“Buddy Potter killed two innocent people in cold blood, Mike. Including a mother who was holding her damn baby. You really think a badge is gonna stop him?”

  Hannon drops the argument and focuses on the country highway they’re speeding along. Until something else starts gnawing at him.

  “One thing Curd said I just can’t get outta my mind.”

  Lott snickers. “Lemme guess. When he asked us where ‘Chris’ from the Central freakin’ Intelligence Agency was?”

  “Why would he say something like that out of the blue? What’s that even mean? It’s the only part of his story that really don’t make any sense. And Barbara mentioned Chris, too, when Curd called the Potters. Said she’d just gotten an email from him.”

  “Partner, this is all one big, messed-up puzzle. We got lots of pieces that don’t make any sense yet. Let’s deal with one at a time.”

  Minutes later, with five other state and local police vehicles in tow, Lott and Hannon’s Charger rolls to a stop in front of the Potter house. They and ten other law enforcement officers exit and start to fan out around the property.

  Lott, Hannon, and a pair of officers head directly to the front door. As they get near, Buddy throws it open, steps out, and scowls at them.

  As usual, he’s wearing his camo Marine cap and a pistol in his hip holster.

  “Now what on God’s green earth is this about?”

  “Marvin E. Potter Jr.,” Lott reads with authority from a multipage document, “in accordance with title forty, section six, chapter two of the criminal code of the State of Tennessee, a warrant has been duly issued for your arrest in connection with the homicides of Billie Jean Hayworth and Billy Clay Payne.”

  “Now wait a minute. Y’all are arresting me?”

  The agents and officers step closer to Buddy.

  “Mr. Potter, please turn around and place your hands behind your back.”

  “I’ll put my hands wherever I please. This is outrageous.”

  “Mr. Potter…”

  “Y’all are just wasting time. Yours and mine.”

  “I’ll remind you, you have the right to remain silent.”

  “Oh, I know my damn rights. I’ve spilled my own blood defendin’ them!”

  Lott, Hannon, and the officers now have Buddy surrounded—which only seems to put him more on edge.

  “Mr. Potter, I’m going to ask you one more time. Turn around and place your—”

  “He’s goin’ for his gun!” Hannon shouts.

  Thinking fast, Hannon and Lott lunge at Buddy—and forcibly grab hold of the older man’s arms.

  His pistol never leaves its holster.

  Neither does the concealed mini revolver in his ankle holster.

  Nor does the combat knife on his belt leave its sheath.

  All those weapons are seized and catalogued as Buddy is led into a cruiser, and Lott, Hannon, and the officers begin their search of the Potters’ house and property.

  Chapter 26

  Tennessee Bureau of Investigation Special Agents Scott Lott and Mike Hannon find nearly sixty firearms—handguns, shotguns, rifles, even an AK-47; enough weaponry to equip a small army—in the basement alone.

  The search of the Potter family home is fastidious and lasts multiple hours, during which time Jenelle and Barbara Potter have been instructed to sit quietly on the living room sofa. They can only watch, visibly uneasy, as their house is turned upside down. They seem especially upset when officers cart away Jenelle’s laptop and the family’s desktop computer, both of which will be sent off to be examined by digital forensic technicians at the state crime lab.

  Officers open every closet, cabinet, and drawer. They look under—and inside—every couch cushion, pillow, and mattress. They thumb through every page of every magazine and book. Hunting for secret cubbies and hidden crawl spaces, they inspect every wall, ceiling, and floorboard. As the search starts to wind down, however, little hard evidence has been found linking anyone in the family to the murders of Billy Payne and Billie Jean Hayworth.

  But then Lott discovers something odd while sifting through stacks of papers on the desk in the living room. He comes upon a picture of Billie Jean that looks to have been printed off the internet. It’s a candid shot of her at an outdoor café with a group of friends. How strange, Lott thinks. This is the woman who was allegedly torturing Jenelle, day in and day out. Why would the Potters have a personal photograph of her?

