by Reed Arvin
“Agreed,” Carl says.
“And these guys come along and interfere every step of the way. If they’re not screaming about police brutality, they’re trying to get killers back on the street. They invest a thousand hours of legal research to prove a guy who’s already been convicted of several other crimes is innocent of one.” He closes his eyes, exhaling deeply. “Once in a blue fucking moon,” he says quietly, “I’d like to have one of them just thank us for a job well done.”
We sit silently awhile, the only sound the soft ticking of the clock on Rayburn’s oak, three-drawer filing cabinet.
“David,” I say, “this guy Buchanan isn’t worthy to tie your shoes.”
He opens his eyes and grins. “Damn right.”
Dolores has been told to hold calls into the office except for Buchanan, so we sit in silence, insulated from the city below us. We make small talk for a while, until the phone rings. It’s 9:50, ten minutes before Buchanan’s due. Rayburn picks up the phone, listens a second, and hangs up. “Something’s going on,” he says. “There’s a crowd gathering in front of the building.” The DA’s window is on the back side of the building, so we move in formation along the perimeter hallway to the side that looks down on the street. Rayburn opens a door, apologizes to the surprised staffer, and we clump around her window. There, nine stories below, two media trucks are jockeying for parking spots. About fifty people are standing around, as well. Several are holding placards, and though they’re too far away to read, it doesn’t take much imagination to fill in the blanks; Buchanan is bringing the full protest circus to the big day. Second Avenue is also a major tourist area, and we can already see a few people jaywalking across the street to check things out. Cameramen spill out of the media trucks and begin filming the protesters.
“Get the doors, David,” Carl says, quietly.
Rayburn nods and picks up the telephone on the staffer’s desk. “Have the guard secure the front door, will you, Dolores?” he says. “That’s correct. Nobody in or out.” We move back out into the hall, and heads snap up from desks as we pass; a few staff members drift out of offices to see what’s going on. The pissed-off expression on Rayburn’s face shuts down any questions. We get back to the DA’s office, and Rayburn slams shut the door. “It’s a Geraldo,” he says. “The bastard leaked.”
“That’s disappointing,” Carl says quietly. “One hopes for a little more honor.”
“Can we possibly conduct this operation with a bunch of reporters tagging along?” Rayburn demands.
“Wrong question,” I say. “Can we refuse to conduct it with reporters tagging along?”
Rayburn stares a second, as our situation sinks in. “No. We can’t.”
Dolores pokes her head in the door. “I’ve called the guards, but Buchanan’s already in the reception area. There’s five people with him, and the guard downstairs says both elevators are full.”
“Holy shit. Excuse my French, Dolores.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Put one of the uniforms on the outer door. Call down and tell the guard that nobody gets on an elevator who doesn’t work in the building. And try to get somebody outside, on the street. We don’t want any rubber-necking goofballs getting hit by a car.” He turns to us. “So what do we think, gentlemen? Any suggestions?”
Carl shrugs. I swear to God, the man is implacable. “The worse one’s adversary behaves, the more important it is to behave impeccably oneself.”
“What does that mean, dammit?”
“I think Carl’s suggesting we turn up the dignity a notch,” I say.
Rayburn stares, then nods. “Damn, that’s not bad.”
“Buchanan’s got the usual hippie protest crowd,” Carl says. “They more they rant and wave their signs, the calmer we become. People will know whom to believe.”
Rayburn stands up straight and smooths his suit. He straightens his tie. “How do I look?”
“Like the district attorney,” Carl says. “Which is who you are.”
Rayburn smiles. “All right then. Let’s go outdignify the fucker.”
WHEN RAYBURN PUNCHES the code on the Simplex locks that open the door to the ninth-floor reception area, we’re bathed in the cold, hard light of three video cameras. With one step out of the inner offices, we leave the real world and enter the weird zone, where appearance is everything. There, standing front and center, is Barry Dougherty, a reporter for the local CBS affiliate. Rayburn gets six inches into the room when Dougherty’s accent-free, television voice rises above the din. “Mr. District Attorney! Was the wrong man executed in the Sunshine Grocery murders?”
