by Scott Pratt
Hannah nodded, and shortly thereafter, Mr. Mooney left.
When Hannah had decided to switch jobs, she’d sensed she was doing the right thing. She wasn’t so certain about the decision now, but at least she’d been right about one thing.
Mr. Mooney was a kind and decent man. If anyone could help her, it would be him.
She picked up Patches, who was whining at her feet, and began to rub his belly.
“I wonder if it’ll be a girl,” she said. “No, I hope it’ll be a girl.”
39
Hannah opened the refrigerator and pulled out a cold bottle of water. She noticed the package of chicken she’d purchased at the store on Tuesday. She’d better do something with it tonight or it might spoil. She decided she’d make herself some stir- fry later and closed the door. Patches was barking excitedly in the bedroom, and Hannah called him. She poured some of her water into Patches’s bowl and bent down and petted his head as he lapped it up. She’d come to love him dearly in the short time she’d had him. He was so sweet and docile. He’d make a wonderful playmate for the baby.
It had been a difficult week. After her conversation with Mr. Mooney last Saturday, he’d called her on Sunday and said he’d completely forgotten he was leaving for vacation. He asked her to keep their conversation private. They would call Tanner into Mr. Mooney’s office when he returned to work on Monday, have a conversation, gauge Tanner’s reaction, and go from there.
Hannah had avoided Tanner the entire week. He’d called and left messages on her answering machine— the last one asked whether he’d done something to offend her—but she’d ignored him. She was looking forward to Monday and the opportunity to confront Tanner. She might not like what he had to say, but at least she’d have some answers.
She stood and walked into the bedroom, removing her red Windbreaker along the way. She dropped it, along with her purse, onto the bed.
The strap went around her neck before she could step away from the bed. Hannah felt herself being pulled back and upward. Her feet left the floor. Her hands went immediately to her throat. Something was choking her. She couldn’t breathe. What was it? Who was it?
Whoever it was, he was powerful, far more powerful than she. Hannah could feel the hair of his beard against her face as he pulled her tightly against him. She could smell the musty odor of his breath, feel the air rushing from his nostrils into her right ear. But she couldn’t get free. She kicked and wriggled and squirmed, trying her best to break his hold, but he slammed her face- first into the floor and pinned her there. She felt something warm trickle from her mouth. Blood, I must be bleeding.
When Hannah accepted the inevitability of her own death, she relaxed. She saw her mother’s smiling face, the expanse of Lake Michigan from a sandy bluff, the majesty of the purple Smoky Mountains. Lottie called to her from the kitchen. Supper was ready. Luke jerked in his bed, his eyes alight, a sure sign that he understood the joke she’d made. Aunt Mary patted her hand on the front porch swing on a moonlit summer night.
As the darkness overtook her and the white light appeared, Hannah found herself a bit surprised, even puzzled, by her lack of fear. The thought passed through her mind that perhaps she should thank this man who was taking her life. True, he was taking her unborn child along with her, but since she’d learned of the pregnancy, Hannah had caught herself—more than once—regarding the thought of a child as another tragedy in the making.
Hannah’s heart stopped beating, and the light grew brighter.
The last emotion she felt was relief.
40
The biker who killed Hannah Mills raised a beer can toward the sky.
“To gettin’ ’er done,” he yelled. Cyrus “Red” Mc-Kinney was in a celebratory mood. “The job” had gone off without a hitch. The girl had been missing for two weeks, and the cops didn’t have a clue. He was certain they would never find her.
Sitting across the table from Red was his cousin, Ricky “Barrel” Reed. Barrel had been the only person Red trusted enough to help him with the job. Red knew what they were doing was strictly forbidden by the gang’s code, but he also knew Barrel would keep quiet about it. He’d cut him in for five thousand of the twenty thousand he’d collected from the Mexican. Barrel had wanted an equal share, but because Red had done the actual wet work, he figured he earned the extra money.
