In good faith

PART II

Tennessee Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Hank Fraley looked up from his desk to see a man walking through the front door.

A fucking babysitter. Just what I need. I’ve got a loud-mouthed sheriff running around sticking his nose into everything, and now I have to deal with a goddamned lawyer.

Fraley had been awake all night, his head was splitting, and the acid in his stomach made him feel as if he were being eaten from the inside out. He couldn’t get the images of the dead family out of his mind. The eyes haunted him. All of them had been shot in the right eye. Thirty years of working homicide cases in Memphis and Nashville-places a lot more violent than this-had steeled Fraley, but nothing could have prepared him for the carnage he saw when he got to the murder scene. Those beautiful, innocent children. The girl was about the same age as Fraley’s granddaughter, the boy just an infant. Who, or what, could do that to a baby?

And now he had to deal with Joe Dillard, the former defense attorney miraculously and suddenly turned prosecutor. Lee Mooney had invited Dillard to the crime scene, and now he was supposed to… What was he supposed to do, anyway? Mooney had called earlier and said he wanted Dillard involved in the investigation. His mission, Mooney said, would be to make sure Fraley didn’t make any mistakes that would come back and bite them on the ass later.

“What kind of mistakes?” Fraley had asked.

“ Legal mistakes,” Mooney said. “ Constitutional mistakes.”

What a load of horse crap. Fraley was doing homicide work when Dillard was still shitting in his diaper. He’d be as useless as teats on a bull. And besides, Fraley was looking for murderers, the kind of people who shot babies at point-blank range. Fuck legal. Fuck constitutional.

The secretary buzzed. Fraley snuffed out his cigarette and told her to send Dillard in. He was a big guy, dark-haired, green-eyed, and athletic-looking, at least twenty years younger than Fraley. He hadn’t managed to put on the paunch yet, but his hair was just starting to go gray and the lines in his forehead and around his eyes were starting to run deep. He was wearing a charcoal suit, a nice one, and a blue shirt and tie. Movie-star teeth.

Fraley had heard a lot about Dillard since being transferred up from Nashville to replace a bad cop named Phil Landers. There’d been a scandal about Landers soliciting false testimony from a jailhouse snitch who turned out to be Dillard’s sister. Then Landers was accused of conducting an illegal search in a big murder case and subsequently lying about it on the witness stand. Dillard was the defense lawyer who finally took Landers down. The bosses in Nashville sent Fraley in to clean up the mess. Said they needed a “stable” force in the office, which Fraley took to mean somebody old. They told him he could ride out his last few years with the TBI in the relative peace of northeast Tennessee. And now this, the worst fucking murder he’d ever seen.

“What can I do for you?” Fraley said without shaking Dillard’s hand. He didn’t bother to stand. He wasn’t about to make it easy.

“I’m not really sure,” Dillard said pleasantly. “To tell you the truth, I don’t really know why I’m here. All I know is that Lee Mooney said he called you, and he sent me up here to help.”

“I don’t need any help, especially from a lawyer.”

There was an awkward silence.

“How can I help?” Dillard said, standing in front of Fraley’s desk, still smiling.

“Go back to your own office. Let me do my job.”

“I’d love to,” he said. “But my boss sent me up here. First day on the new job and all. Probably wouldn’t be good if I told him to go to hell. So here I am.”

“I didn’t know a law degree qualified a person to be a homicide investigator.”

A puzzled look came over Dillard’s face. He stood looking at Fraley for a moment; then he smiled again and said, “Excuse me.”

Fraley watched the man as he walked back out the front door. He thought he was rid of the lawyer, but about fifteen minutes later Fraley looked up from his desk again to see Dillard walk back through the front door and straight past the secretary. He was carrying a bag in his left hand. He walked into Fraley’s office, grinned, and stuck out his right hand.

“Hi, I’m Joe Dillard,” he said. “I think maybe we got off to a bad start. I brought you some coffee and a couple of sticky buns from Perkins.”

Fraley looked at him deadpan, but decided grudgingly to at least shake his hand. “I know who you are,” Fraley said.

“Mooney told me,” Dillard said.

“Told you what?”

“That you can’t resist sticky buns. I called him from the car and he said I should bring you sticky buns.” Dillard opened the bag. “How about it?”

Fraley wanted to say, Fuck a bunch of sticky buns, but that wasn’t what came out of his mouth. What came out of his mouth was, “So you think you can bribe me with sweets?”

“Hope so. I don’t have much money.”

“You’re a lawyer,” Fraley said. “You’ve got more money than God.”

Dillard reached into the bag, pulled out a Styrofoam cup of coffee, and set it in front of Fraley. He pulled out a paper plate and a plastic fork, set those down, and then plopped a sticky bun on the plate. “You want me to eat it for you, too?” he said, licking the sticky stuff off his fingers.

Fraley decided maybe he wasn’t as bad as they’d made him out to be.

“Sit,” Fraley said.

Dillard took his jacket off and sat down across from Fraley. He took the lid off of a second cup of coffee.

“Long night?” Dillard said.

“The longest.”

“Me, too. I couldn’t sleep.”

“So enlighten me,” Fraley said. “What do you think you’re supposed to be doing here?”

“Extra set of eyes, maybe. Extra set of hands.” Dillard licked some more of the sticky bun goo from a thumb. “After you catch whoever did this, I’ll be the one who handles the case in court, and I think Mooney wants me in from the beginning.”

“He told me he was sending you up here to make sure I didn’t make any mistakes.”

“From what I’ve heard about you, you don’t make mistakes.”

“So you’ve been checking me out.”

“And you haven’t been doing the same?”

Fraley shrugged his shoulders.

“That’s what I thought,” Dillard said. “Listen, I’m not here to watch over you. I’m just here to help any way I can.”

Fraley took a big bite of the sticky bun. Cinnamon, butter, sugar

… Damn, it was good. “So where do you want to start?” Fraley said.

“Maybe by telling me what kind of evidence you’ve gathered so far.”

“I got casts of footprints that are useless until I find the feet that match them. I got casts of tire prints that are useless until I find the tires that made them. I got nine-millimeter shell casings that are useless until I find the guns that spit them out. I got a bunch of slugs and I’ll have more after the medical examiner finishes the autopsies. I got two Caucasian adults, a male and a female, shot six times each. Two little kids, one six years old and one seven months, shot three times each. All four of them shot in the right eye. After the adults were shot, someone tucked their arms against their sides and then placed the dead children at right angles across their knees in what appears to be the shape of a cross of some sort. The medical examiner called me a few minutes ago and said that after she cleaned up the father, she discovered that someone had carved a little message in his forehead.”

“A message?”

“Yeah. It took her a little while to figure out what it was. I guess whoever carved it wasn’t much of an artist.”

“What did it say?”

“ ‘Ah Satan.’ ”

“ ‘Ah Satan’? What do you think it means?”

“Who knows? The father also had an upside-down cross cut into the side of his neck. She decided to check on the others, and it turns out that all four of them have these little upside-down crosses carved into their necks. And take a look at these.”

Fraley reached for some photographs and set them down on the desk in front of Dillard. The photos were of the bodies at the crime scene, taken from directly above.

“Does the positioning of the bodies mean anything to you?” Fraley asked.

The children had been placed across the adults’ thighs. Dillard stared at the photos, then looked up at Fraley.

“Crosses,” he said.

“That’s what I was thinking. Maybe upside down, since they’re across the legs instead of the shoulders. Do you know anything about upside-down crosses?”

“Some kind of satanic symbol maybe. I think they call them inverted crosses.”

“Looks like devil worshipers.”

“Either that or somebody wants you to think so. Have you identified all of the victims?”

“They’re local,” Fraley said, “but they’ve only been here about a year. Bjorn Beck, thirty years old, address is 1401 Poplar Street. Clerk at a hotel over by the mall. His wife, Anna, thirty years old, worked at Starlight Marketing selling vacations over the phone. Else, six years old, just started first grade a few weeks ago. The little boy’s name was Elias, seven months old. One of their neighbors said they went to a Jehovah’s Witness convention in Knoxville yesterday. Haven’t confirmed that yet. They were driving a 2001 Chevrolet van, maroon. We’ve got a nationwide alert out on the van.”

“No witnesses?”

“Not that we know of. We canvassed within a mile of the scene. Nobody saw anything unusual. There’s a guy who was checking out a building site about a quarter mile away who heard the shots and called it in, but he didn’t go anywhere near it. As a matter of fact, he said he got cold chills when he heard the shots and headed in the other direction.”

“What about family?”

“Both sets of parents are in Chicago, which is where Beck and his wife were from. Mr. Beck has-or had-a brother who’s flying in from Panama City, Florida, this afternoon to make a positive ID on the bodies.”

“Jesus,” Dillard said, “I can’t imagine having to do something like that.”

The phone rang just as Fraley stuffed another bite of bun into his mouth.

“Fraley. Yeah? Already? Where? Ten minutes.”

He looked at Dillard, trying to decide whether he wanted to tell him. He didn’t seem like such a bad guy. Besides, maybe Fraley could get him to spring for lunch later. Fraley stood up.

“C’mon, Boy Scout,” he said. “They found the van.”

Monday, September 15

A patrol officer noticed the van about five blocks from the downtown area, where a music festival had been held over the weekend. They cordoned off the streets and set up stages all over a blighted five-block area downtown, which had fallen victim to the convenience of mall shopping and the circular development of cities. There were a few junk shops, a couple of bars where the college kids from East Tennessee State University hung out, a couple of hobby shops, and a few lawyer’s offices. If it hadn’t been for a courthouse being located on Main Street, most of the buildings would have been boarded up.

Caroline and I had gone to the festival a few years earlier, because both of us love live music-it doesn’t really matter what kind-and the festival offered a little for everyone: bluegrass, country, rock, gospel, and blues. The city had billed it as a family event, and it was supposed to benefit the merchants downtown, but they’d made the mistake of allowing the bars to give away beer, and they let people drink on the streets. After a couple of years it turned into a two-day drunk. People walked around in a daze, pissing in the alleys, and the more they drank, the more belligerent they became. There’d been several fights two years ago, and last year Caroline and I didn’t even bother to attend. As I gazed at the van, I wondered whether our murderers shot a family of four and then went to the festival to guzzle a few free beers.

There was nothing for me to do at the scene. Men and women with skills far superior to mine in the area of forensic evidence gathering spent their time stooping and examining and picking and poking and photographing. I watched and stayed out of their way, hoping they’d find something that would help identify the killers.

I hung around until they hauled the van off to Knoxville on a flatbed truck; then I went back down to Jonesborough so I could start getting set up in my new office, which was nothing fancier than a twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot Sheetrock box. It was after three when I got there, and the place was nearly deserted. As I walked past the secretary, a forty-year-old, blue-eyed, redheaded bombshell named Rita Jones, she batted her eyes at me and handed me a stack of messages.

“You haven’t even been here a day and you’ve already got more messages than most of us get in a week,” she said.

I’d known Rita for several years. She’d been a legal secretary for close to a dozen lawyers, had broken up more than one marriage, and had hit on me so many times that it got to be a sort of joke between us. My most vivid memory of her was at a Christmas party hosted by the bar association five or six years earlier. She wore red spiked heels, shiny red pants, a Santa hat, and a red knit halter top that barely contained the bounty within. Sometime around nine, after everyone was good and soused, I was leaning against a wall talking to Bob Brown, a lawyer legendary for his ability to ingest huge amounts of liquor and his insatiable sexual appetite. I was listening to one of Brown’s stories when Rita and her bounty happened by. She stopped to say hello, and Brown, without uttering a word, hooked his finger in the front of the halter and pulled it down, revealing her breasts. Rita didn’t bat an eye. Nor did she attempt to cover herself. She looked directly at me, smiled coyly, and said, “All that, and brains, too.” I awkwardly excused myself and walked away, but I hadn’t forgotten those breasts. They were magnificent.

“What’s this?” I said, looking at the stack of messages. “Nobody even knows I’m working here.”

“All media. All about the murders,” she said. She took the stack from my hand and began to go through it. “Associated Press, CNN, Court TV, MSNBC. The list goes on and on. Looks like you’re going to be a celebrity.”

She offered the stack to me again with a wry smile, but I refused to take it.

“Tell them ‘no comment,’ ” I said. “If I have anything to say, I’ll call a press conference and talk to all of them at the same time.”

“I can’t do that, cutie, much as I’d like to,” she said. “You see, it isn’t my job to tell them ‘no comment.’ That’d be your job.”

“Then just tell them I’m not here. I don’t want my phone ringing every five minutes.”

“You mean you want me to lie? Imagine that, a lawyer asking a secretary to lie.”

“Don’t act like you haven’t done it before.”

“But that was back when I was working for those awful private lawyers. Now I’m at the district attorney’s office. Everybody here is honorable, honey. We’re not supposed to lie. We’re not supposed to do anything that would cast aspersions on the office.”

“C’mon, Rita. You’ll make an exception for me, won’t you? I’m not used to being honorable. Maybe it’ll grow on me.”

“I’ll tell you what. You make sure you wear some nice tight pants at least twice a week and I’ll see what I can do.”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you were sexually harassing me.”

“And when can I expect you to do the same?”

“Sorry, Rita,” I said, holding up my ring finger for her to see. “Still married. Still happily married.”

“Well,” she said with a wink, “we’ll just have to see about that, won’t we?”

I turned and walked back to my office with a strange tingling sensation in my stomach. I was flattered by the attention-it had been a long time since a woman had flirted with me so openly-but I knew Rita’s reputation. She was a conqueror, a woman who chewed up men and spit them out like Juicy Fruit. Besides, after twenty years of marriage, I was still madly in love with my wife.

The office was equipped with a desk, a computer, and a couple of chairs. The walls were antique white and bare. I’d left a box of personal items on the desk early in the morning, before I left to go to Fraley’s office, and I started taking things out of the box and arranging them. I’d just set a photograph of my daughter doing an arabesque on the desk when the door opened and Alexander Dunn walked in. Dunn was a trust-funder, the beneficiary of a grandfather who struck it rich in the coal mines in southwest Virginia. He was vertically challenged, maybe five-foot-eight, and his brown hair was medium length, heavily moussed, and combed straight back from his wide forehead. He had thin, nearly indiscernible lips and dull, yellowish teeth. He was wearing a navy blue suit that looked like it was tailor-made, just like the suit he wore during Billy Dockery’s trial. His Italian loafers were black instead of brown, but a white kerchief was still rising out of the breast pocket. He strode straight up to my desk and stood there looking at me.

“The legend returns,” he said. The tone was sarcastic, and he wasn’t smiling.

I knew Alexander was a fairly recent hire in the DA’s office. Prior to his becoming an assistant district attorney, he’d been an ambulance chaser and divorce attorney. He’d been with the DA’s office for less than a year, and from what I’d read in the newspapers, he was trying mightily to make a name for himself by pressing for the maximum punishment on every case he handled. He wasn’t having much success, though, and after watching him try Dockery’s case, I knew why.

“Hello, Alexander,” I said, looking back down at my box of goodies.

“Run out of money?”

“Beg your pardon?”

“Did you run out of money? Is that why you’re working here?”

“Not exactly.”

“Planning on running for office?”

“No.”

“What then? Why are you here?”

“Thought it might be entertaining.” I pulled another photograph out of the box, this one of my son, Jack, swinging a baseball bat.

“Entertaining?” Dunn said. “Well, just so you know, your pleasure is my pain. You’re hurting my career.”

“Really? How?”

“This new murder should be my case,” he blurted. “I’ve been here longer than you.” His tone had changed from sarcastic to whiny.

“Sorry. Just doing what the boss tells me to do.”

“What makes you think you can just waltz in here and take over? People aren’t happy about this, you know. People in the office. People in law enforcement. I’ve heard lots of bad things about you. Don’t expect any help from anyone.”

“Don’t worry, Alexander. I wouldn’t think of asking you for help.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I won’t ask you for help. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m kind of busy here.”

I looked up from the box and noticed that his lower lip had started quivering slightly, but he remained standing in front of my desk. He seemed to be having some kind of debate with himself about whether he should say what was on his mind. Finally, he spit it out.

“How’s that sister of yours? Still a drug addict and a thief?”

It was true. Sarah had been a drug addict and a thief in the past, but she’d been clean for more than a year. She’d replaced her drug addiction with religious fervor, but given a choice between the two extremes, I’d take good old Southern Baptist fanaticism every time.

I forced myself to smile at him, but my blood pressure was steadily rising.

“I’m tired, Alexander,” I said through clenched teeth. “It’s been an extremely difficult first day on the job, and I think you should leave now.”

“It’s a shame,” he said, “having an assistant district attorney whose sister is a career criminal. It doesn’t look good for the office.”

“Maybe you should take it up with the boss.”

“Maybe I will.” He sounded like a fifth grader.

“Let me help you with the door,” I said, and I moved quickly around the desk towards him. I was a good five inches taller than him and at least forty pounds heavier. He started backing towards the door as though he were afraid I’d pull a gun and shoot him if he took his eyes off of me. He opened his mouth to say something else, but I raised an index finger to my lips.

“Shhh. I’m not sure what might happen if you start talking again.”

His eyes opened even wider. A trembling hand found the doorknob behind him. The door squeaked as it opened, and he turned and slithered out.

I stood there staring at the door for almost a full minute with the insult about Sarah ringing in my ears. I was consciously trying to slow my heart rate when I saw the doorknob turn. I couldn’t believe it. The little fool was coming back, probably to get one last shot in. I made it to the door in two steps and jerked it open.

Rita, pulled off balance by the force of the opening door, stumbled into my arms.

“Oh, my God, Rita!” I said, horrified. She backed up a step and smoothed her dress, the excess of her breasts escaping from her D-cups like wild horses from a corral. “I thought you were… I thought-”

“Don’t you pay any attention to him,” she said. “He’s just jealous is all.”

“You were listening?”

“I knew he’d do something like that. He’s been upset ever since he found out you were coming to work here.”

“He’s an asshole.”

“Of the greatest magnitude, honey,” Rita said. “But you still need to be careful how you handle him. Lee protects him.”

“Why? Why is that incompetent little jerk even working here?”

“Because the boss’s wife just happens to be Alexander’s daddy’s sister, and he’s her favorite nephew. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that blood’s thicker than water. Especially around here.”

I knew exactly what she meant. Nepotism was alive and well in northeast Tennessee. The county clerk’s office, the tax assessor’s office, the county highway department, the sheriff’s department, and the school system were all staffed by the sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, and cousins of county commissioners and their spouses. In the past, I’d always found the practice to be somewhat amusing-the hicks perpetuating their own myth-but this was different.

“So I’m stuck with him,” I said, “no matter what he does.”

“You step lightly around him,” Rita said. “He’s not very smart, but he’s mean as a striped snake.”

Monday, September 15

I held my first press conference as an assistant district attorney late that afternoon on the courthouse steps. Lee Mooney asked me to bail him out, so I did, albeit reluctantly. I kept the details to a minimum and got out of there as quickly as I could.

I moved slowly the rest of the day, exhausted. After leaving the scene where the Beck family had been murdered shortly after eleven the night before, I’d taken the long way home and sneaked into the house so I wouldn’t wake Caroline. I didn’t want to describe to her what I’d seen, to try to put the horror into words. I went into the den and mindlessly watched television until after midnight, then lay on the couch and tried to sleep. I tossed and turned until an hour before dawn, the grotesque image of the broken legs running back and forth across my mind like an ember glowing in the night wind.

I finally finished setting up my office a little after five. Besides Alexander, there were four other young lawyers in the office, and not one of them said a word to me all day. Before I left, I called Fraley to see if there was anything new to report. The only thing the canvass had provided was a witness at a house nearby who said she saw two people in black clothes and white makeup get out of the Becks’ van sometime just after dark. I headed home.

We lived on ten acres on a bluff overlooking Boone Lake in a house built primarily of cedar, stone, and glass. I loved the house and the property, and I loved the woman and the dog I shared it with. The back was almost all glass and faced north towards the lake. The views, especially when the leaves turned in October and November, were spectacular. Rio greeted me with his usual enthusiasm, and once I calmed him down, I found Caroline in the bathroom, topless. She was standing in front of the mirror prodding her left breast near the nipple with her index finger. The sight made me more than a little anxious.

“It’s bigger,” she said, referring to a small lump just beneath the areola. “And it’s hard. It’s spreading out like a spiderweb.”

“Have you called the doctor?” I said, keeping my distance. She was so sexy without the top that I knew I’d have trouble keeping my hands to myself, but it obviously wasn’t the time.

“Not yet.”

“Don’t you think you should?”

“Probably, but I think it’s just some kind of cyst. I’m too young to have breast cancer. And besides, there’s no history of it in my family. I asked my mother about it. No history at all.”

Caroline was so vital that it was difficult for me to even comprehend the notion that she might have cancer. She’d been dancing and teaching all her life: ballet, jazz, tap, and acrobatics, so she was in great shape. She’d noticed the lump, which had started out like a bee sting, almost three months earlier. I’d noticed it too, during moments when a lump in her breast was the last thing I wanted to think about. But it was there, and it was growing.

“Caroline, you need to go to the doctor,” I said. “Wait, let me rephrase that. Caroline, you’re going to the doctor. Tomorrow, or as soon as she can see you. If you won’t call and set it up, I’ll do it myself.”

