NINETEEN
Next stop was La Grange, a little county seat down near the Alabama border. The downtown has a nice square with a pretty fountain and big statute of General Lafayette, who had supposedly passed through the area briefly, gazing thoughtfully out at the horizon like some guy in a menswear commercial. La Grange didn’t have that used-up, falling-apart quality of some of the towns in southern Georgia, but it wasn’t exactly humming with activity either.
We came into the police station and left our names with the receptionist, who said that a Detective Jennings would be out shortly.
The man who came out, however, had a small plastic pin on his shirt that said CHIEF OF POLICE. His eyes were a cool green, and he wore a uniform that was as pressed and crisp as your average Marine Corps gunnery sergeant’s.
“I’m Chief Brunson.” He glared at us and didn’t offer his hand. “Come back to my office.” He turned and quick-marched down a short hallway, through a door with his name stenciled on it in big gold letters. His full name was John Wayne Brunson.
We followed him through the door.
“Sit,” Brunson snapped.
Lt. Gooch folded his arms, remained standing. “My appointment was with Detective Jennings, Chief,” he said.
“Let’s get something straight right now, Lieutenant . . . What was your name again?”
“Gooch.”
“Lt. Gooch. Let’s get something straight. I’m a stickler for chain of command.” I appeared to be so far down on the totum pole as not to be worthy of a glance from the Chief. “Interdepartmental matters are my prerogative. If you wish to speak to Detective Jennings, then you make your request to me first. That’s how it’s done in this department.”
“I spent twelve years in the United States Army, Chief.” Lt. Gooch stood for a moment longer, then finally sat. I guess he saw the wisdom of not turning this into a pissing contest right off the bat. Gooch smiled. It wasn’t much of a smile, but it showed a couple of his teeth, and the ends of his mouth turned upwards a little. “I’m all for chain of command.”
“Good.” The Chief of Police didn’t smile back. His desk was completely clean, not a paper, not a book, not a speck of lint on it. The only decorations in the room were a row of black baseball caps on the wall, each of them with a message embroidered on the crown in gold letters. One read CID, one read CHIEF’S TACTICAL UNIT, one read CHIEF OF POLICE. A rack full of weapons, lightly oiled, lay in wait in a glass case behind him: a shortened version of the M-16, a scoped sniper rifle of some sort, an MP5 submachine gun, and a shotgun with a pistol grip.
“You were CID in the Army,” Lt. Gooch said. It wasn’t a question. I wasn’t sure what CID was.
“I’m not here to swap stories about the good old days, Lieutenant.” The Chief looked at his watch. “Now I hate to disappoint you, but you’ll just have to head on back to Atlanta.”
“Now wait a minute, wait a minute,” I said. “We came all the way down here to talk to Detective Jennings on a very urgent matter. If this is about requests and chain of command and so on, fine. Here we are. We’re making our request right now. Chief, if it’s okay with you, we’d like to speak to Detective Jennings.”
The Chief’s cold green eyes looked at me for the first time. “Young lady,” Chief Brunson said, “I was talking to your superior. I’d just as soon you not interrupt our conversation.”
I was about to come up out of the chair, but Lt. Gooch reached over and put his hand on my arm. “If you’re going to speak to my assistant, Chief,” he said, “I’d commend you to address her as Detective while you do so.”
The Chief locked stares with Lt. Gooch. Gooch had something approximating a smile on his face. But the smile hadn’t made it to his eyes.
“Now. My assistant, Detective Deakes, makes a good point,” Lt. Gooch said. “No time like the present. We’re here, we’d like make a request to speak to Detective Jennings.”
“I’ll need a written request, I’m afraid.” The Chief broke out a windy smile for this one. “On stationery. Properly authorized by your superiors.”
Lt. Gooch raised his head a notch. “Ah,” he said. “Written.” Then he turned to me. “You know what CID is?”
“No, I don’t, Lieutenant.”
