“Second, about that tattoo your boy mentioned. You might be looking for a military man. That sounds like someone who could have been in the service once.”
“Any idea where I might start?”
“I’m not the detective,” said Long. “But if I was, I might be looking south. Fort Campbell, maybe. Airborne.”
Then he left us, his bulk receding into the body of the prison.
“What was that about?” asked Aimee, but I didn’t answer.
Fort Campbell, situated right on the borders of Kentucky and Tennessee, home of the 101st Airborne Division.
The Screaming Eagles.
We separated in the parking lot. I thanked Aimee for her help and asked her to let me know if there was anything I could do for Andy Kellog.
“You know the answer to that,” she said. “You find those men, and you let me know when you do. I’ll recommend the worst lawyer I know.”
I tried to smile. It died somewhere between my mouth and my eyes. Aimee knew what I was thinking.
“Frank Merrick,” she said.
“Yeah, Merrick.”
“I think you’d better find them before he does.”
“I could just leave them to him.”
“You could, except it’s not just about him, or even Andy. In this case, justice has to be seen to be done. Someone has to answer publicly. Other children will have been involved. We need to find a way to help them, too, or to help the adults they’ve become. We can’t do that if these men are hunted down and killed by Frank Merrick. You still have my card?”
I checked my wallet. It was there. She tapped it with her finger.
“You get in trouble, and you call me.”
“What makes you think I’m going to get in trouble?”
“You’re a repeat offender, Mr. Parker,” she said, as she climbed into her car. “Trouble is your thing.”
Chapter XIX
Dr. Robert Christian looked distracted and ill at ease when I called unexpectedly at his office on my way back from Warren, but he still agreed to give me a few minutes of his time. There was a patrol car parked outside when I arrived, a man seated in the back, his head resting against the wire dividing the interior of the car, the position of his hands indicating that he had been restrained. A policeman was talking to a woman in her thirties whose head kept moving from one point of a triangle to the next: from the cop, to two children seated in a big Nissan 4x4 to her right, then on to the man in the back of the patrol car. Cop, kids, man. Cop, kids, man. She had clearly been crying. Her kids still were.
“It’s been a long day,” Christian said, as he closed the door of his office and collapsed into the chair behind his desk, “and I haven’t even eaten lunch yet.”
“The guy outside?”
“I can’t really comment,” said Christian, only to relent a little. “There is no easy aspect to what we do, but among the hardest, and the one that needs some of the most delicate handling, involves the moment when someone is forced to confront the accusations made against him. There was a police interview a couple of days back, and today the mother and children arrived here for a session with us only to find the father waiting for them outside. People react in different ways to allegations of abuse: disbelief, denial, rage. We don’t often have to call the police, though. That was…a particularly difficult moment for all involved.”
He began collecting papers from his desk, assembling them into piles and inserting them into folders. “So, Mr. Parker, what can I do for you? I don’t have much time, I’m afraid. I have a meeting up in Augusta in two hours with Senator Harkness to discuss the mandatory-sentencing issue, and I haven’t prepared for it as well as I might have wished.”
State Senator James Harkness was a right-wing hawk with a sledgehammer attitude to just about every issue that came his way. Recently, he had been among those whose voices were raised loudest in favor of mandatory twenty-year sentences for those found guilty of gross sexual assault of a minor, even for those who copped a plea.
“Are you for, or against?”
“In common with most prosecutors, I’m against it but, to gentlemen like the good senator, that’s a little like arguing against Christmas.”
“Can I ask why?”
“It’s pretty simple: it’s a sop to voters that will do more harm than good. Look, of every hundred allegations that get reported, about half will end up with law enforcement. Of that fifty, forty will get charged. Of that forty, thirty-five will plea bargain, five will go to trial, and from that five, there will be two convictions and three acquittals. So, out of that initial hundred we have maybe thirty to forty sex offenders that we can register and of whom we can keep track.
“In the case of mandatory sentencing, there will be no incentive for alleged offenders to cop a plea. They might as well take their chances in court and, in general, prosecutors prefer not to go to trial on abuse allegations unless they have a solid case. The problem for us, as I told you when we last met, is that it can be very difficult to provide the kind of evidence necessary to secure a conviction in criminal court. So, if you introduce mandatory sentencing, there’s a strong possibility that more offenders will slip through the net. We don’t get them on the register, and they go back to doing whatever it was they were doing until someone catches them at it again. Mandatory sentencing allows politicians to appear tough on crime, but it’s essentially counterproductive. Frankly, though, I’d have a better chance of making a chimp understand that than I will of convincing Harkness.”
“Chimps aren’t concerned with reelection,” I said.
“I’d vote for a chimp over Harkness anyday. At least the chimp might evolve further at some stage. So, Mr. Parker, have you made any progress?”
“A little. What do you know about Gilead?”
“I assume you’re not testing my knowledge of biblical trivia,” he replied, “so I take it you’re referring to the Gilead community, and the ‘children of Gilead.’”
He gave me a potted history, similar to what I already knew, although he believed that the scale of the abuse was greater than had previously been suspected. “I’ve met some of the victims, so I know what I’m talking about. I think most of the people in Gilead knew what was happening to those children, and more of the men participated than was acknowledged at first. Then the families scattered after the bodies were found, and some of them were never heard from again. Others, though, cropped up in relation to other cases. One of the victims, the girl whose evidence led to the conviction of Mason Dubus, the man believed to be the ringleader of the abusers, did her best to keep track of them. A couple are in jail in other states, and the rest are dead. Dubus is the only one left alive, or the only one that we know of; even if others of whom we’re not aware have survived, they’re old, old men and women by now.”
“What happened to the children?”
“Some were taken away by their parents or guardians when the community disintegrated. We don’t know where they went. The ones that were rescued were put in foster homes. A couple were taken in by Good Will Hinckley.”
Good Will Hinckley was an institution close to I-95 that provided a home and school environment for kids aged twelve to twenty-one who had suffered molestation, were homeless, or had been affected by substance or alcohol abuse, whether directly or as the result of the addictions of a family member. It had been in existence since the late nineteenth century, and graduated nine or ten seniors every year who might otherwise have found themselves in jail, or in the ground. It was not surprising that some of the children of Gilead had ended up there. It was probably the best thing that could have occurred, under the circumstances.