False Convictions

46

ABOVE THEM, in the peak of the roof, the hornet nest droned in the remnants of sunlight. Casey glanced up and saw that other, smaller, fruit-shaped nests populated the eaves of the roof leading up to the main ball. The amber and black bees hovered and swung lazily on soft air currents, waiting their turn to enter the nest.

“I was with Nelson when she called,” Judge Rivers said, her piercing gaze directed at Casey. “I could hear her through the phone, completely hysterical, begging him to come. I knew he’d been following her around since she came back from college and that her father made some calls asking him to stop, so I knew he was obsessed. Nelson was at Cornell the fall before for about six weeks before he drove up to Potsdam and found her with someone else. She broke his heart, and you can imagine how I felt about her.

“Nelson was struggling with grades and we were actually discussing his options when she called. I told him not to go to her, but I could tell by the look on his face that nothing I said would stop him.”

The judge took a deep breath and Martin swished through the grass, standing close so he could clasp her hand. She bit her lip and her face crumpled briefly before she regained her composure and said, “He called fifteen minutes later, screaming that she was dead. I called the chief and went right over. By the time we got there, the father had arrived. That’s when we realized she was still alive and we called an ambulance and I got Nelson out of there. The chief said he’d handle it. He knew he could trust Martin.”

“I knew Nelson didn’t do it,” Martin said, “but it looked bad.”

“How could you know that?” Casey asked.

“The blood,” Martin said. “That was my thing, blood. Classes down at Quantico. Seminars. Blood can tell you a lot, and I knew just looking at him that he didn’t kill her. She was a mess, and whoever did it would have been covered in it. He just had some on the bottom of his shoes from going in the room. The dad was another story-covered from head to toe-but I knew he didn’t do it because Nelson saw him come in.”

“Maybe Nelson burned his clothes,” Casey said.

“He wore the same clothes I saw him in when he left me,” Judge Rivers said flatly.

Casey glanced at Jake and saw the questioning look.

“So you just defaulted on all the other evidence and prosecuted Dwayne Hubbard because the blood didn’t fit the picture you had in your mind?” Casey said. “Do you know how fast that would be thrown out in court?”

“Which is exactly why we had to do what we did,” Judge Rivers said, her chin high and trembling.

“She didn’t ask me to just sweep it under the rug,” Martin said, his nostrils flaring at Casey as he nodded toward the judge. “She wanted the truth. She would have put her own son behind bars if he did it, but he didn’t. I knew that crime was done by someone who’d done it before. It was too clean, too ritualized to be a first-timer. It took me a month, but I found those other cases. They matched, and Dwayne had the chance to commit every one of them. Nelson was here when the Wyoming girl got killed. It was Dwayne.”

“And we knew if he got away,” the judge said, “that Cassandra Thornton wasn’t going to be his last. He’s totally deranged. Totally evil.”

“How do you know Nelson was here?” Casey asked Martin. “He wasn’t with you.”

Martin glanced at the judge. “Yes, he was. We were all there. It was Patricia’s birthday.”

“You said you met through this case,” Casey said.

“Around that time,” the judge said.

“But that’s not what you said,” Casey said. “How convenient that your boyfriend was investigating the case. Come on.”

“We did what was right,” the judge said. “We weren’t a hundred percent sure, and we were prepared to turn things around if there was even a chance Dwayne was innocent, but he wasn’t. He couldn’t have been. Martin had a friend in the FBI look over the crime scene photos and he said without a doubt these were all done by the same person.”

“Why didn’t you bring the FBI into it?” Casey asked. “Tie them all together and put him away that way?”

The judge hung her head for a moment. “We needed to keep it quiet. You know how these things go, the Feds, the media, look at what’s happening now. We needed to keep it simple and get past it all.”

“So you cooked the evidence to put Hubbard away,” Casey said, shaking her head. “You kept it simple, all right, a two-day trial with a hack for the defense.”

“He was guilty,” Judge Rivers said, raising her voice only to have it swallowed up by the thick overgrowth of trees.

