Trial, page 25
“And you’re saying Bullock did that.”
“Not just me—the GBI. They checked. Since 2017, George had no personal cell phone account—anywhere. End stop.”
Ford’s skeptical expression deepened. “In other words, every single personal cell phone communication George Bullock made for the last four years was on his departmental phone. Which, I assume, was taken off his body during the crime scene search shortly after he died.”
“Exactly. Which means we know exactly what was on it. Not just his communications with Deputy Spinetta on that night he died, which we will be happy to show you. But every text, phone message, and email, including whether Dorothy wanted him to stop at the Piggly Wiggly for a quart of milk.” Harris held up a hand. “No doubt you have a personal cell phone account, and so do I. But there’s nothing on my personal cell I’d be ashamed to have the public see or hear, and I’m confident that’s true of you and the congressman. But one thing I can tell you for sure—it was true of George Bullock. We’ve looked.”
“What about his personal computer?”
“There’s a lot of overlap with his departmental phone. Every email, for example.”
“Even so,” Ford persisted, “I’d like to see it. I’m curious about social media.”
“On what grounds?” Harris’ face closed. “You’ve got no idea, do you? The essence of your defense is making George Bullock look dirty, any way you can. If you’ve got some better reason, I’ll listen. But I’ll be damned if I’ll go tormenting Dorothy Bullock just so you can drag her husband’s corpse through the mud. You’ll need Judge Tilly for that.”
“Sorry, Dalton.” Ford’s voice was at once soft and unrepentant. “Seems to me like you’re feeling the heat. Been getting phone calls at home in the middle of the night? Because I sure have, and so has Allie.” His tone grew quieter yet. “We’ve got a problem here, don’t we? You, me, Allie, and Malcolm. Even your friends on the county commission are getting a little weak in the knees.”
Pausing, Ford glanced over at Chase. “I haven’t had time to share this with Congressman Brevard. But just before coming over, I heard there’s going to be a big rally tonight outside of town, for the right-wing whack job running against Governor Trask. Seems that commissioners gave the man a permit for the field right by where George Bullock got shot, and he’s promising some special surprises. I’m guessing your prospective primary rival Matthew Bell will appear as a lesser attraction. Sort of sends chills down your spine, doesn’t it?”
Abruptly, Harris looked queasy, though not as queasy as Chase felt. “I had nothing to do with that,” he said stiffly.
“But it has something to do with you. And Malcolm.” Ford paused, then continued in a ruminative tone. “Because I’ve got the funniest feeling you know or suspect more about St. George than you’re saying.”
At once, Chase understood what Ford was doing—counterbalancing the pressures on Ford with the possibility that outside forces, perhaps the Justice Department or the media, would discover things about Bullock Harris he suspected might be true.
Gazing at Ford, Harris composed himself. “Bravely spoken, Jabari. At least for a lawyer whose client looks like a murderer. Get back to me when you come up with something that makes him look better.”
He stood and, with perfunctory courtesy, ended the meeting.
Leaving, the two men were quiet until they found a private place on the lawn of the courthouse. “That rally’s a nightmare,” Chase said. “There’ll be media descending like vultures to the site of Bullock’s death, all to watch a political candidate call for revenge on Malcolm. I just hope to God he doesn’t watch it.”
“I’ll ask Allie to call Al Garrett, make sure he doesn’t. The young man’s state of mind is already bad enough.” Briefly, Ford looked over his shoulder. “In its own way, so is Dalton’s. But I learned one other thing just now. For whatever good it does us, I’m guessing Bullock had a ghost phone.”
42
In the early evening, Chase found that America’s foremost right-wing news channel had unleashed a torrent of vituperation against Malcolm, a perverse pregame advertisement for the rally in Cade County.
Its most highly rated host—an Ivy League–educated heir to a fortune built on TV dinners who postured as a culture warrior—devoted a half hour to characterizing the Double-XX video as “irrefutable evidence that Malcolm Hill meant to fulfill a perverse racial quota by assassinating white police.” Participating remotely from Cade County, Matthew Bell told his preening interrogator, “The eyes of America are once again on Georgia. If our district attorney does not seek the death penalty, it’s open season on the thin blue line that is our last defense against barbarism.”
Even the advertising, Chase discovered, provided little respite from the assault against Malcolm. In a close-up, Governor Trask declaimed: “We must ensure that those found guilty of killing our protectors receive the ultimate punishment. And I do not—repeat do not—mean a timorous justice system that makes the family of the victim suffer through endless and frivolous appeals.”
The camera shot widened. Sitting beside the governor on a living room couch was Dorothy Bullock, her son, and her daughter. The widow’s face was painfully drawn, and she spoke in a halting voice from what sounded like a script:
“Like so many of you, I’m a Christian wife and mother who put family at the center of my life. I never wanted the spotlight or paid much attention to politics. But when a vicious crime ripped out the hearts of the two children I hold dear, Governor Trask came to offer us comfort. And the greatest comfort of all was his promise to do everything in his power to ensure that another family would not lose a good man like my husband, Deputy Sheriff George Bullock.” For a brief moment, her voice caught before she pleaded, “Please remember us in your prayers, and Governor Trask on Election Day.”
