Freddie Tom Boyd’s Momma said she knew her son was fated for toil and sorrow all his life because back in July 1964, when she was eight months carrying him, she saw someone fall from a jet plane before it nosed into the woods and exploded just outside of Parrotsville in rural eastern Tennessee. Of course I checked this out. Her story made as much sense, if not more so, than most of the other theories and excuses I had to wade through every day as the chief investigator for the Office of the Public Defender for the 4th Judicial District of Tennessee.
There really was a plane crash like she had said. Several other locals swore they saw someone dropping from the sky “like a shotgunned duck” just before United Airlines Flight 823 crashed, killing thirty-four passengers and four crew members. And according to the FBI, FAA, and NTSB reports, there was one male “free-fall victim” found on the ground in the area where these witnesses had tracked the body’s descent.
Using womb trauma to mitigate Freddie’s sentencing—should he be convicted on the first-degree arson and second-degree murder charges he was facing—would be a bold move. A homespun jury might find it compelling, Freddie being a local boy and all. His court-appointed attorney was confident that pleading self-defense against an unlikable victim would result in his acquittal. That defense relied solely upon me finding a pistol buried somewhere on a five-acre hillside lot in the little river community of Del Rio—a weapon that two teams of evidence recovery officers and their dogs couldn’t find.
Finding that weapon was a tall order even if Freddie had been my only client. But I had ten others before he showed up. It was 2008, and the economy of the rural mountain counties of East Tennessee had crashed harder than the United flight that had cursed Freddie in utero. Folks were hurting, and they had no place to go and nothing else to do but turn on each other. The uptick in murders, assaults, and robberies was alarming.
And there seemed to be more weird cases, too.
Like Luke Allen Hunnicutt, who bought his girlfriend a Dairy Queen Blueberry Freeze and then tried to force her to blow him so he could achieve “Total Smurf Dick.” He strangled her when she refused.
Like Martha Reese McKee, who shot her paraplegic Vietnam vet husband because he got fed up with her parakeet’s nonstop fax machine-sounding chatter and brained it with a firelog hurled against the cage. “The best part of me died when Bubbles died,” she lamented. “I was bad sad. You’ve never felt love until you’ve had bird love.”
Like Dallas Wayne McCurry, who shoplifted a sex toy from Intimate Treasures down there off US 321 near the Newport bypass. When the manager tried to stop him from leaving the store, my client beat him with the device. The shoplifting was a misdemeanor, beneath my purview as a felony investigator. But assault with a deadly weapon with intent to inflict serious injury was a class E felony. Plus, there was the aggravating factor of an assault on a disabled person—a class F felony—because the manager had an artificial leg. I was confident that I could prove that the purloined pocket pussy did not meet the criteria for a deadly weapon. I was not confident I could say so in court without smirking.
Freddie made a mixed first impression. During my first interview with him at the Cocke County Jail, I had asked him how he got around, since he hadn’t had a valid drive’’s license for almost a decade.
“Fred and Barney,” he had replied.
“Who are Fred and Barney?”
“My two fuckin’ legs, man!”
He had said that with a lopsided grin, his blue eyes bright as robin’s eggs without a hint of scorn or guile or bravado or even awareness of his predicament. I thought the drugs he got from the man he had killed hadn’t left his system yet. Or that he presented some extreme mental or emotional disturbance that we could use for sentence mitigation. Both explanations had merit. Later in the interview, he told me that his childhood nickname was “Freddie the Speddie.” He had been in special education classes up until he had dropped out at age sixteen, when he began his sad wanderings as an itinerant mason.
His face was open and childlike despite the deep work tan, the sun wrinkles that stopped at his neckline, and the busted nose all wavy and flattened like it had been smeared on his face in haste with a trowel. He had thick, short-cropped hair black as a raven’s wing that stood up straight on his square head. His side profile mugshot cast a silhouette against the block wall behind him that looked like someone had set a heavy scrub brush—with the bristles pointing up—on top of an upside-down bucket.
