Innocent

IV.
CHAPTER 41

Tommy, August 3, 2009

Summer in all its sweet indulgence. It was five p.m. and Tommy was one of the squad of fathers following their children around the tot lot, relieving beleaguered moms in the hour before dinner. The playground was, without doubt, Tomaso's favorite place on earth. When Tommy's son arrived, he ran from one piece of equipment to another, touching the little merry-go-round, climbing onto the spiderweb and off. Dashing a step behind, Tommy always felt the anguish of his two-year-old that he could not do everything at once.

Dominga was having a harder time with this pregnancy than with Tomaso's. There was more morning nausea and constant fatigue, and she complained of feeling swollen in the heat, like something ripening on the vine. Now officially a lame duck, Tommy was finding it easier to get out of the office and tried to be home no later than four thirty to give her a break. Tomaso and he often returned from the playground to find her sound asleep. Tomaso would crawl across his mother's recumbent body, trying to squeeze his way into her arms. Dominga smiled before she stirred and clutched her little boy to her, grimy and beloved.

Life was good. Tommy was going to be sixty any minute, and his life was better than at any time he could recall. Just as the first Sabich trial and its dismal aftermath had darkened his existence decades before, so the second trial was proving to be the start of a life as an esteemed figure. Public perceptions had formed very much as Brand had foreseen the night they decided to take Rusty's plea. Sabich's conviction verified Tommy on everything. The DNA from the first trial was regarded as controversial, because of doubts about the specimen, but the common comparison was to O.J., who'd also gotten away with murder because of bad labwork. The consensus on the editorial pages was that prosecutor Molto had made the best of it and had convicted a man whose conviction was long overdue. In fact, in the last six weeks, the papers had dropped the word "Acting" when they referred to him as PA. And the county executive had let it be known that Tommy was welcome on the ticket next year if he wanted to run for the job.

He had actually pondered that possibility for a few days. But it was time to accept his blessings. He was ten times luckier than all his peers in the PA's office who'd had to struggle to make their careers while their kids were young. Tommy could leap onto the bench now, a worthy job that would leave him time to savor his boys and to be more than a rumor in their lives. Two weeks ago, he had announced he was running for superior court judge and endorsed Jim Brand to succeed him. Ramon Beroja, a former deputy PA now on the county board, was going to run against Jim in the primary, but the party preferred Brand, largely because of the broad suspicions that Ramon would take on the county executive next. Jim would spend the next six months running hard, but he was expected to win.

Across the tot lot, a man was eyeing Tommy, an old bushy-looking fellow with a stretch of appallingly white legs revealed between the ends of his cargo shorts and his calf-high tube socks. This was not uncommon. Tommy was a familiar figure on TV, and people were always trying to place him, often mistaking him for someone they'd known at an earlier time. But this man was more intent than the usual curious neighbors with their puzzled glances. When the kids he was trailing moved in Tomaso's direction, the man approached Tommy and had actually shaken his hand before Molto finally placed Milo Gorvetich, the computer expert from the Sabich trial.

"Aren't grandchildren life's greatest blessing?" he asked, nodding toward two little girls, both wearing glasses. The girls were on the slide while Tomaso followed them there and stood on the bottom rung, looking up longingly but afraid to venture any farther. This drama played itself out daily. Eventually, Tomaso would cry and his father would lift him to the top. There Tomaso would linger again until he finally found his courage and plunged to the bottom, where Tommy would be waiting to catch him.

"He's my son," said Tommy. "I got a late start."

"Oh, dear," answered Gorvetich, but Tommy laughed. He kept telling Dominga he was going to have a T-shirt made for Tomaso that read, 'That old man over there is actually my father.' Usually by the time Tommy explained himself to the other parents here, they had placed him as PA. From the comments that followed, he could tell that many assumed he was a county power broker looking after the child born of his second or third marriage to a trophy wife. Nobody really ever understood anybody else's life.

"A beautiful boy," said Gorvetich.

"The light of my life," Tommy answered.

It turned out that Gorvetich's youngest daughter was a neighbor of Tommy's, living one street behind him closer to the river. She was a professor of physics married to an engineer. Gorvetich, a widower, was here often at this hour to look after the girls until their parents were home from work.

"So are you preparing for your next big trial?" Gorvetich asked by way of small talk.

