Chapter 9
Jurisdiction
Nate Feldman had a law degree from Emory, a used Honda Civic with a cracked taillight, and an office in a former dentist's suite above a check-cashing store in downtown Calloway, where the examination chair had been taken out and the foot-pedal for the drill was still bolted to the floor.
"I keep it," he said. "It reminds me that things hurt."
He was thirty-six, thin, with prematurely grey hair and an unfashionable moustache, and he worked for a nonprofit called Georgians for Fair Process, which had a staff of three and a budget that depended on a single grant from a foundation in Chicago. He took the cases nobody else wanted. In practice this meant evictions, wage claims, and a steady, bewildering stream of people who had been told by a lawyer in a good suit that their cases were not worth pursuing.
Ruth Bellamy had found him. She had looked up lawyer who doesn't work for anyone on her phone at three o'clock one morning, during a break at the hospital, in the supply closet where she went to cry. He had answered his own telephone at eight.
"I'm not a criminal lawyer," he told Corinne on the first day. "I'm not going to try your case. Marcia Lenoir is the one who prosecutes, and she's good, and I'm not going to interfere. But I can do the thing she can't. I can go after the sheriff."
"You can't sue the sheriff for something that hasn't been proved."
"No. But I can ask somebody else to look at him." He put his feet up on a filing box. "Do you know what the GBI is?"
"The Georgia Bureau of Investigation."
"Right. State level. Not a county, not a town. They investigate when local agencies can't, or shouldn't. Public corruption, officer-involved shootings, a sheriff who's too close to a defendant." He took a breath. "I think we have an argument. A deputy of the Pruitt County Sheriff's Office signs out the central evidence in a rape case in the middle of the night. He's one of the accused. The evidence clerk's private ledger says the tape was a different shade. The sheriff's own review of the 911 call was conducted by the same deputy. It's a thread. If somebody pulls it—"
"They'll say it's a coincidence."
"They'll say it's a coincidence until somebody pulls it." He smiled. It was a tired, hopeful, awkward smile, and she realized that he was the first person in a year who had looked at her case as if it were winnable. "Will you let me try?"
They drove to Atlanta on a Friday in late September, in the Civic, with the windows down because the air-conditioning had never worked and with a cooler in the back seat that held, for reasons that Nate refused to explain, a dozen hard-boiled eggs.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation had its headquarters on Panthersville Road, in a building of tan brick set back from the street behind a strip of dead lawn and a flagpole. They were received in the lobby by a young woman in a lanyard, who took their names and wrote them in a log and asked them to wait.
Special Agent Terrence Ames was fifty-four and looked like a minister who had been called out of retirement. He had a high forehead and a grey moustache and a way of folding his hands on the desk that suggested he had once been very angry, and had learned what to do with it. He shook Nate's hand. He shook Corinne's, and held it for a moment longer than was necessary.
"Ms. Bellamy," he said. "I want to start by telling you that I've read your file."
"Thank you."
"All of it." He sat. "That's not something I say to everyone."
It was a small office, with a window that looked on a parking lot, a calendar from a bail-bondsman, and a framed photograph of a girl in a graduation cap. The door was closed. A thermos steamed on the filing cabinet.
"I'm going to tell you what I can," he said, "and I'm going to tell you what I can't, and I'd like you both to understand that the second list is longer."
Nate nodded.
"The GBI doesn't open a case on its own. We're invited. A governor, an attorney general, a district attorney, or a local agency requests our assistance. In the case of a request to investigate a sheriff, the person who has to make that request is, as a rule, the sheriff's own county, which is to say the district attorney."
"Ms. Lenoir has asked," said Nate.
"I know. I have her letter." Ames opened a folder. "She wrote it in July. It's a very good letter. I read it with a great deal of respect. And it went to my director, who sent it to the Attorney General's office, who sent it to a deputy, who wrote a memorandum. I have the memorandum here."
He took out a single sheet. He looked at it, and then, with the care of a man handling an object that might go off, he laid it on the desk in front of them.
After review, this office finds that the allegations concerning the Pruitt County Sheriff's Office, while serious, relate to a matter currently pending before a court of competent jurisdiction. The Attorney General respectfully declines to authorize a parallel investigation at this time, in order to avoid interference with the pending proceedings.
"Pending proceedings," said Corinne.
"Yes."
"The case."
