Joe Dillard - 02 - In Good Faith (6 page)

“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?”

“Who knows? The father also had an upside-down cross cut into the side of his neck. She decided to check on the others, and it turns out that all four of them have these little upside-down crosses carved into their necks. And take a look at these.”

Fraley reached for some photographs and set them down on the desk in front of Dillard. The photos were of the bodies at the crime scene, taken from directly above.

“Does the positioning of the bodies mean anything to you?” Fraley asked.

The children had been placed across the adults’ thighs. Dillard stared at the photos, then looked up at Fraley.

“Crosses,” he said.

“That’s what I was thinking. Maybe upside down, since they’re across the legs instead of the shoulders. Do you know anything about upside-down crosses?”

“Some kind of satanic symbol maybe. I think they call them inverted crosses.”

“Looks like devil worshipers.”

“Either that or somebody wants you to think so. Have you identified all of the victims?”

“They’re local,” Fraley said, “but they’ve only been here about a year. Bjorn Beck, thirty years old, address is 1401 Poplar Street. Clerk at a hotel over by the mall. His wife, Anna, thirty years old, worked at Starlight Marketing selling vacations over the phone. Else, six years old, just started first grade a few weeks ago. The little boy’s name was Elias, seven months old. One of their neighbors said they went to a Jehovah’s Witness convention in Knoxville yesterday. Haven’t confirmed that yet. They were driving a 2001 Chevrolet van, maroon. We’ve got a nationwide alert out on the van.”

“No witnesses?”

“Not that we know of. We canvassed within a mile of the scene. Nobody saw anything unusual. There’s a guy who was checking out a building site about a quarter mile away who heard the shots and called it in, but he didn’t go anywhere near it. As a matter of fact, he said he got cold chills when he heard the shots and headed in the other direction.”

“What about family?”

“Both sets of parents are in Chicago, which is where Beck and his wife were from. Mr. Beck has—or had—a brother who’s flying in from Panama City, Florida, this afternoon to make a positive ID on the bodies.”

“Jesus,” Dillard said, “I can’t imagine having to do something like that.”

The phone rang just as Fraley stuffed another bite of bun into his mouth.

“Fraley. Yeah? Already? Where? Ten minutes.”

He looked at Dillard, trying to decide whether he wanted to tell him. He didn’t seem like such a bad guy. Besides, maybe Fraley could get him to spring for lunch later. Fraley stood up.

“C’mon, Boy Scout,” he said. “They found the van.”

Monday, September 15

A patrol officer noticed the van about five blocks from the downtown area, where a music festival had been held over the weekend. They cordoned off the streets and set up stages all over a blighted five-block area downtown, which had fallen victim to the convenience of mall shopping and the circular development of cities. There were a few junk shops, a couple of bars where the college kids from East Tennessee State University hung out, a couple of hobby shops, and a few lawyer’s offices. If it hadn’t been for a courthouse being located on Main Street, most of the buildings would have been boarded up.

Caroline and I had gone to the festival a few years earlier, because both of us love live music—it doesn’t really matter what kind—and the festival offered a little for everyone: bluegrass, country, rock, gospel, and blues. The city had billed it as a family event, and it was supposed to benefit the merchants downtown, but they’d made the mistake of allowing the bars to give away beer, and they let people drink on the streets. After a couple of years it turned into a two-day drunk. People walked around in a daze, pissing in the alleys, and the more they drank, the more belligerent they became. There’d been several fights two years ago, and last year Caroline and I didn’t even bother to attend. As I gazed at the van, I wondered whether our murderers shot a family of four and then went to the festival to guzzle a few free beers.

There was nothing for me to do at the scene. Men and women with skills far superior to mine in the area of forensic evidence gathering spent their time stooping and examining and picking and poking and photographing. I watched and stayed out of their way, hoping they’d find something that would help identify the killers.

I hung around until they hauled the van off to Knoxville on a flatbed truck; then I went back down to Jonesborough so I could start getting set up in my new office, which was nothing fancier than a twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot Sheetrock box. It was after three when I got there, and the place was nearly deserted. As I walked past the secretary, a forty-year-old, blue-eyed, redheaded bombshell named Rita Jones, she batted her eyes at me and handed me a stack of messages.

“You haven’t even been here a day and you’ve already got more messages than most of us get in a week,” she said.

