Reflection of Justice: A Clint Wells Detective Novel

By J. Thomas Callahan

United States Attorney Michelle Prescott was raped and murdered in her hotel room. After a lengthy investigation the FBI identified their suspect through DNA evidence recovered at the crime scene that also linked him to a series of similar crimes. David Barnes was arrested and is facing trial for capital murder. While preparing for trial, Defense Investigator Clint Wells finds that his client, abandoned at birth, may have a twin brother with a lengthy history of violent crimes. Are they brothers, and if so, which brother is the killer are just two of the questions Clint must answer in an investigation that takes him halfway across the continent and into the jungles of Central America in search of justice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 7, 2004
• ISBN: 9780595778652

Book preview

Prologue

Atlanta, Georgia

July 18, 2001

Assistant United States Attorney Michelle Prescott had had a bad day, one of the worst in her illustrious career. As she left the Federal Courthouse and made her way to the MARTA subway for a short ride back to her hotel she didn’t believe there was anything that could make it worse. She hated Atlanta. She hated the summer heat and the humidity. She hated the traffic and the congestion. She barely tolerated the rude and impersonal rush-hour crowds who were the antitheses of Southern hospitality. She despised that damned defense attorney that nearly got her case thrown out of court through legal trickery before it even went before the jury, and she hated the Federal Magistrate that had chewed her up and spit her out in front of her boss after that damned bastard shot holes through the Justice Department’s slipshod investigation of the public corruption case she was supposed to be prosecuting. But most of all, she hated being in a strange city away from her husband and children. In her opinion as an experienced traveler, the only thing Atlanta had going for it was its luxury hotel rooms where she could crank up the air conditioning, and sink her voluptuous figure into an oversized tub with a glass of chilled white wine and let the day’s stress and frustration melt away.

Michelle Prescott had been with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for twelve years, being hired right out of law school, and early in her career she was identified as one of its rising stars with prospects of a judgeship in her future. After serving her time in the trenches prosecuting minor crimes her talents were rewarded, and five years ago she had been moved into a high profile unit specializing in the prosecution of political corruption cases. Based in Richmond, Virginia, she didn’t like all of the travel her job entailed. She hated spending most of her weeknights in hotel rooms, even those as nice as the Marriott Marquis, and away from her family. But she was a crusader, and she truly believed that the American people deserved an honest and accountable government.

She was in Atlanta prosecuting a senior member of the Georgia Department of Transportation who was closely connected with a U.S. Congressman, and he had gotten rich taking payoffs and kickbacks from contractors who were awarded lucrative highway construction and maintenance contracts by the state.

After finishing her bath, Michelle wrapped her auburn hair in one of the hotel’s plush towels and pulled on the white terrycloth robe provided by the hotel. She ordered room service at 7:48 p.m. According to the hotel’s PBX records, she placed a quick call to her husband at 7:59 p.m., ending the call at

8:05 p.m. Darren Prescott later told investigators he was getting their children bathed and ready for bed so the call only lasted a few minutes, but during their brief conversation, his wife did not indicate there was any kind of problem, and she told him she expected to be home for the weekend.

After speaking to her husband, the attorney turned on the television and listened to CNN while she waited for her room service dinner to be delivered. Forty-five minutes after she hung up with her husband, the twenty-two-yearold room service waiter found her nearly nude body spread-eagle on the bed. He called the hotel security department, who in turn called the Atlanta Police. Within two hours the FBI had arrived on scene and taken charge of the investigation.

CHAPTER 1

Dacula, Georgia

April 1970

To hell with justice; to hell with the victims and their families; to hell with closure for the survivors; to hell with doing the right thing; to hell with everything fair and just if it was politically expedient to disregard the facts and let a guilty man walk despite the murders of nearly a dozen innocent people. Although I’ve had to deal with how elected officials and political pressure influence the criminal justice system all of my professional life, this was the most politically manipulated and controlled case I had been involved with in a career that spanned more than thirty years in the pursuit of justice. Even after working for a half-dozen sheriffs elected by the will of the people of Bartow County, Georgia, and alongside several dozen politically ambitious prosecutors, I’ve never seen anything that comes close to the political influence and unspeakable behavior on behalf of elected and appointed officials that occurred in this case. This entire matter came about because high-ranking politicians and their political nepotists were more concerned with covering their collective butts, furthering their political agendas and careers, and getting re-elected, than they were with doing the jobs the people had originally elected them to do. The fault does not lie only at their feet though. I also blame the American society as a whole for allowing the self-serving politicians and their cronies to continue to manipulate the criminal justice system in the furtherance of their own political careers and their political and personal agendas.

