by Scott Pratt
“You don’t have to kill anybody, you damned gutless little girl,” Roby said. “But you’re going along. I need somebody I can trust to help me and Harley get away. And you’re right. Some people need to get dead.”
The sheriff looked over at Shaker, who was staring down at his cards.
“I got no dog in this fight,” Harley said. “Y’all got your scams going over here. All I do is fight once in a while.”
“But you killed that Brewer kid. Brought a lot of pressure down on Tree and a lot of pressure on me. I figure you owe us.”
“I don’t figure the same,” Harley said.
The sheriff could feel the tension building in the air. It was dangerous to stand up to Roby, and Harley was making him angry.
“Tell you what,” Roby said. “Either you do what I want you to do or I’m gonna come to your house in the dark of night, and I’m gonna slit your throat, I’m gonna slit your wife’s throat, and I’m gonna kill all three of your children. Then I’m gonna go over to your momma and daddy’s and kill them. I’ll finish up with your brother, your sister, and their families. Hell, I’ll wipe out the whole damned Shaker line. Do you have any doubt I’ll do what I say?”
Harley was obviously shaken by the threat. As he lifted his cigarette to his lips, the sheriff noticed his hand was trembling. Roby noticed, too.
“You better be scared, because I ain’t fucking around here. Stephen Morris is going to get beat in this election. He’s already told Tree he might go to the feds and cop to some kind of deal to save his own ass. If he does, we’re finished, and I don’t intend to allow that to happen. He’s gotta go, and so does his wife, and both of you are going to help me.”
“Why would you want to harm his wife, Roby?” Tree said. “She ain’t involved in all of this.”
“Don’t be a damned fool. You think she hasn’t asked him where all this extra money has been coming from? You think he hasn’t told her? And do you think for a second that she’s going to want to give up the fine lifestyle they enjoy now? She’ll be right by his side when he goes to the feds.”
“But she doesn’t know anything other than what he’s told her.”
“Exactly,” Roby said. “My guess is he’s told her everything. She’s dead, Tree. She may be breathing right this minute, but she’s dead. I’ve made up my mind.”
“I think it’s a mistake. It’s overkill. It’s bad enough that you’re thinking about killing a sitting district attorney—”
“Who’s about to get his ass whipped in an election.”
“Doesn’t matter. You’re gonna murder a sitting district attorney and his wife? What about his kids, Roby? You gonna kill them, too?”
“If I have to. And his fucking cat or dog or whatever. Anything that gets in the way gets killed.”
“I’m not gonna be a part of killing kids,” the sheriff said. “If you’re planning to kill his kids, I’m out.”
“You ain’t out unless I say you’re out.”
“I’m serious, Roby. No kids. You can pull that .45 of yours out and blow my brains out right now, but I’m not going to live with the deaths of children on my conscience. I won’t do it.”
The sheriff and Roby engaged in a staring match for several seconds. The sheriff could feel his heart beating hard inside his chest. He hoped Roby couldn’t hear it.
“Fine,” Roby finally said, “but the wife’s gotta go. Harley, you’re gonna take care of her.”
“You’re going to bring every city, state, and federal cop within fifty miles down on us,” the sheriff said.
“Shut up,” Roby said. “I ain’t finished. There are two more that have to go besides Morris and his wife.”
“Who’s that?”
“Morris’s bagman, that asshole named Harrison, and Morris’s junkie girlfriend, the one he takes drugs to so she can sell them and get high for free.”
“And you’re planning on doing this when?” Tree said.
“Saturday night. I’ve been working on it for weeks. Got it all planned out.”
Roby reached to his left and picked up a pad of paper and set in on the table in front of him.
“Set the cards aside,” he said. “Here’s the plan.”
The sheriff’s mind was racing as the three men huddled deep into the night. He had to prevent Roby from doing what he was planning to do, but if he did, there was a good chance his cover would be blown.
Screw the cover, he thought. It’s been way too long, anyway.
CHAPTER 26
Sheriff Corker pulled his personal vehicle, a ten-year-old red Dodge pickup, into the darkened barn next to the blue Ford Mustang. The car belonged to an FBI agent named Ron Wilcox. Wilcox had been Tree’s FBI “handler” since the sheriff had gone to the agency looking for a way out of the jam he’d gotten himself into.