“I’ll do it,” she said, turning away from the mirror and towards me. “I’ll call her tomorrow. I just dread it.”

Still topless, she reached up to hug me. “Are you okay? The murders have been all over the news. It’s terrible, Joe. Who could kill a child?”

“I’ll let you know as soon as we find out.”

“Do you have any idea?”

“None. The agents are working around the clock, but we just don’t know yet. Maybe we’ll get a break soon.” She smelled inviting.

“They said the police found the van.”

“Yeah. They’re processing it now.”

“Great way to start the new job, huh?”

“Just my luck.”

I could feel the warmth of her skin through my shirt. I pulled her closer.

“Sorry, big boy,” she said. “Sarah’s coming over.”

“Sarah? Why?”

“She’s leaving tomorrow, remember? I’ve got steak in the refrigerator.”

“Damn, I forgot all about it.”

My sister, the object of Alexander Dunn’s earlier insult, was a year older than me. She was a black-haired, green-eyed, hard-bodied beauty who leaned towards extremism in all things and had spent most of her adult life addicted to alcohol and cocaine. We’d been close as children until one summer evening when she was nine years old. That night, my uncle Raymond, who was sixteen at the time, raped her while he was supposed to be looking after the two of us at my grandmother’s house. My grandparents and mother had gone out shopping, and I’d drifted off to sleep while watching a baseball game on television. I heard Sarah’s cries, the pain in her voice, and I went into my grandparents’ bedroom and tried to stop him, but Raymond picked me up and threw me out of the room, nearly knocking me unconscious in the process. When it was over, he threatened to kill both of us if we ever told anyone.

Sarah and I went in different directions after that. I became an overachiever, subconsciously trying to prove to myself that I wasn’t a coward, while she became a suspicious, defiant, self-destructive rebel. She’d been convicted of theft and drug possession half a dozen times, and had spent a fair amount of time in jail. But last year, not long after our mother died, she and I had finally talked about the rape and its effect on our lives. Our relationship improved dramatically after that, and so did Sarah’s life, or at least that was how it appeared. After she was released from jail a year ago, she’d moved into my mother’s house, started going to Narcotics Anonymous meetings, and, to my knowledge, had been clean and sober ever since. She’d met a man at her NA meetings named Robert Godsey whom she said she loved. She was moving to Crossville, Tennessee, the next day to be near him.

Sarah told me her new boyfriend had been clean for five years, but I was concerned. Godsey had been a probation officer in Washington County for at least a decade, and I’d run across him several times in the past. My impression of him wasn’t good, although I hadn’t said a word about it to Sarah. I remembered Godsey as a belligerent hard-ass, always filing violation warrants against his probationers for the tiniest of infractions. He was also a sanctimonious zealot, a man who apparently thought he knew all the answers to questions involving faith and eternity. I’d heard him harangue people in the courthouse hallways about getting right with the Lord more times than I cared to remember. One time a few years ago, I’d seen him back a young woman against the wall with his chest and shove her face with the heel of his hand. I started to confront him, but by the time I broke away from my client he’d stormed out the door. Now he’d transferred to Crossville, and he was taking my sister with him.

Rio began to bark at the front door.

“She’s early,” Caroline said.

I walked through the house, quieted the dog, and opened the door. Sarah stepped inside, wearing black jeans and a pink, V-necked pullover top with short sleeves. I noticed she was wearing a silver fish on a chain around her neck. I’d never seen it before.

“Nice necklace,” I said. Sarah’s conversion to Christianity had been both recent and complete. Caroline and I had gone to her baptism back in mid-August. The ceremony was held on the bank of the Nolichucky River behind the tiny Calvary Baptist Church near Telford where Robert Godsey was a part-time pastor. Godsey himself had immersed her in the brackish water.

“Thanks, Robert gave it to me.”

“Come on in.” I kissed her on the cheek. “Let’s go sit out on the deck. I’ll get you a glass of sweet tea.”

A few minutes later, we were sitting on the deck beneath cirrus clouds that drifted high across the sky like giant kites. I looked beyond Sarah at the pale green lake below, the late-afternoon sun glistening off the ripples like thousands of tiny pieces of hammered gold. An easy breeze was blowing, so pleasant that I thought of falling asleep.

“You okay?” she said. “You look tired.”

“I’ll be fine as long as we don’t talk about the murders. I need to think about something else for a while.”

“No problem. The thought of them sickens me. Where’s Caroline?” Her lips turned upward when she mentioned Caroline. Sarah had a terrific smile, with deep dimples like miniature crescent moons.

“In the bathroom. She’ll be out in a few. I think she’s planning on grilling steak. You hungry?”

“Sounds great.”

“All packed and ready to go?”

“I guess so.”

“When do you start the new job?”

Robert Godsey’s father owned an insurance agency in Crossville. Sarah was going to work for him as a receptionist.

“I start next week.”

I took a deep breath and braced myself. I didn’t want to get into an argument with her on her last day in town, but there was something I wanted to get off my chest.

“Can I ask you a question without you getting all pissed off at me?” I said.

Her eyebrows arched.

“I’m serious. You know I love you and I only want the best for you.”

“You’re already hedging. What is it?”

“I guess I just want to ask you whether you’re sure about this. Really sure. You’ve only known this guy for a couple of months.”

“His name is Robert, and I’ve known him for close to a year.”

“But you’ve only been dating for a couple of months.”

“Three months, almost four,” she said.

“Exactly. So why do you feel the need to pack up and move almost two hundred miles away? Are you sure you don’t want to try the long-distance-relationship thing for a while and see how it goes? Get to know him a little better?”

“I’m leaving. The decision’s been made.”

“I know, but humor me for a minute. Does he make you thumpy?”

“Thumpy?”

“You know, pitty-pat. Fluttery. Heart pounding inside the chest when he comes into the room, that kind of thing. Caroline still does that to me.”

“I guess so.”

“You see? That’s what I mean. If he really made you thumpy, you’d know exactly what I’m talking about.”

“I’m not a teenager. It isn’t puppy love.”

“So you love him. You’re sure you love him.”

“He’s made me a better person. He led me to Jesus.”

“I think you were a good person before, and I guess that’s what’s really bothering me. Tell me this: Would you be going to Crossville if you hadn’t been baptized? Would Godsey accept you if you weren’t a born-again Christian? Or was that part of the deal?”

Sarah’s green eyes tightened. She’d always been quick-tempered, and I could see lines begin to stretch towards her temples like tiny pieces of white thread, a sure sign I’d made her angry.

“How dare you say something like that to me,” she said. “I think you’re jealous. I think you hate the fact that I’m growing beyond you, that I’m leaving you behind in more ways than one.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re a sinner, a nonbeliever. You have no faith. You think when you die you’re just going to rot in the ground, that there’s nothing beyond what you can see and touch and smell. I used to think the same thing, but I don’t anymore. I think you envy me for it.”

“You’re wrong. I’m worried about you.”

“Do you know what God did for you, Joe?” she said, the pitch of her voice rising. “Do you know He gave his only son for you? His only son? So you could be forgiven and have salvation? Think about that. Think about what a tremendous sacrifice that was.”

“I don’t want to debate the Christian religion with you, Sarah. I want you to think about what you’re doing. I don’t think this guy is right for you. I don’t think this whole thing is right for you.”

“I don’t care what you think.” She stood up from the table and picked up her purse.

“What are you doing?” I said. “Are you leaving? Can’t we have a civilized discussion about this?”

I got up and followed her back through the house.

“Wait,” I said. “C’mon, Sarah, please don’t leave. I’m sorry. I won’t say another word about it. Stay and eat.”

She kept walking.

“At least say good-bye to Caroline.”

She stormed out the front door and down the sidewalk. About halfway to her car, she stopped and turned around.

“Tell Caroline I said good-bye,” she said. “And tell her I’m sorry she’s married to an atheist. You’re going to hell, Joe. I feel sorry for you.”

“How’d you get roped into this?” Sheriff Leon Bates said. He was sitting in my office in his khaki uniform with brown epaulets.

“I volunteered for it, believe it or not,” I said.

Two months earlier, before I went to work for the DA’s office, Sheriff Bates and Judge Ivan Glass had gotten into a highly publicized pissing match. A public defender had filed a routine motion to suppress evidence in a drunk-driving case. During the hearing, a question arose about one of the sheriff’s department’s policies in giving Breathalyzer tests. Rather than take a recess and send someone to get a policies-and-procedures manual, Judge Glass ordered a bailiff to contact the sheriff and tell him to come to court immediately to clear up the matter. The bailiff called the sheriff, and the sheriff replied that he was busy, that he was an elected official just like the judge and that the judge didn’t have the authority to order him to court. Glass told the bailiff to call the sheriff back and tell him he’d be held in contempt if he didn’t show up in fifteen minutes. Sheriff Bates replied, “With all due respect, tell the court he can kiss my biscuits.”

Enraged, Judge Glass drafted a petition and charged Bates with contempt of court, a misdemeanor offense but still a crime. In order for Glass to convict Bates, the district attorney’s office had to prosecute the case in court. My second day on the job, Lee Mooney called me into his office and outlined the case for me. We both agreed that the judge had acted improperly, that there was no factual basis for the charge, and that the district attorney’s office should recommend immediate dismissal.

“Would you mind handling it in court?” Mooney had said. “I don’t want to get myself into the same situation as Bates.”

“I’d be happy to,” I said. “Judge Glass is one of my least-favorite people on the planet.”

Judge Ivan Glass and I had battled each other for more than a decade when I was practicing criminal defense. I’d successfully sued him when I was a rookie to make him stop jailing people who couldn’t afford to pay their fines and court costs, and he’d returned the favor by making me and my clients miserable at every opportunity. A little over a year earlier, he’d attempted to send my sister to the penitentiary for six years. I managed to keep him from doing so, but the hard feelings still lingered.

The day of the hearing on the Sheriff Bates contempt charge had arrived, and Bates was in my office for some last-minute counseling. I’d talked to him several times over the past forty-eight hours, and had come to genuinely like him. He was a tall, sturdy man in his mid-forties with light brown hair, brown eyes, a slightly crooked nose, and a mischievous grin. He was as country as they came, but he had a keen mind and a no-nonsense attitude when it came to law enforcement. Bates had been in office for less than two years, but his department had already made more drug arrests than his predecessor did during his entire eight-year term. He’d also begun to take on the local underground gambling industry, a move that was unprecedented in northeast Tennessee.

“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate y’all doing this,” Bates said. “I was afraid I was gonna have to go out and hire me some shark defense lawyer. Just like you used to be.”

“No offense taken,” I said, “and I’m glad to do it. It’ll feel good to put Glass in his place for a change.”

“He’s gonna be one pissed-off hombre, especially with all the folks I’ve got coming.”

I’d asked Sheriff Bates whether he could pack the courtroom. He was a popular sheriff, and since the judge was also a politician, I thought things might go a bit more smoothly if Glass had to face a courtroom full of constituents.

“How many are coming?” I said.

“I reckon there’ll be quite a few.”

“Almost time. Are you ready to go?”

“I’m nervous as a whore in church, but I’m ready.”

“Just let me do all the talking.”

I led Bates out the door and down the hall to the back steps. We walked in silence until I went through the side door into the courtroom.

“Wow,” I said. “This’ll shake him up.”

The courtroom was packed with the good citizens of Washington County. Every seat was occupied, people were standing against both of the side walls, and there was a line outside the door. As soon as Bates walked in, everyone stood and a loud round of applause broke out. The door to the judge’s chamber was closed, but I saw Glass peek out to see what all the commotion was about. His clerk had already taken her spot next to the bench, and the bailiffs were at their stations.

“Let’s sit here,” I said to the sheriff, pointing to the table traditionally used by the defense.

We sat down, as did everyone else in the courtroom. There was an eerie silence while everyone waited for the judge to appear. After several minutes, the door to his chambers opened and Glass, wearing his ancient black robe that was frayed around the sleeves, hobbled carefully up the steps to his bench as the bailiff called court into session. I hadn’t seen him for more than a year, and I was pleased to see that he looked awful. His face was colorless and gaunt, and his mane of white hair-of which he’d always been so proud-had lost its luster. Before, he’d carried himself as a smug adjudicator, one who believed himself to be morally and intellectually superior to others in every way. Now he just looked like a crotchety old man.

Glass sat down and surveyed the courtroom. When his gaze landed on me, he stared at me through his tinted glasses, a look of disgust on his face.

“I thought you went to work for the district attorney,” he snarled.

“I did,” I said without standing.

“Then what are you doing at the defense table?”

“Representing my client.”

“Is the sheriff your client?”

“My clients are the people of Tennessee,” I said, feeling a bit silly at the pomposity of my own words, “and it looks like several of them have shown up today.”

A murmur went up behind me, and Glass raised his gavel. “I don’t know what all you people think you’re doing here,” he bellowed, “but if I hear a peep out of any of you I’ll have you removed from the courtroom immediately. I’m not going to allow myself to be intimidated by a mob.”

“Stop acting like a jerk!” a voice called from the back of the courtroom. The remark was followed by a loud cheer and a round of applause.

“Order!” Glass yelled as the gavel banged. “Order or I’ll clear this courtroom! Bailiffs! I’m ordering you to arrest the next person who opens his mouth!

“Call the case,” Glass barked at his clerk.

The clerk called the case of The State of Tennessee v. Leon Bates.

“Let the record show that Mr. Bates has been summoned here to answer to a charge of contempt filed by this court,” Glass said. “The court is present, the clerk is present, the prosecutor and the defendant are both present. Mr. Bates, since you don’t have an attorney, I assume you’re representing yourself.”

I stood and cleared my throat, more than a little nervous. I knew I was right, but taking on a man as powerful as a criminal court judge was always an uncomfortable experience.

“Mr. Bates doesn’t need an attorney,” I said.

“Oh, really?” Glass sneered. “And why is that?”

“Because the district attorney’s office refuses to prosecute him.”

Glass’s mouth dropped open and his complexion darkened immediately. He leaned forward on his elbows, his lips almost touching his microphone.

“Did I just hear you correctly, Mr. Dillard? Did I just hear you say that the district attorney is refusing to prosecute this case?”

“The charge has no basis in law or fact, Judge. You can’t convict an elected official of contempt of court because he refused to appear when you called him on the telephone. You could have recessed the hearing and subpoenaed him, you could have sent someone over to the sheriff’s department to get a copy of the manual, or you could have recessed court and held the hearing at a time that was convenient for Sheriff Bates. But you have neither the jurisdiction nor the authority to simply call an elected sheriff on the phone and demand that he appear in court, and you certainly don’t have the authority to charge him with a crime when he doesn’t.”

The courtroom was absolutely still, the tension palpable. I was sure that Glass had never encountered a prosecutor who wouldn’t do exactly as he ordered, and I had a pretty good idea of how he would react. I braced for the threat and told myself to hold his stare and just keep breathing steadily.

“What I can do is hold you in contempt of court in the presence of the court and deal with it summarily,” Glass said. His lips were barely moving, his tone full of anger and hatred. “I can fine you or send you off to jail, and I fully intend to if you don’t do your job and prosecute this case.”

“Go ahead, Judge,” I said. “The first thing I’ll do is file a complaint with the court of the judiciary and seek to have you suspended or removed from office. The second thing I’ll do is sue you, and after that, I’ll humiliate you in front of the court of appeals.”

I held my breath, waiting for the explosion. Glass was infamous for his temper and for the pleasure he took in browbeating and bullying attorneys and defendants. I saw him draw in a deep breath, but then he sat back in his high-backed leather chair and began to contemplate the ceiling. Finally, he leaned forward and looked at the audience.

“Perhaps Mr. Dillard is right,” he said. “Perhaps I acted hastily, even unreasonably. But I hope you good people will give me credit for recognizing my mistake and for dealing with it in a reasonable and appropriate manner. Mr. Dillard, after these fine people vacate the courtroom, I’d like to see you in my chambers. Sheriff Bates, the charge against you is dismissed with my apologies.”

The courtroom erupted again in cheers and applause. As Glass made a hasty exit, dozens of people surged forward, clapping Bates on the shoulder and congratulating him on his victory. I was pleased for Bates, but I knew that the rift between Glass and me had just been raised to a new level. There was no way I was going back to his chambers. He hadn’t ordered me to come to his chambers. He’d said, “I’d like to see you in my chambers.” I took that as a request, and chose to deny it. I wasn’t in the mood to listen to any more of his threats. I just wanted to bask in the glow of kicking his belligerent ass in front of three hundred people. I slipped out the side door and took a seat in the jury room. I left the door open and waited until I saw Bates pass by.

“Hey, Leon,” I said as I caught up with him in the hallway, “congratulations.”

Bates stopped and turned around, a wide grin spread across his face.

“Brother, I ain’t never heard nobody talk to a judge like that,” he said. “You got the cojones of a Brahma bull.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Let’s just hope I never give him a chance to cut them off.”

Thursday, September 18

When I got back from lunch that same day, there was a note stuck to my door from Lee Mooney asking me to come to the conference room as soon as possible. I walked in to find Mooney sitting at the table with a young man I didn’t recognize. On top of the table was an evidence box.

“There’s the man right now,” Mooney said as he stood up. “We were just talking about you. I heard you handled yourself very well in front of Judge Glass this morning.”

“I don’t think I’ll be invited to his retirement party,” I said.

“Shit, he’ll never retire,” Mooney said. “The only way he comes off of that bench is in a casket. But don’t worry about it. You made plenty of other friends today, especially Sheriff Bates. He thinks you’re a one-man dream team. Come on over here. I want to introduce you to someone.”

The young man at the table stood up and offered his hand. He was a good-looking kid, late twenties, around six feet tall with short, straw-colored hair, blue eyes, and a square jaw.

“This is Cody Masters,” Mooney said. “Investigator Cody Masters from the Jonesborough Police Department.” I vaguely recalled hearing or reading the name somewhere.

“Joe Dillard,” I said, returning the smile.

“Have a seat,” Mooney said. “We’ve got a little problem, and we think you’re just the man to solve it. Cody has a case coming up for trial next month, and I want you to handle it. It’s a sexual abuse case that got a lot of publicity a couple of years ago. You might remember it. What did they call it in the papers, Cody?”

Masters blushed a little and dropped his head, obviously embarrassed.

“The Pizza Bordello case,” he said.

“I remember that,” I said. “The guy who owned Party Pizza in Jonesborough. What was his name?”

“William Trent,” Mooney said.

“Wow, that’s still around?”

“Afraid so, and it’s set for trial on October fourteenth. Can you do it?”

“You’re not giving me much time to get ready,” I said. “Who was handling it before?”

“Alexander,” Mooney said. “But after the disaster with Billy Dockery, we can’t afford to take another beating on a high-profile case. I want you to try to work out some kind of deal, but if you can’t, you have to win at trial.”

It sounded like an ultimatum. “And if I lose?” I said.

“Let’s not even think about that,” Mooney said as he stood up. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll let you two boys get acquainted.”

I looked at Masters and shook my head. “Maybe I should have stayed retired,” I said. “Why don’t you fill me in?”

For the next half hour, I listened while Cody Masters told me about William Trent, a thirty-five-year-old husband and father of two who had opened a small pizza restaurant in Jonesborough a decade earlier. He was a member of the chamber of commerce, a Little League coach, and a deacon at the Presbyterian church. He was also, from what Masters told me, one very sick son of a bitch.

A couple of years earlier, Masters was approached by two seventeen-year-old girls who told him that William Trent had been having sex with both of them for two years. Both were former employees of Trent’s, and they told Masters a lurid tale. Trent, they said, hired only young girls who he believed would have sex with him. The girls were usually from broken homes, impoverished, weren’t good students-the kind of kids most employers would shy away from. Trent let them know on the front end that certain things would be required of them if they worked at his restaurant, things that he termed “unconventional.” The girls said Trent kept pornography running on a computer screen in the back office, hosted lingerie parties for the employees in the restaurant after hours, kept a small refrigerator in the kitchen stocked with liquor, and occasionally provided cocaine, crystal meth, or marijuana. He also started them at ten dollars an hour, almost double the minimum wage. The girls said there was an unspoken allegiance among the employees-what happened at work stayed at work.

Trent immediately went about seducing them, and from what they told Masters, Trent’s sexual appetite was insatiable. They had sex with him in the walk-in cooler, on the table in the kitchen where the pizza dough was rolled, in the bathrooms, on the counter and on the tables in the front after the restaurant closed, and his car in the parking lot out back. He wanted threesome sex, oral sex, anal sex, sex in bizarre positions-they even let him penetrate them with a catsup bottle a couple of times. And he insisted that the girls use birth control, because he refused to wear a condom.

Masters told me that at least ten girls were involved over a three-year period, although some of the girls refused to cooperate with the police. The big problem with the case, Masters said, was that he was a rookie when he first met the girls, that the district attorneys were all away at their annual conference in Nashville, and that he had made several early mistakes that Trent’s lawyer would undoubtedly bring up at trial.