It was Saturday, the last night of Bike Week in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The news had quickly spread through the ranks of Satan’s Soldiers that the officers had negotiated a fat deal with a gang in Charlotte, and the booze and drugs were flowing. They were hanging out at a bar called Dante’s, a run-down hellhole in Garden City that they took over for a week in the spring each year. Rock music was blaring, bitches were dancing topless on the tables, and two dudes had already ridden their choppers through the place. Red had downed nearly a case of beer during the day and had made two trips to the bathroom in the past hour to snort crystal meth. He was feeling like a conqueror.
“Me and you are two badass motherfuckers,” Red hollered.
“Fuckin-A!” Barrel replied.
“That bitch was just the beginning! We’re gonna be the next Murder Incorporated. Hit men, by God! I always wanted to be a hit man. Fuck this Mickey Mouse shit we been doing! We’re going big-time, baby!”
“Keep your voice down, Red! People can hear you.”
“I don’t give a shit!”
Red rose from his chair and raised both fists into the air.
“Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil,” he yelled, “for I’m the baddest motherfucker in the valley!”
It took less than a week for word to reach the officers. Inquiries had been made, meetings held. And now Red found himself in a barn in Unicoi County, tied securely to a metal chair, surrounded by men he thought were his friends. Barrel was next to him, whimpering like a child.
Red watched the man circling him. He was known as Bear, the president of Satan’s Soldiers. He was six feet tall and thick as an Angus bull. Muscles rippled beneath the tight black tank top he was wearing. Everything on him was covered with thick black hair—his head, face, shoulders, back, and chest—and he was wearing the gang’s signature black bandanna. The rest of the officers were leaning against a stall about ten feet away, watching as he toyed with a length of braided rawhide and the knot at its end. They were known as Turtle, Rain Man, and Mountain.
“Know why you’re here?” Bear asked.
“We ain’t done nothing,” Red said.
The knotted piece of rawhide smashed into his temple. Red saw a bright flash as pain shot through his head and down his spine.
“Don’t lie to me, Red. It’ll go a lot easier on you. That girl you killed worked for the DA. You think they’re gonna stop looking for her, you damned fool? Now we gotta clean up the mess you made.”
“Ain’t no mess,” Red said. “Ain’t nobody gonna find nothing.”
“We got rules. You break the rules, it affects us all. What the hell were you thinking? Going on your own. And a girl! She hadn’t done a damned thing to us. And now, all this heat.”
“There won’t be no heat. They ain’t gonna find nothing.”
“Won’t be no heat? How do you think we found out about it? Because you’re too goddamned dumb to keep your mouth shut. You and this fat lump of shit next to you.”
“We won’t say nothing, Bear,” Barrel cried. “I swear to God we won’t say a word.”
Red heard the whiz of the rawhide and the dull thump as it struck his cousin. Barrel screamed.
“Shut your mouth, lard ass!” Bear yelled. “Now, I’ve known the two of you long enough to know that ol’ Barrel here doesn’t have brains enough to get in out of the rain. So you must have been the one who set it up. Right, Red?”
Red nodded his head and closed his eyes. He listened as Bear’s boots crunched the dirt floor as he continued to circle.
“Who paid you?”
“Some Mexican down in
Morristown.”
“What Mexican? How’d he get in touch with you?”
“Don’t know his name. I found out about the contract from another Mexican dude I party with. I told him I might be interested, so he gave me a number to call. I set up a meet and went to Morristown.”
“How much? How much did it take to get you to betray us?”
“I didn’t betray y’all, man. All I did was a job. It put fifteen grand in my pocket and didn’t cause nobody no harm. Like I said, they ain’t gonna find her.”
“What’d you do with her?”
The interrogation lasted another fifteen minutes. The more Red talked, the less hostile Bear’s voice became. Red told him everything: how they’d cased her place, how they’d killed her, where they’d put the body, what they’d done after the murder.
Bear squatted down in front of Red and put his hands on Red’s knees.
“Anything else you can think of?”