Corker had approached the FBI a few months after Ben Clancy was fired and thrown in jail. He’d wanted to go to them sooner, after Clancy was beaten by Stephen Morris, but Clancy had immediately moved into the US attorney’s office and maintained his lock over the county’s extortion and protection rackets. He was in that job for two years before the Darren Street frame job blew up in his face and he was fired and sent to jail to await trial for conspiracy to commit murder.
Clancy was out of the way after that, as far as the scams were concerned. He couldn’t threaten to expose what was going on without exposing himself to a federal RICO prosecution on top of the conspiracy prosecution. But Roby immediately demanded that the sheriff talk to Morris, who had been in office for two years. Roby hated the government and hated prosecutors, but he hated jail more, and he wanted to ensure the protection would continue. So the sheriff approached Morris about the scheme, found Morris to be self-immersed and greedy, and it was an easy sell from there.
But once Morris came on board, Sheriff Corker had had enough. He was tired of being a bagman, a go-between, and an arbiter for the corrupt players in Knox County. He’d been naive when he first took office. He knew now that he had been handpicked by Ben Clancy and Roby precisely because he was so naive, but he was ready to put a stop to the things that were going on and become a real lawman. His problem? His hands were dirty. He’d done Clancy’s bidding for two years, and although he hadn’t spent a dime of the money he’d taken, he knew he could be convicted as easily as Roby and Clancy and Morris.
Sheriff Corker had no wife—he’d always been awkward around women; he was terrified of them—and no one he could trust enough to talk to about his dilemma. He was afraid to go to a lawyer because he’d always heard lawyers gossip among themselves and were notorious barhoppers. But he could no longer look at himself in the mirror. He’d gone into depressions that had caused him to consider taking his own life, but he’d picked himself up and decided to find a way out. When Ben Clancy went to jail, the sheriff had seen a glimmer of hope.
He’d first arranged a meeting with Stephen Blackburn, who was still the US attorney at the time, and spilled his guts. Blackburn, in turn, had put him in touch with Bradley Kurtz, the new Special Agent in Charge of the Knoxville office. Kurtz had handed him off to the young agent Wilcox, and ever since, the sheriff had worn wires, collected names and evidence, and turned over every dime of what was supposed to be his share of the extortion money from the rackets in Knox County.
The investigation had grown like a baby octopus, its tentacles stretching out with each passing month. Wilcox wanted tapes on Morris, of course, and on Harrison and Roby. Wilcox said he’d placed wiretaps on Morris’s home and cell phones. Then Wilcox brought in a DEA agent named Higgins, who’d wanted the name of every drug dealer, what they were dealing, how much they were dealing, and who their suppliers were. The agent said he wanted tapes and he wanted to develop informants, but after about six months, he said he’d become involved in a much larger investigation and had to back off for a while. Corker hadn’t seen him since.
It had been the same with the cockfighting, the dogfighting, the bare-knuckle. Wilcox demanded more
and more information each month. He was building a case that he said would catapult his career to the top echelon of the FBI, and he guaranteed the sheriff complete immunity from prosecution. Wilcox wanted the sex traffickers, the pimps. He wanted to know where the women came from, how much they cost, who was buying them, and where they wound up. There was no way for the sheriff to gather everything, but he’d tried to get all he could. Wilcox also wanted to know about the organizations who ran the strip clubs, where their girls came from, how they rotated girls in and out, who the major players were. It became a seemingly never-ending series of questions without answers.
But nobody had ever gotten arrested, and as the sheriff walked toward the farmhouse where he met Wilcox every month, he knew that had to change, and it had to change now.
It was nearly one in the morning, and Corker was tired and irritable. Wilcox was in the kitchen, where he always was, with his feet up on the table. He was typical FBI—lean and athletic build, short hair, square jaw. Wilcox was in his early thirties, a pup compared with most of the other agents in Knoxville. He was drinking a cup of coffee.
“What’s the big emergency, Tree?” Wilcox said. “My wife raises hell every time I leave at this time of night.”
