by Scott Pratt
“But there were more than one,” I said. “Maybe three or four. How do you explain that? And what about the Becks? Why would a kid, or a group of kids, want to kill the Becks?”
“I don’t know yet,” Fraley said. “But at least I know where I’m going to look.”
Friday, October 3
“Mr. Snodgrass is here,” Rita Jones said over the office intercom.
“Thanks,” I said. “Would you tell him to come on back?”
William Trent, accused of having sex with his young female employees, was scheduled to go on trial in less than two weeks, and my case was in the toilet. Cody Masters, the young investigator who had originally brought the charges against Trent, had gone back out and interviewed more than two dozen of Trent’s current and former employees. Nobody wanted to get involved in a trial that would undoubtedly be highly publicized and would cause as much embarrassment for the victims as it would for the defendant. Not one of them would cooperate with us.
Two of the girls who had originally given statements to Masters had recanted. Girls who had talked to him but refused to give statements were now telling him they had nothing to say. All that was left were the two girls who had originally made the complaint, Alice Dickson and Rosalie Harbin. Both were now nineteen years old. Alice, the girl who’d kept a very detailed diary, was shy and backwards, and I was worried about how she’d do on the witness stand. Rosalie Harbin was a wild child who’d recently been arrested for forgery and theft. And the man who was about to walk through my door, William Trent’s lawyer, knew I was in trouble. He’d called a week earlier to set up an appointment with me. I didn’t have to ask what he wanted—he’d be looking to make a deal.
Snodgrass’s appearance surprised me, to say the least. I was expecting a refined, smooth-talking pretty boy, but what oozed through the doorway was a gargantuan man who seemed to fill the entire room. Snodgrass was at least six feet, seven inches tall and three hundred and fifty pounds. His face reminded me of a Chinese sharpei’s, with rolls of fat across the forehead, sagging jowls, and a flat, wide nose. He looked to be around fifty, with a greasy shock of wavy black hair that fell to his collar. Peering at me from behind thick glasses were small brown eyes that didn’t seem to fit his face. The white shirt he wore beneath a dark gray blazer looked like he’d been wearing it for a week.
“Have a seat,” I said after I introduced myself and shook his moist, fleshy hand. Small droplets of sweat had formed on his pink forehead, and I could hear him wheezing slightly. The effort of moving all that mass from the parking lot into the building and up the elevator to my office must have been almost more than his cardiovascular system could bear.
“Are you all right?” I asked as he dabbed his forehead with a stained white kerchief.
“Goddamned cigarettes are going to kill me,” he said in a deep, raspy voice, with just a hint of a Southern accent. “The wife’s been nagging me to quit for years, but I don’t pay any attention to her. I like to smoke. Son of a bitch, it’s hot in here! Don’t you people have any goddamned air-conditioning?”
“Feels fine to me,” I said.
“You must be descended from the goddamned Nordics. You must have a layer of blubber on you that keeps you warm all the time.”
I smiled at him, wondering how this blob of vulgarity had managed to build such a fine reputation and to get himself elected to two of the highest state and national offices in the field of criminal defense.
“What brings you all the way up here this morning, Mr. Snodgrass?”
He glared at me with his little eyes and kept dabbing his forehead with the handkerchief.
“You know goddamned good and well what brings me up here,” he said. “We’ve got a trial in two weeks, and both of us know that you don’t have a fucking leg to stand on, legal or otherwise. So let’s cut the bullshit and dispose of the matter this morning. It’ll save the state some money and save you and your office some much-deserved embarrassment.”
His tone was belligerent, his demeanor that of a wolverine rousted from sleep, and an air of superiority surrounded him along with the smell of stale cigarette smoke. I kept the smile fixed to my face and leaned forward on my elbows.
“I’ll bet you scare the hell out of the young guys, don’t you?” I said.
