an hour. He wants me to call him before I come down. I dial the number.
“I got a call from a DEA agent in Knoxville this morning,” Pickering says after he comes on the line. “He wants to drive up and meet with you while you’re here.”
“DEA agent?” I say. “Any idea what he wants?”
“It has something to do with the girl who worked in your office who’s gone missing.”
“What’s his name?”
“Rider. Maurice Rider. Everybody calls him Mo. Good guy. He’s been around for a long time.”
“Do you know what he wants?”
“Not really. He called early. Mentioned that he’d read about the girl in the newspaper this morning. He said he had some information for whoever was looking into it, but he wanted to talk to someone he could trust. He asked if I knew anyone. I told him the sheriff seems to be a pretty solid guy, but he said he doesn’t trust sheriffs. So I mentioned you. When I told him you were coming down this morning, he asked if I thought it’d be okay if he drove up from Knoxville to meet you.”
“Sure,” I say. “If he knows something that might help, I’d be more than willing to talk to him. Right now we’re lost in the dark.”
I manage to avoid Lee Mooney and leave the office around nine fifteen. So many thoughts are floating through my mind that before I realize it, I’ve made the thirty- minute drive to Greeneville. I park my truck in front of the federal courthouse on Depot Street and walk past the concrete pillars designed to keep anyone from parking a vehicle within a hundred feet of the building. The pillars always remind me of that sick bastard Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing that killed dozens of innocent people.
Tom Pickering’s office is on the third floor, and I climb the wide marble steps in the courthouse foyer after making small talk with the U.S. Marshals at the security station just inside the front door. I lay out the Carver case for Pickering, a soft-spoken, studious man in his mid-thirties. Just as we’re finishing up, his secretary buzzes him over the intercom.
“Tell him to come on in,” Pickering says.
Mo Rider walks through the door, and Pickering introduces us. The first thing I notice is the prominent cleft in his chin. He’s fifty or so, wearing khaki pants and a brown button-down shirt. His hair, which he wears closely clipped, has already gone gray. His eyes are green, and he has the rugged look of a man who spends a lot of time outdoors. He takes a seat at the small conference table where Pickering and I have been working.
“I have a little story to tell you,” Rider says after we get past the preliminaries and he’s satisfied I’m not a shill for a drug cartel. “It starts about fourteen, fifteen years ago, when this young girl and her aunt came to my office. The girl’s a hiker. Name’s Katie, Katie Dean. She lives outside of Gatlinburg and spends a lot of time in the national forest. Sweet little gal, scared shitless the day she comes in.
“So she goes out on this overnight hike, gets way back off the beaten path, and runs across a huge patch of marijuana. Biggest we’d ever seen in that area at the time. Her aunt brings her into the office, she shows me exactly where the patch is, and a few days later we go in and burn it.”
“Sounds like a happy ending for you guys,” I say, “but what does this have to do with Hannah?”
“It was anything but a happy ending,” Rider says. “This kid, Katie, was only eighteen years old then. Like I said, she and her aunt were both scared about talking to us, but I assured them nobody would ever know outside of our office. Somebody leaked it, though. We had one guy from the county sheriff’s department on the task force, and he must have found out who she was and leaked the information. We never could prove it, but I know he had to leak it. Corrupt bastard. The whole damned sheriff’s department was in the grower’s pocket. He was making millions, and he spread enough of it around to buy some loyalty.
“So anyway, a couple of days after we burned the field, the girl’s house was firebombed. Katie and another woman-a black woman who lived there with them-got out, but the fire killed her aunt and a young invalid boy, the aunt’s son, even the family dog.”
Rider stops for a minute and shakes his head. The incident he’s describing may have happened more than a decade ago, but I can see that the guilt he feels still weighs heavily on his soul.
“The group that did the firebombing was Mexican, run by a guy named Rudy Mejia,” Rider says. He looks me directly in the eye. “Mejia was murdered about a month later by another grower who was trying to lock up the marijuana business for himself. The other grower’s name was Rafael Ramirez. I think you have him in your jail up there, don’t you?”
“Yeah. I’ve got him on a not-so-strong murder charge. As a matter of fact, he reached out to me yesterday. Said he knows what happened to Hannah, the girl who’s gone missing from our office, but he wants a free pass in exchange for the information.”
“Doesn’t surprise me,” Rider says. “He’s branched out over the years into contract killing and kidnapping. He’s a real peach.”
“So what does all of this have to do with Hannah?”
“After the bombing, I felt like I had to do whatever I could to protect Katie, so I arranged for her to go into witness protection. She didn’t fit the program, but I talked the suits into letting her in anyway. Gave her a new name, new social, the whole bit. The aunt had stashed a bunch of money, and the girl wound up inheriting half of it, plus the farm where they lived. Katie hated witness protection, though. She spent a couple of months in Utah and then split, but at least she kept the alias. She moved back down here, sold the farm, and got a college degree from UT. She wound up working in the DA’s office in Knoxville until a few months ago. Do you see what I’m saying?”
“I think so. I think you’re telling me I don’t know Hannah Mills as well as I think.”
“That’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Rider says. “Did she ever tell you that her father murdered her mother and her brothers and sister? Happened up in Michigan, when she was twelve, thirteen, something like that. That’s why she moved down here in the first place.”
“She never mentioned it. So what you’re telling me is that the girl I know as Hannah Mills is really this Katie?”
“That’s right,” Rider says. “Katie Dean’s her name. One of the sweetest girls I ever met.”
34
Anita White was growing angrier by the minute. She felt like a schoolgirl who’d been called into the office by the principal, who was allowing her to stew before he came in to berate her. Ralph Harmon was the special agent in charge of the TBI office in Johnson City, a title Anita always found amusingly quaint. He wasn’t the captain or the lieutenant or the commander. He was in charge. She allowed herself a brief moment to wonder what bureaucratic sycophant had come up with such a lame title.
She’d been sitting in Harmon’s office for twenty minutes. He’d called her on the phone as she left Toni Miller’s, asked for an update on the case, and then requested a meeting as soon as she arrived. The minute Anita walked in, Harmon walked out, saying he’d be right back. She could hear him through the open door, laughing and talking with one of the secretaries. He wasn’t attending to any important business; he was insulting her in his uniquely inimical way.
Harmon had been In Charge for less than two years before Anita arrived. During her initial meeting with Harmon, she found him to be a transparent man who couldn’t hide the bigotry that lurked beneath his phony smile. He’d made reference to the lack of “people of color” who were field agents in the TBI and had compounded the insult by expressing the opinion that the job was much more suited to men. He’d virtually ignored her since that first day, with the exception of assigning her cases that none of the other agents wanted.
Anita glanced around the room. The wall was plastered with certificates and photographs. She’d never looked at them closely before, but one section of the display caught her eye. There were several photographs of Harmon in military garb: a dress uniform, camouflage, a flight suit. He was smiling broadly in all of them, posing with other soldiers. In one photo, he was wearing a helmet and sitting in the cockpit of a helicopter. The photos surrounded a small, framed display of three medals backed by navy blue velvet. It was obvious that Harmon wanted everyone to know that he was in the military. Anita remembered what her daddy had said about men who displayed the memories of their military careers for all to see.
