Above Suspicion

by Sharkey, Joe;

  Life in Pikeville had settled into a pleasant routine, Mark’s long working hours and the incessant phone calls notwithstanding. Sam Smith had been transferred out of the office, allowing Mark to finally have his own desk, and enabling Dan Brennan, now the senior agent, to claim the Bronco. Since Kathy needed the family car at home, Mark made do with the wheezing old Dodge left behind by Sam, consoled by the fact that the car’s decrepitude at least provided cover, since no one would have guessed that such a sorry vehicle belonged to the FBI.

  His initial apprehension about being a rookie in an unsupervised environment had abated. Mark’s superiors made it clear that his work was appreciated—suddenly, with his presence, the office seemed to be bustling with action; the paperwork was humming back and forth between Pikeville and Covington, where his nominal supervisor was an agent named Terry Hulse. His success in cultivating Susan and Charlie as informants was impressive; so, too, were the reports that he had significantly improved relations between the bureau and the Kentucky State Police, whose Pikeville post was one of the busiest in their department. Before Mark arrived with good cheer and law-enforcement collegiality, state cops had resented the FBI as exceedingly glory-conscious and aloof, but the word filtering through the overworked Pike­ville post was that Putnam was different. Veteran state police officers there had never before come in contact with an FBI agent who made it a part of his routine to stop by the post and shoot the breeze, trading information, offering to help out even on minor criminal investigations of the sort that the FBI often disdained. Mark established himself as someone who showed up even for the scut work, the excruciating night-long surveillances in mountain backwaters, the down-in-the-mud searching for physical evidence at a crime scene, the interminable routine interviewing, the warrant-serving in places that required a hike into the woods. Hungry for the camaraderie of police work and anxious to learn what he could from experienced state cops who understood the region, Putnam worked, as one of the state cops would later recall, not entirely complimentarily, “like a damn rented mule.”

  “I was basically a sponge, soaking up everything I possibly could,” Mark would later concede. “Maybe I was overeager. Work was all I wanted to do.”

  When he wasn’t working, he applied the same fervor to his family life. For a young couple just starting out in a new home, on a salary of just over $30,000 a year, money was adequate but not plentiful. Mark and Kathy seldom went out, preferring to have intimate late-night dinners at home on weekends. He always tried to get out of the office at a reasonable hour on Friday nights, which was designated “date night” with Danielle, who wore her prettiest dress to accompany her father to the Dairy Queen or the McDonald’s out on Route 23. Mark also volunteered to coach a boys’ soccer team at the YMCA in Pikeville.

  Kathy regarded their family routine, happy as it was, as fairly mundane, and she was baffled by the deep curiosity Susan exhibited about small personal details between her and Mark. She realized that Mark was somewhat concerned about the intense nature of Susan’s interest, which he couldn’t easily defuse because he needed to maintain his relationship with her at least long enough to ensure that she would testify at the bank robbery trial of Cat Eyes, now scheduled for January. Furthermore, the bureau was encouraging him to maintain Susan as an active, productive informant, since she was promising to develop and pass on information about other, as yet unspecified, criminal matters in the Tug Valley.

  This meant that Mark met with Susan regularly. Unbidden, she continued calling the Putnam home almost daily. For Kathy, who sensed that Susan felt neglected, empathy overcame prudence. She shrugged off a disquieting sense that Susan’s inquisitiveness about both her husband and her family might be drifting into an obsessive attraction.

  The initial evidence of this was innocent enough to be vaguely flattering. By the end of the summer, Kathy, now five months pregnant, had decided that she was tired of having shoulder-length hair, which had lost its bouncy curl. She went to a beauty salon in Pikeville and had it styled and layered shorter and told Susan that night how pleased she was with it.

  “I guess Mark likes short hair, huh?” Susan asked.

  Kathy replied, “Mark likes women who take care of themselves.”

  A few days later, Mark mentioned that Susan had cut her long hair short and had asked if it was like Kathy’s.

  Not that Mark had much time to ponder Susan’s hairdo. By late October, after months of painstaking detail work and hand-holding­ with an increasingly skittish Charlie Trotter, Mark decided that the groundwork was well enough laid to move to the next stage on the chop-shop case. He had brought Brennan up to date on the investigation and alerted the Covington and Lexington offices, as well as the state police in Pikeville and the sheriff’s department in Letcher County. The next step necessary before a full-scale raid was to photograph the operation itself. After Charlie drew him a map, Mark persuaded a pilot from the state Department of Mines and Minerals to fly him over the site in a small plane. Through gaps in the thinning autumn foliage they saw it—an expanse the size of two football fields littered with trucks, bulldozers, radiators, axles, engines, coal scoops, end loaders, and hundreds of other pieces of equipment—a veritable supermarket of stolen parts, displayed for sale to the right buyers on graded shelves cut into a mountain.

  The raid was scheduled for the last week of October, which would be right after Kathy and Danielle were due to leave for Connecticut. The timing was excellent for Mark, who knew that the real work would come following the raid and the arrests. He would have to spend weeks on the scene, painstakingly creating an inventory of thousands of pieces of evidence that would be needed to assemble a major federal case of interstate theft. With his family out of town, he could work at it around the clock, and without guilt.

