“Success, Mister Beckett. The trial was a little over six years ago and resulted in the conviction of a man called Harold Lee Jeter for the murder of his estranged wife, Norma Mae Parkenson Jeter. Ruby LaCost’s testimony was evidently instrumental in the case. The Judge, one Owen Bishop, is now retired and living in Washington State. The prosecuting attorney, one Clifton Willis, is deceased. The defense attorney, one Ronald Finch, is in private practice here in Kansas City. I hope that helps.” She handed him the sheet of paper.
“Virginia, you are a doll. This is wonderful. Better than I could have hoped for.”
Before she could ask any questions, Crockett bolted from the room. Downstairs in the lobby area he checked a phone book and found Ronald Finch’s number, called, and set up a nearly immediate appointment. On his way there he passed a florist shop, stopped, and sent Virginia a bouquet of five-dozen daisies.
The law offices of Ronald Finch and associates were located on the second floor in the refurbished Stockman’s Building near Kemper Arena in the Kansas City river bottom. It took Crockett nearly thirty minutes to get there. He arrived a little before noon. Finch, a small man in a dark blue rumpled suit was waiting for him.
“You Beckett?” he asked holding out his hand.
“That’s me. Thanks for taking the time to talk.”
“Thanks for buying me lunch,” Finch said, walking away. “C’mon.”
Crockett followed him downstairs and to the other end of the building to the Golden Ox Restaurant. They claimed to have the best steaks in Kansas City. Crockett had eaten there three times in his life. Not once had his steak been worth a damn. Their burgers were terrific.
When they were seated, Finch spoke up.
“Snake Jeter,” he said.
“Snake?” Crockett asked.
“Sorry,” Finch went on. “Harold Jeter. Snake was his nickname. That’s what he preferred to be called. He even wanted me to use his nickname in court. Dumbass. I remembered him when you said his name. You don’t forget somebody like Snake. I dug back in my old files and refreshed my memory. I was a public defender when Snake got busted. The court assigned me to his case. Jesus. The stupid sonofabitch confessed to the cops when they came to his wife’s apartment just minutes after he beat her to death. Crowed about it! Nobody, by God, treated him the way she did. He showed her. Kicked her fuckin’ ass until she fuckin’ died. That kinda thing. Christ, what a mess.”
Crockett smiled. “Not overly repentant, huh?”
“Not much. I tried to get the confession thrown out, Miranda and all that, but Snake wasn’t under arrest when he confessed. Didn’t need to be advised of his rights. I mean I had nothin’. Goddamn Willis, the prosecutor, had two shotguns, an M-16, and a Bowie knife. I didn’t even have a water pistol.”
“You remember a witness for the prosecution named Ruby LaCost?”
“Do I? The victim’s therapist. She’d sit in that witness box and control the whole room. Every man in the place wanted to do her, and every woman in the place wanted to be her. I went after her with everything I had, and that wasn’t much, and I couldn’t even put a dent in that woman. Ever see a sparrow fly into a sliding glass door?”
Crockett got his grin under control as the waitress took Finch’s order. He asked for a burger and fries with a Coke.
“The best I could do for Jeter was use the fact that he’d confessed to keep him off death row. Got twenty-five to life. Ignorant-assed hillbilly. Beat his wife to death because she wouldn’t go home with him. Hell of a reason, huh?”
“Where was home?”
“Arkansas,” Finch replied, consulting a torn envelope he fished out of his jacket pocket. “Hardy. Well, no. Rural route, Hardy. If I remember correctly, he and his mother and brother lived out in the sticks someplace.”
Crockett felt his pulse accelerate. “He had a brother?”
“Uh-huh. His brother and his mother came to Kaycee for the trial. Damn thing lasted less than two full days. The jury was out for about fifteen minutes.”
“What can you tell me about his brother?”