"Not yet," said Tommy. The norm, in fact, was for the PA to be solely an administrator. Most of Tommy's predecessors never saw the inside of a courtroom, and Tommy was already testing the idea that the Sabich case would be the last trial of his life.

"Standard fare for you," said Gorvetich, "but I must say I have been preoccupied by that case since it ended. One thinks of trials as emphatic and conclusive, and this was anything but."

Sometimes it was like that, Tommy answered. A few tight little categories-guilty, not guilty, of this or that-to hold a universe of complicated facts.

"We do a little justice, rather than none at all," answered Tommy.

"To an outsider it's confounding, but you boys are accustomed enough to the murkiness of all of it to find some grim humor, I suppose."

"I don't think I found much to laugh at in that case."

"There's the difference between Brand and you, then," said Gorvetich.

Tommy had his eye on Tomaso, who was yet to move off the ladder, even though a line had formed behind him. Tommy tried to wrest the boy from the first rung, but he squawked in objection and uttered his favorite syllable: "No." In time, Tommy persuaded Tomaso to let the other children climb, but as soon as they had started up, Tomaso went right back to the first rung like a hawk on a perch. His father stood immediately behind him, within arm's reach.

"Persistent," said Gorvetich, laughing.

"Stubborn like his father. Genes are amazing things." He drew his mind back to the conversation before. "What were you saying about Brand?"

"Only that I was struck by a remark he made when we had dinner the week after. It was a little celebration. I believe you were invited."

Tommy remembered. After a month of working round the clock for the trial, he did not want another night away from his family. He explained now that his wife was newly pregnant at the time of the dinner. Tommy accepted Gorvetich's congratulations, before the old professor went back to his story.

"It was the end of the evening. We were out on the walk in front of the Matchbook, and we were both well in our cups, and I made a remark to Jim about how unsettling it must be to be part of a system that sometimes comes to such an unsatisfying outcome. Jim laughed and said that as time went on, he was finding more and more perverse humor in this case, seeing somebody who had contrived to commit the perfect

murder end up punished for a crime in which he had no role."

"What did that mean?" Tommy asked.

"I don't know. I asked at the time, but Jim brushed it off. I thought you might understand."

"Hardly," said Tommy.

"I've rolled it over in my mind. When Sabich pled guilty, I took it for granted he had a collaborator in tampering with his PC. It would have been an exceptional technical feat for a man who demonstrated such limited knowledge of his computer to do that himself. Remember, he hadn't even realized that his Web searches would be cached in the browser."

"Right," said Tommy.

"I've wondered if Jim had concluded that the accomplice wasn't an accomplice at all, but somebody who acted entirely on his own without any direction from Sabich."

Tommy shrugged. He had no idea what this was about. They had tried to consider every possibility the day they'd discovered that the card wasn't on the image. Half expecting the defense to accuse them of something, they had reviewed the chain of evidence carefully to be sure it was secure. Back in December when Yee ordered the PC returned, Gorvetich and Orestes Mauro, an evidence tech from the PA's office, covered the screen, the keyboard, the power button on the tower, and even the mouse in evidence tape, which they'd initialed before shrink-wrapping all the components. The day Nat Sabich testified, the shrink-wrap had been sliced off in the PA's office with the consent of the defense, but the tape seals were removed only in the courtroom in the presence of Sabich's two hotshot experts, who verified that none of them showed the word "Violated" that appeared in blue if the tape was ever disturbed.

So the only possibility was that the tampering had taken place while the machine was in George Mason's chambers. Gorvetich had looked at Mason's log and was of the opinion that no one had access to the computer long enough to make all the changes, especially the registry deletions, which he said would be time-consuming even for him. The only plausible explanation seemed to be that Sabich and some techie they were yet to discover had snuck into the building after hours. But apparently another explanation had occurred to Brand in the ensuing weeks.

"Brand was probably spitballing," said Molto.

"Perhaps so," said Gorvetich. "Or I misunderstood. We'd had quite a bit to drink."

"Probably that. I'll have to ask him."

"Or let it go," said Gorvetich.

The old man seemed woolly-headed and self-involved at all times, but there was a shrewd light in his eyes for a second. Tommy did not quite understand what he was thinking, but Milo's granddaughters had wandered to the other side of the play area and he departed quickly. That was just as well, since Tommy heard the cry he recognized as Tomaso's at the same instant. When Tom looked up, he saw that his son had ascended the ladder. The two-year-old now stood at the top, utterly terrified by what he had achieved.