My name’s Clint Wells. I retired from the Bartow County Sheriff ’s Department in 1994, and being too young not to work and too ethical to work for a sheriff who’d repeatedly demonstrated his willingness to place his political career above the welfare of the community and his staff, I decided to use my professional experience and training to become a part-time private investigator. I’ve spent all of my adult life working in the criminal justice system, starting in the spring of 1968 when I was assigned to the 716th MP Battalion in Saigon, Republic of Vietnam. After I was discharged from the U.S. Army in 1971, I returned to my home in Cartersville, Georgia, and spent the next twenty-three years as a deputy sheriff in Bartow County, a once rural, but now rapidly growing county northwest of Atlanta. As a sheriff ’s deputy, I worked in the Patrol, Detention, Fugitive, Court Security, and Detective Divisions. I’ve investigated just about every type of crime imaginable; from petty theft to armed robbery; from rape to capital murder; and I have been involved in over two thousand felony arrests that have resulted in many tens of thousands of calendar years in prison. I retired as a captain and head of the Detective Division. Nowadays, the majority of my customers are defense attorneys whose clients can afford my exorbitant fees, and I won’t work for just anyone who can meet my price.

There are many unethical defense attorneys out there whose only goal is to win and get their client off regardless of their guilt or innocence or even the safety of the community. I know who most of them are, and I refuse to work with them for any fee. Although some of my former colleagues would have you believe different, I didn’t change sides. When I was sworn in as a deputy, I took an oath to protect and uphold the Constitution of the United States of America and the State of Georgia. My job now is to help a defense attorney ensure that a defendant gets a fair trial, and to compel the State to meet the burden of proof of beyond a reasonable doubt. The United States Constitution requires this burden before the State can convict someone of a criminal offense and deprive them of their life or liberty. I don’t see a conflict in ensuring that the State meets this Constitutional requirement I’ve sworn to protect.

With a guaranteed pension check coming in every month, I can afford to be selective in what cases I choose to become involved with. I do criminal cases because of my law enforcement background, and occasionally I’ll conduct background investigation for some of the local employers. I don’t get involved with divorces or child custody cases. They can be nasty, and they’re outside the scope of my experience and expertise. I won’t do civil litigation cases of any kind. The cases I do agree to take on can’t interfere with my hunting or fishing schedule, and my kids and grandkids come first. The cases I take also have to pique my interest, and there are certain types of cases I will not get involved with on principle.

This most disturbing case began more than three decades ago…

David Barnes had it all; a loving former beauty queen wife, three great kids, a nice home in an exclusive neighborhood in the country, a vacation timeshare on Hilton Head Island, and two luxury cars. He had a stable and fulfilling career with a high five-figure income plus bonuses that routinely boosted his annual earnings into the six-figure range, and he had the respect and admiration of his friends, neighbors, and colleagues. To sum it up, life was good for David Barnes—too good because he also had secrets: sinister, loathsome secrets that, if discovered, could take it all away from him.

David also had an adversary; a man he had never met and who had never met him; a man he did not even know existed; a man who, as time passed, began to resent and envy him and his lifestyle with every fiber of his being, wanted everything he had, and had discovered of some of his secrets.

