by Scott Pratt
“Julie?”
Julie popped her gum and shrugged her shoulders.
“All right, then, let’s get ready to go to work.”
April 12
6:00 p.m.
After I left the nursing home, I spent the next hour driving to Mountain City to stand next to a client who was entering a guilty plea to a reduced charge of negligent homicide in what had originally been a second-degree murder case. My client, a thirty-year-old man named Lester Hancock, had come home unexpectedly one evening to discover his best friend in bed with his wife. Lester had initially handled the dispute admirably. He simply told his buddy to get the hell out of his house and never come back. His friend left, but returned fifteen minutes later and began yelling insults at Lester from the road in front of Lester’s house. Lester yelled back. His friend grabbed a baseball bat from the bed of his pickup truck and started toward the house. Lester stepped out on the front porch and blew a hole in him with a black powder rifle. He wouldn’t have been charged had he not dragged the man inside his house and then lied to the police about the way things really happened.
The drive was spectacular in April. The angle of the sun caused the mountain peaks to reflect off of the shimmering water of Watauga Lake, and the mountains themselves were coming to life. Redbud and Bradford pear blossoms dotted the slopes with pink and white. As I wound slowly through the beautiful countryside, I thought about the question Ma had asked me earlier: “What did Raymond ever do to you?”
Almost immediately following the rape, I started overreacting to anyone who I perceived was trying to bully me. Over the next year, I got myself thrown out of school three times for fighting, and I was only in the third grade. I was afraid of being left alone and had nightmares regularly. The nightmares eased after a while, but then, when I was in the eighth grade and just starting to hit puberty, I threw my helmet at a football coach who grabbed my face mask and screamed at me when I made a mistake on a play during practice. The helmet hit him in the head. They threw me off the team and out of school for a month.
My freshman year in high school, during the time when the hormones were flowing and I felt like I wasn’t in control of anything, including my own body, I went days without sleep and fell into deep depressions. It was the first time I remember having the dream of floating down the turbulent river toward the waterfall.
And then, during my sophomore year, I met Caroline. She was beautiful, smart, funny and optimistic, and at first, I had a lot of trouble believing she wanted to have anything to do with me. But she did. She saw something in me that I didn’t see, and while I didn’t understand, I was grateful. She’d flash a smile at me or give me a sideways glance and wink and my heart would melt. Gradually, the nightmares stopped and over the next few years, I learned what it was like to enjoy life.
Caroline and I were inseparable all through high school. We both worked hard. I was an athlete, she was a dancer, and we were both good students. We both had part-time jobs. I worked on the weekends stocking groceries at a supermarket and she taught dance to kids at the studio where she took lessons. Caroline’s father was a long-haul truck driver who was hardly ever home and her mother was almost as emotionless as mine, but she never complained about either one of them. We had each other, and that was enough.
The only serious problem we had was around graduation time. Caroline wanted to get married — and so did I — but I had something else I wanted to do first. I had trouble explaining it to her, but I wanted to join the army and become a Ranger. Caroline said I was crazy, that I was somehow trying to forge a bond with my dead father. She was probably right, but it didn’t matter. I’d made up my mind. I enlisted a month after I graduated from high school and left for boot camp the same week Caroline entered college at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She said she’d wait for me, and she did. I wrote to her almost every day and I came home to see her every time I went on leave, but it was the longest three years of my life.
By the time I got out of the army, Caroline had earned an undergraduate degree in liberal arts. We were married at the Methodist church her mother attended in Johnson City the same weekend I got back, and I enrolled in school at the University of Tennessee in the fall. Caroline went to work at a dance studio owned by a former Dallas Cowboy cheerleader. She taught jazz and tap and acrobatics and choreographed routines for the dance recitals. I majored in political science and knew what I wanted to be. I was going to law school and I was going to become a prosecutor. I wanted to put people like my Uncle Raymond in jail.
Marrying Caroline was the best decision I ever made. She was so beautiful, so full of life, and she taught me the most important lesson I’d ever learned — how to love. Over the next two years we had two beautiful, healthy children, and Caroline helped me learn how to raise them. She nudged me when I needed nudging, held me back when I needed holding back, and did her best to try to ease the intensity that burned in me.
Unfortunately, however, I brought more than my duffel bag home with me from the army. The Rangers are gung-ho, small-unit specialists who pride themselves on being able to fight in any environment on a moment’s notice. I trained all over the world for three years, but didn’t see any combat until two months before my enlistment expired when my unit was sent to Grenada. Terrible images from the short but bloody battles I fought there haunted me through college and law school. I’d wake up in the middle of the night screaming, covered in sweat, with my wife talking softly to me, trying to calm me down.
As with Sarah’s rape, I eventually managed to suppress the memories, at least most of the time. I even managed to make excellent grades and graduate from both college and law school, despite the fact that I always held a part-time job and was doing my best to be a good husband and father along the way. I kept myself so busy I didn’t have time to think about the past. I didn’t sleep much during that seven-year stretch.