“I probably should have waited until the DAs got back,” Masters said, “but I wanted to get him off the streets. It made me so mad I threw the freaking book at him. I charged him with forty-two felonies. About half of them were aggravated rape and aggravated kidnapping. I tacked on statutory rape, aggravated sexual battery, sexual battery by an authority figure, you name it. He was looking at about twelve hundred years in prison. But his wife posted his bail and they hired Joe Snodgrass from Knoxville. He made me look like a fool at the preliminary hearing.”

I knew Joe Snodgrass by reputation only. He ran one of the most successful criminal defense firms in the state. He’d been the president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and president of the Tennessee Trial Lawyers Association. He had a good reputation as a trial lawyer, and he’d written books on criminal procedure and pretrial litigation in criminal cases.

“What was the problem?” I said.

“I didn’t read the statutes right. Hell, I’m not a lawyer. All of the aggravated rape charges and all of the aggravated kidnapping charges got thrown out after the preliminary. And Snodgrass made the girls look like trashy little whores.”

“What kind of evidence do you have?”

“Not typical rape evidence,” he said. “We don’t have any sperm or DNA, no bruises on any of the victims, no-”

“Wait just a second,” I said, holding up my hand to stop him. “Do you have any physical evidence at all?”

“Not really,” Masters said, shaking his head. “All we have are statements from some of the girls and a diary. Oh, and I got his payroll records so I could make sure the girls were working on the days when they say they had sex with him.”

“How many girls?”

“I think only four are still willing to cooperate.”

“Does Trent have any priors?”

“None.”

“What about the computer at the restaurant? Did you have a forensics expert check it to see whether he was really going to porn sites?”

“I did, but it came up empty. After we got it back from the lab, I had one of the girls come down to the office and she said it wasn’t the same computer. He must have gotten wind we were coming.”

I sat back and thought for a few minutes. Lee was asking me to prosecute what boiled down to a multiple statutory rape case with no physical evidence and victims who were, at the very least, young girls of questionable character. The two I knew about had both said they’d engaged in consensual sex with their boss for a long period of time. The man accused of committing the crimes was a father, husband, reputable businessman, active in his church and community, and had never been in trouble before. He was also obviously well financed. I had only a few weeks to prepare, and in the meantime, I was supposed to be helping with the most intense murder investigation in the history of the district. What was it Lee had said when I met with him before I took the job? Easy money?

“I’m sorry, Mr. Dillard,” Masters said. “I may have screwed this up beyond repair.”

“Call me Joe,” I said, “and don’t worry about it. It would’ve been better if you’d waited until the DAs got back, and it would’ve been a lot better if you’d had the girls wear a wire, but it was a rookie mistake. No sense beating yourself up about it. What charges are left that we can prove?”

“After the preliminary hearing went so badly, Lee got involved for a week or so,” Masters said. “One of the girls kept a diary, and Lee used it to convince the grand jury to indict Trent on ten counts of sexual abuse by an authority figure. We could have charged him with more than a hundred counts, but Lee didn’t want to spend six months at trial proving all of them. He said if everything went well, Trent would wind up with thirty years.”

“Did you say he used a diary to get the indictment?” I said.

“Yeah. Why?”

“Because we can’t use it at trial.”

“We can’t? Why the hell not?”

“It’s hearsay, and it doesn’t fall under any of the exceptions to the hearsay rule.”

“So what are we going to do? We don’t have shit other than the girls’ statements.”

“I’ll figure something out. In the meantime, I want you to go back and reinterview every single employee who worked there for the three years before he was arrested. If any of them will admit to having sex with him, and if they’ll come testify, we can prove a pattern of conduct. Once you get them lined up, I want to talk to all of them.”

“Done,” Masters said.

“When you did the preliminary hearing, did you get any sense of what the defense is going to be?”

“From the way the lawyer was questioning them, it looked like he was going to make them all out to be liars.”

“So Trent is going to deny having any kind of sexual contact with any of his employees?”

“That’s what he said when I arrested him.”

“Did he give you a statement?”

“Nope. Lawyered up five minutes in. Acted like he didn’t have a care in the world.”

“Go ahead and get started on your interviews as soon as you can,” I said. “Keep in mind that in order to convict him under the authority-figure statute, we have to prove three things. We have to prove there was sexual contact between him and the girls, we have to prove the girls were between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, and we have to prove that he had supervisory power over them by virtue of his occupation. The last two will be easy, but the first one will be the key.”

“You know something?” Masters said. “Even if these girls aren’t as pure as the driven snow, no grown man should be allowed to take advantage of them like that. They’re just kids. They were only fifteen years old when he started having sex with them.”

Masters slid the evidence box across the table towards me.

“All the statements, the payroll records, and the diary are in here,” he said. “You want to take a look?”

“Give the diary back to the girl,” I said. “Have her bring it when she comes in to talk to me. I’ll read it then. I’ll take the rest of it home with me.”

Masters shrugged his shoulders and took the diary out of the box. As I’d talked to him, an idea had formed in my mind, but the less he knew about it, the better.

“Guess I’d better get to work,” Masters said as he rose, stretched, and started for the door.

“One more thing,” I said. “Why did these girls decide to come forward after all this time?”

“They didn’t come right out and say it, but I think it was jealousy more than anything else,” Masters said. “Trent let both of them go and replaced them with a couple of fifteen-year-olds. I guess he was tired of them.”

“Women scorned, huh?”

“You got it. Hell hath no fury.”

Nearly two weeks had passed since the Becks were murdered, and despite the fact that Fraley and his fellow agents were working up to fifteen, twenty hours a day, they hadn’t been able to identify a suspect. Dozens of tips had come over the CrimeStoppers line, and we’d made a public request for help, but the killers were still on the loose, and we were no closer to catching them.

On Thursday morning, Caroline and I were sitting in a tiny, cramped office inside the Johnson City Breast Care Center. A silent nurse had led us there quickly upon our arrival. As I looked around, I could see it was an office where only one person worked, probably someone who entered data into a computer. There were three chairs that looked as though they’d been placed hurriedly and haphazardly, one at the computer and two just inside the door. It was a lousy place to tell someone they had cancer, if that was what we were there for.

Caroline had already been through all the tests. Her primary-care doctor had ordered a mammogram and a chest X-ray. I’d gone with her to both appointments, although she insisted she could handle it without me. She kept telling me I should be at work, but I insisted on going with her.

The mammogram showed a suspicious shadow. The doctor who read it wasn’t able to make a diagnosis. She said from one angle, the mass looked like a benign cyst. From another angle, it looked like it could be something else. There was a 95 percent chance it was a cyst, she said, but just to be safe, she wanted a biopsy. The X-ray had been inconclusive. Caroline had gone in four days later for the biopsy. We were there for the results.

Caroline sat down in one of the chairs. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a short-sleeved, red T-shirt. Plain attire, but she made the jeans look fantastic. She’d been quiet on the ride into town, and there was a distance in her eyes that told me she was frightened.

“Why couldn’t they just call us?” she said. “Why do they make us come all the way up here?”

I didn’t want to think about the obvious answer to the question.

“Maybe they want to show you the lab report,” I said. “They’re probably just covering their butts from a law-suit in case something goes wrong later.”

She gave me a look of uncertainty.

“Ninety-five percent,” I said. “There’s a ninety-five-percent chance you’re clean, plus the fact that you’re young and you have no history of cancer in your family. You’re going to be fine.”

“What if it’s bad?” she said.

“If it’s bad, we deal with it. Think positive.”

There was a soft knock on the door and it opened. Into the room stepped a black-haired, thirty-something male wearing a white shirt, brown tie, and khaki pants. There was a pager on his belt. I assumed he was a doctor. Behind him was a chubby woman wearing a colorful print smock. I barely looked at her. There were now four of us in a room designed for one. I was beginning to feel a bit claustrophobic.

“Mrs. Dillard?” the man said.

Caroline nodded.

“And you are…?” He looked at me.

“Her husband,” I said.

“My name is Dr. Jameson,” he said, ignoring the woman behind him.

I reached out and took Caroline’s hand. Maybe it was the somber tone of his voice, but I knew this was going to be bad.

“As you know, we’ve conducted a biopsy on the mass in your left breast. I have the results here, and I’m afraid the news isn’t what you want to hear. The tests are positive for cancer, Mrs. Dillard. Invasive ductal carcinoma. I’m sorry.”

I heard the breath rush involuntarily out of Caroline’s body. My own mind went temporarily blank, as though I’d been blasted with a thousand volts of electricity. I looked at her, she looked at me, and in that moment-that awful moment that I’ll remember until the day I die-we were connected by something I would never have dreamed possible. It was fear. Pure, unadulterated fear. Neither of us could speak.

I could see that Caroline was fighting to hold back the tears, fighting to keep her composure in front of these strangers. Dr. Doom and his assistant were hovering awkwardly. Finally, I spoke.

“Could you give us a minute?”

“Certainly,” the doctor said. He appeared relieved to have been given permission to leave the room. The two of them turned and walked out without another word.

I pushed the door closed and turned to Caroline. Tears were already streaming down both of her cheeks. I reached down and helped her out of the chair, wrapped my arms around her, and held the only woman I’ve ever loved. Her shoulders heaved, and she began to sob.

“Let it go,” I whispered. “Let it go.” I knew there was nothing I could say or do that would alleviate the shock and the terror of the diagnosis she’d just received, and as she stood there, leaning on me and sobbing, I tried to think of what I’d say when she was finished. After a few minutes, the storm began to subside, and I took a small step back. I took her face in my hands and looked into her eyes.

“You’ll beat it,” I said, wiping her tears away with my thumbs. It was all I could do to keep from breaking down and sobbing right along with her. “You’ll beat it. Whatever it takes, whatever you have to do, you’ll do it. I know you, Caroline. You’re as strong as they come, and you’ve got a thousand reasons to stick around, not the least of which is standing right here in front of you. I’ll help you. I’ll do anything you need. The kids will help you. Lots of people will help. You won’t go through this alone. I promise.”

I don’t know whether it was the look on my face, or some gesture I made, or some tone of desperation in my voice that reached her. It had to be something discernible only to a lifelong lover and friend, because I didn’t consciously do anything that would have caused her to do what she did next, something that took me completely by surprise.

She wiped a final tear from her cheek with the back of her hand and took a long, slow breath. Then she looked into my eyes, smiled, and said, “Don’t worry, baby. I won’t leave you. I’ll never leave you. Why don’t you tell the doctor to come back in?”

Sunday, September 28

Norman Brockwell was sixty-six years old.

An English teacher for nearly twenty years. Coach of the Washington County High School basketball team for eight years. And then the big break-appointed by the superintendent to serve as principal of Washington County High School. Twenty-one years in that position.

Twenty-one years.

Two grown children, both educators. An elder at the Simerly Creek Church of Christ. A Cub Scout troop leader. Past president of the Kiwanis Club.

And this is how it ends? Blindfolded and gagged in the middle of nowhere, wearing my underwear, tied to a tree like a dog?

They’d arrived at his house less than an hour ago. He had no idea what time it was; he didn’t get a chance to put on his glasses and look at the clock. All he knew was that he’d gone to bed at midnight while a storm raged outside his window. He’d been asleep in his twin bed upstairs, across the hall from Gladys, a retired mathematics teacher and his wife of forty years. Cheeky, his teacup poodle, hadn’t made a sound until they came into the room. Cheeky had barked meekly, twice, then fallen silent.

That was when he sat up, or at least tried to.

He’d seen a bright flash as something struck him above the left eye, felt himself being rolled roughly onto his stomach. Felt the warm blood oozing from the wound and creeping down the side of his face. Then the blindfold went over his eyes, the gag went into his mouth, and his hands were bound with tape.

He wasn’t sure how many there were, but it seemed like a small army. Hushed voices, both male and female. Short, sharp commands.

They’d grabbed him up by his arms and walked him out the door, down the hall, and down the steps. They’d stuffed him into the trunk of what he guessed was a compact car of some sort, a compact car with a coughing engine and a faulty muffler. He’d ridden, tangled like a cord, in the trunk for maybe half an hour, the last minutes over extremely bumpy terrain.

Then they’d stopped. He heard the trunk lid open and was pulled out, once again by his arms. His joints shrieked as he was half guided, half dragged twenty steps or so. The ground beneath his bare feet was cold and wet, the air dead still. He smelled the clean scents of a mountain forest after a hard rain. They’d straightened him up and backed him against something hard. He knew now it was a tree.

A rope had been wrapped around him at least a dozen times, from waist to shoulders. He strained to see through the blindfold.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil… Gladys. What did they do to Gladys?

He listened. They were close to him now, in front of him. He could hear them breathing.

A female voice said, “Take off the blindfold and take the gag out.”

Footsteps approached. Fingers reached behind his head. And then it was off. Moonlight filtered through the canopy above, casting long shadows among the trees. The car engine was still running; the lights were on. The gag was removed and he filled his lungs. The smell of exhaust reached his nostrils.

Jesus Christ! Lord God help me! Jesus, Mother Mary, and Joseph! What the…?

There were three of them, fanned out in front of him less than ten feet away, facing him. They were… What were they? Ghouls? Vampires? Two of them appeared to be wearing black clothing and had long black hair. But their faces were bright white, even in the dim light. One of them, in the middle, was different. Was it a woman? Was this a nightmare? Please, God, let this be a nightmare!

“Who are you?” Norman Brockwell cried. “Who are you?”

The female at the center turned to her left.

“You picked him,” she said to the lanky figure standing next to her. “Tell him who you are.”

The tallest of them stepped forward. “Remember me, Mr. Brockwell?”

He could feel the boy’s breath on his face, smell the acrid aroma of stale beer. He squinted, studying the figure before him, listening to the voice. He’d heard it before. Suddenly he made the connection.

Boyer. Samuel Boyer. A freak. A rabble-rouser. One of the worst he’d ever encountered. He’d disciplined him, suspended him, and eventually expelled him when he brought a gun to school. What else could he do? There were hundreds of other students in that school who were good people. They didn’t deserve to be terrorized by the likes of …

“I brought a gun along,” Boyer said. Norman Brockwell saw Boyer’s lips curl into a half smile, half snarl. “How do you like it, Mr. Brockwell? How do you like feeling powerless? How do you like being humiliated?”

“Please, Samuel, I’m sorry,” he said. “What can I do to make it up to you? What can I do to make this right?”

Boyer stepped back abruptly.

“Blow for blow, scorn for scorn, doom for doom,” the girl said coldly. “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth. The vengeance of Satan is upon thee.”

The principal watched helplessly as the two on the outside raised pistols, their shiny surfaces glimmering in the moonlight.

“No! Wait, please!”

“Do it!” the girl said, turning her back. “Do it now!”

Norman Brockwell’s eyes glazed over and his chin dropped to his chest. “What did you do to my Gladys?” he asked softly.

And the night roared.

By Sunday, our family and friends had all been told about Caroline’s cancer and the rallying had begun. I thought the telephone call I made to our son, Jack, would be one of the most difficult things I’d ever done, but Jack didn’t panic. He took the news quietly and said he was driving home immediately from Vanderbilt. I tried to talk him out of it-there was nothing he could do-but he insisted. He just wanted to see her, he said. He wanted to hug her. The call to Lilly was more emotional, but the result was the same. She, too, headed straight home.

I woke up a little after five in the morning and couldn’t go back to sleep. Caroline was sleeping soundly, so I decided to wait until six thirty and then roust the kids. I wanted to take them to breakfast. I knew they’d rather sleep in, but we hadn’t had a chance to be alone and talk about what was going on with Caroline.

We got settled into a booth at the Sitting Bull Cafe in Gray. Both were sleepy-eyed and wearing hoodies. Sitting there looking at them, I couldn’t help thinking how lucky I was. Their appearances were opposite-Lilly was blond, green-eyed, and feminine, while Jack was dark-haired, brown-eyed, and rugged. They’d both grown into young adults I admired and respected. They both worked hard at the things they enjoyed, they treated other people with respect, they followed their conscience, and they loved to laugh. They’d had their share of problems and made their share of mistakes, but neither had managed to do anything dumb enough to have any lingering effects. I was grateful for them.

“I want to talk to you about your mom,” I said.

“What is there to talk about?” Jack said. “It is what it is.”

“She’s looking at a long, hard road.”

Both of them nodded without looking up from their menus.

“So how do you feel about it?” I said. “How are you doing?”

Lilly set the menu down and looked at me. “I’m scared,” she said. “It’s hard to think about her having cancer. It’s hard to think about her dying.”

“She’s not going to die,” Jack said.

“She could.”

“But she won’t. She’s too tough. She’ll probably outlive all of us.”

“I’ve been doing some reading,” I said. The truth was that I hadn’t done nearly as much reading as I could have, or should have. The nurses had loaded us down with pamphlets and the Internet was full of information, but once I understood the basics, I didn’t want to read any more. It wasn’t as though I could gain any control by gaining knowledge. Like Jack said, it was what it was.

“There’s been a lot of progress in the past twenty years,” I said. “Her chances of surviving are excellent, but she’s going to go through some rough times, and she’s going to go through some changes.”

“What do you mean?” Lilly said.

“Hormonal changes. Physical changes. She’ll have to go through chemotherapy. It’ll make her sick and she won’t feel like doing much some days. She’ll probably be cranky and irritable. It might even trigger early menopause. She’ll lose her appetite. She’ll lose all of her hair. She’ll probably lose the breast.”

“Better than the alternative,” Jack said.

“Yeah, it is. But I don’t want you guys feeling sorry for her; at least, I don’t want you showing her that you feel sorry for her. We have to treat her like we’ve always treated her. We have to keep her laughing. And I don’t want either one of you using this as an excuse to feel sorry for yourselves. Your friends will be coming around asking, ‘Are you okay? I’m so sorry about your mother.’ Especially your melodramatic girlfriends, Lilly. Remember, you’re not sick. She is. I don’t want to see any Lilly pity parties going on. We’re here to help any way we can. The more we help, the easier this will be on her. The best thing you guys can do for her is to keep on doing what you’ve always done. That makes her proud. That makes her happy.”

I waited for one of them to say, “Okay, Dad, we’re with you,” or “Don’t worry, Dad, we can handle this.” Instead, Jack looked over at Lilly and said, “What’d you think of it?”

She looked back at him, puzzled. “Think of what?”

“Dad’s speech.”

She grinned. “I thought the reference to my melodramatic friends and the pity party was uncalled-for, but other than that, it wasn’t too bad.”

“A little on the corny side,” Jack said.

The waitress was approaching.

“If you two are finished busting my balls, it’s time to order,” I said.

We spent the rest of the meal talking about other things, primarily the Beck murder case, which was no closer to being solved despite the intense pressure being applied by the media and every opportunistic politician within a hundred miles. We got back to the house around eight. Caroline was still asleep. Jack and Lilly wasted no time heading back towards their own beds.

I took Rio and went for a run, washed my truck, read the newspaper, and puttered around the house until noon. I helped Caroline get lunch ready while Jack and Lilly rode into town to pick up a book Lilly needed for school. After lunch, we decided we’d drive up to Red Fork Falls in Unicoi County and do a little hiking. We were just pulling out of the driveway when my cell phone rang.

It was Lee Mooney, and the news wasn’t good.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Caroline. “I have to go.”

Another gruesome trip, first to a modest ranch-style home in a tidy neighborhood outside Jonesborough, then to a remote area near Buffalo Mountain. Two more dreamlike walks through the scenes of unspeakable crimes.

The victims were Norman Brockwell and his wife, Gladys. Gladys had been beaten and stabbed to death in her bed at their home outside of Jonesborough. Her daughter discovered the body after Norman and Gladys failed to show up for church. Norman had apparently been kidnapped and taken to Buffalo Mountain, where he’d been tied to a tree and shot a dozen times. A couple of hunters scouting deer sign for the upcoming bow season had discovered him about the same time his daughter was discovering his wife. Norman had been shot through the right eye. Gladys had been stabbed in the right eye. “Ah Satan” had been carved into Norman’s forehead. Inverted crosses had been carved into both of their necks. The Brockwells’ dog, a tiny apricot teacup poodle, had been beaten to death, probably with the butt of a pistol.

I spent most of the afternoon in a haze of shock and disbelief. At seven, I met Lee Mooney in Jonesborough. He was waiting for me in a conference room just down the hall from my office. Sitting with him at the table were Jerry Blake, the Special Agent in Charge of the TBI office in Johnson City, Hank Fraley, the agent who was running point on the Beck case, and Sheriff Bates.

All of the murders had happened in the county, which fell under Bates’s jurisdiction, but because both Bates and his lead investigators were relatively inexperienced in murder investigations, Mooney had assigned the case to the TBI. That hadn’t stopped Bates from talking to the press about the case, but up to that point, he’d been excluded from the investigation.

“I want to form a task force,” Lee Mooney said as soon as I sat down. “And I want you to head it up.”

I looked at him, incredulous, then looked around the table at the others. The TBI agents were staring down at the table. Bates was looking at the ceiling.

“Me?” I said. “What the hell do I know about heading up a task force, Lee?”

“You’re a leader. People trust your judgment. And you know how to handle the press.”

“And who would make up this task force?”

“Five or six guys from the TBI. A couple of detectives from Johnson City. The sheriff and a few of his people. We might even be able to get one of the local FBI guys involved.”

Jerry Blake was fiddling with a notepad.