  Lott continues looking and soon finds additional pictures of Billie Jean. In one, she’s washing her car. In another, she and some friends are rock climbing. In a third, she’s lying on a beach, wearing a pink bikini.

  On the top of this last photo, the words Billie Whore have been written in black Sharpie.

  Lott considers asking Jenelle and Barbara about the pictures, but he decides to keep quiet. He gathers them all up in a pile, intending to bag and catalogue them later, and sets them down on a chair near the couch where the women are sitting.

  “What are those?” Barbara asks, craning her neck to get a look.

  “Possible evidence, ma’am,” Lott responds. “Need you to stay seated, please.”

  Lott goes back to searching the living room—when a moment later, out of the corner of his eye, he sees Barbara get up, grab the stack of photos, and start to tear them down the middle.

  “Hey, stop that!” Lott calls out.

  He rushes over and just barely manages to snatch the pages out of her hands before she does too much damage. Frankly, that Barbara brazenly attempted to destroy these photographs right in front of him tells Lott they may be even more important than he’d realized.

  “Now sit back down!” he commands. “And don’t either of y’all try that again unless you’d rather wait in the back of a squad car.”

  Once the search of the house is complete, Lott and Hannon shift their focus to Buddy’s pickup truck. They inspect every inch of it, from top to bottom—here, too, looking for secret compartments and hiding spots.

  But that isn’t necessary. A great deal of evidence is sitting out in plain sight. In the center console is a handful of loose .38 bullets, the same caliber as the ones that killed Billy and Billie Jean. And in the truck bed are three suspiciously full trash bags.

  Carefully, with latex-gloved hands, Lott and Hannon slice them open.

  To their surprise, inside the bags they find reams of shredded documents. None of them are readable, but they all appear to be printed emails.

  “Potter’s got enough confetti for a ticker-tape parade,” says Hannon. “Think any of this might be relevant to the case?”

  Lott answers, “Based on what I saw this afternoon? Barbara has a history of trying to destroy sensitive pages. So, yes, I have a hunch they’re relevant. Let’s get ’em to the lab, see if they can’t start putting ’em back together.”

  “But that could take weeks,” Hannon says. “Months. If it’s even possible at all.”

  “We’re hunting a cold-blooded killer, Mike. We’ll tell ’em to pick up the pace.”

  Chapter 27

  Special Agents Scott Lott and Mike Hannon guide Buddy Potter into the chief deputy’s office for questioning. Like Jamie Curd before him, he takes a seat in the plush leather armchair against the back wall. Lott and Hannon sit across from him on either side.

  Unlike Jamie, Buddy’s wrists are handcuffed in front of him.

  Lott shoots daggers at Buddy, letting him stew for a bit before they get started.

  Finally the agent asks, “You know why you’re here, right?”

  Buddy shrugs. Confident. Nonchalant.

  “Somebody’s told you I’m the one who killed somebody.”

  Hannon asks plainly, “Did you? You can be the one to tell us the truth.”

  Buddy shakes his head. “I’m not gonna tell you I did somethin’ I didn’t do.”

  “We don’t think you killed them,” Lott says. “We know you killed them, okay?”

  “I did not kill Billy Payne and Billie Jean Hayworth. Like my wife told y’all, we heard about it on the news.”

  “You didn’t shoot Billy in the face? Then slit his throat with your bowie knife while he was still gaspin’ for his last few breaths? You didn’t shoot Billie Jean in the face, too? While she was clutchin’ her newborn son, screamin’ and cryin’ and beggin’ for her life?”

  “Nope.”

  “You didn’t kill them,” says Hannon, “out of revenge for the way they were treatin’ your daughter? You didn’t kill them to keep Jenelle safe, ’cause you were afraid of what they might do to her?”

  Buddy shakes his head. Bored and annoyed. “Y’all can ask it as many different ways as you want. I sure didn’t like Billy and Billie Jean. But I didn’t kill them.”

  “All right,” replies Lott. “Let me ask you something else then, Mr. Potter. What did you say to Jamie Curd on the phone last night?”

  Buddy blinks a few times. Then a few times more.

  “Come again?”

