Free Joe Dillard - 03 - Injustice for All by Scott Pratt

way she moved. The thought crossed Katie’s mind that had Aunt Mary not been such a kind and gentle person, her similarities to Mother would have been painful.
    The property was beautiful—twenty-five acres of rolling pasture and five more of wooded land that bordered the national forest. The stream dissected the property from the northeast to the southwest, and the mountains rose like great sentinels all around.
    “They’re spectacular, aren’t they?” Aunt Mary said when she noticed Katie staring up at the peak of Mount LeConte. They were rattling along through the pasture in an old green pickup truck that Aunt Mary had backed out of the barn.
    “Yes, ma’am,” Katie said.
    “But they can be dangerous, too. You have to respect the mountains, Katie.”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    As they topped a small ridge heading back toward the house, Katie noticed movement to her left. She looked toward a logging road that led back into the heavy woods and the mountains and saw a line of trucks heading down toward Roaring Fork Road. She counted ten of them, large trucks like those that carried soldiers in the movies, with huge tires and covered in canvas. At the front of the line was a Jeep with a star on the door and a bar of lights across the top.
    “What’s that?” Katie asked, pointing in the direction of the convoy.
    Aunt Mary’s face turned cold.
    “It’s nothing,” she said. “If you ever see them again, you just act like they’re not even there.”

10
    The immediate aftermath of Ray Miller’s public suicide was confusion, followed by the horror of realization. Numbed and silent, I moved slowly across the courtroom floor to where his body lay, and I knelt beside him. Ray had dropped straight to the ground between the prosecution and defense tables, partially on his side, his open eyes staring blankly ahead, his face frozen in a look of eternal defiance. The gun lay at his side, and a dark pool of blood spread slowly on the gray carpet beneath his head.
    Judge Green emerged from his hiding place a few moments later. The first bullet had struck his high-backed chair an inch from his right ear; the second had actually caught the sleeve of his robe. But the judge was unscathed, and he soon began muttering to himself as he leaned against the wall and walked stiffly toward his chambers. I noticed that nobody went to Green’s aid, at least not until the emergency medical people showed up. One of the paramedics found him later, sitting on the toilet in his private bathroom, fully clothed, babbling about miracles and the mysteries of life.
    The sheriff’s department quickly learned that Ray had managed to get the gun into the courtroom by avoiding the security station. He simply walked in a back door of the courthouse—a door frequently used by attorneys and county government employees—and came up the stairwell past the property assessor’s office. That door is now locked, so that anyone entering the courthouse has to pass through the metal detectors. Too little. Too late.
    The medical examiner found a note in Ray’s pocket. It was a long and rambling good-bye to Toni and Tommy, but it established a reason, at least in Ray’s mind, for his suicide. He believed the two million dollars in insurance money his wife would collect would take care of his family far better than he could. Toni told Caroline that Ray had owned the policy for ten years, so the two-year suicide clause standard in life insurance contracts had long expired. Toni has become an instant millionaire, but I know she would gladly trade every dime for an opportunity to turn back the clock and save her husband.
    I’m standing now at the back of a hearse in the immaculate burial ground at the Veterans Administration at Mountain Home. It’s two o’clock on Sunday afternoon, and dozens of people are milling around beneath an overcast sky. A brown canopy has been erected over Ray’s grave. I’m one of eight pallbearers. Jack has driven up from Nashville