“How long have you been a cop, Jerry?” I asked.

“Close to twenty-five years.”

“Ever been on a task force?”

“A couple.”

“What do you think about them? Be honest. Are they effective?”

Blake gave Mooney a sideways glance. “They’re bullshit.”

“Why?”

“Turf wars, mostly. The different agencies don’t trust one another; then they want to take credit for anything good that happens and they want to blame anything bad on somebody else. Lots of egos involved. You wind up with too many chiefs and not enough warriors. You have communication problems. Things that ought to get done don’t get done. Information that ought to be shared doesn’t get shared. It just doesn’t work very well.”

“That’s what I thought,” I said. “The only time I’ve ever seen a task force formed is when the police aren’t making any progress in a case and they want the public to think they’re doing something.”

“But that’s exactly where we are, Joe,” Mooney said. “Word of these killings is already leaking out. By morning, everybody in northeast Tennessee is going to know about it, and we’re going to have a panic on our hands. We have to make people think we’re doing something.”

“Where are we now?” I said to Fraley. “What do you have that you didn’t have before?”

Fraley looked around nervously, as though he were afraid to share information with Bates in the room. Blake’s assertion about distrust between law enforcement agencies was already evident.

“We’re still nowhere,” he said quietly. “We’ve got more footprints that we’ll compare with the Beck murder scene. My guess is that some of them will match up. We’ve got more tire tracks, but we know they’re not from the same vehicle that was at the Beck murder scene. We’ll compare the shell casings and bullets to see if they match, and I’m betting they will. We’ve got two more bodies with crosses carved into them and wounds to their right eyes. They carved ‘ah Satan’ into Norman Brockwell’s forehead just like they did on Mr. Beck. We’ve got hair and fiber and a couple of latent prints from the Becks’ van, but we’ve run the latents through AFIS and haven’t found a match. We’ve got hair and fiber from the Brockwells’ home. We’ve got the rope they used to tie Mr. Brockwell to the tree. The medical examiner says Mrs. Brockwell was probably stabbed with an ice pick, but we don’t have the weapon. She also says Mr. Brockwell had abrasions on his back, elbows, and knees. She thinks he rode out to the woods in the trunk of a car. We’re checking to see if we can find any connection between the Brockwells and the Becks. Talking to family, friends, acquaintances, people they worked with, anybody we can think of. But as of right now, we don’t have a single suspect.”

“The first thing we should do is tell the media the cases aren’t related,” Mooney said. “That should at least keep people from panicking.”

“Forget about the media,” I said. “Somebody’s going to leak it whether we tell them or not. And what do you mean by ‘panic,’ Lee? Do you think people are going to riot in the streets? They’ll put better locks on their doors and they’ll buy guns and ammunition and guard dogs. They’ll watch out for their neighbors. We don’t need to start stonewalling, and I don’t think we need a task force. We don’t want to bring the feds and their egos anywhere near this, and as far as the local guys go, no offense to the sheriff, but the TBI agents are as good as it gets.”

“So what do you suggest?” Lee said. “Status quo? Tell people we’re doing all we can?”

“Give these guys some more time,” I said, nodding towards Fraley and Blake. “Let them do their jobs. And how about we let the sheriff handle the media from now on? I’ll brief him whenever he wants. He can do the press conferences, press releases, whatever. He has an outstanding reputation in the community and people trust him. What do you say, Sheriff? Will you keep the hounds at bay for me?”

“Whatever you need, brother Dillard,” Bates said.

I turned to Fraley again. He was in his early sixties, a little on the heavy side, with receding gray hair, a pink complexion, and a bulbous nose. Despite our shaky start, I’d already developed a significant amount of respect for him. He was smart, tough, hardworking, and despised bullshit.

“Surely you have some ideas,” I said.

Fraley cleared his throat. “A few,” he said.

I expected him to keep talking, but he sat there in silence.

Mooney stared at him. “Care to share them with the rest of the class?”

“Who kills a school principal?” Fraley said. “Think about it. Forced entry through the window at the side of the house, but there was nothing taken, so it wasn’t a burglary that went wrong. Same MO as the Beck killing, as far as the shooting goes. Shot to pieces. And if it wasn’t just some random killing, then you have to ask yourself, who would want to kill a principal? And who would want to kill him and kill him and kill him?”

“Family member looking to speed up the inheritance?” Mooney said. “Disgruntled teacher? Or maybe it was the wife they were after.”

“It wasn’t the wife. They kidnapped Mr. Brockwell, took him for a long ride, tied him to a tree. They terrorized him. He was the target. They wanted him to suffer. His wife just happened to be in the way.”

“So answer your own question,” I said. “Who wants a high school principal to suffer?”

Fraley shrugged his shoulders. “I’m thinking a kid. A kid with a grudge. Probably looking for revenge.”

“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.”

“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 stop 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.”

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.

Jack and I were just walking back to the waiting room from a trip to the cafeteria when my cell phone rang. It was Fraley.

“You need to come out here,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“To the park. The girl in the picture. She’s here. She wants to talk to you.”

I’d called Fraley and taken the picture to him Sunday afternoon after I found it on my windshield. Both of us were skeptical, but he said he’d follow up.

“What?” I said. “Now?”

“As soon as you can.”

“Caroline’s in surgery. Can’t it wait a few hours?”

“I guess it could, but we take a chance on her changing her mind or leaving.”

“Where exactly is she?” I said.

“Near the pavilion. Right where you said she’d be. I’m holding the drawing in my hand and it looks exactly like it. It’s weird.”

I hung up the phone and looked at Jack. “I have to go,” I said. He gave me a bewildered look. “We may have a witness in the murders. She wants to talk to me. Your mother will be in surgery for at least another hour; then she’ll be in recovery for a while. As soon as the surgeon comes out, call me. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Winged Deer is a two-hundred-acre park located on the eastern outskirts of Johnson City. The upper half of the park contains baseball and softball fields and a hiking trail that winds through a five-acre patch of dense forest. The lower half skirts the Watauga River. Along the river are more walking trails, a boat ramp, a board-walk, and a large, covered pavilion that people rent for outdoor gatherings and picnics. There are also a few benches scattered around beneath the oak and maple trees that dot the riverbank. I spotted Fraley’s car in the lot and parked next to it. I found him pacing back and forth near the pavilion, nervously sucking on a cigarette.

“Sorry about this,” Fraley said as soon as I walked up. “How’s the wife?”

“Don’t know yet. She’s still in surgery, but thanks for asking.”

“This one’s strange,” he said.

“How so?”

“You’ll see.” He nodded towards the river.

I started walking down the hill in the direction of the nod. My view of the bench was obscured by the tree at first, but then I saw her. It was as though the drawing I’d held in my hand the day before had come to life. I approached slowly. The dress she was wearing was antique white and ankle length. Her feet were covered by sandals, her head by a finely woven straw hat that fluttered gently in the light breeze. A white crocheted shawl was draped over her shoulders. Her hands were folded in her lap, and she appeared to be looking out over the river, serenely contemplating the universe. I could see dark red hair curling softly down her back and shoulders all the way to her waist. As I approached, she turned towards me and lifted her chin. Beneath the brim of the hat was a young, smooth face with high cheekbones and a jawline that melted into a slightly dimpled chin. Full lips were curved into a pleasant smile. Her nose was small and delicate. A flesh-colored patch, which was secured by a length of what appeared to be nylon, covered her right eye. Her left eye was the most brilliant, clear blue I’d ever seen.

“I’m Joe Dillard,” I said as I stood uncomfortably over her. The eye was beautiful, but at the same time, it was unnerving.

“Someone you love deeply is very ill,” she said in an even tone. Her voice was calm and appealing, like that of a well-trained stage actress.

“What’s your name?” I said.

“I see pain in your eyes. I sense regret. You’ve done things you’d like to forget.”

“Who hasn’t? I was told you have some information for me, Miss… What did you say your name was?”

“You’re skeptical of me.”

“Comes with the territory. Do you mind if I sit down?”

She nodded, and I sat down at the other end of the bench. I looked out over the river. It was placid, a vivid green. Some of the trees on the opposite bank were beginning to change to their fall colors of orange, yellow, and red. The sky was azure, the temperature warm.

“You did the drawing?”

She nodded again.

“You put it on my car?”

“You needed it. It was there.”

“Why a drawing? Why not a phone call?”

“I thought the drawing was more likely to get your attention.”

“Who are you? What’s your name?”

There was an aura of calmness about her, a sense that she was perfectly at peace with herself and everything around her. She looked back out over the river.

“It’s cancer,” she said, “your wife.”

Lucky guess. Coincidence. She knows someone who knows me and she’s heard about it from them.

“No,” I said. “My wife doesn’t have cancer.”

“You lie poorly. She’s very strong, isn’t she?”

“I don’t have time for-”

“And so are you, but you draw much of your strength from her.”

“I’m sorry, but you still haven’t told me your name. You know, I could probably have you arrested just because of what was in the drawing. Would you like to continue this conversation at the police station?”

“You don’t want to arrest me,” she said.

“I don’t want to sit here all morning and listen to you talk in circles, either.” I was becoming impatient. “Now, what’s your name?”

She looked back out over the river. “Alisha. Alisha Elizabeth Davis.”

“Are you some kind of psychic?”

“I see things that others can’t see. I hear and feel things that others can’t.”

“I don’t have a lot of time this morning, Alisha. If you know something about the murders, I’d appreciate it if you’d just tell me.”

“They thirst for revenge, and they won’t stop.”

“Who are they?”

“One is Samuel, another Levi.”

“Do they have last names?”

“Boyer. Barnett.”

I reached into my back pocket for a notepad. I didn’t have one, so I pulled a pen from my shirt pocket and started writing on the palm of my left hand.

“Samuel Boyer?”

She nodded.

“Levi Barnett? You’re saying Samuel Boyer and Levi Barnett did these killings? Do you know where they’re from? Where can we find them?”

“They won’t be hard to find.”

“How do you know? And don’t say you know things. Don’t tell me it came to you in a vision.”

“There’s a third. One who commands. She believes she is the daughter of Satan.”

“How do you know?”

My cell phone rang. I looked down at the caller ID. It was Jack.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I need to take this. I’ll be right back.” I got up and walked twenty or thirty feet away from her, out of earshot.

“Tell me something good,” I said when I answered.

“Surgeon just left,” Jack said. His voice was hushed. “The tumor was stage three, whatever that means. He said it was almost four centimeters long. There was cancer in the skin above the tumor and in the lymph node. He said the type of cancer she has is very aggressive. He already closed her back up. He said he left the tumor so they could see how it responds to chemotherapy.”

“What did he say about the chemo?” It was the one part of the treatment Caroline had talked about the most. She was terrified of chemotherapy.

“Some other doctor is going to handle it, but he said most of the cases similar to Mom’s go through three months of chemo, then surgery to remove the breast and the rest of her lymph nodes, then three more months of chemo. After that she’ll have to go through radiation for a couple of months. He says she’s looking at about a year before she’s clear of it, and that’s if everything goes well.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m standing in the lobby.”

“Where’s your mom?”

“In recovery. The nurse told me we can go back in about a half hour.”

“But she’s okay?”

“Outside of the fact that she has cancer.”

“How’s Lilly?”

“Not good.”

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Wait for me. I want to be in the recovery room when she wakes up.”

I hung up the phone and walked back over to the girl.

She looked up at me, and I noticed a tear running down her left cheek.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

I’d developed a keen intuition over more than a decade of practicing criminal defense law and listening to my own clients lie to me over and over again. Caroline jokingly referred to it as my “bullshit detector.” It wasn’t innate; it was something that I had developed through experience, but I’d learned to trust my ability to detect and sort through lies and to get to the heart of a matter very quickly. This girl gave me no indication that she was lying. Her voice was clear and steady, her manner calm and straightforward. The circumstances were certainly unusual, but I found myself believing her.

“Okay, Alisha,” I said, “if you really want to help me, this is what has to happen. I’m going to go up and talk to that officer for a few minutes. Then he’s going to come back down here and take a statement from you. He’s going to write down everything you say. In the statement, you’re going to tell him exactly what you know about the murders and the people you’ve mentioned. And more important, you’re going to tell him how you know these things. We need details. We need something concrete if we’re going to be able to get warrants and arrest these people. If what you say checks out, I’ll probably need you to testify in front of a grand jury. You may even end up testifying at trial. Do you understand?”

A feeling came over me that reminded me of the way I felt the night I went to the Beck murder scene, but it was different somehow. I felt as though I were experiencing something unnatural, perhaps even supernatural, but the sickening sense of being in the presence of evil was absent. I wanted to talk to this girl, to question her, and I could sense that she wanted to tell me what she knew, but I couldn’t stop envisioning Caroline lying in the recovery room, about to come out of the anesthesia-induced coma. Someone would have to break the news to her, and I wanted it to be me.

“I have to leave,” I said, “but I’m going to go talk to the agent, and he’ll be back down here in just a minute. Just sit tight. Won’t take but a second.”

I jogged back up the hill to where Fraley was standing.

“Well?” he said.

“Write these names down.” I opened my hand so he could see them.

“Who are they?”

“She says they’re the killers.”

“You’re shitting me. You wrote them on your hand?”

“I didn’t bring a notepad. Didn’t know I’d need one.”

“And I took you for a Boy Scout. At least you had a pen.” Fraley began copying the names down. “One of those names is familiar,” he said.

“How so?”

“I put a list together of kids Norman Brockwell had serious problems with before he retired. One of them, Boyer, is on your hand. What’s her name?” He nodded towards the river.

“Alisha Elizabeth Davis. Take a statement from her. Get everything you can. Names, addresses, ages, shit, you know the drill. All we can do is check out everything she says. And let’s make sure we check her out at the same time. I have to get back to the hospital.”

“Bad news?”

“You could say that. Go ahead, before she changes her mind. I’ll call you in a couple of hours.”

I jogged back to my truck and pulled out of the lot. My cell phone rang less than a minute later. It was Fraley.

“She’s gone,” he said.

“What do you mean, gone?”

“I walked back down to the bench and she was gone. I don’t think she could have walked off without me seeing her, but she’s not here. She disappeared.”

As soon as I got back to the hospital, I ran down Caroline’s surgeon and talked to him for about ten minutes. One thing he said stuck in my mind: “The only way to deal with cancer is to kill it.” From there, I headed straight back to the recovery room.

Her eyes fluttered open when I rubbed my fingers across her forehead. Caroline was lying on a gurney behind a flimsy curtain in a gray room that smelled of anesthetic and floor cleaner. A monitor loomed above her, its digital display reflecting her blood pressure, heart rate, and body temperature. A plastic tube carried antinausea medicine from a bag on a hook into a vein in her forearm. The skin on her face was dry and splotched with red, and when I leaned down to kiss her on the cheek, I noticed a bitter smell coming from her mouth.

“Hey, sugar,” I said. “How do you feel?”

She looked up at me, and her eyes lit with a glint of recognition.

“My mouth tastes like a thousand elephants took a dump in it,” she said.

“Smells like it, too.”

She covered her mouth with the back of her hand self-consciously.

“Just kidding, baby,” I said. “Your breath smells fine.”

“Liar. Would you get me some water?”

I poured some water from a pitcher that was sitting on a table near the bed into a plastic cup and helped her drink. Her lips were dry and scaly.

“I’m freezing,” she whispered.

“Be right back,” I said. I went and found a nurse, who directed me to a large cabinet just down the hall. I grabbed a couple of thin blankets and went back to Caroline’s cubicle. I laid the blankets over her and tucked the sides snugly beneath her.

“Is it that bad?” she said after I moved back to the head of the bed.

“What do you mean?”

“I can tell by the look on your face. And the kids aren’t in here. If the news was good, they’d be here, too.”

“I just wanted to be alone with you for a minute,” I said.

“So you could break the bad news to me?”

“It could be worse. I think you’re going to make it.”

She grimaced and adjusted herself on the gurney. “Was there cancer in the node?”

“Yeah, baby. I’m sorry.”

“Did it spread to the skin above the tumor?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit.”

I squeezed her hand gently.

“So I’m going to lose my breast?”

“I don’t think you have much choice.”

“What do I need a breast for, right? We’re not going to have any more kids.”

“They’ll make you another one if you want them to. They do it all the time now.”

“When do I have to start the chemotherapy?”

“A couple of weeks. They want you to heal up from this for a little while first.”

“Will you love me when I’m bald?”

Caroline wasn’t particularly vain, but she loved her hair, and so did I. It was a reflection of her personality, beautiful but occasionally a bit on the unruly side. It was auburn and thick and curly and fell to the middle of her back. It turned a few shades lighter in the summer when she spent more time in the sun. Losing it was the side effect of chemotherapy that she dreaded the most.

“I’ll shave my head if you want,” I said. “We can be bald together.”

Two hours later, after I’d rolled my wife out of the surgery center in a wheelchair, helped her into the car and taken her home, gotten her settled into bed, and made sure Lilly and Jack knew what to do in case something went wrong, I drove back up to the TBI headquarters in Johnson City. Fraley’s office was buzzing. People were running in and out while Fraley alternately barked commands like a general and talked into the telephone. As I sat down across from him, he hung up the phone. He got up from behind the desk and walked over and closed the door.

“How’s the wife?” he said as he returned to his seat.

“In bed. Resting.”

“She okay?”

“Yeah, she’s all right. What’s going on here?”

“I can appreciate what you’re going through,” Fraley said. “I lost my wife to breast cancer.”

The comment shocked me. It was the first time Fraley had given me any indication that he had a life outside of his job.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m truly sorry. What was her name?”

“Robin,” he said, unconsciously smiling at the thought of her. He reached to his left and picked up a small, framed photograph. “Beautiful woman. It was thirty years ago. The treatment has come a long way since then, but at the time, there wasn’t much they could do. It was too far along by the time it was diagnosed. Took her in a hurry. We’d only been married five years.”

“Can I see?” He handed me the photo. It was a studio portrait of a pretty young brunette, maybe twenty-five years old, sitting in front of a fireplace. She was holding an infant wrapped in a blanket, and beside her was a handsome young man smiling the smile of a proud husband and father. I looked back up at Fraley and could see that the young man in the photo was him many years, many heartaches, and many miles ago.

“That’s my daughter,” he said. “She was three months old that day.”

“Where is she now?”

“Nashville. Married to a banker. He’s a good guy. She has a couple of kids of her own.”

“You raise her by yourself?”

“Yeah. Did the best I could. I don’t think I fucked it up too bad.”

“Nice little family.” I handed the photo back to him.

“She’ll be okay,” he said. “Your wife. She’ll be okay.”

“Thanks,” I said. I briefly imagined Caroline lying in a casket covered in flowers, eyes closed, the serene look of the dead on her face. Fraley must have sensed what I was thinking.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to… I mean, I wasn’t trying to make you think about-”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I appreciate the concern.”

“So I guess you’re wondering what’s going on here.”

“You could say that.”

“Reasonable suspects,” Fraley said. “Boyer was thrown out of Brockwell’s school the same year he retired. The boy has a long juvie record, mostly drug related, a couple of assaults. His probation officer says he’s dyed his hair black recently, so he might be a Goth. The other one, Barnett, is still a juvenile. He’s only sixteen, but he’s already spent a year in detention. He’s got drug charges, a couple of thefts, three assaults, one of them aggravated. The aggravated assault is what got him shipped off. Hit a kid with a baseball bat and broke his leg. He’s only been out of detention three months. He’s still on probation, and his probation officer said the last time she saw him, which was two weeks ago, he’d dyed his hair jet-black. Looks promising.”

“She said something about a third,” I said. “I think she said ‘one who commands.’ Something about the daughter of Satan, so it must be a female.”

“Did you get a name?”

“No.”

Fraley raised his eyebrows.

“She was telling me all this stuff; it was weird. I think I was trying to figure out how she knew about the murders; then I got a phone call from my son and I had to leave. I thought she’d give the name to you. Sorry.”

“Don’t sweat it. If these two are the right ones, they’ll lead us to the third. Are you sure you got the girl’s name right?”

“Which girl?”

“The one in the park. Are you sure her name was Alisha Elizabeth Davis?”

“That’s what she said.”

“Alisha Elizabeth Davis was reported missing by her foster parents the day after the Brockwells were killed.”

Fraley slid a piece of paper across the desk towards me. At the top was a black-and-white photograph of the girl on the bench, eye patch and all. Alisha Elizabeth Davis, born April eleventh, 1989, one hundred and fifteen pounds, red hair, blue eyes, last seen on the morning of September twenty-eighth.

“I’ve got a couple of guys talking to her foster parents now,” Fraley said.

“Jesus, this gets stranger by the minute.”

“So, what do you suggest we do next, counselor? Can we get arrest warrants or search warrants based solely on the word of somebody who claims to be a psychic, especially one who’s listed as missing?”

“I guess we could put twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance on them,” I said. “Wait and see where it leads us, but I’d hate to take a chance on someone else getting killed while we’re waiting. I’d also hate to take a chance on somebody screwing up and them finding out we’re onto them.”

“Why don’t we just pick them up?” Fraley said. “Simultaneously. We bring them back here, make sure they see each other, but keep them isolated. We play them off of each other.”

“And what if they refuse to talk to us? What if they say they don’t want to come?”