Fresh from Carl’s pep talk, Rayburn doesn’t show a crease. “Hello, Barry. I appreciate the question. We have total confidence in the jury verdict that was handed down in that case. But in the interest of justice, we’re here to follow up on Professor Buchanan’s concerns.”
Dougherty looks momentarily disappointed; today’s film will not include the sight of a district attorney melting down. Not disappointed enough, however. He leans forward, grinning fiercely. “You mention the jury, Mr. District Attorney. Are you aware that two members of that jury have already stated they would not have voted to convict if they had known about Kwame Jamal Hale?”
I close my eyes. Buchanan has been lining up the jury. This thing is choreographed, start to finish.
Rayburn blanches slightly. “That’s what makes this country great, Barry,” he says. “People are free to speak their minds.” He pushes past Dougherty to Buchanan. “So, Professor Buchanan. I thought we had a deal.”
Buchanan stands, smiling and relaxed. With him are two young women, college age, probably assistants. “People find things out,” he says. “News travels on its own.”
“Maybe it would be better if we just got on with this,” Rayburn says.
“You have your crew ready?”
“In our lot, ready to roll.”
The crowd moves into the hall, where a small but vocal crowd of protesters wait. They cheer Buchanan and his aides like rock stars. A second group, also early enough to make it upstairs before the cops sealed off the building, pile out of an arriving elevator, leaving Rayburn, Carl, and me surrounded by a group of twenty-somethings in blue jeans and tie-dyed T-shirts ranting in our faces against capital punishment. “No to state-sponsored killing! End the death machine!”
We’re encircled by protesters, enduring a relentless barrage of camera flashes until an empty elevator arrives. The door opens, and the merry band piles in with us, chanting all the way down to street level. One of them, a mousy-looking girl about twenty, stands nose-to-nose with Carl; for nine floors we listen to her lecture one of the leading scholars on criminal law in America on how the justice system is a hive of racists who are used by a white hegemony to impose its control on a black underclass. Carl stands impassively, his eyes counting floors as we descend. When the door opens, the protesters bound out of the elevator like children on a field trip to the zoo.
By the time we hit the street there are at least seventy-five people milling around. The professor moves through the crowd, soaking up the love. There are more cameras waiting, and he starts giving interviews; this bit of theater reduces us to his wait staff, since without him, we don’t know where we’re going. Rayburn gives the expected no-comment—he looks good, not out of control—and we escape into his Crown Vic to wait. Eventually, Buchanan loads up his group. The professor gets in his rental car and pulls out on Second Avenue, followed by a line of a dozen or so cars. Rayburn pulls out after the last of Buchanan’s crowd, and the police ID van follows us. Finally comes a row of five media vehicles, creating a motorcade of impressive length. We look like a funeral procession as we pull slowly out, Buchanan leading us back through downtown to I-40. We hit the four lights before the freeway, and the convoy is intact as it turns west, heading toward Memphis. Buchanan settles into a fifty-five-mile-per-hour cruise, running ten under the limit.
Now out of the camera’s v
iew, Rayburn grips the wheel like he wants to strangle it. He keeps looking in the rearview mirror at the vehicles stringing along behind us, cursing under his breath. After a few miles, the city begins its fade into semirural enclaves. The highway slices through heavily forested hills, the terrain on both sides of the highway scorched into a withering brown. The sky is hazy with humidity, muted into a nearly colorless gray.
After twelve miles, we turn south onto State Highway 70, a circuitous, two-lane road tightly bordered on one side by the Harpeth River. Buchanan slows for each switchback and S-corner, and the convoy bunches together behind his hypercareful driving. The metaphor of following Buchanan to a place of unknown destiny is not lost on Rayburn. “God, he’s loving this,” he mutters. “He’s like the Pied Piper of doom.”
“Montgomery Bell State Park is out this way,” I say. “You think he’s heading there?”
