Three Classic Thrillers (88 page)

“Expense money—airfare, hotel, the basics. Two thousand.”

“Do we have it?” she asked with a laugh.

“It’s out of my pocket. We’ll keep it off the books. I just want you to know what we’re doing.”

“You have my approval.”

“And the Frankie Hightower dissent?”

“I’m hard at work. Should take me another two months.”

“Now you’re talking like a real supreme court justice.”

__________

D
enny Ott received a left-handed invitation to the meeting when a fellow preacher mentioned it to him over coffee one morning at Babe’s. Not every minister in town was invited. Two from the Methodist churches and the Presbyterian pastor were specifically excluded, but it appeared as if all others were welcome. There was no Episcopal church in Bowmore, and if the town had a single Catholic, he or she had yet to come forward.

It was held on a Thursday afternoon in the fellowship hall of a fundamentalist congregation called Harvest Tabernacle. The moderator was the church’s pastor, a fiery young man who was generally known as Brother Ted. After a quick prayer, he welcomed his fellow ministers, sixteen in number, including three black ministers. He cast a wary eye at Denny Ott, but said nothing about his presence.

Brother Ted quickly got down to business. He had joined the Brotherhood Coalition, a newly formed collection of fundamentalist preachers throughout south
Mississippi. It was their purpose to quietly and methodically do everything possible, within the Lord’s will, to elect Ron Fisk and thus kill off any chance of same-sex marriages occurring in Mississippi. He ranted on about the evils of homosexuality and its growing acceptability in American society. He quoted the Bible when appropriate, his voice rising with indignation when necessary. He stressed the urgency of electing godly men to all public positions and promised that the Brotherhood would be a force for years to come.

Denny listened with a straight face but growing alarm. He’d had several conversations with the Paytons and knew the real issues behind the race. The manipulation and marketing of Fisk made him sick. He glanced at the other ministers and wondered how many funerals they had held for people killed by Krane Chemical. Cary County should be the last place to embrace the candidacy of someone like Ron Fisk.

Brother Ted grew sufficiently pious when he moved to the subject of Sheila McCarthy. She was a Catholic from the Coast, which in rural Christian circles meant she was a woman of loose morals. She was divorced. She liked to party, and there were rumors of boyfriends. She was a hopeless liberal, opposed to the death penalty, and could not be trusted when faced with decisions dealing with gay marriage and illegal immigration and the like.

When he finished his sermon, someone suggested that perhaps churches should not become so involved in
politics. This was met with general disapproval. Brother Ted jumped in with a brief lecture about the culture wars and the courage they should have to fight for God. It’s time for Christians to get off the sidelines and charge into the arena. This led to a fervent discussion about the erosion of values. Blame was placed on television, Hollywood, the Internet. The list grew long and ugly.

What was their strategy? someone asked.

Organization! Church folk outnumbered the heathen in south Mississippi, and the troops must be mobilized. Campaign workers, door knockers, poll watchers. Spread the message from church to church, house to house. The election was only three weeks away. Their movement was spreading like wildfire.

After an hour, Denny Ott could take no more. He excused himself, drove to his office at the church, and called Mary Grace.

__________

T
he MTA directors met in an emergency session two days after the Fisk campaign launched its waves of anti-gay-marriage ads. The mood was somber. The question was obvious: How did such an issue take center stage? And what could the McCarthy campaign do to counter the attack?

Nat Lester was present and gave a summary of their plans for the final three weeks. McCarthy had $700,000 to fight with, much less than Fisk. Half of her budget was already committed to television ads that would begin
running in twenty-four hours. The remainder was for direct mail and some last-minute radio and TV spots. After that, they were out of money. Small donations were coming from labor, conservationists, good-government groups, and a few of the more moderate lobbying organizations, but 92 percent of McCarthy’s funds were mailed in by trial lawyers.

Nat then summarized the latest poll. The race was a dead heat with the two front-runners at 30 percent, with the same number of voters still undecided. Coley remained around 10 percent. However, the poll was conducted the week before and did not reflect any shift due to the gay marriage ads. Because of those ads, Nat would begin polling over the weekend.