By all accounts David Barnes was an American success story. He had started his life from a humble and disadvantaged beginning. At a little after 2:00 in the morning of April 23, 1970, barking dogs awakened Pastor Mark David Barnes of the Antioch Baptist Church in Dacula, Georgia, a small town an hour northeast of Atlanta. A few seconds after being awakened he heard an insistent knock at the front door of the small parsonage the church provided him and his wife of twenty-three years. Usually late-night visitors meant a crisis had occurred with one of the members of their small congregation that could not wait until morning. Though not an everyday occurrence, it wasn’t all that unusual for him to be awakened in the middle of the night to comfort a lost soul or provide guidance in a family crisis. Before he could pull on his robe and slippers and walk the few feet to the front door, the pastor heard a car door slam and the squealing of tires as a car sped off into the night.

By the time Mark Barnes got the front door opened and stepped out onto the concrete stoop, the sound of the retreating car had faded into the early morning darkness and was covered up by the chirping of the frogs and crickets. As he stepped out onto the weathered concrete slab that made up his front porch, his left foot encountered an obstruction. Looking down to see what his foot had hit, the pastor found that he had nearly stepped on a small child wrapped in a blood streaked, but otherwise clean beach towel.

Pastor Barnes bent down and picked up the small child. He could tell by the small size and the squashed facial features that the child was a newborn, probably no more than an hour or two old at most. The cleric cradled the small bundle in the crook of his left arm while his right hand searched through the bundle for a note or anything that might provide him with a clue to the identity of the baby’s parents. There was no note with the child, and no way to determine who his parents were. Aside from the nondescript terrycloth towel, the only other article wrapped with the newborn was a silver dollar.

This was not the first time a newborn had been left on his doorstep in the middle of the night. It had happened once before fifteen years earlier while he was the pastor of another church in southern Alabama. He called his wife into the living room, and handed the child off to her. Pastor Barnes called the sheriff’s office and the Department of Family and Children’s Services and reported the incident.

The sheriff ’s office and the Department of Family and Children’s Services maintained a list of emergency foster parents, which included the Barnes’s, and they reluctantly agreed to shelter the baby boy until his parents could be located or a suitable permanent foster home could be found. The days turned into weeks, then into months. The baby’s parents were never identified or located, and no suitable foster home was ever found. Being childless, Mark and his wife accepted it as the Will of God, and decided that they would raise the child as their own.

In 1973 they formally adopted their foster son and gave the toddler their name. David grew up in the rural northeast Georgia community knowing no other parents, and not even realizing he was adopted. Although poor, so were most of the other children he attended school and played with, so he had no other standard to measure his carefree life against. David was well cared for, happy, and loved, and as a child little else mattered. As he matured into a teenager, he had all of the normal teen problems—school, curfew, relationship issues, parents that didn’t know anything and that he knew didn’t trust him or understand him. The happy-go-lucky teenager was popular with the other kids, and matured into a handsome light-haired young man. The teenager wanted to attend college and study business and accounting after high school, but the only parents he had ever known had no money for him to further his education. Although a good student, his grades and SAT scores, although above average, weren’t good enough to earn him an academic scholarship, and his football, basketball, and baseball skills weren’t exactly the caliber that attracted the attention of college scouts and scholarships.

During the spring quarter of his senior year in high school an Army Recruiter set up a table in the school’s cafeteria to talk to students about the educational and career opportunities available in the military. Seeing that the Army could provide him training as an Accounting specialist, an area of interest to him, and that it would also give him the opportunity to pay for college under the GI Bill, David obtained his adopted parent’s blessing and enlisted for four years. A few weeks after his high school graduation in 1988, the slightly hung over teenager kissed his girlfriend Roberta Bednarz good-bye and hugged the only parents he had ever known, promised to write regularly, attend church services whenever possible, and call when he could, before he boarded the Greyhound bus that would take him to Ft. Jackson, South Carolina for basic training, and away from the only life he had ever known.