“No, man. I told you everything.”
“Good.”
Bear stood up and turned around.
“Rain Man, you and Psycho hook the chipper up to the pickup and haul it down to the pigpen. I want you to shoot these two pieces of shit, then shred ’em. The pigs will take care of what’s left.”
41
Thirty-six hours after a judge is found dead and twenty-four hours after Hannah Mills is discovered missing—two of the biggest mysteries I can remember in the district—I find myself on the outside.
Fired. Sacked. Terminated.
Caroline says she isn’t surprised. She’s tells me she’s never much cared for Mooney, something she’s kept to herself since I made the decision to go to work for him. He leers at her, she says, and even made a drunken pass at her at last year’s office holiday party. She didn’t mention it to me for the simple reason that she believed I might do something rash, like kick his sorry ass. She was right about that.
Mooney’s public relations campaign against me was anything but subtle. The afternoon he fired me, all of the local television channels featured me front and center on the evening news. Mooney refused interviews, but Rita Jones called me a couple of hours after I left the office and told me Mooney had faxed to the media a press release he’d drafted himself.
The TV news reporters showed up at my house immediately. They parked in the driveway and tried to get me to come out and talk to them, but I just opened the back door and turned Rio loose. They scattered like so many frightened geese. That evening, they did a mini-history of my career as a defense attorney and then as a prosecutor. Aside from the phone’s ringing off the hook, it really wasn’t that bad. The next morning’s newspaper carried a front-page story with the headline “Prosecutor Dismissed for Insubordination,” but outside of the fact that I’d been fired, they didn’t have anything negative to say.
A week later, there was another round of press when Tanner Jarrett went into court and announced that the district attorney’s office was dismissing all charges against Rafael Ramirez. Mooney told the media that my prosecution of Ramirez was “overzealous.” He actually apologized to Ramirez on the evening news. It made me so angry, I threw a shoe at the television and cracked the screen.
Another week quickly passes. I fall back into the same routines I had before I went to work for the district attorney’s office. Caroline and I drive to Nashville to watch Jack play baseball. I piddle around the house. I run, work out, and play with Rio.
I talk with Bates daily, but nothing has developed with Hannah Mills/Katie Dean. It’s the same with Judge Green’s murder. Silence. I’ve tried several times to call Anita White to ask whether they indicted Tommy Miller, but she refuses to speak with me. There hasn’t been a word about it in the news, though, which makes me think Mooney didn’t go through with it. Someone would have leaked the information to the press. A cop, a prosecutor, a grand juror—a piece of news that juicy would have hit the streets in banner headlines.
Then, on Thursday evening, I’m walking back up to the house from a run along the trail by the lake with Rio when I see a car in the driveway. It’s dusk, and I can see an outline of a figure leaning against the car. It looks just like one of those cowboy cutouts people put on their lawns. Rio begins to bark and strains against the leash, but as I get closer, I recognize who it is. It’s Bates, wearing his cowboy hat and his boots and leaning against his confiscated BMW.
“Didn’t think you’d want to be seen with me.” Rio takes a quick sniff of Bates, calms down, and I let him off the leash.
“I don’t, at least not in public. That’s why I came all the way out here.”
“Want to come inside? We’ve got beer and tea, water, soft drinks, whatever you want.”
“You know what? A beer sounds good right about now.”
Bates follows me in. I grab a couple of beers from the refrigerator and lead him out to the deck.
“Where’s the missus?”
“Teaching a dance class.”
“She doing all right these days?”
“Yeah, she’s good. Thanks for asking. So what brings you out here?”
Bates sits at a table and takes a sip from the beer. The weather is warm, in the low seventies, and the light from the rising moon is reflecting soft yellow light off the channel below. The low roar of a bass boat can be heard in the distance. It would be a perfect evening to get half crocked with Bates and listen to his stories, but he seems to be in a somber mood.
“I’ve got some news, Brother Dillard. We found Hannah.”
“Is she—”
“Gone. I’m sorry.”
