Blood Money (Joe Dillard Series No. 6) (2 page)

She blinked a few times. “What? Why?”

“Because my son seems to be quite enamored with you.”

She smiled and her eyes twinkled.
 

“He’s cute,” she said.

“Great,” I said. “He thinks you’re cute and you think he’s cute. A perfect basis on which to make a sound decision and go forward in building a professional relationship.”

“Wait,” she said, “I didn’t mean to—”

I held up my hand. “I was kidding, Charlie, but I can’t give you a job. It doesn’t have anything to do with your father. I just don’t have a job to give. I don’t take in enough work these days to be able to pay you a salary, and I don’t have room for another lawyer here.”

“You don’t have to pay me a salary,” she said. “I already have someone who is willing to pay me five thousand dollars to represent him. That should be enough to get me through until I pass the bar. I still live at home on Buck Mountain with my uncle so I don’t have a lot of expenses. And as far as having a place to work, I have a cell phone and a laptop so I don’t really need an office. I can work anywhere.”

“You need somewhere to meet with clients,” I said.
 

“What I need is someone to show me the ropes. The one thing they don’t teach you in law school is how to actually practice law.”

“You’re right about that,” I said, remembering how utterly helpless I often felt when I got out of law school and hung out my shingle. “If it hadn’t been for the older lawyers around here when I was getting started, I would have wound up getting sued for malpractice every time I turned around. They really helped me out.”

“Maybe it’s your turn,” she said as the smile returned to her face. “A little karma. What goes around comes around.”

“Let me tell you a little about how this profession works,” I said. “You start at the bottom of the totem pole. You have to take cases no one else will take, chase windmills no one else will chase. In a town this size, if you manage to stay with it, work hard, find a niche, and avoid all the pitfalls of substance abuse and greed that seem to plague lawyers, after ten years or so you’ll be able to make a decent living. After twenty years, if you’ve managed to live within your means, you’ll become somewhat comfortable, at least financially. After thirty years, you can start thinking about retirement, but you won’t want to retire because you’ve worked so hard to achieve and maintain your station in the profession. After forty years, you’ll be managing the health and personal problems created by constant stress and emotional turmoil. Sometime after that, you’ll drop dead of a heart attack or a stroke and will soon be forgotten.”
 

“I’ll go ahead and slit my wrists now if you’d like,” she said. “Do you have a razor I can borrow?”

I leaned back in my chair and couldn’t help smiling back at her. She was so pleasant, and Jack was right about her being easy on the eyes.

“Where did you live in Knoxville while you were in school?” I said. “I spent three years down there. Both of my kids were born there.”

“I didn’t live in Knoxville. I commuted.”

“You what? From Buck Mountain?”

“Five days a week for three years,” she said. “I have a 75,000-mile law degree. My grandmother was sick and I didn’t want to leave her alone, so I decided to make the drive every day. I’d leave at five-thirty in the morning and get back around six in the evening.”

“And you still managed to finish at the top of the class?”

“I wasn’t the valedictorian, but I was close.”

The fact that she was so determined to become a lawyer that she was willing to drive roughly two-hundred and fifty miles round-trip every day to earn her degree impressed me. I changed my mind and decided right then to take her on board.

“What’s the case?” I said. “The one that involves someone paying you five thousand dollars. Is it a criminal case?”

“No, it’s civil. The client is a neighbor of mine named Roscoe Barnes. He’s an elderly man and his son is trying to have him involuntarily committed to a mental institution. Roscoe is old, but he isn’t crazy and he’s in pretty good health.”

“Is Roscoe wealthy?”

“I don’t think so. He taught English at Cloudland High School for thirty-five years and his wife was a math teacher before she died fifteen years ago. He owns several hundred acres of land up on the mountain, but a lot of it is exposed rock. I don’t see how it could be worth a lot of money, but Roscoe mentioned that his son – his name is Zane – wants his land. I get the sense that Roscoe isn’t telling me everything, but he’s mentally competent and he isn’t a danger to himself or anyone else. That’s the legal standard for involuntary commitment, isn’t it?”