“Criminal Investigation Division. It’s the Army’s detective bureau. CID is where they park the boys who ain’t got the balls to be actual soldiers.”
The Chief’s face stiffened.
Lt. Gooch’s voice was a soft, casual drawl. “See all that gear back there, Detective Deakes?” The lieutenant pointed at the gun case. “Them machine guns and stuff? I sense that the small-time third-rate bureaucrat holding down the desk in front of us is one of these characters who likes playing Army. Probably goes out and trains with the SWAT boys, got him a little tailored black uniform, goes to all kind of FBI seminars about counter-sniper techniques and whatnot. But you know what? It don’t matter a hill of beans.” Lt. Gooch smiled, and this time it was a pleasant, broad smile. “Because he’s a weak, sneaky little desk jockey, and all the sniper rifles in the world won’t change that.”
The Lieutenant stood.
Chief Brunson glared up at us, smiling tautly. “Lieutenant, I think we can skip the formalities. I’m denying your request right here and now.”
We headed for the door.
“Oh, and Lieutenant?” Chief Brunson had his arms crossed now, leaning back in his chair. “I know you from somewhere, don’t I?”
Lt. Gooch looked back with his empty blue eyes, like he was looking at a bug maybe. “Nope.”
The chief pointed his finger. “I know you. I can’t place you right now, but I know I’ve dealt with you before. I remember you because you had some kind of stink on you. It may take me awhile, I’m going to figure it out.”
We went back to the car and I said, “Well, this is just me, boss, but I thought you did a nice job of apple-polishing in there. Stroked his ego a little. Really softened him up. I expect we’ll get good cooperation from him as we move forward with this investigation.”
Lt. Gooch mumbled something, stared out the window at the statue of General Lafayette.
We ate a silent dinner at a café near the square, then drove aimlessly around for a while, taking a tour of all the two-lane roads in the county. I sensed that Gooch had something in mind, but I figured I’d save my breath and not bother asking. Around six-fifteen we pulled up in front of a small brick ranch house with a ten-year-old Chrysler minivan and a worn-out old muscle car parked out front. A yellow mutt was chained up under a shade tree, sleeping. “Who’s this?” I said.
“Who you think?” Lt. Gooch said, getting out of the car.
I followed him up to the door. The mutt under the tree looked up at us, then went back to his rest. Lt. Gooch knocked, and a white woman with wispy brown hair and an apprehensive squint answered the door. “Yes?”
“Lieutenant Gooch and Detective Deakes from the Atlanta Police Department,” the lieutenant said. “I wonder if we might speak to your husband, Miz Jennings.”
The squinty Mrs. Jennings let her gaze glance off me briefly, then said, “Hold on.” The door closed, and there was some muffled talking, then the door opened again.
A thin, nervous-looking man of about forty-five looked out at us and sighed loudly. Detective Jennings, presumably. He wore the pants but not the jacket from a cheap blue suit, cheap black shoes, a starched white polyester shirt, and a blue tie with tiny gold handcuffs on it. A .38 snubbie was clipped to his belt. “Uh,” the nervous-looking guy said, “y’all, look, I, see, I really can’t, it’s not, you know, it’s not really possible for me to, ah, interface with you. Due to, ah, the instructions I’m under. From the Chief of Police? Chief Brunson?”
I smiled brightly. “Just a courtesy call,” I said. “We’re going through channels, naturally, put the request in to the chief, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, just thought we’d come by and chew the fat a little, cop to cop, friendly gesture sort of thing. Strictly a courtesy call.”
The nervous-looking cop kept standing there, his hand gripping the door so hard his knuckles were white. “Uh, the way the Chief left it with me, I was under the impression maybe he was not, you know, inclined . . . to . . .” He seemed excessively nervous about the whole situation. “See, he more or less, what it is, he pretty near instructed me flat out not to even, not to even talk to y’all. Even on the phone. Or whatever.”
“That is a fact, bud,” Lt. Gooch said. “Your boss made his wishes real clear.”