“But that’s not for you to decide,” Casey said. “That’s for a jury.”

“A judge sometimes has to overrule a jury,” Judge Rivers said. “That’s not just a judge’s prerogative, it’s her duty if she sees a miscarriage of justice. You know that.”

“Well, you weren’t the judge back then,” Casey said. “You were the prosecutor. And even if I bought all this, we know for a fact that your son was the one who raped that girl.”

“He never did,” the judge said, shaking her head with a clenched jaw. “He was with me.”

“You say, but you also said you didn’t know Martin until this case.”

“I said it was around that time.”

“You’re lying.”

“That DNA is a scam,” the judge said. “Whoever is behind all this cooked that up.”

“How do you cook DNA?” Casey asked.

“You buy someone off,” the judge said.

“What if you switched slides?” Jake asked.

Casey cringed. “Whose side are you on?”

“I’m just thinking of the possibilities,” Jake said with a shrug. “And I’d like to ask something else.”

The judge nodded her assent.

“Why did you give back a hundred thousand dollars from your fund?” Jake asked.

“What fund?” the judge said without blinking.

“I know about your campaign fund and how you’re lining pockets on both sides of the aisle in Washington,” Jake said.

Judge Rivers’s pale cheeks went red. She glanced at Martin and chewed her lower lip. “My political donations are hardly anyone’s business. It’s all perfectly legal.”

“But problematic,” Jake said. “You remember getting a hundred-thousand-dollar check from CJD, Citizens for a Just Democracy?”

Her face clouded over.

“A PAC, right?” Jake said. “But who are they?”

“Some businessmen from Buffalo,” she said haltingly. “Massimo D’Costa. An environmental group.”

“Environmental cleanup,” Jake said, nodding, “and what did they want that made you refund their contribution? A hundred grand buys a lot of goodwill. Why give it back?”

“That has nothing to do with my son being innocent,” the judge said, directing her attention to Casey. “I’ve shown you what you need and I hope you’ll help set the record straight. I hope you’ll put Dwayne Hubbard back where he belongs, even if it embarrasses some people. He’ll do this again. They always do.”

Judge Rivers clasped Martin’s hand tighter and tugged him past them, swishing back through the high grass that had gone cool and damp in the late shadows of the day.

“You didn’t answer my question,” Jake said, trailing them with Casey. “Why’d you give it back?”

Judge Rivers kept going. As she climbed into the Suburban, she said, “I’ll play the game to a certain extent, but if it goes against everything I believe in, then I’m not for sale.”

“What does that mean?” Jake said, hurrying to grab hold of the passenger door before she could close it.

“What were they buying?” Jake asked. “Please. It might help me sort this all out.”

The judge scowled at him. “Nothing to do with Dwayne Hubbard. I know what you want. Scandal for your TV show. Any scandal, just pile it on. Parking tickets, boyfriends, political contributions, things everyone does. Things that your kind twist into something perverse.”

“I know you don’t know me,” Jake said, “but I’m not like that. Yes, a scandal is good TV, sure. But I think there really is a link between that PAC and everything that happened with Dwayne Hubbard. Please.”

She sighed and stared, then said, “The Nature Conservancy v. Eastern Oil & Gas.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Jake asked.

“The Marcellus Shale Formation,” she said. “Billions of dollars in natural gas, but they need to use hydrofracture drilling to get to it.”

“Can you tell me about it?” Jake asked, letting go of the door.

“Pumping poison into the ground. It breaks up the rock and frees the gas. Look it up, Mr. Carlson,” she said. “That’s what I did, I looked it up, and that’s why I gave back the money. Every judge who dreams of sitting on that bench knows she has to do more than be a brilliant jurist. She has to be connected and you don’t get connected without greasing the skids. That’s just the way it is. If you dug deep enough, you’d find it with every one of them.”

“Would you be willing to sit down and talk with me about all this on camera?” Jake asked.

The judge gave him a dirty look and slammed the door.