“Maybe somebody in the cartel who decided he wanted a bigger piece of the action and decided to take it?”
“We talked about that, but then, why bring in Poole? That Biloxi drug stuff comes through a Honduras cartel, a real professional operation,” Martin said. “If you’re in that cartel, you’d know plenty of guys with guns, but you wouldn’t know Poole. Poole’s not a drug guy, he’s a Dixie Hicks guy. A holdup man. Completely different set of bad guys. They really don’t intersect.”
“Huh. If we could find the spotter, that’d be a big step,” Lucas said.
“Yeah, it would, but we haven’t come up with anything yet,” Martin said. “We’d do anything we could to get our hands on Poole. We think he killed one of our guys a few years ago.”
“I saw that.”
They talked for a few more minutes, but Lucas got the impression that Mississippi was running out of possibilities. He thanked Martin and went back to the paper on his desk.
Poole first ran into the law when he was eleven years old, after a schoolyard fight. Unlike most schoolyard fights, this wasn’t two punches with the loser swearing togetthe other guy. Poole knockedthe loser down, then kicked him in the face and ribs and back, until a teacher dragged him off. The loser went to the hospital in an ambulance.
There were no more fights until high school. Then, there was only one, with the same result: the loser went to the hospital. A witness told a juvenile court that Poole had “gone psycho.” Poole, who’d been a running back on the junior high and then sophomore football teams, was kicked out of school.
A few weeks later, he held up a dry cleaner’s with a toy pistol. The dry cleaner had a lot of cash and no protection at all: Poole hadn’t gone after a place that might be ready for him, like a liquor store or a convenience store.
The holdup also demonstrated his youthful inexperience. Although he’d picked on a store well north of his home in a Nashville suburb, he hadn’t known about video cameras, and two cameras were mounted on a Dunkin’ Donuts store in the same shopping center and picked up Poole’s face.
He looked very young and the cops took photos around to the high schools and arrested Poole the same day as he’d done the robbery, with most of the money still in his pocket. He was sent to the Mountain View Youth Development Center, where he spent nine months working the woodshop and talking to other teenage felons about the best way to proceed with a life of crime.
Three years after his release, he was arrested again after he and two other men cut through a roof into the box office of a country music venue and robbed it. They got away with a hundred and ten thousand dollars, but one of the men, Boyd Harper, had an angry girlfriend named Rhetta Ann Joyce, who ratted out Harper to the cops.
She did that after learning Harper had spent thirty thousand dollars, virtually his entire cut of the country music money, on cocaine and hookers, and she hadn’t been invited. She had, however, contracted a fiery case of gonorrhea, passed on from one of the hookers and not, as Harper tried to tell her, from a toilet seat.
Harper, in turn, ratted out Poole and an accomplice named Dave Adelstein in return for a shorter sentence. Poole and Adelstein did four years at West Tennessee State Prison. Harper got only a year and a day, at Southeastern Tennessee Regional Correctional Facility, where he studied culinary arts. He’d served only four months when a person unknown stuck the sharpened butt of a dinner fork into his heart. Poole and Adelstein couldn’t have done that themselves, but Tennessee state cops believed that they paid for the killing through a contractual arrangement between Tennessee prison gangs.
They also believed that Poole and/or Adelstein might have had something to do with the demise of Rhetta Ann Joyce, who either jumped or was thrown off the New River Railroad Bridge a month after the two men were released from prison. They believed she was thrown because of the rope around her neck.
The rope might possibly have shown some intention to commit suicide, except that suicides rarely use mountain climbing ropes a hundred and ten feet long. Joyce’s neck hit the bottom of the noose so hard that her head popped off. The head wasn’t found until two weeks after the body, a half mile farther down the New River Gorge, washed up on a sandbar.
Lucas, looking at the riverbank crime scene photo of Joyce’s head, muttered, “That’s not nice.”
—
POOLE HADnot been arrested again, but was widely understood by state and federal law enforcement officials to have been a prime mover of the Dixie Hicks, a loose confederation of holdup men working the lower tier of Confederate states.
He was also believed by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation to have murdered a highway patrolman named Richard Wayne Coones, shot one night on lonely Highway 21 between Bogue Chitto and Shuqualak, Mississippi. The cops got his name from Al Jim Hudson, who said in a deathbed confession that he was in the car when Poole shot Coones. Hudson died shortly thereafter of internal injuries he had suffered while resisting arrest.
FBI intelligence agents learned from a source unnamed in Lucas’s papers that Poole had eventually accumulated over a million dollars in gold—maybe well over a million—on which he intended to retire to Mexico or Belize. Neither the Mexican nor the Belize cops ever got a sniff of him, not that they admitted to, anyway. Lucas knew nothing about Belize cops, but he’d met a high-level Mexican police-intelligence officer and had been impressed. If the Mexicans didn’t know about Poole, he probably wasn’t in Mexico.
Then rumors began to circulate that Poole had been murdered by a Dixie Hicks rival named Ralph (Booger) Baca. According to the source, Baca threw Poole’s body into the Four Holes Swamp in South Carolina, from which it was never recovered. A few months after he allegedly murdered Poole, Baca died in a freak accident when he turned the key on his Harley-Davidson and the Fat Bobextra-capacity tanks inexplicably exploded in his face, turning Baca into a human torch. He lingered, but not long.
Poole had not been seen or heard of again, until the killings in Biloxi. If, in fact, that was Poole at all.
Whether or not it was, Lucas thought, people died around Poole, both his friends and his enemies, including one little girl who had the bad luck to have a dope dealer as a grandfather. But if the DNA and video-camera connection was correct, Poole wasn’t dead. Not yet.
—
IN READINGthrough Poole’s history, Lucas found several notes by a retired MBI investigator named Rory Pratt. Lucas got a number from the MBI and called him.
“Tracked him all over the South,” Pratt said in a deep Mississippi accent. “We didn’t always know who or what we were chasing, but we weren’t gonna quit after Dick Coones got shot down. That was as cold-blooded a killing as you’re likely to find. We looked at everything, but it was like chasing a shadow. We’d hear rumors that he’d been involved in a robbery at such-and-such a place and we’d be there the next day. Never really got hold of anything solid. We talked to guys who were actually involved in some of these holdups and they always denied knowing Poole—but being of that element, they knew what had happened to people whohadtalked about Poole.”
“You get any feel for whether he was actually involved in any of the robberies you checked?” Lucas asked. “Lot of people think he’s dead.”
“He’s not dead. I guarantee that. Not unless someone snuck up behind him and shot him and buried the body in the dark of the moon, and never told anyone. Another thing is, he’s got a girlfriend named Pandora Box...”
“I read that, but I thought it was a joke,” Lucas said.
