JD04 - Reasonable Fear

by Scott Pratt

  But I’d grown accustomed to the wounds and the scars that marked Caroline’s body like bomb craters on a battlefield. To me, she was still the same beautiful creature I’d fallen in love with so many years ago. I think I loved her even more, if that was possible. Through it all: the chemotherapy, the radiation, the sickness, the fatigue, the surgeries, she’d remained unfailingly upbeat and positive. On the extremely rare occasions that her resolve would begin to flag, she would pull herself out of it immediately and would even go so far as to apologize to me for being weak. She’d shown such courage and such strength during her illness that it left me in awe, and whenever I began to feel sorry for myself because of what I did for a living, all I had to do was think about Caroline and what she’d been through. My problems paled in comparison.

  Our eldest child, Jack, had been drafted by the Detroit Tigers after his junior year of college and was finishing up his first season in the minors down in Florida. Our daughter, Lilly, was just beginning her junior year at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and was enjoying her life away from home. Caroline and I shared the house with a couple of dogs, a German shepherd named Rio and a teacup poodle named Chico. We’d saved plenty of money and Caroline had invested it judiciously, primarily by staying away from the wolves on Wall Street. I should have enjoyed life more, but just beneath the surface of my psyche, a bubbling pool of turmoil churned like magma inside a volcano. I struggled constantly to contain this nagging sense of doom and inner rage that seemed to intensify as I grew older. I thought I knew its origins, believed I had a fundamental understanding of the events that had nurtured it over the course of my life, and I’d attempted to take steps – many steps – in a sustained and determined effort to diffuse it, but still it remained. Most often, the rage manifested itself in the form of nightmares – vivid, violent scenes that would cause me to wake up screaming and sweating. Worst of all, they caused me to fear sleep, to avoid it at both a conscious and subconscious level, and the resulting deprivation would inevitably result in exhaustion, followed by restless, involuntary sleep, and even more nightmares. Occasionally, if enough pressure was brought to bear, the psychic magma would spill over the sides of my inner volcano into molten lava and I would lash out, sometimes verbally, sometimes physically. It was as if I would suddenly become some type of feral being, undomesticated and violent, and I would focus my rage upon whatever, or whomever, had caused the internal pressure to rise to the boiling point.

  Whenever it happened, whenever I allowed the demons from the past to gain the upper hand, I wound turn, inevitably, to Caroline. She was my Athena, my Great Ameliorator. She knew how to soothe me, how to convince me that the world was not as dangerous as I might believe it to be. She reminded me always that love is most important in this world, that I was loved, and that despite my psychological torments I retained a far greater capacity for love than for violence. She would patiently reassure me that the path I’d chosen was the right path, that I wasn’t wasting my life, that not only was I relevant, I was necessary. I suspected at some level that she was placating me, but she always managed to do it in a manner that convinced me, at least for awhile, that what she was saying was true, and that, as the cliché goes, everything would be alright.

  The sun was well above the horizon as I pulled into the driveway. A red Mustang that belonged to my sister, Sarah, was parked to the right of the garage. Sarah was a year older than me, a dark-haired, green-eyed, hard-bodied woman who was living proof of the power of genetics. She’s spent most of her adult life abusing herself with drugs and alcohol and had spent a fair amount of time in jail, but you’d never have guessed it by looking at her. With the exception of tiny crows’ feet at the corners of her eyes, she appeared the picture of health and clean living.

  I hadn’t seen Sarah in over a month, which was always a bad sign. So was the fact that she’d apparently come over unannounced on a Sunday morning.

  I knew something was wrong as soon as I walked in the door. Sarah and Caroline were standing next to the kitchen table. Caroline’s arms were around Sarah’s neck and Sarah, who wasn’t given to displays of emotion other than anger, was sobbing. Rio, our German shepherd, was lying next to the wall to their left. He must have sensed the sadness in the room, because he always greeted me enthusiastically. His ears perked up and he looked at me, but he didn’t move. I walked across the kitchen and caught Caroline’s eye. She was stroking the back of Sarah’s head, and I could see that she, too, was crying.

