Nancy Grace - Murder in the Courthouse

“Yep, toy drives.”

They stood a moment looking at the display. “Hey look, Hailey. Her email’s still up.”

“Finch, get out of her business! The woman’s dead.” But even as she spoke, Hailey craned over to see the list of emails up on the screen.

“Check out all these emails from Alton Turner!” Finch exclaimed.

“That doesn’t mean anything, they worked together, practically on top of each other.” As she said the words, she spotted what Fincher meant. At least twenty to thirty emails, one after the next, from Turner. They had been opened.

“But Turner’s been dead for two days now. She was just reading them?”

“Well,” Hailey began, “… I think she was re-reading them. Look.” Hailey clicked open one of the emails. “See, she opened this one yesterday, Monday, when she got to work. Look at the date, he sent these the morning before he died.”

“So she was re-reading them just before she went up to the cafeteria then. What do they say?”

“Finch, I don’t think we should read her…”

“OK. In this one, he’s just saying they should get a sandwich for lunch. That’s innocent enough. But look, now he’s telling her she’s making a bad decision. It’s got to be about the judge. And look, Hailey, here he is asking her if she wants to see a movie. I think he had a crush on her.”

“Well, who wouldn’t?” Hailey countered. “She’s young, she’s beautiful, she jogs, plays softball…”

“She runs the toy drive and dates a married judge plus one court reporter and three sheriffs that we know of…”

“You made your point! I get it! I’m going to stop spying on a dead woman and get my sweater and bag, I hope.” Hailey turned and headed down the row toward the lost and found bin and looked in.

It was surprisingly full of items left behind throughout the courthouse… jackets; a backpack; a little black beaded shoulder bag just big enough for a few items; several lined notepads covered in scribbled writing, probably lawyers’ notes; a kid’s green LeapFrog computer; and a brown leather briefcase.

And sure enough, there it was, right on top of the pile of forgotten belongings. Hailey’s sweater was neatly folded and placed on her old canvas bag.

“See? Somebody turned it in. There are still good people in this world.” Hailey called over her shoulder as she bent over to get her things.

“Finch! Get out of her email!” He was still standing at Elle’s space when Hailey turned around.

“I’m not in her email anymore! I’m at another cubicle looking at alligators!”

“What? Did you just say you’re looking at alligators?”

“Yep. Alligators. I’m at the cubicle next to hers. Look at this inmate transport guy’s space! All these postcards and pictures of all sorts of wild animals. And here’s an old one of Steve Irwin. And here’s one of that other wild animal guy… Jack Hanna.”

Hailey paused briefly, looking at all the exotic animals and photo safari shots. By the huge stack of inmate transport sheets next to his computer screen, he clearly was not afraid of handling dangerous animals.

“Can we go get dinner now?” Hailey asked in mock desperation. “As much as I love spying on county clerks and transport officers, I’m starved.”

“OK, Hailey girl. Let’s go get pizza.”

“Again, Fincher. I never agreed to another pizza night. What about a salad bar? Have you ever even heard of that? They’re awesome… lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, cheese… you know… healthy?”

The two headed back through the double doors and into the cavernous courthouse lobby. Nodding at the night sheriff, Hailey held up her canvas bag and sweater, showing him she found her things. They pushed through the side door out onto the courthouse steps and into fresh air, away from the ghosts of the dead and their now-empty cubicles full of memories. The sky over them just barely hinted at nighttime approaching.

Dinner turned out to be a compromise. Not pizza, not a salad bar… but Mexican. Fincher chowed down on a huge basket of chips and salsa, two cheesy beef burritos, and a bowl that, according to Hailey, looked like a vat of cheese sauce. It was titled on the menu as Queso Divertido, or cheesy fun. Hailey went with the Veggie Lover’s Delight with avocado.

After, Hailey drove her rental car straight back to the hotel where the state was putting her up. It wasn’t luxurious by any means, but it had a double window that looked past Savannah’s famed River Street and out onto the side bend of the Savannah River.

By night, the water was black and silver ripples mirrored the lights of River Street along its edges. Huge ships, barges, and yachts floated past under the stars. There were container ships from faraway ports gliding by in the dark with writing on their sides foreign to Hailey.

After a hot bath, toothpaste, and makeup remover, Hailey sat in the dark on the edge of the king bed situated against the center of the bedroom wall. Hotel drapes still drawn open, she sat motionless, thinking, legs drawn up under her, watching the dark water and the watercraft passing by on the swelling waters of the Intracoastal Waterway that could take a ship all the way up the Eastern Seaboard.

Rowdy voices drifting up from far below her window on the eleventh floor of the River Street Hyatt broke her train of thought. Restless, Hailey paced past the walnut cabinet housing a flat-screen TV. Reaching into her canvas bag, she pulled out her Todd Adams trial notes and her iPad resting in its eggshell-blue case.

Turning on the iPad, she started by poring over searches of Todd Adams, Julie Love, their wedding, and the trial. She rarely found an entry she hadn’t already read.

Staring at the screen’s effervescent glow, just for the heck of it, she plugged in the name Chase Billings. Wow, Hailey had no idea about his history. “Sharpshooter of the Year” eight years in a row, “Rookie of the Year,” and number one in his class at the police academy. He received the Sheriff’s Medal of Valor for storming into an ongoing bank robbery in full SWAT gear, taking down the three thugs inside the bank, and, before it was all done, shooting out the tires of the getaway car. Then there was the National Sheriff’s Star.

Three years before that, he was awarded the Medal for Heroism for chasing down a white van driven by a child predator during a high-speed chase. Billings managed somehow to get the nine-year-old little girl out unharmed and take down the perp. Just to top it all off, he graduated summa cum laude from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Hailey cleared the screen. Billings never once let on.

She clicked off Chase Billings and tapped in the words “Eleanor Odom” and “Chatham County.” Dozens of hits immediately presented themselves.

Just as the night deputy said, there she was… Committee Chairman of Toys for Tots for the past four years running, walk-a-thons, charity runs, you name it, Eleanor Odom did it. The fourth or fifth entry down had a link to Eleanor Odom’s Facebook page. Clicking on the link, a virtual encyclopedia of her life revealed itself. Literally hundreds of photos of Eleanor with friends, at dinner, and with pets all came into view on the screen glowing in the dark of Hailey’s hotel room.

Posts about jogging, the courthouse, cases, trials, fundraisers… it was all there. Her life was an open book. Or was it?

Hailey noticed that while there were plenty of sheriffs peppered throughout the photos, there wasn’t a single one of Judge Bill Regard. Hailey looked him up.

The judge’s online profile revealed a distinguished-looking guy in his mid-to-late thirties, handsome with dark hair brushed straight back from his face and deep brown eyes that practically crackled with intelligence, even in a photo. He was dressed in his long black judicial robes and seated in front of a wall containing shelves of law books Hailey immediately recognized as the OCGA, the Official Code of Georgia, Annotated.