Justice Redeemed

by Scott Pratt

  “I think I might have done something really stupid,” I said, my head still down. I’d been regretting what I’d done at James’s house since the moment I pulled out of his driveway.

  “What do you mean?” Mom said. “While you were gone?”

  “Yeah. Hang on. I think I’m gonna . . .”

  I got up off the stool; hurried over to the sink; and coffee, alcohol, and bile spewed from my mouth. I wretched for five minutes before it finally passed. About halfway into it, I felt a cool washcloth being pressed against the back of my neck. When I was finished and had wiped my face and rinsed my mouth, I leaned back against the kitchen counter.

  “What did you do?” Mom asked.

  “I can’t tell you,” I said. “It could cause problems for you.”

  “You’re not making any sense at all, Darren. You leave here and tell me you’re going to find an old client who might be able to help. You come back drunk and acting like you don’t have a damned bit of sense. Then you toss your cookies in the kitchen sink, and now you won’t tell me what’s going on? I’m your mother. Spit it out.”

  “Did I tell you Jalen Jordan paid me fifty thousand dollars?”

  “You mentioned it.”

  “Did I tell you it was in the van? Under my seat?”

  “I don’t think you mentioned that. So?”

  “It isn’t there anymore,” I said. “It’s gone.”

  “Where did it go?”

  “I gave it to the client I went to see. I gave it to James Tipton.”

  “Why would you give him fifty thousand dollars, Darren?”

  I looked at her and saw the realization cross her face.

  “You didn’t,” she said.

  I nodded. “I know. It was stupid.”

  “Did you hire him, Darren?” Her voice took on a tone I rarely heard. It was a tone of incredulity. It meant the emotional dam was about to burst.

  “I didn’t know what else to do, Mom. I’m terrified for Sean.”

  “So you went out and hired this . . . this . . . who is this guy?”

  “Tipton. His name is James Tipton.”

  “You said he’s a client. Is he a thug? A criminal? Did you give him fifty thousand dollars to commit murder? Has my son involved himself in a conspiracy to commit murder?”

  I dropped my eyes, no longer able to look at her. Hearing those words, hearing the fact that I’d committed a felony for which I could find myself imprisoned for the rest of my life made me ashamed of myself. I wasn’t a killer or a vigilante. I was a lawyer, for God’s sake. I was supposed to follow rules, not break them or make them up as I went along. What could I possibly have been thinking? My stomach began to knot again.

  “Shit, Mom,” I said. “Now what?”

  “Now what? I’ll tell you what! You’re going back out to your van and you’re going to drive back to this James what’s-his-name’s house and you’re going to tell him you were temporarily overcome by insanity and you’re going to get your money back and call this whole thing off!”

  “But what if he—”

  “Get!” she yelled, pulling me toward the door by the elbow. “Right now! Get back over there and call it off! And I don’t care what you think about the police and I damned sure don’t care about your law license. As soon as we get back tomorrow, you’re going straight to the FBI.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Silverware clinked against ceramic plates, customers talked quietly, and waitresses barked orders to line cooks at the Waffle House on Papermill Drive in Knoxville. Assistant US Attorney Ben Clancy sat in a corner booth and watched Special Agent Gary DuBose walk through the door and approach. Clancy smiled. He hadn’t seen DuBose in a while, but the kid bore a strong resemblance to his old man, the late Knox County sheriff Joe DuBose.

  “Good to see you, General Clancy,” DuBose said, using the title conferred on district attorneys general by law enforcement officers. “I appreciate you meeting me this early.”

  “It’s good to see you, too, Gary,” Clancy said. “You’re the spitting image of your daddy when he was a young man.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “I miss him,” Clancy said. “He was a fine, fine man. The best sheriff this county has ever seen.”

  “I miss him, too. It’s still hard to believe he’s gone.”

  “He was always proud of you, I can tell you that,” Clancy said. “And look at you. A DEA agent. How long have you been with them now?”

  “Just over two years.”

  “Time certainly does slip away.”

  At thirty years old, DuBose looked like he’d been carved from a block of granite. Despite the morning chill, he wore only a tight black T-shirt, black utility pants, and black boots. His face was long and angled, his hair cropped close, his eyes forest green.

  “I apologize for last night,” Clancy said after they’d received coffee and ordered breakfast. “The phone woke me up. I’m one of those early to bed, early to rise people.”

  “It could have waited,” DuBose said. “I just thought you’d be excited to maybe get a crack at Darren Street.”

  “Go over it for me,” Clancy said. “And talk slowly. I’m getting old.”

  “About ten months ago,” DuBose said, “I was assigned to the task force that’s investigating the distribution of oxycodone in Knox and Sevier counties. One of the names that kept coming up was James Tipton, Junior. Actually, his entire family’s name kept coming up. Everybody kept saying his grandmother is some sort of kingpin. The word is that they’ve been moving a lot of oxy up here from Florida and selling it wholesale to local distributors. None of them have ever been arrested, but James is a suspect in a couple of unsolved murders over in Sevier County. And two years ago, he was charged with aggravated assault for cutting a guy up with a knife, but a jury acquitted him at trial last year. Darren Street was his lawyer, and they apparently hit it off pretty well.

