A Crime of Passion Read online

  Lana laughed out loud. “Does that mean it’ll get written off on a tax return?”

  “It does. A beautiful irony, isn’t it?”

  CHAPTER 3

  My name is Joe Dillard, and the call that led me to the world of Paul and Lana Milius came on Christmas Eve. The family had gathered. My son, Jack, and his girlfriend, Charleston “Charlie” Story, were home from Nashville for the holidays and were staying with my wife, Caroline, and me. My daughter, Lilly, her husband, Randy, and their son, Joseph, were also at the house, along with my sister, Sarah, and her daughter, Grace. We were doing what people do at Christmas. We’d eaten a nice dinner that Caroline and I had cooked, we’d exchanged gifts, and we were sitting around drinking wine, listening to Christmas music, laughing and playing with the kids when my cell rang. I wouldn’t have answered it had I not seen “Leon Bates” on the screen. Leon had been the sheriff of Washington County, Tennessee, for a long time, and as far as I could tell, he would remain the sheriff for as long as he wanted. He was a rare breed, an excellent lawman, an even better politician, and a decent human being. He and I were close friends, but he didn’t routinely call me on Christmas Eve.

  “Merry Christmas, Sheriff,” I said.

  “Merry Christmas to you, Brother Dillard,” Leon said in his smooth drawl.

  “What’s Santa going to bring you this year?”

  “Ah, probably a bag of hair or a box of rocks. Maybe both. I ain’t been a very good boy.”

  “I find that hard to believe,” I said. “You’re a pillar of the community, Leon. A seeker of justice, a towering hunk of righteous, manly man—”

  “You been drinkin’ a little there, Brother Dillard?”

  “Yeah, I’m working on my third glass of wine, so I’m about half in the bag. What’s up, Leon? What has caused you to reach out to me on this very special holiday evening?”

  “I called to see if you’d be interested in getting rich.”

  “Rich? As in wealthy rich?”

  “As in a million dollars rich.”

  I got up and walked out the door onto the back deck. The air was cold and crisp, the sky clear and full of brilliant stars.

  “If you’re serious, Leon, you have my undivided attention.”

  “Never been more serious in my life. Did you hear about that little ol’ gal—country singer—that turned up dead in a hotel room in Nashville a couple weeks ago? It was all over the news.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Kasey something…Cartwright? Kasey Cartwright. She was from Boones Creek or Gray, wasn’t she?”

  “That’s her. Pretty thing, voice like a nightingale. Wrote good songs, too. I saw her in concert when I was in Nashville back in September. One of the best guitar pickers I’ve ever seen. Played the banjo, the fiddle, and the piano, too. Her dying at such a young age was a damned shame.”

  “Seems like I heard something about an overdose. I thought they ruled her death an accident or maybe a suicide.”

  “There wasn’t any overdose. That was just gossip reporters being gossip reporters, making stuff up. They ruled it a homicide after they did an autopsy and found out her hyoid bone had been crushed. Surprised you didn’t hear that. There’s been a lot of speculation about who did it, but turns out they made an arrest earlier today.”

  “Who got arrested?”

  “Man by the name of Paul Milius. Ever heard of him?”

  “Can’t say that I have.”

  “Owns a company called Perseus Records, the record company that pretty much owned Kasey Cartwright, at least the professional part of her anyway. Nice enough man. I talked to him a few times at political get-togethers in Nashville, and we wound up hitting it off so well that he invited me down to his house in Franklin a couple times. Paul discovered Kasey Cartwright back when she was fifteen is the way the story goes. Signed her to a record deal and started building her career. Turned her into a big star. Would have turned her into a superstar if she’d lived.”

  “Which means he turned her into a cash cow. Why would he kill his cash cow?”

  I heard Leon’s signature chuckle. It was throaty, both pleasant and infectious.

