Blood Money (Joe Dillard Series No. 6) (3 page)

Holly spent two weeks in the hospital following the rape, and Jordan was there every day and night. She went home for the summer and fell into a deep depression. Jordan drove to Ooltewah twice a week to offer whatever love, care and support that Holly would accept. He went with her to some of her rape counseling sessions, and, little by little, she seemed to come back from the abyss. By the end of August, when classes at ETSU resumed, she’d decided to go back to school and rejoin her teammates on the volleyball team, despite the fact that the rapist was still on the loose and still attacking young women. Jordan was inspired by her courage. He proposed to her on the fifth day of September and gave her a ring. It would be a long engagement – they planned to marry the day after they graduated – but Jordan said he knew he’d found his soul mate.
 

Nine months later, with the rapist still on the loose and still committing rapes, Jordan was stopped for speeding in Sullivan County as he and Holly were returning to ETSU from dinner at his parents’ home. A Sullivan County deputy named Todd Raleigh walked up to the passenger window and leaned down. He recognized Jordan, and after giving him a short lecture on careless behavior, let him go. But as Raleigh spoke through the window, Jordan watched in horror as Holly broke down. Tears began to stream down her face and mucous ran from her nose. Her jaw muscles started to spasm involuntarily. She looked as though she’d come face-to-face with death. As soon as Raleigh went back to his cruiser, Jordan noticed the smell of urine. Holly had wet herself.
 

It took Jordan an hour to calm her down enough to speak.
It was him
, she said.
The voice, the eyes, the smell
. She was certain. Todd Raleigh was the man who had raped her.
 

What followed was a nightmare worthy of Dante. They called Holly’s parents, and the four of them went to the sheriff’s department together. They spoke to an investigator who immediately bumped them to the head of the investigative division, who bumped them to the chief deputy. What they were insinuating was ridiculous, they were told. Todd Raleigh was a dedicated officer with an impeccable service record. Holly’s attacker had worn a ski mask, so she’d been unable to provide police with a detailed description. She knew he was white, she knew approximately how tall he was and approximately how much he weighed. He’d left semen in her, though. Why didn’t they just get a DNA sample from Raleigh and either arrest him or eliminate him based on the results?

Not possible, she was told. To request a DNA sample from Raleigh would be akin to accusing him of rape. Besides, he had the same rights as anyone else. Without more evidence, they couldn’t force him to give a sample. In fact, if it came down to it, they would advise him
against
giving a voluntary sample. The chief deputy, a fat, red-faced, bellicose, belligerent individual named Matthew Bacon, blatantly accused Holly of lying. Quite the lawsuit she’d have, he said, if a white cop was accused of raping a young black woman. A college woman, at that. Sensational lawsuit. Was she trying to get rich at this innocent officer’s expense?
 

Jordan left the police department angry and frustrated. Holly was a mess. She retreated somewhere inside herself, into a psychological bunker where no one was allowed. He couldn’t even get her to speak. That night, while Jordan lay on the couch in Holly’s apartment, she went into the bathroom and slit her wrists with a razor blade. On the day she was buried, another young woman was raped.

Jordan became filled with a simmering rage. He also became obsessed with Todd Raleigh. He stopped going to class, didn’t take his finals, and stopped going to basketball workouts. He believed what Holly had said about Raleigh and was consumed with the idea of making Raleigh pay for what he’d done. But he did so in a measured, calculating fashion. He began stalking Raleigh the way a lion stalks a wildebeest, patiently, hiding in the shadows. He borrowed cars from friends and teammates who were too concerned about his well-being to question. The cars served as both camouflage and shelter during long hours of surveillance. He bought a pair of binoculars, took a shotgun from his father’s closet and kept it with him every time he followed or watched Raleigh. Within a week, he knew Raleigh’s routines, and on the fourth day of the second week, he got what he wanted.