“Is what you got from the girl enough to detain them?”

“I don’t know. It’s a close call.”

“But what if she turns out to be right?”

“We have to have probable cause to arrest them, but all we need is reasonable suspicion to detain them. I just don’t know if the word of someone who says she’s psychic is enough, especially since she vanished. Not much legal precedent in that area. If we pick them up and somebody confesses, we risk losing everything on a motion to suppress later.”

“No judge in his right mind would turn these bastards loose if they turn out to be the killers,” Fraley said. “I don’t give a damn what the legalities are.”

I sat back to think it through, trying to imagine the argument in front of a judge later on. We’d had six horrific murders within a three-week period and had enough similarities to reasonably believe the murders were connected. We’d received an unsolicited drawing from an anonymous source that very accurately depicted the second murder scene. We’d followed up on the drawing and located the witness, who said she knew who committed the murders but left before she told us how she knew. She gave us her name and the names of the killers. One of the names she provided was at least indirectly connected to Norman Brockwell. We had another witness who said she saw two Goths getting out of the Becks’ van, and both of our suspects had recently died their hair black, at least indicating the possibility that they might be Goths. Both of them had criminal records, including violence. The witness also told us the killers would strike again. We assessed the risk to the public and, in good faith, decided to act.

“The biggest problem I have is that there isn’t a good-faith exception to the warrant requirement in Tennessee.”

“Say again?” Fraley said. “In English?”

“You have to have probable cause to get a warrant, right?”

“Right.”

“There have been federal cases and cases in other states where judges have ruled that the police lacked probable cause for an arrest, but because they acted in good faith, they upheld the legality of the arrest. It’s called the good-faith exception. Tennessee doesn’t recognize it.”

“Maybe it’s time they did,” Fraley said.

“You’re right,” I said. “This may be the test case. You start getting your people together to coordinate the arrests and the searches and I’ll go draft the warrants. See if you can get some lab people to come in early in case we need them. Which judge is the easiest when it comes to getting warrants signed?”

“Judge Rogers, especially after he’s been home long enough to start drinking. He’ll sign anything.”

“Then Rogers it is. We’ll pick both of them up, search their homes, cars, whatever. Let’s put the screws to them.”

There were only thirteen Tennessee Bureau of Investigation agents assigned to the criminal field investigation unit in all of northeast Tennessee. Those thirteen agents covered twenty-one counties and eight judicial districts. Ten of them had been assigned temporarily to our murder cases, with Fraley at the point.

I was amazed at how quickly they’d been able to mobilize the agents, and once they were all up and running, it was mind-boggling to see how much information they could gather and how quickly they could gather it. We’d identified two suspects at around ten a.m. Fourteen hours later, computers had helped the agents gather information from the National Crime Information Center, local crime databases, local government databases, juvenile authorities, probation departments, and schools. I knew that as soon as the suspects were arrested, most of the agents would head back out to execute the search warrants. They’d talk to parents, relatives, friends, acquaintances, employers-anyone who could provide them with information. It almost made me uneasy to see firsthand how quickly-and how deeply-the government could delve into an individual’s life. What made me more uneasy was that all of this was occurring based on the word of a witness who might be crazy, lying, or just plain wrong.

It was almost eleven o’clock by the time I finished drafting the applications and affidavits required to secure the arrest and search warrants. I called Judge Rogers at home. He agreed to let me come over, and I found him sipping on a vodka martini in his den. The martini obviously wasn’t the judge’s first of the evening. It took me all of five minutes to convince him to sign the warrants. As soon as I left, I called Fraley.

Since I’d stayed in touch with Fraley by phone, I knew that as soon as I left his office that afternoon he’d ordered immediate, full-time surveillance on the homes-or at least the last known addresses-of our two suspects. None of the agents assigned to the surveillance had seen a thing until almost ten p.m., when a banged-up green Chevrolet Cavalier rolled into the driveway at the address the computers provided for Samuel Boyer. The license plate was registered to Boyer. The agents reported that there were two passengers in the car. It parked in the driveway, the engine remained running and the lights stayed on, and what appeared to be a male got out and went into the house. The agents couldn’t make a positive identification because the person was wearing heavy makeup. He was also wearing Goth clothing. The male stayed inside the house for only a couple of minutes and got back in the car. The agents followed the car to a cheap motel on the western outskirts of Johnson City, a place called the Lost Weekend. The suspects were still there.

After the judge signed my warrants, Fraley told me to meet him in the parking lot of a Burger King a couple of blocks from the motel. He flashed his headlights at me as I pulled into the lot, and I pulled in beside him about fifteen minutes before midnight. I locked up my truck and sat down in the passenger seat of his Crown Victoria, warrants in hand.

“It’s too early in the year for it to be this cold,” I said as I closed the door and shivered involuntarily.

“I already talked to the owner of the motel,” Fraley said, ignoring the comment. “Boyer checked in under his own name. Doesn’t seem to be trying to hide anything.”

Fraley spit loudly into a Styrofoam cup. A pungent wintergreen odor filled the car, and I noticed his bottom lip was sticking out as though he’d been punched in the mouth.

“That shit’ll rot your teeth,” I said.

“Been dipping off and on for forty years,” he said. “They ain’t rotten yet.”

“Did the owner make a positive ID?”

“He couldn’t tell from the photo I showed him. He says they always wear makeup.”

“Always?”

“The guy says they’ve rented a room a couple of times before in the past few months. Says they’re weird as hell, but they haven’t done any damage.”

“Do the dates coincide with the other murders?”

“Don’t know. He said they pay cash, and he doesn’t keep records of cash transactions. It’s not exactly the Ritz.”

“Where’s the owner now?” I was wondering whether he might be loyal enough to his cash-paying customers to alert them that the police were making inquiries. Fraley gave me a sideways glance.

“You really think I’m stupid enough to leave him alone?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Sorry,” I said.

“One of my guys is in there keeping him company.”

“Are there still three of them?”

“Small party. Nobody new has showed up.”

“Any idea what’s going on in the room?”

“They pulled the blinds and the curtains as soon as they went in. We haven’t seen a thing.”

“So what’s the plan?”

“As soon as we get the go-ahead from the assistant district attorney-which would be you in this case-we’ll take them down hard and fast. They’re on the ground floor in a corner room, which makes things a little less complicated. Once we’re in position, the agent in the office will call the room as a diversion. As soon as we hear the phone ring, Norcross will hit the door. He’s our door-opening specialist. He’s so good with a sledgehammer we call him Thor.”

I’d been introduced to Norcross at the office earlier in the day. He was at least six-seven and looked like he’d been extracted from a slab of granite.

“Why didn’t you call Johnson City?” I said. “They’ve got a SWAT team.”

“I don’t want to take a chance on someone leaking this to the press. The last thing we need is a bunch of reporters in the parking lot.”

“Don’t you at least have one of those battering rams? Or better yet, why don’t you just get a key from the owner?”

“Because the door will probably be chained on the inside, genius. And trust me, Norcross and a sixteen-pound sledge is better than any battering ram ever devised.”

He turned towards me and held out his hand. “The warrants,” he said.

“And what am I supposed to do? Wait in the car?”

“Go home to your wife,” Fraley said.

“Are you serious? You want me to go home?”

“There’s nothing you can do here. We’ve got the raid planned out, and the plans don’t include you. Once we arrest them, we’ll be interrogating them all night. I don’t want you there.”

“Why?”

“You can’t participate in the interrogation because it could make you a witness, right?”

“Right, but-”

“And if you’re a witness, you can’t handle the case in court. It would be a conflict for you, right?”

“Yeah, but-”

“So you don’t need to be there.”

“I could observe. Maybe help advise you with the questioning.”

“We don’t need your help. We know what we’re doing.”

The tone of his voice was firm, the look on his face determined.

“Why don’t you want me around?” I said. “Tell me the truth.”

“How do you think this is going to go down? Do you think we’re going to politely knock on the door and ask them to come along with us? Do you think we’re going to take them back to the office, give them some cake and coffee, and ask them nicely whether they slaughtered six innocent people?”

“So what you’re telling me is you’re going to brutalize them.”

“ Brutalize might be a little strong, but we’re not going to treat them like houseguests. And I don’t want you second-guessing me. I don’t want to be hearing about their constitutional rights while I’m trying to get information out of them.”

“You need to be thinking about their constitutional rights or you could blow the whole-”

“Don’t lecture me, Dillard. I was interrogating murder suspects while you were still in fucking grammar school. I know what I’m doing, and the last thing I need is a goddamned lawyer looking over my shoulder while I’m doing it.”

He spit into the cup again and stuck his hand out. Reluctantly, I handed him the warrants.

“We’re on the same side, you know,” I said.

“When this goes to court, I promise I won’t try to tell you how to handle your case,” he said. “But until it gets there, it’s mine. We do it my way. Go home, counselor. Take care of your wife. Get some beauty sleep. You need it.”

“Just let me ask you one question,” I said. “Are you going to videotape the interrogations?”

“Let me ask you a question. Am I authorized to offer them anything?”

“You mean leniency? A break in sentencing in exchange for ratting out the others?” I thought about what Lee Mooney had said to me at the scene of the first murders. You have to promise me that when we find the sick bastards who did this, you’ll see to it that every one of them gets the electric chair. No screwups. No deals.

“No,” I said. “Don’t offer them anything.”

Fraley turned and looked out the window. He remained silent for a little while, then turned back towards me.

“Have a good night, counselor,” he said. “I’ll call you first thing in the morning.”

Tuesday, October 7

“Everybody knows what to do, right?” Fraley said as he climbed from his vehicle, which was parked across a side street from the Lost Weekend Motel. Seven men stood in silence. They were dressed in khaki fatigue pants and black jackets that said “Police” across the front and back. All were armed and wore bulletproof vests beneath the jackets.

“Any questions?”

Nobody said a word.

“Good. Remember, if we’re right about these assholes, they’ve already killed six people. Shock and awe, no bullshit. I want all of them facedown on the ground in less than ten seconds. Keep a sharp eye out for weapons.”

The men surrounding Fraley were focused, their eyes wide in anticipation of the unknown danger behind the motel room door. Fraley thought about all the search warrants and felony arrest warrants he’d executed in the past and the inherent danger in breaking down a door without knowing what was on the other side. As the group of officers moved away from their cars and towards the motel, Fraley noticed that his skin was tingling. It was a sensation he hadn’t felt in a long time, and it reminded him of an irony he’d discovered years ago: it was in moments like this, when the prospect of sudden, violent death became real and immediate, that he truly appreciated being alive.

Fraley was in the back of the pack. Norcross led the way. The front was reserved for the young guys, guys with quicker reflexes, better cardiovascular systems, steadier hands. They jogged along the back of the shopping center, staying in the shadows, and across a side street that bordered the parking lot of the Lost Weekend. Once they crossed the street, they turned towards the back of the motel. Norcross picked up the pace as they moved the length of the building to the shadows of the far-west wall and made their way back around to the front. Everyone squatted there while Fraley dialed the agent who was waiting with the motel owner on the cell phone.

“One minute,” Fraley whispered as he closed his phone and stuck it in his pocket.

Norcross led the way around the corner to the room. Four agents passed him silently. Three squatted beneath the window on the east side of the door, flashlights in one hand, guns in the other. The fourth took up a position next to a car in the parking lot about twenty feet away and trained his weapon on the door. Fraley, along with one other agent, stopped on the west side, less than five feet away. Still another remained behind and pointed his gun at the door. Everyone froze for maybe twenty seconds-it seemed like twenty years-waiting for the phone inside the room to ring. Fraley looked at his watch. With his right hand, he started counting down…

Five fingers… four… three… two… one…

Nothing. No sound from inside the room. Fraley muttering, “Ring, goddamn it!” under his breath. Norcross looking back over his shoulder at Fraley, eyebrows raised as if to say, What now?

The telephone inside the room rang. Fraley saw the massive head of the sledgehammer looming above the door. The phone rang again, and then- wham! — the door splintered as it exploded with the sound and force of a gunshot. Norcross tossing the sledge to the side. A man screaming. Lights flashing. A flurry of movement. Fraley feeling his heart pounding inside his chest. Male voices: “Police! Get on the ground! Get on the ground!” A strange scent of incense hanging in the air. Flashes of candlelight. “Give me your hands! Give me your fucking hands! If you move I’ll blow your fucking brains out!” Bright light as someone flipped a switch.

And then only the sound of men breathing heavily.

“Are we clear?” Fraley said.

“Clear.”

“Clear.”

Three bodies facedown on the floor on the dirty shag carpet, hands cuffed tightly behind their backs. Two males and a female, all wearing black robes with hoods. Candles scattered around the room on the floor, on the nightstand by the bed, on the vanity near the bathroom. Black candles. A silver cup, a chalice, lay in the center of the floor, apparently overturned in the confusion. Fraley knelt beside it. Most of the liquid inside had spilled onto the floor, making a dark stain.

“Looks like blood,” he said, resisting the urge to pick it up.

One of the agents was hoisting the girl to her feet. She looked to be around twenty years old, redheaded, attractive at first glance, somehow familiar-looking. As she stood the robe fell open in front. She was naked beneath it. Fraley glanced around the room as other agents pulled their prey up off the floor. The other two-the males-were wearing white pancake makeup. They had black hair, with rings in their eyebrows, noses, and ears. They were both naked beneath the robes. There was blood running down both of their forearms. All of them seemed dazed.

“Get the cars,” Fraley said. Three of the agents left immediately.

The girl began to mumble something unintelligible, quietly at first, then more loudly. Fraley couldn’t understand a word she was saying.

“Shut your fucking mouth!” Fraley hissed as he moved towards her and jerked her cuffed hands upwards behind her back. She winced and went silent.

“You’re all under arrest,” Fraley said through gritted teeth. “You have a right to keep your fucking mouth shut, you have a right to a scumbag lawyer. Anything that comes out of your hole can be used against you in court.”

The agents arrived with the vehicles in less than a minute. Fraley shoved the girl towards the door.

“Get them out of here,” Fraley said. He watched as the three were led out to the waiting vehicles. Once they were out of earshot, Fraley walked towards the bathroom. He’d noticed three separate piles of clothing: one pile-obviously the girl’s-was on the vanity next to the sink. Another pile was near the wall next to the vanity, and a third was inside the bathroom on the floor near the toilet. There was a pair of shoes in each pile.

“Bag these up separately and bring them to the office,” Fraley said to Norcross.

“Shouldn’t they go to the lab?” Norcross said.

“They will. But first I have to make sure who they belong to. Watch and learn, my son.”

As soon as Fraley walked into the office, he turned the thermostat to cool, set the temperature at sixty degrees, and made sure everyone knew to leave it there. The other agents brought the suspects in one at a time. Since there were only two interrogation rooms in the satellite TBI office, Fraley was forced to improvise. Boyer and Barnett were placed in the interrogation rooms. The redhead, the one they weren’t expecting, was handcuffed to a chair in Fraley’s office and left to stew. The door was left open and an agent was posted outside.

Fraley thought about what Dillard had told him. One who commands. A female. This might be her. The lack of makeup and Goth persona certainly set her apart from the others, but she hadn’t done or said anything to indicate she was a leader. After her initial attempt at speaking back at the hotel had been derailed by Fraley’s hammerlock, she’d ridden from the motel to the TBI office in silence in the darkened backseat.

A search of the motel room and the clothing that had been strewn around produced nothing of value-a couple of razor blades, the boys’ wallets, a watch. They hadn’t found even an ID card for the redhead. Fraley still had no idea who she was.

But the green Cavalier parked outside had yielded what Fraley hoped would literally be the smoking guns-two semiautomatic pistols, both nine-millimeter. Drugs were also found in the car-a quarter ounce of marijuana, about a half gram of crystal meth, and a dozen pills, probably hydrocodone or oxycodone, were in the console. When Fraley opened the trunk and flashed his light inside, he saw what appeared to be a bloodstain near the spare-tire well. If it was blood, it might be Norman Brockwell’s. And then there were the shoes and clothes. Maybe the shoes would match footprints found at the scenes. Maybe the clothing would yield fibers. Maybe the tires would match the casts taken from the woods where Norman Brockwell was murdered.

The mobile forensic unit had been on standby at the office and was now going over the room and doing a preliminary on the car. Lab personnel were on standby in Knoxville. The forensics people would do what they could at the scene and then load the car onto a rollback and take it down to Knoxville along with the rest of the evidence. There was usually a significant waiting period for lab work, but this case had been moved to the front of the line. Fraley knew that by midmorning, much of the lab analysis would be finished.

Fraley walked to his office and picked up a few files. The redhead stared at him but said nothing. Fraley did a double take when he saw her eyes. One blue, one green. Piercing, as though they could see straight into his soul, full of hatred. He made a quick trip to the bathroom and walked out to the snack room. He poured himself a cup of coffee and started slathering Cheez Whiz on a cracker. He looked up at the clock on the wall. It was two fifteen a.m. Fraley had been up for twenty-two hours, and it didn’t look like he’d be going home anytime soon.

Fraley had asked Norcross and another agent to Mirandize the suspects again. They were reading the suspects their constitutional rights and asking them to sign a form that acknowledged that their rights had been explained to them and that they understood. He’d already sent two other agents to Levi Barnett’s home to bring back Levi’s aunt, who was identified in his juvenile records as Barnett’s legal guardian. Levi’s father was in prison for dealing crystal meth, and his mother had deserted them a decade ago.

Fraley sipped his coffee and flipped through the files. When he came across the photos of the murdered children, the rage he felt when he thought about his granddaughter returned. He’d looked at the photos only once. They turned his stomach.

He thought briefly about how he would conduct the interrogations. The Reid Technique was now standard operating procedure in law enforcement. Make the suspect as comfortable as possible. Make him think you were there to help him. Try to find some common ground and get him talking; it didn’t matter what the conversation was about initially. The theory behind the Reid Technique was that suspects would naturally feel guilt and want to unload their burden. The officer was there to facilitate the cleansing of the spirit. Get him talking, eventually turn the conversation towards the crime, and gently persuade him to confess.

Fuck that.

If he had his way, he’d subject every goddamned one of them to torture. Maybe a little waterboarding would loosen their tongues. A few well-placed blows to the solar plexus or groin. Maybe even some electroshock therapy. Then, once he had his confessions, he could proceed right to execution. No need for a trial and sentencing once they’d admitted it. Take them out back, shoot them in the head, load them in the back of a pickup truck, and haul them to the city dump. Get them out of the mix and be done with it.

When he came out of his fantasy-induced trance, Fraley noticed that guys were moving in and out of the snack room, trading good-natured insults and laughing. The mood in the office was lighter than it had been in weeks. The raid had gone off without a hitch. Arrests had been made. Evidence had been found and was being processed. The nightmare, it seemed, was over.

Norcross and Taylor came in and sat down, and the others filed out. Norcross had played defensive end at Memphis State before earning a law degree and joining the TBI ten years earlier. At thirty-five, he looked like he belonged on a poster for the Green Berets. His jaw was strong and square, his eyes hazel, and he kept his black hair cut to a half an inch. Taylor was younger, a University of Tennessee accounting graduate who’d been an agent for six years. He was lanky and balding, with a nasal, high-pitched voice that quickly got on Fraley’s nerves.

“What do you think?” Fraley said, looking at Norcross. He was too tired to listen to Taylor.

“The young kid and the girl are cold as fucking ice,” Norcross said. “And did you see that girl’s eyes? Freaky.”

“I take it they didn’t offer to confess.”

“The older guy, Boyer, is the softest one,” Norcross said. “He’s scared shitless. He was shaking so bad he could barely sign the Miranda waiver.”

“But he signed it?”

“Yeah. He was the only one who’d sign.”

“Are they high?”

“Who knows?”

“Nobody lawyered up?”

“Not yet.”

“Did the girl say anything?”

“Not a word. Wouldn’t sign the waiver, wouldn’t tell me her name. Just stared at me. Gave me fucking chills. I’d start with the dude.”

“Have they brought the young kid’s aunt in yet?”

“Yeah, but she’s not happy. She keeps harping about his clothes. She says he’s cold.”

“Fuck her.”

Fraley leaned back and stretched, thinking about the utter futility of what he was about to do. Since he couldn’t offer any kind of deal, there was absolutely no reason for any of them to talk to him. What did they have to gain by confessing? Nothing. What did they stand to lose by confessing? Everything. He put his palms on the table and pushed himself up. Pain shot up his lower back from the beginnings of arthritis in his hips.

“Might as well get to it,” he said as he moved to the sink and ran cold water over a dishrag. He glanced up at the clock. Nearly an hour had passed since the suspects had been placed in the interrogation rooms.

Fraley closed the door behind him as he walked into the room where Samuel Boyer was sitting. In one hand he held two plastic bags of clothing and the dishrag, in the other a manila folder. Boyer, still clad in the ridiculous-looking robe, was sitting with his head down on the table shivering, his cuffed hands clasped in front of him. Fraley tossed the bags of clothing down in front of Boyer.

“Sorry it’s so goddamned cold in here,” Fraley said. “Something’s wrong with the heat and we can’t get anybody to fix it until morning. I brought you your clothes, but I wasn’t sure which set was yours. You can put them on or you can sit there and freeze. Doesn’t matter to me.”