He was built like a fire hydrant, and not much taller. His stubby arms were clotted with muscles, strong spatulate fingers webbed with puckered scars. The fingers and thumb of his non-dominant left hand bore no distinguishable fingerprints, which was quite a distinguishing trait. His palm left a black smudge, and the fingers were black lines fanning out from it. Calluses built up from the constant abrasion against concrete blocks, bricks, and stone were to blame. Immersion in mortar and cement over twenty-six years had further eroded the familiar whorls and ridges. His right hand—his trowel hand—was less marred.
Cocke County Sheriff”s Detective Alonzo “Al” McGaha cut through Freddie’s intriguing incongruities with a single blunt assessment and constant refrain: “He’s a lying sack of shit.”
Per the incident report, just before nine o’clock on the night of August 8, Del Rio Volunteer Fire & Rescue responded to a trailer fire at the Riverview Mobile Home Park that overlooked the French Broad River. A single-wide trailer belonging to Michael Dale Melton was half gone, burning so hotly that it melted the overhead power lines serving the neighborhood. A deputy who had also responded to the call had determined from the neighbors that the owner of the trailer had been at home that evening. His rusty old Dodge Tradesman van was still parked to the side of the trailer. No one recalled seeing him leave the trailer before they noticed the fire. One neighbor said she saw a little black Toyota truck there earlier in the evening. She added that people were always coming and going there, so she didn’t pay much attention to it.
All the neighbors referred to Melton by his nickname—Moby. Moby Melton was a whale of man allegedly weighing over four hundred pounds who lived by himself. They also described him as a packrat. They worried that his trailer might burn for a week because of all the books and magazines and newspapers and whatnot he kept in stacked piles all over his place.
But the firemen had the blaze under control shortly after nightfall. Detective McGaha had responded to the call just before the fire was extinguished. While the two deputies stood there talking and speculating among the small army of volunteer firefighters and the handful of neighbors gathered there—up walked little Freddie Tom Boyd.
Det. McGaha loved to corner me without warning and deliver a dramatic synopsis of the state’s case long before we ever received their discovery file. He was impatient and irascible and always on the verge of fuming about something deeply vexatious to him but never actually voiced. Yet he was not an unlikable man. I knew how much time Al McGaha devoted to youth outreach and athletic programs despite his impossible schedule. I guess he was just born frustrated. That’s why he trudged around grumbling and acting all the while like a blind man who had inherited a strip club.
He caught me just as I was walking out of the west entrance of the courthouse—the little side door used only by security and court officials. It was my preferred portal for egress when I wanted to avoid anyone who would delay my end-of-the-day departure from the courthouse and subsequently add to my thirty-minute commute back to my office in Sevierville. He was finishing a cigarette one flight of steps below me, standing near the green plastic cigarette disposal receptacle that looked like a pawn chess piece. I nodded at him from the landing, then descended the concrete steps. His bold dark eyes were fairly dancing with anticipation. He choked out a long laugh on the exhale of his cigarette, shook his bald leathery head at me in disbelief, and waited for me to reach the sidewalk before commencing his performance.
“Hey, you look to be about my age, almost fifty, right? You remember that old TV commercial where people would all be jawing at each other, and suddenly stop cold when someone said the name of that stockbroker E.F. Hutton? You know, ‘When E.F. Hutton talks—people listen?’ Well, that’s what it was like. Emergency lights flashing, radios squawking, fire engines running, trailer smoking and hissing and popping, sparks whirling everywhere like fireflies on meth. Everybody talking a mile a minute about this and that. And then your little turd of a defendant wanders up out of nowhere and says ‘I hope Moby got out ok.’
“Everything just stopped . . . like that”—he snapped his finger with the sound of a small caliber pistol firing. “You could have heard a mouse fart. Probably ten pair of eyeballs locked onto him. It dawned on us all right then and there: He did it. We didn’t know how or why yet. But we knew it was him. Nobody saw the big man in what was left of the trailer. No one smelled a big man frying in there, either. With all the commotion from the fire response, and because the trailer park had lost power from the fire, we didn’t see the victim lying on the ground behind his old van.
“So, here’s what you got to work with, pardner. Little Freddie set the trailer on fire…big ole Moby come after him like a bee-stung dairy cow…then your boy took a hammer and tried to knock ole Moby’s noggin into the river. Now he’s come up with this self-defense foolishness about Moby pulling a gun on him and all. I mean—Good Lord! One of Moby’s arms was bigger than all of Freddie!”
