“Where is Big Pappy Donovan now?” Grimes said. “He still in prison?”
“No. He’s out. Street’s a lawyer, right? The word is that while they were in prison, Street won Pappy’s appeal and got him out. But during the time between Street winning the appeal and Pappy actually being released, Pappy helped Street escape, and Street ended up going back to Tennessee and getting his case dismissed. Those two dudes are legends inside the walls all over the country.”
“That’s great, good for them,” Grimes said. “Do you know where Big Pappy is?”
“Runs a trucking company out of Dalton, Georgia.”
“And this Rex Fairchild, you say he’s in Charleston?”
“Charleston, West Virginia. He owns a used car lot there, from what I hear.”
“You hear a lot,” Grimes said.
“I don’t talk much unless I’m getting paid for it,” Routh said. “Learn a lot more that way.”
Grimes took the hundreds back out of his pocket and put them on the table.
“I’ll probably be back,” he said.
“Be sure to call before you come so I can get the wife out of here,” Routh said. “She talks a lot. Wouldn’t want to ruin my reputation.”
CHAPTER 35
I hadn’t seen Dan Reid since I was tried and convicted of murder, but I knew the former Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Knoxville office had retired shortly after Ben Clancy was arrested and had opened his own private investigative agency. I called and asked whether he would come to my office to talk about doing some work for me, and to my surprise, he agreed. He walked in the day after I spoke with Katherine Davis, and I went to the lobby to greet him.
Reid was fifty-two, an inch taller than I was, and had thick, short, salt-and-pepper hair and penetrating robin-egg-blue eyes. He was trim and appeared to be fit, one of those guys who was so lean you could see the muscles in his jaws.
“Is this awkward?” I said when he walked into my office and sat down across from me.
He shook his head. “No reason for it to be awkward. I did my job back then. I didn’t think you were guilty, but there wasn’t anything I could do.”
“Did you know Clancy was framing me?”
“I suspected. What do you think about him disappearing?”
“I think he hurt a lot of people during his career, which means there are a lot of possibilities.”
“Some people think you’re one of those possibilities, from what I understand.”
Again, the rumors. I seemed to be a constant topic of conversation among law enforcement agencies, lawyers, judges, clerks, and reporters. I smiled and shook my head. “You’re talking about your former colleagues at the FBI, I assume.”
Reid nodded. “Along with some Knoxville cops and the United States Attorney.”
“They’re mistaken,” I said. “I haven’t done a thing.”
“The feds don’t really matter,” Reid said. “It isn’t their case. No jurisdiction.”
“Did you call Grace the night before my trial started and tell her I wasn’t guilty?” I asked.
“I’m going to take the Fifth on that one.”
“I knew it was you. Well, for what it’s worth, thank you.”
“Didn’t do much good, did it?”
“No, but thanks just the same. So how is the private-eye thing going?”
“I like it,” Reid said. “I get to cherry-pick because I don’t really need money, and I get to do investigative work, which is something I’ve always enjoyed. And it gets me out of the house.”
“What do you charge?”
“A hundred and fifty an hour plus expenses.”
“You pay yourself a little better than the FBI paid you.”
“A lot better.”
“Staying busy?”
“I’ve got all I want.”
“Interested in taking a look at a case for me?”
“Maybe. What do you have?”
Katherine Davis had been bothering me. It all just seemed somehow contrived. And the fact that she was in the criminal justice program and wanted to be a prosecutor meant she might be close to some cops. The more I thought about it, the way she’d hit on me didn’t make sense. She was too young and too gorgeous to be interested in a semisuccessful, hack criminal defense lawyer like me. The thing that bothered me the most, though, was that she hadn’t mentioned my conviction and exoneration, and she hadn’t said a word about my mother. Perhaps it was just paranoia, but I wanted to be sure she was what she said she was.
“Beautiful young girl who says she took an Ambien and did some sleep-driving. Wound up getting arrested for DUI. She came in yesterday and told me about the case, but by the time she left, she was hitting on me. I told her I was too old for her and I was engaged, but she kept on.”
“Maybe you’re just irresistible,” Reid said.
“I’d love to think so, but this woman could have anybody she wants. I think I smell a rat. It might just be paranoia because I’m constantly hearing rumors about being suspected of murder, but then again, it might not.”
“A rat? You think she’s working for the cops?”
“They think I killed two guys in West Virginia, and now they think I may have had something to do with Clancy going missing. I guess they think I’m some kind of serial killer now. I wouldn’t put it past them to send some pretty young thing in here to try and get an admission out of me.”
“Do you have anything to admit?” Reid said.
“Like I said, I haven’t done a thing. Haven’t killed anybody. I just don’t have it in me.”
“Do you have her date of birth and Social Security number?”
“Everything you need is on the intake form she filled out yesterday. Got her driver’s license number, too, if you need it.”
“Every little bit helps,” Reid said. “So what exactly do you want me to do?”
“I want you to be discreet and find out everything there is to know about her. Where she grew up, her circumstances. Follow her. She says she’s a grad student in criminal justice at UT and has been accepted to the law school here in the fall. I’d like to know if that’s really true.”
“And what if it turns out she’s working for the Knoxville PD?”
“I hope she isn’t. I really do. I’d like to think she’s just a beautiful young woman who finds me attractive. But if she’s working for them, I’ll tell her to go play rat somewhere else. I hate informants.”
“Do you have a time frame?” Reid said.
“As soon as possible. Can you get on it immediately?”
“I need to tie a couple of things up first. Give me three days, and then I’ll get started.”
“Excellent. Thank you.”
“For what it’s worth, I’m really sorry about your mother,” Reid said.
“Thank you. It’s been tough.”
“I’ll tell you something else,” he said. “If somebody murdered my mother, you can bet your ass I’d be looking to put a bullet in them.”
“The law frowns on vigilantes,” I said. Once again, paranoia began to overtake me. Was Reid trying to get me to admit something? He’d been an FBI agent his entire adult life. If I admitted something to him, his instinct would have probably been to go straight to the Knoxville PD.
“Right,” Reid said, “and sometimes that’s just a damned shame. Are you still with Grace Alexander?”