“I hate that for you,” the sheriff said sarcastically, “but it’s time for you to get off your ass and be a real agent. You need to do something with this case.”
“Watch your tone,” Wilcox said.
“You say you’ve been building this thing for years. I try to get you to move on people, and you won’t do it,” the sheriff said. “Well, Roby Penn is out of control. He’s going to kill four people on Saturday night. You need to stop it.”
That got Wilcox’s attention, and he took his feet off the table and sat up.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Wilcox said.
“Roby’s got it in his mind that Stephen Morris is going to lose this election, which he is, and that he’s going to come straight to y’all and start flapping his gums about what’s been going on for years.”
“Why would he do that?” Wilcox said. “He’d go straight to jail.”
“Roby thinks the new guy, Darren Street, will crack down on everything. He thinks Morris will come to you and the US attorney to try to make a deal before everything caves.”
“I’m not ready,” Wilcox said. He looked almost frantic. “I mean, I haven’t even taken anything to the grand jury. It’d be weeks, maybe months, before I could get any indictments.”
“After all this time? What the hell have you been doing, boy?”
“Screw you,” Wilcox said. “You have no idea the scale of this investigation, what’s going on, what’s at stake.”
“I know I’ve been feeding you good information with a spoon for years, I’ve been giving you tapes, names, dates, phone numbers, addresses—whatever you asked me for I’ve tried to deliver. I’ve been giving you money every single month, and you haven’t done a damned thing with any of it. Well, now it’s time to shit or get off the pot. People’s lives are at stake.”
“Who’s he planning to kill?” Wilcox said.
“Morris, his wife, Jim Harrison, and Morris’s girlfriend, Leslie Saban.”
“Christ,” Wilcox said. “And he’s going to do it Saturday? Do you know what he has planned?”
“I know everything,” Corker said. “He wrote it down and showed it all to Harley Shaker and me just a couple of hours ago.”
“Harley Shaker . . . that name seems familiar.”
“He’s the guy that killed Gary Brewer!” Tree said. “Don’t you pay any attention?”
“And Gary Brewer is?”
The sheriff sighed and shook his head. How did Wilcox ever get into the FBI? How did he manage to stay?
“A soldier that went missing. Shit, Wilcox, are you going to protect these people or not? He’s planning to kill Morris and his wife at Morris’s house around eleven on Saturday night. He’s going to call Harrison to an abandoned warehouse on Route 19 at midnight, and then he’s going to break into Leslie Saban’s apartment around 3:00 a.m. You and a SWAT team need to be at Morris’s house, waiting for them.”
“Them?”
“Shaker will be with him.”
“What kind of weapons will they be carrying?”
“Pistols.”
“Okay, Sheriff,” Wilcox said, taking a deep breath and pushing himself back from the table. “You’ve done good. This is good. Just leave it to me. We’ll take down Roby Penn and Harley Shaker on Saturday night. It’ll be a big break in this case.”
“So you promise you’ll be there and you’ll be ready?”
“Damn right. They won’t stand a chance. We’ll ambush them.”
“You’ll probably have to kill Roby.”
“We’ll do what we have to do. By the way, where are you going to be while all this is going on, Sheriff?”
“I’ll be in a speedboat in the river. I’m supposed to pick them up after they kill Morris and his wife.”
CHAPTER 27
Stephen Morris was getting on my last nerve. He apparently liked his life of luxury and wanted to keep it, because he certainly wasn’t going down quietly. Claire kept assuring me that we were leading by a large margin and were going to bury him, but he kept going on the offensive. To everyone who would listen, he was saying I was a suspected murderer. Since I was now running for public office, and since he was telling the truth when he said I was a “suspected” murderer, there wasn’t anything I could do about it. One of the weekly newspapers ran a story and quoted Morris as saying I was suspected in “two, and perhaps up to five” murders. That, the story said, qualified me as a “suspected serial killer,” and those three words appeared in the headline. Two days after the reporter, whose name was Jon Brooks, ran his “suspected serial killer” story, I called the newsroom and asked to speak to him. I wanted to know why he hadn’t bothered to call me and get my side of such a sensational story. I was told he no longer worked for the paper. Claire again. She didn’t mess around.