"Yes."
"They won't investigate Dale Sutter for tampering with evidence in the case because the case is still going." She said it slowly. "And the case is still going because they won't investigate."
"That's a fair summary."
"That's insane."
"It's procedure." Ames did not smile. "I'm sorry. I'm genuinely sorry. If I had my way, I'd have a team in the Pruitt County evidence room by Monday. But I don't have my way. I have a director, who has a boss, who has a campaign. And Grant Pruitt Senior has given forty thousand dollars to the governor's re-election."
Nate sat up. "That's public?"
"It's on a website. Anyone can look. It isn't a crime." The agent folded his hands. "I'm not saying it's why. I'm saying it's a fact in the room."
There was a silence. Down the hall, a telephone began to ring and was answered.
"So there's nothing," said Corinne.
"There is one thing."
He got up. He walked to the window and stood with his back to them, looking out at the lot, where a young man in a blue shirt was loading a cardboard box into the trunk of a sedan.
"I want you to forget I said this," he said. "I have a daughter. She's a nurse. I have been in this job twenty-eight years, and in that time I've had what I'd call five cases that I couldn't put down. I won't say yours is the sixth. I'm not allowed to say that." He cleared his throat. "But I'll tell you what I'd do, if I were you. I'd look at a place called the Hickory Run Club."
"What is it?"
"A hunting club. Eleven miles west of Calloway. Private. A lodge, a skeet range, a lake. Membership by invitation. About sixty men." He turned. "I'd look at who's on the roster. And then I'd look at who's not."
"Who's on it?" said Nate.
"I couldn't say."
"Agent Ames—"
"I've said as much as I can." He picked up his thermos, and unscrewed the cap, and poured. "Ms. Bellamy, I'm going to be honest with you. I think you've been done wrong. I think it's going to keep going on, and I think that when it's over, you'll be told that the system worked. It will have worked. It will have done precisely what it was built to do." He looked at her. "And I'm sorry for that. I'd like to be able to tell you that it isn't designed that way."
"But it is."
"I'm a state employee," said Terrence Ames, quietly. "I'm only allowed to say that it is imperfect."
They did not speak for the first forty miles.
Nate drove with both hands on the wheel. Corinne sat with the window down and her arm out, and let the hot wind take her hand, and watched the red clay and pine of south Georgia unspool on either side. They passed a cotton field, a peach stand, a Baptist church with a sign that said HELL IS REAL — SO IS GRACE. They passed a billboard for a personal-injury lawyer in a bright red tie.
At Macon, he pulled into a gas station and bought two coffees and a sleeve of crackers, and when he got back in he opened the cooler and took out an egg.
"Please," said Corinne. "Don't."
"They're good for you."
"Is this a metaphor?"
"No." He peeled it. "I just don't trust vending machines." He offered it to her. She looked at it. Then, with an odd, unexpected rush of something that was not quite laughter, she took it.
They ate eggs in a gas station parking lot in the late afternoon, in the sun, in a stolen quarter hour of silence, with the traffic going by on the interstate.
"I'm sorry," said Nate.
"It's not your fault."
"I thought it'd work. I thought if you gave it to a man who'd read the file—"
"He did read it."
"I know."
"He said it was imperfect." She turned the half-eaten egg in her fingers. "He said that to a person. To my face. I'm twenty-five years old, and a man who is paid to enforce the law has looked me in the eye and told me that the law isn't designed to help me, and that this is a normal thing."
"It isn't normal."
"It's the most normal thing I've ever heard."
He did not answer. She could feel him, on the driver's side, not looking at her, with the coffee cup in both hands. A semi went by on the highway, and the little Civic shook.
"Where's the Hickory Run Club?" she said.
"I don't know."
"Will you find out?"
He turned his head. He was a man who had been told no by a great many people, and was not afraid of it. But something in his face, at that moment, was very careful.
"Corinne," he said. "Do you know what you're asking?"
"I'm asking you to find a place."
"I know. But you're asking me to find the place where the people who protected them are. And you need to be sure that you want to know."
"I don't want to know." She was surprised by the steadiness of her voice. "I need to. It's not the same thing."
"No," said Nate. "It's not."
He put the Civic in gear.
Wes went to jail on the first of October.
