Satan’s Soldiers is a notorious motorcycle gang. I know they’re heavy into the crystal methamphetamine business. They also deal in guns and explosives. I have to hand it to Sarah. She sure knows how to pick ’em.
I walk over to the coffeemaker, pour myself a cup, and sit down at the table. Sarah walks down the hall toward the bedroom. I sip the coffee and hear the chopper roar to life in the driveway. A few minutes later, Sarah, wearing a yellow blouse and a pair of black jeans, walks back into the kitchen.
“How long have you been dating Roy?”
“About a year, I guess.”
“Classy guy. I especially enjoyed the ass grab. Where’d you meet him?”
“Tonto’s.”
Tonto’s is a biker bar on the outskirts of Johnson City. I’ve never been in the place, but I’ve driven by it plenty of times at night on the weekends. Dozens of motorcycles-maybe up to a hundred-are always in the parking lot.
“Didn’t know you ever hung out at Tonto’s,” I say.
“Lots of things you don’t know. Did you stop by to pass judgment?”
“Nah, I just stopped by to say hello. Didn’t exactly expect to find a gangbanger in Ma’s house, though.”
“It’s my house now. And I’ll invite anyone I please.”
“Does he know I’m an assistant district attorney?”
“Yeah. I told him.”
“Do you know what they do, Sarah? That gang? They manufacture and sell crystal-”
“I don’t want to hear it,” she barks. “Mind your own business. And you’d better get used to the idea of having him around. He’s the father of the baby I’m about to have.”
I stare at her in silence. She stands abruptly.
“I have to go to work now.”
She hovers over me until I reluctantly get up. I want to try to talk some sense into her, but I know from years of experience that I might as well beat my head against the refrigerator. I put my cup in the sink and turn around to face her, but she’s already walking away down the hallway again.
“You know the way out,” she calls over her shoulder, and I head out to my truck.
33
I have an appointment with the assistant United States attorney in Greeneville at ten a.m. I’m taking him my case file on Buddy Carver, the child porn aficionado. He’s agreed to present the case to a federal grand jury. I’m sure they’ll indict Carver, and I’m sure Carver’s lawyer won’t have the same success with the federal district judge that he had with Judge Green. Carver will soon be spending his days and nights in a minimum security federal prison, probably in Kentucky or West Virginia.
I stop in at the office for a few minutes to pick up Carver’s file and check for phone messages, but first I dial Anita White’s cell phone number, hoping she’ll give me an update on the investigation into Judge Green’s murder. I need to try to stay a step ahead of her if I can. Anita doesn’t answer the call. I leave her a message and dial Sheriff Bates’s cell number to get the latest on Hannah Mills, but he doesn’t answer, either.
I check my voice mail. There’s a message from Tom Pickering, the AUSA I’m supposed to meet in less than an hour. He wants me to call him before I come down. I dial the number.
“I got a call from a DEA agent in Knoxville this morning,” Pickering says after he comes on the line. “He wants to drive up and meet with you while you’re here.”
“DEA agent?” I say. “Any idea what he wants?”
“It has something to do with the girl who worked in your office who’s gone missing.”
“What’s his name?”
“Rider. Maurice Rider. Everybody calls him Mo. Good guy. He’s been around for a long time.”
“Do you know what he wants?”
“Not really. He called early. Mentioned that he’d read about the girl in the newspaper this morning. He said he had some information for whoever was looking into it, but he wanted to talk to someone he could trust. He asked if I knew anyone. I told him the sheriff seems to be a pretty solid guy, but he said he doesn’t trust sheriffs. So I mentioned you. When I told him you were coming down this morning, he asked if I thought it’d be okay if he drove up from Knoxville to meet you.”
“Sure,” I say. “If he knows something that might help, I’d be more than willing to talk to him. Right now we’re lost in the dark.”
I manage to avoid Lee Mooney and leave the office around nine fifteen. So many thoughts are floating through my mind that before I realize it, I’ve made the thirty- minute drive to Greeneville. I park my truck in front of the federal courthouse on Depot Street and walk past the concrete pillars designed to keep anyone from parking a vehicle within a hundred feet of the building. The pillars always remind me of that sick bastard Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing that killed dozens of innocent people.
Tom Pickering’s office is on the third floor, and I climb the wide marble steps in the courthouse foyer after making small talk with the U.S. Marshals at the security station just inside the front door. I lay out the Carver case for Pickering, a soft-spoken, studious man in his mid-thirties. Just as we’re finishing up, his secretary buzzes him over the intercom.
“Tell him to come on in,” Pickering says.
Mo Rider walks through the door, and Pickering introduces us. The first thing I notice is the prominent cleft in his chin. He’s fifty or so, wearing khaki pants and a brown button-down shirt. His hair, which he wears closely clipped, has already gone gray. His eyes are green, and he has the rugged look of a man who spends a lot of time outdoors. He takes a seat at the small conference table where Pickering and I have been working.
“I have a little story to tell you,” Rider says after we get past the preliminaries and he’s satisfied I’m not a shill for a drug cartel. “It starts about fourteen, fifteen years ago, when this young girl and her aunt came to my office. The girl’s a hiker. Name’s Katie, Katie Dean. She lives outside of Gatlinburg and spends a lot of time in the national forest. Sweet little gal, scared shitless the day she comes in.
“So she goes out on this overnight hike, gets way back off the beaten path, and runs across a huge patch of marijuana. Biggest we’d ever seen in that area at the time. Her aunt brings her into the office, she shows me exactly where the patch is, and a few days later we go in and burn it.”
“Sounds like a happy ending for you guys,” I say, “but what does this have to do with Hannah?”
“It was anything but a happy ending,” Rider says. “This kid, Katie, was only eighteen years old then. Like I said, she and her aunt were both scared about talking to us, but I assured them nobody would ever know outside of our office. Somebody leaked it, though. We had one guy from the county sheriff’s department on the task force, and he must have found out who she was and leaked the information. We never could prove it, but I know he had to leak it. Corrupt bastard. The whole damned sheriff’s department was in the grower’s pocket. He was making millions, and he spread enough of it around to buy some loyalty.
“So anyway, a couple of days after we burned the field, the girl’s house was firebombed. Katie and another woman-a black woman who lived there with them-got out, but the fire killed her aunt and a young invalid boy, the aunt’s son, even the family dog.”
Rider stops for a minute and shakes his head. The incident he’s describing may have happened more than a decade ago, but I can see that the guilt he feels still weighs heavily on his soul.
“The group that did the firebombing was Mexican, run by a guy named Rudy Mejia,” Rider says. He looks me directly in the eye. “Mejia was murdered about a month later by another grower who was trying to lock up the marijuana business for himself. The other grower’s name was Rafael Ramirez. I think you have him in your jail up there, don’t you?”
“Yeah. I’ve got him on a not-so-strong murder charge. As a matter of fact, he reached out to me yesterday. Said he knows what happened to Hannah, the girl who’s gone missing from our office, but he wants a free pass in exchange for the information.”