Not surprisingly, the trial lawyers had wild and varied opinions about what to do. All of their ideas were expensive, Nat continually reminded them. He listened to them argue. Some had sensible ideas, others were radical. Most assumed they knew more about campaigns than the others, and all of them took for granted that whatever course of action they finally agreed on would be immediately embraced by the McCarthy campaign.

Nat did not share with them some depressing gossip. A reporter from the Biloxi newspaper had called that morning with a few questions. He was exploring a story about the raging new issue of same-sex marriages. During the course of a ten-minute interview, he told Nat that the largest television station on the Coast had sold $1 million in prime airtime to the Fisk campaign
for the remaining three weeks. It was believed to be the largest sale ever in a political race.

One million dollars on the Coast meant at least that much for the rest of the markets.

The news was so distressing that Nat was debating whether to tell Sheila. At that moment, he was leaning toward keeping it to himself. And he certainly wouldn’t share it with the trial lawyers. Such sums were so staggering that it might demoralize Sheila’s base.

The MTA president, Bobby Neal, finally hammered out a plan, one that would cost little. He would send to their eight hundred members an urgent e-mail detailing the dire situation and begging for action. Each trial lawyer would be instructed to (1) make a list of at least ten clients who were willing and able to write a check for $100, and (2) make another list of clients and friends who could be motivated to campaign door-to-door and work the polls on Election Day. Grassroots support was critical.

As the meeting began to break up, Willy Benton stood at the far end of the table and got everyone’s attention. He was holding a sheet of paper with small print front and back. “This is a promissory note on a line of credit at the Gulf Bank in Pascagoula,” he announced, and more than one lawyer considered diving under the table. Benton was no small thinker, and he was known for drama. “Half a million dollars,” he said slowly, the numbers booming around the room. “In favor of the campaign to reelect Sheila McCarthy. I’ve already signed it, and I’m going to pass it around this
table. There are twelve of us here. It requires ten signatures to become effective. Each will be liable for fifty thousand.”

Dead silence. Eyes were darting from face to face. Some had already contributed more than $50,000, others much less. Some would spend $50,000 on jet fuel next month, others were bickering with their creditors. Regardless of their bank balances at the moment, each and every one wanted to strangle the little bastard.

Benton handed the note to the unlucky stiff to his left, one without a jet. Fortunately, such moments in a career are rare. Sign it and you’re a tough guy who can roll the dice. Pass it along unsigned and you might as well quit and go home and do real estate.

All twelve signed.

T
he pervert’s name was Darrel Sackett. When last seen, he was thirty-seven years old and housed in a county jail awaiting a new trial on charges of molesting small children. He certainly looked guilty: long sloping forehead, vapid bug eyes enlarged by thick glasses, splotchy stubble from a week’s growth, a thick scar stuck to his chin—the type of face that would alarm any parent, or anyone else for that matter. A career pedophile, he was first arrested at age sixteen. Many other arrests followed, and he’d been convicted at least four times in four different states.

Sackett, with his frightening face and disgusting rap sheet, was introduced to the registered voters of south Mississippi in a snazzy direct mailing from another new organization, this one calling itself Victims Rising. The two-page letter was both a bio of a pathetic criminal
and a summary of the miserable failures of the judicial system.

“Why Is This Man Free?” the letter screamed. Answer: Because Justice Sheila McCarthy overturned his conviction on sixteen counts of child molestation. Eight years earlier, a jury convicted Sackett, and the judge sentenced him to life without parole. His lawyer—one paid by taxpayers—appealed his case to the supreme court, and “there Darrel Sackett found the sympathetic embrace of Justice Sheila McCarthy.” McCarthy condemned the honest and hardworking detectives who extracted a full confession from Sackett. She chastised them for what she saw as their faulty search-and-seizure methods. She hammered the trial judge, who was highly respected and tough on crime, for admitting into evidence the confession and materials taken from Sackett’s apartment. (The jury was visibly shaken when forced to view Sackett’s stash of child porn, seized by the cops during a “valid” search.) She claimed distaste for the defendant, but begged off by saying that she had no choice but to reverse his conviction and send his case back for a new trial.