I nodded and said, “Has the son hired a lawyer?”

“Nathaniel Mitchell. They’ve already served the petition on Roscoe.”

“Then the son has money. Mitchell is the most expensive lawyer in Northeast Tennessee.”

“Zane is a developer,” Charlie said. “Builds big houses in the mountains for the
nouveaux riche
. Maybe he’s struggling because of the economic downturn in the housing industry, but I still don’t understand why he would go after his own father’s property.”

“You should get an affidavit from an expert that says Roscoe is competent and file a motion to have the petition dismissed,” I said. “Try to take them out of the game before it gets started. Once the discovery process gets underway, Mitchell will try to bury you in paper and he’ll make things as expensive as possible hoping your client will run out of money and give them what they want.”

“Roscoe won’t give them anything. He’s a stubborn old bird.”

“I want to meet him and talk to him,” I said. “If I’m going to help you out on a case, I want to know our client. Early Monday morning would be best for me.”

Her eyes brightened.

“You’ll do it, then? You’ll supervise me?”

I nodded again. “We’ll work something out as far as finding some space for you here.”

“How much of the five thousand do you want?”

“Keep it. You need it more than I do.”

Before I could say another word, she was on her feet and around the desk.

“Please let me hug your neck,” she said.

I stood, bent over, and opened my arms. She squeezed me so tightly and for so long I started to feel light-headed.

“Whoa, whoa,” I said. “I can’t help you if you strangle me to death.”

“Thank you, Mr. Dillard,” she said when she finally let me go. “You won’t regret this.”

A minute later, she’d picked up her pocketbook and was walking toward the door. Just before she walked out she turned.

“By the way,” she said. “The answer is no.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Tell Jack I said no. I don’t have a boyfriend.”

Chapter 2

LATER
that afternoon, my cell phone rang. I looked down at the caller ID and smiled. It was my wife, Caroline, probably calling about where she wanted to eat for lunch.
 

“You need to go over to the Sullivan County jail,” she said when I answered, “and talk to a young man named Jordan Scott. I just got off the phone with his father. He’s
 
been arrested for murder.”

“Murder? What murder?”

“It apparently happened this morning,” she said.
 

“I don’t want to get involved in a murder case, Caroline. I thought we talked about—”

“I know, I know,” she said, “but this one is different. You need to get over there right away. He needs help.”

The tone of her voice was urgent, which was uncharacteristic.
 

“Who did he supposedly murder?” I asked.

“A cop. He’s black, Joe. Just a kid, and he shot a white police officer. I think it’s going to be a bad one.”

“Then why do you want me to get involved?”

“Trust me,” she said. “I’ve been talking to his father for the past forty minutes. He’s a good kid from a good family. There are circumstances, Joe. This is something you need to do.”

“What circumstances?”

“I heard them from his father. If I tell you, then you’ll be getting your information third-hand. It’s better if you get it straight from him. If you aren’t comfortable representing him after you talk to him, then fine, don’t do it. But if half of what his father told me is true, you’ll take the case.”

“Which means I’ll probably get caught up in another firestorm.”

“Firestorms are what you do best, baby.”

The door buzzed and clanged, and I walked into a small interview room walled by concrete blocks of gunmetal gray and floored in gray linoleum. The sights, sounds and smells of county jails were routine to me, but the nagging feeling of claustrophobia never quite left me once I walked through the first, locked door.
 

The young man sitting at the round, steel table was wiry and strong, with a long neck and a pair of the biggest hands I’d ever seen. His ebony skin seemed to have been stretched tightly over his body like shiny, black cellophane. His kinky hair was thick and cropped close, his jaws square, sturdy and muscled. His physical presence reminded me of my son – all muscle and sinew, nothing extraneous. His eyes were the brown of chocolate syrup and he had deep dimples in his cheeks. He was handcuffed, shackled and waist-chained, wearing the green and white, striped jumpsuit and rubber flip flops that were standard issue at the Sullivan County Jail. Of the many jails I’d visited over the years, Sullivan County was one of the worst. It was overcrowded and filthy. Toilets and showers were stopped up, wiring was corroded and exposed, and the guards were cynical and abusive.
 
