Blood Money (Joe Dillard Series No. 6) Read Free Page A

county jails were routine to me, but the nagging feeling of claustrophobia never quite left me once I walked through the first, locked door.  
    The young man sitting at the round, steel table was wiry and strong, with a long neck and a pair of the biggest hands I’d ever seen. His ebony skin seemed to have been stretched tightly over his body like shiny, black cellophane. His kinky hair was thick and cropped close, his jaws square, sturdy and muscled. His physical presence reminded me of my son – all muscle and sinew, nothing extraneous. His eyes were the brown of chocolate syrup and he had deep dimples in his cheeks. He was handcuffed, shackled and waist-chained, wearing the green and white, striped jumpsuit and rubber flip flops that were standard issue at the Sullivan County Jail. Of the many jails I’d visited over the years, Sullivan County was one of the worst. It was overcrowded and filthy. Toilets and showers were stopped up, wiring was corroded and exposed, and the guards were cynical and abusive.   If you believed what Winston Churchill once wrote – that you could judge a society by the way it treats its prisoners – then Sullivan County was a cruel and unforgiving place.
    I set my briefcase down on the table and took out a legal pad and a pen.  
    “My name is Joe Dillard,” I said. “I’m a lawyer. Your father called and asked me to talk to you. Anything you say to me is strictly confidential, but I want you to know up front that I’m not your lawyer, at least not yet. I want to hear what you have to say before I decide whether I’m going to represent you. Are you okay with that?”
    He nodded.
    “Your name is Jordan Scott?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Do you know what you’re charged with, Jordan?”
    “Murder.”
    “Did you kill someone?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Do you know who you killed?”
    “His name was Todd Raleigh. He was a deputy for the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Department.”
    “Do you want to tell me why you killed him?”
    “Because he deserved to die.”

Chapter 3

    THIS is what I learned during my first conversation with Jordan Scott, who was well-mannered, articulate and intelligent:
    Jordan had grown up in a middle-class home in Kingsport. His father worked as a machinist at Tennessee Eastman in Kingsport and his mother was a speech pathologist in the Sullivan County school system. Jordan had a sister named Della who was one year older and a brother named David who was three years younger and who suffered enough brain damage during a traumatic birth to be classified by those who make such determinations as “borderline mentally incapacitated.”
    Jordan said he was a straight-A student at Dobyns-Bennett High School and an all-state athlete. He was an all-state running back in football, an all-state shooting guard in basketball, and won the state championship in the two-hundred meter hurdles in track his senior year. He had athletic and academic scholarship offers from Division I college programs all over the country, including the University of Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina and Duke.  
    But Jordan decided to stay close to home. He didn’t want to leave David, and although he was big, strong and fast enough to compete at the Division I level, he knew he wasn’t – and never would be – quite big enough, quite strong enough, or quite fast enough to compete with the freaks of nature in the NBA or the NFL. East Tennessee State University in Johnson City was only a thirty-minute drive from home. It was a Division I school with a decent basketball team, and it offered something else that appealed to Jordan – a medical school. There were only a handful of African-American doctors in the region, and Jordan believed he could be of some value to his community in that regard, so he chose ETSU over all the others and enrolled. His parents bought him a used car when he graduated from high school, and between the academic and athletic scholarship money he received, he