  After work on Friday night, the Putnams drove to Lexington, where they spent the night in a motel so Kathy and Danielle could catch an early flight the next morning. When they checked in, there was a message to call the office.

  Kathy saw that something was wrong. “The raid is going down tomorrow,” Mark told her disconsolately. “There was some kind of glitch with the search warrants and they had to move fast.”

  The next day, after seeing Kathy and Danielle off at the airport, Mark drove the three hours directly to the site, but he was already too late. Dan Brennan was on hand supervising the dozen or so officers who had conducted the raid and were crawling over the location, marveling at the extent of the operation. The news was not good. There had been no arrests; someone had apparently tipped off Vernon Mullins and his men, who were nowhere to be seen when the police stormed up the hollow. The only living creatures anywhere in the vicinity were a pack of menacing Dobermans, who weren’t impressed by badges and guns.

  As Brennan briefed Mark, a heavy downpour erupted from black clouds over the mountains. Most of the officers fled to their cars, and Brennan departed, saying he’d see Mark back at the office. Furious at what he regarded as an operation that had been botched despite all of his careful preparations, bewildered that someone could have tipped off the suspects, Mark stood ankle deep in cold mud on the hillside and took out a notebook. He crawled under a bulldozer to look for its vehicle identification number.

  For three weeks afterward, he stayed at a tiny motel in Whitesburg and spent the daylight hours at the muddy chop-shop site, often accompanied by sheriff’s deputies, a state cop who had helped to prepare the case, and a technician from the National Auto Theft Bureau that represented the interests of various insurance companies. They photographed hundreds of vehicles and parts, recording whatever identification numbers they could find. As Charlie had promised, it was a haul. Mark was conservative about placing a dollar value on the cache of stolen material, but after the preliminary inventory, he estimated that they had recovered $2.2 million in stolen equipment that was traceable directly through serial numbers to its owners.

  Regional newspaper accounts of the r
aid, quoting state police estimates, put the total value of all the equipment at $6 million and called it the biggest single recovery of stolen vehicles and parts in recent memory. But, the newspapers also pointed out, no arrests had been made. Police were still looking for the thieves.

  The trucks and other equipment were moved into a fenced-in area nearby for safekeeping. It was almost Thanksgiving when Mark was able to get back to the office to continue his statistical work, which involved entering the mass of serial numbers and other data into the National Crime Information Center computer. When numbers matched, the next step was to locate and notify the owners, who were spread out over a five-state area. The owners then had to be interviewed, one by one.

  Brennan had been right. The detail work was daunting.

  But Mark, who had begun police work as a clerk, had been prepared. What he didn’t expect, when he returned to the site one Saturday, was to be confronted by a man named Charlie Tackett, whom Charlie Trotter had named as a ringleader in the operation. Tackett, aware that no arrest warrants had been prepared and that no evidence yet linked him to the crime, strode right up to Mark with a broad grin and held out his hand. Mark had spoken with him once in the initial phase of the investigation and was left with the strong impression that Tackett felt he had protection.

  “Mark, how you doing, son?” he said, clearly amused at his own audacity.

  Mark narrowed his eyes. “Hey, Charlie, where have you been?”

  “Now, I don’t want to be telling you that.”

  “Where’s your boss Vernon these days?”

  Tackett laughed. “Let me tell you something: Vernon and I have a lot of friends in this area. We’re businessmen, son. A lot of people depend on us for parts. I don’t know how many people have come up to me—”

  Mark lost his cool. “Charlie, is that some kind of threat? Because if it is, you can just shove it up your ass. If they want to shoot me, go ahead and let them. But I guarantee you, there’ll be about eight thousand agents who’ll come down and bust every fucking thing that’s going on down here, every business you got going, and every business your partners got going. So I don’t think that would be a very good move.”

  “Oh, man, nobody’s threatening nobody,” Charlie said, kicking at the dirt and chuckling. “I’m just fucking with you, man. No threats! This is a game with us—a game. They’re not going to get us. You don’t even have enough to make an arrest warrant.”

  So far, that was true. Mark was depending on Charlie Trotter to supply that. “Charlie, this isn’t state court where you can buy your way out of it.”

  “Time will tell. Time will tell. You’ll come around. We got a lot of people that we know, a lot of people on the payroll.”

  “I know you do.”

  Both men’s gazes drifted to where a local cop was walking around with a clipboard, looking down at some parts.

  “Like I said, there are a lot of people on our payroll.”

  “Shove it, Charlie. It isn’t going to work.”

  But Mark had reason to worry as the case wore on.

  Twice, the site where the parts were stored was broken into by thieves, who carted things off at night. Angry and frustrated, Mark moved back to the motel after Thanksgiving and even spent several nights on the site in a sleeping bag. When he went back to Pikeville, he had a call.

  “Bad news,” said a local cop who was also on the case.

  “We got broken into last night. They got all the CB radios.”

  In all, there were four burglaries within seven nights.

  Mark was in the area one morning when a battered pickup truck pulled up. “You Putnam?” the driver called through the open window.

