All the prosecutors had was conjecture and the vague recollection of a little girl whose memory had translated the lights and roars of a truck outside her bedroom window into a UFO.
Steven Hill would escape paying for Roy Taylor’s death. Instead, they brought him up on the other three murders, including Peyton Tillman’s—once his autopsy showed that there was water in his lungs, which proved the judge had been drowned before his wrists were slit.
I called Gail’s sister when I heard Hill would not stand trial for Roy Taylor’s death. She said going after Hill for the other three murders would have to be enough. Besides, the prosecutors were asking for the death penalty on all three charges and you could only kill someone once. I was disappointed. I had my heart set on gassing, drugging and, possibly, beating Steven Hill to death. Most important, though, if Hill was convicted of any of the charges, Brenda assured me, the governor would hear more evidence in favor of setting Gail free. I hoped to god she was right.
Everyone affected by Steven Hill’s crimes was anxious to bring him to trial quickly, especially the Durham Police Department. Every good cop on that force felt betrayed; I heard it said over and over at night in bars, on street corners, in diners after the shift change. Once again, one bad cop had gotten all the headlines while the rest were forgotten. But what could they do?
Plenty, as it later turned out.
Hill’s trial was moved far from Wake and Durham counties because of the publicity. Ironically, it was held in Detective Morrow’s old hometown, Asheville. She returned in triumph, local girl made good, an avenging angel there to see that justice was done. She deserved every headline she got.
When Steven Hill was brought into the courtroom for the first time, he was confronted by row after row of fully uniformed, off-duty Durham police officers who had traveled many miles to see him pay for his crimes. They sat side by side, jaws set tight, shoulders squared back, staring at Steven Hill. I saw two of the officers who had questioned me that night in the white conference room; I recognized others from previous cases or from their work patrolling Durham’s streets. It was a long trial, and the days in the overheated courtroom could seem even longer, but at least a dozen officers showed up every single day, and not one of them ever got up and left until the judge had signaled the end of a session. They rarely reacted to testimony and they ne ky a Departmenver commented to the press. They just stared at Steven Hill with disdainful eyes.
I couldn’t have taken their peculiar form of punishment. I would have cracked and been dragged screaming to Dorothea Dix Hospital before the end of the trial.
It got to Hill eventually. He had been remanded without bail, and the nights in jail had to have been rough for a former cop. Payback had begun.
As the days passed, Hill showed up in court looking less and less like a pretty boy, disintegrating before the jury’s eyes. He grew puffy from the starchy food, and soon his belly spilled over his suit pants. Wrinkles appeared around his jaw and even the striking green eyes disappeared. It turned out they were the product of contact lenses. He took to wearing heavy black glasses to court instead. His hair turned gray and took on a disheveled look. A hardness settled over his pale skin, making him seem brittle and unpredictable. I wouldn’t be fully satisfied until he lost all his hair and his teeth fell out, but I was pleased that the jury got a good look at the man who destroyed three families and killed four men without ever looking back. We all saw the real Steven Hill emerge.
Detective Morrow had headed up the joint investigation into the murders and nothing escaped her notice. Rumor had it that she had ordered the filter in Peyton Tillman’s hot tub removed and every hair in it analyzed and compared to Steven Hill’s. I don’t know if that was true—god help the lab if it was—but I do know that she compiled enough physical evidence to tie Hill to all three recent murder scenes. It was like weaving a spider web of thin strands of proof all linked together to create an inescapable net.
Hill had left a fingerprint on the wooden railing of Tillman’s deck, as well as on the handle of the upstairs toilet. Several of his hairs were discovered in Tillman’s car. When they had been left there, no one really knew for sure, but the jury was happy to make that call. Tillman’s missing files on the tainted court cases were uncovered in Hill’s basement, hidden beneath a socket wrench set in a drawer of his tool chest. Most damning of all, traces of skin tissue were detected on Hill’s regulation police baton, and tests showed that they matched Peyton Tillman as well as an unidentified third person. It was Bobby D., of course, from the wound inflicted the night Hill broke into our office. Neither Bobby D. nor I volunteered that info.