Always good with numbers, David had chosen an Accounting Specialist MOS—military occupational specialty. After basic training the young soldier was stationed at Ft. Harrison, Indiana for advanced training, and then he was assigned there as his permanent duty station. He worked eight to five Monday through Friday processing the Army’s civilian employee pay records. While in the service David also took the opportunity to attend college so that by the time his initial enlistment was up in July 1992 he had earned a bachelor’s degree in Accounting. After his discharge, David returned to Georgia, and he used his GI Bill benefits to enroll in the MBA program at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

While finishing his MBA, David met Tricia, a nursing student and former Miss Georgia contestant. A week after his graduation they were married. David accepted a position with a commercial real estate developer headquartered in Cartersville, Georgia, and Tricia took a nursing position at a local pediatrician’s office. Within a few years David had been promoted to Chief Financial Officer and was responsible for the financial operation of the company’s multiple projects located throughout the southeastern United States. Tricia was able to quit her nursing job and stay home with their children. David loved his work, but she resented the travel his job required, frequently leaving her at home alone to care for their three preschool aged children.

Two hours after Mark David Barnes found the towel swaddled newborn on his front porch, nineteen-year-old Army deserter Anthony Gaddis pulled his 1966 Volkswagen Beetle up to the emergency entrance of Cobb General Hospital in a panic. The seventeen-year-old runaway he had gotten pregnant nine months earlier and married just two weeks ago, before he had gone AWOL from the Army, was still complaining of severe stomach and back pain. She was also bleeding so heavily from her vagina that the front seat of his car was covered with her blood. The army deserter had never seen childbirth before, and having received minimal prenatal care, his new wife had basically the same understanding of childbirth that he did, but Anthony knew something wasn’t right. No one should be bleeding as much as she was, that much he did know. The ER staff immediately recognized that she was in labor and was hemorrhaging. Without bothering to take a history from Anthony, they started an IV of blood plasma and rushed his now unconscious young wife into the operating room.

As the morning sun lifted over the pine studded horizon a surgical resident came to the waiting area and escorted Anthony to the hospital chapel. Mr. Gaddis, I’m Dr. Sheffield, he began in a deep southern drawl as he extended his hand to Anthony. I’m afraid I have some bad news, he continued in a solemn tone."

The exhausted and scared deserter answered, What? What’s wrong with my wife?

The young physician stated, Mr. Gaddis, we did everything possible, everything that modern medical science has taught us. Perhaps if ya’ll had arrived sooner, had gotten treatment earlier, she wouldn’t have lost so much blood. I’m sorry Mr. Gaddis, but we couldn’t save your wife. She hemorrhaged and lost a large volume of blood during childbirth, and we couldn’t replace it fast enough to save her.

Huh, what do you mean, ‘During childbirth?’ the confused deserter asked, his mind still addled by the affects of marijuana, beer, and fatigue.

What I’m sayin Mr. Gaddis, is that your wife passed away because she lost too much blood while she was giving birth to your son.

Anthony, confused by the drugs, alcohol, fatigues, and stress, assumed he was talking about the child he had abandoned at the church a few hours earlier.

The doctor continued, I’m sorry we couldn’t save her, but we did manage to save the baby. He’s a little on the small side, but he’s healthy. I’m truly sorry sir. There was just nothin more we could do.

I don’t understand. Baby, she already had the baby.

That’s right sir. She had a baby. It caused her insides to tear, and she lost a lot of blood even before ya’ll got here. The baby’ll be fine.

But…but…but she had the baby already, Anthony protested with tears streaming down his face.

The doctor, well past the end of his twenty-four hour shift misunderstood Anthony’s protestations as the ramblings of an emotionally distraught husband and father. Yes sir, that’s what I said. She had a baby boy. He’s healthy, and he’ll be just fine. I’m going to leave you hear in the chapel for a few minutes so you can collect your thoughts. Someone’ll be by in just a few minutes so that you can make arrangements for your wife’s remains. There’s a telephone in the corner if you need to call anyone, he said as he led the distraught and confused soldier into the hospital’s small chapel for some privacy.

A half hour after being led to the hospital chapel and informed that his wife had died during childbirth, two Cobb County Sheriff ’s deputies arrived. The senior deputy shook Anthony awake and authoritatively stated, Mr. Gaddis, or should I say Private Gaddis, I’ve been instructed to take you into custody and hold you for military authorities. Someone from Fort McPherson will pick you up later in the day. Your son will be turned remain in the hospital nursery until someone can take custody of him, or if you are unable to provide the name and telephone number of a relative, he’ll be placed in foster care.

