Justice Lost (Darren Street #3)(48)



“Set the cards aside,” he said. “Here’s the plan.”

The sheriff’s mind was racing as the three men huddled deep into the night. He had to prevent Roby from doing what he was planning to do, but if he did, there was a good chance his cover would be blown.

Screw the cover, he thought. It’s been way too long, anyway.





CHAPTER 26

Sheriff Corker pulled his personal vehicle, a ten-year-old red Dodge pickup, into the darkened barn next to the blue Ford Mustang. The car belonged to an FBI agent named Ron Wilcox. Wilcox had been Tree’s FBI “handler” since the sheriff had gone to the agency looking for a way out of the jam he’d gotten himself into.

Corker had approached the FBI a few months after Ben Clancy was fired and thrown in jail. He’d wanted to go to them sooner, after Clancy was beaten by Stephen Morris, but Clancy had immediately moved into the US attorney’s office and maintained his lock over the county’s extortion and protection rackets. He was in that job for two years before the Darren Street frame job blew up in his face and he was fired and sent to jail to await trial for conspiracy to commit murder.

Clancy was out of the way after that, as far as the scams were concerned. He couldn’t threaten to expose what was going on without exposing himself to a federal RICO prosecution on top of the conspiracy prosecution. But Roby immediately demanded that the sheriff talk to Morris, who had been in office for two years. Roby hated the government and hated prosecutors, but he hated jail more, and he wanted to ensure the protection would continue. So the sheriff approached Morris about the scheme, found Morris to be self-immersed and greedy, and it was an easy sell from there.

But once Morris came on board, Sheriff Corker had had enough. He was tired of being a bagman, a go-between, and an arbiter for the corrupt players in Knox County. He’d been naive when he first took office. He knew now that he had been handpicked by Ben Clancy and Roby precisely because he was so naive, but he was ready to put a stop to the things that were going on and become a real lawman. His problem? His hands were dirty. He’d done Clancy’s bidding for two years, and although he hadn’t spent a dime of the money he’d taken, he knew he could be convicted as easily as Roby and Clancy and Morris.

Sheriff Corker had no wife—he’d always been awkward around women; he was terrified of them—and no one he could trust enough to talk to about his dilemma. He was afraid to go to a lawyer because he’d always heard lawyers gossip among themselves and were notorious barhoppers. But he could no longer look at himself in the mirror. He’d gone into depressions that had caused him to consider taking his own life, but he’d picked himself up and decided to find a way out. When Ben Clancy went to jail, the sheriff had seen a glimmer of hope.

He’d first arranged a meeting with Stephen Blackburn, who was still the US attorney at the time, and spilled his guts. Blackburn, in turn, had put him in touch with Bradley Kurtz, the new Special Agent in Charge of the Knoxville office. Kurtz had handed him off to the young agent Wilcox, and ever since, the sheriff had worn wires, collected names and evidence, and turned over every dime of what was supposed to be his share of the extortion money from the rackets in Knox County.

The investigation had grown like a baby octopus, its tentacles stretching out with each passing month. Wilcox wanted tapes on Morris, of course, and on Harrison and Roby. Wilcox said he’d placed wiretaps on Morris’s home and cell phones. Then Wilcox brought in a DEA agent named Higgins, who’d wanted the name of every drug dealer, what they were dealing, how much they were dealing, and who their suppliers were. The agent said he wanted tapes and he wanted to develop informants, but after about six months, he said he’d become involved in a much larger investigation and had to back off for a while. Corker hadn’t seen him since.

It had been the same with the cockfighting, the dogfighting, the bare-knuckle. Wilcox demanded more and more information each month. He was building a case that he said would catapult his career to the top echelon of the FBI, and he guaranteed the sheriff complete immunity from prosecution. Wilcox wanted the sex traffickers, the pimps. He wanted to know where the women came from, how much they cost, who was buying them, and where they wound up. There was no way for the sheriff to gather everything, but he’d tried to get all he could. Wilcox also wanted to know about the organizations who ran the strip clubs, where their girls came from, how they rotated girls in and out, who the major players were. It became a seemingly never-ending series of questions without answers.

But nobody had ever gotten arrested, and as the sheriff walked toward the farmhouse where he met Wilcox every month, he knew that had to change, and it had to change now.

It was nearly one in the morning, and Corker was tired and irritable. Wilcox was in the kitchen, where he always was, with his feet up on the table. He was typical FBI—lean and athletic build, short hair, square jaw. Wilcox was in his early thirties, a pup compared with most of the other agents in Knoxville. He was drinking a cup of coffee.

“What’s the big emergency, Tree?” Wilcox said. “My wife raises hell every time I leave at this time of night.”

“I hate that for you,” the sheriff said sarcastically, “but it’s time for you to get off your ass and be a real agent. You need to do something with this case.”

“Watch your tone,” Wilcox said.

“You say you’ve been building this thing for years. I try to get you to move on people, and you won’t do it,” the sheriff said. “Well, Roby Penn is out of control. He’s going to kill four people on Saturday night. You need to stop it.”

Scott Pratt's Books