Scott Pratt - Injustice for all

“Is there any particular reason why you’re being so difficult?” Anita said. Norcross stepped back off the porch and began to wander away toward the back of the house.

“ Me? I’m being difficult? You come to my home unannounced less than a day after my husband’s funeral, you try to barge in, you’re asking me questions about my son, and you won’t even tell me why you’re here.” She pointed toward Norcross. “And now he is trespassing on my property!”

“We can come back with a warrant,” Anita said.

“For what? Are you going to arrest me for something? Have you forgotten what my husband did for a living, Agent… what was your name?”

“White.”

“He was a lawyer. I know my rights.”

“All right, Mrs. Miller. I’ll tell you why we’re here. We’re investigating a crime, and we think your son may have some information that could help us.”

“My son doesn’t know anything about any crime.”

“We’d like to hear that from him.”

“Well, good luck with that,” Toni Miller said, and she slammed the door in Anita’s face.

Anita White knew she was being stonewalled, but she wasn’t the kind to sit on her hands and wait for something to happen. With the sound of the slamming door reverberating in her ears, she walked to the neighbors on the east side of the Millers’ home and sent Norcross to the neighbors on the west side. Both agents worked their way down and across the street. An hour later they were back in the car.

“There’s always somebody in a neighborhood like this who can’t keep their nose in their own business,” Anita said as she pulled back out onto the rain-soaked street and headed for the TBI offices on Boone Street. “It never fails. This one is priceless. She lives right across the street, but she still uses binoculars. Her name’s Goodin. Trudy Goodin.”

“And what did Trudy Goodin have to say?” Norcross asked.

“Tommy didn’t come home last night. Showed up here about a half hour before we did and left about fifteen minutes later. We didn’t miss him by much.”

“Would this nosy neighbor have any idea where he might be?”

“She said he was in a hurry. Made a couple of trips in and out of the house, threw a bunch of stuff into his car, and took off. She thinks he probably went back to school.”

“And where’s school?”

“Durham, North Carolina. He goes to Duke.”

“So let’s lay this out,” Norcross said. “Our suspect’s father commits suicide in Judge Green’s courtroom less than a week ago after publicly blaming the judge for his legal and financial problems. They bury the father yesterday. Our suspect doesn’t stay at home and mourn like a normal person. He doesn’t stay home to comfort his mother or look out for her in her time of grief. He spends the night out. The judge is killed sometime during the night or early this morning. We go to our suspect’s home, and his mother is totally uncooperative, almost confrontational. She even shuts the door on us. So we canvass, and we find out from a neighbor that our suspect has arrived home this morning not long before we arrived, hurriedly thrown his belongings into his car, and left. What do you think? Enough for a warrant?”

“Not an arrest warrant, but maybe a search warrant. Especially when you add the fact that we have two sightings of a white car in or near the vicinity of the murder, around the same time as the murder, our suspect owns a white car, and our victim is a judge.”

“So we search the mother’s house? The kid’s car?”

“The house for sure. But the car could be a problem. We’ll go ahead and list the car on our warrant here, but if he’s gone back to school, he’s out of state. We’ll have to hook up with the cops over there and get a judge in North Carolina to issue a warrant.”

Anita turned to Norcross.

“How well do you know Joe Dillard?”

“Not that well on a personal level, but I’ve worked with him. The Natasha Davis case, the one where Fraley got killed. Fraley loved him. Why do you ask?”

“Just wondering what you think of him.”

“I think a lot of him. He’s always been straight with me. Good lawyer. Tough guy, honest. I hear he was a Ranger in the army.”

“Know anything about his son?”

“All-American boy. Almost too good to be true. I saw him play baseball a couple of times when he was a senior in high school. He can flat-out crush it. Why are you asking about Dillard?”

“I got a weird vibe from him this morning,” Anita said. “And the nosy neighbor said Tommy Miller was wearing a bright red T-shirt with ‘Tiger Baseball’ on the front and a name and the number thirty- five on the back. Guess what the name was.”

“No clue.”

“Dillard.”

I leave Jack some very simple instructions. I tell him to pack his bags immediately and go back to Nashville. I tell him to avoid the police at all costs. I tell him if they try to contact him, to get ahold of me immediately. I don’t know what Caroline said to Toni Miller. I don’t want to know.

I take my time going back to the office. I stop for lunch at Dixie Barbecue, one of my favorite spots, and spend a little time shooting the breeze with the owner, a genuinely pleasant man named Alan Wyatt. Afterward, I take the long way to Jonesborough. I’m not looking forward to listening to what I know I’ll hear from Mooney when I get there-a whiny diatribe about the terrible misfortune of having a judge whacked in his district. I sneak past Rita Jones, the receptionist, and I’m just about to immerse myself in work when Mooney buzzes me on the intercom.

“I need you to come in here,” he says.

I walk reluctantly back to his office and stand in the doorway, unwilling to go inside and subject myself to the inevitable.

“I think you should dismiss the charges against Rafael Ramirez,” he says.

“Beg your pardon?” I can’t believe he’s even thinking about Ramirez. “I seem to remember your busting my balls just a little while ago about the public’s perception of the office.”

“The case is weak. Stinnett is representing him. You’re going to wind up embarrassing us again, just like you did with Carver. We’ll put out a press release that says the evidence is insufficient to proceed to trial, but that we’ll continue the investigation. Maybe we’ll come up with something more.”

I shake my head in disbelief. Rafael Ramirez is a career criminal, and a dangerous one at that. He’s been on the regional drug task force’s radar for several years, but because he’s stayed on the move and has killed anyone he thought might be a snitch, the task force hasn’t been able to make a case on him. They’ve told me he’s a Mexican national who, in the country illegally, began his drug career working for a farmer outside of Pigeon Forge sometime in the early 1980s. According to the drug task force, the farmer, a man named Duncan who was found shot to death in his barn twenty years ago, taught Ramirez the intricacies of raising marijuana in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park near Gatlinburg. Once Ramirez learned to grow, conceal, harvest, and cure the crop, he realized he could wholesale the drug to his Mexican connections. They, in turn, distribute it all over the country. Ramirez is a multimillionaire who lives like a pauper, often sleeping for months in the woods near his vast patches. He’s apparently content to smuggle his cash back to his family in Mexico. The drug task force says the Ramirez family lives like royalty on a five-thousand-acre ranch outside Guadalajara, while Rafael lives primarily in the woods and does all the work.

Ramirez controls a group of around twenty fanatical followers who help him with the crops each year and help him maintain his wholesale network. He’s also dabbling in contract killing, according to the drug task force’s informants, none of whom are willing to say anything on the record or testify. I can’t blame them. Ramirez’s record regarding betrayal is straightforward and consistent. If anyone within the organization gets out of line, they wind up dead. If anyone outside the organization tries to screw Ramirez, they wind up tortured and dead.