I continued to brush off the accusations every chance I got. “Where is the evidence?” I would say when asked. “Show me one shred of evidence they have against me.”
There wasn’t any, of course, and I knew it. I turned it on anyone who brought it up.
“He’s pointing the finger at me because he never found the person who killed my mother,” I would say. I was careful not to mention or criticize the police, the sheriff’s department, or the TBI. After all, I would be working with those people if I was elected, even after I got rid of the sheriff. I knew it would be difficult enough, given the circumstances and all the rumors, but I was confident I could gain their trust over time. Besides, despite the fact that I was occasionally feeling some regret, I still didn’t think I’d ever killed anyone who didn’t absolutely deserve killing, and I would have bet that nearly every cop in Knoxville would have agreed with me.
Morris’s constant railing, however, was taking me to a dangerous place. It was still there, that caged lion inside of me, and Morris was beginning to represent fresh meat. Even if I was a killer, I believed myself to be more honorable than an extortionist thief who betrayed the public trust every day of his life. And as far as I was concerned, Morris was responsible for many more deaths than I was. People died every day from drug overdoses in Knox County. He protected drug dealers. People died in the sex-trafficking industry all the time. He protected them. Gary Brewer was most likely dead. He protected the bare-knuckle fighting. And that didn’t even begin to take into account the countless animals that had died in the cockfighting and dogfighting rings. After watching him attack me on television one evening with a week to go before the election, I decided to pay him a visit and tell him that if he didn’t shut his mouth, he’d be my next victim. I decided not to ask Claire for permission.
As always, I had to be careful. I didn’t want anyone else to see us together or hear anything I might say to him. I also wanted to make sure he wasn’t wired. So I went
into my old Darren stalk mode where I used disguises and rented cars from shady operators for cash. The next morning, I drove almost a hundred miles away and bought a pair of infrared binoculars for cash from a large sporting goods store. In order to get close enough to him to have the conversation I wanted to have, I figured I would need to confine him for a little while, so I wanted to do things in such a way that nobody but Morris himself could say I ever got near him. That meant surveillance. If I did it right, even if he did go crying to the press or the cops after I had my talk with him, I’d just say he was desperate and call him a liar.
I followed Morris from his home to his work and from work back home three days in a row, looking for an opening, and I watched his place on several occasions during those three days, both from the water and from a ridge I could hike to from a nearby park.
On the third day I followed Morris, I learned something that Claire probably already knew. Morris had a squeeze. She was young, brunette, extremely attractive, and she came out of her apartment and planted a kiss on his lips as soon as he got out of his car. He was carrying a box about the size of a shoe box. They disappeared into her apartment, and he came back out about forty-five minutes later. I didn’t try to look through the windows to see what was going on. I just laughed out loud when she planted that big kiss on him. Gotcha again, I thought. I wondered when Claire was planning to release the news of his extramarital affair. I supposed she was saving it as a surprise. The bomb would most likely drop the day before the election.
I did some research on the address and the apartment number Morris went into and found out the young woman’s name was Leslie Saban. There was very little information about her on the Internet, and since she looked so young, I assumed she was a student, maybe a law student he had met while doing a guest lecture. Or maybe she was an engineering student or a stripper. Who knew?
Morris didn’t just have a girlfriend. He also had a six-thousand-square-foot mansion that sat right on the river. It was surrounded by at least twenty acres. There was a barn that housed two thoroughbred horses, a white rail fence that enclosed most of the property, a Lexus, a Mercedes, a BMW convertible, two children, and a wife. His estate was gated and named Serenity Ridge. The yard and the landscaping were immaculate, the barn looked to be nicer than most people’s homes, and there seemed to be a constant influx and outgo of workers and helpers and nannies and house cleaners. Someone was always working in the yard or painting or working with the horses. The place was a buzz of activity, but Morris was rarely there. Unless his wife was independently wealthy—and I hadn’t heard anything about her being so—he would have an extremely difficult time explaining how he managed to accumulate all these material goods on a district attorney’s salary. I was looking forward to hauling him in front of a grand jury and asking him all about his goodies.