He had pleaded guilty in the first week of August to simple assault, after a negotiation in which Marcia Lenoir, who did not prosecute the case, had made several calls on his behalf. He had been sentenced to ninety days in the Pruitt County Detention Center, with no probation. The judge had said, with some regret, that she could not be seen to condone an assault on a defendant in a related case. Owen Maddox had required four stitches in the lip and had given, in court, in a neck brace, a statement about his fear of the Bellamy family that was reported in the Ledger under the headline ACCUSER'S BROTHER JAILED FOR GAS-STATION BEATING.
Corinne drove him there herself, in her mother's Camry. Their mother had a shift. Wes sat in the passenger seat with a Walmart bag on his knees that contained a toothbrush, a change of socks, and a paperback Western he had been told he could bring.
"Don't come every week," he said. "Once a month."
"I'll come every week."
"Corrie."
"What are you going to do about it?"
He looked out the window. They were passing the Dollar General, the feed store, the long low brick wall of the cemetery where their father lay under a flat grey stone that the county had never quite finished lettering. He had broken the lip of a man who had, on a Tuesday afternoon at a gas station, said something he would not repeat to his sister. And he had gone to the police and pleaded guilty, and lost his job, and would go on losing things: the apartment, the truck, the girl he'd been seeing, whose mother had told her in so many words that a man with a record was not a good bet.
"It's the sheriff's jail," he said, at last.
"I know."
"Dale's people run it."
"I know."
"They put me in with, it doesn't matter. Don't worry. I'll be careful. I'm good at being quiet." He looked at her, then. His eyes were red-rimmed. "I'd do it again."
"I know."
"I want you to know that. I'm not sorry. He said it so easily. He said it like it was nothing. Like he was ordering a sandwich." He wiped his face with the back of his fist, hard, angrily. "I'm sorry that I wasn't there. That's what I can't. I'm sorry that I wasn't at that party. If I'd been there, if I'd gone with you, I'd have, I would've—"
"Wes. Stop."
"I would have killed them."
He said it very quietly. He said it to the glass, not to her.
She pulled into the lot of the detention center. It was a long flat building of yellow brick, with a chain-link fence and an American flag, and in front of it, on the steps, in the white sun, stood three deputies in tan, smoking. One of them lifted a hand in a lazy greeting. It was not directed at either of them. It was only the wave of a man who had noticed a car.
Corinne turned off the engine.
"No," she said. "You wouldn't have."
"I would."
"You'd have been in the next room, with your hands in your pockets. And you'd have been on the list." She did not look at him. "I'm glad you weren't. Do you understand? I'm glad. I've got one brother. I don't want him on the list."
He didn't say anything. He sat for a moment with the Walmart bag in his lap. Then he opened the door, and got out, and stood on the asphalt in his work boots and his clean shirt, a broad awkward man of twenty-seven with their father's eyes, and he looked back in at her through the open window.
"Don't count," he said. "Okay? Don't count while I'm in there. Just sleep."
"I'll try."
"Just try."
He walked up the steps. The three deputies parted for him, politely, without a word. The door opened. The door closed.
She sat in the Camry with her hands on the wheel, and she counted. She counted the bricks across the front of the building. There were nine hundred and sixty-two.
Her phone buzzed on the passenger seat.
It was a number she knew.
She had deleted him, from her contacts, in June of last year. She had blocked him in August. But the number was a thing she could not delete, because she had learned it by heart in the spring of 2017, on the fourth night, when he had written it on her palm in a bar and said, so you can't say you lost it. It was the only number she had ever learned by body and not by mind.
The message had come through a different app.
Corinne. Please don't block this one. I need to see you. Not for them. Not for the case. I have something. I should have given it to you a year ago. I was afraid. I'm still afraid. But I think somebody's going to get hurt if I wait any longer. Tell me where you want to meet. —C.
She read it once.
Then she put the phone face down on the seat, and sat for a long moment with her palms pressed flat against the steering wheel, as one holds a thing steady in a storm.
I have something.
Down the road, behind the cemetery wall, the sun was going down in a long smear of orange. In the rearview mirror, the flag stirred. And Corinne Bellamy, who had been trained since she was nineteen to treat every statement as evidence and every witness as a question, sat in her mother's car outside the jail where her brother had been taken, and did the thing she had never done in a year: she let herself want to believe him.
It took four seconds. She counted.
Then she picked up the phone, and typed: No.
And blocked the number.