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  Conflict of Interest

  By Scott Pratt

  This book, along with every book I’ve written and every book I’ll write, is dedicated to my darling Kristy, to her unconquerable spirit and her inspirational courage. I loved her before I was born and I’ll love her after I’m long gone.

  Copyright © 2013 by Scott Pratt.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book was printed in the United States of America.

  CHAPTER 1

  I lifted my arms and allowed the guard to run his hands all over me. He was a young man, maybe twenty, just starting his career at the sheriff’s department. They start all of the new deputies at the jail. It familiarizes them with the “local talent,” so to speak, and teaches them how to deal with the same kind of incorrigible conduct they’ll encounter later on patrol. I looked at the name stitched into his black pullover shirt as he finished frisking me. It was Freeman. I mused at the irony while he grunted something unintelligible and waved me through the metal detector.

  I walked down the gunmetal gray halls and heard the shouts of inmates, the echoes of clanking iron doors and the buzzing of electric locks. I’d been practicing criminal law in one form or another for almost twenty years and the sounds I was hearing had become familiar. They were still disconcerting to a degree – I disliked everything about confinement and mistrusted almost everything about governmental authority – but over the years I’d come to accept them as a part of my life, much the way one who lives in a polluted city comes to accept the foul odor in the air.

  My name is Joe Dillard, and I was at the Washington County Detention Center on a Sunday night at ten o’clock to see a man who, from what his family and a couple of his friends said on the phone, wanted to hire me. They said he would be willing to pay me a substantial amount of money to act as his defense lawyer in a criminal case. They said he was being railroaded.

  I’d never met the man, but from what the people I spoke to during a flurry of telephone calls said, he was a hard-working businessman. An entrepreneur. A success story. He wasn’t world-class rich, but he was far from poor. He could pay a good fee, they kept saying. He could pay a really good fee. One person suggested that he could afford as much as a hundred thousand dollars.

  I didn’t know whether I wanted to get involved, but the lure of a hundred grand elicited a promise from me that I would at least go down to the jail and talk to him. Before I did, however, I spoke to the police officer who was in charge of the investigation and to a couple of witnesses. I didn’t like what I heard.

  His name was Howard French. He was forty. He had a wife and two teenage girls. He owned and operated a company he’d inherited from his father. The company manufactured cabinets and countertops and employed fifty people. I looked him over as he walked into the interview room in his bright orange jail jumpsuit. He was a shade under six feet tall and more than a little overweight. His hair was brown and cut like a banker’s and his eyes were brown. He had lots of deep acne scars in his cheeks. He looked extremely uncomfortable in the handcuffs and shackles. You’d think most anyone would look uncomfortable in handcuffs and shackles, but it isn’t so. I’d met guys that wore them like old socks.

  Howard French had been charged with second-degree murder. He’d been in jail for less than twenty-four hours and would certainly make bond as soon as he was arraigned by a judge the following morning. He sat down stiffly in the steel chair as the guard walked out and closed the door.

  “Thank you for coming, Mr. Dillard,” he said. “Thank you for coming.” He was nodding like a bobble head. I reached out and shook his cuffed right hand.

  “I’m sorry about what happened,” I said.

  He cocked his head to the left and said, “What do you mean?” Somehow I knew he’d say that.

  “I’m sorry about the girls.”

  “Oh, me too. I can’t tell you how sorry I am about those two young ladies. But I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “No, I swear it. Not a thing.”

  I resisted the urge to get up and walk out the door. I’d been there for less than a minute and he’d already lied to me.

  “Why don’t you give me your version of what happened, Mr. French?”

  “Call me Howie,” he said. “Everybody calls me Howie. Okay, well, I went to the Bay House to eat supper, you know? I finished eating and walked outside and there was all this commotion up at the top of the parking lot by the street. Tires squealing and a big crash and a fireball and all, so I ran up there to see what was going on. When I got to the street there was this car that was upside down on its roof. It was on fire and there was this police officer and a woman dragging someone away from the fire and then the police officer went back to the car but the fire was getting hotter and he couldn’t get close to it.”

  “So you walked out of the restaurant just as it happened?”

  “Yeah. Just as it happened.”

  “What time was it?”

  “I’m not real sure. Around ten o’clock I guess.”

  “Doesn’t the Bay House close at nine?”

  “Maybe. I’m not sure.”

  “You were eating alone on a Saturday night? Where were your wife and kids?”

  “They were busy. They went to a movie or something.”

  “Did you go anyplace else before you went to the restaurant?”

  “I rode around some.”

  “You were driving your red Viper?”

  He nodded his head enthusiastically.

  “I love driving that car,” he said. “It’s a cool car, you know? Really fast. Five hundred horsepower. It’ll fly.”

  His eyes lit up when he talked about the Viper, the fool. He was forty years old and running around town in a hopped-up muscle car like a kid half his age.

  “Do you race it?” I said.