Raleigh left his apartment at 5:30 a.m. and appeared to be going for a run. Nothing unusual. Raleigh went for a run every day, but he never ran at the same place and the times varied depending on the shift he was working. On this day, he drove to the parking lot of an abandoned bakery about a mile from a park near the Holston River just outside the Kingsport city limits. The morning was gray and misty, the sun not yet up. Jordan hung back, watching as Raleigh got out of his car and jogged off toward the park. He waited ten minutes and drove past the park. He didn’t see Raleigh, so he parked a couple of hundred yards down the road. He retrieved the shotgun from the trunk and slipped into a field adjacent to the park, moving low and slowly through the tall fescue. Jordan knew the park well – he’d run there many times in high school – so he worked his way to fence line on a rise that overlooked the southern end. Raleigh was nowhere in sight, and neither was anyone else. Jordan put his back against a poplar tree, laid the shotgun across his thighs, and waited. Just as the sun began to peek over the trees behind him, Jordan saw a small car pull into the parking lot. A solitary figure got out, walked to the rear of the car, and pulled a bicycle off a rack. It appeared to be a woman, though Jordan couldn’t quite tell from where he was. The rider guided the bike onto the asphalt path that wound through the park and started pedaling.
 

The attack happened in an instant.
 

The biker had circled the far end of the park and had just started along the western border when a figure emerged, seemingly from nowhere, throwing a shoulder into the biker like a linebacker. The biker went flying, and a second later was being dragged toward the bushes. Jordan sprinted from his hiding place to the spot where he saw the biker disappear. He listened, and above his own breathing, could hear muffled sounds of struggle among the leaves and the underbrush. He flipped the shotgun’s safety off and moved toward the sound.

The first thing Jordan saw were two sets of feet. Raleigh was grunting and cursing.
 

“Stop!” Jordan yelled, aiming the shotgun at the back of Raleigh’s head. “Get off of her!”

The ski-masked man turned and locked predatory eyes onto Jordan, who was less than ten feet away. The girl – Jordan didn’t even know her name – was bleeding from the nose and appeared to be half-conscious. Raleigh jumped up and tried to run, but the double-ought buckshot Jordan fired from the twelve-gauge blew half of his head off before he got ten feet.
 

Raleigh was dead.

Holly was avenged.

Jordan called the police and calmly waited for them to arrive.

After listening to what he had to say, I sat back and folded my arms.
 

“How much of this did you tell the police?” I asked.

“I didn’t tell them anything other than I shot the man because he was raping the girl.”

“They didn’t question you?”

“They tried. I told them I wanted to speak to a lawyer.”

“Do they have the gun?”

“Yes.”

“Did the girl say anything to you before the police got there?”

“She was crying. I asked her if she was all right but she seemed to be afraid of me. I guess I can’t blame her since she saw me shoot the man. Am I going to spend the rest of my life in jail?”

“I don’t know, Jordan. It’s possible. I have a pretty good idea how they’ll come at you. They’ll say you went vigilante, and there’s no place for vigilantes in a civilized society. They’ll say Raleigh was running away when you pulled the trigger, so the danger to the girl had passed and there was no danger to you. They’ll say the amount of force you used was unreasonable, excessive under the circumstances. They’ll talk to people at the sheriff’s department and they’ll find out about the accusation Holly made against Raleigh. Then they’ll go back and talk to everybody you know and they’ll find out you’ve been skipping school and basketball practice. They’ll put it together, and when they do, they’ll start screaming pre-meditation, especially since you were carrying the shotgun with you in a city park on a Monday morning. They’ll say you were hunting Raleigh. They’ll play up the pre-meditation to try to get a first-degree murder conviction. They probably won’t ask for the death penalty, but you never know. If they convict you of first-degree murder, you won’t be eligible for parole for fifty-one years. Did you see a weapon on Raleigh, by the way?”

“He had a knife.”

“Did he make a move toward you? Were you afraid he was going to kill you?”

