No Controlling Legal Authority Ch. 01

"Caller ID, Judge." There was the sound of a chuckle on the other end of the line. "Not exactly cutting edge technology, you know, so I wouldn't call it 'spooky,' exactly."

"Well, whatever," Caleb said, recovering from his surprise, "I have a job for you. Needs immediate attention. There's a young woman over in Sedalia, who's apparently in some danger and says she needs my help. I need her story checked out before I commit myself. Are you in a position to get over there and talk to her on such short notice?"

"Sure, Judge, no problem. How soon do you want a report?"

"Phone in every afternoon at five; I'll tell Mildred to expect the calls and to put you through. You can follow up with a written report over the weekend. We need to wrap this up within the week. Agreed?"

"I'll get right on it, Judge. You don't want me to do this alone, do you?"

"No, take Hunter with you. Two of you will be faster than one, and you never know when you might need a witness."

"You got it, Judge. Now, you want to fill me in on what we're looking for?"

Caleb proceeded to recount the details of his phone conversation with Terrell. Moon Dog interrupted occasionally to clear up a point or obtain a better description, and Caleb kicked himself a couple of times for not being thorough enough in his questioning of Trash Can. After a few minutes, Moon Dog had a pretty good idea of the assignment and was pressing to get off the line.

"I'll start with your old buddy, Trash Can, Judge and then talk to the woman, and we'll go from there. While we were talking, I checked the Internet and I can get a flight out of here at 5:00 am, so I should be there around noon, figuring a couple of hours driving down from the airport. I gotta get going; talk to you tomorrow at 5:00."

"Five, it is. You be careful, Moon Dog, Caruthers sounds like he could get pretty nasty."

"Don't worry about us, Judge. He's nothing Hunter and I can't handle."

"I believe that."

The daily reports and the dossier, which were delivered by special courier on Friday, had spelled out things pretty clearly and left little to the Judge's imagination. That's the way Moon Dog liked to work; dig out the facts, pretty or ugly, lay them out on the table in all their sordid details and let the Judge make the call. In the end, of course, he had agreed to help the girl, although not without misgivings. What proved to be the deciding factor is anybody's guess, but the decision changed his life forever.

As he expected, Moon Dog and Hunter had done their jobs well; the dossier was hefty, two hundred pages or so, and read with the same excruciating detail as Ken Starr's Independent Counsel's report of the Lewinsky matter. They had obviously interviewed the girl extensively and with far better results than Trash Can had gotten, because there were some pretty significant variations in the girl's stories which Moon Dog had duly noted in his report. Caleb read the report immediately and instantly became engrossed. He read it through once, quickly, just to get the gist of the story and then he laid the report on his desk and stood to stretch for a minute before beginning a second read for substance. It was late, nearing the supper hour, but he was too preoccupied with the girl's story to notice his hunger. He glanced out the window and, in the gathering darkness he could just make out the Verhines going through their nightly ritual of closing up their jewelry shop across the street. Always the same, he laughed, Ismael would wait in the car out front, while Irene would turn out the lights and lock up for the night, and, as soon as Irene climbed into the car, Ismael would clamber out and go back to the store to check the locks. He could see Irene leaning out of the car, screaming at Ismael, and although the sounds couldn't penetrate the thick, bulletproof glass of his windows, he, like everyone else in town, knew exactly what she was saying, because it was always the same. "Ismael, come back to the car. What do you take your wife for, some schmuck that can't lock a door? Oy, it's late and I'm ravenous. Quit wasting my time and take me to dinner." Once, the story went, some forty years before, they had arrived to open the store in the morning and found the door unlocked. Nothing was missing, hell, they didn't think anybody even knew the place was unlocked but old Ismael had never let Irene forget that lapse.

Caleb loosened his tie and collar and settled into his soft leather chair, before picking up Moon Dog's report again. He arranged a yellow, legal pad and a hand full of pencils on the desk, so he could take notes, and thumbed past the pages of expense statements, witness identifications and daily schedules in the front to reach the first page and began to study the report in earnest.

Moon Dog's Report

Anne had, indeed, grown up in Missouri, in a little town not far from Sedalia. Her parents had been decent, middle class folks, who minded their business, went to church on Wednesday nights, regular as clockwork, and never gave anybody any trouble. Her daddy had been a gentle sort of soul, a slightly built man, who tended to be a little on the timid side. He had worked as a clerk in a shoe store nearly all of his life, and he worshiped the ground her mother walked on. He would bring her presents wrapped in shiny paper and tied with gay, brightly colored ribbons for no reason at all and she would laugh happily and tear into the paper excitedly, kissing him eagerly when the gift emerged, but she always made him take them back, saying they were too expensive. Anne had been their only child, and, like other couples who begin families later in life often experience, they never seemed to be completely sure of what to make of her. Cancer had taken her mother early, while Anne was still young and in high school. There followed a really dark period. Anne's father slid into a deep depression. He shut himself in his room for days at a time, ignoring Anne, and took what solace he could from the bottle. They tried to be patient and understanding at the shoe store, but too many absences, or worse, too many drunken appearances, stretched them thin and he was let go. His decline worsened, and he drank more in a deepening cycle of pain, despair and guilt. Anne would come home and find him collapsed on the living room floor in a puddle of vomit and urine, and she would clean him up and put him to bed. Things happened to her in school, terrible things, and when she went to him for help, he would sob drunkenly and tell her to ask her mother. In a year he too was gone, and Anne was cast adrift to handle her sorrow as best she could.

