Justice Lost (Darren Street #3)(50)
Morris’s constant railing, however, was taking me to a dangerous place. It was still there, that caged lion inside of me, and Morris was beginning to represent fresh meat. Even if I was a killer, I believed myself to be more honorable than an extortionist thief who betrayed the public trust every day of his life. And as far as I was concerned, Morris was responsible for many more deaths than I was. People died every day from drug overdoses in Knox County. He protected drug dealers. People died in the sex-trafficking industry all the time. He protected them. Gary Brewer was most likely dead. He protected the bare-knuckle fighting. And that didn’t even begin to take into account the countless animals that had died in the cockfighting and dogfighting rings. After watching him attack me on television one evening with a week to go before the election, I decided to pay him a visit and tell him that if he didn’t shut his mouth, he’d be my next victim. I decided not to ask Claire for permission.
As always, I had to be careful. I didn’t want anyone else to see us together or hear anything I might say to him. I also wanted to make sure he wasn’t wired. So I went into my old Darren stalk mode where I used disguises and rented cars from shady operators for cash. The next morning, I drove almost a hundred miles away and bought a pair of infrared binoculars for cash from a large sporting goods store. In order to get close enough to him to have the conversation I wanted to have, I figured I would need to confine him for a little while, so I wanted to do things in such a way that nobody but Morris himself could say I ever got near him. That meant surveillance. If I did it right, even if he did go crying to the press or the cops after I had my talk with him, I’d just say he was desperate and call him a liar.
I followed Morris from his home to his work and from work back home three days in a row, looking for an opening, and I watched his place on several occasions during those three days, both from the water and from a ridge I could hike to from a nearby park.
On the third day I followed Morris, I learned something that Claire probably already knew. Morris had a squeeze. She was young, brunette, extremely attractive, and she came out of her apartment and planted a kiss on his lips as soon as he got out of his car. He was carrying a box about the size of a shoe box. They disappeared into her apartment, and he came back out about forty-five minutes later. I didn’t try to look through the windows to see what was going on. I just laughed out loud when she planted that big kiss on him. Gotcha again, I thought. I wondered when Claire was planning to release the news of his extramarital affair. I supposed she was saving it as a surprise. The bomb would most likely drop the day before the election.
I did some research on the address and the apartment number Morris went into and found out the young woman’s name was Leslie Saban. There was very little information about her on the Internet, and since she looked so young, I assumed she was a student, maybe a law student he had met while doing a guest lecture. Or maybe she was an engineering student or a stripper. Who knew?
Morris didn’t just have a girlfriend. He also had a six-thousand-square-foot mansion that sat right on the river. It was surrounded by at least twenty acres. There was a barn that housed two thoroughbred horses, a white rail fence that enclosed most of the property, a Lexus, a Mercedes, a BMW convertible, two children, and a wife. His estate was gated and named Serenity Ridge. The yard and the landscaping were immaculate, the barn looked to be nicer than most people’s homes, and there seemed to be a constant influx and outgo of workers and helpers and nannies and house cleaners. Someone was always working in the yard or painting or working with the horses. The place was a buzz of activity, but Morris was rarely there. Unless his wife was independently wealthy—and I hadn’t heard anything about her being so—he would have an extremely difficult time explaining how he managed to accumulate all these material goods on a district attorney’s salary. I was looking forward to hauling him in front of a grand jury and asking him all about his goodies.
On Saturday night, three days before the election, I rented a pontoon boat from the same dock where Claire had rented the boat we took Janie Schofield out on. I paid cash, wore a fake beard, and used a false ID. I took the infrared binoculars, some fishing gear, and a six-pack of beer along with me. I eased the pontoon west until I came to Morris’s estate and dropped the anchor in the middle of the river. It was early November, but the night was warm and clear, around sixty-five degrees with a slight breeze. Orion was directly over the boat.
There were a few other vessels around me, all fancy bass boats with lots of horsepower, trolling motors so they could get close to the riverbank and move slowly. They were illuminated by neon running lights. They stalked the shorelines in search of fish while I sat in the middle of the river and pointed the infrared binoculars at Morris’s house. They’d cost me more than $500 and were surprisingly powerful.
The house was within fifty feet of the water, the river wasn’t particularly wide at that point, and I could see the inside of his house clearly. Morris’s wife, Gwyn, was in the kitchen, chopping vegetables. I scanned the house, and movement outside caught my attention. I trained the binoculars on the movement and could clearly see Morris sitting at a high table on his patio. He appeared to be texting someone on his phone. On the table in front of him was a water pipe, and when he put the phone down, he picked up the pipe, flicked a lighter, and took a deep pull off the pipe. I didn’t know what he was smoking, but I assumed it was marijuana. I smiled to myself. There he was, the district attorney general, catching a weekend buzz on a fine November night on his luxurious patio. I didn’t see any sign of his kids. Maybe they were out for the evening.