“He was about twenty then. Kinda sandy haired. Chunky. Not fat. Wore a new pair of those Big Smith jeans, work shoes, and a white shirt buttoned up to his neck. I talked to him and his mother quite a bit. She was a beaten down country woman and the brother didn’t say more than ten words. Diminished IQ. I don’t think he really understood what was going on. If he did, he probably couldn’t figure out what all the fuss was about. His brother just did what he had to do. It would have been the woman’s fault because she didn’t do what she was told. Something like that. Not exactly the Deliverance Syndrome, but sure as hell stereotypical ridge runners.”
“You remember names?”
Finch consulted his envelope. “Mama’s name was Effie Mae Jeter. God only knows what Effie stood for. The brother’s name was Jerome Jeffery Jeter. His mom and brother didn’t call him Jerome or Jerry though. It was something else, but I can’t remember what. Dog or something. Effie Mae was just beat to shit. Jerome was a mouth breather. That one not only wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, somebody left him out in the rain. I’ll tell you one thing though. If his brother was in the courtroom, Jerome never took his eyes off him. Not once. Went past hero worship. It was almost like devotion. Gave me the creeps. Still does, now that I think about it.”
“Scary, huh?”
“Let me put it this way. These kind of boys might not buttfuck you while you were on a canoe trip, but if they thought they had a fair reason, they’d kill you and bury your body in a goddamn swamp.”
“No shit?”
“None at all.”
“What caught Jerome’s attention if Harold wasn’t in the courtroom?”
“The LaCost woman. Of course, she pretty much held the room’s attention anyway.”
The food arrived and Crockett asked for his sandwich and fries to be boxed up to go.
“You leaving?”
“Yeah,” Crocket replied, dropping two twenties on the table. “Gotta run. Thanks for everything.”
Finch grinned. “I was counting on getting to hear a few Justice Department stories before I had to go back to the mundane.”
“I’ve had about all the stories I can handle for today,” Crockett said, and headed for the truck.
On the way home, Crockett discovered that the Golden Ox still made a hell of a burger. At least the portion of it that didn’t fall all over his suit.
Crockett stormed into his living room in a better mood than he’d been in for days. Clete sat on the couch with a cell phone in his lap.
“How’d it go?” he asked.
“Not too shabby,” Crockett replied, taking off his jacket and fussing with the shoulder holster. “There was a murder trial. Guy named Harold Lee Jeter. Nicknamed Snake. Got twenty-five to life. Killed his wife who was Ruby’s client. She hung his ass out to dry at the trial.”
He dropped his jacket on the back of a chair and tossed the pistol and holster on the couch beside Clete.
“Now get this,” Crockett went on, loosening his tie and beginning to pace. “Harold Lee has a brother named Jerome Jeffery Jeeter. ‘Bout half smart. I talked to the lawyer that defended Harold. He thinks the brother has some real problems. Might have trouble with right and wrong, worshiped Harold, so on and so forth. And here’s the kicker. They hail from near someplace called Hardy, Arkansas. If that’s in northern Arkansas, then it’s spider country, Texican.”
Clete grinned. “It is spider country, son. It’s also on the Spring River. That’s a cold water river that starts at Mammoth Spring, Arkansas, just inside the state line from Missouri. One of the biggest springs on the planet. That area is also known for sinkholes and caves. Lots of limestone. Hardy’s a little tourist town, got a big retirement community nearby, canoe rentals, river float trips, trout fishing five or ten miles upriver toward the spring. Scenic Arkansas at its best.”
“A river and caves?”
“Betcher ass.”
&nbs
p; Crockett scowled. “How the hell do you know all that?”
“That ain’t all I know, Mary,” Clete said. “I been busy. Friday I finally woke up and got my brain in gear. I called a guy at CDNAD. That’s the Criminal DNA Database. He got a hold of the people at CODIS and ran the perp’s DNA back through the system, this time not looking for a match, but for something close to a match. I heard from him while you were out runnin’ around. Near as they can figure, there’s about a billion to one probability that whoever snatched Ruby has a brother named Harold Lee Jeter that’s in the South Central Correctional Center at this time, doing twenty-five to life for beatin’ his wife to death. The South Central Correctional Center is a C-5. That is a maximum security shithole. It is located in someplace called Licking, Missouri.”