  “That’s why I like you so much, Brother Dillard,” he said after a few seconds. “There you are, sitting at the house on the night before Christmas, half in the bag—as you put it—and I lay out a little scenario for you and you cut right to the chase. Why would he kill his cash cow? That’s a question that’s being asked all over Nashville as we speak. And I mean all over Nashville. Paul Milius is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and hundreds of millions of dollars will buy you a lot of powerful friends in the capitol city of the great state of Tennessee. Those powerful friends are all wondering the same thing, and apparently Paul Milius is screaming to high heaven that he didn’t do it.”

  “Speaking of cutting to the chase, what does this have to do with me?”

  “Milius’s wife wants you to help defend him,” Leon said.

  “Why? She’s never heard of me.”

  “Okay, I’ll give you that. You’re probably right. I doubt that she’d ever heard of you until recently. But some friends of hers have heard of you, and they want you to defend him.”

  “What friends?”

  “Me, most importantly. I’ve been making friends in high places in Nashville for years and years, and like I said a minute ago, Paul and Lana Milius are among those friends. Paul is in jail right now. I just got off the phone with his wife, Lana. She says he’s in shock, which is understandable, especially if he’s really innocent. She wants him to have the best lawyer they can get. I know you think of yourself as a ham-and-egger, but you’ve built quite a reputation. Getting yourself appointed district attorney after Mooney tried to kill you, then all that with John Lipscomb and those boys from Colombia, then rescuing the little girl that was kidnapped—”

  “Don’t remind me of all that bad stuff, Leon. It’s Christmas.” I was a touch wounded that he’d called me a “ham-and-egger.” I didn’t think of myself as a high-powered game changer, but I thought I was maybe a touch above a ham-and-egger.

  “I was right there with you in the middle of all of it, and I don’t regret a thing,” Leon said. “But we’re getting off track here. I’ve told Lana all about you, and she wants to hire you. They’ve had their company lawyers advising Paul up to this point—which wasn’t none too bright, if you ask me—and I think the advice was bad. Paul’s talked to the police a couple times, and he voluntarily gave them a DNA sample.”

  “That’s not good, Leon. Do the cops have a DNA match?”

  “My contacts at the Nashville PD say they do. A small piece of skin that was wedged between the victim’s teeth. Turns out that skin belonged to Paul, but he still swears he didn’t kill the girl. His wife believes him. Hell, I believe him. Lana wants you to go down there, run the case, and then handle the trial if it gets that far. I told them you wouldn’t do it for less than a million retainer, nonrefundable, plus expenses. Paul Milius can pay that out of the cookie jar on top of his refrigerator. He can also afford to post whatever bond you can talk a judge into setting.”

  “My wife has cancer, Leon. I can’t go to Nashville.”

  “I thought she was doing well.”

  “She is, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to run off three hundred miles away and do a murder case that could take a year or more.”

  “Demand a speedy trial. Get the judge to try him quick. And you can negotiate with Paul. He has a private jet. I’ve been on it. Make him fly you down there and back whenever you want. You can get Nashville lawyers to do the legwork for you. Hell, Brother Dillard, you’re a good negotiator. You can get whatever you want out of Paul.”

  “You really told them a million?”

  “I swear on the memory of my sweet momma.”

  “And you think they’ll pay it?”

  “I wouldn’t be talking to you if I didn’t.”

  “You know, the biggest fee I ever got from a client was $250,000 from Erlene Barlowe back befor
e you became sheriff. This would make that look like peanuts.”

  “Erlene told me how much she paid you, plus she said she paid you another good lick to get her out of trouble. She doesn’t begrudge a dime of it.”

  “You still seeing her?”

  “She’s in the kitchen making banana pudding. You want to holler at her?”

  “Another time, Leon. Tell her I said, ‘Merry Christmas.’ Let me sleep on this.”

  “I told ’em you’d want to think about it a day or two, but don’t take too long. They’re a pretty itchy bunch.”

  “I’ll let you know something within forty-eight hours.”

  “Sounds good. Merry Christmas, Brother Dillard. I hope Santy Claus brings you a bushel and a peck of everything you want. Plus a million smackeroos.”

