by Scott Pratt
I walk to the front porch and ring the doorbell. It’s a little after eight. I know she has to be at work by nine, so I figure she should be up. She comes to the door wearing an oversized black T-shirt that says “Biker Bitch” in white letters across the front. Her face is full and pink, and her pregnant belly is pushing against the inside of the shirt.
“What are you doing here?” Sarah says matter-of-factly.
“Just thought I’d stop by and say hello. Haven’t seen much of you lately. Damn, you’re as big as a house.”
“Thanks. Thanks a lot.”
“No, I didn’t mean it that way. It just surprised me. You look good. You really do. You look healthy. A little tired maybe, but healthy.”
“Your powers of observation never cease to amaze.” Her tone is unfriendly and sarcastic.
“Caroline misses you. So do I.”
“I see Caroline once in a while.”
“Really? She hasn’t mentioned it.”
“I guess she doesn’t tell you everything, does she?”
“Have I done something to piss you off?”
“Not lately.”
“Well, are you going to invite me in for a cup of coffee or leave me standing out here on the porch?”
“I have company.”
“So introduce me.”
She shrugs her shoulders and opens the door. I follow her through the living room and into the kitchen. Standing next to the sink is one of the biggest men I’ve ever seen. He’s a good five inches taller than I and looks to weigh in the neighborhood of three hundred pounds. He has a huge belly, but other than that, he looks like a weight lifter. He’s wearing a white T-shirt under a black leather vest, blue jeans, and boots. He has a brown beard that reaches to his collarbone, and both of his thickly muscled arms are covered in tattoos. His brown hair is pulled into a ponytail that falls to the middle of his back.
“This is my friend Roy,” Sarah says.
He peers at me through expressionless blue eyes. Though I’m intimidated by his size, I step toward him and put out my hand.
“Joe Dillard. Sarah’s brother.”
His hand is rough, calloused, and as big as a ham. He squeezes tightly, as if to let me know he could crush me if he wanted to.
“They call me Mountain,” he says in a raspy bass.
“I can see why. That must be your bike out front. Nice.”
He nods and drains the last of his coffee as I back away from him slowly. He looks at Sarah and says, “Gotta hit the road, babe.”
Sarah walks over to him, and he bends down to kiss her. While he’s at it, he grabs two huge handfuls of her butt.
“I’ll stop by sometime tonight,” he says, and then he lumbers past me and out the front door. As he’s walking away, I see a patch on the back of his leather vest. It’s a red skeleton with a wicked smile on its face and a long, pointed red tail. It’s wearing a beret and carrying a rifle. Beneath the skeleton are the words “Satan’s Soldiers.”
Satan’s Soldiers is a notorious motorcycle gang. I know they’re heavy into the crystal methamphetamine business. They also deal in guns and explosives. I have to hand it to Sarah. She sure knows how to pick ’em.
I walk over to the coffeemaker, pour myself a cup, and sit down at the table. Sarah walks down the hall toward the bedroom. I sip the coffee and hear the chopper roar to life in the driveway. A few minutes later, Sarah, wearing a yellow blouse and a pair of black jeans, walks back into the kitchen.
“How long have you been dating Roy?”
“About a year, I guess.”
“Classy guy. I especially enjoyed the ass grab. Where’d you meet him?”
“Tonto’s.”
Tonto’s is a biker bar on the outskirts of Johnson City. I’ve never been in the place, but I’ve driven by it plenty of times at night on the weekends. Dozens of motorcycles—maybe up to a hundred—are always in the parking lot.
“Didn’t know you ever hung out at Tonto’s,” I say.
“Lots of things you don’t know. Did you stop by to pass judgment?”
“Nah, I just stopped by to say hello. Didn’t exactly expect to find a gangbanger in Ma’s house, though.”
“It’s my house now. And I’ll invite anyone I please.”
“Does he know I’m an assistant district attorney?”
“Yeah. I told him.”
