Killing Chase (3 page)

Crystal was due to drop her off around one thirty on that hot summer day. My bedroom overlooked our long, straight driveway, and I sat perched in the window, and watched for that old, gray Ford Escort. I expected to see it any minute. One thirty became one forty-five, which soon turned into two, and there was no sign of Bailey or her mom. I called her home and a message told me the number had been disconnected. I redialed, thinking I had erred, but I got the same message the second time around. I thought it sad that they couldn’t afford their phone anymore, which got me to wondering if my dad had any luck in convincing Crystal to let us help. I assumed her mom didn’t have a cell phone either. By two thirty, I had a feeling she wasn’t coming over so I asked Mattie to drive me to her trailer. Crystal’s car wasn’t in the small gravel parking spot, but I did notice a trashcan overflowing with bags of trash. I knocked on the door, and no one answered. I tried to open it, but it was locked.

“Let’s go, Chase. They aren’t here,” said Mattie.

An older woman, with her hair in curlers, stepped out from the trailer next door. “They done moved out ‘bout three or four hours ago. A man helped ’em load up a small U-Haul, and they just left. Crystal said they were headin’ to greener pastures, whatever that means.”

Just like that, my world flipped upside down. My best friend was gone without so much as a goodbye. I would see her again, but time and circumstance has a way of changing people.

***

“Hamp, where you been?” I heard. I snapped back to the present and realized I was standing next to my now unlocked cell door.

“You were thinking about her, weren’t you?” he said, as he pulled up his pants, his business completed.

“What do you mean, Sam? Who am I thinking about?” I said uneasily.
How on God’s green earth does he know I’m thinking about anyone?

“Why, Bailey, of course. The girl from your dreams. You woke me up last night saying that name over and over and over.” Hearing someone else say her name was like having my heart pierced with a sharp icicle. It was cold and it hurt, more than I’d ever care to admit.

“Take care, Hamp. Wherever you’re going,” he said, finality in his voice. I opened the cell door, turned, threw up a half-hearted wave, and walked out without saying goodbye.

After breakfast, I walked over
to T Wing where the prison library was located. It was a five-hundred-square-foot room with bookshelves on each wall and a desk in the middle. From five forty-five to seven forty-five a.m., I sorted, repaired, checked out, and checked in books. There were over seven hundred books in our collection, from the American classics to crime fiction to religious texts. We had twenty-five King James Bibles and two Korans, and these books were always checked out. Redemption was big in prison. I spent most of my time repairing them, and I requested new Bibles, but requests moved through the chain like cold molasses in winter.

I supposed I could ask my father to donate fifty Bibles, but I’d rather not. Starting tonight, I will need his unwitting help to ensure I remain free. Free. The last memory I have of freedom is the day before I reported to the New Hanover Correctional Center in Wilmington. Wednesday, March 16, 2005. I should have been the starting pitcher for the Foggy Harbor Hawks that day, but instead I was at home, left to my own devices. Mom drank herself into a stupor and stayed in her bedroom, and my father went to work as if it were just another ordinary day. I spent it alone, in the beach cabana, just watching the waves come in, listening to the music on my iPod, and wondering how I would survive the next twelve years locked up. I had no calls or visitors—just Mattie, who would occasionally come out to sit and talk.

I spent that day thinking about the night of December 11, 2004, the night the trajectory of my life changed. Understanding that day, however, required backing up to Friday, December 10, 2004—one of the greatest days of my life. We played the Butler Bulldogs in the 2A State Championship game in Charlotte. The game was close and went down to the wire. We got the ball on our twenty-yard line, down two, with a minute and a half left on the clock in the 4th quarter.

The stadium in Charlotte was packed and the noise was incredible. Somehow, three pass plays later, we were sitting on their twenty-five-yard line with one timeout in our back pocket and thirty seconds remaining. We’d been getting good yardage all game long on screen passes to our stable of scat backs, but there was no way we were putting the ball back in the air and risking a turnover. I faked the handoff to the right and ran a naked bootleg to the left, catching them flat-footed. I made it to the twelve before one of their linebackers brought me down. Butler called timeout immediately to preserve some time in case we made the field goal. With twenty-one seconds left, my good friend Zack Griffin split the uprights, and we were up by one. We kicked off and pinned them on their twenty-five. Two plays later, Cam Tanner—yes, that Cam Tanner—picked off their quarterback, and we had our state championship. It was surreal.

