Joe Dillard - 02 - In Good Faith (12 page)

I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. The offer was ridiculous, but it was the way he delivered it that amused me. It made me think of a huge, animated purple blow-fish, pompously spouting his vastly superior intellectual theories to all the little shrimps around him.

“Sorry,” I said, trying to stop laughing. His face was darkening, and even through all the layers of fat, I could see he was becoming angry. “I can’t do that, Mr. Snodgrass. It’s out of the question.”

“Then rather than sitting there doing your impression of a hyena, perhaps you’d care to make some kind of reasonable counteroffer.”

“I thought you said your terms were nonnegotiable.”

“I might be willing to negotiate on the amount of the fine,” he said.

I could see the conversation was pointless, so I decided to end it. Besides, he was beginning to get on my nerves. I leaned back and rubbed my face, as though I were giving his suggestion due consideration. Finally, I rested my chin on my fingertips and looked him directly in the eye.

“All right, Mr. Snodgrass. I’ll make you a reasonable counteroffer. If your client will agree to undergo a simple procedure, I’ll dismiss the charges. He can walk away clean.”

“Procedure? What do you mean?”

“A medical procedure. I believe it’s called castration. If he’ll let a doctor remove his balls so I’m sure he won’t do this to any more young girls, I’ll dismiss the case. Those are
my
terms, and they’re nonnegotiable.”

I noticed his hands tighten on the arms of the chair and his face went another shade darker. Slowly, he began to hoist himself to his feet.

“I’ll be speaking to your superior about this matter,” he said. “I’m sure he would want to be aware of your cavalier attitude, especially after I grind you into the dust.You might want to think about seeking alternative employment.”

“Have a nice day, Mr. Snodgrass,” I said without bothering to get up. “I’ll see you in a couple of weeks, provided you’re still with us.”

He glared at me one last time and slammed the door.

Sunday, October 5

I knew I’d be spending most of Monday at the hospital with Caroline, so I called Tom Short and asked him if he’d meet me at my office in Jonesborough on Sunday afternoon. Tom was a forensic psychiatrist I’d known for years and whom I’d used as an expert witness in several cases I’d defended. He had an uncanny ability to diagnose personality disorders, but more important, he could analyze a set of facts or circumstances and make reliable predictions about future behavior. I wanted to show him the file and see what he had to say about the killers we were looking for.

He walked in wearing jeans and a red flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He was just under six feet tall, with veiny blacksmith’s forearms and a perpetual gleam in his astute pale blue eyes. He wore oval-shaped glasses and a two-day stubble. The worn stem of a tobacco pipe stuck out of his shirt pocket. The part in his thinning hair may have been a little closer to his ear than the last time I’d seen him, which was more than a year ago.

“You don’t look any different,” he said as he shook my hand.

“What were you expecting?”

“I don’t know, maybe a jackbooted Nazi. I couldn’t believe it when I read in the paper that you’d become a prosecutor, a minion of the government.”

“I’m not a minion. I’m a civil servant, a proud representative of the people of Tennessee.”

“Bullshit,” he said. “You have too much compassion to do this job for long. My guess is you won’t last a year.”

“I appreciate your confidence,” I said, motioning to a chair and anxious to get started. “Now, if you could find it in your heart to focus your laser beam on something besides me, I need your help.”

I lifted a folder out of the file and spent the next half hour laying out everything we knew. The last items I showed him were the photographs from the crime scenes and the autopsies. He leaned back and took his pipe out of his shirt pocket and stuck it between his teeth, unlit.

“They’re young,” he said. “And they’re angry. Most likely male.”

“You’re sure of it?”

“Relatively. Crimes of this kind, where there are multiple killers, tend to involve younger people. There’s something going on here besides anger, though. Something a little beyond. I think you’re dealing with a competition of some sort.”

“Competition?”

“For attention, approval, that sort of thing. The number of wounds tells me they’re trying to impress someone, maybe each other, with the amount of damage they’re willing to inflict, the lengths they’re willing to go to. Maybe they’re still establishing a pecking order of some sort. And the mutilation, the carvings and the broken legs at the first scene, the positioning of the bodies, they’re taunting you, but at the same time, they’re paying homage to someone, probably their leader.”

