to a modest ranch-style home in a tidy neighborhood outside Jonesborough, then to a remote area near Buffalo Mountain. Two more dreamlike walks through the scenes of unspeakable crimes.
The victims were Norman Brockwell and his wife, Gladys. Gladys had been beaten and stabbed to death in her bed at their home outside of Jonesborough. Her daughter discovered the body after Norman and Gladys failed to show up for church. Norman had apparently been kidnapped and taken to Buffalo Mountain, where he’d been tied to a tree and shot a dozen times. A couple of hunters scouting deer sign for the upcoming bow season had discovered him about the same time his daughter was discovering his wife. Norman had been shot through the right eye. Gladys had been stabbed in the right eye. “Ah Satan” had been carved into Norman’s forehead. Inverted crosses had been carved into both of their necks. The Brockwells’ dog, a tiny apricot teacup poodle, had been beaten to death, probably with the butt of a pistol.
I spent most of the afternoon in a haze of shock and disbelief. At seven, I met Lee Mooney in Jonesborough. He was waiting for me in a conference room just down the hall from my office. Sitting with him at the table were Jerry Blake, the Special Agent in Charge of the TBI office in Johnson City, Hank Fraley, the agent who was running point on the Beck case, and Sheriff Bates.
All of the murders had happened in the county, which fell under Bates’s jurisdiction, but because both Bates and his lead investigators were relatively inexperienced in murder investigations, Mooney had assigned the case to the TBI. That hadn’t stopped Bates from talking to the press about the case, but up to that point, he’d been excluded from the investigation.
“I want to form a task force,” Lee Mooney said as soon as I sat down. “And I want you to head it up.”
I looked at him, incredulous, then looked around the table at the others. The TBI agents were staring down at the table. Bates was looking at the ceiling.
“Me?” I said. “What the hell do I know about heading up a task force, Lee?”
“You’re a leader. People trust your judgment. And you know how to handle the press.”
“And who would make up this task force?”
“Five or six guys from the TBI. A couple of detectives from Johnson City. The sheriff and a few of his people. We might even be able to get one of the local FBI guys involved.”
Jerry Blake was fiddling with a notepad.
“How long have you been a cop, Jerry?” I asked.
“Close to twenty-five years.”
“Ever been on a task force?”
“A couple.”
“What do you think about them? Be honest. Are they effective?”
Blake gave Mooney a sideways glance. “They’re bullshit.”
“Why?”
“Turf wars, mostly. The different agencies don’t trust one another; then they want to take credit for anything good that happens and they want to blame anything bad on somebody else. Lots of egos involved. You wind up with too many chiefs and not enough warriors. You have communication problems. Things that ought to get done don’t get done. Information that ought to be shared doesn’t get shared. It just doesn’t work very well.”
“That’s what I thought,” I said. “The only time I’ve ever seen a task force formed is when the police aren’t making any progress in a case and they want the public to think they’re doing something.”
“But that’s exactly where we are, Joe,” Mooney said. “Word of these killings is already leaking out. By morning, everybody in northeast Tennessee is going to know about it, and we’re going to have a panic on our hands. We have to make people think we’re doing something.”
“Where are we now?” I said to Fraley. “What do you have that you didn’t have before?”
Fraley looked around nervously, as though he were afraid to share information with Bates in the room. Blake’s assertion about distrust between law enforcement agencies was already evident.
“We’re still nowhere,” he said quietly. “We’ve got more footprints that we’ll compare with the Beck murder scene. My guess is that some of them will match up. We’ve got more tire tracks, but we know they’re not from the same vehicle that was at the Beck murder scene. We’ll compare the shell casings and bullets to see if they match, and I’m betting they will. We’ve got two more bodies with crosses carved into them and wounds to their right eyes. They carved ‘ah Satan’ into Norman Brockwell’s forehead just like they did on Mr. Beck. We’ve got hair and fiber and a couple of latent prints from the Becks’ van, but we’ve run the latents through AFIS and haven’t found a match. We’ve got hair and fiber from the Brockwells’ home. We’ve got the rope they used to tie Mr. Brockwell to the tree. The medical examiner says Mrs. Brockwell was probably stabbed with an ice pick, but we don’t have the weapon. She also says Mr. Brockwell had abrasions on his back, elbows, and knees. She thinks he rode out to the woods in the trunk of a car. We’re checking to see if we can find any connection between the Brockwells and the Becks. Talking to family, friends, acquaintances, people they worked with, anybody we can think of. But as of right now, we don’t have a single suspect.”
“The first thing we should do is tell the media the cases aren’t related,” Mooney said. “That should at least keep people from panicking.”
“Forget about the media,” I said. “Somebody’s going to leak it whether we tell them or not. And what do you mean by ‘panic,’ Lee? Do you think people are going to riot in the streets? They’ll put better locks on their doors and they’ll buy guns and ammunition and guard dogs. They’ll watch out for their neighbors. We don’t need to start stonewalling, and I don’t think we need a task force. We don’t want to bring the feds and their egos anywhere near this, and as far as the local guys go
, no offense to the sheriff, but the TBI agents are as good as it gets.”
“So what do you suggest?” Lee said. “Status quo? Tell people we’re doing all we can?”
“Give these guys some more time,” I said, nodding towards Fraley and Blake. “Let them do their jobs. And how about we let the sheriff handle the media from now on? I’ll brief him whenever he wants. He can do the press conferences, press releases, whatever. He has an outstanding reputation in the community and people trust him. What do you say, Sheriff? Will you keep the hounds at bay for me?”
“Whatever you need, brother Dillard,” Bates said.
I turned to Fraley again. He was in his early sixties, a little on the heavy side, with receding gray hair, a pink complexion, and a bulbous nose. Despite our shaky start, I’d already developed a significant amount of respect for him. He was smart, tough, hardworking, and despised bullshit.
“Surely you have some ideas,” I said.
Fraley cleared his throat. “A few,” he said.
I expected him to keep talking, but he sat there in silence.
Mooney stared at him. “Care to share them with the rest of the class?”
“Who kills a school principal?” Fraley said. “Think about it. Forced entry through the window at the side of the house, but there was nothing taken, so it wasn’t a burglary that went wrong. Same MO as the Beck killing, as far as the shooting goes. Shot to pieces. And if it wasn’t just some random killing, then you have to ask yourself, who would want to kill a principal? And who would want to kill him and kill him and kill him?”
“Family member looking to speed up the inheritance?” Mooney said. “Disgruntled teacher? Or maybe it was the wife they were after.”
“It wasn’t the wife. They kidnapped Mr. Brockwell, took him for a long ride, tied him to a tree. They terrorized him. He was the target. They wanted him to suffer. His wife just happened to be in the way.”
“So answer your own question,” I said. “Who wants a high school principal to suffer?”
Fraley shrugged his shoulders. “I’m thinking a kid. A kid with a grudge. Probably looking for revenge.”
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