Scott Pratt - Injustice for all

“Anyone in particular come to mind?”

I shrug my shoulders. “Like I said, long list. I guess you could start by finding out if anyone he sent to the penitentiary has been paroled lately.”

“We’re already working on that. What about this Ray Miller? How well did you know him?”

“He’s dead. I don’t think he killed the judge from beyond the grave.”

“Quite a coincidence, though, don’t you think? Green suspends Miller. Then Miller commits suicide in his courtroom after taking a couple of shots at Green. Miller is buried yesterday, and the judge is found this morning.”

“Ray Miller’s gone, Anita. That story is over.”

“So how well did you say you knew him?”

I look directly at her and her eyes narrow slightly. She’s testing me.

“Forgive me, but I’m really not in the mood to be jerked around right now.”

“Really? It was an innocuous question. I just thought you might be able to help.”

I smile inwardly for a brief second. She may be the first cop I’ve ever heard use the word innocuous.

“Sorry,” I say. “Mooney’s had his foot up my butt for the past hour and a half. I guess I’m a little touchy. I knew Ray well. His son and mine played baseball together for years. We were friends.”

Anita looks toward the sky. “Storm’s coming,” she says. “We’d better button this up.”

I follow her gaze toward a thunderhead over Buffalo Mountain. It’s moving steadily toward us. The newly sprouting leaves on the trees that cover the mountain are a dull gold against the blackening sky. The breeze stiffens, and I shove my hands into my pockets.

“How old is Miller’s son?” Anita asks.

“Another innocuous question?”

“Feel free to regard it any way you’d like.”

I look down and start digging at the grass with my shoe. I realize Tommy has to be a suspect, but I just can’t wrap my mind around the idea that he’d be capable of killing anyone, even the judge. I could tell Anita about finding him sound asleep on the couch earlier, but I know the drill. If I tell her, I drag myself and my son smack into the middle of a murder investigation. They’ll probably even want to talk to Caroline and Lilly. The TBI agents will separate us and interrogate us. Anyone who refuses to talk to them will be deemed to be hiding something. If there’s any small discrepancy in any of our stories, they’ll all think we’re lying.

Then again, if I don’t tell her, am I committing a crime? Am I somehow obstructing justice? Tampering? Failing to disclose a material fact in a criminal investigation? I run the possibilities through my mind quickly and decide that though I might have some ethical obligation to tell Anita that Tommy was at my house this morning, I’m not breaking any laws by keeping it to myself. The kid’s been through enough, and even though I know she’ll do everything in her power to question him, I also know that he has a right to remain silent. He doesn’t have to tell her a damned thing.

“He’s twenty, and I think you’re wrong if you suspect Tommy Miller of doing this,” I say. “I’ve known him since he was a little kid. He’s spent the night at my house at least a hundred times over the past ten or twelve years. He’s eaten with us, gone to movies and ball games with us, spent holidays with us. We’ve even taken him with us on vacation a couple of times. He’s my son’s best friend, and my wife and I would adopt him in a heartbeat. He’s a fantastic kid. There’s no way he could have done this.”

I hear the distinctive sound of a zipper as the paramedics close the body bag. Anita and I watch as they begin to roll the charred remains of Judge Green toward the ambulance.

“That’s quite an endorsement coming from an assistant district attorney,” Anita says.

“I know him, and I know he didn’t do this.”

“So if I arrest him for murder, I guess somebody else will be prosecuting.”

I hear a clap of thunder in the distance as she turns her back to me and walks away. I hurry off toward my pickup. I need to talk to Tommy.

Instead of going to the office, I head straight back to the house. By the time I get there, the thunderstorm is beginning to unleash its fury. As I pull into the driveway, I can see whitecaps on the channel below, and the young birch trees at the edge of the woods are bending with the howling wind. Small raindrops are whizzing by the windshield horizontally, and the thick cloud cover has transformed morning into dusk.

The Honda Civic that I assume belongs to Tommy Miller is gone. I open the door from the garage into the kitchen and Rio almost knocks me down. He’s excited to see me, unaccustomed to my coming home so early in the day.

Caroline is standing at the stove, while Jack sits at the kitchen table. There’s a stack of pancakes in front of him, and the smell of bacon fills my nostrils. Both of them look at me in surprise.

“What are you doing here?” Caroline says.

I ignore her and walk straight to the table. “Where’s Tommy?” I say to Jack.

“What?”

“You heard me. Where’s Tommy? I saw him sleeping downstairs before I left.”

“I guess he went home.”

“Did you talk to him? What did he say?”

The questions I’m firing at Jack are quick, and the tone of my voice is intense. It’s not the kind of treatment he’s used to getting from me. Caroline walks over from the stove and sets a plate of scrambled eggs down on the table.

“What time did Tommy show up?”

“I don’t know,” Jack says. “Why are you so pissed off?”

“I asked you a question, and I want a straight answer. Now, what time did Tommy show up? ”

“Don’t yell at him,” Caroline says evenly.

“Stay out of this.”

Jack is looking at me with wide eyes. We haven’t exchanged a cross word since his first year in college when he got a little too deep into the Nashville party scene. Caroline doesn’t reply. She knows how I feel about Jack, and she knows I wouldn’t be acting this way without a good reason.

“I don’t know what time he got here,” Jack says, looking back down at his plate. “I woke up this morning and he was here. He was already awake.”

“Did you talk to him before he left?”

“Yeah, a little bit. He said he got hammered last night.”

“What time did he leave?”

“About ten minutes ago.”

“What else did he say?”

“Not much. He was pretty quiet. I don’t think he felt good.”

“How did he look?”

“What do you mean, ‘How did he look?’ He looked like someone who buried his father yesterday and tried to drown the memory in a liquor bottle.”

“Did he look like he’d been in a fight?”

“I didn’t notice anything.”

“No cuts? No blood? No bruises?”

“Not that I saw. What’s going on, Dad?”

“What about his clothes? Did you see anything on his clothes?”

“Not really. I mean, he was wearing some of my clothes.”

“What the hell happened to his clothes?”

“I don’t know.”

I take a deep breath and sit down across from him. Caroline returns the pan to the stove and walks back to the table.

“You’d better sit down,” I say to her.

For the next few minutes, I describe to them the crime scene, how someone apparently planned the murder, lay in wait, then brutally assaulted, hanged, and burned a man. When I’m finished, I stare straight at Jack.

“They haven’t positively identified the body yet. But there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind who it is.”

“Who?” Caroline asks.

“It’s Judge Green.” I’m still staring at Jack. “And Tommy Miller is at the top of their list of suspects. The TBI is going to be crawling all over this.”