“You only have three witnesses on your list,” he said. “Two of them are tramps and the other is Barney Fife. Do you have any idea what I’m going to do to them on the witness stand, Dillard? I’ll filet them like halibut. You don’t have a speck of physical evidence to corroborate anything they say. And my client had an impeccable reputation until your wonder boy with a badge ruined it. I’m thinking seriously of filing a civil suit against him and his department as soon as my client is acquitted.”
“Your client is a perverted sociopath,” I said. “I’m looking forward to meeting him.”
“You can’t be serious,” Snodgrass said. “Surely you don’t plan to continue with this masquerade. The jig is up, Dillard, the fat lady is singing, the show is over. I hear you’re a good trial lawyer, and word is you’ve won a lot of cases, but you’re not Houdini. There’s no way you’ll get out of the box I’m going to put you in if you insist on trying this case.”
I leaned back in the chair and laced my fingers behind my head. He was right about my case, but I had a plan to salvage it. And judging from the way he was conducting himself, I knew his ego would lead him down a path at trial that he’d later regret. But I wanted to be sure.
“Can I ask you a question, Mr. Snodgrass? Do you really think these girls made up a story just to ruin your client’s reputation? I’m sure you’ve seen the statements from the other girls who are now refusing to testify. They corroborated everything Miss Dickson and Miss Harbin said.”
“What I think doesn’t matter,” he snapped. “What matters is what you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt, and you can’t prove that my client spit on the goddamned sidewalk, let alone convict him of all of these absurd sexual offenses.”
“So he’s going to deny having any sexual contact whatsoever with either of these girls.”
“You’re goddamned right he’s going to deny it!” Small beads of spit flew from his lips as his voice grew louder. “And do you know why he’s going to deny it? Because he didn’t do it! Do you really think he’d stick his cock in either one of those nasty little skanks?”
I was sure the vulgarity and the tone were designed to see what kind of reaction he’d get from me. If I lost my composure and started battling with him or suddenly became self-righteously indignant, he’d be sure to bait me at trial. I kept my face relaxed and my voice pleasant. He didn’t know it, but he’d just confirmed my strategy.
“You have your opinion; I have mine,” I said. “Now, I doubt if you came all the way up here just to argue with me and insult my witnesses. What is it you want?”
He shifted in the chair and rolled his head. When his chin dropped, it disappeared completely into the rolls of fat.
“I want to make you an offer you can’t refuse,” he said. “I want to give you an easy out, an opportunity to save face. I’m offering you a gift.”
“I’m listening.”
He took a deep breath and straightened his tie.
“In exchange for the dismissal of all of the felony charges, my client is generously offering to plead guilty to one count of misdemeanor assault,” he said dramatically. “He’s also willing to pay a fifty-dollar fine plus the court costs on three conditions. One, he doesn’t have to register as a sex offender. Two, you agree to unsupervised probation, and three, you agree that the charge will be expunged from his record after one year. Those are our terms. They’re not negotiable.”
I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. The offer was ridiculous, but it was the way he delivered it that amused me. It made me think of a huge, animated purple blow-fish, pompously spouting his vastly superior intellectual theories to all the little shrimps around him.
“Sorry,” I said, trying to st
op laughing. His face was darkening, and even through all the layers of fat, I could see he was becoming angry. “I can’t do that, Mr. Snodgrass. It’s out of the question.”
“Then rather than sitting there doing your impression of a hyena, perhaps you’d care to make some kind of reasonable counteroffer.”
“I thought you said your terms were nonnegotiable.”
“I might be willing to negotiate on the amount of the fine,” he said.
I could see the conversation was pointless, so I decided to end it. Besides, he was beginning to get on my nerves. I leaned back and rubbed my face, as though I were giving his suggestion due consideration. Finally, I rested my chin on my fingertips and looked him directly in the eye.
“All right, Mr. Snodgrass. I’ll make you a reasonable counteroffer. If your client will agree to undergo a simple procedure, I’ll dismiss the charges. He can walk away clean.”
“Procedure? What do you mean?”
“A medical procedure. I believe it’s called castration. If he’ll let a doctor remove his balls so I’m sure he won’t do this to any more young girls, I’ll dismiss the case. Those are my terms, and they’re nonnegotiable.”
