They weaved through the piney woods and parked in front of Fats’s hunting cabin. Kilgore was grilling steaks on the deck and Fats was already into the bourbon.
It was time to discuss what to do about Jesse Rudy.
Chapter 26
As the assistant district attorney, Egan Clement was assigned by her boss to investigate seven unsolved murders that occurred between 1966 and 1971. Five of them were thought to be gang-related because the victims were involved, at some level, with organized crime. Periodically, the turf battles erupted and one killing led to the inevitable payback. Fats Bowman had a deputy he considered to be his chief investigator, but he was untrained and inexperienced, primarily because the sheriff had little interest in wasting manpower trying to solve gangland killings. The reality was that the cases were cold and no one was digging.
After Jesse was sworn in, it took five months to get a look at the sheriff department’s files. For murders, they were quite thin and revealed little. He also badgered the state police for assistance, but confirmed what he had expected—Harrison County was the domain of Fats Bowman, and the State preferred to avoid it. Likewise, the FBI had not been involved. The murders, as well as the plethora of other criminal activity, involved state statutes, not federal.
Egan was particularly bothered by the murder of Dusty Cromwell. His death was no great loss to society, but the manner in which it happened was galling. He had been gunned down on a public beach, on a warm, sunny afternoon, less than a mile from the Biloxi lighthouse. At least a dozen witnesses heard the crack from the rifle shot, though no one saw the gunman. A family—mother, father, and two children—were within forty feet of Dusty when half his head was blown off, and they saw the carnage as his girlfriend screamed for help.
The sheriff department’s file had plenty of gory photographs, along with an autopsy report that concluded with the obvious. Witnesses gave statements in which they recounted what they saw, which was little more than a man killed instantly by a single bullet to the head. A brief bio of Cromwell gave the details of a thug with a shady past and three felony convictions. His club, Surf Club, had been torched and he had sworn revenge against Lance Malco, Ginger Redfield, and others, though the others were not named. In short, Dusty had managed to make some fearsome enemies in his short career as a mobster.
Jesse was convinced Lance Malco was behind the murder. Egan agreed, and their theory, or rather their speculation, was that Lance used Mike Savage, a known arsonist, to torch Surf Club. Cromwell retaliated by killing Savage and cutting off his ear. Cromwell then hired someone to take out Lance and the hit was almost a success. The bullet with his name on it barely missed, shattered his windshield, and peppered him and Nevin Noll with bits of glass. Convinced his life was on the line, Lance hired a contract killer to take care of Dusty.
It was an interesting story and quite plausible, but thoroughly beyond proof.
The state’s death penalty statute made contract killing a capital offense, punishable by death in the gas chamber at Parchman prison. Lance and his gang had killed several men and there was no reason to stop. They had proven to be immune from prosecution. Only Nevin Noll had been charged and arrested. His murder of Earl Fortier ten years earlier in Pascagoula had landed him in a trial, but he walked away a free man when the jury found him not guilty.
As the district attorney, it was Jesse’s sworn duty to prosecute all felonies, regardless of who committed them or how despicable the victims might have been. He wasn’t afraid of Lance Malco and his thugs, and he would indict them all when and if he had the proof. But finding it seemed impossible.
With no help from the police at any level, Jesse decided to get his hands dirty. The criminals he was after played a deadly game with no rules and no conscience. To catch a thief, he needed to hire a thief.
The runner’s name was Haley Stofer. He was driving carefully along Highway 90, obeying all the laws, when a roadblock suddenly appeared in front of him just west of Bay St. Louis. The sheriff of Hancock County had received a tip and wanted to have a chat with Stofer. In his trunk they found eighty pounds of marijuana. According to the tipster, Stofer worked for a trafficker in New Orleans and was making a run to Mobile. During his second day in the county jail, Stofer’s lawyer broke the news that he was looking at thirty years in prison.