With that, Chase switched off the television, went to his rental car, and began driving toward Old County Road.
Night had fallen. As Chase neared the site of the shooting, his headlights caught a long line of cars parked by the side of the road. He pulled up behind them, considering his own safety. But all others would see in the semidark of the rally, he concluded, was another white man in a baseball cap. They would not be expecting a congressman from Massachusetts come to witness the fever enveloping his son.
Leaving the car, he walked for twenty minutes toward the crowd already filling a field bathed in light, his footsteps crunching gravel. Near the entrance to the rally, he saw a makeshift memorial that marked the place of Bullock’s death, bunches of flowers piling up beneath an easel that contained his photograph in laminated Styrofoam, gazing out with a look of resolute vigilance beneath his visored cap.
The field was surrounded by wooden barriers, with an opening manned by sheriff’s deputies through which Chase passed. The last uniformed man, he realized, was Al Garrett. As Garrett marked faces, his eyes widened slightly in recognition of Chase.
Chase kept moving.
The scene resembled a rock concert in waiting. An ear-shattering sound system pulsed anthems to the patriotism and grit of white Christian America. Klieg lights split the night sky, illuminating a raised wooden platform. Edging through the crowd, Chase saw that the stage was surrounded by armed members of White Lightning who included Charles and Molly Parnell, and chose to stop where he was.
The throng pressing against him smelled of sweat and passion, anticipation and anger, with a fainter scent of beer, whiskey, and marijuana. One bearded man to his right, Chase guessed, was a crackhead or, more likely from the perspiration beaded on his forehead, gripped by opioids. Most of the men and women wore blue jeans and T-shirts, some emblazoned with bolts of white lightning, and many sported red “MAGA” caps smudged and wilted with use.
Comingled among them were conventional-looking types—perhaps businesspeople or professionals—seized by the same passions as their more rough-hewn compatriots. No doubt many of those surrounding him were loving parents, good neighbors, loyal friends; now, as often, Chase wondered at the transformation of ordinary citizens by fear and hatred into people who loathed, at least in the abstract, others in whom had they known them they could have found the elements of their common humanity.
Except for a brown middle-aged couple he assumed were Hispanic, everyone he saw was white. Though they talked among themselves in an indistinct cacophony, their gazes were fixed on a massive movie screen at the rear of the stage. They had been promised a special surprise and, hoping against hope, longed for the ultimate rapture only one man could bring.
No wonder, Chase thought, that the ruling class of Cade County had come to fear them.
Suddenly, spotlights crisscrossed the stage and a lone figure appeared, his bland face and squinty eyes filling the screen behind him. At once Chase recognized the primary challenger to Governor Trask, an ordained minister–turned–firebrand legislator whose defining political brand was fealty to the man he repeatedly called “America’s once and future president.” The screams of recognition filling the air, Chase knew, were less for Larry Clapp the man than for him as a surrogate for their idol.
“You know me,” he began. “I’m a pastor called to save America for the rightful children of a righteous God. I’m running for governor because a Judas who calls himself Trask betrayed His tribune, America’s only true leader…”
At once, Clapp’s biblical indictment was drowned in a confusion of sounds: boos and screams of outrage for Judas, a swelling chorus of longing for America’s only true leader. When at last it had subsided, Clapp proclaimed in righteous contempt: “Like Judas, this traitor named Trask feigned devotion to the man God sent to save us. But two years ago our modern-day Judas betrayed all of us by allowing the enemies of America to steal the presidency…”
Abruptly, Clapp’s visage disappeared. Stunned, Chase found himself deafened by a primal outcry of rage as a photograph of Allie Hill appeared on the screen, surrounded by her allies as she spoke from the steps of the courthouse. It did not escape Chase or anyone around him that the faces of America’s supposed enemies were Black.
Reduced to a strutting pygmy beneath the massive image of Allie, Clapp launched his words through the sound system with reverberating contempt. “But this is the true face of Traitor Trask’s Blue Georgia…”
Replacing his mother, Malcolm Hill’s mug shot filled the screen.
To Chase, his son appeared dazed, his eyes filled with shock at a horror he could not quite believe. But the roar of bloodlust all around him was a call for revenge on a vicious Black killer who was not fully human. “Kill him,” a man’s preternaturally deep voice sounded above the crowd, and then a ragged chant rose from Chase’s neighbors.
“Kill him…kill him…kill him…”
“But let us not despair,” Clapp cried out. “Because this is the face of our once and future America…”
Instantly, Malcolm was erased by the tangerine apparition of their leader.
The crowd screamed in frenzy, fists raised to the sky. Then the leader’s lips began moving, and his legions became still and silent so swiftly that this frightened Chase more than what had come before.
He was speaking, Chase realized, from the palm-rich grounds of the subtropical redoubt where courtiers came to pledge their obeisance. “Before the Great Betrayal,” he said in a tone that fused nostalgia with anger, “we were returning America to what it should be: a proud nation that keeps good people safe from the enemies destroying our cities and overrunning our borders. But look at what’s happened since Traitor Trask—and that’s the perfect name for him—stabbed our country in the back by helping the radical socialist Democrats steal the White House on a wave of massive voter fraud…”
As howls of anger filled the skies, a knowing smile played on his lips.