  “Yesterday evening, Jamie placed a telephone call to your home. He spoke briefly with your wife. Then he spoke to you. I’d like to know what you told him.”

  “I…can’t remember it exactly.”

  Hannon takes out a few sheets of paper from a file. “Maybe we can refresh your memory. According to our transcript, Jamie said to you, ‘You got rid of everything from Billy’s, didn’t you?’ You said, ‘Uh-huh.’ What did you mean by that?”

  Buddy sags in his seat. He licks his lips.

  In an instant, his demeanor has entirely shifted from defiant to that of a very guilty man. But he’s also completely clammed up.

  Lott asks, “Mr. Potter, are you a cold-blooded killer? Or protector of your family?”

  “I’m protector of my family. But I did not do this.”

  Lott continues, “I believe you were sick and tired of the most precious person in your life being attacked and harassed. Constantly. I know that, okay? I know how you must have felt.”

  Buddy stares off into the distance.

  Then he starts to break down.

  “Ever since all this crap started,” he says, “I’ve had my life threatened! My wife has been threatened! They—they’ve threatened to take Jenelle, cut her head off! Murder her!” The brawny former Marine starts choking back emotion.

  Seizing on the momentum, Hannon says, “In your mind, you had no other choice.”

  Lott says, “You had to kill them, Buddy. To protect Jenelle. You had to.”

  Buddy lifts his cuffed wrists and buries his face in his hands.

  The agents wait. Eagerly. But Buddy still won’t outright confess.

  Their questioning continues like this for quite some time. They come at Buddy from all angles, prodding him again and again to admit his participation in the murders.

  And yet he won’t.

  To anyone watching the interrogation, Buddy’s fear, remorse, and guilt are obvious. Along with Jamie’s testimony, the matching-caliber bullets found in Buddy’s truck, and his admission to having been at the crime scene, it’s inconceivable that any jury in the state would let Buddy walk.

  Still, Lott and Hannon want an absolutely airtight case.

  They want a confession.

  After a few solid hours of dancing around in circles, Lott gets an idea.

  He hands Buddy a telephone and asks him to dial.

  “Hello?” says a woman on the other end.

  “Barbara?” mutters Buddy. “Before you find out from somebody else…I want you to know…I was involved in it. I did it. I didn’t want you two to be afraid no more.”

  Barbara lets out a long breath that almost sounds like a whistle.

  “Buddy, you’re really not yourself right now. You need to think about it more.”

  “No, Barbara. I have thought about it.”

  “Well, I don’t understand what you’re even talkin’ about,” she says, sounding awfully unemotional for a woman whose husband just confessed to two homicides. “You were here at home with me all night! You can tell ’em that if you want. I saw you.”

  Lott and Hannon exchange a look. Is Barbara suggesting she’ll lie for Buddy and provide him an alibi? Does that mean she already knew he’d killed Billy and Billie Jean? Could she have been involved in the murders as well?

  “Yeah, I know but…listen to me, Barb. I just said I did it. It is what it is.”

  Buddy ends the call and, tail between his legs, hands the receiver back to Lott. He might have managed to avoid confessing directly to his interrogators. But from the slump of his shoulders, it’s clear he understands that his fate is sealed.

  “What I still wanna know is,” Lott says, “how’d you get so much nonsense in your head in the first place? Jenelle and the victims were squabbling online, sure. But that’s all it was. We’ve seen no evidence of any real-life threats made against her or you or your wife. None. Where’d you get all that crap, Potter?”

  But Buddy just grumbles, “I’m done talkin’.”

  Chapter 28

  Eight months later

  It’s a crisp autumn day in 2012 when Tennessee assistant district attorney general Dennis Brooks, a senior prosecutor with fourteen years’ experience, is assigned the most complex, high-profile, utterly bizarre double-homicide case of his career.

  Brooks recalls vividly the local and national media attention the heart-wrenching murders of Billy Payne and Billie Jean Hayworth received earlier in the year. Two vibrant new parents, executed in their own home, one literally holding their infant in her arms—all supposedly because they had unfriended a woman on Facebook?