The mutt under the tree lifted its head and let out a pitiful sound that might have been a groan or a yawn. Then, worn out by all that effort, he put his head back down on his paws.
“Like I say,” I repeated, “just a courtesy call.” I reached forward and put out my hand.
Det. Jennings looked at it for a moment, then finally shook, his grip soft and moist.
“My partner here,” Lt. Gooch said, “she’s big on soft-soaping people. This ain’t no goddamn courtesy call, Jennings. What’s happening here is a little girl is fixing to die if you don’t stand up and be counted.”
“Huh?” Jennings said.
“Open the goddamn door,” Lt. Gooch said. He pushed the door open and walked into the house. It was an excruciatingly neat place, all knotty pine and plaid upholstery, with a large gold-framed picture of a pallid, womanly Jesus on the wall over the brick fireplace.
“Miz Jennings,” the lieutenant said to Jennings’s squinty wife, “I apologize for barging in. You think you could get us some tea?”
“Now just, hold on here a doggone—” Jennings’s hands were balled up in impotent fists down around his genitalia.
“Sit down, please, Detective,” Lt. Gooch said. He took the big plaid chair with the red crocheted blanket on it, then crossed one scuffed boot over his knee. After a moment Jennings sat tentatively on the couch. “I know that horse’s ass bureaucrat told you not to talk to us. But we already got the file. All we need is your general impressions.”
The detective crossed his arms over his chest, sort of like he was giving himself a reassuring hug. The fingers on his right hand trembled slightly. “My impressions?”
“Of the Lacy Freemont case. Little girl come up missing November of eighty-nine. Found her body three months later over near West Point Lake. Remember? What we spoke about on the phone?”
Jennings let out a low groan that reminded me of the noise the dog out front had made. “Look. I got twenty-four years in. One more year, I get the full retirement. I can’t—”
“You saying that dipshit would fire you for talking to us?”
Jennings nodded. “Might could do it, yessir.”
Lt. Gooch looked around the room. “You see him in this room, bud?”
Jennings blinked.
“Huh? He got wiretaps in here? Got your wife spying on you?”
Jennings groaned like his dog again.
“Then what you worried about, bud? I ain’t asking you to give me no files or nothing. I already got the file.” Lt. Gooch held up the file on the Freemont girl’s homicide.
“Chief Brunson . . . he—”
Lt. Gooch narrowed his eyes as though in disbelief. “Why,” he said, “do you keep talking about that man? This is just us, bud. This is just you and me and Detective Deakes. And I guarantee you, me, and Detective Deakes ain’t planning on telling your boss that you been speaking out of school.”
“Yessir but . . . The Chief doesn’t like people getting all up in his cases that haven’t been solved.”
“What do you mean his case?” Lt. Gooch said. “This Freemont girl’s got your name on it.”
Jennings flinched. “Yessir. But, ah, it was really more the Chief’s case. He was . . . Back then he wasn’t the chief. He was the city detective. We only got one detective, see, and he was it.”
“Then how come your name’s on the file?”
“Well, he got moved up to chief later that year. And he transferred some of the cases to me.”
“Wait,” I said. “But it’s your name on the reports. Your signature.”
Jennings didn’t say anything.
“You saying you altered the file?” I said.
The room was silent for a moment, then Jennings’s sad-looking wife scurried in with a tray of iced tea. She had put a wedge of lemon and a sprig of fresh mint in each glass. “Why don’t you just tell them,” she said. “Tell them what that man did.”
Jennings groaned yet again. “Look,” he said finally. “There was some dispute. As to what his case-closing ratio was. Our old chief died, and Chief Brunson wanted the job. Only the newspaper, the Advocate, they had some kid reporter trying to make a name for hisself. And he was sniffing around, gonna do a story about how Chief Brunson had this terrible case-closing ratio. So he, ah, Chief Brunson, he changed various records. Backdated various reports and files and whatnot. So that all the unsolved cases got put under my name instead of his. And since the old chief wasn’t there to dispute it, he got away with it.”
