Joe Dillard - 02 - In Good Faith Read Online Free PDF Page B

in less than an hour.
    I hung up and splashed cold water on my face. I pulled on my jeans, a hooded sweatshirt, and an old pair of hiking boots. I pecked Caroline on the cheek and headed out the door. Rio started whining. He wanted to go. I dropped the tailgate on my pickup and he jumped in.
    The place I was going was Marbleton Road, little more than a wide dirt path that intersected with Smalling Road near the mountains at the western edge of Washington County. The intersection was just north of Interstate 81 and just south of nowhere. You could stand at the intersection of Marbleton and Smalling roads and unleash an arrow from a bow in any direction without fear of hitting anything human. The closest house was more than a half mile away.
    I got there around ten. As I rounded a curve on Smalling Road, still a quarter mile away, I could see red and blue lights, plenty of them, flashing eerily off of the trees surrounding the intersection. A young deputy stopped me about two hundred yards from Smalling Road and told me I was going to have to turn around. I showed him the brand-new badge identifying me as an assistant district attorney that Lee Mooney had given me a few days earlier, and he waved me through. I spotted Mooney’s SUV parked in a field to my left about a hundred yards south of the flashing lights, and I pulled over next to it and got out.
    Rio’s ears were pointed straight up and his nostrils were flared. He was standing in the back of the truck, facing the intersection, and he was growling. The behavior was distinctly uncharacteristic. When I reached up to try to calm him, I noticed the hair on his back was at attention. I grabbed his harness and put him in the cab of the truck. I took a flashlight from the glove compartment, stuffed my hands inside the pocket on the front of my sweatshirt, and walked towards the lights. It suddenly seemed much colder than it was when I left home.
    There were several unmarked cars and police cruisers, a crime scene van, and three ambulances, all parked within a couple hundred feet of Marbleton Road. Just past the intersection was another van, this one from a local television station, channel twelve. A bright light illuminated a reporter sticking a microphone into the face of a man I recognized to be the sheriff of Washington County, a shameless publicity hound named Leon Bates. The flashing lights from the emergency vehicles made me dizzy. When I stepped up to the intersection at Marbleton, yellow police tape had been pulled across the road, and yet another young deputy accosted me. I looked at him closely for few seconds as his complexion changed from light blue to light red to light blue to light red.
    “Who are you?” he demanded. I knew nearly every cop in the county when I quit practicing law a year ago. I’d already run across two I’d never laid eyes on. The county commission wouldn’t pay them a competitive wage, so a lot of them became disillusioned and moved on.
    “Joe Dillard,” I said, reaching for the identification badge again. He looked at me warily.
    “This is a crime scene,” he said. “You can’t go stomping around in here.”
    “Where’s Lee Mooney? He told me to come.”
    The young officer turned and nodded towards the darkness. I could see beams from flashlights through the leaves on the low tree branches. They appeared to be about a hundred yards down the road. I also noticed brighter flashes of light. Someone was taking photographs.
    “How bad is it?” I said.
    “As bad as it gets. Walk through the trees to the left or the right. Don’t walk on the road. They’re making casts of foot- and tire prints.”
    As I made my way through the trees, I noticed a full moon creeping up behind a hill to the northeast, almost as though it was afraid of what it would see when it cleared the ridge. When I got to within twenty yards of the flashlights, I could hear muffled voices. I yelled out, “Lee Mooney!”
    “Over here,” a voice called in