By the time I graduated from law school, my son Jack was just entering the first grade. When I interviewed for a job at the district attorney’s office back in Washington County, I was disappointed to find that the starting salary for rookie prosecutors was less than twenty-five thousand dollars a year and that it would take me at least ten years to get to the fifty thousand dollars. It seemed like such a waste to have spent all that time and effort for such a paltry salary. Caroline was starting up her own dance studio and we knew it would take some time before she started earning a decent salary. I figured I could make at least twice what the district attorney’s office was offering by practicing on my own, even as a rookie, so I set up shop in Johnson City. I told myself that after I’d made some serious money and gained some experience, I’d close down the office and go to work as a prosecutor.
I immediately started taking criminal defense cases, reasoning that the experience would help me later when I went to the D.A.’s office. I put the same amount of sweat and effort into my law practice as I’d put into being an athlete, a soldier and a student, and I soon became very good at it. I found that the law offered a great deal of leeway to an astute and enterprising mind, and I learned to take on even the most damning evidence and spin it to suit my arguments. Within a couple of years, I started to win jury trials. The trial victories translated into publicity, and I soon became the busiest criminal defense lawyer around. The money started rolling in.
I defended murderers, thieves, drug dealers, prostitutes, white collar embezzlers, wife beaters and drunk drivers. The only cases I refused to take were sex crimes. I convinced myself that I was some kind of white knight, a trial lawyer who defended the rights of the accused against an oppressive government. And along the way, I made an unfortunate discovery. I learned that many of the police officers and prosecutors who were on the other side weren’t much different than the criminals I was defending. They didn’t care about the truth — all they cared about was winning. Still, the thought of moving to the prosecutor’s office was always on my mind. But the money kept me from it. I was taking good care of my wife
and my kids. I took pride in being a provider. I took pride in being able to give my children material goods and opportunities I never had. Before I knew it, ten years had passed.
And then, along came Billy Dockery.
Billy was a thirty-year-old mama’s boy charged with killing an elderly woman after he broke into her house in the middle of the night. He was long-haired, skinny, stupid, and arrogant, and I was repelled by him from the moment we met. But he swore he was innocent, the case against him was weak, and his mother was willing to pony up a big fee, so I took his case. A year later, a jury found him not guilty after a three-day trial.
Billy showed up at my office — drunk — the day after he was acquitted. He tossed an envelope onto my desk. When I asked him what was in it, he said it was a cash bonus, five thousand dollars. I told him his mother had already paid my fee. He was giddy and insistent. I knew he didn’t have a job, so I asked him where he got the money.
“Off’n that woman,” he said.
“What woman?”
“That woman I killed. I got a bunch more’n this. I figger you earned a piece of it.”
I threw him and his money out onto the street. There wasn’t any use in telling the police about it. Double jeopardy prevented Billy from being tried again, and the rules about client confidentiality meant I couldn’t divulge his dirty little secret.
Prior to Billy, I did what all criminal defense lawyers do — I avoided discussions with my clients about what really happened. I concerned myself only with evidence and procedure. But when Billy slapped me in the face with the truth, I realized I’d been fooling myself for years. I realized that my profession, my reputation, my entire perception of myself, was nothing more than a facade. I was a whore, selling my services to the highest bidder. I wasn’t interested in the truth. I was interested in winning, because winning led to money. I’d completely lost my sense of honor. I’d almost lost my sense of self.
When that realization hit me, I wanted to quit practicing law altogether. But my children were in high school and would soon be going off to college. Caroline had managed our money well, but we didn’t have enough stashed away to allow me to quit outright. So Caroline and I talked it over, and we decided I’d keep going until the kids had graduated and gone on to college. After that, we’d figure out what I was going to do for the rest of my life.
I immediately began to cut back on the number of cases I took. The death penalty cases I was doing were all appointed, payback from judges for the days when I was spinning facts and helping people like Billy Dockery walk out the door. My son was in college and my daughter was a senior in high school. In less than a year, I hoped to finish up the cases I had and walk away from the profession that Uncle Raymond, at least indirectly, had led me to.
By the time I got back from Mountain City, it was almost dark. So far, my birthday had been a bust. Johnny Wayne had been gagged, I’d practically fallen apart in Ma’s room, and the flashback of Sarah’s rape kept playing over and over in my head. I couldn’t reach Caroline or either of the kids on my cell phone. I’d called ten times on the way back down the mountain.
I finally pulled into the driveway and pushed the button on the garage door opener. There wasn’t another car in sight. Rio, my ten-month-old German shepherd, came bounding out of the garage and started his daily ritual of running around the truck. I’d rescued Rio from a bad situation when he was only two months old. I was his hero. When he saw me pull into the driveway every day, the excitement was too much for his young bladder. As soon as I got out of the truck, he peed on my shoe.
Where could they be? I didn’t see my son’s car. When I’d talked to Jack on the phone last week, he promised to come to dinner with us on my birthday. I thought seriously about backing out and going somewhere to drown my sorrows, but I decided I’d go in and see if they left me a note. Surely they wouldn’t forget my birthday. These were the people I loved more than anything else in the world. They’d never forgotten my birthday. They always made a big deal out of it.
Caroline hadn’t said anything that morning, but I’d left at 5:30 a.m. and showered at the gym after I worked out. She and Lilly were still asleep when I walked out the door. Maybe they did forget.