“Do you know what they do, Sarah? That gang? They manufacture and sell crystal—”
“I don’t want to hear it,” she barks. “Mind your own business. And you’d better get used to the idea of having him around. He’s the father of the baby I’m about to have.”
I stare at her in silence. She stands abruptly.
“I have to go to work now.”
She hovers over me until I reluctantly get up. I want to try to talk some sense into her, but I know from years of experience that I might as well beat my head against the refrigerator. I put my cup in the sink and turn around to face her, but she’s already walking away down the hallway again.
“You know the way out,” she calls over her shoulder, and I head out to my truck.
33
I have an appointment with the assistant United States attorney in Greeneville at ten a.m. I’m taking him my case file on Buddy Carver, the child porn aficionado. He’s agreed to present the case to a federal grand jury. I’m sure they’ll indict Carver, and I’m sure Carver’s lawyer won’t have the same success with the federal district judge that he had with Judge Green. Carver will soon be spending his days and nights in a minimum security federal prison, probably in Kentucky or West Virginia.
I stop in at the office for a few minutes to pick up Carver’s file and check for phone messages, but first I dial Anita White’s cell phone number, hoping she’ll give me an update on the investigation into Judge Green’s murder. I need to try to stay a step ahead of her if I can. Anita doesn’t answer the call. I leave her a message and dial Sheriff Bates’s cell number to get the latest on Hannah Mills, but he doesn’t answer, either.
I check my voice mail. There’s a message from Tom Pickering, the AUSA I’m supposed to meet in less than an hour. He wants me to call him before I come down. I dial the number.
“I got a call from a DEA agent in Knoxville this morning,” Pickering says after he comes on the line. “He wants to drive up and meet with you while you’re here.”
“DEA agent?” I say. “Any idea what he wants?”
“It has something to do with the girl who worked in your office who’s gone missing.”
“What’s his name?”
“Rider. Maurice Rider. Everybody calls him Mo. Good guy. He’s been around for a long time.”
“Do you know what he wants?”
“Not really. He called early. Mentioned that he’d read about the girl in the newspaper this morning. He said he had some information for whoever was looking into it, but he wanted to talk to someone he could trust. He asked if I knew anyone. I told him the sheriff seems to be a pretty solid guy, but he said he doesn’t trust sheriffs. So I mentioned you. When I told him you were coming down this morning, he asked if I thought it’d be okay if he drove up from Knoxville to meet you.”
“Sure,” I say. “If he knows something that might help, I’d be more than willing to talk to him. Right now we’re lost in the dark.”
I manage to avoid Lee Mooney and leave the office around nine fifteen. So many thoughts are floating through my mind that before I realize it, I’ve made the thirty- minute drive to Greeneville. I park my truck in front of the federal courthouse on Depot Street and walk past the concrete pillars designed to keep anyone from parking a vehicle within a hundred feet of the building. The pillars always remind me of that sick bastard Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing that killed dozens of innocent people.
Tom Pickering’s office is on the third floor, and I climb the wide marble steps in the courthouse foyer after making small talk with the U.S. Marshals at the security station just inside the front door. I
lay out the Carver case for Pickering, a soft-spoken, studious man in his mid-thirties. Just as we’re finishing up, his secretary buzzes him over the intercom.
“Tell him to come on in,” Pickering says.
Mo Rider walks through the door, and Pickering introduces us. The first thing I notice is the prominent cleft in his chin. He’s fifty or so, wearing khaki pants and a brown button-down shirt. His hair, which he wears closely clipped, has already gone gray. His eyes are green, and he has the rugged look of a man who spends a lot of time outdoors. He takes a seat at the small conference table where Pickering and I have been working.
“I have a little story to tell you,” Rider says after we get past the preliminaries and he’s satisfied I’m not a shill for a drug cartel. “It starts about fourteen, fifteen years ago, when this young girl and her aunt came to my office. The girl’s a hiker. Name’s Katie, Katie Dean. She lives outside of Gatlinburg and spends a lot of time in the national forest. Sweet little gal, scared shitless the day she comes in.