We celebrated on the bus the first three hours of the four-hour trip home and pulled in to Foggy Harbor High at three thirty a.m., exhausted. As a group, the team decided there would be a bonfire on the beach Saturday night to celebrate.

Fast forward to Saturday night. About three hundred people had gathered on Atlantic Beach. It was a cold night, and the air had a salty crispness to it as the wind blew in from the ocean. The bonfire was lit at seven thirty, and by nine thirty, most of the attendees were as well. Everyone was feeling it; we were all ten feet tall and bulletproof. A state championship for the trophy case, one week of school left before the eighteen-day Christmas break, and for me, a full four-year scholarship to play quarterback at Clemson. The Can’t Miss Kid.

I sat near the fire with some of my best friends from the team, laughing and throwing back Milwaukee’s Best. I’m sure Foggy Harbor’s finest knew about the party, but for whatever reason, they left us alone. At some point, I saw Bailey, and for a moment, I felt something slipping away. I raised my beer to her, and she looked at me, unsure of how to respond. She simply turned away to join her friends. I was nothing to her anymore.

Sometime later, I left the fire to take a leak. I retreated about twenty yards into the brush and sparse pines and as I was walking back, I could hear two people yelling near a large pickup truck parked away from the fire. Everyone had driven onto the beach. I walked toward the sound, and Bailey’s voice cut through the air.

“Leave me alone, you bastard,” she screamed at someone behind the dark truck. I thought I could see her pushing someone away, so I took off in a drunken sprint.

“You know you want some of the Cam-a-nater, bitch,” said a surly Cameron Tanner. He laughed drunkenly as he came into my view and stumbled toward a retreating Bailey.

“Cam!” I shouted, “Leave her alone. You’re drunk and you need to back away.”

“I can take care of myself, Chase,” she sneered. “I don’t need you butting into my business.”

“Since when is this asswipe your business?” I countered.

“You heard her, get the fuck out of here, Clemson.”

“I will, as soon as you leave, Division III.”

I turned to look at Bailey, who was still backing away from Cam and edging closer to the protected dunes.

“Are you all—” was all I could get out before Cam rushed me and punched me in the head from behind. We went down in a heap of testosterone and swinging arms. He landed a few punches to my side, and I was able to get in two shots to his stomach.

Cam had gotten a lot stronger since that day at the inlet, and I was having a hard time matching him blow for blow. I could throw a football fifty yards on the fly and run a 4.4, but they were not necessarily great qualifications for fighting, unless I planned on running away. He detached himself from me and stood up. I saw him grinning in the moonlight as he lifted his foot to stomp my face and turn it into a permanent part of the beach. Before he could, I kicked my leg up and caught him square in the balls. I rolled over and stood up as he fell to the sand, writhing in pain.

Bailey yelled and screamed, begging us to stop, and some people ran over from the fire to see what was going on. Cam was still on the ground in pain, and in a fit of anger, I kicked him viciously, twice, in the side of his head with my thick-soled Timberland boots. He lay there moaning and still, and I walked away as some people knelt down to help him.

“Are you proud of yourself, Chase?” Bailey screamed at me, tears rolling down her delicate face as the cold winter wind blew her hair askew. “You always have to come to the fucking rescue, isn’t that right, Clemson?” she said, chock full of contempt.

I ignored her and walked back to the fire, my side sore from Cam’s punches. I didn’t see him get up; instead, there were shouts to call 911. Five minutes later, an ambulance arrived, as well as several police cars. The police fanned out and gathered information from eyewitnesses. Against my better judgment, I gave my story to a police detective next to the fire, as it slowly died, along with my future, instead of requesting a lawyer.

The ambulance soon left with Cam, and the beach emptied. The detective who questioned me walked me over to his car and told me to turn around and place my hands on the vehicle. An officer then patted me down, placed me in cuffs, and read me my Miranda rights. They charged me with assault and booked me into the Foggy Harbor City Jail. I stayed there until noon the next day, when my father’s attorney, Arthur Stinson, arrived to bail me out. He had some bad news. Cam Tanner was in a coma, and there was a better than fifty-percent chance he would not come out of it.

