Almost Midnight (23 page)

“I will to you and Jack Merritt but not to anyone from Stone or Taney County.”

J
ACK AND CHIP
had gone directly to Troop D headquarters from the airport. They were still there when the two troopers showed up with Darrell. After being briefed by Stephens on the conversation at the stoplight, they took Darrell into Tom Martin’s basement office and pulled up some chairs. Chip advised Darrell of his rights but that was as far as he got. Darrell asked him to leave and to send in Lee Stephens instead. He thought he’d made himself clear: he’d talk to the Highway Patrol and to no one else. The county boys weren’t to be trusted.

Jack and Stephens spent more than an hour with Darrell in Tom’s office. Stephens mostly watched and listened while Jack prodded and Darrell talked. At first Darrell was all over the place, riffing about this and that, the logistics of crank production, local blood feuds, local outlaws, but always coming back to Mary, agonizing over Mary, insisting she had done nothing wrong. After a while Jack managed to steer the conversation to the Lawrence homicides and Darrell agreed to give a videotaped confession.

By this point, apparently, Darrell was under the impression that if he gave himself up and confessed to everything, all charges against Mary would be dropped. She’d be set free at once with nothing more than a “slap on the wrist.” This is what he believed Jack had promised him in Tom’s office. Afterward Jack would deny promising Darrell anything. He hadn’t cut any deals, offered any inducements. All he’d done was point the conversation in the right direction. Darrell had taken care of the rest.

——

T
HE VIDEOTAPING WAS
carried out in a large basement room that normally doubled as conference and recreational space for the Troop D platoon. Tom, who’d been keeping a low profile, letting his partner handle the interviewing, set up the camera while Jack and Stephens positioned themselves on either side of Darrell at a table by the front wall.

Jack got things started by once again advising Darrell of his rights and asking him about his relationship with Lloyd. Darrell, bleary-eyed and unshaven, answered in his no-hurry Missouri drawl, thick and lazy, sometimes pausing for a drag on a cigarette, occasionally coughing into a bunched fist.

Ten minutes into the confession, Darrell reached the point where he and Mary returned to Missouri from their first road trip and Mary dropped him off at Bear Creek Road.

“What was your original intention and what was her thought of what you were going to do when you went down there?” Jack asked.

“Well, like I told Lee, I’m not real straight on that except that she’d try to talk me out of it and going and deal with Lloyd. I led her to believe that I was gonna burn his cabin and go over the hill and deal with Rocky and I may have told her or not, but the fact is that she didn’t believe it. You know how if you get mad and fly off the handle and say you’re gonna kill somebody, everybody’s done it sometime, but she really didn’t believe it. And after it was over, she kinda went into shock and she was watching me like I was somebody strange or something. She just—she couldn’t believe it and she was real different, paranoid.”

“Okay.”

“She didn’t want me to do none of that.”

Jack pushed on, asking Darrell about the actual shootings.

“Lloyd came through just real slow, creeping, looking both sides of the road. He knew I liked Willie, but I was determined that nothing was going to stop me, because once, once I got started, I, you know, I didn’t—it was all the way or nothing. I thought if I
didn’t get Lloyd, he would get Mary, do something bad to her. In fact, I’m sure of it.”

“So, when Lloyd came by, what happened?”

“Well, I shot him and then I shot Frankie and then, uh, I shot Willie.”

And then the getaway, Jack still pushing, Darrell stumbling a bit over the exact sequence of events.

“Now after you left the shooting scene, where did you go?”

“I walked down the creek until I got to Highway 65 and crossed under the bridge and went up to the top of the hill to that junction.”

“And what occurred at the junction?”

“Mary had heard it on the radio. We’ve talked about it since then. She said it was just like she was in a dream and she functioned automatically and she just come and picked me up.”

Wrapping up, Jack asked Darrell why he had finally decided to confess.

“For Mary’s sake, because she tried to talk me out of this and, uh, she didn’t—she didn’t want no part of it. But she loved me and she was probably intimidated by me or something.”

“For your sake, do you have any remorse or regrets on what has occurred?”

“Not for Lloyd. I believe I had to do that. I do for Willie and Frankie.”