  “We haven’t been able to get squat on the family, but James apparently branched out on his own into Kentucky a while back. One of his sellers got popped up there, rolled on a distributor, and the guy put us onto James. We were fairly early into it. I had what I thought was some pretty solid intelligence but no wires or anything. What we were really interested in were the suppliers in Florida, so my boss suggested I go see him and rattle his chain, see if anything happened. We’d heard he was using his own product, and you never know, right? So me and a couple of my guys paid him a surprise visit at his little trailer up in the mountains one night. I told him it was just a matter of time before we had enough to indict him and that once we did, he was going away for at least thirty years and we would wind up arresting his whole family. I told him that if he would be willing to work for us and give us his suppliers, we’d figure out a way to keep his jail sentence to a minimum and maybe back off his family if they quit moving drugs. He’s looking at a lot of time, though, General, and I know how you feel about making deals with those kind of people. I hope I didn’t cross any lines, but I told him in exchange for a sentence reduction, he would have to give up his suppliers, work for us, and forfeit the money and property he’s accumulated as a result of dealing drugs. He basically told me to go screw myself, but I could tell I scared him. So I left him my cell number and told him to call me if he changed his mind, otherwise I’d see him when we eventually got enough evidence together to indict him.

  “Last night around nine I get a call from him and he wants to meet; he says it’s urgent. So I drive to Strawberry Plains and meet him in this little bar and he tells me that the lawyer who represented him on the aggravated assault just tried to hire him to kill somebody, and he wants to know if I’d be interested in cutting a deal in exchange for information on the lawyer. I tell him I might, so he goes into this bizarre story of how Darren Street came to his house and offered him fifty thousand dollars to kill a man named Jalen Jordan because Jo
rdan had supposedly threatened to kill Street’s kid. He said Street already paid him the money.”

  Clancy dipped a piece of toast in an egg yolk, took a bite, and chased it with a cup of coffee.

  “Interesting,” he said. “It’d be nice if we had something besides the word of a suspected drug dealer and murderer to back it up.”

  “I asked him if he had a recording of any kind and he said he didn’t. But I couldn’t wait to call you, General Clancy. My dad would have given his right arm for a shot at Darren Street.”

  Clancy nodded. “I know. Street was extremely disrespectful to him.” He motioned to the waitress for more coffee.

  “This could be huge,” DuBose said. “We catch Street in a murder conspiracy and jam up a drug dealer. Plus, from what Tipton told me, this Jalen Jordan might very well have killed those two little boys. Should we set up a meet with the FBI and put them on him?”

  “We’re already on him,” Clancy said as DuBose’s chin fell.

  “So you knew about all this?”

  “No, no,” Clancy said. “You did the right thing by calling me immediately, Gary. Exactly the right thing. We knew about Jordan from an entirely independent source. We’re all over him. But this with Darren Street is all new. I’ll have to give some thought as to how we should deal with it. Do you know how Tipton left things with Street?”

  “He said he agreed to do it and that Street gave him the money. They’re supposed to meet again late this morning, and Street is supposed to bring some more information about Jordan. Pictures, address, descriptions of vehicles, that kind of thing. So what do you want me to do? Do we wire Tipton ourselves and sting Street?”

  “You guys have what, four safe houses in and around the city?” Clancy said. “I’d like to talk to Tipton alone.”

  “Right,” DuBose said. “We have four. Which one do you want to use?”

  “The big one on Creekside Avenue.”

  “Not a problem.”

  “Go outside and call Tipton,” Clancy said. “I have things I have to take care of at the office this morning, but set something up as soon as possible after noon. Just me, you, and Tipton. That’s it. Don’t say a word to anyone else. I’ll get the check.”

  “Got it, General,” DuBose said, and he slid out of the booth and headed for the door.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  When I went back to Tipton’s trailer after the tongue lashing my mother gave me, he wasn’t home. I waited for an hour with that crazy dog barking and all of those skulls staring at me, but I eventually lost my nerve and decided to come back early the next morning. I went back to the chalet, set the alarm on my phone for 5:00 a.m., and arrived at Tipton’s around 5:45. It was still dark and still frightening, but I was relieved to see Tipton’s car in the driveway. I pulled up close to the front porch and got out. The dog was terrifying; he had the heavy chain stretched out tight, and I kept glancing over there. If he broke the chain or the pole or his collar, he would be on me in about three seconds and I was sure I’d be dead less than a minute later. I pounded on the door several times and yelled James’s name. Finally, the porch light came on and James opened the door. He was wearing only a pair of boxer shorts, smelled strongly of beer and tobacco, and looked like death warmed over.

  “I’m sorry to show up so early like this,” I said over the ferocious barking of the dog, “but I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want you to do it.”

  The look on his face was one of confusion mixed with pain. Judging by the way he looked, I could only imagine how badly his head was pounding.

  “I’m gonna shoot that fuckin’ dog,” he muttered, and he turned away from the door as though he might really be going to get a gun.