“God Damn!” Crockett roared. “Here I am out beatin’ the fuckin’ bushes, and you sit in here on the freakin’ phone and put the whole thing together!”
“Well, I know how much you like to play policeman, and I wanted your one-legged ass to feel useful, so I let you paddle around in the shallow end while I did a forward twisting two-and-a-half off the three meter board. Didn’t wantcha to lose interest and wander off.”
Crockett dropped into a chair and rubbed his face with both hands. “This is more than a lead, Texican,” he said.
“Oh yeah. Unless ol’ Snake’s got two or three brothers runnin’ around out there, Jerome Jeffery Jeter is the one who took Ruby.”
“We gotta go have a little chat with Harold.”
Clete nodded. “I figured we’d go tomorrow. I’ll get on the computer in a little bit and see what I can find out about the Missouri Department of Corrections, and where the hell Licking is. Then we’ll swoop down on ol’ Harold.”
“You think the prison guys will cooperate?”
“I’m with the Secret Service and you’re with the Department of Justice, son. I’ll think they’ll be tickled to death. Ol’ Harold Lee, on the other hand, may not.”
“And we’ll have to stay within the limits of the law.”
Clete smiled. “Yessir,” he said. “At least for a while.”
“The South Central Correctional Center,” Clete intoned, reading from a printed sheet, “is one of several prisons administered by the Missouri Department of Corrections.”
“No shit?” Crockett asked. They were southbound on Missouri Highway 63 in Crockett’s truck.
“Absolutely none,” Clete went on. “The South Central Correctional Center is situated on a two hundred and five acre tract site northwest of Licking about one mile west of the city of Licking off U.S. Highway 63.”
“Northwest of Licking and west of Licking, too?” Crockett asked.
“That’s what it says here,” Clete replied, holding up the paper. “It also says that the SCCC, I bet that stands for South Central Correctional Center, don’t you?”
“I’m almost certain.”
“The SCCC employs four hundred and forty-five correctional professionals…”
“As opposed to correctional amateurs, I should think,” Crockett said.
“Stop interrupting. This is some very important information. Where was I?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Here we are. The SCCC employs four hundred and forty-five correctional professionals when fully staffed and has a capacity to confine one thousand five hundred ninety-six maximum-security male inmates.”
“And this correctional facility is manned faithfully by correctional professionals?”
“Like I said before, that’s what it says here.”
Crockett grinned. “Wonder how many of those correctional professionals are about sixty pounds overweight, have bad teeth, are named ‘Bubba’, and used to pull the wings off of flies before they got old enough to appreciate the joys of killing Bambi and the near sexual fulfillment that comes from the energetic application of a baton to portions of an inmate’s physiology?”
Clete smiled. “’Bout three outa five, I speck,” he drawled.
“Goddammit,” Crockett said. “What the fuck are all these correctional officials gonna correct? The fucking time to correct shit is before some dumass like Harold Lee Jeter kills an innocent woman. You can’t correct a fucking thing after the fact. All you can do is punish. Correctional facility my ass. They don’t correct a goddamn thing. Just like those poor bastards who walk around inside in their uniforms calling themselves correctional officers. Bullshit! They’re guards. Prison guards. That’s all they are and that is all they will ever be. Calling a dandelion a rose don’t change its color or its smell. It’s not a correctional facility, it’s a fucking prison. The guy that runs it ain’t a superintendent, he’s a fucking warden. You want governmental abuse, graft, nepotism, corruption, embezzlement, fraud, and a dozen other crimes, come to a fucking prison. And I’m not talking about the inmates. I’m talking about the goddamn staff.”
The truck was silent for a moment before Clete spoke up.
“Ah, Crockett?”
“Yeah?”
“When we get to the correctional institution?”
“Yeah?”
“Maybe you better wait outside.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Ruby LaCost opened her eye. The light of early morning filtered its way into her limestone warren. She shifted her position on the thin foam pallet to ease pressure on her waist from the chain that bound her. Such a strange action had become second nature to her over the days of her captivity, and she did it without thought. Groaning from the shift of her position and the reaction to movement from her continuous headache, Ruby levered herself to a sitting position and reached for the rag beside her washing bucket. Wetting the rag, she placed it over her damaged eye, soaking the matter that glued the eyelid shut every time she slept.
