Justice Lost (Darren Street #3)(49)

That got Wilcox’s attention, and he took his feet off the table and sat up.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Wilcox said.

“Roby’s got it in his mind that Stephen Morris is going to lose this election, which he is, and that he’s going to come straight to y’all and start flapping his gums about what’s been going on for years.”

“Why would he do that?” Wilcox said. “He’d go straight to jail.”

“Roby thinks the new guy, Darren Street, will crack down on everything. He thinks Morris will come to you and the US attorney to try to make a deal before everything caves.”

“I’m not ready,” Wilcox said. He looked almost frantic. “I mean, I haven’t even taken anything to the grand jury. It’d be weeks, maybe months, before I could get any indictments.”

“After all this time? What the hell have you been doing, boy?”

“Screw you,” Wilcox said. “You have no idea the scale of this investigation, what’s going on, what’s at stake.”

“I know I’ve been feeding you good information with a spoon for years, I’ve been giving you tapes, names, dates, phone numbers, addresses—whatever you asked me for I’ve tried to deliver. I’ve been giving you money every single month, and you haven’t done a damned thing with any of it. Well, now it’s time to shit or get off the pot. People’s lives are at stake.”

“Who’s he planning to kill?” Wilcox said.

“Morris, his wife, Jim Harrison, and Morris’s girlfriend, Leslie Saban.”

“Christ,” Wilcox said. “And he’s going to do it Saturday? Do you know what he has planned?”

“I know everything,” Corker said. “He wrote it down and showed it all to Harley Shaker and me just a couple of hours ago.”

“Harley Shaker . . . that name seems familiar.”

“He’s the guy that killed Gary Brewer!” Tree said. “Don’t you pay any attention?”

“And Gary Brewer is?”

The sheriff sighed and shook his head. How did Wilcox ever get into the FBI? How did he manage to stay?

“A soldier that went missing. Shit, Wilcox, are you going to protect these people or not? He’s planning to kill Morris and his wife at Morris’s house around eleven on Saturday night. He’s going to call Harrison to an abandoned warehouse on Route 19 at midnight, and then he’s going to break into Leslie Saban’s apartment around 3:00 a.m. You and a SWAT team need to be at Morris’s house, waiting for them.”

“Them?”

“Shaker will be with him.”

“What kind of weapons will they be carrying?”

“Pistols.”

“Okay, Sheriff,” Wilcox said, taking a deep breath and pushing himself back from the table. “You’ve done good. This is good. Just leave it to me. We’ll take down Roby Penn and Harley Shaker on Saturday night. It’ll be a big break in this case.”

“So you promise you’ll be there and you’ll be ready?”

“Damn right. They won’t stand a chance. We’ll ambush them.”

“You’ll probably have to kill Roby.”

“We’ll do what we have to do. By the way, where are you going to be while all this is going on, Sheriff?”

“I’ll be in a speedboat in the river. I’m supposed to pick them up after they kill Morris and his wife.”





CHAPTER 27

Stephen Morris was getting on my last nerve. He apparently liked his life of luxury and wanted to keep it, because he certainly wasn’t going down quietly. Claire kept assuring me that we were leading by a large margin and were going to bury him, but he kept going on the offensive. To everyone who would listen, he was saying I was a suspected murderer. Since I was now running for public office, and since he was telling the truth when he said I was a “suspected” murderer, there wasn’t anything I could do about it. One of the weekly newspapers ran a story and quoted Morris as saying I was suspected in “two, and perhaps up to five” murders. That, the story said, qualified me as a “suspected serial killer,” and those three words appeared in the headline. Two days after the reporter, whose name was Jon Brooks, ran his “suspected serial killer” story, I called the newsroom and asked to speak to him. I wanted to know why he hadn’t bothered to call me and get my side of such a sensational story. I was told he no longer worked for the paper. Claire again. She didn’t mess around.

I continued to brush off the accusations every chance I got. “Where is the evidence?” I would say when asked. “Show me one shred of evidence they have against me.”

There wasn’t any, of course, and I knew it. I turned it on anyone who brought it up.

“He’s pointing the finger at me because he never found the person who killed my mother,” I would say. I was careful not to mention or criticize the police, the sheriff’s department, or the TBI. After all, I would be working with those people if I was elected, even after I got rid of the sheriff. I knew it would be difficult enough, given the circumstances and all the rumors, but I was confident I could gain their trust over time. Besides, despite the fact that I was occasionally feeling some regret, I still didn’t think I’d ever killed anyone who didn’t absolutely deserve killing, and I would have bet that nearly every cop in Knoxville would have agreed with me.