False Convictions

7

POLICE HEADQUARTERS WAS a two-story brick building built in the colonial style with a grand cupola whose peeling white paint was offset by a small golden dome. Police cars nearly filled the parking lot between the building and the Owasco River, which wound through the center of town ten feet below street level and was hemmed in by concrete banks.

Chief Zarnazzi with his thinning gray hair and wire-rimmed glasses reminded Casey of a plucked chicken. He wore the tired look of someone used to the night shift but greeted them with a warm handshake and a hand surprisingly strong and smooth for a man his age. He asked them to sit down before taking up his position like a rigid schoolteacher behind his small oak desk.

“So, the Freedom Project?” the chief said, scratching his chin. “Turning loose the bad guys.”

“That’s an incorrect generalization,” Casey said. “The Project has been able to correct a lot of mistakes made by the courts. These people are innocent.”

“A man’s not innocent after twenty years in jail,” the chief said with an expression Casey couldn’t read.

“This will be my first case for the Project, Chief Zarnazzi,” Casey said, “but I know that it doesn’t pursue just any case, only where there’s a high likelihood that concrete DNA evidence can exculpate our clients.”

“Skull plate, what?” the chief asked.

“Exculpate,” Casey said, “prove they’re innocent.”

“Right.”

“I can get court orders for the evidence if you need that,” Casey said. “As you probably know, it’s a statutory right in New York State, but it’s my understanding that most police forces work pretty cooperatively with the Project, based on its reputation.”

“Oh, of course,” the chief said. “You don’t need anything more than Marty here to vouch for you.”

Marty bobbed his head vigorously.

“Happy to help,” the chief said. “Just a little old-fashioned is all. We’ve got a warehouse out on State Street. Marty knows. Sergeant Stittle is my man out there and he’ll give you all you need. I’ll call him to make sure. When’s good?”

Casey looked over at Marty and smiled. “Right now would work.”

The chief slapped his hands on the face of his desk and rose up to show them the door. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Miss Jordan. I didn’t see it, but Marty tells me they made a movie about you.”

Casey glanced at the young lawyer, who blushed again and studied his shoes.

“It was a couple years ago,” Casey said, “and you know how they twist things around.”

“Right,” the chief said as they left him. “Of course, no one ever made a movie about anybody I know.”

The Auburn police stored their evidence in an old concrete warehouse that had once been the endpoint for a railroad spur. A crumbling factory, sheathed in undergrowth, rose up beyond the warehouse, and Casey could only just make out where the old tracks lay in their bed of waist-high weeds. A rusted chain-link fence surrounded the place, but the gates hung wide open at angles that spoke of their disuse. Three vehicles, one of them a police cruiser with its trunk open, sat parked in the back of the building beneath a loading dock with a dozen tractor trailer-size garage doors.

Casey mounted the steps with Marty in tow, knocked on a green metal door she presumed was the office, then walked right in. Three men in uniform looked up from a card table positioned beneath a naked bulb. Monopoly pieces lay scattered about a board. One of the men, hugely fat with sweat on his cherry brow despite the damp coolness, wiped his face on a sleeve and rose up, huffing with the effort. In one hand were two orange five-hundred-dollar bills.

“Can I help you?” he asked, scowling.

“Chief Zarnazzi sent us. I’m Casey Jordan.”

“Oh,” the fat man said, his face falling, “I thought Casey was a guy. I’m Sergeant Stittle.”

Casey looked down at herself and held up both hands. “We’re here to get the evidence.”

“We got plenty of that,” the sergeant said, his mouth a slit in the dough of his blank face.

Casey glanced at Marty and said, “From the Hubbard case. Dwayne Hubbard.”

The big man scratched his head while his two cop buddies smirked at him.

“You got an index number for that?”

“Didn’t your chief just call you?”

“Said some Casey guy was coming and to help him out,” the sergeant said. “Happy to give you what you need, but you got to tell me what you need.”

“Don’t you have this stuff listed by case name?” she asked, angling her head toward the yawning doorway that opened into the bowels of the warehouse, where row after row of boxes rested on shelves stretching to the twenty-foot ceiling.

“Sure, what year?” the sergeant asked.

“Nineteen eighty-nine,” Casey said.

Sergeant Stittle sighed and nodded at a metal shelf jammed with heavy white three-ring binders. “In there, you could find something by the name, but it ain’t on the computer that far back.”

Casey felt warm, even in the cool, moldy office.

“Do you mind if I look?”

“Chief said help,” the sergeant said, nodding at a beaten and moldy refrigerator, “so you can get a chair and a Diet Coke if you like.”