I knew any pushback from me would only wind him up more. But I couldn’t resist.
“So that’s your whole argument? That there can’t be a gun because Moby didn’t need one to assault my client?”
Det. McGaha cocked his head back and stuck his chin out, lifting his open palms upward like a preacher delivering self-evident proof of the divine.
“What else do I need? You think a jury will believe little Freddie took the gun from Moby after he clobbered him into the Hereafter with a hammer, then high-tailed it back to his girlfriend’s house in her truck—which he wasn’t even supposed to be driving—and buried the gun on the property behind her trailer? Why hide a gun you didn’t fire and didn’t belong to you in the first place? Makes no sense. We found a bloody mason’s hammer with skin on it not more than an arm’s reach from Moby’s body. But we never found a gun. We had one deputy with a metal detector, and two evidence detection dog teams—one firearm dog on loan from ATF, the other a bloodhound—and two dog handlers per dog. They spent six hours searching every foot of that sorry hill. Got tore up all to hell by briars and honey locust thorns. Never did find that gun. ‘Cause there ain’t no gun to find. ‘Cause your client is a lying sack of shit.”
There it was, again, the imperative to it all: Find the weapon, free Freddie from his shit sack.
It wasn’t just the failure of the forensic search teams that kept me up at night about this case. Freddie had considerable trouble telling the same story twice about anything, no matter how trivial or terrible the consequences. And yet, from what I could determine at the time, he was not necessarily lying. At least not in the sense that there was one credible, convincing, and verifiable fact-based narrative, and he knew what it was but refused to admit it and spit it. No, the truth had a lot of moving parts for Freddie. He couldn’t keep them all together long enough to save his ass when he needed to—and he sure needed to now. He could recall events quite well, but he related them like a warped record played. His stories skipped and bumped along, relating some things perfectly until they jumped to another track and then there would be another tune that was wholly out of place with what had gone before. He was the kind of person you’d see on the street after a long absence and greet with “Hey, man, where’ve you been all this time?” and he would point to a spot not ten feet away and say, “Oh I was just over there for a spell.” He wasn’t joking. He was telling his truth.
He had incredibly acute senses, so much so that shadows and nuances and minutia lost to most people swerved him like a moving flashlight does to a moth. People said he could spot a four-leaf clover on the ground from atop two scaffold panels stacked ten feet high while he was laying brick. His eye for detail made him a good mason. But it also made him an impossible guide to follow through all his meanderings of meaning and the competing and disparate matters of fact that scattered his attention and shattered his credibility.
I interviewed him at the jail for two full hours, taking detailed notes of his directions to the hidden pistol. I was guardedly optimistic. Surely my client did not fear me like he did the police. Right? He trusted me and understood how unreal important it was for us to recover that weapon. Right? All the drugs were out of his system, and he was willing and able to tell his attorney’s investigator the truth about where he hid Moby’s gun only four days ago. Right?
Right. Armed with a rented metal detector and Freddie’s latest account of his actions on the night of August 8, I set out late morning on an overcast muggy day for the grown-over hillside and wooded hilltop that was the backdrop to his girlfriend’s small property. I had drawn a search grid over an enlarged aerial image of the area taken from the most recent Cocke County tax map and marked out about two acres total for the most likely hiding spots for the weapon according to Freddie’s new and hopefully improved recollection. In the non-wooded section of the hill, the metal detector’s extension arm and the cord for the detector’s headphones became repeatedly ensnared by the seemingly animated grasp of head-high stalks of mullein plants, dense coils of catbriers, saw-toothed offshoots of impenetrable blackberry thickets, poison ivy patches, and other aggressive weeds. At the top of the hill at the tree line, and under the narrow canopy of mixed oak and pine trees there that terminated at a barbed-wire property line fence, the metal detector beeped nonstop as it repeatedly and maddeningly discovered pile after pile of rusty fencing staples and common nails dumped in the woods long ago. The effort of sweeping the metal detector coil back and forth slowly an inch or so above the ground over two acres—just under 10,000 square yards—swelled my arms and shoulders to cramping. I stirred up a ground hornet’s nest, too, while I was at it, and got stung up as a reward for my diligence. After four hours of searching, I found the same thing the evidence teams found: nothing.
