Sarah was in real trouble this time. If I lost this fight, she was likely to lose the rest of her life.
Friday, November 7
The next morning, my cell phone rang at six. I’d been up for a half hour, sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and waiting for the sun to come up. The sky was just beginning to brighten, and as I looked out over the back deck I could begin to make out the silhouettes of the trees along the ridgeline to the east. I walked over to the counter where the phone was charging and looked at the caller ID. It was Leon Bates.
“We need to have a sit-down,” Bates said.
“When?”
“This morning. Right now, if you can. It’s pretty important.”
“Where?”
“Someplace private. I don’t want nobody seeing us or hearing what I have to say.”
“How about here? There’s nobody here but Caroline and me, and she won’t be awake for a couple of hours.”
While I waited for Bates, I threw on some clothes, a jacket, and a pair of gloves. The temperature was in the low thirties, but the wind was calm. I thought it might be best if Bates and I took a walk around the property. That way Caroline wouldn’t be disturbed when Rio inevitably started barking.
I called the dog, walked outside, and stood at the head of the driveway. Bates showed up in his black Crown Victoria a few minutes later.
“You up for a walk?” I said.
“Damn straight. Just let me grab my gloves. Is that dog going to tear my leg off?”
“Not unless I tell him to.”
We walked down the driveway and behind the house, through the backyard, and onto a walking trail that I’d carved out of the woods several years earlier. Many of the trees had lost their foliage, and they covered the ground like a vast green carpet. Dampness from recent rains gave rise to a slightly musty odor, an odor that always reminded me of playing in the woods behind my grandparents’ home when I was a child. Rio ran ahead of us, lifting his leg next to tree trunks and chasing squirrels.
“Nice place,” Bates said. He was wearing his dark brown cowboy hat, an image he often liked to portray to the media.
“Thanks. You should come out sometime and bring the wife. We’ll drink a few beers and swap a few lies.”
“I might just do that. How’s the missus?”
“Doing as well as can be expected under the circumstances.”
“That cancer’s a demon. Both of my grannies died from it. My great-uncle, too. The more they learn about it, the more it seems to spread.”
I nodded my head in silence. Surely he didn’t come all the way out here to talk about cancer.
“I heard about your sister,” Bates said. “Sounds like a bum rap to me.”
“It’ll turn out okay. The DA down there is a jerk, but we’ll figure out a way to beat him.”
The woods were damp and cool, and I could see Bates’s breath as we walked slowly along the path. The sun was just clearing the hills to the east, and streaks of pale yellow light were filtering through the branches and the few remaining leaves on the trees.
“So what brings you out here so early in the morning?” I said.
“Afraid I’ve got some bad news.”
“How bad? The way things have been going lately, I’m not sure I can handle much more.”
“There’s a problem in your office. A serious problem. I need to be sure I can count on you before I make another move.”
“Count on me for what?”
“To carry the prosecution through. To do what’s right. It ain’t gonna be easy.”
“Why don’t you just tell me what it is?”
“You give me your word you won’t say anything to anybody?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good enough for me. I’ve got Alexander Dunn on tape and on video collecting two thousand dollars in extortion money from a man who runs a little gambling operation out in the county.”
I stopped in my tracks, stunned. Alexander? He was an asshole, but I didn’t think he was a criminal. And I didn’t think he needed money.
“Sorry to drop it on you like this,” Bates said. “I need to move on Alexander while it’s fresh, but I ain’t gonna do nothing unless I know you’re with me.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m having a little trouble wrapping my mind around this. You say you’ve got Alexander on tape? You set him up?”
“Yeah,” Bates said with a slight chuckle. “He walked right into it. He’s got no idea.”
“How did this come about?”
“About a year ago I busted a bookie named Powers, big operation, especially for this part of the country. He was booking around fifty thousand a week. About a month after that I popped a casino that was set up in a big boat out on the lake. They’d run up and down the lake all night, gambling. Busted the operator and all the players.”
“I remember both of them,” I said. “It was all over the news. That’s when I knew you were either crazy or serious about what you were doing. The cops and the prosecutors around here have always left the gamblers alone.”
“What you didn’t hear about was that three or four months after the arrests, after the cases went to criminal court, they wound up getting dismissed at the recommendation of the district attorney’s office. The first case, the bookie, walked because Alexander Dunn told the judge that the sheriff’s department had illegally wire-tapped the bookie’s phone.”
“Did you?”
“Maybe, but we weren’t gonna use any of it in court. We got enough information from the tap that we started putting pressure on some of the players and went at him that way. Then we set up a sting and popped him when he paid off a winner. I don’t even know how Alexander found out about the tap.
“Then the second case got dismissed because Alexander told the judge we’d illegally obtained a search warrant for the boat and that the boat may have been in another county when we did the raid. Hell, I didn’t know the county line ran right down the middle of the goddamned lake, but it seemed to me like Alexander was looking for ways to get the cases dismissed instead of helping us put these guys in jail, where they belonged. Even the customers walked.”
“So you started looking at Alexander?” I said.
“Let’s just say I was suspicious. A couple of weeks ago, I arrested this ol’ boy who lives on a farm out in the county and ran a little casino in what used to be the hayloft of his barn. Not real big-time, but big enough. So I got him into interrogation and started threatening him. I threatened to bring the feds in, which I’d never do, but he didn’t know it. I threatened to arrest his wife. Told him I knew she was in on it, too. Finally, after three or four hours, he told me he had some information that I might be interested in. Said it was big stuff. So I agreed to make a little trade with him if the information turned out to be useful. Turned out to be damned useful.”
We started walking again, slowly. I was having trouble believing what I was hearing, but Bates had no reason to lie to me.
“This boy said most of the people who run gambling operations around here-card games, bingo, video slots, tip boards, bookies, craps, roulette, you name it-used to make campaign contributions to the district attorney and the sheriff. Always in cash, even in years when there wasn’t an election. They had sort of an unspoken understanding. I’ve never taken any of their filthy money and never will, but a few months after Mooney got elected, Alexander started making the rounds. He told everybody there was a new deal. Monthly payments, cash, and he raised the stakes on them. My informant says they were all pissed about it, but what were they gonna do? Call me?”
“So how’d you set him up?”
“I just waited for him to make his regular monthly pickup. Had cameras inside and outside of the house, and the informant wore a wire.”
We turned a corner on the trail and started walking back towards the house. The quickly rising temperature had caused the air near the cool ground to condense, and a shroud of gray mist hung motionless among the trees. The thought of Alexander extorting money from gamblers blew my mind. He put forth such a polished public image, and he was so damned smug. Still, I took no pleasure in what Bates was telling me. It could only lead to a huge public scandal, with the district attorney’s office at its center.