Dark and Bloody Ground (38 page)

“That is the damndest fit I ever seen pitched,” she said at last. “Lester Burns, you’re hired.”

“What about Mitchell?” Lester asked, suddenly gone soft and plaintive with the voice of a puppy. “What about this sincere, brilliant man who wants to help you and get paid enough to do a decent job?”

“I’ll have to ask Benny. I’ll have to consult with him.” She walked to the car.

Lester and Dale Mitchell thought they had lost Sherry that night but the next day she telephoned and said that if Mitchell were willing to negotiate, she would meet with him at the McDonald’s in Oneida, Tennessee, on the border, about halfway between Harriman and Somerset. At that meeting, which took place on Tuesday, she agreed to pay Mitchell a hundred and fifty thousand upfront in cash and to sign over to him a house she claimed to have bought in Florida that was worth another hundred thousand. Lester, who had coached Mitchell in the art of asking high and settling for less, thought this acceptable, although he doubted the value or the existence of the house. The plan was for Sherry to return to the farm on the evening of Friday, September 7, to turn over the cash.

“We’ll be here,” Lester said. “And we’ll have plenty of protection. I don’t trust any of them.” He continued paying sheriff’s deputies a hundred dollars each per twelve-hour shift, round the clock.

In the meantime he had to drive over to Whitesburg to get Carol out of the Letcher County jail. He had not fulfilled the promise he had made—there had not been time, he insisted—to detectives in Florida to turn Carol over for questioning when she reached Kentucky. The KSP issued a warrant for her arrest, charging her with facilitation of a crime, citing the bill of sale she had signed back in
June for the Olds used in the Acker murder. When, on September 3, information reached the KSP that she had been staying at the Somerset Holiday Inn and was in the process of checking out, a pair of local policemen were dispatched to pick her up. They arrested her, against her frantic protests, at the reception desk and took her to the Somerset Police Department, where she was permitted to telephone her attorney. She could only leave a message at his office, however, because at the time he was overseeing a cattle-worming operation at his farm. KSP troopers arrived to take Carol to the Letcher County jail.

Lester did not hear about the arrest until that evening, when Sheriff Adams visited the farm. Lester immediately wondered about Carol’s car, the MR2. Discovering that it was still parked at the Holiday Inn, he prevailed upon the sheriff to have the car towed to the farm, telling Adams that the MR2 belonged to him.

Lester knew that he would have to turn the MR2 over to the KSP, but he found that it could not be driven, because Carol had been arrested with her keys. He summoned a locksmith, who punched out the trunk lock in order to make a key from it, only to figure out that the trunk and ignition keys were different. When Lester finally had the car delivered to the Hazard KSP post, the trunk lock remained missing.

Lester had begun to find Carol a pain in the neck. “She drives me nuts,” he told everyone. “She won’t let me alone. I’ve hidden behind trees to get away from her. She thinks she’s Patty Hearst. The woman is nutty as a pet coon.”

On the day of Sherry’s scheduled return with the money for Mitchell, Lester passed the time by attending a land auction near Cumberland Falls. He adored these events, their challenge, the stylish patter of the auctioneer, the secretive hand signals and the furtive, mumbled exchanges among men, most of them older than himself, with hats pulled down over sunburned faces, who formed dark conspiratorial knots here and there on the green field. In that part of the South, all land was sold at auction on the spot, a custom derived from Britain and Ireland. Lester was the shrewdest of players and the most garrulous, badgering people, kidding them, distracting them, complaining of being canoodled and hornswoggled, stalking off in a snit and plunging back in just in time to bid once more. His was the winning bid that day, nearly half a million dollars for several hundred
acres. He wrote out a check for the sixty-eight-thousand-dollar down payment.

Sherry was supposed to show up at ten-thirty that night. The same four men as before waited for her at the farmhouse, inside this time, as fog was rolling in from the lake and autumn was in the air. Flush with his latest acquisition, Lester recounted the day’s triumph and poured down the bourbon with his pal, a small farmer deeply in his debt, with Mitchell and the accountant staying sober. Around nine, Lester sent the deputy on guard to town for chicken.

Eleven o’clock. No Sherry. Was she lost in the fog? Lester wondered. Mitchell grew pessimistic and went home, to see his parents, he said. He could be reached if Sherry showed. Lester fell asleep.