What? the confused soldier answered, his mind still clouded by the affects of drugs, alcohol, and fatigue. It took him a few minutes to grasp the seriousness of his predicament, and he stated, My parents are in Oklahoma. I’ll call them and get them to come pick my son up.

Anthony picked up the telephone and dialed his parent’s telephone number from memory, reversing the long distance charges. His mother answered on the sixth ring as he was getting ready to hang up. Mommy, it’s me, Tony.

Tony, do you know what time it is. It’s not even five o’clock in the morning. Are you drunk and in trouble again? You must be or you wouldn’t be calling at such an ungodly hour, and reversing the charges too.

Mommy, will you quit bitchin me out and just listen for a goddamned minute!"

Don’t you dare talk to me that way young man! I’ll hang up this phone if you even try it again. Do you understand me?

Yes Mommy. I understand. I’m sorry, but it’s important and I don’t have very long and I need your help."

"What kind of trouble are you in now for God’s sake?

Mommy, Sheila’s dead and they’re arresting me and taking me back to the Army. I need you to come here and get my baby.

What baby? Who’s Sheila? Tony what in tarnation is going on? What have you done? Why are they arresting you? You didn’t kill this girl Sheila did you?"

Mommy, just wait a minute and I’ll explain everything, but I need you and Daddy to come here and pick up my son so they won’t put him in foster care.

Your son? Where are you?

I’m…I’m…I don’t know where I am, somewhere in Georgia I think. Hang on. I’ll let you talk to the police. With that Anthony Gaddis gave the telephone to the senior deputy, who in turn described exactly what was going on and where she and her husband needed to go to pick up their grandchild.

Having been absent from his post less than a ten days, his commanding officer decided that rather than set an example for the other draftees and have Private E-2 Anthony Gaddis face a General Court Martial for desertion in time of war, the nineteen-year-old draftee would be given the opportunity to absolve himself of his sins with non-judicial punishment; reduction in rank from private E-2 to private E-1, loss of half his pay for a month, and a month’s extra duty for being AWOL, Absent Without Leave. The orders that had prompted his desertion, and he and his new wife to flee Ft. Belvoir were amended and reinstated. Within two weeks Anthony found himself reclassified from a heavy construction equipment operator MOS in a combat engineering battalion to an infantry MOS, and on a plane to Vietnam as an infantry rifleman.

Despite inadequate infantry training and a generally poor attitude, Anthony Gaddis somehow managed to stay alive in Vietnam, and returned to the United States. It only took him fifteen months to complete his twelvemonth tour. The three months the recalcitrant private spent in the Long Bihn Jail for assaulting his platoon sergeant when he was caught smoking marijuana while on guard duty did not count toward the completion of his tour of duty.

In October 1971 Private Anthony Gaddis received a General Discharge from the Army, returned to his parent’s home in Stillwater, Oklahoma, and was reunited with the son he’d seen one time for barely five minutes eighteen months earlier, before he was returned to the Army. At the time his son Michael was one and a half years old, and his parent’s, who had begrudgingly cared for him during his father’s absence, quickly relinquished any further responsibility for the toddler. The former soldier took a few days to get to know his son. He spent most of that time lazing around drinking beer, smoking marijuana, and experiencing the sexual revolution, rather than bonding with his son, before he reluctantly went to work at his father’s garage repairing farm equipment. Michael grew up with no limits or boundaries, and without much supervision from his alcoholic and abusive father and the steady string of girlfriends, one-night stands, and whores, usually as drunk or stoned and abusive as his father, that paraded through the beat-up travel trailer that, for want of a better word, Michael called home.

In his more lucid moments, Anthony would torment his son with the story of the twin brother he and his mother had abandoned on the steps of a church somewhere in the north Georgia town named after the famous vampire, Count Dracula, before his own birth had killed his sainted mother. Sometimes, wanting to punish his son for real or imagined transgressions, or just to be a sadistic bastard, he would threaten to abandon Michael on the steps of a