Just Cause

by John Katzenbach

  Brown said nothing. He heard Harris take a deep breath.

  “. . . Ain’t never gonna make this case, no sir. You know how many interviews we’ve logged on this one, Tanny? More’n three hundred. And that’s been me and my chief of detectives, Henry Lincoln, you know him. A couple of major-crimes guys from the county put in some time, too. Don’t mean shit. No witnesses, ’cause nobody saw her get picked up on the road. No forensics, ’cause there ain’t hardly nothing left of her. No suspects, even though we ran profiles and rousted all the usual likely folks. No nothing. When you get right down to it, all we really gonna do is just help her folks try and understand and maybe go down to the church an extra time myself, see if a little prayer or two won’t help. You know what I pray for, Tanny?”

  “No,” he replied hoarsely.

  “Tanny, I don’t pray we make this guy. No, ’cause I don’t even think the Almighty gonna be able to make this case. I just prays that whoever did it just come by Eatonville this one time, and that he heads on off to someplace new and some other town, someplace where someone sees ’im and they got mobile forensic teams and all that new scientific stuff, and where maybe he makes a mistake and gets hisself busted bad. That’s what I prays for.”

  The police captain was quiet, as if thinking. “’Cause I figures that gal goes terrible, you know. Pain and fear, Tanny. Pain, fear, and terror something special, and no one wants to know about it.”

  He paused again. “And then you calls me with this question come out of the blue, and I’m wondering what you got that makes you ask this question of me.”

  Silence gathered on the line.

  “You know the man that came off the Row?” Brown said.

  “Sure. Robert Earl Ferguson.”

  “He ever been in Eatonville?”

  Lucious Harris stopped. Brown could hear a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line before the big man said, “I thought he was innocent. That’s what the papers and TV says.”

  “Has he ever been in Eatonville? Around the time that gal disappeared?”

  “He was here,” Harris responded slowly.

  Brown felt a half-grunt, half-groan escape between his lips. He realized his teeth were shut tight. “When?”

  “Not close time. Maybe three, four months back before little Alexandra disappeared. Gave a speech in a church. Hell, I went to see him myself. He was right interesting. Talked about Jesus standing by your side and giving you the light of day no matter how dark the world seems.”

  “What about . . .”

  “Stayed a couple of days. Maybe a Saturday, then a Sunday, then drove off. Back to some school, I heard. I don’t think he was here when Alexandra Jones takes off. I’ll check hotels and motels, but I don’t know. Sure, he coulda come back. But what makes you think . . .”

  Brown leaned forward at the desk, a throbbing behind his temples. “Check for me, Luke. See if you can’t put him in the area when the gal disappears.”

  “I’ll try. Ain’t gonna do no good, I don’t suspect. You saying he’s not innocent?”

  “I’m not saying nothing. Just check, will ya?”

  “No problem, Tanny. I’ll check. Then maybe we’ll have a talk ’cause I don’t like what I’m hearing in your voice, my friend.”

  “I don’t like it either,” Brown replied. He hung up the telephone.

  He remembered Pachoula in the moments after Joanie Shriver disappeared. He could hear the sirens picking up, see the knots of people forming on the street corners, talking, then setting off in search. The first camera crews were there that night, not long after the first telephone calls from the newspapers had started to flood into the switchboard. A little white girl disappears while trying to walk home from school. It’s a nightmare that strikes a vulnerability within everyone. Blonde hair. Smile. Wasn’t four hours before that face was on the television. Every minute that passed made it worse.

  What did he learn? Brown thought. He learned that the same event would be ignored, no cameras and microphones, no Boy Scouts and National Guardsmen searching the swamp, if he changed one single aspect of the equation: Turn white into black.

  Fighting to maintain composure, Brown rose and went to find Cowart. A large map of the state of Florida hung in the offices of Major Crimes and he paused next to it. His eyes went first to Eatonville, then down to Perrine. Dozens, he thought. There are dozens of small, black enclaves throughout the state. The leftover South. Pushed by history and economics into little pockets of varying success or poverty, but all with one single thing in common: None were anyone’s idea of a mainstream. All handled by undermanned, sometimes ill-trained police forces, with half the resources available to white communities and twice the problems with drugs and alcohol and robbery, frustration and despair.

  Hunting grounds.

  21

  CONJUNCTION

  Andrea Shaeffer returned late to her motel room. She double-locked the door behind her, then checked the bathroom, the small closet, beneath the bed, behind the drapes, and finally the window, determining that it was still closed tight. She fought off the urge to open her pocketbook and remove the nine-millimeter pistol concealed within. A sense of misshapen fear had dogged her since leaving Ferguson’s apartment. As the weak daylight had dissipated around her, she had felt a tightness, as if she were wearing clothes several sizes too small.

  Who was he? she asked herself.

  She reached into her small suitcase and rummaged around until she found some of the lavender-scented notepaper that she used to write unmailed letters to her mother. Then she switched on the small lamp at a tiny table in the corner of the room, pulled up a chair and started writing.