“I didn’t know what he’d do. He was raping somebody. Was I just supposed to let him run away so he could rape somebody else?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know what you should have done, but it doesn’t matter now, does it? You did what you did. You shot him, you told them you shot him, and now you’re going to have to deal with the consequences. Even if you’re eventually found not guilty of murder, you’re going to be in this place for months, maybe a year, probably in solitary confinement. You’re also going to become the focus of a whole bunch of hatred, whether you deserve it or not. You think you killed a man, a rapist, but you also killed a symbol. Even if Raleigh was what you say he was, and believe me, we’re going to have to find a way to prove it and find a way to get it admitted in court, you killed a representative of law and order, a
white
representative of law and order in a community that is dominated by whites. You’ve committed an act that flies in the face of their entire judicial system, and you’re about to find out how brutal that system can be. If everything is the way you say it is, and
if
we can get a fair trial in front of an impartial jury, then maybe you can walk away from this, but even if you do, I want you to know you’re going to pay a steep price.”
   

Tears welled in his eyes and they took on a luminescent glow.
 

“I don’t know you, Mr. Dillard, but I want to ask you a question.”

“Go ahead.”

“Have you ever been in love?”
 

I thought about Caroline and the many years we’d been together, the trials and tribulations, the joy and the pain.
 

“Yes, Jordan, I’ve been in love for a long, long time.”

“That’s what he took from me, and no matter what the judicial system does to me, I don’t think the price could be any steeper.”

Chapter 4

CHARLIE
Story sat down on the couch in the day room. It was clean, almost sterile, like a lobby in a college dorm, Spartan in its décor and furnishings. The block walls were painted a glossy, pale yellow. The floor was covered with short-napped, indoor-outdoor, brown carpet. She’d been coming to this place every other Sunday since she was old enough to drive.

A man in a khaki uniform similar to those worn by janitors walked across the room, sat down next to her, and smiled. His hair was dark brown, short, and just starting to gray at the temples. He had green eyes flecked with gold, a high forehead and a sharp, angular face dimpled in the chin.
 

“Only a few more trips to the big house,” Charlie’s father, Luke Story, said as he kissed her on the cheek.

“I know. Finally.”

“Finally? You mean you won’t miss it?”

“I’m sure I will,” Charlie said. “I’ll miss the pleasing sights and sounds and the delightful people. Especially the guards. They’re so charming, such wonderful conversationalists.”

“Yeah, they’ll miss you, too. They start drooling every time you walk through the door.”

“It’s hard to believe you’re getting out, that it’s almost over.”

For twenty years, since Charlie was five, her father had been in federal prison. She knew his story well. He was open with her about what he’d done, and she’d read the transcripts from his trial and every newspaper account that was published. Luke had graduated from Cloudland High School in Roan Mountain, Tennessee, in 1967, was drafted in 1968 and sent to Vietnam in February of 1969. He wound up being assigned to the 101
^st
Airborne Division as an infantryman, and in May, ten weeks after he arrived in country, his left arm was nearly blown off just below the elbow by a rocket propelled grenade as he and his fellow soldiers tried to take a hill from the North Vietnamese Army. By September, he was home with a Purple Heart, a useless arm, and more than his share of bitter resentment.
 

Luke moved back in with his parents when he returned to Tennessee and invested some of the money from the disability check he received each month into marijuana seed and fertilizer. He started growing weed on his parents’ land the following spring, got busted by the sheriff’s department two years later, and spent a year in the county jail. As soon as he got out, he went back to growing weed, and within three years he’d earned enough to pay cash for his own place, a run-down, hundred-acre farm a couple of miles from his parents. He lived in a breezy old farm house, grew tobacco and corn along with the marijuana, and started a herd of Black Angus beef cattle. By the time he was thirty, he’d learned to bribe the locals, and the marijuana had made him a millionaire. He later took a wife, Ruth Ann, whom he’d met during a trip to the West Virginia mountains to visit one of his old Army buddies who was also in the marijuana business.
 

The demand for weed was booming, Luke was conscientious about improving his product, and the money continued to roll in. So he bought another two hundred acres adjacent to his property, completely remodeled the old farm house and the barn, and Ruth Ann started a greenhouse business that quickly became profitable. Five years later, after two miscarriages, Ruth Ann finally gave birth to a daughter. She was conceived during a trip to Charleston, South Carolina, so her parents named her Charleston.