Boyer looked at the bags and reached for one. Slowly, he pulled on a pair of black jeans. Fraley unlocked Boyer’s cuffs briefly so he could put on a black sweatshirt. He pulled a pair of black boots out of the bag and looked at Fraley as if to ask whether he had permission to put them on.

“Go ahead,” Fraley said. “For all I know you might be leaving in a little while.”

Boyer pulled on a pair of socks and slid the boots over them.

“There. Feel better?” Fraley said.

Boyer didn’t respond. Fraley sat back and watched as Boyer dropped his head onto the table, into the same position he’d been in when Fraley entered the room. Fraley stood and walked to the door.

“Norcross!”

A moment later, the big man filled the doorway as Fraley sat down.

“This young man’s about to remove his clothes,” Fraley said. “Once he does, I need you to put them back in this bag and tag them.”

Fraley lifted the empty bag from which Boyer had removed the clothing and the boots. Boyer’s head came up off of the table. He looked at Fraley curiously.

“Go on now,” Fraley said. “Take everything back off and put your vampire robe on. I’ll let you keep it until we send you down to the jail.”

Boyer hesitated, obviously confused.

“Take those fucking clothes off now or I’ll have my buddy Glenn here rip them off your scrawny little ass!” Fraley yelled as he slammed a massive fist onto the table.

As Boyer began to remove his boots, Fraley allowed himself a smile. “I appreciate your help,” he said to Boyer. “I thought those clothes and those boots were yours, but it might have been hard to prove until you put them on.” He turned towards Norcross. “After dumb-ass here finishes taking off his clothes, take the other bag in there and do the same thing to the other dumb-ass. As soon as he puts the clothes on, make him take them off and turn the goddamn heat back up.”

After Norcross left the room and closed the door, Fraley tossed the dishrag onto Boyer’s forehead.

“Wipe that shit off your face,” Fraley said. “I want to see who I’m talking to.”

Boyer reached up with his cuffed hands and removed the rag from his face. He was a skinny kid, nothing but a sack of bones. He stared at Fraley for a second, then tossed the rag onto the table.

“The makeup’s coming off,” Fraley said. “If you don’t do it, I will. If I do it, I promise you won’t like it.”

Boyer lowered his head back onto the table. Fraley waited thirty seconds. Boyer didn’t move.

Fraley rose, picked up the rag with his right hand, and grabbed a handful of black hair with his left. He jerked Boyer’s head back and slammed it down, face-first. Boyer let out a groan. Fraley jerked Boyer’s head up again and began rubbing the rag roughly across his forehead. The greasy makeup smeared, but very little of it came off. Blood began to run from Boyer’s left nostril.

Fraley dropped the rag across Boyer’s nose and moved back to his seat. “You shouldn’t have resisted arrest back at the motel,” Fraley said. “You wouldn’t have gotten your nose broken.”

Fraley opened the manila file and took out some photographs. Two were close-ups of the Beck children after they’d been cleaned up, with grotesque black holes where their right eyes had been shot out. One was a photo of Bjorn Beck with his eye shot out and the “ah Satan” message carved into his forehead. Another was Anna Beck. All four photos clearly showed the inverted crosses carved into the necks of the victims.

“A little reminder of what you did,” Fraley said as he slid the photos, one by one, across the table.

Boyer, holding the rag to his nose, glanced at the photos and then closed his eyes. Tears were running down his face, lightly streaking the makeup like lines on a road map.

“Look at them or I swear to God I’ll staple your eyelids open,” Fraley said.

Boyer opened his eyes and at least appeared to be looking at the photos. His eyes were dark, nearly black, surrounded by pink. Fraley leaned back and folded his arms across his chest.

“We found the guns in the glove compartment of your car,” Fraley said calmly. “They’re going to match the bullets we found at two murder scenes. Our evidence guys are going through your car with a fine-toothed comb, including the trunk. We think you gave Norman Brockwell a ride out to the woods in the trunk of your car. They’re looking for little pieces of his skin, fingernails, saliva, hair, blood, anything they can find. And they’ll find plenty, won’t they? You know they will. You were too fucking stupid or too fucking high to clean it, weren’t you?

“We’re going to match the tread on your tires to the tracks we found out there in the woods where you tied Norman Brockwell to a tree and shot him. And those boots you just put on? My guess is they’re going to match up to footprints we found at both crime scenes, you pathetic little piece of shit.”

Boyer’s eyes had glazed over. He looked stunned. It was exactly what Fraley had been hoping for when he entered the room.

“And how do you think we found you in the first place? We’ve got a witness. Somebody already gave you up. Game’s over for you, Sammy boy. You’re going to get the death penalty. The death penalty. They’re going to strap you into the electric chair and cook you like a fucking Thanksgiving turkey. If we can keep you alive long enough. As soon as people around here find out we’ve arrested the gutless sonsabitches that slaughtered a couple of babies, they’re going to want blood.”

Fraley paused to let the words sink in.

“There’s only one way out for you,” he said, leaning forward. “Tell me what happened, tell me why it happened, tell me who was there besides you, and I’ll tell the district attorney you cooperated. You know how it works. You’ve been in the system. The first one to the district attorney’s office gets the deal.”

Boyer’s eyes rose to meet Fraley’s. He didn’t look like a cold-blooded killer. Sitting there with the streaks running through his makeup and his nose swollen and red, he looked like a scared, stupid clown.

Fraley picked up the photo of Bjorn Beck and pointed to the “ah Satan” carved into his forehead.

“And just what the fuck is this supposed to mean?” Fraley said. “Was this supposed to scare us?”

“What k-k-kind of d-deal w-w-will you g-give me?” Boyer said. They were the first words Fraley had heard him speak.

“Depends on what you have to say.” Fraley thought about what Dillard had said in the car: no deals. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t against the law for cops to lie to suspects during interrogation.

“Wh-where is sh-she?” Boyer said. His eyes moved slowly towards the door, as though he were trying to see through it.

“Who? The redhead? The question is, Who is she?”

“Sh-sh-sh-sh-she…”

“Take it easy,” Fraley said. “She what?”

There was a sudden explosion as the fluorescent lights above Fraley shattered behind their plastic coverings. Fraley flinched and found himself on his knees beside the table, gun drawn, the room enveloped in darkness.

Boyer let out a bloodcurdling scream. “Ahhhhhh! Ahhhhhh! It’s her! It’s her! She’ll kill us! She’ll kill us all!”

The door flew open and Fraley could see the beams of flashlights in the hall.

“You okay in there?” Fraley recognized the voice. It was Norcross. Fraley rose from his crouch by the table and moved to the door. Boyer continued to scream.

“It’s Satan! She has the power of Satan!”

“Shut up!” Fraley yelled at Boyer. He turned to Norcross. “What the hell happened?”

“Not sure. Power surge or something. Whole building’s dark.”

“Stay with this guy.”

The office was chaotic. Agents were running up and down the hallways, in and out of the front door, shouting commands and asking questions. Fraley moved out of the doorway and down the hall towards his office. The agent who had been watching over the redhead was gone. The office was black. Fraley reached into his pocket for his Zippo cigarette lighter. He flipped open the top, flicked the wheel with his thumb, and stepped inside.

He could see her silhouette in the chair. As he moved closer, the lighter went out. He flipped the wheel again. Nothing. Again. It came to life briefly, just long enough for Fraley to see that she was smiling.

Fraley recognized her now. He’d seen her only briefly, and she’d been wearing the big hat and the patch over her eye, but it had to be her.

The girl cuffed to the chair was the girl in the park.

I spent a sleepless night lying in bed next to Caroline. Her left breast was covered by a large, bloodstained bandage. Another dressing covered a stitched wound and a drain beneath her left arm. The medication she’d been given at the surgery center helped her sleep, but she moaned occasionally and mumbled almost continuously. At four in the morning I tried to call the TBI office to see if I could find out how the interrogations were going, but the number was busy every time I called. I didn’t want to call Fraley’s cell phone; I knew he’d let me know when-or if-he needed me.

At five thirty a.m., about forty minutes before sunrise, I gave up the idea of getting any sleep and got up to fix a pot of coffee. I let Rio out and wandered through the kitchen onto the back deck. The eastern sky was just beginning to streak with pink and orange light. A soft breeze was blowing out of the southwest, sending the little blue-and-orange sailboat wind gauges that Caroline loved so much spinning slowly in circles. It was a time of day that I usually enjoyed, the calmness of the dawn. Typically, I used the time to contemplate the vastness of the sky, to appreciate the way the light played off of the trees across the lake as the sun crept over the hill to the east, or to daydream about sitting in a luxury box at Yankee Stadium or Fenway Park someday, watching Jack play with the big boys.

But this morning I found myself in a dark mood. The murders weighed heavily on my mind, but even more disturbing were the thoughts of what was happening to Caroline. I knew Caroline would fight with every ounce of her strength, and I sincerely believed she would survive, but I couldn’t stop thinking that cancer would change her in some fundamental way. I imagined her without a breast, and I wondered if she would become somehow inhibited, whether she would lose her confidence or some of her zest for life. I wondered how such a drastic change in her appearance would affect our relationship, and selfishly hoped it wouldn’t lessen the intimacy we’d always enjoyed. I thought about the scars she’d soon have, how a reconstructed breast would look, how I’d react to her losing her hair, what it would be like to make love to her.

At the hospital, I’d heard Sarah mention something about how fortunate we were that my new job provided insurance coverage that would pay for Caroline’s treatment. From what I’d read, the treatment could cost a quarter of a million dollars, maybe more. I overheard Sarah tell Caroline’s mother that God had intervened. It was God who had caused me to go to work for the district attorney’s office. It was God who had saved us from financial calamity.

But as I stood on the deck, I didn’t appreciate Sarah’s reasoning or God’s kindness. I would have much preferred He spare Caroline the pain and heartache she was experiencing by falling victim to such a terrible disease. How could the benevolent, loving God that Sarah described allow such a thing to happen to a person so kind, so gentle, so full of love?

Thoughts of God took me back to my grandmother’s dining room table in the little house in Unicoi County where she and my grandfather lived with my uncle Raymond, who was then fourteen years old. It was a Sunday afternoon, two years before the rape, and my mother, Sarah, and I had made our weekly trip to Grandma and Grandpa’s house. Sarah and I would play while Ma fixed lunch in the kitchen. A little after noon, the door would open and Grandpa, Grandma and Raymond, looking scrubbed and wearing their Sunday clothes, would arrive from church. I was six, old enough that I’d begun to wonder why we didn’t go to church with them. For some reason, I thought that day would be a good day to ask.

As I sat at the table picking at a piece of fried chicken, I looked up at my mother.

“Ma, how come we don’t go to church with Grandma and Grandpa?” I said.

An expression of horror came over my mother’s face and she dropped her fork. It clanged noisily off of her plate and fell to the hardwood floor.

“Hush your mouth and eat,” she said.

Everyone was quiet for a minute, until my grandma spoke.

“Why don’t you explain it to him, Elizabeth?” she said to my mother. There was a coolness in her voice I’d never heard. “Why don’t you tell the boy why he doesn’t go to church? I’d like to know myself.”

At the time, I knew very little of my family history, but I knew my father had been killed in a war in a faraway place called Vietnam not long before I was born. Most mothers would probably have described a fallen soldier to their sons as a hero, but not my mother. His death was a “waste,” she said. Politicians were to blame, politicians greedy to feed what she called the “war machine.” My father didn’t want to go to Vietnam. He didn’t volunteer to go. He was drafted, forced to leave his home and his pregnant wife to fight a war in which neither he nor his country had any business. My mother was full of bitterness, contempt, and distrust for anyone or anything that might be able to exert power or control over her, including, as I was about to find out, God.

Confronted with my grandma’s challenge, my mother turned to her with narrowed eyes.

“You know good and well why he doesn’t go to church,” she said. “He doesn’t go because I don’t want him to go. He doesn’t go because he’s my son, it’s my choice, and I choose not to have his head filled with lies and false hope. He doesn’t go because there is no God, and if you had the least bit of sense you’d have realized it by now.”

“How dare you!” my grandma yelled, rising from the table. “How dare you blaspheme the Lord in my home!”

I didn’t know the definition of blaspheme, but even at that early age, I was capable of discerning meaning from context. I’d never before heard my grandma raise her voice. She was trembling as she pointed her fork at my mother’s face.

“Are you going to raise him to be a godless heathen?” she yelled. “How do you expect him to get through life without faith?”

“He’ll get through the same way I do,” my mother shot back. “He’ll learn to rely on himself.”

“Joseph!” Grandma said harshly. “Take your sister and go outside. Now! Raymond, you go with them.”

I looked at my grandpa, who was sitting there with a bewildered look on his face. He rarely spoke, and it appeared that he had no intention of inserting himself into the battle I’d unintentionally started. I crawled down off the chair and walked outside to the front porch with Sarah and Raymond right behind me. As soon as we walked onto the porch, Raymond shoved me hard in the back and I went sprawling onto the front lawn.

“Moron,” he hissed. “Why can’t you keep your fucking mouth shut? Now my dinner’s gonna get cold.”

I picked myself up off the ground and walked out to the barn. I could hear voices coming from inside the house, the voices of my mother and grandma, shrill and forlorn as the argument raged. Eventually, the voices quieted. An hour later, my mother yelled from beside the car that it was time to go home. I descended the ladder from the hayloft, and as I climbed into the backseat, I could see Ma’s face in the rearview mirror and I knew she’d been crying. The following Sunday, we stayed home for lunch. We went back occasionally on Sunday after that, but it was always well after Grandpa and Grandma had arrived home from church, and Grandma always prepared the meal. We never spoke of God again.

A couple of years later, Raymond raped Sarah on that Friday night in my grandparents’ bed. Less than a year after that, he drowned in the Nolichucky River. Maybe his death was God’s way of punishing him for what he did to Sarah, but I always wondered, if there was a God, why He would have allowed Raymond to rape a nine-year-old girl in the first place.

Just as the sun was showing itself, the sky streaked with orange and purple, the telephone rang in the kitchen. I hurried inside to answer before it awoke Caroline, and as soon as I picked it up I saw Fraley’s now-familiar cell phone number on the caller ID.

“How’d it go?” I said.

“We need to meet,” Fraley said. “I need another search warrant.”

Wednesday, October 8

I told Fraley I’d meet him at a Waffle House near Boone’s Creek and went in to check on Caroline. She was so sore I had to help her to the bathroom and back to bed. Lilly was getting ready to drive back to Knoxville to school, and Jack was packing up for his trip back to Nashville. Once I got Caroline settled, I went upstairs to Lilly’s room. She was already dressed, standing in front of the mirror by her dresser applying lipstick.

“Can you take another day off?” I said. “I have to go to work, and I don’t want to leave your mom here alone.”

“Are you asking if I want to sleep in?” she said. “Are you asking if I’d mind not driving to Knoxville and going to class? Would I like to stay here and not have to eat in the cafeteria for another day? Sounds awful.”

“Good. You’re the designated nurse. Her pain medication is in the cupboard above the microwave. Two every four hours. I just gave her a couple, so she’ll be due again around eleven.”

Lilly grinned. “I guess this means I’ll have to go down and get in bed with her.”

I stopped by Jack’s room to say good-bye. He’d spent the entire summer on the road playing baseball and had been in college for over a year, but it still broke my heart to see him go.

“Thanks for coming,” I said as I hugged his neck. “It means a lot to both of us to have you around.”

“Are you going to be able to handle all of this?” he said. “Can you juggle the work and everything?”

“Lilly’s going to stay one more day, but after that, I’ll be fine.”

“All you have to do is call. I’ll take a semester off if I have to.”

“I love you,” I said. “Have a safe trip.”

The restaurant was less crowded than I expected, so Fraley and I were able to get a booth in the corner.

“I’ve seen corpses that look better than you,” I said as soon as he sat down.

“You ain’t exactly Miss America yourself.” The waitress set a pot of coffee down in front of us and we both ordered breakfast. Fraley, ever the picture of health, ordered four eggs over easy, sausage, bacon, hash browns with cheese, and four pieces of toast.

“So what’s going on?” I said after the waitress left.

“The raid went fine. Took them down quick and got them out of there. We interrupted some kind of ritual or something. They were wearing robes with nothing on underneath, and the guys were bleeding from fresh razor cuts on their arms. There was a silver chalice with blood in it in the middle of the floor. I guess they were bleeding into the cup. They had candles all over the place. It looked like maybe they were getting ready to drink the blood or something.”

“Vampires?”

“I’m not sure. Probably some kind of satanic ritual. I’ll have to study up on it. We found two nine-millimeter pistols in the car, both stolen during a burglary back in July. All of our lab people came in at five this morning down in Knoxville just to work this case. One of the ballistics guys has already matched several of the bullets we found at both scenes with the guns.”

“That’s fantastic,” I said. “Looks like we’ve got our murderers.”

“It gets better, and it gets worse. There were two pairs of boots and a pair of shoes in the motel room. The boot prints match up to prints at both scenes. They belong to the boys.”

“Great. What about DNA?” I said. “Anything in the car?”

“They’re running the tests,” Fraley said. “It’ll take a while longer, but I don’t have much doubt they’re going to find traces of Brockwell’s DNA in the car. My main concern now is the girl.”

Fraley filled me in on the details of the preceding night: the familiar-looking redhead who’d been arrested in the motel room; her cold, calculating demeanor; the interview with Boyer and the chaotic scene just as Fraley thought Boyer was about to break down and confess; Fraley’s realization that the girl they had in custody looked just like the girl we’d talked to in the park.

“It took me a while to figure it out,” Fraley said. “I went back to the juvenile records. You said the girl in the park’s name was Alisha Elizabeth Davis. Like I told you before, Alisha Elizabeth Davis was reported missing by her foster parents ten days ago. They said she woke up screaming the night the Brockwells were murdered and she went missing the next day.”

“Why was she in foster care in the first place?”

“Because her sister stabbed her.”

“That’s strange,” I said. “Why did they take her out of the home instead of putting the sister in jail?”

“Because the sister’s crazy,” Fraley said. “The foster parents told the agents that the sister has some serious mental problems. She’s already been in a mental institution, and for some reason the mother didn’t want her to go back. So they put Alisha in foster care, I guess to keep her from getting hurt again. From what the foster parents said, Alisha’s a great kid. They said she volunteers at the Salvation Army’s homeless shelter and at the pediatric cancer ward at the hospital. She graduated near the top of her class in high school and is working her way through college now. She sells paintings and drawings and makes pottery in a little shop in back of their house and sells it at craft shows. They said she was happy there.”

“So what does this have to do with the girl in custody?” I said.

“She’s the sister,” Fraley said. “The crazy sister. I went back into the records and took a closer look. Her name is Natasha Marie Davis. She’s Alisha’s identical twin.”

I sat back and let it sink in for a moment. An identical twin. The girl in the park has an identical twin? And she was trying to tell me that her twin sister is killing people? I suddenly made a connection.

“You say the girl in the park was stabbed by her sister?” I said.

“That’s right.”

“She wore a patch over her eye. Was she stabbed in the eye?”

“In the eye.”

“The patch was over the right eye, wasn’t it?”

“You’re catching on.”

“Any idea what she used to stab her?”

“Ice pick.”

“Son of a bitch,” I said. “Son of a bitch! Tell me we have something that links the girl to the murders.”

“Not a thing. That’s why I need the warrant. We’re going to look for an ice pick, along with anything else we might run across.”

“Where are you going to search?”

“Her mother’s house. That’s where she lives.”

“I’m going with you.”

“She has an inverted cross tattooed on her neck,” Fraley said. “I saw it just before I left. And there’s something else.” He reached over and picked up a napkin and set it down on the table in front of him. He took a pen out of his pocket, scrawled something on it, and shoved it towards me. I looked down at the napkin. On it Fraley had written the same letters that had been carved into the foreheads of Bjorn Beck and Norman Brockwell-“ah Satan.”

“What about it?” I said.

“Write it out,” Fraley said. “Backwards.”

Four hours later, after I’d drafted yet another warrant application and gotten it signed by Judge Rogers, Fraley and I climbed the front porch steps of a small frame house in what was known as the Red Row section of Johnson City. It was a poor neighborhood in the southeast part of the city that bordered a massive “environmental center,” what used to be called a landfill and before that a dump. A small sign on the front door informed visitors, “A Christian Lives Here.” Underneath the sentence, in ink, someone had printed, very neatly, “And a Witch.”

I winced when I saw the woman who opened the door. She was tall and looked to be around sixty years old, although the information we had on her put her age at forty-seven. The skin on her face was sagging and had the faded yellow look of an old newspaper. Her unruly hair was a peculiar shade of red, and her eyes were covered by opaque glasses so thick that she appeared to be wearing goggles. She was wearing a full-length flowered robe that made her body shapeless.

“Marie Davis?” I heard Fraley say.

“Yes.”

Fraley produced an ID and introduced us. Four more agents stood at the bottom of the porch, waiting.

“We have a warrant to search your home,” Fraley said, “and we need to speak to you about Natasha.”

She sighed, muttered something under her breath, and moved away from the door.