I was so disgusted that after returning the metal detector to the tool rental place, I called Det. McGaha and scheduled a primary crime scene inspection. With a bored deputy looking on, I spent the rest of my day poking through Moby’s burnt-out trailer, looking for things that would make an already unsympathetic victim even more unlikable to a jury. I was not disappointed. Not all of the trailer’s contents were consumed by the fire. Not by half. He really was a packrat. And a drug dealer. I found blackened drug scales, bongs, bubblers, one-hitter pipes, hundreds of melted prescription vials and Ziplock baggies, decades’ worth of High Times magazines, along with stacks of Shotgun News and similar firearm-focused journals. I also plowed through knee-high piles of porn magazines that I wished I had never seen. They were charred and waterlogged…the pages seared and swollen together…the soot-smudged naked bodies of men, women, and children morphing into freakishly-posed hydra-headed multi-limbed PTSD-inducing monsters I could never unsee for the rest of my life. Yet I photographed it all and corroborated the photos with crime scene rulers and measuring tape references. That was my job, no more, no less.
It was convenient—and even more therapeutic—that my office in Sevierville was so close to the Forks of the Little Pigeon River. Likewise, the Big Pigeon River sliced right through Newport, pouring sluggishly past the backdoor of the Cocke County Jail, only a short clamber across the railroad tracks and less than a five-minute walk from the courthouse. Whenever I am troubled or uncertain or need to calm down after getting all het up about something, I head toward a river. So that’s what I did after my extremely long day spent searching the two crime scenes.
If I didn’t find that damn pistol Freddie buried, there were gonna be tears—from Freddie’s Momma, for sure. If Freddie wasn’t flat out lying—a repugnant scenario that became more likely day by day—then I had to figure out how to make him tell me exactly where he hid the gun that Moby pulled on him. Because questioning him in the usual ways wasn’t working for either of us so far.
I didn’t take my meditative river stroll until the downtown Newport traffic disappeared, and well after the late summer’s heat had left the sunbaked pavement in the form of steam created by a five o’clock downpour that made folks hunker inside doorways and under awnings and then dash-n-splash their way to their cars with newspapers or shopping bags held over their heads. The heavy rain had turned the river into pungent soup stock, all tawny and thick and sprinkled with rotted logs and tree limbs. I wandered and pondered imponderables long after the sun had gone off the clock. The streetlights blinked alive, casting iridescent halos in the sultry dark. As the night fell around me, the cicadas’ songs sizzled in the trees. A soft breeze mixed the sweet smell of crepe myrtle blossoms with the sickly sweeter smell of sewage from an overloaded septic field seeping into the river somewhere near the north side of the McSween Memorial Bridge, where there were signs warning pregnant women and children from eating the catfish and smallmouth bass taken from the river there and limiting everyone else to two meals a month of the same.
I must have walked up and down Main Street and along the river at least a dozen times, all the while reimagining what a successful interview with Freddie might be like. I finally stopped by Feed My Sheep Ministries to sit on a bench and make some handwritten notes to myself on the back of a religious pamphlet I plucked out of the self-service box there. As I was writing, it dawned on me that the American Legion Post 41—the old Cocke County Veterans Memorial Building—was just a block away. Talk about coincidence! Freddie’s Momma believed her son to be fated by a plane and a person falling out of the sky. The Veterans Memorial Building was the emergency repository where the remains of the airplane crash victims were brought and kept until they could be identified. That structure was legendary for its proud yet blood-drenched history, its current majestic neglect, and reputed paranormal activity. It is supposedly haunted beyond human endurance. No one has ever spent an entire night in the building since the July 9, 1964 crash and the subsequent temporary internment of the remains of thirty-nine bodies, two of which were children aged four and six. Folks say it is the spectral presence of these children, in particular, that drives even the most morbidly curious out of the building at a run, never to return.