I noticed his hands tighten on the arms of the chair and his face went another shade darker. Slowly, he began to hoist himself to his feet.
“I’ll be speaking to your superior about this matter,” he said. “I’m sure he would want to be aware of your cavalier attitude, especially after I grind you into the dust.You might want to think about seeking alternative employment.”
“Have a nice day, Mr. Snodgrass,” I said without bothering to get up. “I’ll see you in a couple of weeks, provided you’re still with us.”
He glared at me one last time and slammed the door.
Sunday, October 5
I knew I’d be spending most of Monday at the hospital with Caroline, so I called Tom Short and asked him if he’d meet me at my office in Jonesborough on Sunday afternoon. Tom was a forensic psychiatrist I’d known for years and whom I’d used as an expert witness in several cases I’d defended. He had an uncanny ability to diagnose personality disorders, but more important, he could analyze a set of facts or circumstances and make reliable predictions about future behavior. I wanted to show him the file and see what he had to say about the killers we were looking for.
He walked in wearing jeans and a red flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He was just under six feet tall, with veiny blacksmith’s forearms and a perpetual gleam in his astute pale blue eyes. He wore oval-shaped glasses and a two-day stubble. The worn stem of a tobacco pipe stuck out of his shirt pocket. The part in his thinning hair may have been a little closer to his ear than the last time I’d seen him, which was more than a year ago.
“You don’t look any different,” he said as he shook my hand.
“What were you expecting?”
“I don’t know, maybe a jackbooted Nazi. I couldn’t believe it when I read in the paper that you’d become a prosecutor, a minion of the government.”
“I’m not a minion. I’m a civil servant, a proud representative of the people of Tennessee.”
“Bullshit,” he said. “You have too much compassion to do this job for long. My guess is you won’t last a year.”
“I appreciate your confidence,” I said, motioning to a chair and anxious to get started. “Now, if you could find it in your heart to focus your laser beam on something besides me, I need your help.”
I lifted a folder out of the file and spent the next half hour laying out everything we knew. The last items I showed him were the photographs from the crime scenes and the autopsies. He leaned back and took his pipe out of his shirt pocket and stuck it between his teeth, unlit.
“They’re young,” he said. “And they’re angry. Most likely male.”
“You’re sure of it?”
“Relatively. Crimes of this kind, where there are multiple killers, tend to involve younger people. There’s something going on here besides anger, though. Something a little beyond. I think you’re dealing with a competition of some sort.”
“Competition?”
“For attention, approval, that sort of thing. The number of wounds tells me they’re trying to impress someone, maybe each other, with the amount of damage they’re willing to inflict, the lengths they’re willing to go to. Maybe they’re still establishing a pecking order of some sort. And the mutilation, the carvings and the broken legs at the first scene, the positioning of the bodies, they’re taunting you, but at the same time, they’re paying homage to someone, probably their leader.”
“Do you think Satan is their leader?”
“I think the leader is flesh and bone.”
“But do you think it’s some kind of Satanic cult?”
“Maybe, but more likely it’s a group of fledgling sociopaths, obviously outcasts, rabidly angry, perhaps experimenting with how best to express their feelings to the world. Satan may be of some symbolic value to them, but I doubt they’re dedicated in any meaningful way.”
“How could anybody be dedicated in any meaningful way to Satan?”
Tom removed the pipe from his teeth and regarded me curiously. “I don’t remember religion as being one of your passions.”
“Why is everyone suddenly so interested in my feelings towards religion?” I said. I was thinking about the remarks Sarah had made to me just before she left.
“Is someone else interested?” Tom said.
“Never mind. Do you have any suggestions on how we catch them?”
“I assume you’ve checked out the Goth bars.”
“There’s only one. The TBI agents have been there more than once. They came up empty.”
“The only other way I could suggest, but I certainly wouldn’t recommend it, would be to call them out. You could go public and insult them openly. Set yourself up as a target. They’re obviously arrogant, so it wouldn’t sit well with them. Of course, you’d be putting yourself, and probably your family, at extreme risk.”