“How about two chairs?” Casey said, nodding toward Marty.

“Coming up.”

With Marty’s help, Casey dug through three of the thick case binders, page by page since the cases weren’t cataloged by name but by date. The three men rattled dice, skipped around the board, and bought up properties as if she wasn’t there. The second page of the fourth binder held her case.

“Got it,” she said, loud enough to disturb the game.

Sergeant Stittle heaved his bulk up from the chair with a squeak of metal and a groan of flesh. He peered over Casey’s shoulder and planted a sausage finger next to the index number with a meaningful nod. In his other hand, he fingered a little red plastic hotel from the game board.

“Hmm,” he said.

“Hmm, what?” Casey said. “You can find it, right?”

“If it’s still here,” he said, straightening with a heavy sigh.

“What’s that mean?” Marty asked.

“Means you’re getting close to the wrinkle in time,” Stittle said.

“What’s that?” Marty asked.

“You never heard of A Wrinkle in Time?” Stittle asked. “Got no kids? Nah, you’re too young. Missy here knows what I mean.”

“I have no idea,” Casey said.

Stittle chortled, jolting his belly so that a tail of his shirt sprang loose from the waist of his pants. “Kids’ book. They get a wrinkle in time and, whoosh, what was there one second is gone the next.”

“I don’t have kids,” Casey said.

Stittle gave her a disappointed look and said, “We keep evidence as long as we can, but after a while, we gotta make room for the new stuff. You can’t believe the shit they make us hang on to these days-pardon the French, but last week they gave us a whole damn couch that smelled like cat piss.”

Casey shook her head. “No, wait. You threw away evidence from a murder case to make room for a couch?”

Stittle shrugged and headed for the doorway, his fingers fondling the plastic hotel. “We can take a look, but I’m pretty sure we threw out the last of the 1989 stuff in March and I’m a good ways into 1990, but that stuff in the back gets kind of jumbled.”

Casey glanced at Marty and they followed the big sergeant into the gloomy warehouse, their feet scuffing through the dust. When they reached the last row, Casey could see that the boxes, brown bags, and thick envelopes at the beginning of the row bore crisply printed labels with bar codes. Halfway down the aisle, the various containers had been spilled onto the floor. Beyond the clutter, the boxes and envelopes sagged inward, faded and dusty.

“Yeah,” Stittle said, sorting through several of the spilled boxes and envelopes. “These are all ninety. I don’t see anything from eighty-nine, but help yourself. Also, you could check in the Dumpster.”

“Wait,” Casey said, the numbers on a box across the aisle catching her eye.

She planted a finger on the date of a box resting eye level. “This says 1988. So does this. All these.”

Casey poked her finger at the dates on boxes and envelopes all up and down the area across from the mess.

“Yup,” Stittle said. “That’s eighty-eight, but I thought you said eighty-nine.”

“I did,” Casey said, trying not to raise her voice, “but why would eighty-nine be gone before eighty-eight? You can’t have gotten rid of eighty-nine. You still have eighty-eight.”

Stittle looked from one side of the aisle to the next, his hands hanging flat along the slabs of fat, the plastic hotel pinched between thumb and forefinger. He rubbed his right finger under his left eye and nodded and said, “Yeah, I don’t know.”

Casey planted a fist on either hip and asked, “Why would you get rid of one year before the other?”

Stittle slowly wagged his head. “I guess ’cause they’re on the other side of the aisle?”

“You guess?” Casey said. “You’re the one who threw this stuff out, right?”

“To make room.”

Marty cleared his throat. Casey looked hard at him and he shrugged apologetically.

“You’re welcome to look,” Stittle said, his little eyes shifting under Casey’s gaze.

“Right,” Casey said. “I can look. I can dig through the shit in your Dumpster and pull every box and bag down off the shelves in this aisle, but you know-and I know-that everything from 1989 is already gone, right?”

“Some stuff might be around,” Stittle said, using his thumb to roll the little hotel around in his palm.

“Right, because you’re doing such a half-ass job, something from a 1989 case just might be around somewhere,” Casey said, the pressure building behind her eyes. “But we both know that the evidence to this case, my case, is already gone. Don’t we?”

Stittle made a stupid face and shrugged.

“You got a Get Out of Jail Free card?” Casey asked.

“A what?” Stittle said, scowling.

“Monopoly,” Casey said, nodding at the red plastic hotel in his hand. “Get Out of Jail Free, you got one of those?”

“I don’t.”

“Too bad,” Casey said, turning to go. “When I’m finished, you’ll wish you did.”