Injustice for all

41

Thirty-six hours after a judge is found dead and twenty-four hours after Hannah Mills is discovered missing-two of the biggest mysteries I can remember in the district-I find myself on the outside.

Fired. Sacked. Terminated.

Caroline says she isn’t surprised. She’s tells me she’s never much cared for Mooney, something she’s kept to herself since I made the decision to go to work for him. He leers at her, she says, and even made a drunken pass at her at last year’s office holiday party. She didn’t mention it to me for the simple reason that she believed I might do something rash, like kick his sorry ass. She was right about that.

Mooney’s public relations campaign against me was anything but subtle. The afternoon he fired me, all of the local television channels featured me front and center on the evening news. Mooney refused interviews, but Rita Jones called me a couple of hours after I left the office and told me Mooney had faxed to the media a press release he’d drafted himself.

The TV news reporters showed up at my house immediately. They parked in the driveway and tried to get me to come out and talk to them, but I just opened the back door and turned Rio loose. They scattered like so many frightened geese. That evening, they did a mini-history of my career as a defense attorney and then as a prosecutor. Aside from the phone’s ringing off the hook, it really wasn’t that bad. The next morning’s newspaper carried a front-page story with the headline “Prosecutor Dismissed for Insubordination,” but outside of the fact that I’d been fired, they didn’t have anything negative to say.

A week later, there was another round of press when Tanner Jarrett went into court and announced that the district attorney’s office was dismissing all charges against Rafael Ramirez. Mooney told the media that my prosecution of Ramirez was “overzealous.” He actually apologized to Ramirez on the evening news. It made me so angry, I threw a shoe at the television and cracked the screen.

Another week quickly passes. I fall back into the same routines I had before I went to work for the district attorney’s office. Caroline and I drive to Nashville to watch Jack play baseball. I piddle around the house. I run, work out, and play with Rio.

I talk with Bates daily, but nothing has developed with Hannah Mills/Katie Dean. It’s the same with Judge Green’s murder. Silence. I’ve tried several times to call Anita White to ask whether they indicted Tommy Miller, but she refuses to speak with me. There hasn’t been a word about it in the news, though, which makes me think Mooney didn’t go through with it. Someone would have leaked the information to the press. A cop, a prosecutor, a grand juror-a piece of news that juicy would have hit the streets in banner headlines.

Then, on Thursday evening, I’m walking back up to the house from a run along the trail by the lake with Rio when I see a car in the driveway. It’s dusk, and I can see an outline of a figure leaning against the car. It looks just like one of those cowboy cutouts people put on their lawns. Rio begins to bark and strains against the leash, but as I get closer, I recognize who it is. It’s Bates, wearing his cowboy hat and his boots and leaning against his confiscated BMW.

“Didn’t think you’d want to be seen with me.” Rio takes a quick sniff of Bates, calms down, and I let him off the leash.

“I don’t, at least not in public. That’s why I came all the way out here.”

“Want to come inside? We’ve got beer and tea, water, soft drinks, whatever you want.”

“You know what? A beer sounds good right about now.”

Bates follows me in. I grab a couple of beers from the refrigerator and lead him out to the deck.

“Where’s the missus?”

“Teaching a dance class.”

“She doing all right these days?”

“Yeah, she’s good. Thanks for asking. So what brings you out here?”

Bates sits at a table and takes a sip from the beer. The weather is warm, in the low seventies, and the light from the rising moon is reflecting soft yellow light off the channel below. The low roar of a bass boat can be heard in the distance. It would be a perfect evening to get half crocked with Bates and listen to his stories, but he seems to be in a somber mood.

“I’ve got some news, Brother Dillard. We found Hannah.”

“Is she-”

“Gone. I’m sorry.”

I drop my head in silence. I’ve thought about her every day since she disappeared, and since I learned about her past from Agent Rider, I’ve thought about her even more. Poor kid. Family killed by a crazy father. Aunt and cousin killed by a drug dealer. I knew I saw pain in her eyes, but I had no idea how deeply it ran.

“Where’d you find her?”

“In an abandoned mine shaft up on Buffalo Mountain.”

“How did she die?”

“Strangled. I’ve got an old buddy of mine, a forensic pathologist, doing an autopsy as we speak.”

“An old buddy? What’s wrong with the medical examiner?”

“Nobody knows we found her yet besides me, an undercover deputy, and my buddy the pathologist. And now you. I intend to keep it that way for a while. My buddy’s gonna store her for me until we get this sorted out.”

“Where?”

“In a big cooler in his garage. He tells me he’s got a bunch of other body parts in there.”

“Is he some kind of wacko?”

“Aren’t most pathologists? He’s a little on the strange side, but sharp as they come. Don’t worry about it. It’s a heckuva lot better than the place we found her.”