“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m not ready to die for the cause yet, and I’m not willing to put Caroline in any kind of danger.”
He didn’t say anything when I mentioned Caroline. He obviously hadn’t heard about her illness, and I didn’t feel like discussing it.
“Don’t worry; you’ll catch them,” he said.
“What makes you so sure?”
“Like I said, they’re arrogant. Arrogance breeds sloppiness. It’s just a matter of time.”
After Tom left, I walked back down to my truck, which was parked on the street beside the courthouse. As I approached, I noticed something had been tucked beneath the windshield wiper blade on the passenger side. It was a manila envelope with nothing written on it. I got in the cab and opened it up.
Inside was a single sheet of paper. On it was a charcoal drawing. The drawing, which appeared to have been done by a professional artist, was in two frames, each taking up half the page. One half depicted two long-haired ghouls pointing pistols at a man tied to a tree. The man was elderly and naked except for his underwear, just like Norman Brockwell was when they found him. In the upper-left corner of the frame was a pair of fierce-looking eyes, one darkly shaded and the other lightly shaded, watching what was about to happen in the frame. The second frame was a drawing of a woman—maybe a girl—in a floppy straw hat. She was wearing a long dress and a shawl and was seated on a park bench beneath a tree, overlooking a river. Beyond her was an outdoor amphitheater, and behind her was a statue of a winged deer.
I immediately recognized the spot where the young woman was sitting, because I’d been there hundreds of times. Caroline and I had spent many hours walking along the river at Winged Deer Park, talking about our hopes and dreams, about our children, our relationships, our problems. The spot depicted in the drawing was in the park. It was one of our favorite places.
My eyes fell to a written caption beneath the young woman on the bench. It said, “She knows. Come tomorrow.”
/> Monday, October 6
It had been twenty-two days since the Becks were murdered, a week since the Brockwells. The agents had interviewed nearly a hundred people and followed up on dozens of false leads that had come in through hotlines set up by the TBI. The local newspaper editorialized that the police were incompetent. One editorial demanded a task force. Someone let it leak that the district attorney had already proposed a task force, but the idea had been vetoed by Joe Dillard, the prosecutor who would handle the case when it went to trial and was guiding the investigation. The paper pointed out that Dillard was also the newest member of the DA’s office and that he had virtually no law enforcement experience. I didn’t bother to confront anyone who’d been in the room during the discussion about a task force. It didn’t matter.
On Monday morning Caroline, Jack, Lilly, and I drove to the medical center in Johnson City. Caroline was scheduled for exploratory surgery, the first stage in her treatment. The surgeon was to open Caroline’s breast, measure the tumor, and cut out a small section of skin above it and some of the surrounding tissue. He’d also remove what he called the sentinel lymph node. He’d send sections of the tumor, the skin, the tissue, and the node to the lab. They already knew the tumor was malignant, but the lab would tell the doctor whether the samples from the node and the skin contained cancer cells. If not, he’d remove the tumor and a portion of the surrounding tissue, and Caroline might be faced with only six or eight weeks of radiation therapy. That was the best case. If the tumor was large, however, or if there was cancer in the node or the skin, the treatment would be much different.
We sat in a waiting room in the surgery center until ten a.m., nearly two hours after they wheeled Caroline away on a gurney. By that time, we’d been joined by Caroline’s mother and two of her friends whose names I didn’t know, Sarah and her boyfriend—neither of whom spoke to me—a couple of Lilly’s friends, and a man I’d never laid eyes on. It turned out he was from Caroline’s mother’s church. He put his hand on Caroline’s forehead and prayed over her just before she was taken off to surgery. He asked the Lord to free her from this terrible disease. I didn’t have much faith in his ability to rid Caroline of cancer, but I didn’t object to his praying over her. I wouldn’t have cared if a painted medicine man came in and danced circles around her. Anything that might help, I was up for it.