  “No, no. I don’t race it. I just drive it around.”

  “Do you ever race it on the street? You know what I mean. Pull up next to somebody at a red light and rev the engine, see if they want to go a few blocks?”

  “Nah, I’ve had plenty of people try to get me to race, but I don’t pay attention.”

  I sat back and folded my arms. I wasn’t all that pleased about being there so late on a Sunday, and his nasal tone – plus the fact that he was lying through his teeth – was quickly getting on my nerves.

  “How about we cut the crap, Mr. French?” I said. “I came down here because some members of your family and a couple of your friends called me and asked me to consider defending you. You’ve been charged with second-degree murder because the police and several witnesses say you were drag racing on a busy street when there was a lot of traffic around. A young girl was killed and another was burned so badly she’ll never be the same. The one who was killed, do you even know her name?”

  “Yeah, I know her name. Of course I know her name. It’s been all over the news.”

  “What was it?”

  “I think it was maybe Britney?”

  “That’s right. Britney James. And the girl who was with her in the passenger seat? The one who is in a coma right now? Do you know her name?”

  “I think maybe it’s Jane.”

  “Jane Clouse. Do you know what they were doing when
David Burke slammed his Mustang into the back of their car?”

  “People are saying they were maybe looking at some pictures.”

  “Right. Britney James had been crowned Homecoming Queen at her high school on Friday night, about twenty-four hours before this happened. Her best friend Jane Clouse had taken a bunch of pictures. They had them developed at Walgreen’s. They’d just picked up the pictures and were sitting at a red light when the Mustang you were racing hit them going a hundred and thirty miles an hour.”

  “I wasn’t racing—”

  “Stop,” I said, holding up my hand. “Just stop. The impact ruptured the gas tank in the little Honda Britney was driving. It also snapped the driveshaft in two, lifted the car off the ground, turned it over, and sent it more than two hundred feet down the street. Do you know that at least four different witnesses have told the police that you were sitting at a red light next to the Mustang revving your engine less than a half-mile away a few seconds before the crash?”

  “They saw me? They saw my face?”

  “I don’t think anyone saw your face, but they saw a red Viper.”

  “So?”

  “Is this really the way you want to play it? Is your defense going to be that you weren’t even on the road when the crash happened? That the red Viper everybody saw must have belonged to someone else and that you just happened to be dining a couple of hundred feet from the wreck? I don’t know this for a fact, but I’d be willing to bet that you’re the only guy within a hundred-mile radius of Johnson City, Tennessee who owns a red Dodge Viper.”

  His shoulders slumped and his chin dropped. He hesitated a few seconds before taking a deep breath.

  “I can’t go to jail,” he said. “I might have been at the red light next to the Mustang. The Mustang might have been revving its engine. The guy who was driving it might have been trying to get me to race him. I might have started to race him, but I might have gotten scared and backed off before he ran into those girls. It wasn’t my fault.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “That’s like saying you and a buddy walked into a bank intending to rob it but you got scared and left in the middle of the robbery. You’d still be held responsible under the criminal law for bank robbery. And if the buddy you went into the bank with killed someone during the robbery after you left? You’d be held responsible for the killing, too. This is the same thing. That’s why they charged you, and that’s why you’re going to wind up in jail. They won’t be able to convict you of murder, but you’ll get convicted of vehicular homicide for the girl who died and aggravated assault for the girl who was burned. If she dies, you’ll get convicted of two counts of vehicular homicide. You’re going to prison. You might as well get used to the idea and start planning for it.”

  “But I didn’t hit them! He hit them!”

  “He’ll get convicted and go to prison, too, if it makes you feel any better.”

  He leaned forward on his elbows and started looking at me with what I perceived as a conspiratorial gleam in his eyes.

  “What kind of money are we talking here?” he said. “How much will it take for you to get serious about this? Everybody has been telling me to get old Joe Dillard. He’s the baddest man around. He’ll fight for you. He’s not afraid of anything or anybody. He’s a junkyard dog, that’s what he is. He’ll chew the state’s witnesses up and spit them out all over the courtroom. That’s what I need, Mr. Dillard. I need that junkyard dog. How much will it cost me?”

  I stood and pushed the button on the wall to summon the guards. The words I’d spoken had absolutely no meaning to him.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  “Leaving. I’m going home.”

  “What? Wait a minute! You’ll take my case, won’t you? I’ll pay you two hundred thousand dollars, up front, cash on the barrel head.”

  There was a time in my life when two hundred thousand dollars would have enticed me to defend Jack the Ripper. But those days had passed. I’d made good money during my legal career and I enjoyed the things money brought to me and to my family, but I was no longer interested in trading my conscience for a fat fee. I just wanted to be a good man, a good lawyer, a good husband and father. I wanted life to be simpler than it had been in the past.

  This guy was guilty, and he’d already showed me he wasn’t the least bit interested in the truth. He wanted to be free of responsibility for the death and pain he’d caused, and for two hundred thousand dollars, he would expect me to insure both his freedom and his public absolution. And to be honest, for two hundred grand, I could have probably done it.