About three o’clock that morning, Lester and his two remaining companions were preparing to leave the farm. They were climbing into the accountant’s car and telling the deputy that he could go home when they saw headlights approaching through the fog. Lester hurried back inside to phone Mitchell, who lived only ten minutes away, as Sherry drove up in a new Bronco she had purchased. She was accompanied by two men wearing sidearms.

She walked into the house carrying a cardboard stereo box and introduced her escorts as a detective with the Oak Ridge police and his friend. She sat holding the box, waiting for Dale Mitchell to return. Even Lester, who had drunk himself sober, had no conversation but kept his eyes on the box.

When Mitchell returned, he and Sherry went into the kitchen and closed the door.

“Here’s the money,” she said, handing over the box. “A hundred and fifty thousand. I didn’t count it bill for bill. If it’s not all there, tell me and I’ll make it up. If I overpaid you, you can give it back to me. I wouldn’t spend it all in one place, if I was you.”

Mitchell took the box. He said he would count the money later.

“Okay,” Sherry said. “Now give me a receipt.”

“A receipt? I’d rather not do that. I, ah ...”

“What if you go down the road and have an accident and get yourself killed? I’d have no proof I paid you.”

Mitchell continued to balk. Sherry insisted, threatening to take the money back. Mitchell gave in. On a yellow legal pad he wrote that he had received the amount from her as an attorney’s fee. He dated it, signed it, and handed it to her. She slipped it into her jeans.

After Sherry and her bodyguards departed, Lester and Mitchell drove to Lester’s law office. There in a waiting room Mitchell handed Lester fifteen five-thousand-dollar stacks of new one-hundred-dollar bills. Half his fee, Mitchell said, as he and Lester had agreed, an even split of seventy-five thousand.

Sherry had not been lost in any fog that night. Fearing ambush, she had deliberately delayed her arrival to catch the others off guard. Back home in her parents’ house—a new one E. L. and Louise had just moved into—she read over the receipt from Mitchell in the early-morning light.

In the privacy of her bedroom she contemplated her doll collection. Choosing a fat little baby doll wearing a jumpsuit and wrapped in a tiny blue blanket, she undressed it and pried open a plastic hatch on its back. She removed the batteries, stuffed the folded receipt into the hole, replaced the batteries, and snapped the hatch closed. Dressed and rewrapped in its blanket, the doll whimpered as she returned it to its place on the shelf.

Because she figured that the FBI must have her parents’ line tapped, Sherry provided Dale Mitchell with a code to use when he telephoned. When Sherry said “one,” “two,” or “three,” the numbers indicated various pay phones at which the lawyer could reach her within a certain number of minutes. It was over one of these phones that Mitchell asked her to return the receipt.

“Don’t worry about it,” she told him. “I’ll tear it up.”

Mitchell soon flew to Miami to check out the house he was to receive as part of his fee. He had it appraised and learned that it was worth no more than sixty thousand. He also discovered that she had rented it, with only an option to buy, and was not in any position to sign it over.

Sherry agreed to pay Mitchell more money. She did so with a series of at least a dozen five-thousand-dollar cashier’s checks, listing the payer as any one of several names she made up or borrowed from her or Benny’s relatives, including his mother.

By mid-September, the FBI already had reasons to suspect that the total take from the Acker robbery was considerably more than Dr. Acker had been able to estimate. And late that month, when an event occurred involving someone closely linked to Sherry Sheets and the
rest of the gang, Rod Kincaid became convinced that more than a million dollars must have been stolen. He also began to worry that recovering it might prove very difficult.

On September 24, Pat Mason flew to Las Vegas and checked into the Frontier Hotel. Waiting for her room to be made ready, she started playing the slots. She dropped sixty dollars at one machine, stopped to eat a cheeseburger, and began at another. Within minutes, three sevens came up.

The machine started to vibrate. Bells sounded. Lights flashed. Other players gathered round. “JACKPOT! JACKPOT!” The words blinked on and off across the video screen. No coins poured forth. Instead a long number printed out beneath “YOU HAVE WON.” The total was beyond any one-armed bandit’s capacity to hold.

The casino manager rushed up. Pat Mason had won one million, twenty-three thousand, six hundred and thirty-six dollars and sixty-two cents. She was very happy.

The FBI was not. Agents with a special interest in this unusual stroke of good fortune visited the Frontier the next day. This particular machine, the hotel’s management told them, had never paid off before. It was brand new, with only sixteen hours on it. The odds against this payoff had been, well, nearly incalculable. But that was Vegas. You never knew.