“Do you think Satan is their leader?”

“I think the leader is flesh and bone.”

“But do you think it’s some kind of Satanic cult?”

“Maybe, but more likely it’s a group of fledgling sociopaths, obviously outcasts, rabidly angry, perhaps experimenting with how best to express their feelings to the world. Satan may be of some symbolic value to them, but I doubt they’re dedicated in any meaningful way.”

“How could anybody be dedicated in any meaningful way to Satan?”

Tom removed the pipe from his teeth and regarded me curiously. “I don’t remember religion as being one of your passions.”

“Why is everyone suddenly so interested in my feelings towards religion?” I said. I was thinking about the remarks Sarah had made to me just before she left.

“Is someone else interested?” Tom said.

“Never mind. Do you have any suggestions on how we catch them?”

“I assume you’ve checked out the Goth bars.”

“There’s only one. The TBI agents have been there more than once. They came up empty.”

“The only other way I could suggest, but I certainly wouldn’t recommend it, would be to call them out. You could go public and insult them openly. Set yourself up as a target. They’re obviously arrogant, so it wouldn’t sit well with them. Of course, you’d be putting yourself, and probably your family, at extreme risk.”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m not ready to die for the cause yet, and I’m not willing to put Caroline in any kind of danger.”

He didn’t say anything when I mentioned Caroline. He obviously hadn’t heard about her illness, and I didn’t feel like discussing it.

“Don’t worry; you’ll catch them,” he said.

“What makes you so sure?”

“Like I said, they’re arrogant. Arrogance breeds sloppiness. It’s just a matter of time.”

After Tom left, I walked back down to my truck, which was parked on the street beside the courthouse. As I approached, I noticed something had been tucked beneath the windshield wiper blade on the passenger side. It was a manila envelope with nothing written on it. I got in the cab and opened it up.

Inside was a single sheet of paper. On it was a charcoal drawing. The drawing, which appeared to have been done by a professional artist, was in two frames, each taking up half the page. One half depicted two long-haired ghouls pointing pistols at a man tied to a tree. The man was elderly and naked except for his underwear, just like Norman Brockwell was when they found him. In the upper-left corner of the frame was a pair of fierce-looking eyes, one darkly shaded and the other lightly shaded, watching what was about to happen in the frame. The second frame was a drawing of a woman—maybe a girl—in a floppy straw hat. She was wearing a long dress and a shawl and was seated on a park bench beneath a tree, overlooking a river. Beyond her was an outdoor amphitheater, and behind her was a statue of a winged deer.

I immediately recognized the spot where the young woman was sitting, because I’d been there hundreds of times. Caroline and I had spent many hours walking along the river at Winged Deer Park, talking about our hopes and dreams, about our children, our relationships, our problems. The spot depicted in the drawing was in the park. It was one of our favorite places.

My eyes fell to a written caption beneath the young woman on the bench. It said, “She knows. Come tomorrow.”

Monday, October 6

It had been twenty-two days since the Becks were murdered, a week since the Brockwells. The agents had interviewed nearly a hundred people and followed up on dozens of false leads that had come in through hotlines set up by the TBI. The local newspaper editorialized that the police were incompetent. One editorial demanded a task force. Someone let it leak that the district attorney had already proposed a task force, but the idea had been vetoed by Joe Dillard, the prosecutor who would handle the case when it went to trial and was guiding the investigation. The paper pointed out that Dillard was also the newest member of the DA’s office and that he had virtually no law enforcement experience. I didn’t bother to confront anyone who’d been in the room during the discussion about a task force. It didn’t matter.

On Monday morning Caroline, Jack, Lilly, and I drove to the medical center in Johnson City. Caroline was scheduled for exploratory surgery, the first stage in her treatment. The surgeon was to open Caroline’s breast, measure the tumor, and cut out a small section of skin above it and some of the surrounding tissue. He’d also remove what he called the sentinel lymph node. He’d send sections of the tumor, the skin, the tissue, and the node to the lab. They already knew the tumor was malignant, but the lab would tell the doctor whether the samples from the node and the skin contained cancer cells. If not, he’d remove the tumor and a portion of the surrounding tissue, and Caroline might be faced with only six or eight weeks of radiation therapy. That was the best case. If the tumor was large, however, or if there was cancer in the node or the skin, the treatment would be much different.