I’d known Rita for several years. She’d been a legal secretary for close to a dozen lawyers, had broken up more than one marriage, and had hit on me so many times that it got to be a sort of joke between us. My most vivid memory of her was at a Christmas party hosted by the bar association five or six years earlier. She wore red spiked heels, shiny red pants, a Santa hat, and a red knit halter top that barely contained the bounty within. Sometime around nine, after everyone was good and soused, I was leaning against a wall talking to Bob Brown, a lawyer legendary for his ability to ingest huge amounts of liquor and his insatiable sexual appetite. I was listening to one of Brown’s stories when Rita and her bounty happened by. She stopped to say hello, and Brown, without uttering a word, hooked his finger in the front of the halter and pulled it down, revealing her breasts. Rita didn’t bat an eye. Nor did she attempt to cover herself. She looked directly at me, smiled coyly, and said, “All that, and brains, too.” I awkwardly excused myself and walked away, but I hadn’t forgotten those breasts. They were magnificent.

“What’s this?” I said, looking at the stack of messages. “Nobody even knows I’m working here.”

“All media. All about the murders,” she said. She took the stack from my hand and began to go through it. “Associated Press, CNN, Court TV, MSNBC. The list goes on and on. Looks like you’re going to be a celebrity.”

She offered the stack to me again with a wry smile, but I refused to take it.

“Tell them ‘no comment,’ ” I said. “If I have anything to say, I’ll call a press conference and talk to all of them at the same time.”

“I can’t do that, cutie, much as I’d like to,” she said. “You see, it isn’t my
job
to tell them ‘no comment.’ That’d be your job.”

“Then just tell them I’m not here. I don’t want my phone ringing every five minutes.”

“You mean you want me to lie? Imagine that, a lawyer asking a secretary to lie.”

“Don’t act like you haven’t done it before.”

“But that was back when I was working for those awful private lawyers. Now I’m at the district attorney’s office. Everybody here is honorable, honey. We’re not supposed to lie. We’re not supposed to do anything that would cast aspersions on the office.”

“C’mon, Rita. You’ll make an exception for me, won’t you? I’m not used to being honorable. Maybe it’ll grow on me.”

“I’ll tell you what. You make sure you wear some nice tight pants at least twice a week and I’ll see what I can do.”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you were sexually harassing me.”

“And when can I expect you to do the same?”

“Sorry, Rita,” I said, holding up my ring finger for her to see. “Still married. Still
happily
married.”

“Well,” she said with a wink, “we’ll just have to see about that, won’t we?”

I turned and walked back to my office with a strange tingling sensation in my stomach. I was flattered by the attention—it had been a long time since a woman had flirted with me so openly—but I knew Rita’s reputation. She was a conqueror, a woman who chewed up men and spit them out like Juicy Fruit. Besides, after twenty years of marriage, I was still madly in love with my wife.

The office was equipped with a desk, a computer, and a couple of chairs. The walls were antique white and bare. I’d left a box of personal items on the desk early in the morning, before I left to go to Fraley’s office, and I started taking things out of the box and arranging them. I’d just set a photograph of my daughter doing an arabesque on the desk when the door opened and Alexander Dunn walked in. Dunn was a trust-funder, the beneficiary of a grandfather who struck it rich in the coal mines in southwest Virginia. He was vertically challenged, maybe five-foot-eight, and his brown hair was medium length, heavily moussed, and combed straight back from his wide forehead. He had thin, nearly indiscernible lips and dull, yellowish teeth. He was wearing a navy blue suit that looked like it was tailor-made, just like the suit he wore during Billy Dockery’s trial. His Italian loafers were black instead of brown, but a white kerchief was still rising out of the breast pocket. He strode straight up to my desk and stood there looking at me.

“The legend returns,” he said. The tone was sarcastic, and he wasn’t smiling.

I knew Alexander was a fairly recent hire in the DA’s office. Prior to his becoming an assistant district attorney, he’d been an ambulance chaser and divorce attorney. He’d been with the DA’s office for less than a year, and from what I’d read in the newspapers, he was trying mightily to make a name for himself by pressing for the maximum punishment on every case he handled. He wasn’t having much success, though, and after watching him try Dockery’s case, I knew why.

“Hello, Alexander,” I said, looking back down at my box of goodies.