Part 1 (1/2)
”Reasonable Fear”
SCOTT PRATT.
This book, along with every book I've written and every book I'll write, is dedicated to my darling Kristy, to her unconquerable spirit and to her inspirational courage. I loved her before I was born and I'll love her after I'm long gone.
Reasonable Force That degree of force which is not excessive and is appropriate in protecting oneself or one's property. When such force is used, a person is justified and is not criminally liable. Black's Law Dictionary.
PART I.
Chapter One.
A ten-year-old boy, fis.h.i.+ng along the bank of Boone Lake with his father, was the first to spot the body. She was floating about ten feet from sh.o.r.e in the gray light of dawn, slightly submerged in the still, green water. I arrived around 6:30 a.m., shortly after the emergency medical people. The sheriff had called me as soon as he was notified.
It was the end of summer, the ”dog days” as they're known in the Northeast Tennessee idiom, the time of year when the heat is sweltering and the humidity stifling, when the first of the leaves separate from the branches that have sustained them through spring and summer. They float briefly, silently, on the breeze until they drop to the earth, signaling the beginning of the season of death.
Normally, the district attorney wouldn't show up at the scene of an apparent drowning, but the sheriff said the boy's father told the emergency dispatcher that the woman in the water was naked. Maybe she was skinny-dipping and drowned. Maybe she was drunk and fell from a boat. Maybe she committed suicide. Or maybe she didn't go into the water voluntarily. If she was murdered, I'd ultimately be responsible for seeing to it that whoever killed her was prosecuted, and I liked to be in on the investigation from the beginning whenever possible.
My name is Joe Dillard, a name bestowed upon me when Lyndon Johnson controlled the White House and Robert McNamara and ”the hawks” controlled U.S. foreign policy. My father, the son of a Unicoi County cattle and tobacco farmer, was a casualty of those hawks. He'd been drafted and sent to Vietnam. He'd visited my mother and infant sister in Hawaii while on leave from the Vietnam War six weeks before he was killed. It was during that visit to Hawaii that I was conceived. I never met my father, but from the photos I've seen of him, there's no doubt in my mind about my paternity. The last photograph ever taken of him two days before he died showed a tall, strapping young man, tawny and s.h.i.+rtless beneath the afternoon sun on a mountainside, both of his arms draped over the shoulders of his buddies. His hair, like mine, was dark, his eyes, like mine, were green, his shoulders and chest wide and thickly muscled, his waist lean and rippled. He was grinning widely, an innocent, boyish grin that belied the fear that must have resided in his belly.
At the age of forty-three, I found myself occupying the office of district attorney general over four counties in Northeast Tennessee. I wasn't elected. I was appointed by governor of Tennessee after the previous district attorney was accused of a terrible crime. My temples were flecked with gray, and my joints ached occasionally, but all in all, I'd managed to remain relatively robust as I entered middle age.
A young sheriff's deputy and his stocky partner were dragging her onto the gra.s.s as I walked down the bank from the road. Two other deputies were searching for evidence, while yet another was standing in the road talking to a man whom I a.s.sumed made the initial call and a boy. It was Sunday morning, the day before Labor Day. In two days, the Tennessee Valley Authority would begin the yearly process of steadily drawing down Boone Lake. By October, the lake would be twenty to thirty feet below full pool and would look like a giant mud puddle. It would stay that way until February, when the TVA would begin using the system of dams constructed during Roosevelt's New Deal era to gradually fill it again. Each year, on the Sat.u.r.day before Labor Day, the lake is covered with house boats, pontoon boats, deck boats, ski boats and jet skis as the locals take advantage of their last opportunity of the summer to enjoy the water at full pool. They come early and stay late, many of them drink like Irish Catholics at a wake, and nearly every year, someone dies.
The rising sun was hot against my face and a purple haze enveloped the surrounding mountains like a giant shroud. The sky was pale and blue, the air thick and moist. I could already feel sweat running down the side of my face from my temples. I stopped about ten feet from the body and watched while a paramedic efficiently but unenthusiastically attempted to revive her. After a few minutes, he looked at his partner and simply shook his head.
”How long you reckon she's been in the water?” a voice behind me said.
