confrontational. She even shuts the door on us. So we canvass, and we find out from a neighbor that our suspect has arrived home this morning not long before we arrived, hurriedly thrown his belongings into his car, and left. What do you think? Enough for a warrant?”
“Not an arrest warrant, but maybe a search warrant. Especially when you add the fact that we have two sightings of a white car in or near the vicinity of the murder, around the same time as the murder, our suspect owns a white car, and our victim is a judge.”
“So we search the mother’s house? The kid’s car?”
“The house for sure. But the car could be a problem. We’ll go ahead and list the car on our warrant here, but if he’s gone back to school, he’s out of state. We’ll have to hook up with the cops over there and get a judge in North Carolina to issue a warrant.”
Anita turned to Norcross.
“How well do you know Joe Dillard?”
“Not that well on a personal level, but I’ve worked with him. The Natasha Davis case, the one where Fraley got killed. Fraley loved him. Why do you ask?”
“Just wondering what you think of him.”
“I think a lot of him. He’s always been straight with me. Good lawyer. Tough guy, honest. I hear he was a Ranger in the army.”
“Know anything about his son?”
“All-American boy. Almost too good to be true. I saw him play baseball a couple of times when he was a senior in high school. He can flat-out crush it. Why are you asking about Dillard?”
“I got a weird vibe from him this morning,” Anita said. “And the nosy neighbor said Tommy Miller was wearing a bright red T-shirt with ‘Tiger Baseball’ on the front and a name and the number thirty- five on the back. Guess what the name was.”
“No clue.”
“Dillard.”
18
I leave Jack some very simple instructions. I tell him to pack his bags immediately and go back to Nashville. I tell him to avoid the police at all costs. I tell him if they try to contact him, to get ahold of me immediately. I don’t know what Caroline said to Toni Miller. I don’t want to know.
I take my time going back to the office. I stop for lunch at Dixie Barbecue, one of my favorite spots, and spend a little time shooting the breeze with the owner, a genuinely pleasant man named Alan Wyatt. Afterward, I take the long way to Jonesborough. I’m not looking forward to listening to what I know I’ll hear from Mooney when I get there-a whiny diatribe about the terrible misfortune of having a judge whacked in his district. I sneak past Rita Jones, the receptionist, and I’m just about to immerse myself in work when Mooney buzzes me on the intercom.
“I need you to come in here,” he says.
I walk reluctantly back to his office and stand in the doorway, unwilling to go inside and subject myself to the inevitable.
“I think you should dismiss the charges against Rafael Ramirez,” he says.
“Beg your pardon?” I can’t believe he’s even thinking about Ramirez. “I seem to remember your busting my balls just a little while ago about the public’s perception of the office.”
“The case is weak. Stinnett is representing him. You’re going to wind up embarrassing us again, just like you did with Carver. We’ll put out a press release that says the evidence is insufficient to proceed to trial, but that we’ll continue the investigation. Maybe we’ll come up with something more.”
I shake my head in disbelief. Rafael Ramirez is a career criminal, and a dangerous one at that. He’s been on the regional drug task force’s radar for several years, but because he’s stayed on the move and has killed anyone he thought might be a snitch, the task force hasn’t been able to make a case on him. They’ve told me he’s a Mexican national who, in the country illegally, began his drug career working for a farmer outside of Pigeon Forge sometime in the early 1980s. According to the drug task force, the farmer, a man named Duncan who was found shot to death in his barn twenty years ago, taught Ramirez the intricacies of raising marijuana in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park near Gatlinburg. Once Ramirez learned to grow, conceal, harvest, and cure the crop, he realized he could wholesale the drug to his Mexican connections. They, in turn, distribute it all over the country. Ramirez is a multimillionaire who lives like a pauper, often sleeping for months in the woods near his vast patches. He’s apparently content to smuggle his cash back to his family in Mexico. The drug task force says the Ramirez family lives like royalty on a five-thousand-acre ranch outside Guadalajara, while Rafael lives primarily in the woods and does all the work.
Ramirez controls a group of around twenty fanatical followers who help him with the crops each year and help him maintain his wholesale network. He’s also dabbling in contract killing, according to the drug task force’s informants, none of whom are willing to say anything on the record or testify. I can’t blame them. Ramirez’s record regarding betrayal is straightforward and consistent. If anyone within the organization gets out of line, they wind up dead. If anyone outside the organization tries to screw Ramirez, they wind up tortured and dead.
About four months earlier, Ramirez made the first big mistake of his illustrious career. Based on information the task force had gathered from informants, we knew that Ramirez’s young nephew, Ramon, had come up last year from Guadalajara to learn the marijuana production and wholesale business at the elbow of Uncle Rafael. Maybe Rafael was growing tired and thinking of retirement, or maybe his business enterprise had grown so much that he needed a family member he could trust to help him run it. Either way, Ramon was chosen.
During the winter months, when business was slow, nephew Ramon had taken up residence at an apartment complex in Johnson City and had decided to take advantage of the local party scene. At a college bar called Plato’s, Ramon ran into a cocaine dealer named Roberto Sanchez. Sanchez was flashy-he drove a Porsche, tossed cash around like candy, and had a small stable of women who followed him everywhere he went. The more Ramon drank, the more jealous of Sanchez he became. When Sanchez went to the bathroom late that night, Ramon followed him and ambushed him with a pool cue.
As soon as Sanchez was released from the hospital, he set up a little ambush of his own. He waited outside Ramon’s apartment building until three in the morning, and when Ramon showed up after another night at the bar, Sanchez shot him twice. The first bullet went through Ramon’s jaw. The second one hit him as he tried to run away. It went in under his scapula and out beneath his right arm. Ramon didn’t go the hospital. Instead, he called his uncle Rafael.
It took Rafael two months to set Sanchez up. He summoned another family member from Mexico, who started hitting the bars and convinced Sanchez he was a high-level cocaine dealer. He offered Sanchez two kilos for the bargain-basement price of seventeen thousand dollars. When Sanchez went to a rural road in Washington County to buy his coke, the fake dealer was waiting for him, along with Rafael and Ramon Ramirez. Their plan was simple. They intended to kill Sanchez and take his seventeen thousand dollars. They didn’t need the money. It was the principle of the thing. Sanchez had shown great disrespect to Ramon when he shot him in the back.
But Sanchez didn’t go down without a fight. He managed to squeeze off close to thirty rounds from a Mac-9 machine pistol before he was hit twice in the head. Three of those rounds hit Rafael Ramirez: one in the neck, another in the left thigh, and a third lodged against a kidney. The fake drug dealer, who remains unidentified, was shot through the heart and died at the scene. Young Ramon was also hit, although we don’t know how many times. He left a blood trail from the passenger side of the car, where he was firing from near the front fender, to the driver’s side, where he got into the vehicle and fled. He must have been in a panic, because he left his uncle behind, along with the seventeen thousand dollars.
Uncle Rafael survived his wounds. A benevolent God and a skilled surgeon made it possible for him to continue to share his talents and his bountiful spirit with the rest of us. After convalescing in the hospital at state expense for two weeks, he was transported to the Washington County Detention Center. I’d convinced a grand jury to indict him for felony murder based on the evidence the police found at the scene.
“We’ve got enough to convict him,” I finally say to Mooney. “We’ve got a ballistics match from the slugs in