“Three thousand acres of woodlands,” Carl offers, from the backseat. “That gun would be a needle in a haystack.” The road turns southeast now, and we click off twenty uneventful miles toward Montgomery Bell Park. We’re nearly to the entrance when Buchanan slows to a crawl. The cars bunch up again, and Buchanan turns left onto a side road that’s practically invisible in the trees. The road is ostensibly gravel, but nearly overgrown by grass. We move slowly, gradually climbing an incline through heavily forested acreage. We go this way about fifteen minutes, which in the difficult conditions feels like three times as long. We’re several miles from Highway 70 now, seriously into Deliverance country. A meadow opens up before us, and Buchanan pulls off the road into the opening. The meadow is large, about twenty acres, and looks like it’s been fallow for years. Tall brown grass blows in the hot air, and juniper and birch trees line the edges of the open space. In the distance, about seventy-five yards away, a dilapidated tobacco barn leans hard against the wind, its battered shape barely hanging together. It looks like a decent storm would send it splintering into pieces.
Buchanan steers his car through the rough pastureland toward the barn, and the convoy follows, the big vans hobby-horsing up and down over the uneven earth, the protesters’ cars following behind. Rayburn’s Crown Vic is squeaking and protesting with the off-road treatment, its suspension barely up to the task. Buchanan eventually pulls up on the east side of the dilapidated structure. The vehicles in the convoy scatter across a thirty-yard area. Doors slam as the crowd of people pile out of cars and vans. “Everything about this is wrong,” Carl mutters. “We’re looking for a shotgun that killed three people in cold blood.”
Everyone gathers around Buchanan, who’s plainly aware of the cameras. We wait for the ID crew to get out of their van with their shovels and a metal detector. When everybody’s ready, the moment of truth arrives.
“The weapon is inside the barn,” Buchanan says. “Along the south wall.”
Rayburn steps through the crowd to Buchanan. “How did you know this was the one?”
Buchanan pulls a Polaroid photograph out of his pocket. “Kwame Jamal told me the directions. I confirmed the location with him with this picture.”
Rayburn plucks the photo from Buchanan’s hand. “So you just went around looking for barns?”
“We’ve researched this whole area, and there are only three,” Buchanan answers. “All long abandoned. I took photographs of each of them. Kwame recognized this one right away.”
“Why inside a barn?” Rayburn asks. “Doesn’t make sense. A structure draws people.”
“He could dig without being seen. He also said the ground is softer.”
People in the crowd start walking toward the building, and the ID squad moves quickly to cordon it off with yellow police tape. A couple of uniforms are posted, making sure bystanders don’t interfere. The media photographers move toward the barrier to take their pictures. For a few seconds, Rayburn, Carl, and I are alone with Buchanan, out of media earshot. Rayburn leans over to the professor. “We’re going to take this barn apart, stick by stick,” he says. “If it turns out that anybody’s tampered with any evidence, I’m going to take you apart next.”
Buchanan turns with a sneer. “Is that a threat, Mr. District Attorney?”
“You’re damn right, it is,” he says. “And if there are footprints anywhere near this gun—assuming we find it—you better pray they’re not your size.”
Buchanan gives him a shit-eating smile of contempt. “Vietnam. North Korea. Iran. Your death-penalty compadres. How proud you must be to share a legal philosophy with these paragons of liberty.”
Rayburn smiles back. “Obstruction of justice. Falsifying evidence. Perjury. If this is a scam, your compadres are going to be in Brushy Mountain prison. I’d suggest you try to shower alone the first year or two.”
Buchanan recoils, finally giving Rayburn the response he wants. It’s a small victory, but Rayburn seems satisfied. He shakes his head in disgust, then nods toward me and Carl. “Let’s go,” he says, leading us behind the barrier. Buchanan follows, and we move off in a group. The ID crew moves slowly, looking for signs of tampering. Rayburn looks at Buchanan and says, “It’s not that we don’t trust you, Professor. It’s just that we don’t trust you.”
It takes twenty minutes to satisfy the ID crew that the entrance to the barn has been adequately examined. The barn door is ten feet tall and opens with a wooden bar-type handle. An officer dusts it for prints and takes a sample of the wood, meticulously tweezing off a splinter. He pushes open the door, which creaks like it hasn’t moved in years. The photographer takes a series of flash pictures of the barn’s interior from the doorway, and the floor is checked for footprints and debris.