  Dear Mom, she wrote. Something happened. She stared at the words at the top of the page. What did he say? she asked herself. He said he was safe. From what?

  She leaned back in her chair, chewing on the end of her pen like a student searching for the answer on a test. She remembered being taken into a lineup room, despite her protests that she would be unable to recognize the two men who’d attacked her. The lights had been dimmed and she was flanked by a pair of detectives whose names she could no longer recall. She had watched intently as two sets of men were brought in and lined up against the wall. On command, they had turned first to the right, then the left, giving her a view of their profiles. She remembered the whispered admonitions from the detectives: Take your time, and Is there anyone who seems familiar? But she had been unable to make any identification. She had shaken her head at the detectives, and they’d shrugged. She recalled the look that had passed over their faces, and remembered then that she had decided that she wouldn’t be helpless. That she wouldn’t let anyone get away free ever again after delivering so much hurt.

  She looked down at the unmailable letter and then wrote: I met a man filled with death.

  That’s it, she thought She examined all that Ferguson had shown her: anger, mockery, arrogance. Fear, but only in short supply—only when he was uncertain why I was there. But once he learned, it evaporated. Why? Because he had nothing to fear. Why? Because I was there for the wrong reason.

  She put the pen down beside the paper and stood up.

  What’s the right reason? she demanded.

  Shaeffer rose and walked over to the double bed. She sat down and drew her knees up beneath her chin, wrapping her arms around her legs to hold them steady while she balanced precariously on the edge of the bed. For a moment or two she rocked back and forth, trying to determine what her course of action should be. Finally she imposed a discipline on her thoughts, unfolded and reached for the telephone.

  It took her a few tries to track Michael Weiss down, finally reaching him through the superintendent’s office at the state prison in Starke.

  “Andy? That you? Where have you been?”

  “Mike. I’m up in Newark, New Jersey.
”

  “New Jersey. Jesus. What’s in New Jersey? You were supposed to be sitting on Cowart in Miami. Is he in New Jersey?”

  “No, but . . .”

  “Well, where the hell is he?”

  “North Florida. Pachoula, but . . .”

  “Why aren’t you there?”

  “Mike, give me a moment and I’ll explain.”

  “It’d better be good. And another thing. You were supposed to be checking in, like, all the time. I’m in charge of this investigation, you do remember, don’t you?”

  “Mike, just give me a minute, huh? I came up here to see Robert Earl Ferguson.”

  “The guy Cowart got off Death Row?”

  “Right. The guy who was in the cell next to Sullivan.”

  “Up to the moment he tried to reach through the bars and strangle him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So?”

  “It was . . .” She hesitated. “Well, unusual.”

  There was a momentary pause before the senior policeman asked, “How so?”

  “I’m still trying to put my finger on it.”

  She heard him sigh. “What’s this got to do with our case?”

  “Well, I got to thinking, Mike. You know, Sullivan and Cowart were like two sides of a triangle. Ferguson was the other leg, the connection that brought them together. Without Ferguson, Cowart never sees Sullivan. I just figured I better go check him out. See if he had an alibi for the time the killings took place. See if he knew anything. Just get a look at the guy.”

  Weiss hesitated before saying, “Well, okay. That doesn’t exactly not make sense. I don’t know what it adds, but it’s not crazy. You’re thinking there’s some link between the three of them? Maybe something that contributed to the murders?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Well, if there was, why wouldn’t that bastard Cowart have put that into his story in the paper?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because he was afraid it would make him look bad?”

  “Look bad? Jesus, Andy, he’s a whore. All reporters are whores. They don’t care about yesterday’s trick, only today’s. If he had something, he’d have put it into the paper lickety split. I can see the headlines: DEATH ROW CONNECTION UNCOVERED. I don’t know if they got type big enough for that story. They’d go crazy. Probably win him another damn prize.”

  “Maybe.”

  Weiss snorted. “Yeah, maybe. Anyway, you got anything independent that gets this guy Ferguson to Tarpon Drive?”

  “No.”

  “Like anybody make him, down in Islamorada? Any of those folks you questioned on Tarpon Drive mention a black man?”

  “No.”

  “How about a hotel receipt or plane ticket or something? What about bloodwork or prints or a murder weapon?”

  “No.”

  “So you went all the way up there, just because somehow he was connected to the other two players here?”

  “Right,” she said slowly. “It was sort of a hunch.”

  “Please, Andy. They have hunches on Perry fucking Mason, not in real life. Don’t talk to me about hunches. Just talk to me about what you learned from the creep.”

  “He denied any direct knowledge of the crime. But he had some interesting insights into the way things work on Death Row. Said that most of the guards there are only a step away from being killers themselves. Suggested we focus on them.”

  “That makes sense,” Weiss replied. “It’s also precisely what I’m doing right now and you should be doing, too. The guy had an alibi, right?”

  “Said he was in class. He’s studying criminology.”

  “Really? Now that’s interesting.”

  “Yeah. He had a bookcase filled with textbooks on forensics and detection. Said he used them in class.”

  “Okay. Can you check that out and then, when it turns out to be true, get back down here?”