  “Yeah,” he said, approaching the pickup. “Who are you?”

  “Well, I ain’t going to say. But they say you’re a good boy, and I hate to see you wasting your time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you know that guy you been working with?” He named one of the cops.

  “What about him?” Mark said.

  “I hear he’s been selling CBs,” the driver said, and rumbled off.

  The next morning, Charlie Trotter came by the office with more unnerving news for Mark. He looked nervous. “I had a problem last night. I was a little drunk and some of the boys jumped me and took me aside. He lifted his shirt and turned around. From shoulder to belt line, a crude X had been carved in his back.

  5

  Though she hated being away from Mark, Kathy was glad that she had chosen to go back to Connecticut, which she thought of as home, to have the baby. She had developed some minor complications late in the pregnancy and felt more confident knowing that she would deliver in a hospital in Connecticut. In December, Mark managed to get the time off to fly back east. He was with her on December 9 when Mark Jr. was born, the image of his father.

  In the baby book Kathy bought to match the one they’d kept for Danielle, the new father wrote:

  Who would have thought that your mom and I were capable of producing a son? From the moment I saw you, healthy and strong, I realized you were going to be special. Your mom and I have been through so much during the pregnancy, and the fact that you made it through unscathed meant only one thing—your sister and I won’t be calling you Looie Loser. Seriously, every man needs a son to do things with. I only hope you know how to fix cars and machinery so you can teach me. I would like to take this opportunity to welcome you to our family and wish you luck—you will need it in dealing with your mom and sister. Right now you appear to be your mama’s boy, but that will change in time. Ever hear of the Sox?

  Your old pop

  It was reinvigorating to leave the problems of Pikeville behind for a few weeks, but Kathy could see Mark’s distress, barely masked by the glow of the new baby and the holidays. The botched raid at the chop-shop site had bolstered his conviction that he needed to do everything himself, instead of depending on others. Sidelined in Connecticut, he fretted about the implications of what had happened. Recovering stolen goods was only half of the job, and even with the material in hand, that aspect of the case still needed months of hard work. The other half was bringing criminal charges against thieves brazen enough to laugh in his face and claim that they had “protection.” His key informant had obviously blown his cover—that X on Charlie’s back was a bloody message not only to its victim but to his supposed protector as well. Mark brooded over the possibility that he wouldn’t be able to come up with criminal indictments of the Mullins gang as easily as he had come up with the stolen trucks and bulldozers. There was also the problem of Cat Eyes, whose trial was coming up right after New Year’s, with no guarantees that a mountain jury was going to return a guilty verdict on an amusing local boy. Susan’s testimony would be crucial—but there were no guarantees that she would actually go through with it and publicly expose herself as the accuser. He wondered if he was in over his head.

  With a sense of foreboding mixed with impatience to get back on the job, he returned to Pikeville with Kathy, Danielle, and the baby a few days after Christmas.

  Susan was in the office waiting for him with a big smile. She startled him with a kiss on the lips and said brightly, “I got you a couple of things for Christmas. I’m sorry I didn’t wrap it but you know how it is.”

  He was bewildered. “Susan, don’t buy me anything.”

  She took out a pair of expensive running shoes and a Nike T-shirt and set them proudly on his desk. “Well, you wear those ratty old sneakers all the time, and I think you could use these.”

  “I can’t take these, Susan!”

  Her face clouded like a scolded child’s. “I will be very insulted if you don’t take these. You’ve been very good to me this year. This is just between us.”

  Not wanting to hurt her feelings, he muttered thanks clumsily. But as soon as she was gone, he got on the phone to Terry Hulse
in Covington and asked him for advice on what to do with a gift from an informant. Again Hulse told him not to worry, just to write a memo about it and put the stuff in the safe. But he also wondered whether Mark was worried about more than a pair of sneakers and a shirt. “Hey, is there anything going on with this girl?” he asked.

  Mark considered his response for a moment before replying, “Well, she has made her intentions known if that’s what you mean.”

  His supervisor didn’t seem overly concerned. “Just be careful,” Hulse told him. “And do good work. See that she testifies.”

  Ensuring that she testified was the main reason he had been going to the trouble of sustaining his relationship with Susan, who required high maintenance, not only from him but also from Kathy. Susan, he had come to believe over the fall, was a loose cannon. She continued to shoot her mouth off about working for the FBI. What little information she had managed to pass on since the Cat Eyes arrest—mostly tips on small-scale criminal activities in the Tug Valley—wasn’t worth the effort. Partly thanks to connections he’d developed through her, and partly thanks to his own hard work, he now had a growing network of informants. For that, he was grateful to Susan, and his feelings for her complicated things. She had been among the first people to accept him in his new post. But she’d been paid, regularly. It was time to move on. Mark was looking forward to putting an end to his work with Susan as soon as the trial was over. Because she had, indeed, made her intentions known.

  It was during their last meeting, in December, before he’d gone to Connecticut. He had been driving Susan home to Freeburn and as was their routine they pulled off on a mountain siding to talk. She seemed unusually pleased with herself. “I lost ten pounds, you know.”