I must confess that during all the years I had worked in and around Newport, I never gave much thought to that imposing but lonely three-story brick building with the five long white pillars. And until Freddie became my client, I hadn’t shown any interest in the ghost stories surrounding that structure, either. For starters, as a criminal defense investigator for poor people, I was already drowning from all the strange sad stories pouring through my office daily. I didn’t have time to fool with phantoms. Secondly, I always found it difficult to imagine ghosts thriving next to the City of Newport Fire Station, what with its frequent wailing sirens and flashing lights and staccato bursts of amplified radio chatter. Most folks, living or dead, would get tired of that shit pronto and relocate. The Veterans Memorial Building was also effectively blocked off from casual inspection by the two enormous Bradford pear trees near its front entrance, and by the frantic traffic zipping along the US 321 Cosby Highway business spur and swarming all around the huge 24-hour Walgreens located across the street. It was a perfect example of something hiding in plain sight.
At night, you could walk by it and never notice it squatting on its little promontory in the dark like a huge beast of yet-undetermined living status. Was it dead, dying, or merely pretending to be comatose? All the ground floor windows were covered with plywood painted white. The glass double front doors were not boarded up but chained and padlocked. The double doors reflected the red glow of the cursive Walgreen’s logo across the street. I walked up the long flight of concrete steps leading up from the street level sidewalk and joining the small courtyard before the entrance. I cupped my hands to the sides of my face to act as blinders to block out the reflected lights and peered intently through the entrance doors. I don’t know what I was expecting to see of the inside, particularly at night. But I looked anyway. I could make out the crusty hardwood flooring. Some paint cans on the floor. A broom leaning against a flaky wall. Escaping from the doorway were the eye-watering exhalations from this old moldy drafty abandoned structure whose tragic legacy would seem to also include rampant water leaks and mouse infestation.
Staring through the glass doors, I thought I heard a whispered command: “Talk to the body, not to the head.” What the hell was that? The skin on my arms pebbled up. I took a few steps backwards from the doorway in alarm, looking around reflexively, trying to locate the source of the cryptic communication.
And then it happened.
They say you review your entire life during a near-death experience. “Near death” would seem to mean just that. I mean, if I was now close to the dead whose spirit remains were still roaming around inside the dank and dour edifice—wouldn’t that qualify?
In a few seconds, the totality of my life played out before me like a movie trailer. There were all the familiar reruns of my lifetime highs and lows. Then up popped some scenes which I either had forgotten about entirely or hadn’t thought about in decades. My first dog, Sassy, a crazy little feist who ate the fake grass in my Easter basket and died with green all over her face. Smiley, the velveteen stuffed crocodile with the missing eye that I slept with for the first six years of my life. My older sister accidentally sitting on and breaking the BB gun I had just received for my tenth birthday.
The rush of recollections scared me through and through. I spun away from the red unblinking cyclops gaze of the glass doors and ran back down the steps to the street below.
All during the long drive home, my mind churned over what I had just experienced at the Veterans Memorial Building. I was wrapped in thought so deeply that I drove past two of my exits. I had been drawn to the Veterans Memorial Building by simple curiosity and happenstance, not as some pilgrim seeking wisdom or redemption. It wasn’t like I expected the solution to Freddie’s predicament to come floating out of the gloomy building in glowing letters like from a Magic 8-Ball or Ouija Board, or like a seance wherein a secret message would be murmured only to me from The Beyond. But I did receive such a message.
As for the occult directive “talk to the body,” I supposed that meant indulging my client’s digressive, non-linear, sensory-overloaded “body” narratives—at the expense of eliciting conventional, sequential cause-and-effect “mind” or behavior admissions tied to the evidence at hand—to find the weapon. But if I found the weapon and Moby’s fingerprints were not on it—or if Freddie was lying about how he got possession of it—wouldn’t Freddie become even more tightly bound to the shit sack of his fate? That’s what Det. McGaha believed and hoped would happen. Indeed, my own doubts about Freddie’s self-defense story were still simmering just below the boiling point of total disbelief. I couldn’t come up with any comforting answers to my own misgivings.
But this much I knew: Tomorrow’s jail interview would be my last chance to save him.
*
“You’re not telling me the whole truth, Freddie.”
“Yes I am! I swear to God I am!”
