Justice Burning (Darren Street Book 2) Read online

  “How much longer?” Frazier said.

  “About four minutes. Do you want to get the hell out of here, or do you want to watch it blow?”

  “I’m watching,” Frazier said. “Son of a bitch was responsible for my brother getting killed. I’m gonna sit here and watch him go up in flames.”

  CHAPTER 7

  The night I spent with Grace at the Oliver Hotel was magical.

  Until I got a call at four in the morning.

  It was from my friend Bob Ridge, the football coach and Knoxville policeman. When the phone woke me up, I looked at the caller ID and wondered, What the hell?

  “Something wrong, Bob?” I said into the phone.

  “Oh, Darren, thank God you’re okay. Where are you?”

  “I’m at a hotel with Grace. What’s up?”

  “There’s been a . . . there’s been . . . Darren, you need to come to your mother’s house right away.”

  I couldn’t imagine what was going on, but an internal alarm went off and I immediately felt an incredible sense of anxiety. This was going to be bad. I just knew it was going to be bad.

  “Why?” I said. “What’s happened?”

  “I don’t want to talk it about it over the phone. You just need to get here as soon as you can.”

  Grace had awakened by the time I hung up.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but we need to leave. That was Bob Ridge. Something has happened at my mom’s.”

  “Any idea what?” Grace said.

  “He wouldn’t say, but from the tone of his voice, it isn’t good.”

  It took us about twenty minutes to get dressed, get checked out, and get into the car. It took another fifteen to drive to my mom’s. I could see red-and-blue lights flashing three-quarters of a mile from her house. A quarter of a mile from her house, we were stopped by a Knoxville police officer and told we couldn’t get through. I explained to him who I was and that Bob Ridge had called me, and he let us pass. When we pulled up near the house—we had to stop a couple of hundred yards away because of all the emergency vehicles blocking the road—I got out and started jogging. It didn’t take long before I realized that my mother’s house, the house she had lived in for decades and that she loved, was nothing but a smoldering pile of ash. It had been completely obliterated. My car was leaning against a tree fifty feet from where it had been parked in the driveway.

  I stopped dead in my tracks, staring in disbelief. How could this possibly be? Was I having one of my nightmares? Would I wake up in a minute drenched in sweat and babbling incoherently? There was a house there. My mom’s house. It was built solidly of wood and stone and concrete, and was full of furniture and appliances and photographs and knickknacks. How could it be gone?

  Grace caught up to me a couple of seconds later and I heard her mutter, “Oh my God. No.”

  Bob Ridge’s massive form came into focus a minute later.

  “What . . . what happened?” I could barely speak.

  “We’re not sure yet,” he said. “Did your mother have a propane tank?”

  “No. Everything in the house is electric. The fucking house is gone, Bob. Where’s my mom?”

  “We’re looking, Darren.”

  “Is her car around? It was in the garage. That’s my car against the tree over there.”

  “There’s a car, well, what’s left of a car, buried beneath the rubble at the far end of the house.”

  “Then she was home. She’s dead, isn’t she, Bob?”

  “It’s too early to say. Take it easy. Maybe we’ll find her.”

  I was numb. I felt my legs give, and I dropped to my knees. I wanted to yell at the sky and curse God. I wanted to kill something or someone. I wanted to cry, because at my core, I knew this was somehow related to me. Whoever had done this wanted me dead.

  After a minute, I looked up at Bob. He and Grace seemed like apparitions.

  “You’ll find her,” I said, “in pieces.”

  CHAPTER 8

  I was right. Over the next three days, as they sifted through the ash and rubble of what had been my mother’s home, they found bits and pieces of her. Part of a leg here. A burned piece of skull there. A couple of fingers. The only comfort I could take from any of it was that she had obviously been killed instantly. She hadn’t suffered.

  What little was found of her was sent to Neeley’s Funeral Home in Farragut, and a memorial service was held a week after her death. I was told later it was well attended and that the preacher did a wonderful job paying tribute to my mom. It was all like a mist-shrouded dream to me. I barely remembered attending and didn’t remember any details.

  All of my clothes were gone and my car was destroyed, along with mementos from high school and college, and cards and letters I’d received from Sean, my mom, and Grace. Nothing—absolutely nothing—in that house had survived the blast intact. Grace was kind enough to allow me to move into her apartment, but I slept on the couch. She bought me clothes and hovered over me, but I could barely acknowledge her. I purposefully kept her at a distance, emotionally and physically, because I knew something deep inside of me had changed, something had broken, and I knew innately that I had become dangerous. All I could think about was what I was going to do to whoever had killed my mom. Sometimes I fantasized about kidnapping the person and torturing him, cutting off ears and fingers and toes and limbs. Sometimes I thought about burning him alive. I thought about waterboarding him and then shooting him in the head. The thoughts were ugly and vile, and I was almost ashamed of myself.

  Almost.