  CHAPTER 4

  When I went back into the living room, everyone was watching Sarah’s three-year-old daughter, Grace, as she gave an impromptu performance of “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” in front of the Christmas tree. Caroline was sitting on the couch with her long legs crossed. She was wearing a red Christmas sweater and a white skirt. Her long, auburn hair was shining, and her brown eyes were glistening as the candles on the tables flickered. She had a glass of white wine in her right hand and a look of contentment on her face.

  As I stood there looking at Caroline, I was reminded of how lucky I was to have her and how fortunate all of us were that she was still among us. Her battle with metastatic breast cancer had turned into a trench war with Caroline dug in on one end of the field and the disease dug in at the other. Caroline and her doctors lobbed medications like Fasolodex, Femara, Zoladex, and Zometa at the enemy, while the cancer simply dug in deeper and waited for a sign of weakness, anything that would allow it to strike or to mutate. It was a difficult and uncertain existence for all of us.

  She had made it more than a year since the terrible diagnosis had been delivered that her cancer had metastasized to her bones. She’d fought through a terribly difficult round of radiation, through pain, nausea, fatigue, dry mouth, weight loss. She was doing well under the circumstances, but fear was always there, lurking like a monster under the bed. When would the cancer break out again and spread to her liver, her kidneys, her heart? Would the doctors be able to control it again? And always the ultimate question: how long did she have? The statistics gave her another year. Her doctor at Vanderbilt said she could live much longer, but none of us knew. We’d tried to “live like she was dying,” as the Tim McGraw song says, to enjoy each day, each moment, to its fullest, but we’d found it impractical. We’d discovered that living the way we had always lived worked best for us, and we wanted it to last as long as possible.

  “Who was that?” Caroline said to me after the dance was finished and the applause died down.

  “Leon Bates.”

  “Leon? On Christmas Eve? What did he want?”

  It probably wasn’t the most appropriate time to discuss it, but I knew that eventually everyone in the family would weigh in on the subject. Since Leon wanted a decision quickly, and since the family was gathered and the mood was light, I decided to forge ahead.

  “He wants me to take a murder case in Nashville. The retainer is a million dollars.”

  The news brought a collective gasp and a thirty-second silence.

  “Is it Paul Milius?” Jack said. He was sitting on an overstuff ed chair next to the couch with Charlie curled up on his lap.

  “How did you know?”

  “Ever heard of Facebook? Twitter? They’re forms of social media that have been around for quite some time now. They’re sometimes used to spread news very quickly.”

  “Wise ass,” I said. I looked around at the rest of the group. “Yes, Paul Milius. Owns a record company in Nashville. He’s accused of murdering an eighteen-year-old country singer named Kasey Cartwright two weeks ago.”

  “The girl from here?” Caroline asked.

  “Yes. They apparently arrested him earlier today. Leon said Milius and his wife want me to defend him, and Leon made it pretty clear that he wants me to defend him. Leon said it doesn’t make sense that Milius would kill a girl that was making him a fortune, and he says Milius is insisting he’s innocent. Leon told them the fee would be a million up front plus expenses, and they apparently were okay with that figure. They want an answer within forty-eight hours.” I looked at Caroline. “What do you think? Do I call Leon back and tell him no, or should we consider it? It’s a lot of money.”

  “How long will it take? A year?” she asked.

  “Depends on which judge we draw and what his or her docket is like. It also depends on Milius. I can move for a speedy trial if that’s what he wants, but you know how it is. Most defendants want it to drag on as long as possible, hoping a key witness will die or evidence will get lost. It could take longer than a year.”

  “How much time will you have to actually spend in Nashville?”

  “I don’t know, babe. Leon says Milius has a private jet, and I can negotiate being home as much as possible. Charlie and Jack are both living there, so I can hire Charlie—if she’s willing—and let her handle a lot of the pre-trial work. I can hire other lawyers from Nashville if I need to. If it winds up going to trial, which it probably will since he’s paying out so much money, then I’ll have to spend some time down there. But at this point, I don’t have any way of knowing how long the trial will take because I don’t know anything about the case.”

  “What if Caroline gets sick?”