“No, Freddie, I believe you’ve left some things out. The police dog teams couldn’t find the gun. I spent half a day up there, and I couldn’t find it with a metal detector. You know, if you were thinking that you wanted to carry the gun up there and bury it, but didn’t go through with it—hey, I understand. You were a little high, and a lot of scared. Moby attacked you, and you had to defend yourself with your hammer. It was a terrible mess. The stress from something like that would make anyone forget the details of what followed. But if you did not take Moby’s gun and bury it behind Courtney’s trailer, then buddy, I need to know that now. I need to know now, so we have time to figure out how best to help you. It’s time to tell it all, brother.”
He began to rock back and forth on the stainless-steel bench, gnawing on leathery gray-green fingernails already bitten to their quicks. His closed mouth worked, but no sound slipped out. His big blue eyes stared vacantly, his head nodding in time with his body’s repetitive motion, looking like a small child trying to swing on a swing when there was no one around to push.
“No, no, I buried it, it’s up there…like I told you,” he finally muttered through his fingers.
“Let’s go over it again, then. You were there gettin’ high with Moby Sunday night, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Did you buy drugs from Moby that night?”
“No. We just shared the pot he had. We were looking at his dirty magazines.”
“Right. What started the fight between y’all?”
“He got mad at me. Started yelling, saying I was smoking his pot for free, looking at his magazines for free. Told me that I had to give him something in return.”
“Okay. Then what happened?”
Freddie closed his eyes, pushed out his bottom lip, and shook his head. Then with his eyes still closed, he spoke barely above a whisper.
“He pushed me onto his bed. Climbed on top of me. Started grinding. Couldn’t get him off of me. But I got away from him.”
“How did you get away from him?”
Freddie’s eyes reopened, but he never actually looked at me. Just stared at his work-swollen hands again and began to pick at the calluses there as he talked, his voice still hushed and trembling.
“He wouldn’t get off me. I had his lighter in my hand. I told him if he didn’t get off of me, I was gonna burn down his trailer and him with it. He didn’t move, so I started a fire in a pile of papers near the bed. When he reached over to smack down the fire, I pushed him off me and ran out the trailer to Courtney’s truck.”
“And he caught up with you at the truck?”
“Yessir. I was opening the truck door, and I heard him behind me say ‘You ain’t going nowhere until I get paid one way or another.’”
“What did you do when you heard that?”
“Looked at him over my shoulder. That’s when I saw he had a gun on me.”
“What did you do then?”
“I grabbed my brick hammer that was a-laying on the truck seat.”
“Did you hit him with the hammer?”
“Yessir. I tried to knock him out of the park.”
“Hit him more than once?”
“Oh yeah. I was scared, man. He was like three of me, and he had that gun. He was gonna kill me.”
“How did you come to get a-hold of his gun?”
“When he fell, he dropped it. I grabbed it up and drove to Courtney’s trailer.”
Now came the tricky part, the part where his explanation of the whereabouts of the gun had fallen apart several times before. Time to put the ghost advice of “talk to the body, not to the head” into play.
“When you got to your girlfriend’s trailer—when you got out of her truck—how dark was it outside?”
Freddie stopped picking at his hands and clenched them together. He bent over slightly and rested his chin on his fists, still rocking his body consolingly. He stared at his own knuckles.
“Not full dark yet. The moon was just rising. I could see it glowing as it climbed up through the trees.”
His reply was louder and less hesitant than before. He spoke like a person reading aloud a favorite passage from a book.
“What did it smell like when you got out of the truck?”
Freddie didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Then he smiled tightly and said, “I could smell the mimosa behind Courtney’s trailer.”
“What does a mimosa tree smell like to you?”
“Like honey and watermelon.”
“Did you walk past the mimosa tree on the way uphill to hide the gun?”
“I did. I remember seeing how the puffy flowers looked in the moonlight. They wasn’t pink no more, but gold and orange, like the moon.”
“Did you cut right or left of the mimosa tree when you started up the hill?
“Left.”
“Why did you go left?”
“It was clearer that way.”
“You mean you could see a path?”
“No. There wasn’t really no path. Just stretches of grass where there wasn’t all the bushes and briars and such.”
“Did you have to climb over the big rocks on that hill there that night?”
“No. Uh-uh. I went around all them big rocks on the hill. Sometimes I seen copperheads a-laying on them rocks at sundown, and I didn’t want to rile them.”