Jack asked Darrell if he had anything to say in closing.

“Yes, I do. The reason I’m doing this is for Mary because she didn’t want any part of it and I dragged her into it. She’s the finest person I know and I’ll do anything to get her out of it and she was just kinda in shock at the time.”

Saturday morning Tom, Jack, and Stephens picked Darrell up at the Greene County jail and drove down to Bear Creek Road where they met Chip Mason and Chuck Keithley. Darrell directed the men to where he’d hidden Lloyd’s wallet and papers eight months earlier and then they drove over to the campground near Chadwick and unearthed the plastic cooler containing Lloyd’s stolen drugs.
Perhaps there was something else Darrell could have done to help cinch the case against him. Tough imagining, however, what it might have been.

M
ARY ARRIVED BACK
in Springfield late Friday, two or three hours after Darrell’s confession at Troop D headquarters. Chuck Keithley had sent veteran deputy and onetime U.S. marshal Doug Van Allen to Phoenix to collect her, and since a female prisoner couldn’t be transported in the company of a man alone, he’d deputized Van Allen’s wife, Scotty, and sent her along, too.

The Van Allens picked Mary up at the Durango jail, a low-slung, brown-brick, barbed-wire facility, where she’d spent the night after being transferred from the main jail on Madison. She was quiet and sullen on the way back, her wrists cuffed in front of her, her clothes giving off a detectable jailhouse odor. Scotty tried talking with her but after a while decided there was no sense pushing it. All she was getting in response were terse yes-or-no answers. The threesome drove to Forsyth from the Springfield airport and Mary phoned her mom from the Taney County jail. She wanted to know when Barbara and Fred would be coming over to get her.

The next morning, wearing an orange county-issue jumpsuit, her hair matted and her eyes puffy, Mary was escorted the short distance from the jail to the courthouse for her arraignment. Judge Chowning set her bail at $100,000 cash or $200,000 property. Later the same day she was back home.

CHAPTER NINE

T
HE TANEY COUNTY
jail sits right next to the courthouse in downtown Forsyth. It holds thirty men and eight women and is usually booked to capacity. At the rear of the jail, along a short corridor, there’s a small maximum-security unit: three identical eight-by-eleven cells with twelve-foot-high ceilings and cement-block walls. Each cell in the unit has a set of bunk beds, a stainless-steel toilet, a sink with hot and cold running water, and a tiny molded-plastic table with attached stools. Outside the cells, on the opposite side of the corridor, three window slots afford a dim view of a do-it-yourself car wash and a hunting-and-fishing store across the street.

Darrell was transferred from Springfield to the maximum-security unit in Forsyth two days after Mary was set free on bond.
As a celebrity prisoner, he was assigned a cell to himself. One of his new neighbors in the unit asked him what he was in for.

“Homo-cide,” Darrell answered.

“Do you mean homicide?”

“Yow, that’s it.”

His first afternoon he called Mary’s number in Branson from the jailhouse phone and got Barbara Epps on the line. Screwing up his nerve he told her who he was and asked for Mary. Barbara said she wouldn’t allow him to talk with Mary. She asked him if it was true: Was it really he who had killed the three Lawrences?

“Yeah,” Darrell said, “I killed them.”

Barbara started crying. She hadn’t wanted to believe it; she’d been holding out hope it wasn’t true. When she first heard about the Lawrence homicides and Chip told her Darrell and Mary might be involved, she’d been defiant in her disbelief. No way, she’d said. No way could her daughter have had anything to do with such a thing. Even over the past few days she’d refused to concede the obvious. But now she had no choice: the last shred of protective doubt had been stripped away.

“Why’d you get Mary involved in a mess like that?” she asked.

Darrell had no easy answer. He said he was sorry. He hadn’t meant Mary any harm. He loved her and thought she was the best person he’d ever known.

“Are there any more hoodlums in Stone or Taney Counties that could harm my daughter?” Barbara asked.

“No,” Darrell answered.

