I walked back over to her, pulled out the kitchen chair, and sat down. “I know I don’t need to babysit you.” I touched her knee. “But I want to be with you, and we do need to talk.”
Sammy wouldn’t look me in the eye. “I didn’t start the fight.” A tear rolled down her cheek.
I wasn’t going to push it, and I wouldn’t tell her about the video, Schmitty’s visit, or the crazy parents. “It’s just important that we talk about what happened and then about what’s going to happen.”
“You’re sending me back there?” Sammy’s sadness flipped to anger. “I’m not going back there.”
I held her gaze. “Let me be clear,” I said. Worries about money and debt were gone. They had to be. Sammy was smart enough to pick up on doubt. She needed strength. “You are not going back to that school ever again. Understood?”
I saw her body relax and she nodded. “Understood.”
“Trust me,” I said. “We’ll take our time and find a new school for you. Don’t worry. There are lots of places to go to school.”
As I crossed the highway over to the Northside, there was a group of about twenty protesters congregated near the top of the exit ramp. They were chanting and holding signs. How many more Lost Boys were out there? Why hadn’t they found the killer? They wanted to hold the police accountable. They wanted answers.
That’s how it begins. The initial shock was gone, and now people were getting angry.
I kept driving to my office, wondering how many would be waiting for me there, but there wasn’t a line. Two women were smoking outside my office door. I resisted the urge to drive past and parked directly in front of my office. I turned off the old car’s engine and, when it had rattled to a stop, forced myself to get out and walk toward my office.
The old me would have blasted past the mothers without so much as a nod when they looked my way, but that day I started taking control and even channeling some of my brother’s charm.
“Good morning, ladies.” I forced a smile and moved ahead. “I’m Justin Glass and I appreciate you coming here, filling out the screening forms, and speaking with my paralegal.” I checked my watch. “But I have a meeting now, so I need to get inside and get to work.” I reached out and touched one of the women’s shoulder. “Thank you for coming here.”
Then I stepped past and into the office, still forcing the smile. Three adults and three kids were crammed in the reception area. “Good afternoon, everybody.” I smiled and greeted them, then continued walking to my office. “Emma, can I see you?”
She was already standing. “Of course.” She picked up a manila folder, a notebook, and a pen and followed me inside, saying to the people waiting, “It’ll be a moment.” She closed the office door behind her. “Pretty smooth, Mr. Glass.”
I slouched down into my seat. “It’s exhausting being nice.”
Emma pulled the extra chair away from the wall and moved it closer, then sat down across from me. “Preference as to where we begin?”
“Surprise me.”
“How about Mr. Bates?”
“Cecil Bates.” I smiled. “Perfect.”
“He’s coming in for a meeting next week, Monday. I think you have to be there for that.”
“OK. Morning or afternoon?”
“Early afternoon.” Emma laughed. “In the morning he’d be hung over and by late afternoon he’d be drunk, so scheduling it was a tough call.”
“Hard decision,” I deadpanned. There was a pause, and then I started to laugh, too. It wasn’t even that funny, but I needed to laugh. It just came up and out. To the people waiting outside, I probably sounded like a madman. Then I shook my head, got control of myself. “Figure out something to do for him, Emma. I don’t know. Anything. If he wants me to fight, I’ll fight.”
“OK.” Emma wrote the instruction down. “I also got a bunch of interviews with families set up.” Her face turned sour. “But there’s no money in them. We lose on every one.”
“I know.” I thought about Schmitty and the chief and keeping the community together and Sammy, and then, ultimately, Tanisha and all the families that came to me, the ones who chose me. “We have to do it,” I said. “It’ll die down, eventually.”
“Maybe.” She nodded. “I’ll call you if there’s something interesting.”
“And the Poles research?”
Emma handed me the manila folder that she had brought from her desk. “Definitely questionable.”
I opened the folder and flipped through the various reports, spreadsheets, and screenshots taken from websites. “Where’d you get all this?”
“Nikolas helped out.”
I looked up at her. “All public information?”
Emma didn’t answer. Her silence was its own confession.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
I pity most of them, although I’d likely be among the last people they’d want pity from. The racists on the edge of society were so fragile. The assumptions and lessons they’d been taught for generations now under attack from all directions, they had to feel what little they had was in danger of being taken away. Racism had become the last defense of a way of life that’d been dead for over a century.
But Jimmy Poles was different. I had no pity for him. He wasn’t on the edge. He wasn’t fragile. He had a good-paying and stable government job. He graduated high school and finished college at Mizzou. He wasn’t living in a trailer park on the fringe of the Ozarks, isolated. He lived in a rambler in the suburbs.
There was no argument that he was being left behind by the modern world, but there he was with an AK-47, a Confederate flag, and a picture of Hillary Clinton riddled with bullet holes.
His Facebook page was a stream of racist pictures and videos. One was a collage containing portraits of every president—but at the end of the list, instead of an official portrait, Barack Obama was portrayed as two cartoonish white eyes peering from a black background. There were images of Michelle Obama as a monkey and then hundreds of racist comments about newspaper articles and current events.
It turned my stomach.
Perhaps the worst part was that I knew exactly how Jimmy Poles would respond when confronted about his online and off-line activities. He’d smirk and dismiss me as politically correct. He’d talk about his right to free speech. He’d talk about defending the Constitution from both foreign and domestic threats—people who looked like me, of course, being the domestic threat.
But was somebody like that a killer?
“He’s single. Doesn’t appear to be dating anybody.” Emma leaned over and pointed to a printout of a chat room set up for fans of a local country music radio station. “Then there’s this.”
Poles had posted a long statement about the Lost Boys. It was entitled “A Different Point of View.”
JPOLE18361: I work with these thugs every day. And I think we should all give him a round of applause. Shake his hand. We should lift him up as a great leader. For the cost of a few ounces of lead, he saved the taxpayers millions of dollars. Everybody knows where these kids were headed. The liberals will never admit it. But it is fact. He saved us all a lot of work. The guy put a lot of sick dogs to sleep.