“So she goes out on this overnight hike, gets way back off the beaten path, and runs across a huge patch of marijuana. Biggest we’d ever seen in that area at the time. Her aunt brings her into the office, she shows me exactly where the patch is, and a few days later we go in and burn it.”
“Sounds like a happy ending for you guys,” I say, “but what does this have to do with Hannah?”
“It was anything but a happy ending,” Rider says. “This kid, Katie, was only eighteen years old then. Like I said, she and her aunt were both scared about talking to us, but I assured them nobody would ever know outside of our office. Somebody leaked it, though. We had one guy from the county sheriff’s department on the task force, and he must have found out who she was and leaked the information. We never could prove it, but I know he had to leak it. Corrupt bastard. The whole damned sheriff’s department was in the grower’s pocket. He was making millions, and he spread enough of it around to buy some loyalty.
“So anyway, a couple of days after we burned the field, the girl’s house was firebombed. Katie and another woman—a black woman who lived there with them—got out, but the fire killed her aunt and a young invalid boy, the aunt’s son, even the family dog.”
Rider stops for a minute and shakes his head. The incident he’s describing may have happened more than a decade ago, but I can see that the guilt he feels still weighs heavily on his soul.
“The group that did the firebombing was Mexican, run by a guy named Rudy Mejia,” Rider says. He looks me directly in the eye. “Mejia was murdered about a month later by another grower who was trying to lock up the marijuana business for himself. The other grower’s name was Rafael Ramirez. I think you have him in your jail up there, don’t you?”
“Yeah. I’ve got him on a not-so-strong murder charge. As a matter of fact, he reached out to me yesterday. Said he knows what happened to Hannah, the girl who’s gone missing from our office, but he wants a free pass in exchange for the information.”
“Doesn’t surprise me,” Rider says. “He’s branched out over the years into contract killing and kidnapping. He’s a real peach.”
“So what does all of this have to do with Hannah?”
“After the bombing, I felt like I had to do whatever I could to protect Katie, so I arranged for her to go into witness protection. She didn’t fit the program, but I talked the suits into letting her in anyway. Gave her a new name, new social, the whole bit. The aunt had stashed a bunch of money, and the girl wound up inheriting half of it, plus the farm where they lived. Katie hated witness protection, though. She spent a couple of months in Utah and then split, but at least she kept the alias. She moved back down here, sold the farm, and got a college degree from UT. She wound up working in the DA’s office in Knoxville until a few months ago. Do you see what I’m saying?”
“I think so. I think you’re telling me I don’t know Hannah Mills as well as I think.”
“That’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Rider says. “Did she ever tell you that her father murdered her mother and her brothers and sister? Happened up in Michigan, when she was twelve, thirteen, something like that. That’s why she moved down here in the first place.”
“She never mentioned it. So what you’re telling me is that the girl I know as Hannah Mills is really this Katie?”
“That’s right,” Rider says. “Katie Dean’s her name. One of the sweetest girls I ever met.”
34
Anita White was growing angrier by the minute. She felt like a schoolgirl who’d been called into the office by the principal, who was allowing her to stew before he came in to berate her. Ralph Harmon was the special agent in charge of the TBI office in Johnson City, a title Anita always found amusingly quaint. He wasn’t the captain or the lieutenant or the commander. He was in charge. She allowed herself a brief moment to wonder what bureaucratic sycophant had come up with such a lame title.
She’d been sitting in Harmon’s office for twenty minutes. He’d called her on the phone as she left Toni Miller’s, asked for an update on the case, and then requested a meeting as soon as she arrived. The minute Anita walked in, Harmon walked out, saying he’d be right back. She could hear him through the open door, laughing and talking with one of the secretaries. He wasn’t attending to any important business; he was insulting her in his uniquely inimical way.