“You’ve been up that way before this time when you were going to hide the gun?”
“Yeah.”
“Why did you go up that hill on those other times?”
“Aw, I don’t know. I guess when Courtney got mad at me, I’d walk around up there to smoke. She won’t let me smoke inside the trailer, and the neighbor’s little dog barks at me all to be damned if I stay outside in her yard and smoke. So I would walk on up the hill a-ways.”
“Which way did you go after you passed the mimosa tree and came to the rocks?”
“I cut right. There’s all them rows of exposed tree roots there before you get to the woods on top of the hill. Them roots act like stair steps. Made it easier to climb up that part of the hill in the dark.”
At this point, a hum of excitement buzzed within me. I had to lock down on my practiced poker face after he mentioned the exposed tree roots and his sporadic smoking retreats up the hill. These new details seemed promising. Or they could just be more vivid and precise distractions that popped up enticingly inside the pinball palace that was Freddie’s memory.
“So, when you used to walk up that hill to smoke, what did you do with the butts when you’d finished the cigarette? You wouldn’t throw them on the ground, right? Didn’t want to start a fire, right?”
“Nosir, I was raised up right. I never smoked in a barn. And I never throwed cigarette butts on the ground, neither.”
“What did you do with them?”
“I’d pinch them dead, and then dig a little cathole in the ground and bury them there.”
“Did you ever bury the cigarette butts up in the woods, at the top of the hill?”
“Yeah. That’s where I would go to bury them. The ground was softer and wetter up top under the trees.”
“Did you have a favorite place to go in the woods when you went up there? Place to pop a squat and smoke and look around?”
“I did. There is a big ole locust lying on the ground up there. Probably been a-laying there longer than I’ve been alive. Sitting on that locust log, you get a good view of Courtney’s neighborhood, you could see stretches of the river, and you could see the Smokies from there in the daytime.”
“What about on the night you went up there after running away from Moby? What could you see with the moon coming up and all?”
“Mostly just house lights and streetlights. And I seen…the fire. Moby’s trailer burning. When I come down from the hill, all of the lights went out in the trailer park, and I could see flashlights slashing and stabbing this way and that, and then I heard the sirens and saw the lights from the firetrucks. But the full moon was higher then, and I could see where I was at and all.”
“When you buried the cigarette butts up in the wooded area on top of the hill, did you always bury them in the same place?
“Yeah. I think so. Pretty much always. ‘Cause I used to find my old cigarette butts sometimes when I was a-digging a new hole to throw away another one.”
“You think you could find that spot where you buried the cigarette butts?”
“Yessir.”
“How could you be sure where that spot was?”
“Because it was along the backside of that locust log. It’s the only dead locust up there, and that big ole log ain’t going nowhere by itself.”
“Is that where you buried Moby’s pistol?”
“Yessir.”
After answering in the affirmative, his pensive state was broken. He unclenched his hands and stopped rocking. For the first time during the interview, he looked at me directly, his eyes shiny with long overdue tears.
“Thank you, Freddie. I’m gonna find that gun for you, now.”
*
I raced over to the Riverview trailer park and got there at noon, less than an hour after I had finished talking with Freddie. I parked in the driveway to his girlfriend’s trailer. Courtney wasn’t home. She worked at the Dollar General two miles away and had to get a ride from a neighbor because her little truck was still in the sheriff’s impound lot. There wasn’t a cloud in sight in the burning sky. The intense midday heat hushed all the birds and bugs. It was so quiet out that I could hear the river’s sighs off in the distance below me. The only persistent noise that registered was my heart thudding under my T-shirt as I scrambled up the hill behind Courtney’s trailer.
I knew I would find the buried weapon. I was so strangely confident that I had only brought two trekking poles with the mud baskets removed to help me probe around in the ground for it. I had also put Det. McGaha’s phone number on speed dial, so when I did find the gun, I could summon him immediately to verify and take custody of this new evidence that might set Freddie free.