I spent the next two weeks at home, wandering aimlessly around the house, ignoring the schoolwork my teachers sent home. Cam’s condition continued to worsen, and on Sunday, December 26, a doctor declared him brain dead. Art came over to explain what was happening. When a doctor declares someone brain dead, it means they are unresponsive to stimuli, have no reflex activity, and are unable to breathe on their own without the use of a ventilator. Mr. Stinson had been in regular contact with the district attorney, who told him I would be charged with involuntary manslaughter, pending the autopsy results.

Much later, I would understand that as human beings we were flawed from the moment we took our first breath. We broke things and hurt people, and in the process, hurt ourselves. The proper course of action would have been to express remorse over the death of Cameron Tanner. Instead, I retreated into my own little world and threw myself the world’s biggest pity party.
How could this happen to me?
In due time, the district attorney took the case to the Brunswick County Grand Jury, which found there was enough evidence to charge me with involuntary manslaughter. Arthur advised us to hire new counsel for the trial, as criminal defense was out of his purview. We hired Jackson Ellis, a renowned criminal defense attorney out of Atlanta, and a good friend of my father’s. I wanted a trial, but Mr. Ellis thought a plea deal would be a better option, since I had already admitted to kicking Cam twice in the head after the fight ended. Plus, the prosecution had eyewitnesses to back this up. I wanted to argue self-defense, but he turned that argument into Swiss cheese. The fight was over when he went down from my kick.

The prosecution had already portrayed me as the rich kid who thought he could buy his way out of prison. It was class warfare at its finest. Jack argued that a two-week trial would be risky and could make the jury look at me in a harsher light. We acquiesced and Jack began sentence bargaining, a process where the two sides agree in advance on what the sentence will be. Cam’s family was pressing hard to have me locked away, with the key dumped in the deep Atlantic.

Jack began with an offer of five years in a minimum- security prison. Allen Banks, the DA, countered with twenty years in a medium-security facility. Back and forth we went for two days until I reluctantly agreed to a 12-year sentence in a medium-security prison, with the possibility of parole in ten years, if I had no blemishes on my record. At the beginning of my ninth year, I would be moved to a minimum-security prison, where I would serve out the remaining four years, unless I was paroled in the tenth year. Got all that.

The agreement was reached on February 10th and I was given a reporting date of March 17. I began to focus on March 17, 2015 as a possible parole date, and this date was still on my mind, until a visitor showed up a couple of weeks ago.

March 1, 2012

I was leaving laundry after
lunch when a corrections officer by the name of Patterson told me I was needed in medical. I asked him if they needed me to scrub in for surgery. That got a laugh out of him, but he offered no more information. I hoisted my canvas laundry bag over my shoulder and followed him, wondering what was going on. Prison is a highly structured environment, and deviation from the norm seldom happened.

We walked past the locked door that led to the administrative offices, took a right into the empty lobby of the clinic, and walked down a narrow hall that smelled vaguely antiseptic. Patterson opened a door labeled “Exam Room 9” and ushered me in.

“I’ll escort you back when you’re done,” he said as he closed the door and stepped back into the hall.

Seated on a rolling doctor’s stool was a rumpled-looking man in an even more rumpled black suit. He had a mop of unruly black hair, flecked with bits of gray, and deep-set eyes. Worry lines creased his face. He could’ve been fifty or seventy-five.

“Mr. Hampton, I’m FBI Special Agent Rollin Schmidt,” he said, offering his hand. He showed me his worn credentials and offered me the wooden straight-back chair that was set against the wall.

“Sir, I don’t know what trouble I’m in, but I’ve got a pretty airtight alibi for the last seven years,” I said in jest as I sat down.

“Relax, Mr. Hampton. I just need your undivided attention for the next fifteen minutes and your promise that what we talk about does not leave this room. Can you agree to that?”

“You have my undivided attention, Special Agent Schmidt.”

He nodded his head and seemed unsure of how to begin.

“Chase, did you play monopoly growing up?”

“Once or twice.”

“Are you familiar with the Get Out of Jail card?”

“I am, but I believe it’s called the Get Out of Jail Free card, Mr. Schmidt.”

“What we have in mind isn’t free, but it will get you out of prison if you agree to our offer.”

