Afraid of the Dark

Chapter Thirty-five

Douglas Road,” the driver said as the Metro-Dade bus squeaked to a stop.

Vince rose and offered a sincere “Thank you” on his way out; bus drivers were supposed to call out stops for the blind, but not all of them did. The smell of diesel fumes engulfed him as the bus pulled away, and Vince could hear the click-clack of Sam’s nails on the sidewalk as his four-legged friend led him to the crosswalk.

“Time for a doggy pedicure, buddy.”

Vince stopped at the crosswalk, checked his GPS navigator, and waited for the familiar female robotic voice: “Go one hundred yards, and your destination is on the right.” The traffic light changed with an audible click, and Sam led the way across the street.

Vince had visited MLFC headquarters before, but his mental image of it was sketchy. Although he had received a full tour, Chuck Mays’ idea of being descriptive for the benefit of his blind friend was simply to add his all-purpose adverb to everything. The offices weren’t big; they were f-ing big. The computers weren’t superfast; they were super f-ing fast.

“You have arrived,” announced the navigation system. Sam stopped, and by Vince’s calculation, they were directly in front of Chuck’s building.

“Over here, Paulo,” said Chuck. “What are you, fucking blind?”

The guy had a way with words.

“Too nice of a day to sit in the office,” said Chuck. “Thought we’d walk down to the pond and feed the ducks.”

Vince hesitated. No matter where they were, whenever Chuck said something about a walk down to the pond to feed the ducks, Vince detected the distinct odor of marijuana in the air. Some guys just seemed to get a rush flouting the law under a cop’s nose, even if the cop was blind.

“There’s no pond here,” said Vince, “and probably no ducks, either.”

“Busted. Guess I’ll settle for a cigarette.”

They found a bench in the shade on the other side of the building, away from traffic noises. A light breeze felt good on Vince’s face. He opened his backpack and emptied a water bottle into a travel-size bowl for Sam. Chuck was wired on caffeine overload and dominated the small talk-everything from his new receptionist’s great set of tits to the latest stupid bureaucrat at the Division of Motor Vehicles to hand over twenty thousand driver’s license numbers to hackers in the Ukraine by clicking on a bogus link for free porn. Finally, Chuck took a breath, and Vince got straight to the point of his visit.

“This isn’t easy for me to talk about,” said Vince, “but sometimes I can’t remember what McKenna looked like.”

It was a rare occurrence, but Chuck was actually silenced. Vince heard only the breeze stirring the palm fronds overhead.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Chuck, clearly not knowing how to respond.

Vince sensed his uneasiness-“a guy thing”-but there was something he needed to say. “It’s strange. My grandmother, who has been dead for over two decades, I can picture perfectly in my mind. But with my brother, who I see every week, it’s now almost impossible for me to attach a face to his voice.”

Chuck lit up another cigarette. “What about me? How can you forget my ugly mug?”

Vince stayed on a serious track. “The way I described this to Alicia is to imagine that there is a big photo album in my mind. If people are part of my past, they stay there forever, just as they were. But if I make them a part of my new life, their image fades. The more contact I have with them, the more they are defined by things that don’t depend on sight.”

“Well, if that’s the case, shouldn’t you remember McKenna?”

“She’s the exception. When I think of that night, I don’t see McKenna the young woman anymore. I see McKenna the five-year-old girl who used to jump into my arms when I came to visit. It’s getting so that my memory of that day-that horrible day-is one of a five-year-old girl.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“On the surface, you’re right. But she wasn’t five when she was murdered. And no matter how much evidence we concealed, we weren’t going to make her five.”

“Nobody hid any evidence, Vince.”

“I’m talking about the text message from her cell phone. FMLTWIA.”

“I know what you’re talking about. Hacking into her provider’s network and zapping it from her cellular records was my version of child’s play.”

“And I never told anyone a thing about it.”

“There was no reason for anyone to know.”

Vince shifted uneasily. He hated moments like these, when people could see the angst on his face and he could see nothing on theirs.

“Look, at the time, we were of one mind,” said Vince. “The last thing we wanted was a rag-sheet reporter dragging McKenna’s reputation through the mud. But without that text message, the only evidence we had was the recording of her dying declaration-which I screwed up. The text would have put Jamal Wakefield at the scene of the crime. What nineteen-year-old guy wouldn’t have come running in response to a message like that?”

“It’s hard to run from a secret detention facility.”

“You don’t really believe that line Swyteck has been selling, do you?”

Chuck took a long drag from his cigarette. “Jamal didn’t kill McKenna.”

“Don’t patronize me. If I had stayed on the line with the nine-one-one operator and let McKenna talk to her, the case against Jamal would have been a lock. There was only a hearsay problem because I recorded it to something as unreliable as my home answering machine.”

“You need to stop beating yourself up over that. The text message doesn’t convict Jamal. It actually proves his innocence.”

“How can you say that?”

“For one thing, McKenna would never have sent a text like that. Not that I knew everything about my daughter, but that much I did know. The man who killed her picked up her cell phone and texted Jamal. It was all part of setting up her ex-boyfriend.”

Vince paused, confused. “When did you decide this?”

“After I heard Jamal’s alibi, I did the math.”

“Math?”

“The time of death was a time certain. So was the time of the text message. We also know the severity of McKenna’s wounds. With a little input from medical and forensic experts, I was able to make a fairly reliable calculation of how long a healthy teenage girl of McKenna’s height and weight could survive those injuries. That gave me an approximate time of the attack. The bottom line is that McKenna was probably stabbed before the text was sent.”

Vince considered it. Some things weren’t measurable with mathematical certainty, but if anyone could do it, Chuck could. “So Jamal was framed?”

“That’s my calculation.”

Sam rested his head on Vince’s leg. Vince patted his huge head, then scratched him in his favorite spot: on the forehead, right between the eyes. Sam’s eyes. Vince’s eyes. “Which means that the son of a bitch who did this is definitely still out there.”

“Three years and running,” said Chuck.

“Which means Swyteck was right.”

“Yeah,” said Chuck. “So right that Jamal’s mother intends to sue me under some bullshit theory.”

“How do you know that?”

“Jamal’s uncle called me. He said he was hiring Jack Swyteck, and that it was going to be the courtroom equivalent of jihad.”

“Well, if it’s war they want…”

A puff of smoke hit Vince in the face.

“I got a better idea,” said Chuck.

“Tell me.”

There was another cloud of smoke, then Chuck turned into Marlon Brando. “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.”