After ten minutes of searching the floor, an officer walks in with his metal detector. He walks toward the south wall, and the thing squeaks a high-pitched signal. The officer slowly advances, and the signal gets stronger. By the time he reaches the wall, the signal meter is pegged at maximum. He sweeps back and forth a little, isolating the strongest spot. Satisfied, he hands off the metal detector and picks up a narrow spade. He starts moving earth carefully, digging under the bottom timber. The spade sinks easily into the soft, powdery dirt. About six inches under the timber, the spade stops. He nods at two other ID officers, who come over to help. They get on their knees and start pulling dirt out from under the timber with their gloved hands, making little piles as they go. Eventually, one of them manages to get his arm underneath, and he says, “I got something.” They pull him out, and the first officer uses a crowbar to pull the bottom two timbers off the barn wall. The soft wood comes off easily, the boards splintering under the pressure. With the boards gone, the ID officer shines a flashlight into the hole. He reaches in and says, “I got it.”
Carl and I stare like stone soldiers while we watch the officer struggle with something in the hole. Then, slowly, he carefully lifts out of the dirt a sawed-off, pistol-gripped, Browning BPS shotgun. Photographers shooting through the open door are jostling each other for the money shot, the picture they hope will give them the Pulitzer. I hear a voice from outside. “Yeah, we’re on. We got it live.”
I look at Carl, who is pale, washed out. Rayburn is staring silently, his face blank. And so it begins, I think. I don’t know who’s lying. But if it isn’t Hale, we have killed the wrong man.
CHAPTER
11
WE SIT INSIDE RAYBURN’S car back at 222 West, but nobody moves. The shotgun, along with extensive soil and paint samples from the location, are in the police ID van, on their way to Paul Landmeyer’s forensic lab for examination. Upstairs in the office, we have the staff to face. Rayburn shakes his head. “It’s the system,” he says bleakly. “It’s not perfect, which means somebody has to take the fall. And that somebody is us.” He looks at me. “You OK?”
“Yeah.” This is a lie.
“Look, we’re going to stick together on this.”
“Sure.”
“I want everybody to get home as quickly as possible. When you’re not here, they can’t ask you questions.”
“We’re staying,” I say.
“You’re following orders,” Rayburn says. “If reporters think they can get statements from prosecutors one at a time, it’ll be open season. We have to coordinate through the office.”
“He’s right, Thomas,” Carl says. “Let’s get inside before reporters find us out here.”
We slip through the back entrance into a tomblike office. It’s late afternoon on Friday, which is slow anyway. But there’s no denying that people have scattered. I don’t blame them, nor do I interpret this as a lack of loyalty. It’s just practical. I have no doubt that fifteen seconds after the live TV pictures of the shotgun were beamed onto Nashville TV screens, briefcases were being packed for the weekend. Dolores emerges from Rayburn’s office, and hands Rayburn a note, which he reads stoically. He looks up. “The governor called.”
Dolores coughs and hands him a second slip of paper. “Also the state attorney general,” she says.
Rayburn nods. “You guys get outta here as soon as you can,” he says. “And take your phones off the hooks.”
I protest, knowing it’s futile. “Listen…”
“That’s an order, Thomas,” Rayburn says. “Paul is going to do his thing at the lab. I’ll stretch that out as long as I can. Meanwhile, I don’t want one word out of this office except from me.” He looks at Carl. “I’m sorry about this, Carl. It’s a hell of a way to wrap up your career.” He turns and vanishes behind his door.
Carl nods at me. “He’s right, Thomas. We’re a target as long as we’re hanging out here.”
“I need a few minutes.”
“I’ll wait and walk you down.”
“Don’t,” I say. “I’m OK.”
Carl gazes at me closely, but moves off. I walk down the hall and into my office. Stillman, for once, isn’t anywhere around. I walk in, shut and lock the door. I lean back against it, trying to figure out what to do. This is no academic exercise. This is a well-orchestrated attack by people who have figured this thing out from top to bottom. The fact that Buchanan—and Towns, apparently—have gone to extraordinary lengths to discredit the death penalty doesn’t make them bad people, in my opinion, at least as long as Hale is telling the truth. But that doesn’t change the fact that Carl and I are the symbols who stand in their way, and if they prevail, we go down the drain.
