Agent Greer read the pages slowly. His face got more serious with every one.
I realized my arrest might have uncovered something much bigger than one sheriff’s abuse of his badge.
Then Miller pointed to the last entry, and his voice dropped to a whisper.
“This is the incident they told me never to mention.”
The last entry was dated fourteen months earlier, in August of the previous year.
Agent Greer read it out loud.
“August 9. Sheriff arrested Mrs. Hattie Greene, age 81, at her property on Cypress Creek Road. Charge: obstruction and disorderly conduct. She was standing on her porch telling surveyors from Pinecrest Holdings to get off her land. She was not disorderly. She was crying.
At booking she said she needed her heart pills. They were in her purse. Sheriff said no medication until she saw the jail nurse. Jail nurse doesn’t come on weekends.
August 10. Mrs. Greene asked for her pills four times. I asked the sheriff twice. He said, ‘She’ll live.’
August 11, 3:15 a.m. Mrs. Greene found unresponsive in cell 3. Taken to Pell County Memorial.
August 13. Mrs. Greene died.
Sheriff told everybody on shift never to mention the pills. He said the report would say she was found unresponsive with no prior complaint. He said if anybody said different, they’d be done in law enforcement in this state.”
Nobody in the room breathed.
I knew that name. I’d read it in one of the thirty-one letters Aunt Lorraine sent me. It had been written on yellow legal paper in a teenage boy’s handwriting.
“My great-grandmother Hattie Greene died in the Pell County Jail. They say it was her heart. But she called my mama from jail and said they took her pills. Nobody will listen. They sold her land three months after she died. Please, somebody, listen. — Jaylen Greene, age 17.”
Agent Greer looked up from the notebook at Voss.
“Sheriff, what is Pinecrest Holdings?”
Voss didn’t answer.
But AUSA Delgado did. She pulled a document from her portfolio and laid it beside Miller’s notebook.
“Pinecrest Holdings LLC,” she said, “was registered with the Georgia Secretary of State two years ago. Its registered agent is a man named Wade Purcell.” She looked at Voss. “Your brother-in-law.”
The deputy who’d been at the computer, a heavyset man named Briggs, made a small sound like he’d been punched.
“In the last two years,” Delgado went on, reading from her notes, “Pinecrest Holdings has acquired eleven parcels of land in Pell County, all through tax deed sales or estate sales. Total acreage: roughly six hundred and forty acres of timberland and river frontage. Every single one of those parcels belonged to someone who was arrested by this department within the twelve months before they lost the property.”