  The question came from my sister, Sarah, a raven-haired, strong-jawed woman a year older than me who was sitting near Caroline on the couch. She was the only adult in the room who was completely sober because she’d had so many problems with drug and alcohol abuse in the past that she didn’t allow herself to drink. She didn’t mind, however, that the rest of us imbibed occasionally.

  “She’s already sick,” I said. “And that’s why we’re talking about it. If it wasn’t for the cancer, I don’t think there would be much question as to whether I’d take a case like this.”

  “What if she gets worse?” Sarah said.

  I shrugged my shoulders and looked at Caroline.

  “I hate to put this on you, but it’s your call,” I said. “If you don’t want me to go, I won’t, and I won’t regret it in the least. If you want me to do it, I’ll do it.”

  “That isn’t fair, Dad,” my daughter, Lilly, who was a twenty-four-year old clone of Caroline with the exception that her eyes were blue, said with a slight slur. Lilly was the pacifist in the family. She avoided confrontation like she avoided communicable diseases, so I was surprised when she spoke up, but like the rest of us, she’d been drinking.

  “Why is it not fair?” I said. “She’s the one who has cancer. If she doesn’t want me to take the case, all she has to do is say so. I’m willing to abide by whatever decision she makes.”

  “Just tell them thanks but no thanks,” Lilly said. “If the circumstances were different, if Mom wasn’t sick, then we could have a discussion about whether you being away for what could be an extended period of time would be a good idea. But she is sick, and I think it’s selfish and egotistical of you to even consider it.”

  I felt my jaw drop involuntarily and took a sip of wine.

  “Wow,” I said. “Selfish and egotistical? Because I have the audacity to consider earning a million-dollar fee that will go a long, long way toward providing for my family for many years to come? That’s a bit harsh, don’t you think?”

  “You don’t have to ‘provide for your family’ anymore,” Lilly said, using her fingers to place quotation marks around the phrase. “Randy and I are fine. I have a good job, and he’s in medical school. Jack is about to graduate from law school. All you have to worry about is you and Mom. You guys have money, don’t you? Do you really need a million dollars?”

  “Did you hear what you just said? Are you listening to yourself? Who the hell doesn’t need a million dollars?”

  Caroli
ne stood and raised a hand.

  “Stop,” she said. “I won’t have raised voices in the house on Christmas Eve.” She looked around the room at each of us with tears welling in her eyes. “I love all of you so much, and I regret that we have to go through this…this experience with cancer. Lilly, I appreciate what you said, and I understand how you feel. And you’re right. Your father doesn’t need to provide for you and Jack anymore. You’ve both done a wonderful job of being able to take care of yourselves. But you also know how your father is. I don’t think him taking a case like this has anything at all to do with money. From what he said a few minutes ago, he smells injustice, and when he smells injustice, he wants to do something about it. It’s an important part of who he is, what he’s become. It’s what he does, and I admire him for it. And as far as me getting sicker, getting worse, even dying, well, I just can’t accept that we have to live our lives or make our choices based on such a huge uncertainty.

  “I realize I might not be here next Christmas, and I know all of you think about it. It’s there, always, in the back of our minds. But you know what? I might be here ten Christmases from now. I read all the time about women with metastatic breast cancer who are still alive after ten, fifteen years. The treatments are better than they used to be, and I’m young and strong and, for the most part, healthy. So I say we take the cancer consideration completely out of the picture and make a decision based on what we think is best for everyone in this room.

  “Jack, I’m sure your dad will involve you in the case as much as he can since you’re in Nashville, and the experience you’ll gain in a high-profile murder case will be extremely valuable to you. Charlie, he’s already said he’d like to hire you, which I assume will mean you’ll earn a fairly significant fee for yourself and gain some useful experience. Lilly, you and Randy and Sarah and the kids can keep me company when Joe is away. It’ll give us an excuse to get together more often. And say what you will about money, a million dollars isn’t an amount you can simply ignore. It could eventually benefit Grace or Joey or any children Jack might have. Your dad and I have been on both sides of the poverty line during our marriage. Back when he was in law school, we had two children and were living off the measly salary I was making at a dance school in Knoxville. We got through it, but I have to tell you that given the choice between wealth and poverty, I choose wealth.”