Fraley motioned to the other agents to walk around the house, and he and I walked in. She led us to the kitchen table and motioned for us to sit down. As she walked to the counter and retrieved a pack of cigarettes and an ashtray, I looked around. The tiny den was a Christian shrine. An oversized King James Bible nearly covered the coffee table in front of the couch, and there were angels on every shelf, atop the television, and in every nook and cranny in the room. There were wooden angels, ceramic angels, plastic angels, brass angels, all different sizes. They gave the room the tacky look of a roadside flea market.

A large crucifix, at least three feet in length, dominated the paneled wall opposite the front door. On the wall to my left was a print of da Vinci’s The Last Supper. But it was the large print on the far wall that caught my attention. It depicted an eyeball atop a pyramid. The all-seeing eye of providence.

“Is she dead?” Marie sat down across from Fraley. The way she said it sounded almost hopeful. I watched her light a cigarette. Her teeth were the same color as her skin and as unruly as her hair.

“No, ma’am,” Fraley said. “She’s fine. She’s down at my office. We picked her up last night at a motel in Johnson City.”

Marie stared off towards the living room for a long moment. She looked like she’d gone into a coma without closing her eyes.

“Ms. Davis, are you all right?” Fraley said.

Smoke rose up in a spiral from the end of her cigarette. She had the slow mannerisms and defeated look of an addict. The house was dirty and poorly lit. The carpet in the den was stained and matted. The linoleum floor beneath my feet was sticky, and a sour, musty odor hung in the air. The sound of dogs barking and snarling suddenly came reverberating through the house from the backyard.

“Jesus!” Fraley said as he rose from the table. “Are they loose?”

“They’re penned up,” Marie said, “and I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t use the Lord’s name in vain in my home.”

Fraley stepped through the kitchen to a back door and opened it. The other two agents walked in, both looking a little pale.

“Dobermans,” I heard one of them mutter. “I hate Dobermans. My neighbor had one when I was a kid and it damned near killed me.”

“What can you tell us about Natasha?” Fraley said after he returned to his seat at the table.

Her expression turned hard and she looked away. “I got nothing to say about Natasha,” she said.

“Can you at least tell me why you won’t talk to us about her?” Fraley said.

She blew out a lungful of smoke and turned back towards Fraley. The hand that held her cigarette had started to tremble.

“I reckon you’ll find out soon enough,” she said.

“What about your other daughter?” Fraley said. “What can you tell us about Alisha?”

“Can’t say nothing about her either.”

“Why not?” Fraley said. “Why won’t you tell us anything about your daughters?”

“I’m gonna go in and sit in my chair,” she said. “Y’all got no idea what you’re up against.”

She got up from the table and began to walk stiffly towards the den. When she reached the recliner, she sat down and picked up a remote control from the arm of the chair. She pointed it at the television and flipped it on. A televangelist wearing a bushy gray toupee was pointing back at her from his pulpit, warning her about the wages of sin.

“Ms. Davis,” Fraley said, following her into the room. “This warrant says we can search your home, but you could make things easier on both of us. Do you know if there’s an ice pick anywhere in the house?”

She responded by turning the volume up on the television.

“Fine,” Fraley said. “We’ll do it the hard way.” He snatched the remote out of her hand and turned the television off. “Where’s Natasha’s room?” he said.

“Right down the hall,” Marie said. “I don’t never go in there myself.”

“Go check it out,” Fraley said to me. “You guys go ahead and get started.”

I walked through the den and into the dim hallway. About ten feet down the hall on the left was a door, painted black. I reached for the doorknob, but hesitated, not wanting to go in the room alone. I could hear commotion coming from the kitchen as the agents began their search. I walked back to the edge of the den and waited for Fraley.

“What’s wrong?” he said as he pushed past me into the hallway. “Scared of the dark?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “For some reason I feel like I’m about to walk through the gates of hell, and I think I’d like some company.”

Fraley turned the knob and opened the door. It was pitch-black inside the room. Fraley started feeling along the wall for a light switch, found it, and flipped it on.

I stepped inside and looked around. The room wasn’t much bigger than a prison cell, with a closet that ran the length of the wall to my right. At first glance, it looked like nothing special. I thought we’d find candles and pentagrams and inverted crosses. Instead, the room was just dirty, with clothing strewn all over the place.

A mirror over a small dresser caught my eye. I stepped towards it. Scrawled on the mirror in what looked like blood were the words “ah Satan.” Beneath it was the phrase, “Hell is for children.”

There was a stack of books on a table by the bed. Fraley picked up the book on the top, looked at the cover, then dropped it as though it burned him.

“What is it?” I said.

“The Satanic Bible,” he said. Fraley picked up another book and showed it to me, Helter Skelter. A third was The Art of Black Magic. “What kind of freak reads this shit?”

“Did you see the print hanging in the den?” I said. “The one with the eye?”

“Yeah. What about it?”

“Do you know what that symbol is?”

“Enlighten me.”

“It’s on the back of paper currency. It represents the all-seeing eye of providence. It may not mean anything, but all of our victims were shot or stabbed in the eye. Do you see what I’m getting at?”

“We’ll take it with us, along with the books and the mirror,” Fraley said. “Let’s finish up and get the hell out of here. This place gives me the creeps.”

Three hours later, Fraley and I stood inside a room in the TBI office that was used to monitor interrogations. Natasha had been moved from Fraley’s office to the interrogation room while we searched her house. Sam Boyer had been taken to the county jail in Jonesborough, while Levi Barnett was transported to the juvenile detention center in Johnson City. We could see Natasha on a video monitor, rocking slowly back and forth in her chair.

The agents had removed the mirror from Natasha’s room and the print of the eye of providence from the den, and searched every inch of the house. We bagged the literature. We found some prescription drugs in a dresser upstairs in Marie’s bedroom, but we hadn’t found an ice pick or any shoes that matched the smaller footprints found near the tree where Norman Brockwell was found. Outside of the symbols, we had nothing concrete to tie Natasha to the murders. There was some circumstantial evidence-the fact that “ah Satan” was Natasha spelled backwards and the inverted-cross tattoo on her neck-but I still had no way of proving Natasha was at either of the crime scenes.

“It looks like our only hope is if she confesses or if one of the others turns on her,” I said to Fraley.

“She’s not going to confess,” Fraley said.“She wouldn’t say a damned word to me.”

“Maybe you should take another crack at her,” I said.

I sat down at the video monitor and watched while Fraley made another futile attempt to question Natasha. She refused to speak or acknowledge him in any way. She simply stared down at the table, unblinking, the hood of the robe pulled over her head. Fraley cajoled her and pleaded with her, then threatened her. Finally, he resorted to insults. He tried every tactic he knew, but he might as well have been talking to a flat rock. She didn’t even look at him.

After nearly an hour of talking to himself, Fraley stood and walked out of the room. Natasha remained frozen.

“What the hell are we going to do with her?” Fraley said, a look of defeat and disgust on his face.

“We don’t have a choice,” I said. “We don’t have enough to hold her. We have to let her go.”

There was an outrage in the community I’d never encountered. Word quickly got out that arrests had been made. By the time Fraley’s agents took Sam Boyer to the county jail for booking, an angry mob had formed near the sally port. I watched the report on the news that night as they chanted, “Baby killer,” at him and screamed insults. Some of them threw objects-the reporters said they were throwing baby rattles and teddy bears-as the agents took Boyer out of the van, covered him with their bodies to protect him, and shuffled him quickly into the jail.

Everywhere I went, I was accosted by people I didn’t know. At the grocery store, at the post office, in the hallways at the courthouse, people would thank me for helping to finally arrest those who had been terrorizing the community. “Kill the bastards,” they would whisper. “Fry their asses.” They thirsted for blood, for vicarious satisfaction, and I was the designated henchman.

I couldn’t help wondering how Boyer felt, and whether the mob mentality might work to our advantage somehow. The other suspect, Levi Barnett, was transported to the juvenile detention center and was spared the mob scene. Natasha was released, though she was under twenty-four-hour surveillance, leaving Boyer the focal point of the hatred of an entire community.

We convened a special session of the county grand jury, and based on the evidence I presented, they indicted Boyer and Barnett for six counts of first-degree murder, five counts of especially aggravated kidnapping-one each for the Becks and Norman Brockwell-one count of felony theft for stealing the Becks’ van, and one count of burglary for breaking into the Brockwells’ home. I drafted the statutory notice that informed Boyer and his lawyers that the state was seeking the death penalty. I had plenty of evidence against the boys-Fraley and his companions had done an excellent job-but I was still uneasy about whether the arrest and search warrants would hold up once the defense lawyers found out about Alisha. I didn’t offer to present her as a witness in front of the grand jury; I simply referred to her as a confidential informant. She was still nowhere to be found.

Since Levi Barnett was a juvenile, we couldn’t seek the death penalty against him. Tennessee’s death penalty statute was indiscriminate when it came to matters of race, creed, or religion, but it drew the line at killing children. In Tennessee, you had to be eighteen years old to vote, to buy cigarettes, and to get yourself killed by the state.

Boyer was arraigned via satellite three days after his arrest and interrogation. Judge Ivan Glass appeared on a television screen at the jail and informed Boyer of the charges against him and his rights. He also appointed James T. Beaumont III to represent him, the same lawyer who had represented Billy Dockery a couple of months earlier.

Levi Barnett was a little more complicated. Before we could get him into court to try him as an adult, we had to convince the juvenile court judge to transfer him to the jurisdiction of the adult criminal court. It wasn’t much more than a formality, but the judge was vacationing in Italy and couldn’t conduct the hearing for three weeks. We reached the judge by phone at his motel in Venice and asked permission to bring in a substitute judge, but true to form, he refused to give up his fifteen minutes of fame.

I spent the next week fending off the media, organizing as much evidence as I could, and preparing for the William Trent trial. Despite the fact that both Fraley and I told Lee Mooney we believed Natasha Davis was directly involved in the Beck and Brockwell murders, the extra TBI agents had been ordered to return to their respective assignments around the state. That left Fraley shorthanded, and after a week of men staring at the house on Red Row and seeing nothing, the surveillance on Natasha had been discontinued.

On Tuesday morning, the fourteenth of October, I got to the office at six and went back over my notes and strategy for the Trent trial. At eight, I looked up to see Lee Mooney standing in my doorway, sipping a cup of tea.

“Are you ready for this?” Mooney asked.

“As ready as I can be.”

“Are you going to win?”

“Who knows? Depends on the jury; you know that.”

“Why haven’t you made a deal?”

“Because the only deal Snodgrass will accept is a slap on the wrist. No jail time, expungement, no supervised probation. Hell, I’m surprised he didn’t ask for a public apology from the DA’s office.”

“This is important, Joe. Don’t screw it up.”

He turned and disappeared without saying another word, and I sat there wondering what would happen if my plan backfired and I lost the case. About fifteen minutes later, Cody Masters showed up, accompanied by our two star witnesses, Alice Dickson and Rosalie Harbin.

Alice Dickson was an attractive, introverted nineteen-year-old who’d grown up in a small trailer that perched precariously on a Washington County hillside in the Lamar community. I’d visited the trailer and spoken to Alice’s aunt while preparing for the trial. Alice had been born to a teenager named Tara Dickson back in the late eighties. Her mother was neither willing nor able to care for an infant, and when Alice was three months old, she was wrapped in a blanket, put in a bushel basket, and left on Jeanine Taylor’s tiny front porch in the middle of the night. Jeanine was Tara’s older sister. No one had seen or heard from Tara since. When I asked about Alice’s father, Jeanine just shook her head. She had no idea who the father was.

Jeanine already had two small children of her own. Her husband worked at a factory in Johnson City for just above the minimum wage, and Jeanine worked at a convenience store. They barely got by. When Alice was thirteen, Jeanine’s husband, a hard drinker named Rocky Taylor, began to molest her. Alice immediately told Jeanine, who refused to believe her. But within a week, the molestation escalated to rape. When Rocky, in a drunken stupor, followed Alice into the bathroom late one Friday night, Jeanine caught him in the act. She gave him a choice of hitting the road or going to jail. Rocky chose the road, leaving Jeanine to raise three children alone.

The other girl, Rosalie Harbin, was nothing short of a hellion. She was dark-haired, dark-eyed, and flirty, and had been raised by her Mexican mother and marijuana-dealing father about two miles from where Alice grew up. She’d been in trouble for various petty offenses-mostly thefts-since she was twelve. By the time she turned eighteen, she’d added forgery to her growing repertoire of illegal skills.

The girls had met on the school bus, and though they were polar opposites, they’d been friends since they were six years old. It was Rosalie who’d heard from one of her other friends about the unusual circumstances at William Trent’s pizza place, and it had been Rosalie who’d encouraged her friend Alice to go with her and apply for a job. Alice, who was desperately poor and barely over fifteen, had traded in her morals for the opportunity to make ten dollars an hour. Rosalie was the same age, but I got the impression that she would have done it for free.

“Now, remember what I told you,” I said as we got up to leave for the courtroom. “Just tell your stories. When Snodgrass comes after you, stay calm. He’s going to insult you; he’s going to accuse you of being liars. Rosalie, he’s going to bring up every theft and forgery charge that the judge will let him get away with. His entire strategy is to make both of you look like you’re not credible witnesses, and that’s exactly what I want him to do.”

I turned to Alice. Her strawberry-blond hair was shimmering; her blue eyes were clear. She’d worn a conservative, high-necked blue dress and looked like a young girl on her way to church. It was precisely the look I’d hoped for.

“Are you ready for this?” I said.

She nodded.

“Do you have it in your purse?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t mention it until I ask you about it. It won’t be until after Snodgrass cross-examines you.”

“Okay.”

“Let’s do it.”

By one thirty, we’d picked a jury, broken for lunch, and were ready to start the trial. There were three newspaper reporters and one television crew in the gallery. The only other people in the courtroom were William Trent’s wife and his mother. Cody Masters was sitting at the prosecution table next to me, while Trent, dressed in a dark blue suit and yellow tie, sat next to Joe Snodgrass at the defense table. Trent was a slight man, around five feet, eight inches, and skinny, with receding sandy blond hair and expressionless brown eyes. He was chewing his fingernails as I walked into the room.

The judge was Brooks Langley, a skin-headed, seventy-year-old retiree who was sitting in because both of the regular criminal court judges had accepted campaign contributions from William Trent. I’d dealt with Judge Langley through a couple of motion hearings and was impressed with both his knowledge of the legal issues and the way he ran his courtroom. I didn’t think Snodgrass would be able to get away with much grandstanding.

The jury consisted of seven women and five men. All but one of the men had daughters, and all but two of the women were mothers. In picking the jury, I wanted to be sure I stacked it with as many women as possible. I intended to remind them what it was like to be fifteen.

During the initial questioning of the potential jurors, Snodgrass had strongly hinted that his client was falsely accused by two conniving former employees who became angry when they were fired for poor work performance and insolence. He intimated that the girls were planning to file a civil suit if Trent was convicted. It was the first time I’d heard that allegation.

The judge handed me the indictment, and I read it out loud to the jury. It charged William Trent with ten separate counts of sexual abuse by an authority figure. Mooney had framed the indictment so that I had to prove only five dates on which the sexual abuse occurred. On all five of those dates, both Alice Dickson and Rosalie Harbin claimed that they had “threesome” sex with Trent. I was impressed with the way Mooney did it, because it meant that each girl could corroborate what the other was saying on the witness stand.

As soon as I finished reading the indictment, Judge Langley asked me whether I wanted to make an opening statement.

“I’ll defer to Mr. Snodgrass,” I said.

Surprised, Snodgrass grunted and stood up. He’d cleaned up a little for the show. His hair wasn’t greasy and his shirt wasn’t wrinkled, but he still reminded me of Jabba the Hutt. Snodgrass spent the next thirty minutes telling the jurors-in his uniquely bellicose way-what a wonderful human being his client was, and that a terrible miscarriage of justice was being perpetrated on Mr. Trent by an unreasonable, even cruel system. When he was finished, I walked over in front of the jury, spread my feet, clasped my hands behind my back, and looked them straight in the eye.

“This isn’t going to take long,” I said. “We don’t have any physical evidence to present to you. I wish we did, but we don’t. All we have is a story to tell you, and the story will make your skin crawl.”

I turned slowly and pointed my finger at Trent.

“That man sitting right there, that perverted man, used his supervisory power and authority-power that he held by virtue of being an employer-to satisfy his own selfish sexual needs. He took advantage of his employees’ youth and station in life, and he abused them over a long period of time in the most shameful of ways. When you’ve heard this story, and you’ve heard his pathetic denials and excuses for why he’s being falsely accused, you’ll come to the same conclusion that I have. He’s guilty. He’s guilty as sin.”

I turned and walked over to the podium.

“Are you ready to proceed?” Judge Langley asked.

“I am.”

“Call your first witness.”

“The state calls Alice Dickson.”

Masters looked at me curiously from his seat at the prosecution table and mouthed the words, What are you doing?

My original plan had been to put Masters on the stand first to tell the jury how the investigation came about and then to follow him with Rosalie Harbin and then finish with Alice. It’s the standard in trial work: you start slowly and then build to a climactic finish. But the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that I’d call only one witness in this trial, and that witness was Alice Dickson. I knew Snodgrass would make Cody Masters look like an idiot on cross-examination. He’d referred to him as Barney Fife during his opening statement, just like he did in my office a couple of weeks earlier. I didn’t want to give Snodgrass the opportunity to take the focus of the trial away from the real issue, which was whether his client was a pervert and had been screwing underage girls for years.

I’d also decided not to put Rosalie Harbin on the witness stand. She oozed sexuality, and she was unpredictable and often flippant. I believed she would anger the women and make the men think she probably got what she asked for. She also had a habit of committing crimes of moral turpitude, things like theft and forgery, and it was entirely possible that the jury would dislike her so much that they’d acquit Trent on every count, no matter how convincing Alice might be.

So Alice was it. All or nothing. A multiple-count felony case with only one witness.

I’d never heard of anyone trying anything like it before.

Alice walked in with her eyes downcast and slowly climbed the steps up to the witness chair. Her hair was shoulder-length, her face smooth and cream-colored. She looked frightened, and as I led her through the routine preliminary questions, her voice was trembling. But when we got to the serious questions, she sat up straight and started talking directly to the jurors. I started at the beginning, asking her about her life, how she’d been abandoned by her mother and had no idea who her father was, and how she’d grown up impoverished, one of five people sharing a bathroom and two bedrooms in an old trailer. I asked her about the sexual abuse at the hands of her uncle, and she told the jury, in a moving moment, that she blamed herself for her aunt losing her husband. After twenty minutes or so, we got around to Trent.

“Do you know the defendant?” I said.

“Yes. His name is William Trent. We called him Bill.”

“And would you point him out, please?”

She looked right at him and held out her hand. It wasn’t shaking. “That’s him, in the blue suit.”

“Let the record show the witness has identified the defendant,” Judge Langley said.

“Miss Dickson,” I said, “would you tell the jury how you came to know Mr. Trent?”

“My girlfriend Rosalie and I went to his restaurant and applied for a job.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Four years ago. I was fifteen.”

“The indictment in this case alleges that William Trent used his supervisory power and authority over you to sexually abuse you. Did that happen?”

“Yes. Many times.”

“Would you please tell the jury in your own words what happened?”

She began to speak, and for the next half hour she recounted the same tale that she’d told Cody Masters two years earlier. She described in explicit detail the mole on the head of William Trent’s penis and the small tattoo of a pitchfork-wielding devil on the left cheek of his ass. She recalled the size of the penis as being “about the same as one of those Oscar Mayer wieners, maybe a little shorter. It wasn’t very big.”

She described the pornography, the lingerie parties, the liquor in the small refrigerator behind the counter. I didn’t ask her about the drugs, because she told me she’d never used them. Rosalie was the one who liked the drugs.

Alice then went into Trent’s sexual habits, his fetishes, his refusal to use a condom, and his insistence that the girls use birth control. She described his preference for having sex in places like the walk-in cooler. Snodgrass tried to object, saying that she couldn’t testify to anything that wasn’t alleged in the indictment, but after a short hearing outside of the jury’s presence, the judge ruled that the testimony could be used to prove a pattern of conduct, and he let it in.

I ended the direct examination by asking her about the exact dates on which both she and Rosalie had had sex with Trent and had her describe the events in detail. She was obviously embarrassed by what she’d done, but she also came across as contrite, apologizing repeatedly to the jury and saying, “I’m so ashamed.”

When she was finished, I glanced at the jury. Three of the women were in tears, and a couple of the men looked like they wanted to jump over the railing and kill Trent. I could hear Snodgrass wheezing. He pushed himself up from the table and lumbered to the podium.

“That’s quite a memory you have there, Miss Dickson,” he said. She didn’t respond. “Since you have such a fine memory, especially when it comes to your sex life, how about recalling for the jury your other sexual experiences?”

Judge Langley looked at me, waiting for an objection, but I kept my mouth shut. The question was improper, but I already knew the answer, and I knew Snodgrass wouldn’t like it.

“I haven’t had any other sexual experiences,” Alice said softly.

“I beg your pardon? Are you telling this jury that you’ve never had sex?”

“No, I’m not saying that,” she said. “I’ve had sex with your client, and my uncle raped me. That’s all.”