  The police came around immediately. Two Knoxville homicide investigators, Dawn Rule and Lawrence Kingman, were assigned to find my mother’s murderer. They were, of course, assisted by a slew of arson investigators and forensics investigators. The day after my mother’s memorial service, Dawn Rule called me and asked whether I would come to the Knoxville Police Department headquarters the following morning. I agreed. The nondescript brick building was on Howard Baker Jr. Avenue, a couple of miles east of Neyland Stadium. I showed up at eight thirty.

  Dawn Rule was a blue-eyed redhead around forty, a little overweight, with pale skin. She wore her hair short and spoke in a chirpy voice. She was wearing a pair of navy-blue pants and a white blouse, open at the neck, with a badge and gun clipped to her belt. Kingman was younger by a few years, maybe thirty-five. His receding hairline had been clipped within a quarter inch of his scalp, and he had chocolate-brown eyes and a nose that looked like it had been broken more than once. I’d already talked to both of them briefly; they’d checked my alibi at the hotel, and I didn’t think I was a suspect in my mother’s murder.

  I was escorted into an interview room by Detective Rule, and she offered me a bottle of water, which I accepted. Kingman came in a couple of seconds later and closed the door.

  “Dynamite,” Kingman said, his tone matter-of-fact. “Our forensics people have confirmed through the lab that dynamite was used to blow up your mother’s home.”

  “What kind of a coward does something like that?” I asked. It was almost appropriate that dynamite had been used, because I felt as though a fuse had lit inside of me. It had been smoldering for years, since Clancy had framed me and sent me off to prison, and while I’d endured and tried to overcome the things that had happened to me there, now my mother’s death had become the spark that ignited the fuse. It was burning hot and fast, and I knew it would soon lead to a violent explosion.

  “Any way to trace the dynamite?” I said.

  “We’ve been working on it with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. It appears the dynamite was purchased by Archland Coal Company in West Virginia. They blow holes in the mountains and mine coal.”

  “And why would a coal-mining company in West Virginia want to kill my mother?”

  Rule cleared her throat. “We think the question is: why would a coal-mining company want to kill you?”

  I nodded my head. “I’ve thought about that—a lot. I’ve made a bunch
of enemies during my career, dealt with a lot of whack jobs. I didn’t really think any of them would do something like this, but I guess I was wrong. I don’t recall ever pissing off a coal-mining company, though. What have you found?”

  “We think a resident of a little place called Cowen, West Virginia, population about five hundred souls, may be responsible,” Rule said.

  “I don’t know anybody from Cowen, West Virginia,” I said.

  “Maybe you do, or at least you did.”

  “Yeah? Who’s that?”

  “A man named Robert Edward Lee Frazier. Ever heard of him?”

  I felt my heart speed up just a tick. She was talking about Bobby Lee Frazier, the man who stabbed me eleven times with a twelve-inch ice pick because I kicked his ass in a prison yard and embarrassed him in front of his friends after he’d tried to intimidate me into doing legal work for him for free.

  “I’ve heard of him,” I said, “but he’s dead. He didn’t do it.”

  “We know he’s dead. Your cellmate killed him, defending you.”

  “I didn’t tell you that.” I was still uncomfortable talking about anything that had happened in prison, especially to the police. “But even if I had told you that—which I didn’t—what difference would it make?”

  “Bobby Lee has a brother,” Detective Kingman said. “Name’s Donald Jackson Frazier. Everybody calls him Donnie. He was released from prison six months ago. It might have been him looking to get to you.”

  If it was him, he would soon be meeting me face-to-face. I certainly didn’t say that to the two police officers sitting in front of me, but that was exactly what went through my mind. “What prison was he in?”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, might have run across him.”

  “I doubt it,” Kingman said. “You were in the federal system. He was in the West Virginia state system, a place called The Northern Correctional Facility in Moundsville.”

  “Moundsville, huh? Sounds like a place I’m glad I didn’t get to visit. Listen, I’ve thought about it a lot, and the more I think about it, the longer the list of suspects gets. It might have been some clown from West Virginia, but it might also have been Ben Clancy, or some friend of Rupert Lattimore, or any one of a dozen other outstanding citizens I’ve defended over my career.”

  Frazier’s brother made sense. Perfect sense, but I didn’t want the police to arrest him. If he had really killed my mom, I wanted to confirm it myself and deal with it in my own way.

  “Have you talked to this Frazier guy?”

  “We haven’t found him yet,” Detective Rule replied. “He chose to serve all of his sentence, didn’t want to be on parole, so he isn’t under any kind of supervision.”

  “Think he did it alone?”

  “Not unless he knows a lot about explosives. The dynamite was placed to do maximum damage, and they made sure they used more than enough to destroy the house and kill anyone inside. Plus, you have to know what you’re doing with dynamite. You have to use blasting caps and crimp the safety fuse into the caps. You can blow yourself up in a hurry if you screw up.”

  “So you have two suspects plus every crazy who was unhappy with my efforts on their behalf in the courtroom,” I said. “Is that all?”

  “We have one suspect and believe he probably had an accomplice,” Rule said, correcting me. “That’s it for now. We just wanted to fill you in. Thought you’d want to know.”