  But I just didn’t want to. The door buzzed and I pushed it open.

  “So you’re going to walk out on me?” he said. “Just like that? Didn’t you kill five men not too long ago? Five men! Why aren’t you in jail? What makes you any different than me?”

  I stopped and turned to face him.

  “I’m not any different than you, Mr. French,” I said. “But I’m surprised nobody has ever taught you that life isn’t fair sometimes. Good luck in prison.”

  CHAPTER 2

  The accusation Harold French hurled at me was true. It had been nearly a year since I’d ambushed and killed five men as they approached my home intending to kill me and every member of my family. I laid in wait for them, set traps for them, and I killed them exactly the way the United States Army had taught me to kill when I was still a teenager – efficiently and without passion.

  The events that led up to that night were so perfectly arbitrary and chaotic that I’d often thought that perhaps something else was at play, something like fate or destiny, but I’d learned over the years that dwelling on the past was as useless as fretting over the future. In the aftermath of the “Gunfight at the OK Corral,” as the media labeled it, I resigned my job as district attorney general and went back to private practice, albeit on a limited basis. My daughter had given birth to a baby boy back in May and had honored me by naming the child Joseph. My son was still pursuing his professional baseball career at the minor league level and my wife’s breast cancer was a painful, distant memory. I’d decided I wouldn’t let what happened that night have any effect on me, and until French mentioned it at the jail, I hadn’t thought about it in months. Once I walked out of his jail cell, I pushed it from my mind again.

  Six days after my meeting with French, I learned of Lindsay Monroe’s disappearance when I walked through the kitchen after mowing the lawn on a Saturday morning. My wife, Caroline, who had been sweeping the kitchen floor, was standing stone still, staring at a small television on the kitchen counter with a look of abject horror on her face. The weekend anchorman at the local CBS affiliate, a fresh-faced kid with a nasal voice and an accent that said, “Hi, I’m from nowhere,” was doing his best to sound and look deadly serious. This is what he said:

  “Police and a small group of volunteers are combing Tennessee’s oldest town this morning in search of a six-year-old girl who was apparently taken from her bed last night. Lindsay Monroe of Jonesborough was reported missing shortly after 7:00 a.m. by her mother, Mary Monroe. Sources say Mrs. Monroe called 9-1-1 after going to Lindsay’s room and finding the child’s bed empty. Mrs. Monroe reportedly told the emergency dispatcher that a window in the second floor bedroom was open and a screen had been removed. We go live now to News Twelve correspondent Nate Baldasano, who is outside the Monroe home.”

  “No,” Caroline murmured. “Please, no.”

  The screen switched to a slim, mid-thirties, generic looking man with black hair named Nate Baldasano. Baldasano had been a reporter for News Twelve for at least ten years. I’d been interviewed by him several times because I’d been involved in a lot of criminal cases both as a defense lawyer and later as a prosecutor. Ten years is a long time for a television reporter to stay in the Tri-Cities media market. It means one of two things: the reporter either lacks drive or lacks talent.

  “There is a pall hanging over Jonesborough’s National Historic District this mor
ning,” Baldasano said. “The police aren’t releasing any information as of yet, but so far we know that a six-year-old first-grader, Lindsay Monroe, has gone missing. Her parents, Richard Monroe, a respected local businessman, and Mary Monroe are both inside the house at this time along with several police officers. Neighbors and friends of the Monroes have started a search of the immediate area.”

  The broadcast cut to a blonde woman. At the bottom of the screen was the caption, “Melissa Franklin, Neighbor.”

  “We’re frantic,” the woman said. “We’ve already printed hundreds of flyers and are going door-to-door passing them out and asking people to help us find Lindsay. Everyone around here knows her. She’s such a sweet, lovely child.”

  A photo of the girl flashed onto the screen. I recognized her. She was dark-haired and blue-eyed, a beautiful little girl, grinning widely, missing a front tooth. The next shot was of the house. I recognized it, too, because it was smack in the middle of downtown Jonesborough, only a couple of blocks from the old Washington County courthouse on Main Street. It was a large, two-story brick house that was built in the 1870s and was one of a dozen or so “historic homes” that the tourists liked to ogle from the sidewalk. I’d been inside it once, many years earlier, before the Monroes bought it. Caroline and I had been invited to a progressive dinner a week before Christmas – a dinner that starts with drinks at one home, then moves to another home for appetizers, then to another home for soup and salad, then to another home for the main course – that kind of thing – and the house where the Monroes now lived had been the last stop of the evening. At the time, it was owned by a retired liquor distributor named Lovelace. It had been updated and remodeled several times, and it was impressive. The interior reminded me of the Biltmore Estate in Ashville, North Carolina, all gleaming hardwood, expensive rugs, pristine antique furniture and sparkling chandeliers.