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.I then headed on up to Columbia and spent some time speaking with a specialagent named Richard Brewer at the headquarters of SLED.It was SLED specialagents that had investigated the murder, as they did all homicides committedin the state of South Carolina, with the occasional exception of those thatoccurred within the jurisdiction of the Charleston PD. They like to think of themselves as independent down there, said Brewer. We call it the Republic of Charleston. Brewer was about my age, with straw-colored hair and a jock s build.He worestandard issue SLED gear: green combats, a black T-shirt with SLED in greenletters on the back, and a Glock 40 on his belt.He was one of the team ofagents that had worked the case.He was a little more forthcoming than thedeputy but could add little to what I already knew.Atys Jones was virtuallyalone in the world, he said, with only a few distant relatives left alive.Hehad a job packing shelves at a Piggly Wiggly and lived in a small one-bedwalk-up in Kingville that was now occupied by a family of Ukrainianimmigrants. That boy, he said, shaking his head. He had few people in this world tocare about him before this, and he has a whole lot fewer now. You think he did it? Jury will decide that.Off the record, I don t see no other candidates onthe horizon. And it was you that spoke to the Larousses? Their statements were among thematerial Elliot had passed on to me. Father and son, plus the staff at their house.They all had alibis.We repretty professional here, Mr.Parker.We covered all the bases.I don t thinkyou ll find too many holes in them there reports. Page 106 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.htmlI thanked him and he gave me his card in case I had any other questions. You got yourself a hard job, Mr.Parker, he said as I stood to leave. Ireckon you re going to be about as popular as shit in summertime. It ll be a new experience for me. He raised a skeptical eyebrow. You know, I find that hard to believe. Back at my hotel, I spoke to the people at the Pine Point Co-op about Bear,and they confirmed that he had arrived on time the day before and had workedabout as hard as a man could be expected to work.They still sounded a littlenervous, so I asked them to put Bear on the line. How you doing, Bear? Okay. He reconsidered. Good, I m doing good.I like it here.I get to workon boats. Glad to hear it.Listen, Bear, I have to say this: you screw this up, orcause these people any trouble, and I ll personally hunt you down and drag youto the cops, you understand. Sure. He didn t sound aggrieved or hurt.I figured Bear was used to peoplewarning him not to screw up.It was just a question of whether or not he tookit in. Okay, then, I said. I won t screw up, he confirmed. I like these people. After I hung up on Bear, I spent an hour in the hotel gym followed by as manylengths of the pool as I could manage without cramping and drowning.Afterward, I showered and reread those sections of the case file that Elliotand I had discussed the night before.I kept coming back to two items: thestory, photocopied from an out-of-print local history, of the death of thetrunk minder Henry; and the disappearance, two decades before, of Atys Jones smother and aunt.Their pictures stared out at me from the newspaper clippings,two women forever frozen in their late teens and vanished from a world thathad largely forgotten about them, until now.As evening approached, I left the hotel and had coffee and a muffin in thePinckney Café.While I waited for Elliot to arrive, I leafed through a copy ofthePost and Courier that somebody had abandoned.One story in particularcaught my eye: a warrant had been issued for the arrest of a former prisonguard named Landron Mobley after he had missed a hearing of the CorrectionsCommittee in connection with allegations of improper relationships withfemale prisoners.The only reason the story attracted my attention was becauseLandron Mobley had hired one Elliot Norton to represent him at both thehearing and what was expected to be a subsequent rape trial.I mentioned thecase to Elliot when he arrived fifteen minutes later. Old Landron s a piece of work, said Elliot. He ll turn up, eventually. Doesn t seem like a high-class client, I commented.Elliot glanced at the story, then pushed it away although he still seemed tofeel that some further explanation was necessary.Page 107 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html I knew him when I was younger, so I guess that s why he came to me.And,hey, every man is entitled to representation, doesn t matter how guilty heis. He raised his finger to the waitress for the check, but there was somethingabout the movement, something too hurried, that indicated Landron Mobley hadjust ceased to be a welcome topic of conversation between us. Let s go, he said. Least I know where one of my clients is at. The Richland County Detention Center stood at the end of John Mark Dial Road,about one hundred miles northwest of Charleston, the approach marked by theoffices of bondsmen and attorneys.It was a complex of low redbrick buildingssurrounded by two rows of fencing topped with razor wire.Its windows werelong and narrow, overlooking the parking lot and the woods beyond on one side.The inner fence was electrified.There wasn t a great deal that we could do to prevent the knowledge of AtysJones s impending release from reaching the media, so it wasn t too much of asurprise to find a camera crew and a handful of journalists and photographersin the parking lot, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.I had gone onahead of Elliot and had been watching them for about fifteen minutes by thetime Elliot s car appeared.Nothing exciting had happened to either them or mein the interim, apart from one brief flurry of domestic theater when anunhappy wife, a small, dainty woman in high heels and a blue dress, arrived tocollect her husband after he d spent some time cooling his heels in a cell.Hehad blood on his shirt and beer stains on his pants as he emerged blinkinginto the fading light of the early evening, at which point his wife slappedhim once across the head and gave him the benefit of her wide and prettyprofane vocabulary
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