“The other charges being?”
“Initially, Grant County caught him with a shit-ton of kiddie porn on his laptop computer. We’re talking tweens, eight to eleven years old.” Faith pushed away thoughts of her own children. “Nesbitt was sentenced to five years with possible probation after three, but it never came to that. The idiot is king of the self-inflicted wound. He started making trouble the minute he walked through the gates. Lots of fighting, holding on to contraband, stealing shit from the wrong people. Finally, he ended up punching out a CO who woke up out of a coma two weeks later. Nesbitt got two dimes tacked onto his initial sentence for attempted murder of a corrections officer.”
“He’s looking at Buck Rogers Time,” Amanda said, using old-timey slang for a release date so far into the future that it felt like a fantasy. “Nesbitt doesn’t have a lot to lose. He has a history of creating trouble. What’s your impression? Does he really think he’s going to walk out of here?”
“He’s a below-the-knee amputee.”
“Does that change your answer?”
“No.” Faith tried to put herself in Nesbitt’s shoe. “He’s behind bars for the attack on the CO no matter what happens to his original case. There’s no causal connection between the alleged constitutional violation and the acts he took against the guard. But here’s where the chess moves come in. Take away the cloud hanging over Nesbitt’s head concerning the Grant County investigation. If Nesbitt can get the kiddie porn charge off his sheet, he’s out of protective custody. Then, he can petition for transfer. Yes, he’s got the attempted murder on the CO, but I can see a scenario where he argues diminished capacity because of the disability. That could buy him a ticket into a low-security facility, which is a country-club compared to where he is now.”
“You think he’s playing us for better accommodations?”
“I think he’s absolutely playing us. Con’s gonna con. Nesbitt wouldn’t do this if he wasn’t working at least twenty different angles. My gut tells me that vengeance against Grant County is his primary motive, but there’s a lot of other benefits he can get if we re-open his original case. Attention. Special treatment. Trips to the police station, the courthouse.”
Amanda asked, “Will? Anything to add?”
Will said, “No.”
Amanda told Faith, “Tell me about Nesbitt’s petitions for post-trial relief.”
“He appealed his kiddie porn conviction on two separate issues.” Faith referred to her notes to make sure she got it right. “First, he said the initial search of his house that revealed the contents of his hard drive was fruit of the poisoned tree. Law enforcement did not have a warrant and they did not have probable cause to enter his residence. Nothing pointed to him as a suspect.”
“Second?”
“Even if law enforcement had probable cause to enter, they were limited to searching for a suspect or a weapon or a possible hostage, not a computer file. They would’ve needed a warrant to search the computer.”
Amanda’s eyebrow rose up again, because Nesbitt’s lawyers were on firmer ground. “And?”
Faith’s cheeks felt red. Will had started to pay close attention. He had a weird sixth sense about when shit was about to get real. “One of the detectives testified at trial that she was searching the desk drawers for weapons when she accidentally bumped the laptop. The screen woke up, she saw images of child pornography, and they charged Nesbitt for possession of illegal images.”
“Lena Adams.” Amanda’s disgusted tone said it all. None of them bought the story. This was why Nick had been so hot under the collar when they were interviewing Nesbitt. For Faith’s part, she wouldn’t believe Lena Adams if the crooked cop swore on a stack of Bibles that the sun rose in the east.
Faith felt overwhelmed by the need to state the obvious. “If we discover during an investigation that Lena lied about how the porn was found on Nesbitt’s computer, then every single case she’s ever worked on will be put under a microscope. And Nesbitt can make a damn good argument to kick that porn charge off his sheet. We would basically be helping a pedophile.”
“You just said he’d remain in prison.”
“But it would be a nicer prison.”
“We’ll burn that bridge when we cross it.” Amanda paced off the space between the pulpit and the wall, her hands clasped together under her chin. “Tell me about the newspaper articles.”
Faith wanted to stew on Nesbitt some more, but Amanda was right.
She said, “All of the articles appear to be from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution except for the Grant County ones, which are from the Grant Observer. When I asked Nesbitt how he got the articles, he said ‘a friend’ sent them.”
“Mother? Father?”
“According to his jacket, Nesbitt’s mother died from an overdose when he was a kid. His stepfather raised him, but that guy’s been serving time in the Atlanta Pen for almost a decade. They don’t write or talk on the phone. Nesbitt’s got no other family. He hasn’t had a visitor since he entered the system. He doesn’t make phone calls or send emails. Unless he’s using a contraband phone, then all bets are off.”
“I’ll put in a request for Nesbitt’s mail. There’s a central station where all inmate correspondences are scanned and cross-checked for suspected criminal activity.” Amanda typed the order into her phone, asking Faith, “What’s the importance of Nesbitt’s one-week deadline? What happens in a week?”
“The prison is taken off lockdown. Maybe his phone smuggling information won’t be relevant when the inmates are out of their cells. Maybe they’ll kick his ass if they find out he’s been talking to the po-po.” She shrugged. “Maybe he’s been inside long enough to know that inertia is the enemy of progress.”
“Maybe.” She dropped her phone back into her pocket. “Should I be worried about Nick?”
Faith’s stomach clenched. “Everybody needs worrying about sometime.”
“Thank you, Agent Fortune Cookie.” She rolled her hand at the wrist to move along the conversation. “Return to the articles.”
“Eight possible victims total. And obviously that’s not including Grant County.” Faith looked back at her notes. “They were all Caucasian females between nineteen and forty-one years old. They were students, office workers, an EMT, a kindergarten teacher, and a vet tech. Married. Divorced. Single. The articles start with Grant County. The other cases spanned the subsequent eight years and took place in Pickens, Effingham, Appling, Taliaferro, Dougall, and if he’s right about the woman found yesterday, White County.”
“So, someone took a dartboard to the state.” Amanda turned and paced back to the pulpit. “MO?”
“All the women were reported missing by friends or family. They were found anywhere from eight days to three months later, usually in a wooded area. Not hidden, just laid on the ground. Some were on their backs. Some were face-down, on their sides. A lot were ravaged by local wildlife, especially the ones up north. All of the victims were dressed in their own clothes.”
“Raped?”
“The articles don’t say, but if we’re talking murder, we’re more than likely talking about rape.”
“Cause of death?”
Faith didn’t have to look at her notes, because the deaths had all been classified the same way. “None of the coroners saw anything untoward, so we’ve got: unknown, no suspected foul play, unknown, undetermined, wash, rinse, repeat.”
Amanda frowned, but she was clearly unsurprised. At the county level, only coroners had the power to officially rule a death suspicious and request an autopsy by a professional medical examiner.