“Come on, Miss Dickson,” Snodgrass said sarcastically. “Surely you don’t expect this jury to believe that you would engage in what you’ve described as kinky, consensual sex with a man more than twice your age on a regular basis and not be sexually active otherwise. Are you saving yourself for marriage?”

Alice dropped her head and closed her eyes for a moment. I saw her shoulders rise as she took a deep breath. When she opened her eyes, a tear was running down her left cheek.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be married,” she said. “No one would want me after what he did to me, after what I did with him. I feel… I feel … dirty.”

She covered her face with her hands and began to sob quietly, and I felt a lump in my throat. After a half minute had passed, Judge Langley reached down and offered her a tissue.

Snodgrass had stepped in it. I looked over at the jurors, and could tell that even the men were moved by the testimony. Alice was coming across as sincere, and I didn’t think there was anything Snodgrass could do. He stood mute at the podium, waiting for Alice to regain her composure. When she stopped crying and looked at him, he went on the attack.

“I’m not even going to get into the specifics of these allegations with you, because, frankly, I find them utterly preposterous,” Snodgrass said. “So let’s talk about the truth. The truth is that you don’t have anything to prove that you ever had sex with my client besides your and your friend’s word, do you, Miss Dickson?” he barked.

“I guess not,” she said.

“The truth is that you don’t have any of Mr. Trent’s DNA to back up your claims, do you?”

“No. I don’t.”

“No pictures?”

“No.”

“No video- or audiotape?”

“No.”

“No sex toys with Mr. Trent’s fingerprints on them?”

“No.”

“No witnesses other than your friend Miss Harbin?”

“No.”

“How many people would you estimate worked for Mr. Trent during the two years that you were there?”

“I don’t know. People came and went some. Twelve, thirteen, maybe a few more,” Alice said.

“And none of those people ever witnessed any of the things you’re claiming, did they?”

“Yes, they did. They just don’t want to get involved.”

“Don’t want to get involved? They don’t want to help put what you claim is a sex maniac who takes advantage of young girls behind bars? I find that hard to believe, Miss Dickson.”

“I think they’re ashamed. Like me.”

“The truth is, you didn’t report this conduct until after Mr. Trent fired you, isn’t that correct?”

“I needed the job. I needed the money.”

“Are you saying that you couldn’t have found a job where your employer didn’t require you to have sex?”

“He paid us twice what anyone else would have paid. I couldn’t have found a job making ten dollars an hour.”

“So for two years, you allowed yourself to be sexually abused and you never told a soul. Did you tell your aunt?”

“I didn’t tell anyone.”

“You say you were raped by your uncle. Did you tell anyone about that?”

“I told my aunt. She kicked him out and divorced him.”

“Did you tell her immediately?”

“Yes.”

“Didn’t wait two years?”

“No.”

“So you tell your aunt immediately that your uncle raped you, but then you allow yourself to be sexually abused for two years and don’t say a word, is that what you want us to believe?”

“Objection,” I said. “Asked and answered.”

“Sustained,” Judge Langley said. “Move along to something else, Mr. Snodgrass.”

“Let’s get back to the truth, Miss Dickson,” Snodgrass said. “The truth is that you worked for two years for a man who paid you well and treated you with respect, isn’t that right?”

“He paid me well,” Alice said.

“The truth is that after you turned seventeen, you started using drugs with your friend Rosalie and your behavior became erratic, isn’t that right?”

I stood again. “I object, Judge. There’s absolutely no evidence that she ever used drugs. There’s no foundation for the question.”

“Sustained.”

“The truth is that you started showing up late for work, when you bothered to show up at all, isn’t it, Miss Dickson?”

“No, that isn’t true.”

“The truth is that Mr. Trent gave you several chances to alter your behavior, but he finally was forced to terminate your employment, isn’t that right?”

“No. That isn’t true.”

“And the truth is that when Mr. Trent terminated you and Miss Harbin, the two of you concocted this story in order to exact revenge on Mr. Trent, isn’t it? And if your little scheme works, you plan to file a civil suit against Mr. Trent, don’t you?”

“I don’t even know what that means,” she said.

Snodgrass banged his fist down on the podium and bellowed at her, “The truth is that you’re a liar! And so is your friend. Isn’t that right?”

Alice looked down at her hands and shook her head slowly.

“Isn’t that right, Miss Dickson?”

“No,” she said quietly.

“That’s all I have for this… for this… tart, ” Snodgrass said dramatically as he turned his back on the witness stand and plodded to the defense table.

I was anxious to get up and start the redirect. Snodgrass’s attack had been passionate, and I didn’t want to give the jurors much time to let it sink in. Finally, after a couple of minutes, Judge Langley looked up from the notes he’d been taking.

“Redirect, Mr. Dillard?” he said.

“Absolutely,” I said as I stood and walked back up to the podium. It was time to spring the trap.

“Miss Dickson,” I said, “Mr. Snodgrass mentioned that you seem to have a very clear memory of the things that happened between you and Mr. Trent. Is there any particular reason why your memories are so vivid?”

“Yes,” she said, “there’s a good reason.”

“And what is it?”

“I wrote it all down.”

“Do you mean you kept a diary?”

“Yes,” she said.

Snodgrass got to his feet as quickly as his mass would allow.

“Your Honor, I absolutely object to any mention of a diary. A diary is hearsay; it’s an out-of-court statement, and it doesn’t fall under any of the hearsay exceptions.”

“Mr. Dillard?” the judge said.

“That would be true if I’d tried to use the diary during my direct examination,” I said, “but Mr. Snodgrass opened the door to the diary when he saw fit to accuse Miss Dickson of concocting a story and called her a liar. The diary becomes admissible as a prior consistent statement, and I can use it to rehabilitate my witness.”

“We had no notice of any diary!” Snodgrass yelled.

“That’s because I wasn’t planning to use it unless he attacked her credibility, and that’s exactly what he did.”

“He’s withheld evidence from us, Judge! He has an obligation to allow us to inspect any evidence in his possession, and he knows it. This case should be dismissed, Mr. Dillard should be held in contempt, and the court should immediately file a complaint against him with the Board of Professional Responsibility.”

“Judge,” I said, “I knew of the diary’s existence, but it wasn’t in my possession because I knew it was inadmissible. I asked Miss Dickson to bring it along with her today in case Mr. Snodgrass challenged her credibility. She has a written record of everything that happened to her, and it will corroborate perfectly everything she said here today.”

Judge Langley leaned forward and glared down at Snodgrass. “He’s right, Mr. Snodgrass, and unless you’ve been hiding in a cave for the last several years, you should know it. The relevant parts of the diary are admissible. I’ll take it back into chambers and determine which parts are relevant and which parts aren’t. Court’s in recess.”

As soon as the jury filed out, Snodgrass and Trent disappeared into an anteroom. Because I’d practiced criminal defense for so long, I had a good idea of what the conversation would be like. Snodgrass was undoubtedly telling his client that his goose was about to be cooked, and that he’d better start living in the real world and accept some kind of deal. Otherwise, it was entirely possible that he’d spend the rest of his life in jail.

Ten minutes after Judge Langley recessed court, a bailiff came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder.

“Judge wants to see you and the defense lawyer in chambers,” he said.

I walked back to the judge’s office. Langley was sitting behind the desk with the diary open in front of him. He looked up as I walked in.

“Where’s Mr. Snodgrass?” he said.

“Counseling with his client, I think.”

“That was a dirty trick you pulled, Mr. Dillard,” he said.

“I know.”

He smiled and looked back down at the diary. I heard the door open, and Snodgrass walked in. The wheezing was a little louder than it had been earlier.

“You can’t let this in, Judge,” he said. “It’s reversible error. It’ll wind up right back in your lap.”

“Spare me the melodramatics, Mr. Snodgrass,” the judge said. “Listen to this.”

Judge Langley picked the diary up off the table and began to read: “ ‘I got my first paycheck today. Bill made me suck his thing in the bathroom before he would give it to me. He shot his stuff all over my face. He is really sick. I wish I could quit but we need the money so bad so I just try to imagine that I am floating on a cloud until it is over. I made over four hundred dollars. I gave half of it to Jeanine to help with food and rent and stuff like that and I am keeping the rest. I need to get a car as soon as I can so Jeanine will not have to pick me up every day. I should have enough by the time I am old enough to get my license.’ ”

He set the diary back down on the table and looked at Snodgrass.

“Are you sure you want to continue this?” he said. “If the jury convicts him, and I have no doubt they will, he’ll be looking at a minimum of thirty years. Even if they don’t convict on the counts involving the second girl, I’ll max him out. That child was the same age as my granddaughter when he got hold of her. This is one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen.”

Snodgrass seemed to deflate. His giant head turned slowly towards me.

“If you’d told me about the goddamned diary in the first place, we could have made a deal and finished this,” he growled. “How much fucking time do you think he deserves for dipping his wick in a willing teenager?”

“Ten years if he serves it flat,” I said. “Fifteen if he wants to take his chances with the parole board.”

He turned and started shuffling slowly towards the door, his huge, rounded shoulders slumping forward, the soles of his shoes making a swooshing sound as he dragged them across the carpet. When he got to the door, he paused.

“I’ll sell it to him,” he began slowly. Then he lifted his chin and turned on his now-familiar glare. “But don’t you think for one second that I’m going to forget what you did to me today. Somewhere down the road, I’ll find a way to even the score.”

“I think I just heard him threaten you,” Judge Langley said after Snodgrass stalked out.

“It’s not the first time.”

I sat down in the chair across from the judge with a loud sigh.

“What’s the matter?” the judge said. “You won. Seems to me you should be smiling.”

“I just had a thought that scared the hell out of me.”

“Must have been some thought,” Langley said. “Your reputation is that you’re not scared of anything, including judges.”

I smiled. Langley had turned out to be a rarity-a good judge and a decent human being.

“I was thinking that less than two years ago, I was doing the same thing Snodgrass is doing: defending lying scumbags like Trent. I guarantee Trent told Snodgrass he’d never touched those girls. Then Snodgrass comes into court and gets ambushed by something like the diary. It’s scary enough to think that I used to do that kind of stuff, but you know what scares me even more?”

Langley shook his head, a half smile on his face.

“What scares me even more is the thought that if I hadn’t quit doing it, I would’ve ended up just like Snodgrass.”

The transfer hearing in juvenile court for Levi Barnett was straightforward and uneventful. Fraley and a couple of TBI lab experts took the witness stand and laid out the evidence we had against him-his shoes perfectly matched footprints left at both crime scenes, and his fingerprints were on both of the guns found in Boyer’s glove compartment as well as on the steering wheel of the Becks’ van. Fraley had sent the prints from the van to AFIS early on, but Barnett’s prints hadn’t made it into the system. The judge, after a short speech, surrendered jurisdiction to the adult court. Barnett, swarthy, stocky, acne scarred, and dressed in a pair of jail-issued orange coveralls, sat stoically through the hearing. He didn’t utter a sound, not even to his court-appointed lawyer.

The following Wednesday, Boyer and Barnett were scheduled for their first public appearance in criminal court. Barnett was to be arraigned again, this time as an adult, the judge would appoint him another lawyer, and a trial date would be set.

As I drove towards the courthouse in Jonesborough early Wednesday morning, I passed a convenience store about a quarter mile from the courthouse. In the parking lot less than thirty feet from the road, someone had constructed a gallows. Hanging from the two nooses were dummies with bright white faces, black wigs, and black clothing. I knew both Boyer and Barnett would pass the spot on their way to the courthouse from the jail, and I took some small pleasure in thinking about their reactions.

The scene on Main Street outside the courthouse was chaotic. I counted eight news vans and trucks already parked in the street. As I passed by the front of the courthouse, I saw at least fifty people milling around on the steps and the sidewalk. Court didn’t convene for at least an hour. I’d done defense work in Washington County for more than a decade, and I’d never seen anything even remotely similar. I circled the courthouse looking for a parking spot. There were none. I turned back onto Main Street and looked in both directions. The street was packed with cars. I finally found a spot nearly a quarter mile west of the courthouse and pulled in.

I walked south one block, headed east, and managed to make it unnoticed to the back door of the county assessor’s office on the ground floor. From there, I took the steps up to my office. Fraley was already there, leaning back in a chair with his legs crossed and his feet up on my desk. We talked for a while, mostly about Caroline, until it was almost time to go down to the courtroom.

“Ready to meet the soldiers of Satan?” Fraley said.

“You don’t really believe that garbage, do you?”

“What do you believe, counselor? Are you a religious man?”

“None of your business.”

“So you’re not a religious man.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to. If you were religious, you’d have said so.”

I scowled at Fraley. I liked him and I’d grown to respect him, but we weren’t so close that I felt comfortable talking personal religious philosophy with him.

“It’s all right,” Fraley said. “I’d rather have an atheist prosecuting this case. I think it would be easy to lose your focus if you were worried about what God wanted you to do.”

“I’m not an atheist,” I said.

“Don’t tell me you’re one of those gutless agnostics,” Fraley said. “One of those pussies who doesn’t believe in God but doesn’t have the balls to say so.”

I looked up at the clock. Almost nine.

“Let’s get this over with,” I said.

I stuck my head into Lee Mooney’s office on the way out.

“Aren’t you coming?” I said.

“Nope,” Mooney said, not bothering to look up from the newspaper he was reading, “it’s your show.”

The biggest case in the history of the district was unfolding, and Mooney had become like a ghost in the office, appearing and disappearing seemingly at will. He was keeping his distance from me, the case, and the media. I wondered whether he was showing political restraint or whether he was just plain scared.

Fraley and I took the back steps to the second floor and walked down a private hallway into the courtroom. The place reminded me of the day Bates had packed the courtroom. Every seat in the gallery was occupied, and people were standing against the walls. Television cameras and reporters were crammed into the jury box like frat boys in a phone booth.

There were two lawyers at the defense table, Jim Beaumont and Herb Dunbar. Dunbar, who was being appointed to represent Levi Barnett, was a bellicose bully with a belly that stuck out a full foot in front of him. His clothes were always too small, and his face was the shape and size of a serving platter. He wore his strawberry-blond hair in an Afro, and his complexion was the color of red zinfandel wine. He’d been known to step on opposing lawyers’ feet during bench conferences, to belabor minutiae to the point of filibuster, to drive judges and other lawyers nearly insane with his constant bickering. I once heard him exclaim that he believed his job as a defense attorney was to “create a mountain out of every molehill and force the state to come and fight on my mountain,” and from everything I’d seen and heard, he stubbornly clung to his creed.

The door to Glass’s office opened and the bailiff hailed court into session. Glass took his seat and snarled at the bailiffs, “Bring in the defendants!”

Boyer and Barnett walked in ringed by sheriff’s deputies, and the courtroom went dead still. It was the first time I’d seen Boyer in person, and the first thing I noticed was how young and frail he looked. He was walking with his head slumped forward, eyes on the ground in front of him. He was around six feet tall, slight and pale, with straight black hair that fell to his shoulders. The hair had been dyed; the roots were light brown. His face was angular, his upper lip paper thin. There was a small dimple in his chin. As he walked past me to the podium in the short-sleeved jail jumpsuit, I could see pink scars the length of both his forearms.

Barnett was at least six inches shorter than Boyer, with a thick neck and long arms that, like Boyer’s, were covered with pink scars. He leaned forward when he walked, his arms hanging loosely, like a gorilla’s. Unlike Boyer, however, Barnett wasn’t looking at the floor. He glared defiantly around the courtroom as he plodded towards the front. Judge Glass stared down from the bench as the attorneys scurried forward to the podium to stand next to their clients.

“State versus Samuel Boyer and Levi Barnett,” the judge said. “Case number 40,665. Let me see the indictments.”

A clerk handed the thick document to the judge and he glanced over it.

“You’re both charged with six counts of first-degree murder by premeditation. In the alternative, the state has charged you with six counts of first-degree felony murder. You’re also charged with five counts of kidnapping, one count of robbery, and one count of burglary. Is this a death penalty case, Mr. Dillard?”

I nodded in his direction. “It is, Judge. The state is seeking the death penalty against Mr. Boyer. Mr. Barnett is a juvenile.” I never dreamed I’d hear myself utter those words.

“Filed your notice?”

“We have.”

“Fine. I’ve appointed Mr. Beaumont to represent Mr. Boyer and Mr. Dunbar to represent Mr. Barnett. Since Mr. Boyer’s already been arraigned, I’ll ask Mr. Dunbar: Do you waive the formal reading of the indictment?”

Herb Dunbar cleared his throat. “We do, Your Honor.”

“How does your client plead?”

“Not guilty, but we’d like-”

Suddenly, Barnett turned his back on the judge and began to chant something, quietly at first. I couldn’t understand him, but then Boyer slowly turned and joined him. Boyer looked tentative, as though he was unsure about what he was doing. But he quickly settled into it and the words became loud and clear. It was the same phrase that had been carved into Bjorn Beck’s forehead.

“Ah Satan, ah Satan, ah Satan, ah Satan, ah Satan, ah Satan…”

Both of them appeared to be staring at the same spot in the back of the courtroom. The looks on their faces were emotionless, their voices monotone.

“Ah Satan, ah Satan, ah Satan, ah Satan, ah Satan, ah Satan…”

“What the…? What are they saying?” Judge Glass was sputtering. “Stop that! Stop now or I’ll have you removed from the courtroom!”

Beaumont backed quickly away from his client, but Dunbar stupidly reached up and tried to put his hand over Barnett’s mouth. I saw Barnett smile as he bit down hard on one of Dunbar’s stubby fingers. Dunbar howled and jerked his hand away.

“Goddammit!” he cried. “Goddammit! The son of a bitch bit me!”

“Get them out of here!” Judge Glass was standing, retreating towards the steps that led down away from the bench. I could see fear in his eyes, and I didn’t blame him. There was something about the tone of their voices, the robotic manner in which they spoke, the continuous use of the word Satan. Nobody moved. It was as if no one were breathing.

Several bailiffs converged on Boyer and Barnett, grabbed them by the arms, and began to lead them out of the courtroom. As they did so, both boys continued to chant, and they continued to look at the same spot in the courtroom. I followed their eyes and almost gasped. Standing in the back against the wall was a tall, redheaded young woman in a black leather jacket. It was Natasha.

The chanting faded steadily as the bailiffs led the defendants off down the hallway outside the courtroom. Beaumont and Dunbar had moved to the defense table. Dunbar was wrapping a handkerchief around his finger; Barnett had bitten him so hard he was bleeding. I heard him mutter something to Beaumont about a tetanus shot, but Beaumont looked too stunned to respond.

There were at least a hundred people in the courtroom, and it was so quiet I could hear the ancient clock on the wall above me ticking. It took Judge Glass a couple of minutes to regain his composure. Finally, he looked down at Beaumont and Dunbar and said, “I’ve been on this bench for forty years, and I’ve never seen anything so disrespectful. The young people in this nation are going to hell in a handbasket, I tell you. Hell in a handbasket.”

“Judge, we can do the scheduling without them,” I said.

“I know that!” he snapped. “Don’t you think I know that, Mr. Dillard? Do you think you’re the only person in this room who knows what’s what?”

“I didn’t mean any disrespect. Just trying to move things along.”

The judge looked out over the crowd. “You folks came to see the show,” he said. “I guess you got your money’s worth.” He turned to his clerk. “Give me a trial date. Six months.”

As the clerk looked through her calendar, I glanced over my shoulder. Natasha was still there, and she was staring at me. I didn’t hold the gaze, but over the next several minutes, as Judge Glass set the trial date, motion deadlines, expert deadlines, and plea deadlines, I periodically looked back at her. Each time, she was looking directly at me, seemingly sneering. I felt she was trying to intimidate me, and by the time we were finished and the courtroom began to clear, I was angry. I stood motionless at the table as first the judge, then the lawyers and the crowd moved out. The reporters and camera-men were packing up their gear. I continued to look in her direction. She didn’t move.

“What are you doing?” Fraley said from over my shoulder.

“Natasha’s here.” He followed my stare.

“That’s un-fucking-believable,” he said.

“She’s been staring at me since they made their scene.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “but do me a favor. Shoot her if she tries to kill me.”

I started to walk towards her as the last of the crowd moved through the double doors. As I pushed through the low swinging door that separated the lawyers from the spectators, she remained perfectly still, as if she were glued to the wall, her eyes boring into me. When I was five feet away, I stopped.

“I know what you did,” I said to her. “We’ll be coming for you soon.”

Her face tightened and she moved off the wall. Her eyes were mesmerizing; I couldn’t break her stare for a full thirty seconds. She started speaking, but I couldn’t understand a word. It sounded like gibberish, but the words were being delivered with purpose, the volume steadily growing. She moved towards me. I felt a droplet of spit hit my cheek as she continued. The veins in her neck and forehead began to swell.

A strong hand closed around my bicep and pulled me in the opposite direction. I turned and realized it was Fraley. Behind him was a television camera sitting on the shoulder of a man, pointed directly at me. When I looked back, Natasha was gone.

“What did you say to her?” Fraley said as soon as I gathered my briefcase and we got out of sight of the reporters.

“I think I was trying to tell her I’m not afraid of her,” I said.

“I hate to tell you this,” Fraley said, “but it looks to me like she’s the one who’s not afraid.”