  “What’s going on?” I asked quietly.

  “Some bad news,” Caroline said. Her wavy, auburn hair had grown back to the length it had been before she lost it to chemotherapy, and her dark eyes were glistening with tears.

  “Is Gracie alright?” Gracie was my niece, Sarah’s eighteen-month-old daughter.

  “Gracie’s fine. She went to church with one of Sarah’s friends.”

  Sarah pulled away from Caroline and ran both of her hands through her hair.

  “Sorry,” she said. She was wearing a wrinkled, pink sweat suit and looked like she hadn’t slept.

  “Should I go back to the bedroom?” I asked, half-hoping Sarah would say yes and the two of them would work out whatever the problem was without me.

  “It’s okay, just give me a sec,” Sarah said.

  I sat down on one of the stools near the counter, feeling awkward. Caroline pulled a couple of napkins out of a drawer in the kitchen and handed one of them to Sarah. The two of them sat down at the round table in the dining area, just a few feet away.

  “Roy and Sarah are splitting up,” Caroline said. “She and Gracie are moving back into your mother’s old place.”

  The news stunned me. Roy Walker, who was known by his nickname, Mountain, was a Washington County sheriff’s deputy who had worked undercover drug cases for Sheriff Bates for several years. He and Sarah had met at a biker bar two years ago and had been together ever since, by far the longest relationship Sarah had ever maintained. She’d moved in with him just a few months after they met and Gracie came along shortly thereafter. I knew Roy’s work occasionally required him to be away from home more than Sarah liked, but my impression had been that the two of them were getting along well.

  “What happened?” I asked Sarah. “I thought you guys were doing great.”

  “I’ve tried everything I can think of to make it work, but he took an assignment with the DEA in Memphis without even asking me about it. He could be down there for two years, maybe more.”

  “Why don’t you go with him?”

  “I don’t want to move to Memphis. It’s too big, it’s too hot and it’s too dangerous. I don’t want to quit my job, and I don’t want to raise Gracie there. Oh, and there’s one other thing. He doesn’t love me anymore, if he ever did.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “He told me. He said the words, ‘I made a mistake. I don’t love you, and I never will.’”

  She started to tear up again, which made me uncomfortable. I could count on one hand the number of times I’d seen her cry during our lifetime.

  “I can’t really blame him,” she continued. “I’m ten years older than he is and I’m not exactly a prize. My track record alone would make most men run as fast as they could in the other direction.”

  “Don’t talk that way,” I said. “You’ve been through a lot.”

  “Yeah, and most of it has been of my own making.”

  “Do you want me to talk to him?”

  “No, Joe, I don’t want you to talk to him. You can’t fix this. Besides, he’s already gone. He left this morning.”

  “This morning?”

  “They offered him the assignment a month ago. We’ve been arguing about it ever since, but I knew he’d go. He barely speaks to me, and he treats Gracie like she’s somebody else’s child.”

  I’d seen the pain in her eyes many times before, and it caused me to think about how arbitrary and cruel fate can be. Sarah’s life had always been star-crossed, like some
tragic figure in Greek mythology, tormented by the gods for their pleasure and amusement. It started when she was only nine years old on a Friday evening in June. I was eight years old. . .

  My mother and grandparents had gone out and left Sarah and me at our grandparents’ small home in rural Unicoi County with our uncle, a sixteen-year-old named Raymond. I was watching a baseball game on TV and dozed off on the couch. When I woke up, it was dark. The only light in the house was the light from the television. I remember sitting up and rubbing my eyes, and then I heard a noise. It scared me, because it sounded like a cry for help. I got up off of the couch and started tiptoeing toward the noise, growing more frightened with every step.

  As I got closer to the sound, I could make out words, “No! Stop! Don’t!”

