“I don’t care what he said. He got what he deserved, both times.”
I held the photos of Sarah up so he could see them. He glanced at them, but quickly looked away.
“These are from the first time,” I said. “I just took some more. This one was even worse.”
“You can tell it to a jury, Mr. Dillard. A Cumberland County jury who won’t appreciate some drug-addled harlot coming into their county and attempting to kill one of their own.”
“I don’t give a damn where the jury’s from. There’s no way they’ll convict her. Did he tell you he was hopped up on cocaine?”
“The jury will convict her if I have anything to do with it,” Sells said. “I intend to try her, convict her, and send her to the penitentiary, where she belongs. Now, I’ve got work to do, Mr. Dillard. It’s time for you to leave.”
I stood there staring at him. “You have work to do? What kind of work? Is there someone else you need to railroad?”
“Get the hell out of here!” Sells roared.
I smiled at him. “You know something?” I said. “I’m going to enjoy this. I’m going to enjoy showing people that you’re nothing more than a corrupt hick.”
I spun on my heel and walked out the door, hoping I could get out of the district before he thought up a reason to have me arrested. My heart was pounding as I jogged through the courthouse lobby and out the front door to my truck.
Once I cleared the county line, I started thinking about Sarah. I’d been around the legal system long enough to know that if a prosecutor was bent on convicting someone and he had a judge in his pocket who would let him bend the rules, the chances of beating him at trial were slim.
Sarah was in real trouble this time. If I lost this fight, she was likely to lose the rest of her life.
Friday, November 7
The next morning, my cell phone rang at six. I’d been up for a half hour, sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and waiting for the sun to come up. The sky was just beginning to brighten, and as I looked out over the back deck I could begin to make out the silhouettes of the trees along the ridgeline to the east. I walked over to the counter where the phone was charging and looked at the caller ID. It was Leon Bates.
“We need to have a sit-down,” Bates said.
“When?”
“This morning. Right now, if you can. It’s pretty important.”
“Where?”
“Someplace private. I don’t want nobody seeing us or hearing what I have to say.”
“How about here? There’s nobody here but Caroline and me, and she won’t be awake for a couple of hours.”
While I waited for Bates, I threw on some clothes, a jacket, and a pair of gloves. The temperature was in the low thirties, but the wind was calm. I thought it might be best if Bates and I took a walk around the property. That way Caroline wouldn’t be disturbed when Rio inevitably started barking.
I called the dog, walked outside, and stood at the head of the driveway. Bates showed up in his black Crown Victoria a few minutes later.
“You up for a walk?” I said.
“Damn straight. Just let me grab my gloves. Is that dog going to tear my leg off?”
“Not unless I tell him to.”
We walked down the driveway and behind the house, through the backyard, and onto a walking trail that I’d carved out of the woods several years earlier. Many of the trees had lost their foliage, and they covered the ground like a vast green carpet. Dampness from recent rains gave rise to a slightly musty odor, an odor that always reminded me of playing in the woods behind my grandparents’ home when I was a child. Rio ran ahead of us, lifting his leg next to tree trunks and chasing squirrels.
“Nice place,” Bates said. He was wearing his dark brown cowboy hat, an image he often liked to portray to the media.
“Thanks. You should come out sometime and bring the wife. We’ll drink a few beers and swap a few lies.”
“I might just do that. How’s the missus?”
“Doing as well as can be expected under the circumstances.”
“That cancer’s a demon. Both of my grannies died from it. My great-uncle, too. The more they learn about it, the more it seems to spread.”
I nodded my head in silence. Surely he didn’t come all the way out here to talk about cancer.
“I heard about your sister,” Bates said. “Sounds like a bum rap to me.”
“It’ll turn out okay. The DA down there is a jerk, but we’ll figure out a way to beat him.”
The woods were damp and cool, and I could see Bates’s breath as we walked slowly along the path. The sun was just clearing the hills to the east, and streaks of pale yellow light were filtering through the branches and the few remaining leaves on the trees.
“So what brings you out here so early in the morning?” I said.
“Afraid I’ve got some bad news.”
“How bad? The way things have been going lately, I’m not sure I can handle much more.”
“There’s a problem in your office. A serious problem. I need to be sure I can count on you before I make another move.”
“Count on me for what?”
“To carry the prosecution through. To do what’s right. It ain’t gonna be easy.”
“Why don’t you just tell me what it is?”
“You give me your word you won’t say anything to anybody?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good enough for me. I’ve got Alexander Dunn on tape and on video collecting two thousand dollars in extortion money from a man who runs a little gambling operation out in the county.”
I stopped in my tracks, stunned. Alexander? He was an asshole, but I didn’t think he was a criminal. And I didn’t think he needed money.
“Sorry to drop it on you like this,” Bates said. “I need to move on Alexander while it’s fresh, but I ain’t gonna do nothing unless I know you’re with me.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m having a little trouble wrapping my mind around this. You say you’ve got Alexander on tape? You set him up?”
“Yeah,” Bates said with a slight chuckle. “He walked right into it. He’s got no idea.”
“How did this come about?”
“About a year ago I busted a bookie named Powers, big operation, especially for this part of the country. He was booking around fifty thousand a week. About a month after that I popped a casino that was set up in a big boat out on the lake. They’d run up and down the lake all night, gambling. Busted the operator and all the players.”
“I remember both of them,” I said. “It was all over the news. That’s when I knew you were either crazy or serious about what you were doing. The cops and the prosecutors around here have always left the gamblers alone.”
“What you didn’t hear about was that three or four months after the arrests, after the cases went to criminal court, they wound up getting dismissed at the recommendation of the district attorney’s office. The first case, the bookie, walked because Alexander Dunn told the judge that the sheriff’s department had illegally wire-tapped the bookie’s phone.”
“Did you?”
“Maybe, but we weren’t gonna use any of it in court. We got enough information from the tap that we started putting pressure on some of the players and went at him that way. Then we set up a sting and popped him when he paid off a winner. I don’t even know how Alexander found out about the tap.
“Then the second case got dismissed because Alexander told the judge we’d illegally obtained a search warrant for the boat and that the boat may have been in another county when we did the raid. Hell, I didn’t know the county line ran right down the middle of the goddamned lake, but it seemed to me like Alexander was looking for ways to get the cases dismissed instead of helping us put these guys in jail, where they belonged. Even the customers walked.”