I turned and saw Sheriff Leon Bates, mid-forties, tall, lean and tan, clad in his khaki uniform, cowboy hat and boots, striding toward us. Bates was an immensely popular sheriff who was in the last year of his first four-year term, although I had no doubt he would be around for as many terms as he desired. He was a consummate southern sheriff, mixing a congenial brand of backwoods lingo with a sharp mind for law enforcement, and over the past three years, he'd earned both my respect and my friends.h.i.+p.
”I'm not an expert,” the EMT said, ”but it doesn't look like she's been in long. Her lips are purple, but I don't see any signs of lividity. She isn't even in rigor yet.”
I moved closer and looked down at the woman. I guessed her age at mid-to-late twenties. She was pretty, even in death. Her face was angular, her nose pet.i.te. Her open eyes were turquoise, and her hair was long and blonde. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were ample and her body lean. Her pubic area was shaved clean. She was wearing a thin, gold chain around her neck and rings of various types on all of her fingers.
”Any wounds or marks that you can see?” Bates said.
The EMT shook his head. ”Just a tattoo.”
I'd noticed the tattoo when I walked up, but I hadn't looked closely. When the EMT mentioned it, I stepped over and crouched down next to her. It was on the inside of her right forearm, a single, pink petal clinging to the stem of a dying rose. Beneath the rose were several withered petals lying in green gra.s.s. Above the stem and petal was the word, ”Hope.”
Bates removed his cowboy hat and began scratching his head.
”How does a young beauty like this wind up drowned in the lake on the busiest night of the year without a soul seeing it?” he said to no one in particular. ”n.o.body's reported a girl missing, n.o.body's called in and said she fell in or went swimming and went under. n.o.body's said a word.”
”She didn't drown,” the EMT said.
”Excuse me?”
”I said she didn't drown. There isn't any water in her lungs.”
”That's an important tidbit,” Bates said. ”I appreciate you getting around to sharing it with me.”
Bates walked over next to me and hooked his thumbs in his belt.
”No water in her lungs means she was dead when she went in,” he said. ”Not a mark on her. How do you reckon she died, brother Dillard?”
I shrugged my shoulders. ”You're the sleuth. I'm just the lowly lawyer.”
Bates looked around, scanning the tree-covered hills that surrounded the water. He raised his head skyward, and I followed his gaze. A half-dozen turkey vultures, black against the sky with wing spans of at least six feet, were circling ominously above.
”Amazing,” he said. ”How do you reckon they figure it out so fast?”
”They smell it,” I said.
”Is it true they don't make any sound?”
”They hiss. Like a snake.”
Bates sighed and resumed his survey of the surrounding area. ”No houses in sight,” he said. ”Maybe a few campers scattered here and there, but we'll play h.e.l.l finding anybody who saw anything. I guess we do what we always do when we run across a body with no witnesses.”
”What's that?” I said.
”We start at the end and go backward.”
Chapter Two.
I left a short time later and drove my truck along the narrow back roads that wound through the gently rolling hills of the Gray and Boones Creek communities. I rolled the windows down and let the smell of the morning swirl through the cab of my truck. Cattle were lying in the pale-yellow shade of the elms, locusts, poplars and oaks that grew along the fringes of the pastures, and the rectangular tobacco patches were golden against the hillsides. Along the way, I started thinking about how hardened I'd become, how the sight of a dead young girl no longer moved me. It troubled me to think that I'd come to accept violence and cruelty as a part of everyday life.
Other att.i.tudes had changed as well. I'd long ago rearranged the idealistic beliefs of my youth when it came to understanding or rehabilitating violent criminals. Whether the traits that caused them to commit their terrible transgressions were created by genetics, environment or substance abuse was no longer of concern to me. My single purpose was getting them off the streets, into a secure warehouse, and keeping them there for as long as possible so they couldn't injure, maim or kill again.
I pulled into a convenience store in Boones Creek and was just starting to fill up the tank in my truck when I heard someone call my name. The voice was vaguely familiar. I turned and saw a woman walking out of the store toward me. She was as vaguely familiar as the voice. Then it hit me.
”Leah? Leah Turner?”
The woman walked quickly to me and threw her arms around my neck.
”I heard you were here,” she said into my ear. ”It's so good to see you.”
She stepped back, and I looked at her. Leah Turner was a cla.s.smate of mine at the University of Tennessee College of Law. I hadn't seen her in close to twenty years, but she'd changed very little. She had light brown hair that fell in ringlets around her dimpled cheeks, the clearest, prettiest, blue eyes I'd ever seen and a smile that could melt the iciest heart.