  I knew it was Sarah’s voice, and it was coming from Uncle Raymond’s bedroom. I pushed the door open just a little. In the lamplight I could make out Raymond. He was on the bed on his knees, naked, with his back to me. Sarah’s voice was coming from underneath him. She was saying, “It hurts. Stop it.”

  I didn’t know what was going on. I was too young and too sheltered to know anything about sex. But there was so much pain, so much fear in Sarah’s voice that I knew whatever was happening was bad. I finally managed to say, “What’s going on?” from where I was standing in the doorway. I remember being surprised that my voice worked.

  Raymond’s head snapped around and he looked at me like he was going to kill me.

  “Get out of here, you little twerp,” he said.

  “What are you doing to her?” I asked.

  At that moment, Sarah said something in a tiny voice, something that haunts me to this day. She said, “Get him off of me, Joey. He’s hurting me.” I would hear that phrase thousands of times, later, in my dreams.

  I stood there mute for a few seconds trying to figure out what I should do, but Raymond didn’t give me a chance. He jumped off the bed and grabbed me by the throat. He slammed my head so hard against the wall that it nearly knocked me unconscious. He grabbed me by the collar of my shirt and by the waistband of my pants and pitched me like a bale of straw out into the hallway. I skidded a couple of times on my stomach and he slammed the door. I thought about going out to the garage to get a baseball bat or a shovel, an axe, anything. I could hear Sarah crying on the other side of the door, but I was frozen with fear. My arms and legs wouldn’t work. I was too scared to move.

  Finally, after what seemed like forever, they came out of the room. Sarah was sniffling and wiping her nose with the back of her hand. Raymond grabbed both of us by the back of the neck, dragged us into the living room, and pushed us onto the couch. He bent down close to us and pointed his finger within an inch of my nose.

  “If you say one word about this to anybody, I’ll kill your sister,” he hissed. Then he turned to Sarah. “And if you say anything, I’ll kill your brother. You got it?”

  Neither of us ever said a word. We’d never even mentioned the rape to each other until a few years ago, just before I stopped practicing criminal defense law. It was a breakthrough that seemed to help temporarily, but I knew neither of us would ever put the incident behind us completely. I’d carried the guilt I felt for not being able to stop Raymond around like a yoke for almost four decades, and I couldn’t even begin to imagine the terrible violation, degradation, and humiliation Sarah felt. We’d dealt with our emotions in different ways, but at the heart of it, I believed Sarah was more honest. I acted like it never happened. She acted like she couldn’t forget. Through it all, though, through the drinking and the drugs and the abusive relationships and the petty thefts and the incarcerations, I’d always remembered the innocent, smiling face that was hers before Raymond took her into the room that night, and I’d tried never to judge her. She was my sister and I loved her – a simple ideal that had endured through a lifetime of complexity.

  And now the gods were at it again, leaving her a single mother in her mid-forties, feeling as though she’d failed her mate, her child and herself. And once again, I felt helpless. There was nothing I could do except try and help her deal with the fallout.

  “So are you going to be okay?” I asked her.

  “If you’re asking if I’m planning on getting plastered, the answer is no. I admit I’ve thought about it, but whenever I do, I look at Gracie and the urge goes away.”

  “Good. I’m glad to hear that, Sarah.”

  “Can we talk about something else?” she said. “I vented for an hour before you got here. Caroline has probably heard enough.”

  “You can vent all day if you want,” Caroline said. “I’ll even let you cuss at Joe if you think it’ll make you feel better.”

  Sarah’s lips turned up slightly. Sarah’s mouth could rival General George Patton. There’d been times in the past when she’d cursed me the way an old farmer would curse a disobedient mule.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Caroline turned to me. “What was going on at the lake?” she asked. “Was it bad?”

  “It was a young woman,” I said. “We don’t have any idea who she is yet.”

  “Drowned?”

