“There,” I said triumphantly. “You’re a tough audience, but I knew I could make you smile.”
“Don’t quit your day job,” he said, waving me toward the elevator. Up on the sixth floor, I tried the CIA joke on Angela Price and the rest of the federal and state agents. They liked it about as much as Shipley had, so I decided to hold the FBI joke I’d prepared as an encore. “Okay, a lot has happened since I saw you last,” I said. First I told them about what I’d seen in the pot patch just twenty-four hours earlier; then I recounted what happened in the cave; finally I circled back to the sheriff’s drunken phone call. “I don’t get it,” I said. “Maybe it was just the liquor talking, but he sounded like a man who’s trying to do the right thing.”
Price looked dubious. “Well, I’d be happy to be convinced of that. But it’ll take a lot more than a sloppy drunk crying into the phone to persuade me. I’d give more weight to the theft of the bones and the explosions in the cave.”
“Yeah, the phone call rang a bit hollow to me after that, too,” I admitted,
“although we don’t know for sure the sheriff was involved in those. Or in his brother’s shakedown operation, either.”
The DEA agent—I had never really gotten a fix on his name—leapt in and began asking questions about the pot patch: who was the farmer, where was his patch, how big, and so on. Some things I could answer, but others—the location, Vern’s full name, the number of plants—I didn’t know. “I’m sorry I’m not more help on the specifics,” I said. “I was a ways off, I was sick as a dog, and I was scared out of my wits. Not at my most observant.” I hesitated. “I’m not sure I should say this next part, but I feel sorry for Cousin Vern. He’s obviously struggling, he’s got a sick kid, and Orbin shot the man’s dog out of pure spite. Looked like it just about broke Vern’s heart. I don’t know how much leeway you have in cases like this, but if there’s any way to give that guy a break somehow, it seems like the humane thing to do.”
An awkward silence followed my plea. Finally Price spoke up. “Well, Doctor Brockton, it’s a good thing you became a scientist rather than a law enforcement officer or a prosecutor. If we let everybody who’s got a sad story off the hook, we wouldn’t make many arrests. Still, if it makes you feel better, I’ll remind you that the focus of this informal investigation is corrupt officials, not small-scale pot farmers. And we do have some discretion in how we deal with small fry who help us land bigger fish. Beyond that, we can’t promise anything.”
I nodded. “Fair enough. I appreciate that. And I’ll certainly encourage anyone who can to cooperate as fully as possible. Mind you, I haven’t seen anything that suggests that Tom Kitchings is involved in extortion. However, sick and scared as I was out in the pot patch, I saw enough to testify that Tom’s brother—who is also his chief deputy—is crooked as a dog’s hind leg.”
“Is he taking bribes, or is he extorting money?” The question came from a man who had slipped into the room right after I’d started talking. Price introduced him as David Welton, the in-house lawyer for the FBI’s East Tennessee field office.
“Well, he put a gun to the man’s head and promised to kill him if he didn’t come up with a thousand dollars in two weeks. I’d sure call that extortion.”
Welton was taking notes now. “And he was in uniform when he did this?”
“Hell, even his helicopter was wearing a uniform.”
The lawyer looked at Price. “Sounds like we’ve got him on both Hobbs and colorful law,” he said. She nodded.
I looked from one to the other, bewildered. Welton explained, “The Hobbs Act outlaws robbery or extortion that interferes with commerce. It was passed back in 1946 to keep the Teamsters Union from taking over the trucking industry.” I appreciated the history lesson, but I wasn’t sure whether I was getting less bewildered or more. “Marijuana cultivation isn’t legal commerce,” he went on,
“but I think we can make the case that in Cooke County, it’s established commerce. A pillar of the underground economy, in fact.” I was beginning to see his reasoning, but could it really be possible that Orbin’s crime was obstructing drug trafficking? “By the way,” he added, “speaking of pot patches, if your friend Vern has booby-trapped his, the way a lot of these backwoods guys do”—I felt a rush of panic on Waylon’s behalf but tried not to show it—
“he could be looking at ten years in federal prison for that alone.” I made a mental note to warn Waylon at the first opportunity.