Free Joe Dillard - 02 - In Good Faith by Scott Pratt Page B

on a high-profile case. I want you to try to work out some kind of deal, but if you can’t, you have to win at trial.”
    It sounded like an ultimatum. “And if I lose?” I said.
    “Let’s not even think about that,” Mooney said as he stood up. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll let you two boys get acquainted.”
    I looked at Masters and shook my head. “Maybe I should have stayed retired,” I said. “Why don’t you fill me in?”
    For the next half hour, I listened while Cody Masters told me about William Trent, a thirty-five-year-old husband and father of two who had opened a small pizza restaurant in Jonesborough a decade earlier. He was a member of the chamber of commerce, a Little League coach, and a deacon at the Presbyterian church. He was also, from what Masters told me, one very sick son of a bitch.
    A couple of years earlier, Masters was approached by two seventeen-year-old girls who told him that William Trent had been having sex with both of them for two years. Both were former employees of Trent’s, and they told Masters a lurid tale. Trent, they said, hired only young girls who he believed would have sex with him. The girls were usually from broken homes, impoverished, weren’t good students—the kind of kids most employers would shy away from. Trent let them know on the front end that certain things would be required of them if they worked at his restaurant, things that he termed “unconventional.” The girls said Trent kept pornography running on a computer screen in the back office, hosted lingerie parties for the employees in the restaurant after hours, kept a small refrigerator in the kitchen stocked with liquor, and occasionally provided cocaine, crystal meth, or marijuana. He also started them at ten dollars an hour, almost double the minimum wage. The girls said there was an unspoken allegiance among the employees—what happened at work stayed at work.
    Trent immediately went about seducing them, and from what they told Masters, Trent’s sexual appetite was insatiable. They had sex with him in the walk-in cooler, on the table in the kitchen where the pizza dough was rolled, in the bathrooms, on the counter and on the tables in the front after the restaurant closed, and his car in the parking lot out back. He wanted threesome sex, oral sex, anal sex, sex in bizarre positions—they even let him penetrate them with a catsup bottle a couple of times. And he insisted that the girls use birth control, because he refused to wear a condom.
    Masters told me that at least ten girls were involved over a three-year period, although some of the girls refused to cooperate with the police. The big problem with the case, Masters said, was that he was a rookie when he first met the girls, that the district attorneys were all away at their annual conference in Nashville, and that he had made several early mistakes that Trent’s lawyer would undoubtedly bring up at trial.
    “I probably should have waited until the DAs got back,” Masters said, “but I wanted to get him off the streets. It made me so mad I threw the freaking book at him. I charged him with forty-two felonies. About half of them were aggravated rape and aggravated kidnapping. I tacked on statutory rape, aggravated sexual battery, sexual battery by an authority figure, you name it. He was looking at about twelve hundred years in prison. But his wife posted his bail and they hired Joe Snodgrass from Knoxville. He made me look like a fool at the preliminary hearing.”
    I knew Joe Snodgrass by reputation only. He ran one of the most successful criminal defense firms in the state. He’d been the president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and president of the Tennessee Trial Lawyers Association. He had a good reputation as a trial lawyer, and he’d written books on criminal procedure and pretrial litigation in criminal cases.
    “What was the problem?” I said.
    “I didn’t read the statutes right. Hell, I’m