Talley’s eyes flipped down to the banner in the lower third of the screen. A guilty verdict had been handed down in federal court. Three Atlanta vice/homicide undercover cops were on the take. Talley remembered reading about the fed’s investigation a few months before.
The three looked away from the screen, but the cameras were relentless and moved in for close-ups.
Wait a minute. Conally. The name rang a bell.
Suddenly it hit him like a ton of bricks. It wasn’t just Officer Conally, it was undercover Detective Tim Conally, one of the lead detectives on the Clint Burrell Cruise case. Conally conducted dozens of interviews, canvassing the city’s hookers, looking for leads, and if Jim recalled correctly, Conally was the cop who’d actually found the murder weapon hidden in a duffel bag in Cruise’s closet.
Jim’s head was spinning. He felt a little dizzy.
Headline News flashed a clip of grainy, black-and-white video, the actual FBI surveillance rigged up in some dopers’ homes. The cops looked and acted like street thugs, busting into the dopers’ luxury homes in gated communities, cleaning them out of tens of thousands on each rogue raid. The cops were caught on tape, robbing Atlanta’s most powerful drug suppliers of vast amounts of drugs, money, jewelry, even taking their wide-screen TVs-anything and everything the dopers had that the cops wanted.
And now, every one of the detectives’ cases were in jeopardy, depending on the significance of the role they played in each case. Cruise’s case had to be reversed with prejudice-in other words, due to willful misconduct by the State-in order for retrial to be legally impermissible. Hailey Dean was clean as a whistle, but “the State” included the cops.
This would work. The local papers would have a field day.
It had to be divine intervention when Talley saw the screen and put two and two together that Conally was a lead detective in the Cruise investigation. Jim pulled up the trial transcript on his screen and plugged in Conally’s name to search. Not only did Conally discover the murder weapon, he also transported some of the DNA evidence from a few of the crime scenes to the lab.
Perfect. That destroyed the chain of evidence, so DNA was out the window along with the murder weapon. The State screwed up.
The case was irreversibly tainted! Cruise would walk. Praise the Lord as far as Jim was concerned. He didn’t have a choice now…he had to reverse! If the jury had known the truth about one of the lead detectives on the stand, they may have had a totally different outcome. Conally now had no credibility. You’d have thought the defense attorney would have brought this up on appeal. True, the conviction had just gone down a few months ago, but the federal indictment had been brewing for months.
Of course, the truth was, C.C. could still uphold the conviction by holding the evidence against Cruise was so overwhelming that Conally’s testimony didn’t matter. But Judge C.C. wanted a reversal, and here was just cause.
Maybe nobody would blame Talley after all. Whatever. He could hand Judge C.C. a reversal on a silver platter
Jim thought again, briefly, of the murder victims and their families. But hey, it wasn’t his fault.
Shit. Justice sucked.
24
St. Simons Island, Georgia
THE TREES HAD WITHSTOOD THE FIERCE WINDS OF HURRICANE season and watched as twisters churned up the land around them for miles. They presided over battles played out beneath their boughs during the War Between the States. They had shaded pirates and Indians and preachers and crooks.
But they had never before been forced to wear orange markers tied around their waists.
And this, Virginia knew, was far more humiliating than anything else.
When she first heard about the markers, she told herself they were most likely placed there by the agricultural Cooperative Extension Service. With active branches in all 159 counties in the state, they routinely marked and destroyed trees that posed a danger-maybe fusiform rust disease, with its deadly orange powder, or some other contagious, coniferous malady.
But after a late-night run to the 7-Eleven, reality sunk in.
Virginia slipped in around 10:40, just before closing at 11, on her regular cigarette run. Larry was behind the counter, wearing a white T-shirt, brown polyester Sansabelt pants, and a red fishing hat that said “Kiss My Bass.”
“Salem Lights. Carton. What’s happening, Larry? What’s with those big dirt trucks parked across from the store? I’ve got to tell you, not only are they unattractive and running away your business, they’re against code. Heavy use trucks aren’t permitted back here on the Island. These old narrow streets can’t take it. They’ll crack under the weight.”
“V.G.”-he was the only one who got away with calling her that-“it’s really happening this time. You know my daddy and his daddy before him fished these marshes. We’ve had our home place off the point for eighty years that I know of, just us and the June bugs. Can you believe it, V.G.?”
“Believe what, Larry? Is this about the beach replenishing? Are the trucks here to start loading the sand?”
“V.G., they’re dumping sand all right, but it’s a whole lot bigger than the Commission’s sand exchange. Plus, they claim that’s just to swap sand off the floor of the water and plump up the beaches for the tourists.”
“Don’t get me started on that, Larry. You know damn well what it’ll do to the turtles, if anybody cares.”
Looking hurt that she’d even suggest he didn’t care about the turtles, he protested, “V.G., you know how I feel. Didn’t I wear a bumper sticker about the turtles on the back of the El Camino when nobody else would?”
“Yes. You did. I apologize. I know you care. What about the trucks?”
“It’s a helluva lot worse than swapping sand. They’re about a hair away from laying a cement base, from what I can tell. Saw the cement-mixer trucks going in yesterday. I’d have thought you’d be the first one to know about it. It’s an outfit out of Atlanta. They’re building right on the beach, right on the sand, V.G. Right on the sand.”
Her blood ran cold. All she could manage was a strangled-sounding “What?!”
“Condos. Nice ones…real lux. Heard tell they’re starting at over a million dollars apiece…over a million, V.G. Who’d pay that kind of money but Yankees or the peeps that drive down from Atlanta on weekends? Nobody from around here, I can tell you that much. And you know what’ll come next, right?”
She knew. It made her sick. “Don’t say it, Larry,” she begged, as if his saying it would somehow make it come true.
“Yep, there goes the marshland. You know how they dry up when construction comes in. No more marshland, no more St. Simons. That’s what I say.”
He was right. Marshes adjacent to construction dried up like hardened Play-Doh. Everything growing in them that made the marshes one of God’s lush, green creations, would die a slow, thirsty death.
Larry stared out through the plate glass and across the street at the dirt trucks, their mud flaps already splattered from work on the site.
“Who are they?” she demanded. “What’s their name? Seen any locals with them?”
She tried to keep the questioning casual, but her face was hot, and she realized she had unthinkingly scratched a gnawed-looking hole into the carton of Salems.
Larry thought about her questions for a moment and she didn’t rush him. She nervously opened a pack and wedged a cigarette into the corner of her naked lips. Not even Chapstick, she didn’t trust it.