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?”