Her wrists and ankles were nearly healed from where the zip ties had damaged them on her ride in the back of the pickup truck. The scar tissue was thick and distorted. Ruby knew that during times of stress the body will throw so much energy into healing wounds as quickly as possible that there is often nearly an excess of healing that occurs. Hence the heavy scar tissue. She wondered what her face must look like.
She sat for a moment, finger combing her hair as best she could to remove rats and tangles. This morning, for the second time, an alarming amount of hair clung to her fingers. She had always enjoyed thick healthy hair. Now she was losing it by the handful. Yesterday she had steeled herself against the pain and managed to extract the balance of a broken front tooth. Already the swelling in her gum was beginning to abate and the pain was lessening. Her skin was losing a little of its color, too. Not that Ruby spent time in tanning booths and the like, she did not. She was Italian. There had always been a natural rich olive tint to her skin. It seemed to be washing out.
She had no shampoo, she had no soap except for the remnant of a bar of Ivory that she horded. Ruby was not used to being dirty. Now she was not used to being clean. Her period had come and gone and she had ripped up a spare sweatshirt to deal with it. Her captor had seemed ignorant of such things. Noticing the bloody scraps of sweatshirt in her latrine bucket, he asked her once if she was sick. Ruby sensed that if she became really ill he would simply dispose of her.
Not that he was intentionally cruel. He was not. His cruelty came from ignorance or stupidity. He had consumed Spring River water all his life. He was adapted to it. Ruby was not. Consequently, and in spite of her addition of ‘shine, she had a light case of Montezuma’s revenge that was nearly perpetual. That, combined with her diet of Ding Dongs, Ho-ho’s, Twinkies, Pop Tarts, Vienna Sausages and Spam, was wearing her down physically and mentally. As her injuries got better, Ruby did not.
Her damaged and missing teeth made eating difficult. She could chew only on one side of her mouth, and even then not effectively. Her wounded eye wept and drained constantly. She could not open the lid all the way and the vision was so blurry as to be useless. Her nose ran a great deal of the time, the sinuses around her eye acting up. That s
ide of her head never completely stopped throbbing with her heartbeat.
She had no way to brush her teeth. She talked her captor out of a box of salt and rinsed her mouth with saltwater as she finger brushed the areas that could stand the touch. She also used a light saltwater mix to soak her bad eye two or three times a day. There was an infection in both the eye and her sinuses, but the salt water seemed to keep it under control. She had asked for aspirin and antibiotic cream and had received neither. She judged that if her captor did not see the value of something to himself, it was beyond his comprehension that someone else might need that thing. Therefore it was unnecessary.
The liquor helped. It was a natural disinfectant and a natural mood elevator. Boog kept a mason jar of shine available to her most of the time. Ruby had found that the shine, mixed about four to one with river water, made an acceptable nightcap if consumed rapidly. Once he had made coffee and brought her a cup, but only once. Not that he made some for himself and not for her. That would have been impolite. All things considered, he did try to be polite to her. The longest he had been gone during her captivity was three days, and he made sure to leave her extra everything. He was doing the best he thought he needed to do. It was not enough.
Her injuries so limited her early awareness that Ruby did not know how long she’d been held in the cave. Her best estimate was two to three weeks. Boog didn’t know either. Any extended awareness of time seemed to elude him. She got up, used the latrine bucket, and stood to stretch her muscles. She exercised as much as her head and eye would allow her to, afraid of losing all her muscle tone. In her heart of hearts she knew that she would never leave the cave unless she found a way to escape. She knew that her physical condition, without medical help and a decent diet, would continue to decline until she became a total liability. At that point, Boog would probably drop her down a shaft or sinkhole and go on about his business without giving her another thought.
She heard him, composed herself, dropped to sit on her heels on the pad, and waited for him to come to her. When he did, she spoke up.
Abducted Page 23
