A Time for Mercy (Jake Brigance #3) - John Grisham Page 0,92

anything. Hank Grayson, the only known eyewitness, said in his deposition that he thought there was a car behind him, though he made it clear he wasn’t certain. Jake went through every photograph and slowly collected the names of the people at the site. Most were from Ford County, and some admitted they showed up when they heard the chatter on their police scanners. At least a dozen were late-night travelers who got stuck on the road during the three hours it took to remove the bodies and clear the scene. Jake tracked down each one of these. Not a one had witnessed the accident; indeed, most arrived long after it happened.

But in six of the photos, there was a white man with a bald head who looked out of place. He was about fifty, wore a dark suit, white shirt, dark tie, much too nicely dressed for rural Ford County on a Friday night. He stood with other spectators and watched as the firemen cut and sawed to remove the four bodies. No one seemed to know him. Jake asked the first responders about the man, but no one had ever seen him. In Jake’s world, he became the mysterious stranger, the man in the dark suit.

Melvin Cochran lived a quarter of a mile from the crossing and was awakened that night by sirens. He got dressed, went outside, saw the carnival-like scene down the hill, and grabbed his video camera. As he walked to the scene, with the switch on, he began to pass cars parked on the shoulder, all headed east. Once at the scene, he filmed for almost an hour before the battery ran low. Jake got a copy of the video and had watched it, frame by frame, for hours. The man in the dark suit was in several scenes, observing the tragedy, at times seemingly bored and wanting to move on.

As Melvin approached the site, he passed a total of eleven parked vehicles. Jake was able to identify the license plates on seven of them. The others were obscured. Five of the seven were from Ford County, one was from Tyler County, and one was from Tennessee. He doggedly tracked down each one and eventually matched the vehicles with the names and faces of their owners in the crowd.

On a wall in a workroom, Jake cut and pasted and pieced together a large composite of the scene with small nameplates for twenty-six rescue personnel and thirty-two spectators. Everyone was identified, except the man in the dark suit.

The vehicle with Tennessee plates was registered to a food brokerage firm in Nashville; thus, no individual name was available. For a month Jake considered this to be a dead end, which didn’t bother him. He figured that if the mysterious man had seen anything relevant he would have spoken to an officer on the scene. But it nagged him. The man had an odd look about him, and Jake was chasing every detail. The case could be the biggest one of his career and he was determined to know everything about it.

He would later curse his curiosity.

He finally paid $250 to a private investigator in Nashville and sent him a photo of the mystery man. Two days later, the investigator faxed Jake a report, one that he at first wanted to destroy. It read:

I went to the corporate address with the photo and asked around. I was directed to the office of Mr. Neal Nickel, a district rep of some sort. He was obviously the man in the photo and I showed it to him. He was surprised that I had found him and he asked how I did so. I said I was working for some of the lawyers involved with the case but did not give any names. We talked for maybe fifteen minutes. Nice guy, with nothing to hide. He said he had been to the wedding of a relative down in Vicksburg and was on his way back home. He lives in a suburb of Nashville. Said he was not familiar with Highway 88 but thought it might save some time. As he crossed into Ford County he began to follow a pickup truck, one that was all over the road. So he backed off and gave the guy plenty of room, said the driver was obviously drunk. As they went down a hill, he saw the highway signs indicating a crossing ahead. Then he saw the red warning lights flashing