I see an elongated mound. I bring the weapon around, pull the charging handle, and aim it toward the mound. I creep forward slowly. The floor of the cave begins to tremble beneath my feet. I shoulder the weapon. The sound grows louder.
“Faaaahhhh-eeeeee.”
It’s the voice of a female. I suddenly realize I recognize it.
The mound begins to erode as the tremors intensify. Suddenly, the clay that covers it splits, and I can make out what I believe is a face. It’s a body, slimy, in the early stages of decomposition. The lips are moving.
“Faaaahhhiiiinnnddd-mmmeeeee.”
The tremors stop; the body bends at the waist and sits up. The head turns toward me, and I find myself looking directly at what’s left of Hannah Mills’s sweet face.
“Find me,” she whispers. “Find me.”
31
Anita White’s plan was to execute the search warrants simultaneously, early in the morning, in Tennessee and North Carolina. Detective Rama from Durham had taken the documents Anita faxed him and drafted his own application. The primary difference in the two applications was that Rama had received information (from Anita, a fellow law enforcement officer) that Tommy Miller had returned to Durham because he was a student at Duke University, and that the vehicle was now in North Carolina. He’d called Anita late the previous afternoon and told her that the judge had issued the warrants for both Tommy’s car and his apartment, that he’d obtained an address for Tommy, and that he was personally staking out Tommy’s place at the Belmont complex near the Duke campus. Rama had called again around eleven at night to tell Anita that Tommy was in the apartment, but the car wasn’t in the lot. Anita told him that even if he couldn’t find the car in the morning, she wanted Tommy held for questioning.
Anita hung up her phone at seven a.m.
“Rama’s in place,” she said to Norcross. “He’s going in now.”
Anita pulled into Toni Miller’s driveway. Norcross was in the passenger seat, and two more agents were in a separate car right behind them. She threw the car into park, killed the engine, and got out. The other two agents went around to the back as Toni and Norcross strode to the front porch. Anita rapped sharply on the front door.
“Police! Search warrant!” she yelled. She banged on the door again.
A couple of minutes later, Anita heard a voice from the other side of the door. It was Toni Miller.
“What do you want?”
“Police, Mrs. Miller! We have a search warrant. Open the door.”
“Get the hell out of here!” The voice sounded tortured, as though Toni Miller had been horrifically wounded.
“Open the door, Mrs. Miller, or we’ll break it down!”
“There’s nothing you want here! Go away! Please! Go away!”
“Last chance, Mrs. Miller! Open the door!”
There was a long silence before Anita heard a loud click as Toni Miller slid the dead bolt. Anita pushed the door open and walked into the foyer. The ceiling in the foyer was nearly twenty feet high; the floor was marble. A large chandelier hung above Anita’s head.
Toni had backed up near a decorative rail that spiraled upward along a staircase. Anita gasped when she saw her. She was naked-her robe lay in a pile at her feet-and she was crying hysterically. She spread her arms wide and screamed, “Go ahead! Search me! I have nothing to hide!”
“Walk through and let the others in,” Anita said to Norcross, who had turned his back to Toni. Anita stepped toward Toni, reached down, and picked up the robe and nightgown off the floor. She wrapped the robe around Toni’s shoulders and led her silently into a den off the foyer. Toni was now sobbing quietly. Anita felt deep sympathy for this tortured woman, a woman who had probably done nothing wrong, a woman whose husband-and now her son-had put her through far more than Anita suspected she deserved.
Anita helped Toni sit on a couch and knelt in front of her.
“I’m sorry to have to put you through this, Mrs. Miller, but I have a job to do. We have a warrant that allows us to search the property, inside and out. We’ll do it as quickly and quietly as we can. And when we’re finished, I’d still like to ask you a few questions.”
Anita looked into Toni’s eyes. They’d taken on a faraway look, as though she’d transported herself mentally to some other place, some other time.
“Just do what you have to do and get out,” Toni whispered.
The search lasted four hours and encompassed three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen, den, dining area, laundry room, game room, basement, and garage. The agents found nothing whatsoever that could be called evidence. When Anita examined Toni’s cell phone, she found that Toni hadn’t made a single call to Tommy in the past twenty four hours. There were several calls to and from someone named Caroline, however. Wasn’t that Dillard’s wife?
Anita had called Rama every half hour during the search to see how things were going with Tommy Miller, but Rama wasn’t answering his cell. Anita figured he was either searching the car or sweating Tommy.
She told the other agents to wait outside and walked back into the den where Toni Miller had been sitting during the entire search. She hadn’t said a word.
“We’re finished, Mrs. Miller,” Anita said. Toni didn’t respond.
“I’d like to talk to you for a minute, if you feel up to it,” Anita said.
“Get out of my house,” came the reply. The voice was cold, full of contempt.
Anita turned and walked out the front door. As she walked toward the car, her cell phone buzzed. It was Rama.
“Talk to me,” Anita said.
“Bad news,” Rama said. “He spotted us first thing when we pulled into the complex this morning. I don’t know what the hell he was doing out that early, but he ran like a rabbit. We’ve spent the whole morning looking for him. No luck so far.”
“The car?” Anita said.
“No sign of it yet. We’ll stay on it.”
Anita closed the phone. Her only viable suspect, a kid, was staying a step ahead of her. Now both he and his vehicle had disappeared. Anita had nothing solid to tie Tommy Miller to the judge’s murder. But if he had nothing to hide, why would he run?
As Anita got into the car, her cell phone rang. She looked at the number and turned to Norcross.
“It’s the boss.”
“Like I told you before,” Norcross said, “I’m glad he didn’t dump this case on me.”
32
Judge Green’s murder dominates the radio broadcasts as I drive through Boones Creek toward Jonesborough the next morning. Hannah’s disappearance merits a brief mention. I’ve left home later than usual because I’m too tired to work out. I decide to take a detour and stop by my sister’s house. It’s several miles out of the way, but I haven’t seen or heard from her since Christmas, when she suddenly announced to everyone that she was four months’ pregnant. Since she’s forty-four years old, unmarried, and hasn’t been exactly a model citizen, the news came as quite a surprise. We had a short discussion that resulted in her storming out of the house, and I haven’t spoken to her since.
Sarah lives in the house that belonged to my mother before she died of Alzheimer’s a few years back. She’s a
