straightforward to me. Felony murder, pled to second degree, thirty years, served twenty. No ballistics?”
Roe shook his head. “We never found the bullet.”
“Two eyewitnesses.”
“Yeah.”
They both knew that in the case of violent crimes eyewitness reports could be among the least reliable evidence of all.
Buck glanced through the reports submitted by the arresting officer in Georgia and flipped over to the suspect’s statement. Halfway through, he smothered a mirthless snort of laughter. “If I was going to try to alibi out, I believe I’d come up with something better than I was on my way home from selling crack to Smokey Beardsley at the time of the robbery.” He glanced up at Roe. “Checked out, did it?”
Roe rubbed his nose, his lips quirking dryly. “About like you’d expect. Keep reading.”
Meg placed a mug of coffee in front of Buck and topped off Roe’s from the pot she carried. Buck thanked her and she said, “It’ll just be another minute on those fries, hon.” The room had already begun to fill with the aroma of hot grease.
Meg went back to the kitchen, calling good-bye to the two ladies as the bell over the door announced their departure. Buck read on, paused, and read it again. He glanced at Roe. “Hit and run, huh? Did an accident report ever come in?”
The other man shook his head. “He says it was just a fender bender, no injuries. Maybe no damage. The other party might not have wanted to turn it in to their insurance, or might not have wanted it on their record for whatever reason. Could have been some kid in daddy’s car…” He shrugged. “Lots of reasons.”
“So he drove up from Georgia about five o’clock that afternoon, stopped at the Cash-n-Carry for gas and kept the receipt, spent an hour or two visiting his good buddy Smokey, and was sixty miles away, sideswiping a green sedan, by nine-o’clock, when the robbery happened. No ideas on the other driver?”
Roe shook his head. “He said he didn’t see the driver, but swore up and down he could identify the passenger. There’s a description there.”
Buck glanced at it. “Pretty generic. Still, if he could’ve found whoever was in the other car, that would have corroborated his timeline. And with everything else circumstantial…” He shrugged. “I can’t see him serving time. I’m guessing you never found the other car?”
“Never looked,” said Roe. “By the time we got around to it, he’d pled out.”
Police matters in a small town never moved with quite the same efficiency that they did on television crime dramas. Buck flipped through the file once more, then looked up at Roe. “What am I missing here? Some passing cokehead commits armed robbery on his way home from dealing drugs, no other connections here… What made you put in a notification request? You got some reason to think he might come back here? What’s special about this guy?”
Roe sipped his coffee. “Yeah, I wondered the same thing at the time. I wasn’t the one who wanted to keep tabs on him. It was Jon.”
Buck frowned a little. “Judge Stockton?”
“He was the judge on the case.”
Buck thought about that while Meg set a tall club sandwich and a steaming plate of fries in front of him. “You boys need anything else right now? I’ve got some sweet tea if you get tired of that coffee.”
“Thanks, Meg, it looks great.”
Buck reached for the bottle of ketchup on the table as Meg departed, and he said, “So did this dude Berman threaten him or what?”
“Not in open court. That would’ve gone on the record. He just came to me real quiet like a day or two later and asked would I do him a favor and let him know when the man got out.”
“Wonder why,” said Buck.
“I asked. Never did get an answer.”
“Maybe he knew the family.”
“Maybe.”
Buck ate in silence for a while. Then he said, “So do you think you got the right man?”
Roe leaned back again in his seat and released a quiet breath. “I don’t know.” His tone was heavy. “At the time I did. You know how it is. We get a handful of violent crimes a year around here, most of them drug-related. We put it out over the wire and within the hour the Georgia boys picked up a DUI matching his description, same kind of damage to the front fender, a wad of cash and a thirty-eight in the glove box… Looked like a wrap to me. You don’t go