The conversation with Barbara Epps didn’t improve Darrell’s appetite. Since getting arrested he hadn’t eaten a thing; he’d been too depressed and torn up even to think of food. He’d been surviving on water, unfiltered Pall Malls, and Skoals chewing tobacco. He certainly wasn’t up to eating anything now. He felt lost and helpless. He wanted to do something for Mary but he hadn’t a clue what it might be. Then it dawned on him: he’d try praying for her, asking God to give her strength and courage and peace of mind.

Back in his cell he lay down on the bottom bunk and closed his
eyes. Hesitantly, feeling his way,
awkward, awkward, so awkward
, he tried finding the right words, the right frame of mind. It had been so long. He couldn’t help thinking back to when he was a boy and praying had come as naturally as breathing. But after all those years running with Satan, the pores of his spirit had contracted. His heart had congealed with fear and hate.

During the past months on the road with Mary the most he’d been able to muster was an occasional plea before falling asleep, not so much a prayer as a groan from the gut: “Please God, if I die tonight I don’t want to go to hell.”
Hell
—he’d never stopped believing in hell. It was one of the few teachings from his Pentecostal boyhood he’d never lost sight of. And he’d known, those windswept nights in the hills outside Elko, those crying times in Tucson—he’d known, as surely as he knew anything, that if he died right then, there was no other place he’d be going.

So he lay there on his bunk trying to find the right words, his face glistening with sweat and tears, not knowing if the words would be heard even if he found them to say.
Please, God, help Mary
. Then again, and again.
Please, God, help Mary
. A jailhouse mantra. He didn’t dare pray for himself. He couldn’t begin to imagine God helping someone who’d done what he had done. He couldn’t imagine prayers on his own behalf making any difference. His was a lost cause; his damnation was sealed. But Mary was another story: maybe,
please God
, his prayers could help turn the tide in her favor.

All that day and the next Darrell kept at it.
Please, God, help Mary
. He still wasn’t eating and his emotional pain was so intense that it sometimes felt as if his internal organs were trying to claw their way out of his body. By the third day, Wednesday, he began to note a change. The praying was coming easier now and he felt himself growing softer and more alive, like a chrysalis thawing out after a long dark winter. It was worth a shot now, he thought. Besides praying for Mary, he’d try praying for himself.

At first it was a chore. He was long out of practice and still not in the least sure his prayers would be heeded. He asked God to forgive
him and to save him. He said that he was sorry for his sins. He knew that he’d been saved once before, when he was just a boy, but for more than twenty years he’d been stuck on the path of rebellion. All he wanted now was to get right with God.

Darrell kept at it all day long, struggling for the right words, wiping away the tears with his sleeve. By evening he felt his appetite returning but he decided against eating. He’d gone this far—might as well take it all the way. He’d keep praying and fasting, praying and fasting, hoping against hope that God would see fit to forgive him and save him.

L
ATE THAT SAME
Wednesday, Chuck Keithley’s older brother, Roscoe, was sitting in his living room wondering what in the world was going on. It was almost midnight and for two hours he’d been trying to read his Bible. So far, however, it had been a colossal waste of time. From one line to another he couldn’t keep track of what he’d just read. It was a hopeless muddle. Nothing of this sort had ever happened to him before. For years he’d done a little Scripture reading before tucking in for the night and it had always come as easily to him as the bluegrass tunes he still enjoyed picking on his vintage Martin flattop. But not tonight: so far tonight had been a total loss.

But there was something else troubling him, something beyond his maddening inability to concentrate. For the past half hour he’d been hearing a voice—soft at first but then louder and more persistent.
You’ve got to go visit Darrell Mease
. This was what the voice was saying, the same message, over and over. Roscoe had tried ignoring it at first, he’d tried putting it out of his mind, but there it was again.
You’ve got to go visit Darrell Mease
. Try as he might, he simply couldn’t escape it.

And why Darrell Mease? Of course Roscoe had heard of Darrell: the past few days you couldn’t pick up a local newspaper without coming across his name. Perhaps, too, he’d heard something about Darrell from his wife, Wanetta, who’d once worked with Lexie Mease at a Christian summer camp just outside of Branson. Or
from his younger brother, Chuck, who was the sheriff of Taney County. But that was as far as it went. Roscoe had never laid eyes on the man and until tonight he’d never given him more than a passing thought.