We sat in a waiting room in the surgery center until ten a.m., nearly two hours after they wheeled Caroline away on a gurney. By that time, we’d been joined by Caroline’s mother and two of her friends whose names I didn’t know, Sarah and her boyfriend—neither of whom spoke to me—a couple of Lilly’s friends, and a man I’d never laid eyes on. It turned out he was from Caroline’s mother’s church. He put his hand on Caroline’s forehead and prayed over her just before she was taken off to surgery. He asked the Lord to free her from this terrible disease. I didn’t have much faith in his ability to rid Caroline of cancer, but I didn’t object to his praying over her. I wouldn’t have cared if a painted medicine man came in and danced circles around her. Anything that might help, I was up for it.

Jack and I were just walking back to the waiting room from a trip to the cafeteria when my cell phone rang. It was Fraley.

“You need to come out here,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“To the park. The girl in the picture. She’s here. She wants to talk to you.”

I’d called Fraley and taken the picture to him Sunday afternoon after I found it on my windshield. Both of us were skeptical, but he said he’d follow up.

“What?” I said. “Now?”

“As soon as you can.”

“Caroline’s in surgery. Can’t it wait a few hours?”

“I guess it could, but we take a chance on her changing her mind or leaving.”

“Where exactly is she?” I said.

“Near the pavilion. Right where you said she’d be. I’m holding the drawing in my hand and it looks exactly like it. It’s weird.”

I hung up the phone and looked at Jack. “I have to go,” I said. He gave me a bewildered look. “We may have a witness in the murders. She wants to talk to me. Your mother will be in surgery for at least another hour; then she’ll be in recovery for a while. As soon as the surgeon comes out, call me. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Winged Deer is a two-hundred-acre park located on the eastern outskirts of Johnson City. The upper half of the park contains baseball and softball fields and a hiking trail that winds through a five-acre patch of dense forest. The lower half skirts the Watauga River. Along the river are more walking trails, a boat ramp, a board-walk, and a large, covered pavilion that people rent for outdoor gatherings and picnics. There are also a few benches scattered around beneath the oak and maple trees that dot the riverbank. I spotted Fraley’s car in the lot and parked next to it. I found him pacing back and forth near the pavilion, nervously sucking on a cigarette.

“Sorry about this,” Fraley said as soon as I walked up. “How’s the wife?”

“Don’t know yet. She’s still in surgery, but thanks for asking.”

“This one’s strange,” he said.

“How so?”

“You’ll see.” He nodded towards the river.

I started walking down the hill in the direction of the nod. My view of the bench was obscured by the tree at first, but then I saw her. It was as though the drawing I’d held in my hand the day before had come to life. I approached slowly. The dress she was wearing was antique white and ankle length. Her feet were covered by sandals, her head by a finely woven straw hat that fluttered gently in the light breeze. A white crocheted shawl was draped over her shoulders. Her hands were folded in her lap, and she appeared to be looking out over the river, serenely contemplating the universe. I could see dark red hair curling softly down her back and shoulders all the way to her waist. As I approached, she turned towards me and lifted her chin. Beneath the brim of the hat was a young, smooth face with high cheekbones and a jawline that melted into a slightly dimpled chin. Full lips were curved into a pleasant smile. Her nose was small and delicate. A flesh-colored patch, which was secured by a length of what appeared to be nylon, covered her right eye. Her left eye was the most brilliant, clear blue I’d ever seen.

“I’m Joe Dillard,” I said as I stood uncomfortably over her. The eye was beautiful, but at the same time, it was unnerving.

“Someone you love deeply is very ill,” she said in an even tone. Her voice was calm and appealing, like that of a well-trained stage actress.

“What’s your name?” I said.

“I see pain in your eyes. I sense regret. You’ve done things you’d like to forget.”