“So you’re saying you never worked the Freemont case at all.”
“Well, shoot, if you put it like that . . .” He ran his finger around the lip of his tea glass until it started making a high, irritating noise. “I mean, I was kind of the unofficial assistant detective. Like a gofer, really. I worked uniform half-time and then helped him on cases half-time, driving things up to the state crime lab, whatnot. So, yeah, I kind of followed him around on that case.”
Lt. Gooch shook his head. “Falsifying police records. Mm!”
“Look, please, what do you want to know? I might be able to help you. Somewhat, anyway.”
“Tell us about the case.”
Jennings closed his eyes. “Me and my wife was trying to have a baby at the time. We was going up to Atlanta for these infertility treatments. Cost us all kind of money. I owed some money around town. Took out a note on the house. I just couldn’t afford to buck him at that point in time.”
The house was very silent, a kind of silence that only a home without children in it can take on. I took it the infertility treatments hadn’t been successful.
Lt. Gooch leaned forward, his sandpapery voice growing soft. “Bud, we ain’t here to judge nobody. Talk to us about Lacy Freemont.”
Jennings opened his eyes, took a deep breath, and sat up straight. “To hell with Chief Brunson,” he said. Then, looking at me: “Excuse my French, ma’am.”
I smiled encouragingly at him.
“She was the prettiest little girl I ever saw. Her mama lived in a trailer park out on Highway 29, just past the chicken factory. She wasn’t exactly a prostitute—the mama, I’m talking about—but she wasn’t exactly not. If you know what I mean. There was a lot of men around.”
Lt. Gooch nodded. There was the pattern again. Cute kids. Messed-up families. Poor people with no leverage among cops or politicians, people who couldn’t or wouldn’t push for thorough investigations, people who wouldn’t attract TV cameras or newspaper reporters.
“Chief Brunson, he figured it was one of the boyfriends, probably took her off and killed her. He got it down to two or three of them. But nothing beyond that. One of the fellows we were looking at, he died a couple years later. Cirrhosis of the liver. Another one got convicted of rape in Alabama about six months after Lacy disappeared. Robinson DuPree. Still doing time over there far as I know. The Chief, once he heard that Robinson got arrested, he said to file the case, not bother working it anymore. Figured it had to been him.”
“Anybody else?”
“Well, I didn’t do none of the interviews in the case. All the ones with my name on them, they was actually the Chief. Anyway, after the chief told me not to think about it anymore, it got to bothering me. So I went back and I talked to Lacy’s mama. Figured I’d just take one last crack at it.” Jennings got a nervous look on his face, stopped talking.
“And?”
“Aw, you know how it is. When you can’t solve a case? Lot of times the victim’s family gets real belligerent. She started spouting off about Chief Brunson, all this stuff about how this whole thing was his fault, and he was responsible for the girl coming up missing and stuff. I mean Lacy’s mama, she’d been drinking a little at the time, so it wasn’t entirely clear what she was getting at. I thought she was just mad because he didn’t apprehend anybody. But later I realized it was more than that.”
“Meaning what?” Lt. Gooch said.
But Jennings didn’t say.
“I asked you a question,” Lt. Gooch said.
Jennings pinched his lips together, still didn’t speak.
“Okay, another question then,” I said, not wanting to spoil what little goodwill we had going for us. “Did you get anything off the body? Semen samples, blood samples, anything tangible like that?”
“I think there was a semen sample, yes. Gathered from the girl’s, ah, anus.”
“I presume it was never DNA tested?”
“We weren’t doing DNA back then. Shoot, be honest, down here we still don’t DNA anybody unless we got a likely suspect. Takes a lot of time and money.”
“That sample could still be tested, you know,” I said. “If it was stored properly.”
Jennings looked at me then at Lt. Gooch, then back at me. “Wait, hold on,” he said. “You aren’t suggesting I go behind the Chief’s back, dig up that sample out of the evidence lockup?”
