False Convictions

45

MARTIN PULLED over onto the gravel shoulder of the road and they got out. Jake pulled in behind them, joining them on the road’s shoulder. Not far off the road in a nest of waist-high grass sat a small red ranch whose remaining paint had faded to a deep shade of pink.

“I bought the place from the father,” Judge Rivers said, her voice as somber as her face. “He never set foot inside it again. I felt bad for him.”

“And getting him out of the way kept things quiet,” Casey said.

“He knew Nelson was innocent,” the judge said. “We showed him why.”

“But you still had to buy him off,” Casey said. “How much?”

The judge closed her eyes for a moment. “Nearly everything I had. Quite a bit. He took the money and moved down to Tallahassee and Martin boarded it up.”

“Martin was the investigating officer,” Casey said, raising her eyebrows at Jake.

“Martin Yancy?” Jake said.

Martin nodded.

“They said you dropped off the face of the earth,” Jake said.

“Here I am,” Martin said. “I don’t see anybody from the old days, though. I make a point of it. I work for a defense contractor in Rochester. I’ve got a boat on Lake Ontario that I normally go to if Patty comes here for a weekend.”

The mailbox listed atop its metal post and Casey could still make out the name Thornton in the flakes of rust. The windows of the house had been patched over with plywood boards, warped and faded to gray. The late rays of sunshine lit the roof and its peak hung with a droning, basketball-size nest of hornets. Out back, the skeleton of a swing set sagged under the shadow of a massive willow tree, split down the center by lightning or rot or both.

“No one’s been inside since that night?” Casey said, following the judge up the sun-bleached driveway.

“A couple people since that night,” the judge said. “People who needed convincing.”

Martin passed them all with a flashlight in one hand and jangling the keys that hung from a chain on his belt in the other. He stepped up onto the porch and undid the padlock holding down a metal bar blocking the door. Warm musty air from inside wafted out at them and with it the fetid odor of something dead inside a wall. Martin sniffed and kicked at the scattered droppings on the floor.

“Mice.”

The judge pushed past him, snatching up his flashlight and flicking it on before leading them down the gloomy hallway and into the last bedroom. Casey sniffed at an odor so old that the kick had gone out of its stink. She looked around the bedroom of a teenage girl, the curling poster of Van Halen on the wall, lace curtains, a Rubik’s Cube next to a corroded lava lamp, and the velvet painting of a white stallion. Photos tacked to a corkboard bore ghostly images faded beyond recognition. It took Casey’s eyes a moment to adjust to the flashlight beam and the dim light seeping through the gaps in the boarded windows. As they did, the chocolate brown mess on the naked mattress and spattered over the wall materialized. Casey realized it was dried blood, a stain that never leaves without help from human hands.

She stumbled back and into Jake, who caught her by the elbow.

“The coroner said he mutilated her face, first,” the judge said quietly, pointing the light at a mirror on the wall above some dresser drawers, “the nose, ears, and lips right over there. Evidently, he wanted her to see it. After that, he tied her to the bed and carved out her eyes. That’s when he raped her, and when he was done, he stabbed her eleven times in the lower abdomen, circling the navel in a three- to four-inch radius. I’ve heard two different theories from psychologists on that one, both agree that he was angry with his victim.”

“No shit,” Casey said.

“I know what you’re thinking,” the judge said, “but with most serial killers, it’s about them, not the victim. He wanted to punish his victims personally, for some kind of insult, real or perceived we have no idea.”

A chill crept up Casey’s spine like a small spider.

The judge stood staring at the bed for a minute, her light resting on the dusty gray mattress, stained nearly black in places, before she turned to them. “In thirty-five years as a prosecutor and a judge I’ve seen some crazy things, and heard some crazy things. Nothing like this.”

Casey cleared her throat and spoke softly. “How does this prove your son’s innocence?”

Her words startled the judge from her trance. “Oh. Right. The cutting was the same in the other three cases I showed you, and this, here.”

The judge stepped toward the wall and pointed the light at a smear of blood. “You see this?”

“Like a football,” Jake said.

“It’s an eye,” the judge said, pointing the flashlight at other spots on each of the other walls. “See? Four of them. Watching. Now, look at these again.”

Casey saw now that the judge still held the folder she’d shown her at the lake house in her other hand. The judge shone her light on the file and found a photo with her finger. Casey studied the black-and-white photo of a blood-spattered wall, seeing now the same football-shaped smear amid the gore.

“That doesn’t look much like an eye,” Casey said.

“They’re eyes,” Martin said, as if she’d insulted him. “We had a couple different psychiatrists look at them.”

“And you figured that the night of the murder?” Jake asked.

Martin looked confused.

“Myron Kissle said the word came down you were looking for a black man,” Jake said. “How did you get that kind of a lead from this?”

“Kissle?” Martin said.

“It’s what he told me when I interviewed him,” Jake said.

“For TV? Kissle’s gone loopy,” Martin said. “He used to be a decent cop, but he’s lonely out there living with his crackpot wife. The man craves attention. Patti heard that he showed up at a PBA meeting a year or two ago in his pajamas.”

Patricia Rivers nodded.

Jake looked around the room. “Well.”

“Well, nothing,” Martin said. “No one put out word for anyone but a killer covered in blood.”

“But he wasn’t covered in blood,” Casey said.

“No,” the judge said, “he was too smart for that, and too smart to get caught.”

“But you caught him,” Jake said.

“Chance,” the judge said, leaving the room and walking slowly through the rodent shit toward the front door.

“Which is a bitch,” Casey said, thinking of Graham’s words.

The judge gave her a funny look and said, “Someone saw him pull his knife outside Gilly’s, and the fight. The police got a call and put it together with the APB.”

“We figured he was headed for the bus station,” Martin said. “Black guy with blood on his shirt.”

“But not covered in blood,” Casey said, pointing her thumb back inside the house.

Judge Rivers nodded and motioned with her head for them to follow. She pushed through the knee-high grass to the side yard where a charred oil barrel stood in a tangle of weeds. Around the perimeter of the yard, trees and scrub grew wild with their obvious intent to swallow up the yard as well as the house itself if given the time. Casey followed, walking gingerly to keep her heels from sinking into the soft earth.

“He burned the clothes he wore and changed into new ones,” the judge said, pointing into the empty drum whose sooty dirt couldn’t grow even a weed.

“All this sounds good,” Casey said, sweeping a loose lock of hair behind her ear. “But none of it makes sense. If it’s true, why wasn’t it in the trial record?”

Martin and the judge looked at each other before she said, “I told you, he was smart.”