Sackett was moved from the state prison back to the Lauderdale County jail, where he escaped one week later. He had not been heard from since. He was out there, “a free man,” no doubt continuing his violence against innocent children.

The last paragraph ended with the usual rant against liberal judges. The fine print gave the standard approval by Ron Fisk.

Certain relevant facts were conveniently omitted. First, the court voted 8 to 1 to reverse the Sackett conviction and send it back for a new trial. The actions of the police were so egregious that four other justices wrote concurring opinions that were even more scathing in their condemnation of the forced confession and warrantless, unconstitutional search. The lone dissenter, Justice Romano, was a misguided soul who had never voted to reverse a criminal conviction, and privately vowed that he would never do so.

Second, Sackett was dead. Four years earlier he’d been killed in a bar fight in Alaska. The news of his passing barely made it to Mississippi, and when his file was retired in Lauderdale County, not a single reporter noticed. Barry Rinehart’s exhaustive research discovered the truth, for what little it mattered.

The Fisk campaign was far beyond the truth now. The candidate was too busy to sweat the details, and he had placed his complete trust in Tony Zachary. The race had become a crusade, a calling of the highest order, and if facts were slightly bent or even ignored, then it was justified because of the importance of his candidacy. Besides, it was politics, a dirty game, and you could rest assured the other side wasn’t playing fair, either.

Barry Rinehart had never been shackled by the truth. His only concern was not getting caught in his lies. If a madman like Darrel Sackett was out there, on the loose, very much alive and doing his filthy deeds, then his story was more shocking. A dead Sackett was a
pleasant thought, but Rinehart preferred the power of fear. And he knew that McCarthy couldn’t respond. She had reversed his conviction, plain and simple. Any effort to explain why would be futile in the world of thirty-second ads and snappy sound bites.

After the shock of the ad, she would try to erase Sackett from her mind.

__________

A
fter the shock, though, she had to at least revisit the case. She saw the ad online, at the Victims Rising Web site, after receiving a frantic call from Nat Lester. Paul, her clerk, found the reported case, and they read it in silence. She vaguely remembered it. In the eight years since, she had read a thousand briefs and written hundreds of opinions.

“You got it right,” Paul said when he finished.

“Yes, but why does it look so wrong now?” she said. She’d been hard at work, her desk covered with memos from half a dozen cases. She was stunned, bewildered.

He didn’t answer.

“I wonder what’s next,” she said, closing her eyes.

“Probably a death penalty case. And they’ll cherry-pick the facts again.”

“Thanks. Anything else?”

“Sure. There’s lots of material in these books. You’re a judge. Every time you make a decision someone loses. These guys don’t care about the truth, so they can make anything sound bad.”

“Please shut up.”

__________

H
er first ads began, and they lightened the mood somewhat. Nat chose to begin with a straightforward piece with Sheila in a black robe sitting at the bench, smiling earnestly at the camera. She talked about her experience—eight years as a trial judge in Harrison County, nine years on the supreme court. She hated to pat her own back, but twice in the past five years she had received the highest rating in the state bar’s annual review of all appellate judges. She was not a liberal judge, nor a conservative one. She refused to be labeled. Her commitment was simply to follow the laws of Mississippi, not to make new ones. The best judges are those without agendas, without preconceived notions of how they might rule. The best judges are those with experience. Neither of her opponents had ever presided over a trial, or issued a ruling, or studied complicated briefs, or listened to oral arguments, or written a final opinion. Until now, neither of her opponents had shown the slightest interest in sitting as a judge. Yet they are asking the voters to jump-start their judicial careers at the very top. She finished by saying, without the smile, “I was appointed to this position by the governor nine years ago, then I was reelected by you, the people. I am a judge, not a politician, and I don’t have the money that some are spending to purchase this seat. I ask you, the voters, to help send the message that a seat on the Mississippi Supreme Court cannot be bought by big business. Thank you.”