Harmon had been In Charge for less than two years before Anita arrived. During her initial meeting with Harmon, she found him to be a transparent man who couldn’t hide the bigotry that lurked beneath his phony smile. He’d made reference to the lack of “people of color” who were field agents in the TBI and had compounded the insult by expressing the opinion that the job was much more suited to men. He’d virtually ignored her since that first day, with the exception of assigning her cases that none of the other agents wanted.
Anita glanced around the room. The wall was plastered with certificates and photographs. She’d never looked at them closely before, but one section of the display caught her eye. There were several photographs of Harmon in military garb: a dress uniform, camouflage, a flight suit. He was smiling broadly in all of them, posing with other soldiers. In one photo, he was wearing a helmet and sitting in the cockpit of a helicopter. The photos surrounded a small, framed display of three medals backed by navy blue velvet. It was obvious that Harmon wanted everyone to know that he was in the military. Anita remembered what her daddy had said about men who displayed the memories of their military careers for all to see.
“Men like that are pretenders, Neets,” her daddy had said. “Soldiers who’ve been in combat, those who have seen the true face of war, aren’t going to put up a bunch of pictures on the wall. They don’t even like to think about it, let alone be reminded of it all the time.”
She smiled to herself. Thinking of her father always made her smile, and thinking of Harmon as a pretender would make easier what was undoubtedly going to be a difficult conversation.
Harmon came in a few minutes later and closed the door behind him. Anita had always thought he carried himself like one of the wise guys she’d seen in the movies. A few years older than she, he was medium height with a potbelly. His suits were always a bit too tight, and he wore his dark hair combed straight back from his forehead and held in place with hair spray or mousse.
“Do you know how many phone calls I’ve received about this investigation in the past twenty-four hours?” Harmon began.
“Several, I’d imagine.”
“Dozens. The brass in Nashville are so far up my ass, I can feel them tickling my tonsils. They want to know what we’re doing about this.”
“We’re doing all we can.”
“But we’re not getting any results. People want results when a judge is murdered, Agent White. They want somebody arrested. They want somebody punished. They figure, hell, if somebody can kill a judge and get away with it, none of us are safe. People call their congressmen and ask them why nobody’s been arrested yet. They ask the
m what kind of outfit we’re running up here.”
“But it’s only been a day and a half,” Anita said.
“Doesn’t matter. When people around here call the politicians, the politicians call the brass in Nashville and ask them why nobody’s been arrested yet. And then guess who the brass call? Me. They ask me what we’re doing. They ask me who I put in charge of the investigation. They ask me whether we have a suspect in custody, and if not, why not? And you know what I have to tell them? Lies, that’s what. I tell them I’ve got my best agent in charge of the investigation. I tell them she’s an up-and-comer, a real go-getter. I tell them she already has a suspect and she’s already gotten a search warrant. I tell them she’ll have someone locked up by the end of the day. And then I call her, and she tells me she doesn’t have a damned thing. Not only that; she tells me her only suspect has disappeared like a goddamned fart in a hurricane. I called you in here now because I want you to explain yourself to me so I can explain myself to them. And it had better be good.”
Anita thought back on what Norcross had said to her in the car yesterday. How the boss had been the first agent at the crime scene; how he must have known how tough it was going to be.
“Why did you assign this case to me?” Anita asked.
Harmon looked surprised. He laced his fingers together and rested his elbows on the desk.
“I just told you. You’re my up-and-comer. My go-getter. I thought you were the right person for the job.”
“Do you know what I think? I think instead of assigning this case to me, you draped it around my neck like a yoke. You were at the crime scene. You knew it was outdoors. You knew the weather was about to turn. Fire and water are two of the worst things that can happen to a crime scene, and this one had both. What evidence the fire didn’t consume, the water washed away. So you dumped it on me. When the brass call, why don’t you just tell them the truth? Tell them you knew it was going to be an impossible case, so you dumped it on the agent whose very existence offends you. Why don’t you tell them you knew you might need a sacrificial lamb, so you dumped it on the agent you’d most like to blame if everything goes to hell in a handbasket?”