What the agents did know was that the standard Vegas fee for laundering money was forty percent. In this instance, however, they could find nothing, apart from the winner’s unsavory associations, to indicate that the good luck had been anything other than that.

For the next week or so, Pat Mason was a celebrity. She was the second-biggest slot-machine winner in Las Vegas history. According to Florida newspapers, Ms. Mason had foretold her astonishing success before leaving for Nevada.

“She told me the day she left that she’d win a million,” Marvin Friedman, her boss at Autoputer, informed the
South Broward Sentinel.
"I just couldn’t believe it when she called me and told me that she actually did it.” What a fantastic thing to happen to a forty-five-year-old single woman from a small town in Tennessee. At the car brokerage she had been making no more than a thousand a week.

“I had a feeling,” Pat Mason confided to the
Miami Herald.
"It’s hard to explain.”

24

F
RUSTRATED AS HE WAS BY THE APPARENT MYSTERIES
of Pat Mason’s good fortune, Rod Kincaid was not entirely pessimistic about the Bureau’s chances of tracing and recovering a large amount of what remained missing of the stolen Acker money. By late September and through the end of the year, he was spending many hours alone in his London office making notes while listening to certain intriguing tape recordings.

The principal voice on these tapes was male and distinctly Eastern Kentuckian. It crooned, bellowed, blustered, murmured, and cackled, caressing words and phrases as if they were the hollows and undulations of a woman’s body. So commanding and cajoling and in its own way majestic was this voice that if the language it uttered had been anything other than specifically American, one could easily have assumed it to be that of a prince or king, describing the conquest of territories and the splendor of his own domain during some long-gone feudal era. Stories, jests, attacks, enumerations of riches, the voice traversed the plains of human experience. Often Kincaid reversed the tape and ran it again to hear that voice spin a yarn once more.

Kincaid made sure he was alone when playing these tapes because he frequently found himself bursting into guffaws and emitting inarticulate noises of appreciation that had nothing to do with his role as an agent and could have been misunderstood by some
humorless colleague as unseemly enthusiasm for a crook. Something about the voice made its scheming malice as seductive as its wit, its wickedness as compelling as its humanity. The sound of it was not merely regional: it
was
Eastern Kentucky, the authentic thing manipulated by an artist of the vernacular who was as precise with timing and as attuned to nuance as some great fiddler. What irony, that Lester Burns might do himself in by means of the very instrument he had perfected. “Why, Lester,” Kincaid thought. “You scallywag!”

Because it was Lester Burns’s voice that Kincaid had managed secretly to record: Lester boasting and bragging and confiding and revealing one thing and another about his control of the Acker money and other, unrelated goings-on. It was an explosion of disclosure.

Hearing Lester spill bean after bean as if his glands excreted sodium pentothal, Kincaid marveled at the manic candor of this man who had the reputation of being the canniest lawyer in Kentucky. Whatever on earth he thought he was doing, Lester Burns seemed compelled to confess. Something had come over him. It was not only the tapes. Only the other night, Kincaid heard from a reliable source, Lester had taken several friends to dinner at a Burnside restaurant and, having ravished the buffet, had dropped to his knees, wept, pressed a napkin to his brow, extended his hands palms up, and begged forgiveness—nobody knew for what, presumably not merely for gluttony. It was the whiskey talking, his friends had said. Kincaid had many reasons to believe that this thirst for absolution derived from other sins.

Two undercover agents posing as good old boys out to make fast bucks were recording Lester at his farm, at the 7 Gables restaurant, and elsewhere as he bragged about his fee and conspired with Dr. Billy Davis—Lillian’s husband—and the agents to defraud an insurance company of over a million dollars. The men working undercover were Robert W. Comer, who had agreed to his new career in 1983 after being confronted with various kinds of fraud he had committed in the coal fields and three and a half million dollars in unreported illegal income, and H. E. McNeal, who was actually a Virginia state trooper and a Special Deputy United States Marshal on loan to the FBI. Comer had known Lester for some fifteen years and, believing that Lester had cheated him in a coal deal years before, was glad of the chance to get even; McNeal, who was going under the name of Harry McBride, was the one who wore the concealed recorder. The
two would get Lester talking—the easiest part of their assignment—until a tape ran out, then meet regular agents at the Fish and Creek Recreation Area near Cumberland Falls to summarize the conversation, receive a fresh tape, and return to record more.