  “I don’t think so. There wasn’t any water in her lungs. Looks like a murder.”

  She winked at me. “You’ll catch ‘em,” she said. “You always do.”

  The thought crossed my mind that Caroline had evolved to the same place that I had. I’d just gone to view a dead body, I’d just told her there’d been a murder, and it was as though I’d casually mentioned that the price of gas had dropped two cents a gallon.

  “Joe and I were planning to drive up to Grandfather Mountain this afternoon,” she said to Sarah. “It’s so beautiful up there, and it’ll be a lot cooler than it is here. Why don’t you and Gracie come with us?”

  My cell phone, which I’d laid on the counter, started to buzz. I picked it up and looked at the ID. It was Bates. I seriously considered ignoring it, but after a few seconds, I answered.

  “Hope you ain’t got settled in yet, Brother Dillard,” he said, “cause I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news.”

  “I’m waiting.”

  “There’re two more floaters. Both women. Both too young to die.”

  Chapter Four

  I arrived at the office early the morning after the bodies were discovered. Sitting across from me was a young lady named Cathi Lingart, a thirty-year-old Wisconsin native who had followed her husband to Northeast Tennessee several years earlier and had somehow managed to get hired on as a secretary at the DA’s office in Unicoi County long before I took over. She was wearing a flowered, yellow summer dress and her hands were folded primly in her lap. Cathi was a couple of inches shy of five feet tall. She wore her wispy, brown hair cut short, with the exception of long, straight bangs that fell nearly to her eyebrows. With her heavy jowls, she looked like a cross between an English bulldog and a page boy, and when she spoke, she did so with her eyes closed.

  “He rolls his eyes at me all the time,” Cathi said with her eyes tightly shut, her eyebrows quivering as if she were trying to blink. She was speaking of Landon Burke, the assistant district attorney who ran the Unicoi County office. Burke was in his mid-fifties, a cantankerous sort and the oldest lawyer on the staff. He was yet another employee of the district attorney’s office who was hired before I came along. I knew him only casually.

  “And he’s always telling me to open my eyes,” she continued.

  Cathi had made the appointment with me two weeks earlier, and despite the fact that we suddenly had what appeared to be a triple homicide on our hands and I knew she was coming to me with some sort of petty grievance, I didn’t cancel. Since taking over the office, I’d tried to treat all of the employees equally and tried to make myself available to them whenever possible. But as time passed, I was beginning to think I’d have to put some restrictions on the open door policy. I was now responsible for supervising fifty lawyers and support people in four counties, each of whom dragged a
large pile of personal baggage to the job. The office had approximately five thousand cases pending in fourteen different courts at any given time, and if anything went wrong in any of those cases, the blame inevitably fell on me. I was also responsible for creating and maintaining a budget, managing the vast amounts of paperwork required by the courts, the legislature and the feds, hiring and firing employees, maintaining good relationships with the law enforcement community, the judges, the defense bar and the public, and for overseeing a child support division that enforced the laws against deadbeat parents. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the day the governor appointed me to the district attorney general’s job, I was involuntarily converted from a hard-driving lawyer who investigated and tried violent criminal cases to an unfamiliar and uncomfortable mixture of politician, bureaucrat and babysitter.

  “Is he abusive?” I said to Cathi.

  “I don’t know. Well, no, I wouldn’t say he’s abusive. He’s just mean sometimes.”

  “That’s his nature, isn’t it? You’re not the only person he’s mean to, are you?”

  “He’s mean to everybody, but he’s meanest to me.”

  “What do you want me to do, Cathi?”

  “Can’t you fire him?”

  I felt the beginnings of a headache coming on, and I leaned back in my chair and started massaging my forehead with my fingers.

  “Landon has three kids in college,” I said. “He’s a good lawyer. He handles his case load and hasn’t done anything particularly stupid that I’m aware of. I can’t fire him because he’s sometimes unpleasant to work with.”