By the time I made it up to the hilltop and saw the carcass of the fallen locust tree, my shirt was plastered to my heaving chest, but I was giddy with anticipation. Decaying leaves and rotted bark littered the ground on both sides of the locust log, except for a small, raised circle of overturned earth about a foot in diameter. I took the trekking poles and started stabbing the ends into the dirt there, sinking the carbide tips about six inches deep, making holes two inches apart from each other. On my third thrust of the trekking pole, I heard a click of metal hitting something solid. The tip of the pole was stopped by something an inch or so beneath the dirt pile. Keeping the one pole steady where it had come to a halt, I took the tip of the other trekking pole and gingerly dug and scraped away the dirt there. A flash of silver instantly appeared. I hunted around for a suitable digging stick, found one, and used it to gently brush away more of the dirt. More dirt removed, more silver metal emerged. Then the unmistakable grooved surface of a semiautomatic pistol slide came into view, with the engraved trademark and logo “Ruger. Prescott AZ USA” leaping up from its fresh grave and forcing a growl of triumph from me.
After taking a few photos of the evidence site, I sat on the locust log, in the welcome shade provided by some red oak trees surrounding me. I felt the dampness of myTt-shirt leave me, chilling me slightly. But I was untroubled as I indulged in self-congratulatory reveries. Finding this weapon after two evidence detection dog teams had failed to do so might possibly save Freddie from spending the rest of his life in prison. But it would definitely renew the blighted dreams of my own professional life and earn the begrudging respect of the law enforcement community, who regarded indigent defense investigators as diabolical minions of Satan who yearned to set free evildoers like Freddie. I felt at peace with it all as I watched the river churn in the distance and tracked the occasional silvery jets above me drawing cottony threads of their vapor trails that crisscrossed the blue sky. The planes reminded me to thank the ghosts from United Flight 823 for their assistance with this case.
Det. McGaha and a young deputy showed up about thirty minutes after I had left the voicemail message. It took them another fifteen minutes to pick their way up the hill. When they arrived at the top, they had sweat moons under their arms and around their necks and beltlines. They were not happy. Silently they gloved up, with the deputy unearthing the pistol and handing it to Det. McGaha, who dropped the magazine from the weapon, racked out a live round from the pistol chamber, then placed everything on top an oversized manila evidence envelope lying on the ground near his feet.
“Hey, Al…there’s something else here.”
The deputy clawed around in the hole and pulled out a black metal pistol magazine, fully loaded. The blunt copper-nosed bullets gleamed at the top of the magazine where the dirt hadn’t caked.
“Mmm hmm. Now what have we got here?”
Det. McGaha reached for the magazine, the very sight of which made me instantly dizzy and nearly sick to my empty stomach. My soaring moment of victory, my lofty idylls of vindication—all fell screaming from the Freddie-eyed sky and cratered into the cursed hilltop. All hopes of acquittal and redemption were incinerated beyond recognition. Freddie Tom Boyd had finally told me a truth that led to recovering the gun…but it was buried with lies that would doom him to die in prison.
Det. McGaha clapped one blue-gloved hand on my shoulder, and with the other held the magazine inches away from my stunned gaze.
“Hey, you reckon Moby wasn’t confident enough to handle itty bitty Freddie all by himself? You think that’s why he not only brought a fully-loaded pistol with him, but an extra magazine, too?” He took his one hand off me and leaned down to pick up the pistol with it.
“And looky here—the safety is still on!” He started chuckling to himself and shaking his head as he placed the weapon, the live round, and the magazine into the evidence envelope.
“Son—this lucky find of yours just smeared some pretty bad facts all over your bright shiny self-defense theory, wouldn’t you say?”
I couldn’t find the words. Instead, I found myself sinking into another near-death trance. This time it wasn’t my life I was reviewing: It was the end of Freddie’s life as a free man.
There he was in my mind…running from the smoke-filled trailer with Moby’s pistol and extra magazine in hand…just reaching Courtney’s truck when his enraged and terrifying tormenter caught up with him…Freddie pointing the Ruger at Moby’s vast bulk and frantically squeezing the trigger to no avail because he didn’t know how to disengage the safety…desperately grabbing for the mason’s hammer…the bloody bludgeoning that followed…then the even more desperate flight to his hilltop happy place carrying what he hoped would be his buried treasure . . . but would prove to be the first diggings of his grave.
Det. McGaha studied me.
“Hey pardner…you good? You look like you just saw a ghost!”
