Scott Pratt - In good faith

“I don’t think I’ll be invited to his retirement party,” I said.

“Shit, he’ll never retire,” Mooney said. “The only way he comes off of that bench is in a casket. But don’t worry about it. You made plenty of other friends today, especially Sheriff Bates. He thinks you’re a one-man dream team. Come on over here. I want to introduce you to someone.”

The young man at the table stood up and offered his hand. He was a good-looking kid, late twenties, around six feet tall with short, straw-colored hair, blue eyes, and a square jaw.

“This is Cody Masters,” Mooney said. “Investigator Cody Masters from the Jonesborough Police Department.” I vaguely recalled hearing or reading the name somewhere.

“Joe Dillard,” I said, returning the smile.

“Have a seat,” Mooney said. “We’ve got a little problem, and we think you’re just the man to solve it. Cody has a case coming up for trial next month, and I want you to handle it. It’s a sexual abuse case that got a lot of publicity a couple of years ago. You might remember it. What did they call it in the papers, Cody?”

Masters blushed a little and dropped his head, obviously embarrassed.

“The Pizza Bordello case,” he said.

“I remember that,” I said. “The guy who owned Party Pizza in Jonesborough. What was his name?”

“William Trent,” Mooney said.

“Wow, that’s still around?”

“Afraid so, and it’s set for trial on October fourteenth. Can you do it?”

“You’re not giving me much time to get ready,” I said. “Who was handling it before?”

“Alexander,” Mooney said. “But after the disaster with Billy Dockery, we can’t afford to take another beating on a high-profile case. I want you to try to work out some kind of deal, but if you can’t, you have to win at trial.”

It sounded like an ultimatum. “And if I lose?” I said.

“Let’s not even think about that,” Mooney said as he stood up. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll let you two boys get acquainted.”

I looked at Masters and shook my head. “Maybe I should have stayed retired,” I said. “Why don’t you fill me in?”

For the next half hour, I listened while Cody Masters told me about William Trent, a thirty-five-year-old husband and father of two who had opened a small pizza restaurant in Jonesborough a decade earlier. He was a member of the chamber of commerce, a Little League coach, and a deacon at the Presbyterian church. He was also, from what Masters told me, one very sick son of a bitch.

A couple of years earlier, Masters was approached by two seventeen-year-old girls who told him that William Trent had been having sex with both of them for two years. Both were former employees of Trent’s, and they told Masters a lurid tale. Trent, they said, hired only young girls who he believed would have sex with him. The girls were usually from broken homes, impoverished, weren’t good students-the kind of kids most employers would shy away from. Trent let them know on the front end that certain things would be required of them if they worked at his restaurant, things that he termed “unconventional.” The girls said Trent kept pornography running on a computer screen in the back office, hosted lingerie parties for the employees in the restaurant after hours, kept a small refrigerator in the kitchen stocked with liquor, and occasionally provided cocaine, crystal meth, or marijuana. He also started them at ten dollars an hour, almost double the minimum wage. The girls said there was an unspoken allegiance among the employees-what happened at work stayed at work.

Trent immediately went about seducing them, and from what they told Masters, Trent’s sexual appetite was insatiable. They had sex with him in the walk-in cooler, on the table in the kitchen where the pizza dough was rolled, in the bathrooms, on the counter and on the tables in the front after the restaurant closed, and his car in the parking lot out back. He wanted threesome sex, oral sex, anal sex, sex in bizarre positions-they even let him penetrate them with a catsup bottle a couple of times. And he insisted that the girls use birth control, because he refused to wear a condom.

Masters told me that at least ten girls were involved over a three-year period, although some of the girls refused to cooperate with the police. The big problem with the case, Masters said, was that he was a rookie when he first met the girls, that the district attorneys were all away at their annual conference in Nashville, and that he had made several early mistakes that Trent’s lawyer would undoubtedly bring up at trial.

“I probably should have waited until the DAs got back,” Masters said, “but I wanted to get him off the streets. It made me so mad I threw the freaking book at him. I charged him with forty-two felonies. About half of them were aggravated rape and aggravated kidnapping. I tacked on statutory rape, aggravated sexual battery, sexual battery by an authority figure, you name it. He was looking at about twelve hundred years in prison. But his wife posted his bail and they hired Joe Snodgrass from Knoxville. He made me look like a fool at the preliminary hearing.”

I knew Joe Snodgrass by reputation only. He ran one of the most successful criminal defense firms in the state. He’d been the president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and president of the Tennessee Trial Lawyers Association. He had a good reputation as a trial lawyer, and he’d written books on criminal procedure and pretrial litigation in criminal cases.

“What was the problem?” I said.

“I didn’t read the statutes right. Hell, I’m not a lawyer. All of the aggravated rape charges and all of the aggravated kidnapping charges got thrown out after the preliminary. And Snodgrass made the girls look like trashy little whores.”

“What kind of evidence do you have?”

“Not typical rape evidence,” he said. “We don’t have any sperm or DNA, no bruises on any of the victims, no-”

“Wait just a second,” I said, holding up my hand to stop him. “Do you have any physical evidence at all?”

“Not really,” Masters said, shaking his head. “All we have are statements from some of the girls and a diary. Oh, and I got his payroll records so I could make sure the girls were working on the days when they say they had sex with him.”

“How many girls?”

“I think only four are still willing to cooperate.”

“Does Trent have any priors?”

“None.”

“What about the computer at the restaurant? Did you have a forensics expert check it to see whether he was really going to porn sites?”

“I did, but it came up empty. After we got it back from the lab, I had one of the girls come down to the office and she said it wasn’t the same computer. He must have gotten wind we were coming.”

I sat back and thought for a few minutes. Lee was asking me to prosecute what boiled down to a multiple statutory rape case with no physical evidence and victims who were, at the very least, young girls of questionable character. The two I knew about had both said they’d engaged in consensual sex with their boss for a long period of time. The man accused of committing the crimes was a father, husband, reputable businessman, active in his church and community, and had never been in trouble before. He was also obviously well financed. I had only a few weeks to prepare, and in the meantime, I was supposed to be helping with the most intense murder investigation in the history of the district. What was it Lee had said when I met with him before I took the job? Easy money?

“I’m sorry, Mr. Dillard,” Masters said. “I may have screwed this up beyond repair.”

“Call me Joe,” I said, “and don’t worry about it. It would’ve been better if you’d waited until the DAs got back, and it would’ve been a lot better if you’d had the girls wear a wire, but it was a rookie mistake. No sense beating yourself up about it. What charges are left that we can prove?”