Or maybe something was wrong. Something had to be wrong. I rubbed Rio’s ears for a minute and walked up and opened the door that led to the kitchen. It was dark inside. I let the dog go in ahead of me. It was quiet.
“Hello! Anybody home?” I flipped on the light in the kitchen.
A huge poster had been hung from the kitchen ceiling. It stretched all the way to the floor and was at least six feet wide. It looked like something a high school football team would run through when they took the field for a game. The poster, in bright blue letters, said:
Happy Birthday Dad!
WE LOVE YOU!
I laughed as the three of them came around the corner from the den into the kitchen singing “Happy Birthday.” All three were wearing striped pajamas and grinning like Cheshire cats. They’d tied their wrists together. The Dillard family chain gang. My self-pity vanished and I opened my arms for a group hug.
Caroline announced that they were taking me to dinner, and they quickly changed out of the goofy pajamas. I chose Cafe Pacific, a quiet little place on the outskirts of Johnson City that served the best seafood in town. As I sat in the restaurant eating prawns and scallops in an incredible Thai sauce, I looked at their faces, settling finally on Caroline’s. I’d fallen in love with the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen all those years ago, and she was even more beautiful now. Her wavy auburn hair shimmered in the candlelight. Her smooth, fair skin and deep brown eyes glowed, and when she caught me looking at her I got a coy smile that brought out the dimple in her left cheek. Caroline has the firm, lithe body of a dancer, but it’s soft and curvy where it matters. She’s studied dance all her life and still operates a small dance studio. Lilly is Caroline’s clone, with the exception that her hair runs to a lighter shade and her eyes are hazel. Lilly is seventeen and in her senior year of high school. She wants to be a dancer, or a photographer, or an artist, or a Broadway actress.
Jack looks a lot like me. He just turned nineteen and is tall and muscular, with dark hair and brooding eyes that are nearly black. Jack is a top student and a highly competitive athlete whose goal is to play professional baseball, and he works at it with the intensity of a fanatic. He and I have spent countless hours together practicing on a baseball field. He’ll hit until his hands blister, throw until his arm aches, lift weights until his muscles burn, and run until his legs give out. The work paid off in the form of a scholarship to Vanderbilt.
When the waiter brought me a piece of chocolate cake, Caroline reached into her purse and produced a candle. She stuck it in the cake and lit it.
“Make a wish,” she said.
“And don’t tell us what it is,” Lilly said. She says that every year.
I made a silent wish for an innocent client. And the sooner the better.
Jack reached under the table and pulled out a small, flat, gift-wrapped box.
“This is from all of us,” he said.
I opened the card. There was a message, in Caroline’s handwriting: “Follow your heart. Follow your dreams. We’ll all be there, wherever it leads. We love you.” She was as eager as I to get me out of the legal profession. She thought my work kept me at war with myself — she’d told me more than once that she’d never seen anybody so conflicted. She’d been encouraging me to go to night school and get certified as a high school teacher and a coach.
Inside the package were box seat tickets to an Atlanta Braves game in July.
“I cleared your calendar,” Caroline said. “We’re all going. Don’t you dare schedule anything for that weekend.”
“Not a chance,” I said. It was perfect.
We finished dessert and drove back home around nine. As I pulled into the driveway, the headlights swept over the front porch about thirty feet to the left of the garage. I saw something
move. We lived on ten isolated acres on a bluff overlooking Boone Lake about five miles out of the city. We’d left Rio in the house when we went to the restaurant. I stopped just outside the garage and got out of the car. I could hear Rio raising hell inside.
“Go in and turn on the porch light,” I said to Caroline. “You guys stay in the car.”
“No way,” Jack said as he got out of the back seat.
I walked around the corner toward the front with Jack right beside me. Someone got out of the porch swing and stood.
“Who’s there?” I said.
Silence. And then the porch light came on. Standing next to the swing in a pair of ratty khaki shorts and a green T-shirt that said, “Do Me, I’m Irish,” was my sister Sarah.
April 12
11:00 p.m.
By the time Landers returned to his office, the Johnson City detectives had managed to gather more information on the murder victim. John Paul Tester was a widower with one grown kid, a son who was a deputy sheriff and a chaplain at the Cocke County sheriff’s department. Tester had come up to Johnson City to preach at a revival at a little church near Boones Creek. He delivered the sermon, collected almost three hundred dollars from the offering plate for his trouble, left the church around nine, and nobody had seen him since. His bank records showed that he withdrew two hundred dollars in cash from an automatic teller machine at 11:45 p.m. The machine was located inside the Mouse’s Tail. If Tester ran through three hundred dollars there and needed more money around midnight, the Barlowe woman had to have noticed him.
She lied.
Landers spent the afternoon drafting an affidavit for a search warrant and running down a judge. All he had to do was tell the judge that the owner of the club where the murder victim was last seen lied and was refusing to cooperate. The warrant the judge signed authorized the TBI to search the Mouse’s Tail for any evidence relevant to the murder of John Paul Tester. And since it was a strip club, the judge didn’t have any qualms about Landers executing the warrant during business hours.