If you believed what Winston Churchill once wrote – that you could judge a society by the way it treats its prisoners – then Sullivan County was a cruel and unforgiving place.

I set my briefcase down on the table and took out a legal pad and a pen.
 

“My name is Joe Dillard,” I said. “I’m a lawyer. Your father called and asked me to talk to you. Anything you say to me is strictly confidential, but I want you to know up front that I’m not your lawyer, at least not yet. I want to hear what you have to say before I decide whether I’m going to represent you. Are you okay with that?”

He nodded.

“Your name is Jordan Scott?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you know what you’re charged with, Jordan?”

“Murder.”

“Did you kill someone?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you know who you killed?”

“His name was Todd Raleigh. He was a deputy for the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Department.”

“Do you want to tell me why you killed him?”

“Because he deserved to die.”

Chapter 3

THIS
is what I learned during my first conversation with Jordan Scott, who was well-mannered, articulate and intelligent:

Jordan had grown up in a middle-class home in Kingsport. His father worked as a machinist at Tennessee Eastman in Kingsport and his mother was a speech pathologist in the Sullivan County school system. Jordan had a sister named Della who was one year older and a brother named David who was three years younger and who suffered enough brain damage during a traumatic birth to be classified by those who make such determinations as “borderline mentally incapacitated.”

Jordan said he was a straight-A student at Dobyns-Bennett High School and an all-state athlete. He was an all-state running back in football, an all-state shooting guard in basketball, and won the state championship in the two-hundred meter hurdles in track his senior year. He had athletic and academic scholarship offers from Division I college programs all over the country, including the University of Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina and Duke.
 

But Jordan decided to stay close to home. He didn’t want to leave David, and although he was big, strong and fast enough to compete at the Division I level, he knew he wasn’t – and never would be – quite big enough, quite strong enough, or quite fast enough to compete with the freaks of nature in the NBA or the NFL. East Tennessee State University in Johnson City was only a thirty-minute drive from home. It was a Division I school with a decent basketball team, and it offered something else that appealed to Jordan – a medical school. There were only a handful of African-American doctors in the region, and Jordan believed he could be of some value to his community in that regard, so he chose ETSU over all the others and enrolled. His parents bought him a used car when he graduated from high school, and between the academic and athletic scholarship money he received, he was able to pay all of his school expenses, split an apartment with a teammate, and stick some money in his pocket each semester. Life was good.

During his freshman year, Jordan maintained a 4.0 grade point average and led the basketball team in scoring and assists. He was named to the Atlantic Sun All-Conference team and was selected as Freshman of the Year. He also fell in love with a green-eyed, brown-skinned, Tara Banks look-alike named Holly Ross. Holly was from
 
Ooltewah, a small town near Chattanooga. She was a volleyball player, a long, lean, reserved beauty who was studying biology and believed she was destined to help save the planet.

In May of Jordan’s sophomore year, after a season in which Jordan struggled with hamstring and ankle injuries and still put up even better numbers than his freshman year, Holly went out for a jog alone. As she ran along a path through a stretch of woods at the Mountain Home Veterans Administration Center across the street from the ETSU campus, she was attacked, brutally beaten and raped at knifepoint, thus becoming the third victim of a serial rapist who terrorized the region for the next several months. The police had not released information about the first two rapes to the public, hoping to catch the rapist without causing a panic, but after Holly was attacked, they changed their plan and sounded the public alarm. Three women had been raped in three different counties: one in Sullivan County, one in Carter County, and Holly in Washington County. Over the summer, three more women, all younger than twenty-five, suffered the same fate as Holly. A multi-county task force was formed as the police searched desperately for the rapist.