“Out of prison?” I said in disbelief.

“Yes, in about two weeks, give or take a day or two. A great deal of thought and planning has gone into this endeavor already, even without your agreeing, and while I personally don’t like this idea, my bosses are gonna run with it as long as you run with them.”

“What’s the rub?”

“You simply have to go home to Foggy Harbor and do a few things that we’ve been unable to do.”

“What could I possibly do that the vaunted FBI is unable to do?”

“We’re concerned your father’s company, Aquatic Expeditions, is involved in something detrimental to our national security. We’re not sure if his firm is dealing with a criminal enterprise or a rogue nation, and we aren’t even sure if he is involved or knows about it. That’s where you come in.”

“You want me to spy on my father, Mr. Schmidt?”

“We want you to be our eyes and ears, Chase, our very own informational sponge.”

“What makes you think I will have access to the company once I’m out?” I inquired.

“Pardon the pun, but we’re hoping your father will bring you
aboard.
One of the requirements for your parole is that you get a job within two weeks of your release. We do not want you to ask your father for a job; we’d rather he come to that decision on his own. In fact, we want you to apply for some other jobs around Foggy Harbor. Given your history, no one will want to hire a just-paroled ex-con with a manslaughter charge.”

“Well, now you’re just hurting my feelings, Mr. Schmidt,” I said with a smile, “but I understand. When you say spying, what do you mean?”

“Planting listening devices in his office and the offices of his executives and management team, and generally soaking up as much information as possible. Your contact will give you instructions on an as-needed basis.”

“Oh, is that all? I was worried this was going to be hard,” I said sarcastically. “Don’t you have people more qualified than me? Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to get out of here, but am I the best person for this job?”

“Chase, as I said, you are the most uniquely qualified, and if we do this right, no one will ever expect you are working for us.”

“If I agree to this, where do I get all the gear and how do I learn how to install these devices? Do I just head down to the local Radio Shack with a list and a government credit card?”

“We’ve got that covered. Soon after your release, an agent from my team will be in touch. That’s all I can say right now.”

“Mr. Schmidt, my father and I have never been all that close. I suspect you know this. Suppose he doesn’t offer me a job or a place to live. Do I just get to walk away?”

“We know that he is making a genuine effort to be a part of your life based on the phone recordings we’ve listened to and the visits he’s made recently. We see the glass half full; maybe you should as well. You have two months. If we don’t see progress, we find a parole violation, and back in you go to serve out your remaining time. Any more questions?”

“May I play devil’s advocate here for a moment?”

“Go right ahead, Mr. Hampton,” he said, seeming to know the question already.

“What if I were to call my father and tell him what you just told me? What’s to stop me from doing that?”

FBI Special Agent Rollin Schmidt’s eyes lit up at the question, and he looked at me warmly before he came in for the kill.

“Chase, your remaining years in the North Carolina state prison system would not be enjoyable. I dare say you would end up serving out your full sentence at a max-security institution due to some unfortunate violation. Poor Chase had illegal drugs and a homemade knife hidden in his mattress. And you certainly wouldn’t like your new cellmate, that I’m sure of. You following me here?”

“I think you’re saying that telling my dad this would be a bad idea.”

“I knew we had the right guy for this job,” he said with a smile that made me uncomfortable. Mr. Schmidt was not someone to screw with, I decided.

“I’m not eligible for parole for another three years. How do I explain this?”

“Chase, people get released early all the time. Due to overcrowding, you are one of a hundred inmates across the state who will be released due to this unfortunate circumstance. We’ve got all the bases covered. So do we have a deal?”

“I’m flat broke, except for the three hundred fifty bucks in my prison account; what do I do for money?”

“That’s up to you. Combined, your parents are worth millions. I’m sure they’ll be more than willing to help you out.”

“I’m not big on asking for money.”

“The thousand dollars deposited into your account every month would say otherwise.”

“Those are guilt payments, nothing more. I’ve never asked for a dime; however, it’s true that I don’t send it back.”

“Half full, Chase. Half full. So what’ll it be?”

I sat there with a zillion questions swirling in my head, vying for attention and needing to be answered. Astounded at the thought of getting out, I said the only thing someone in prison for seven years would say, if given the same opportunity.

“We have a deal.”