  “Uh, sure. Yeah.”

  There was a momentary quiet on the line before Weiss said, “Andy, why do I detect a note of hesitation in your voice?”

  She paused before replying. “Mike, you ever have the sensation that you just talked with the right guy, but for the wrong reason? I mean, this guy made me sweat. I don’t know how else to put it. He was wrong. I’m sure of it. All wrong. But why, I can’t say. Just spooked me good.”

  “Another hunch?”

  “A feeling. Christ, Mike, I’m not crazy.”

  Weiss waited an instant before asking, “How spooked?”

  “Up in the ninety-ninth percentile.” She could sense the older detective thinking hard.

  “You know what I’m supposed to say, right?”

  She nodded as she answered. “That I’m to take a cold shower, or a hot shower, whatever, and then forget it. Let the creep do whatever he’s doing and make his mistake somewhere and let those cops take care of it and get my tail back down to the Sunshine State.”

  He laughed. “Christ,” he said. “You even sound like me.”

  “So?”

  “Okay,” he said slowly. “Take the right shower. Then poke around as much as you want to for a day or so. I can carry on here without much trouble. But when it’s all said and done and you don’t have anything, I want you to write up a report with all your guesses and feelings and whatever the hell else you think is appropriate, and we’ll send it off to a guy I know with the New Jersey State Police. He’ll just laugh it off, but, hey, at least you won’t think you’re crazy. And your ass will be covered.”

  “Thanks, Mike,” she said, oddly relieved and frightened in the same moment.

  “Oh,” he said, “a couple other things. You haven’t even asked what the hell I’ve found out down here.”

  “What?”

  “Well, Sullivan left about three boxes filled with personal things. Mostly books, radio, little television, Bible, that sort of shit, but there were a couple of real intriguing documents. One was his whole appeal, all mapped out, ready to file with the court, pro se. All he had to do was hand it to an official and bingo, automatic stay of execution. And you know something? The sucker made a pretty convincing argument for prejudicial statements to the jury by the prosecutor that nailed him. I mean, he might have stretched that one out for years.”

  “But he never filed it.”

  “Nope. But that’s not all. How about a letter from a producer named Maynard out in LaLa Land. The same guy who bought the rights to your friend Ferguson’s life story after Cowart made him into a star. Made the same offer to Sullivan. Ten grand. Actually, not quite ten grand. Ninety-nine hundred. For exclusive rights to his life story.”

  “But Sullivan’s life was in the public record, why would he pay . . .”

  “I spoke with him earlier today. The slick said it was standard operating procedure before making a movie. Tie up all the rights. And, he said Sullivan promised him he was going to file the appeal. So the guy had to make a move to get the rights, otherwise Sullivan could have messed him up as long as he was appealing his case. Surprised the hell out of the guy when Sullivan went to the chair.”

  “Keep going.”

  “Well, so there’s ninety-nine hundred bucks floating about somewhere and I’m thinking, we find out what happened to that money and we find out how Sullivan paid for those two killings.”

  “But we’ve got a Son of Sam law. Victims’ rights. Sullivan couldn’t collect the money. It was supposed to go to the victims of his crimes.”

  “Right. Supposed to. The producer deposited the money in a Miami bank account according to instructions Sullivan gave him as part of the deal. Producer then writes a letter to the Victims’ Rights Commission in Tallahassee, informing them of the payment, just as he’s required to by law. Of course it takes the bureaucrats months and months to figure anything out. In t
he meantime . . .”

  “I can guess.”

  “Right. The money exits, stage left. It’s not in that account anymore. The victims’ rights people don’t have it and Sullivan sure doesn’t need it, wherever he is.”

  “So . . .”

  “So, I’m guessing we trace that account, maybe we can find the sucker who opened it up and emptied it out. Then we’ll have a reasonable suspect for a pair of homicides.”

  “Ten thousand dollars.”

  “Ninety-nine hundred. Real interesting number, that. Gets around the problem with the federal law requiring documentation of money transactions above ten grand . . .”

  “But ninety-nine hundred isn’t . . .”

  “Hell, up there they’d kill you for a pack of smokes. What do you suppose somebody’d do for almost ten grand? And remember, some of those prison guards aren’t making much more than three, four hundred a week. Ten big ones probably sound like a whole helluva lot of money to them.”

  “What about setting up the account?”

  “In Miami? Got a phony driver’s license and a fake social security number? I mean it’s not exactly like they spend a lot of time in Miami regulating what goes on at the banks. They’re all so damn busy laundering heavy bucks for drug dealers, they probably never even noticed this little transaction. Christ, Andy, you can probably close out the damn account at an automatic teller, not even have to look a real person in the eyes.”

  “Does the producer know who opened it?”

  “That idiot? No way. Sullivan just provided the number and the instructions. All he knows is that Sullivan screwed him by telling his life tale to Cowart, so it all went splat into the paper when this guy thought it was going to be his exclusively. Then double-screwed him by jumping into the electric chair. He ain’t too pleased by circumstances.”