The State took custody of her because she was a minor and had no relatives to take her in, and she was sent to live at the Caruthers' Children's Home for Orphans. It was a horrible place, tattered and run down, and overcrowded with children of all ages. It was operated by a truly vile couple, Cletus and Nadeen Caruthers, who, after a failed attempt at pig farming, decided to try their luck at raising orphans. Their only interest, at least until Anne arrived, was collecting the monthly support payments which the State made for each orphan and spending as little of it as possible on the children. Upon her arrival at the home, the Caruthers immediately appreciated some considerable commercial opportunity in her unusual beauty and budding figure, and, being encouraged by rumors about some disgusting events at her school, they forced her to perform some unspeakably depraved and degrading acts, while they photographed and videotaped her. They kept her there, a virtual prisoner, till well past her eighteenth birthday, the point at which the State had ceased paying for her upkeep, and she only got away with the help of one of her teachers, who had encouraged her to apply for college. She did so secretively because she knew Cletus and Nadeen would block her plan if they learned of it in time. The teacher received the letter saying she had been accepted and was being awarded a full scholarship, and gave it to her in class, and that night she crawled out a window with all her belongings in a pillow case over her shoulder and turned her back on the Caruthers' Children's Home for Orphans forever.

She bought a ticket and took the bus to Rolla, and she spent the next several years trying her best to put Cletus and Nadeen behind her. She graduated Cum Laude, because she was bright and energetic and passed the National Teacher's Examination easily. She had time on her hands in college because she was socially withdrawn and had few friends. She developed an interest in physical fitness and spent most of her free time working out in the school gym. She started running in the evenings, and, by the time she graduated, she was entering 10-kilometer races and regularly finishing in the top twenty-five. She took her first position teaching elementary school in a county near St. Louis, but when the local pencil factory shut down, most of the workers moved away and there were too many teachers, so her contract wasn't renewed. She struggled and searched for work, being careful not to look too close to the Caruthers, but in the end she was forced to take a job that turned out to be too close for her own good. It wasn't what she had wanted at all. It was only about forty miles from what had been home, and it was a private school, grades 7 through 12, that didn't pay nearly as well as public schools, but she was new and hadn't much experience, so she had to take what she could get.

The school building was located some distance off the road. It was a solid looking, stone structure, built with massive blocks of Missouri limestone, with small windows lined up in soldierly array across the facade. The windows were placed high on the walls, which rendered them very good for letting in light but not so good for looking out and gazing at the scenery, and their placement gave the place a fortified look which was not unlike the state prison where she had gone once with Cletus and Nadeen to visit Nadeen's mother. The structure frowned down at the long drive from the road and dominated the landscape with its crenellated walls and fortified towers at either end. It had been a convent in years past, was abandoned for a while and lately had been restored to a new purpose as a boys' school. More precisely, it found new life as a school for wayward, problem boys of well to do parents; a sort of halfway house for prominent kids on the path to reform school or military service; a stopping point for errant youths requiring a third or fourth chance.

She had hated the name, "Hardwick School for Young Men," from the minute she first saw it on the marquee on the highway just out of town, because she had some very unpleasant memories involving candles, and she hated it worse when she met Headmaster Rufus Justice, who was better known to the student population as "Rough Justice," on account of his penchant for using the whip, particularly in those cases where the object of his discipline lacked influential parents. Rufus was unctuous and officious, but he was not unattractive in an oily, slicked-back way, sort of like a used car salesman with a vocabulary. There were things about him which reminded her of Cletus, especially when he leered at her salaciously during her job interview, and he made her uneasy, but she put her reservations aside, because she was nearly out of money, and took the job.

She spent most of her time avoiding Headmaster Justice, who had become fond of staring at her legs and bosom and patting her inappropriately. She made few friends among the faculty because they feared Rufus nearly as much as the students did, and didn't want to be seen to be interfering with whatever relationship Rufus had in mind to establish with the pretty, new teacher. At first it wasn't too bad because football season was getting underway and Rufus was pretty well occupied with explaining the intricacies of the game to the football coach and generally left her alone outside of lunchtime. A good while before Halloween, however, he realized the football season was pretty much of a lost cause for that year and found himself with a good bit of free time on his hands, and so he took to dropping by her classroom to observe her "techniques," and calling her into his office on every pretext he could manufacture. He developed a keen interest in her social life and extracurricular activities and was constantly asking her if she was lonely or needed something fun to do. She made excuses and brushed him off politely, but he was obviously becoming impatient with her and had developed an itch, which he needed to scratch in the worst way.

Caleb chewed absentmindedly on the eraser of a pencil while he read through the background information that Moon Dog had provided. He caught himself anticipating the next pages, his mind racing ahead to the salacious parts of the story that he knew were coming, and he remonstrated himself for his impatience. Cool it, buddy, he thought, reminding himself that the devil's in the details and to slow down and absorb the thing.

He laid the report on his desk and, standing, walked across the room to the credenza against the wall beneath the portraits of old Andrew Jackson and Alvin York. He took a small brass key from his vest pocket and unlocked the cabinet, swinging the doors open to access the two shelves of liquor bottles. He immediately poured himself two fingers of single malt scotch in a tumbler and raised the glass in his own ritualistic salute to the two famous Tennesseans. "Go Vols," he said, nodding toward the stern countenances of "Old Hickory" and Sgt. York, and took a small, judicious sip of the liquor, before returning to his desk and Moon Dog's report.