I drop my head in silence. I’ve thought about her every day since she disappeared, and since I learned about her past from Agent Rider, I’ve thought about her even more. Poor kid. Family killed by a crazy father. Aunt and cousin killed by a drug dealer. I knew I saw pain in her eyes, but I had no idea how deeply it ran.
“Where’d you find her?”
“In an abandoned mine shaft up on Buffalo Mountain.”
“How did she die?”
“Strangled. I’ve got an old buddy of mine, a forensic pathologist, doing an autopsy as we speak.”
“An old buddy? What’s wrong with the medical examiner?”
“Nobody knows we found her yet besides me, an undercover deputy, and my buddy the pathologist. And now you. I intend to keep it that way for a while. My buddy’s gonna store her for me until we get this sorted out.”
“Where?”
“In a big cooler in his garage. He tells me he’s got a bunch of other body parts in there.”
“Is he some kind of wacko?”
“Aren’t most pathologists? He’s a little on the strange side, but sharp as they come. Don’t worry about it. It’s a heckuva lot better than the place we found her.”
It takes me a minute to digest this piece of information. Nobody knows they’ve found her? How could that be possible? When a body is discovered, everybody and his brother shows up at the scene—police, EMTs, coroner, gawkers. I’ve never heard of anyone in law enforcement concealing the discovery of a body.
“What’s going on, Leon?”
“Let’s just say there are certain people who don’t need to know about this.”
“Talk to me.”
Bates takes a long pull off his beer, removes his hat, and sets it on the table in front of him. He runs his long fingers through his hair and breathes deeply.
“I’ve had a guy undercover for a couple of years,” he begins. “We’re trying to take down a motorcycle gang, Satan’s Soldiers. My guess is you’ve heard of them.”
Not only have I heard of them; my sister is pregnant by one, a tidbit I decide to keep to myself. I nod at Bates.
“Pretty rough bunch,” Bates continues. “So last night, my undercover comes to me and tells me a little story. Seems that one of the gang members heard about a contract being put out on a girl. He decided to do a little freelance work, you know, outside of his regular drug dealing and gun running with the gang. Pick up
a little extra cash. So he meets with this Mexican who’s offering the contract, takes ten grand down, gathers up his cousin, and goes and does the deed. The girl turns out to be Hannah. They strangle her in her bedroom, carry her out, and put her in the trunk. Then they take her up to Buffalo Mountain, dump her in this old mine shaft, and pour a couple of sacks of lime down the hole on top of her. Me and the undercover had a helluva time getting her out of there. It was a mess. So when they’re done, these two geniuses go buy a bottle of liquor and drive around in her car for a few hours before they take it back.
“They collect another ten grand a couple of days later and manage to keep quiet about it for about a week, but then one of them gets drunk and runs his mouth. You have to understand, now, this is a breach of code. You don’t go around killing folks without the approval of the officers, and you damned sure don’t go around killing folks who haven’t done anything to disrespect the gang. Bad for business. So word spreads among the gang, the officers hold a meeting, and they decide these two have to be punished for what they’ve done. Not for killing Hannah, mind you, but for taking this contract without the knowledge or consent of the hierarchy.”
“So what’s the punishment?”
“Death. They’re both dead. Shot in the head, dismembered, and run through a wood chipper into a pigpen on a farm in Unicoi County.”
“You know who they are?”
“I know who they were. Not that it does me any damned good.”
“So why the secrecy with Hannah’s body?”
“The contract came from a Mexican who is a known associate of your ol’ buddy Rafael Ramirez. The undercover says the contract didn’t come from Ramirez’s guy; it came through him. The undercover has worked his way up to treasurer of the gang. They trust him. He was there when these two guys were interrogated. The president of the club wanted to know what else they’d been doing on the side before he killed them, so he tortured them awhile. Turns out they weren’t really doing anything else on the side, but the guy who actually met with the Mexican and took the contract said whoever was putting up the money was someone important.”