  At least, that was the sensational narrative the press ran with. Was it true?

  Brooks has a hunch there’s more to the story. First, he’ll have to establish a complete timeline and theory of the crimes, and then decide what charges to file against whom—and, most important, what to argue at trial to secure convictions.

  Brooks clears off the mahogany desk in his book-lined office, loosens his tie, and cracks open the banker’s box that contains all the relevant case materials. Crime scene photos. Autopsy results. Forensic lab reports. Police interrogation notes.

  There are reams of documents to sift through, but the case against Buddy Potter and Jamie Curd seems cut-and-dried. The evidence against them is overwhelming. Both men have checkered histories with the victims. Ballistics tests also matched markings on the bullet that killed Billy with similar identifying markings on loose rounds found in Buddy’s truck. And just in case the jury still has any doubts, both men are on tape confessing—Buddy to his wife, Jamie to investigators.

  But for Brooks, a few things aren’t adding up.

  First, toward the end of his interrogation, Jamie casually asks investigators the whereabouts of someone named “Chris,” who worked for the CIA. Then, on the phone with Jamie, Barbara mentions receiving an email from a Chris as well. Who could they possibly have been referring to? How, if at all, does this mystery man fit into the case?

  Second, during Buddy’s police interview, he speaks of wanting to protect Jenelle from murder at the hands of Billy and Billie Jean. But the victims were frazzled new parents with no history of violence, who only wanted to be left alone. Where did Buddy get such vile, paranoid ideas?

  It doesn’t take long for Brooks to get his answers.

  At the bottom of the banker’s box, he finds a thumb drive. On it is half a gigabyte of Facebook and Topix posts. Copies of hundreds of text messages. And lots and lots of emails. Nearly a thousand in all. Many were pulled from the computers seized at the Potter house, and some were painstakingly reconstructed by the crime lab from the trash bags of shredded documents found in Buddy’s pickup.

  Brooks plugs in the drive and starts going through this mountain of correspondence between Jenelle, Jamie, Barbara, and “Chris.”

  What he reads is horrifying—but incredibly illuminating.

  Brooks notes that Chris was the one who initiated contact with Barbara and Jamie, and that he was the source of the most outlandish claims—that Billy was in a drug gang, that he was plotting to kill Jenelle and hurt her family—for which there is zero evidence.

  Chris’s emails are incendiary, claiming to Barbara that Jamie said he was willing to commit murder on Jenelle’s behalf, while convincing Jamie that Jenelle might commit suicide if her tormentors weren’t stopped. Chris boasts of his own past covert operations and assassinations, and muses about taking out Billy and Billie Jean himself. And he encourages Barbara to bring Jamie and Buddy together to plan and carry out the murder.

  Brooks thinks whoever the hell this Chris guy is, he ought to be on trial, too. What kind of CIA agent would do all this?

  The answer, of course, is obvious.

  Despite what the Potters and Jamie Curd seem to believe, Chris isn’t a real CIA agent at all.

  Not a chance.

  Like most people, Brooks doesn’t really know much about the Central Intelligence Agency beyond what he’s seen in spy movies. But he’s pretty damn sure no actual CIA agent would spend months obsessing over a silly social media feud among some melodramatic young people in rural Tennessee.

  No actual CIA agent would write literally hundreds of detailed, delusional, inflammatory emails about it.

  No actual CIA agent would send anyone a “highly classified photograph” of himself wearing a black shirt and a badge as a way of proving his identity.

  No actual CIA agent would share fantasies about killing innocent people.

  No actual CIA agent would dupe civilians into committing murder.

  For Brooks, the question now becomes: Who’s the real Chris?

  There are multiple candidates, but in his mind, only one of them fits the bill.

  Jenelle Potter.

  Dennis Brooks soon comes to the conclusion that Jenelle, consumed by her unrequited love for Billy and her intense jealousy of Billie Jean, created the persona of “Chris” to manipulate her boyfriend and parents into murdering the couple.

  Brooks knows how his theory must sound.