The evidence for George Carter and Pete Bunn’s deaths was even more solid. Hill had grown sloppier with each murder. George Carter’s blood was found in Hill’s truck, pooled in the grooves of the flat bed beneath the spare tire. The bullets that had killed Pete Bunn matched a gun found among Hill’s large collection of weapons. It was a Bren Ten automatic. Very nice, but obscure and expensive. Hill was too cheap to have gotten rid of it. Maybe he should have used that Lorcin he’d reserved for me.
Hill had also left a trail of DNA all through Bunn’s house while searching for the tapes the night Slim Jim Jones and I stood listening at the top of the hill: hairs on the back of the sofa where khe er he had stopped to rest, fabric fibers on the sharp hinge of a cabinet door and saliva on the rim of an empty Red Dog beer bottle left on the kitchen table. I suspect that Red Dog had been his tenth or so of the night. Otherwise, he’d never have been so careless. It pleased me to know that having drinks with the man had contributed to his downfall.
Other evidence pointed to George Carter’s imprisonment in Bunn’s house. Carter’s fingerprints were found in the bedroom and his hair fibers in the shower drain. His blood had pooled on the bedroom floor at one time, but had been scrubbed away. A relentless Detective Morrow and her forensics team found the evidence anyway.
When I heard that, I began to believe that maybe Bunn really had been the one to murder George Carter. But Steven Hill was the one who was still alive and he would be the one to pay the price. The jury was North Carolina mountain folk and they bought the Slim Jim Jones argument lock, stock and gun barrel: who in tarnation would be dumb enough to kill someone and dump him on their own farm? Clearly, they decided, it had been Hill, not Bunn, who’d done it.
The hidden tapes played their part. While they had not been enough to bring Hill to trial for killing Roy Taylor, they helped convince the jury that Hill had been the one to shoot George Carter. Only some of the tapes featured Hill’s conversations with Carter, but the judge allowed the D.A. to play them in their entirety. Roy Taylor’s parents sat in the courtroom that day, alongside of the silent officers, listening as Roy came back to life, hearing their dead son’s voice urging Hill to forget the idea, telling him that once he started he would never be able to stop.
“They’ll own you,” he told Hill. “You’ll never be able to go back to being a good cop. Think before you get started.”
“You know what your problem is, Taylor?” Hill had replied. “You just don’t live in the real world.”
I don’t know what constitutes the real world these days, but I suspect that Steven Hill was living in it big time by the end of that trial. A parade of drug dealers who’d done business with him followed the audiotapes into evidence and provided comic relief in an otherwise depressing episode. They looked and acted like extras in a bad cop show, but their impact was impressive. Most had eventually landed in jail on other charges and were outraged at not getting their money’s worth from their bribes to Hill.
One by one, they took the stand to describe how Hill had offered to destroy evidence for money. By the end of their testimony, Steven Hill looked like the spokesman for the Home Shopping Network from Hell—someone who was willing to auction off justice for whoever could cough up the cash.
There was no point in putting either me or Bill Butler on the stand. I was just as happy. It allowed the issue of my gun and its fake registration to sink in a sea of more important matters. They never traced the gun back to me, anyway, giving Steven Hill something to po kmet fander during his long nights in jail.
After two weeks of relentless hammering away at Hill, the prosecution rested. The defense took less than a week and it was vintage “Some Other Dude Done It.” Only Hill and his attorney made the mistake of trying to blame it all on a dead man and the mountain jury didn’t want to buy it. If Pete Bunn had been the bad guy all along, who the hell had shot Pete Bunn? I was afraid Hill would try to pin that one on me, but he didn’t want me to take the stand for fear of what I could slip in on cross-examination. Instead, his lawyer tried to blame Bunn’s murder on unnamed drug dealers. This was a hard sell, given how amiable the dozen drug dealers introduced to the jury thus far had been.