  “I appreciate it.” I was suddenly anxious to get out of there and get busy on my own. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”

  CHAPTER 9

  The police didn’t know it, but I had a far more reliable source of information than them. His name was Mike “Big Pappy” Donovan, and he was the shot caller of the Independent White Boy car at the federal max prison in Rosewood, California, when I was there. Inmates divide themselves into groups, primarily based on race. They’re called cars. Some guys choose to ride in gang cars—Bloods, Crips, Aryans, MS-13—but others choose not to gangbang. Those guys wind up in independent cars, and since I was white, I wound up in the Independent White Boy car. Pappy was the leader, or “shot caller.” He negotiated with leaders of other cars for rights to prison hustles like gambling and drug dealing and cigarette selling; he negotiated solutions to disputes between people in his own car and between people in his car who might have a beef with people in another car. He negotiated with the guards and the prison administrators. He was roughly the same size as Bob Ridge—six feet seven inches tall—and he was muscular. If you got out of line, he could, and would, ruin your day.

  I had handled an appeal for him and was actually able to get him out of prison. We proved that the cop who had arrested him on a bogus crack cocaine charge was a liar, and Pappy was released after serving twelve years of a thirty-five-year sentence for distributing crack cocaine. Before he was released, though, he helped me escape, and I was subsequently able to prove my own innocence with the help of Grace.

  Big Pappy and I had been in touch a few times since we’d been freed. He owned a trucking company that was based in Georgia, and he traveled through Knoxville occasionally, so we’d been able to have a few meals and a few beers and talk about our time at the prison.

  The first time we got together was at a bar in the Old City. After he got a few beers in him, he said, “Darren, old buddy, I have a confession to make.”

  “You shot the governor,” I said.

  He laughed and said, “Nah, I stay out of politics. But when I told you I hadn’t ever messed with cocaine while you were working on my appeal, I wasn’t exactly being truthful. The cop that eventually busted me was crooked as hell, and we did the right thing in my appeal. But I moved a bunch of powder coke back in the day. Did some other bad things, too. I sort of deserved all that time they gave me in prison, not that I want to go back.”

  I shook my head and smiled. I knew Pappy was no angel. You didn’t do the things he did in prison without having an extra-hard shell and a healthy dose of crazy predator in you. But I played along. “You’re kidding me, right?” I said.

  “Afraid not. I played you. I wanted you to believe in my innocence, thought it would make you try harder. I was right, too, wasn’t I?”

  “Probably,” I said.

  “Still friends?” he said.

  “Friends? You helped me break out of prison and get myself cleared. I’ll always be your friend. How’s Linda, anyway?”

  Linda Lacy was a woman who Pappy claimed as his girlfriend while he was in prison. She continued the trucking company he’d started and ran it for twelve years. She also hid and invested the millions he made in prison from his various hustles. Linda had given me a ride across the country in an eighteen-wheeler when I broke out of prison.

  “Linda’s not around anymore,” Pappy said. “I caught her in bed with a guy who worked for me. Thought he was my friend. I didn’t take it well.”

  “So you sent her packing?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” he said. “I sent her a long, long ways away. I’m afraid she won’t ever be coming back, if you know what I mean.”

  “I think that’s all I want to hear,” I said.

  “Probably for the best. You can take a little comfort in knowing that she didn’t go on her journey alone. Her lover went with her.”

  Pappy had just told me he’d killed two people. He trusted me, and after what he’d done for me in prison, I trusted him. I knew he had far more contacts within the prison walls than I did, because he’d been in so much longer, been to so many more prisons, and he’d been a shot caller. He’d also told me he missed prison in a strange sort of way, and that he stayed in touch with a lot of guys on the inside. He didn’t miss it enough to want to go back, but being a shot caller is the ultimate sign of respect in a prison, and he told me he missed that kind of respect.

  I called him within five minutes of leaving the police station. He’d heard what happened to my mother and had even showed up for her memorial service e
ven though he’d never met her. I didn’t remember him being there, but Grace had told me he’d come.

  “My man, Darren,” he said when he answered his cell. “You all right?”

  “I need to talk to you,” I said, “but not over the phone. Where are you?”

  “In Cincinnati, but I’m headed your way. Be rolling through Knoxville in about four hours.”

  “You know the Flying J truck stop on Watt Road?”

  “Been there many times.”

  “Meet you there around one thirty this afternoon?”

  “You got it, brother.”

  “I’ll be waiting in the lot out back. When I see your truck pull in, I’ll just come get in the cab.”

  “Sounds like a plan. See you in a few hours.”

  Big Pappy showed up right on time in his gleaming, black Kenworth with “Donovan Trucking” emblazoned in gold on the trailer. I’d taken a cab to the truck stop and waved him down when I saw him pull in. He stopped the truck, and I climbed into the cab. I reached over and shook his massive hand.

  “Good to see you, my brother,” Pappy said.

  “Good to see you,” I said. “I might as well get right to it. The cops might have a line on who killed my mother, but I want to find them first. I’m going to need your help.”

  “Who are they looking at?” Pappy said.

  “Guy named Donnie Frazier from West Virginia. He was Bobby Lee Frazier’s brother. Did you know Bobby Lee was from West Virginia or that he had a brother?”