We just looked at him.
“If the Chief ever found out, he’d kill me!”
“How come? This case is more than a decade old. Okay, so he made you fudge some reports. Why would he care at this point?”
Jennings seemed to be debating with himself about something. Finally he said. “Lacy’s mama. She gave me something.”
I spread my hands. “Okay.”
Jennings looked up at his wife. “Darling? Could you give us a minute? This is getting down to police talk. Liable to upset you.”
His wife looked at him for a minute, pulled a wisp of hair back from her forehead, then walked into the kitchen. Jennings watched her go, then stood up and got something out of a knotty pine cabinet against the far wall. A videotape. On the spine, handwritten in faded magic marker, the label read: DATES.
He turned on the TV, slid the tape into his VCR, hit the play button.
“Call ’em johns, call ’em dates, call ’em close friends, I don’t know what term you want to use. But what I’m getting at, Lacy’s mama, she was making home movies, you know what I mean?”
The screen came up full of electronic snow, then abruptly a blurry, dull image came on the screen. It was an overhead shot of a bed in a small room. A counter in the bottom right corner played the date and time. 10:43 PM 10-28-90. After a minute or two of nothing happening there was a sound of unintelligible voices, then a door opened and two people came in the room—a woman in a shortie nightgown, and a man in a suit. The man in the suit sat down on the bed and started pulling off his shoes. The quality of the video was not good, but it was clear enough that when he turned toward the camera you could make out his features. It was a younger version of Chief John Wayne Brunson. The woman started pulling her nightdress off over her shoulders, then the screen went blank.
“That’s it?” I said.
Jennings fiddled with the remote control, frowning, but nothing came on the screen. He ejected the tape, peered at it closely, then frowned. “It’s an old tape. Looks like it just broke.”
“Anything else on there?”
Jennings shrugged. “Just them going at it.”
“I’d like to examine that tape,” Lt. Gooch said.
Jennings glanced at him sourly. “Sir, you got one thing right about Chief Brunson. I been under his thumb a long time. But around here there’s not a lot of jobs that pays half decent and that gives you good benefits and that lets you retire at forty-five years of age. I been sticking it out while a lot of other officers, good officers, have come and gone. I got one year to go, and I’m not doing anything to jeopardize that pension.” He nodded at the kitchen. “Me and my wife, we had plans to have a family. They didn’t come to pass. So we’ve made some more plans. Get a Winnebago, travel, see some places. But won’t none of that come true if I don’t stick out this next year.”
“I promise you we won’t reveal what’s on that tape,” I said. “Or especially where it came from.”
Jennings clamped his thin lips together, looked at me with eyes that were half angry, half sad and pitiful. “You know that’s a promise you can’t keep,” he said. “And anyway, that’s not what I’m talking about. This here’s my insurance policy. That bastard, if he should try to get rid of me for one reason or another—like he’s done a lot of good men on this force—well, I’m keeping this in reserve just in case.” He smiled then, a pinched angry smile full of bitter triumph and a certain amount of self-contempt.
“Were there any other suspects?” Lt. Gooch said.
Jennings shrugged. “Not really.”
“Cable guy? Creepy stranger? Strange landlord?”
“Way she told it, Chief Brunson was the creepy stranger.”
“You think he did it?”
The angry little smile came back. “Sometimes I wish it had been him. But I checked on his whereabouts the day Lacy disappeared.” He shook his head. “Wasn’t him. He was up at a seminar in Atlanta at the GBI crime lab.”
“Is Lacy’s mother still around?”
Jennings shook his head. “Married some trucker, moved up north. I never heard where to, exactly.”
We asked a few more questions, but didn’t make any particular headway.
As we got up to leave, Jennings said, “Earlier? Y’all said a little girl was fixing to die?”
“Yep,” Lt. Gooch said.
“What’d you mean by that?”
“Just what I said.” Gooch got up and walked swiftly to the front door, not looking back.