It takes me a minute to digest this piece of information. Nobody knows they’ve found her? How could that be possible? When a body is discovered, everybody and his brother shows up at the scene-police, EMTs, coroner, gawkers. I’ve never heard of anyone in law enforcement concealing the discovery of a body.

“What’s going on, Leon?”

“Let’s just say there are certain people who don’t need to know about this.”

“Talk to me.”

Bates takes a long pull off his beer, removes his hat, and sets it on the table in front of him. He runs his long fingers through his hair and breathes deeply.

“I’ve had a guy undercover for a couple of years,” he begins. “We’re trying to take down a motorcycle gang, Satan’s Soldiers. My guess is you’ve heard of them.”

Not only have I heard of them; my sister is pregnant by one, a tidbit I decide to keep to myself. I nod at Bates.

“Pretty rough bunch,” Bates continues. “So last night, my undercover comes to me and tells me a little story. Seems that one of the gang members heard about a contract being put out on a girl. He decided to do a little freelance work, you know, outside of his regular drug dealing and gun running with the gang. Pick up a little extra cash. So he meets with this Mexican who’s offering the contract, takes ten grand down, gathers up his cousin, and goes and does the deed. The girl turns out to be Hannah. They strangle her in her bedroom, carry her out, and put her in the trunk. Then they take her up to Buffalo Mountain, dump her in this old mine shaft, and pour a couple of sacks of lime down the hole on top of her. Me and the undercover had a helluva time getting her out of there. It was a mess. So when they’re done, these two geniuses go buy a bottle of liquor and drive around in her car for a few hours before they take it back.

“They collect another ten grand a couple of days later and manage to keep quiet about it for about a week, but then one of them gets drunk and runs his mouth. You have to understand, now, this is a breach of code. You don’t go around killing folks without the approval of the officers, and you damned sure don’t go around killing folks who haven’t done anything to disrespect the gang. Bad for business. So word spreads among the gang, the officers hold a meeting, and they decide these two have to be punished for what they’ve done. Not for killing Hannah, mind you, but for taking this contract without the knowledge or consent of the hierarchy.”

“So what’s the punishment?”

“Death. They’re both dead. Shot in the head, dismembered, and run through a wood chipper into a pigpen on a farm in Unicoi County.”

“You know who they are?”

“I know who they were. Not that it does me any damned good.”

“So why the secrecy with Hannah’s body?”

“The contract came from a Mexican who is a known associate of your ol’ buddy Rafael Ramirez. The undercover says the contract didn’t come from Ramirez’s guy; it came through him. The undercover has worked his way up to treasurer of the gang. They trust him. He was there when these two guys were interrogated. The president of the club wanted to know what else they’d been doing on the side before he killed them, so he tortured them awhile. Turns out they weren’t really doing anything else on the side, but the guy who actually met with the Mexican and took the contract said whoever was putting up the money was someone important.”

“Someone important? He didn’t say who?”

“The Mexican didn’t tell him.”

“Any ideas?”

“A couple, but first I need to ask you a question. You remember when I asked you whether Hannah had said anything about being pregnant? You told me she was a virgin. How would you know a thing like that?”

I immediately think again about the night at the bar.

“I probably should have told you this before, but maybe four or five weeks before she disappeared, I went to a little birthday party for Tanner Jarrett up at Rowdy’s. Mooney kept buying drinks for Hannah, and before we knew it, she was plastered. Then out of nowhere she blurted out that she was a virgin.”

“Who was there?” Bates says.

“Caroline and I, Tanner, Mooney, Rita and the guy she’s dating, a few others.”

“Who took her home?”

“Tanner.”

“Well, she wasn’t no virgin. My forensics boys dug up one of those early-pregnancy tests in a trash barrel outside her house. The lab guys were able to get prints, skin cells, and some urine off the tube. The DNA matched Hannah, and the test was positive. She was pregnant.”

“Okay,” I say. “So she was pregnant. What does that have to do with a contract killing?”

“The Mexican who paid this gangbanger said Hannah was pregnant and was blackmailing someone important. So before I release any news about finding her, there are a couple of things I want to do. My pathologist buddy says he thinks he can extract DNA from the embryo. We need to do whatever we can to find out who the daddy is. That should go a long ways toward telling who the killer might be. The other thing we need to do is go find Mr. Ramirez and try to get some answers out of him.”

“Ramirez is gone, Leon. You’re not going to find him. And even if you do, you’re not going to get anything out of him. You don’t have any leverage.”

“I said we. We’re going to find him. I’ve been talking to Rider some. He’ll help me. He hates Ramirez with a passion.”

“Anything I can do?”

“As a matter of fact there is, but I want you to take your time and do it right. No screwups. If this turns out the way I think it’s going to, there are going to be some big changes around here. Big changes, and I want you right in the middle of it.”

“I assume you have a suspect.”

“Two of ’em, brother. Two of ’em.”