High in Trial

FOUR

Twenty-two hours before the shooting



Buck got tied up on a call with one of the commissioners, and he had a conference call with the state police at two. Just before three o’clock, Rosie brought in the schedule of court appearances and a stack of forms for him to initial, which he did without glancing at them. “Did you find the file on that Berman fellow?”

“It was in the basement, from 1993 when the case was closed, before we started putting everything on the computer. You know, if you could get the commissioners to authorize just two clerks, we could start scanning some of that stuff in.”

“Yeah, that and other dreams.” He scrawled his last “BL” and glanced up at her. “Well? Where is it?”

“The sheriff—that is, Mr. Bleckley took it with him.”

He stared at her. “He did what?’

“That’s what you wanted it for, isn’t it? I mean, I didn’t think to ask… I just figured…”

Buck bit down hard on his temper. His back teeth ached with the effort. He pushed up abruptly from the desk and strode toward the door.

“Where are you going?”

“Lunch.”

“But it’s almost three o’clock!”

“You think I don’t know that?”

“Buck…” She sounded worried. “Did I do something wrong?”

He sucked in a breath as he looked back at her and then compressed his lips tightly against the words that wanted to be blurted. In the end all he said was a terse, “Next time, ask.” And, because she was still in the room, he didn’t even get the satisfaction of slamming the door on his way out.

Buck had always found that it took less energy to let his anger go than to hold on to it, and if he got mad about everything that went wrong in this office, he wouldn’t have time to do anything but get mad. By the time he walked the three blocks to Meg’s Diner, he’d calmed considerably. Roe’s SUV was parked in front, just as he figured it would be, which saved him a trip out to the country.

This late in the day Meg wasn’t officially serving, but she looked up from wiping the counter when he came in and called, “Afternoon, Buck. Don’t tell me you’re just now getting around to lunch.”

“I’m afraid so, Meg. What’ve you got left over for a poor starving lawman?”

The place was nearly empty. John Williams, from the bank, was chatting over coffee with Preacher Barton, and a couple of women at a window table lingered over pie. Roe was in a booth, and he looked up, unsurprised, when Buck came in.

“How about I whip you up a club sandwich and a fresh batch of fries?” Meg offered. “I’ve got some blueberry pie, too.”

“Meg, I swear, I’m going to marry you some day.”

Meg, who was easily twice his age, winked at him and replied, “I’m not going to wait forever, you handsome thing,” as she disappeared into the kitchen. Buck made his way over to Roe, stopping to speak to John and the preacher and nodding pleasantly toward the women at the window table. They smiled back at him.

He slid into the booth opposite Roe. “You know you can go to jail for stealing official government documents.”

Roe leaned back against the seat with a small frown. He closed the file and pushed it toward Buck. “I just wanted to see if it made any more sense now than it did back then.”

Buck turned a couple of pages. “Looks pretty straightforward to me. Felony murder, pled to second degree, thirty years, served twenty. No ballistics?”

Roe shook his head. “We never found the bullet.”

“Two eyewitnesses.”

“Yeah.”

They both knew that in the case of violent crimes eyewitness reports could be among the least reliable evidence of all.

Buck glanced through the reports submitted by the arresting officer in Georgia and flipped over to the suspect’s statement. Halfway through, he smothered a mirthless snort of laughter. “If I was going to try to alibi out, I believe I’d come up with something better than I was on my way home from selling crack to Smokey Beardsley at the time of the robbery.” He glanced up at Roe. “Checked out, did it?”

Roe rubbed his nose, his lips quirking dryly. “About like you’d expect. Keep reading.”

Meg placed a mug of coffee in front of Buck and topped off Roe’s from the pot she carried. Buck thanked her and she said, “It’ll just be another minute on those fries, hon.” The room had already begun to fill with the aroma of hot grease.

Meg went back to the kitchen, calling good-bye to the two ladies as the bell over the door announced their departure. Buck read on, paused, and read it again. He glanced at Roe. “Hit and run, huh? Did an accident report ever come in?”

The other man shook his head. “He says it was just a fender bender, no injuries. Maybe no damage. The other party might not have wanted to turn it in to their insurance, or might not have wanted it on their record for whatever reason. Could have been some kid in daddy’s car…” He shrugged. “Lots of reasons.”

“So he drove up from Georgia about five o’clock that afternoon, stopped at the Cash-n-Carry for gas and kept the receipt, spent an hour or two visiting his good buddy Smokey, and was sixty miles away, sideswiping a green sedan, by nine-o’clock, when the robbery happened. No ideas on the other driver?”

Roe shook his head. “He said he didn’t see the driver, but swore up and down he could identify the passenger. There’s a description there.”

Buck glanced at it. “Pretty generic. Still, if he could’ve found whoever was in the other car, that would have corroborated his timeline. And with everything else circumstantial…” He shrugged. “I can’t see him serving time. I’m guessing you never found the other car?”

“Never looked,” said Roe. “By the time we got around to it, he’d pled out.”

Police matters in a small town never moved with quite the same efficiency that they did on television crime dramas. Buck flipped through the file once more, then looked up at Roe. “What am I missing here? Some passing cokehead commits armed robbery on his way home from dealing drugs, no other connections here… What made you put in a notification request? You got some reason to think he might come back here? What’s special about this guy?”

Roe sipped his coffee. “Yeah, I wondered the same thing at the time. I wasn’t the one who wanted to keep tabs on him. It was Jon.”

Buck frowned a little. “Judge Stockton?”

“He was the judge on the case.”

Buck thought about that while Meg set a tall club sandwich and a steaming plate of fries in front of him. “You boys need anything else right now? I’ve got some sweet tea if you get tired of that coffee.”

“Thanks, Meg, it looks great.”

Buck reached for the bottle of ketchup on the table as Meg departed, and he said, “So did this dude Berman threaten him or what?”

“Not in open court. That would’ve gone on the record. He just came to me real quiet like a day or two later and asked would I do him a favor and let him know when the man got out.”

“Wonder why,” said Buck.

“I asked. Never did get an answer.”

“Maybe he knew the family.”

“Maybe.”

Buck ate in silence for a while. Then he said, “So do you think you got the right man?”

Roe leaned back again in his seat and released a quiet breath. “I don’t know.” His tone was heavy. “At the time I did. You know how it is. We get a handful of violent crimes a year around here, most of them drug-related. We put it out over the wire and within the hour the Georgia boys picked up a DUI matching his description, same kind of damage to the front fender, a wad of cash and a thirty-eight in the glove box… Looked like a wrap to me. You don’t go chasing after the maybes when you’ve got a suspect sitting in your cell. Maybe that’s not right. But that’s the way it is.”

Buck chewed thoughtfully. “You said ‘at the time’ you thought you had the right man. Something happen to change your mind?”

He hesitated, then shook his head, frowning at the file on the table between them. “Nope,” he said. “I didn’t see a thing in that file to make me think we got the wrong man.” He drained his cup and stood. “Or that we got the right one, either.”

Buck swallowed quickly. “Hey, wait a minute. That’s it? Judge Stockton wanted to keep an eye on this guy. He must’ve had his reasons. Don’t you think we should do some kind of follow-up?”

“I don’t know what. Jon is the one who wanted to keep up with him, and he’s dead. I guess his reasons died with him.”

“Maybe.” Buck put down the sandwich and opened the front flap of the file again. “But I think I’ll give his parole officer a call anyway.”

“You do what you think’s best.” Roe smiled and clapped him on the shoulder as he passed. “That’s why they’re paying you the sheriff’s money, son, not me.”



~*~