In the end, by the time the judge issued deliberation instructions, even Steven Hill knew he was going down. I figure he spent sixty solid minutes debating the pros and cons of the gas chamber versus lethal injection before he cracked, because one hour after jury deliberations began, Steven Hill cut a deal to avoid the death penalty. He pled guilty to three counts of murder one and took life without the possibility of parole on all three counts—to be served consecutively. He would never be a free man again.
I wondered at his decision. I had flip-flopped on capital punishment again during the trial. If anyone deserved killing, Hill did. But for a cop, what could possibly be worse than a lifetime behind bars, running into people you helped put there? I wished him the worst as they led him away in chains. “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” I thought to myself. “Let’s see what your fading good looks get you behind bars.”
A month after Steven Hill pled guilty to the murders, the governor of North Carolina granted Gail Honeycutt clemency. She would be free before Christmas. Gail’s father had a heart attack when he heard the news and died a few hours later. In some ways, I think this released Gail to start a new life every bit as much as the governor’s decision did.
The work I’d done had been instrumental in convincing the governor of Gail’s innocence, but he would never know it. By rousing consensus, I kept a low profile. Instead, Bill Butler was sent to the governor’s mansion to relate what had been said in the forest that night. They took his word for it, and that was good enough for me. All I really cared about was setting Gail free—and rubbing Bill Butler’s face in my superior detecting abilities for the next twenty-five years.
Besides, what I lacked in official recognition was more than made up for by the Honeycutt clan. They threw Gail a homecoming party at Nanny Honeycutt’s white farmhouse north of Mebane, near the Piedmont foothills. The farm was decorated to the gills for Christmas. Enough lights covered the trees and barn roofs to power the state’s electric milking machines for the next century. Even an old Scrooge like me felt a jolt of festive awe when I spotted those lights blazing.
I stopped and stared when I first saw the farmhouse—it looked exactly like the one my grandfather had lived in before he lost his land and savings. I felt as if I were coming hom kre span>
Inside, tables lined a huge dining room, and every surface inch was filled by platters, bowls, baskets and tubs of the Honeycutt specialties: hams baked in milk; deep-fried turkeys; smoked pork loins; fried catfish; barbecue beef ribs; Brunswick stew; and a barnyard of fried chicken. Not to mention green beans, snap peas, squash, canned stewed tomatoes, fried okra, last summer’s sweet corn, baked beans, homemade mashed potatoes, coleslaw, Jell-O salad and a token plate of lettuce that went untouched all evening long. Yeast rolls that melted when you bit into them competed with corn bread, hush puppies and homemade biscuits for my starch intake. All of this was washed down by gallons of iced tea or beer and followed by one of a dozen desserts, including cherry, apple, pumpkin and blackberry pies; banana pudding so sweet it made your fillings ache; peanut butter, coconut and caramel cakes; brownies as big as a trivet; blueberry and peach cobblers; and oatmeal cookies. The peanut butter cake was the best of the lot. I know because I tasted it all.
Nanny Honeycutt had decreed that I should share guest- of-honor status with Gail. A big banner at one end of the room read WELCOME HOME GAIL, and its twin on the other side read THANK YOU CASEY. I posed under it with Gail for at least a dozen photographs. I was the only one of us who could manage a smile.
It was hard to move because the crush of relatives was so great, not to mention I’d eaten far too much for actual physical activity. Instead, I sat in a chair tilted against one wall for most of the night, murmuring meaningless chat to a parade of well-wishers while I watched the festivities. When it comes to family affairs, I’m a much better observer than I am a participant.
Nanny Honeycutt had urged me to bring a date. I thought long and hard before settling on Robert, the versatile acupuncturist who had hypnotized Gail for me. I wasn’t interested in him myself, I was just doing my Christian duty as an incurably romantic busybody. I figured with all those female Honeycutts in their tight jeans, at least one of them was bound to glow a nice pink in his direction. Robert was better at mingling than I was. He worked his way through the crowd like a politician. I even overheard him telling one tank of a man that acupuncture could help with the ache in his shoulders and to give him a call. And damn if the good old boy didn’t tuck Robert’s business card into the front of his bib overalls, as if he planned to do just that.