  “James! Wait! Don’t shoot the dog, please. Just listen to me, okay? I changed my mind. I don’t want you to do what I asked you to do last night. I don’t want you to hurt anyone. Do you understand me?”

  He started rubbing his face with both hands, but soon stopped and nodded his head.

  “You understand?” I said. “You’re not going to go back inside and forget I was here?”

  “Nah, I gotcha, Counselor. Don’t kill the fuckwad child rapist. You gonna do it yourself?”

  “I’ll probably just hide until the police catch up to him. They’ll be onto him soon.”

  “What about your boy? Is he gonna be okay?”

  “I won’t let anything happen to Sean. I’ll keep him hidden.”

  “And the money?” He pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. “You want me to get the money?”

  “Keep it,” I said. “For your trouble.”

  James nodded again. “You want to come in and have a cup of coffee?”

  “Thanks, but I’m going to head on back to Knoxville. I have some things I need to do. Go back to bed, James. I’m really sorry I bothered you with all of this.”

  I drove back to the chalet, and Mom and I drank coffee while we waited for Sean to get out of bed. Once he was up, we packed up our vehicles, drove into Gatlinburg, and had breakfast. After that, we took Sean to the Ripley’s Aquarium. We’d been to the aquarium a couple of times before. I usually loved it as much as Sean did, but I had a hard time concentrating on anything other than what I was going to do about Jalen Jordan. I knew he was out there somewhere. Was he waiting for me to make a mistake? To relax? Would he really kill my kid?

  After we’d gone through the aquarium, I gave Mom my credit card and told her to take Sean and check into the Hilton Hotel in Knoxville.

  “Entertain him for the rest of the day,” I said. “I’ll catch up with you later.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to do what you told me to do. I’m going to talk to the FBI.”

  I drove from Gatlinburg to the FBI office in Knoxville. On the way, I called and asked to speak to Special Agent Freeman, the agent Officer Denton told me she’d spoken to. Freeman was gruff, but he agreed to meet with me. I walked into his office around eleven thirty.

  “What can I do for you?” Freeman said in a businesslike tone. He had a smug half smile on his face, the kind of “my shit don’t stink” look FBI agents are famous for.

  “Have you ever heard of a man named Jalen Jordan?” I said.

  “Not sure. Should I have heard of him?”

  “He came to see me Tuesday afternoon and asked me to represent him in an assault case that was filed by the Knoxville police. I talked to him for a little while and decided I didn’t like him. When I told him I didn’t want to represent him, he threatened my son.”

  Freeman’s expression didn’t change a bit. He just sat there looking at me.

  “And?” Freeman said.

  “He said he’d hate to see somebody throw my son off a cliff out by The Sinks like those other two boys that have been killed.”

  “So?”

  “I was hoping you might do something about it.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t’ know, whatever you can do. Put a tail on him. Keep a close eye on my son.”

  “Can’t do it,” Freeman said. “Don’t have the manpower to babysit.” He was acting so disinterested that I wanted to slap him to get his attention.

  “Listen,” I said, “I know you guys have the bag that was found in Jordan’s glove compartment. It contained two pairs of boys’ underwear. That underwear most likely belonged to the two boys who were murdered.”

  “And how would you know that?” Freeman said.

  “I can’t say.”

  “Attorney-client privilege, huh?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So you wouldn’t be willing to offer any testimony that Jalen Jordan confessed to you that he committed these two murders, am I right?” It was getting to the point where I wanted to do more than slap him—I wanted to jerk him up and punch him in the mouth.

  “It was a privil
eged conversation,” I said. “I couldn’t testify if I wanted to. Any judge would toss it in a heartbeat.”

  “So again, why are you here?”

  “I’m trying to get some help for my son,” I said loudly. “Are you too thick to understand that?”

  “And I just told you we aren’t in the babysitting business. So the guy threatened your son. That isn’t exactly a federal crime, is it? And you just told me anything Jordan might have said to you is privileged. So I don’t see much point in continuing this conversation.”

  “Have you gone through the van yet?” I said. “Have you sent the underwear off to the lab? Can you tell me how long it’s going to be before you arrest him?”

  “I’m not in the habit of discussing ongoing investigations with defense attorneys,” Freeman said, “and neither is any other FBI agent in his right mind. Listen, Counselor, you apparently caught a bad break when Jordan walked through your door. But there isn’t anything I, or anyone else in law enforcement to my knowledge, can do to help you right now. My best advice would be for you to take your son on a little vacation until it’s safe for him to return.”

  “A vacation?” I said. “Could you give me any idea as to how long this vacation would need to be?”

  “Best guess? About two months. The lab is slow. And if you tell anyone I said that, I’ll deny it.”

  “Two months?” I said. “I’ve practically told you that Jalen Jordan is your murderer and you’re telling me it’s going to take you two months to get him off the street? What if he kills another kid in the meantime? Somebody besides my kid?”

  “Not gonna happen,” Freeman said.

  “How can you know that?”

  “Because I know. You’ll just have to take my word for it.”

  “But it’s still going to be two months before he’s arrested?”

  “Give or take a week,” Freeman said. “Listen, I’ve already told you more than I should, and I have a lot of work to do, so if you don’t mind?”