“Before the Great Betrayal,” he called out, “the radical Democrats and the vicious Black Lives Matter militants only wanted to defund your police. But now that I’m gone, they feel free to kill them.”
He stopped, allowing those in the throng to state their need to cry out against Malcolm. Then he started again, punctuating the din with fresh incitements to hatred and fear.
“Right here in Cade County, a murderous militant who was harvesting illegal ballots killed a heroic deputy, a crusader against drugs who left behind a wife and two children.” His voice rose in anger. “Has everyone seen that video…?”
The answering tumult, ripe with loathing, confirmed for Chase that Malcolm’s moment of carelessness had metastasized from viral to lethal. “Back in the day,” the leader said disdainfully, “we used to know what to do with people like that. But these days we’re oh so polite. So your first line of defense is voting for the only man running for governor who will keep Georgia safe…
“Who will make the death penalty swift and sure…”
“Kill him,” the chant rose again. “Kill him…”
“And who, above all, will stop the radical Democrats from defrauding the good people of Georgia in this election and—even more important—the presidential election of 2024.”
At this promise, the apotheosis of rapturous longing for this man who personified his followers’ unmoored cravings for restoration and revenge, they unleashed a sheet of thunderous noise that, in Chase’s mind, encased them in their own insanity, linking those around him with the mob that had stormed the Capitol. The America they lusted for, so dangerous to Allie and Malcolm, had no place for him.
He was no safer here, Chase realized, than he’d been on January 6. The question was whether leaving or staying would endanger him more.
Surreptitiously, Chase looked around him at profiles illuminated by passions so consuming that perhaps they would not notice a single man edging away. “In 2024,” their leader cried out, “we will stop America’s enemies from running our government…
“Confiscating our guns…
“Toppling our monuments…
“Attacking our religion…
“Destroying our traditions…
“Defiling our schools…
“Corrupting our children…
“And”—here he paused for an emphasis pregnant with warning—“replacing our people, the real Americans, with rapists, murderers, subversives, and foreigners alien to our shores and contemptuous of our laws…”
Had Malcolm been with him, Chase thought, in a frenzy of recognition the people around him might have torn his son apart. It was this, running through him like an electric current, that jolted him into leaving before the rally was over.
Damp with sweat, Chase angled through the press of bodies with his head down, averting his eyes from the open mouths and angry faces, blocking out the cascade of noise summoned by the inflammatory rhetoric of their unstable and narcissistic leader from the safety of his self-obsessed cocoon. “Hey, man, why you leaving?” a man’s voice demanded. “Where you going?”
Silent, Chase kept moving. It took him a half hour to reach an open space near the edge of the crowd and, when he did, the leader’s demands for attention still reverberated through the sound system.
At the corner of his vision, a frazzled, middle-aged blonde woman in a White Lightning T-shirt was staring in apparent recognition. Suddenly, she ran up to him and tipped back his cap, peering into his face with glazed eyes. “Do I know you?” she asked thickly.
Chase tensed at once. “Don’t think so,” he answered, slurring his voice. “I’d remember.”
She regarded him with nearsighted suspicion. Then, quite abruptly, she pressed her lips against his in a simulacrum of sexual hunger and tried to stick her tongue in his mouth, filling his nostrils with the smell of stale beer.
Instinctively, he recoiled. “That’s OK,” the woman told him vaguely. “I love you anyways.” Shoulders slumped, she stumbled away in no particular direction.
Alone now, Chase walked quickly to his car, passing the sound trucks that beamed the rally to millions of American homes. Thinning in the air behind him, the leader’s voice became the indistinct mumble of a grade B monster. In the rearview mirror, the smear of red lipstick on Chase’s mouth looked like blood.
Wiping it off, he remembered accounts of spontaneous carnality after fundamentalist revivals in the 1920s, echoes from what he had thought of as a more primitive America.
Still shaken, Congressman Chase Brevard turned on the ignition and drove toward Allie’s farmhouse.
When he arrived, Jabari Ford was already there, huddled in the dining room with Allie and her communications director, a tall Black woman, all three of them absorbed in a Zoom call with an anchorwoman from MSNBC. Only when the call was finished did Allie look up at Chase, her somber gaze resting on his face.
“I guess you saw the rally,” she said.
“Actually, I was there.”
“You’re insane,” Ford blurted in astonishment.
Chase kept looking at Allie. “Just white,” he answered, “so I could get by with it. But they are.”
For a moment no one spoke. Then Allie said, “I’m going on MSNBC tomorrow night. To tell Malcolm’s story and ask anyone with information to come forward.”
Chase looked from one expectant face to the other, then settled on Allie’s again. “For whatever my opinion’s worth, I don’t think you’ve got any choice.”
Only Allie understood his unspoken coda, the judgment of Malcolm’s father about the dangers to their son he had witnessed in person. “I can see that you’re busy,” he said.
Slowly, Allie nodded. “I’ll walk you out.”
Outside, they faced each other in the darkness, crickets chirring around them. “Malcolm likes the books you brought him,” she said.
