Last Look

3

It was well past dusk when Dorsey heard her father’s footsteps on the front porch. The squeal of the screen door followed, then its slap against the door jamb.

She waited silently in the living room, seated in her grandmother’s rocking chair, which had sat for sixty-some years in that same spot near the bow window overlooking what had once been gardens. If Dorsey closed her eyes, she could almost imagine herself curled on her grandmother’s lap, secure and sheltered, the gentle to and fro of the rocker lulling her to sleep.

But there’d be no comfort tonight. Anger, frustration, denial, indignation-her father’s emotions would run the gamut. She wondered if Matt-whose arrogance was a given to all who knew him well-was capable of considering the possibility that Decker had been telling the truth.

“I just saw Mike Summers out on the beach.” Matt made an attempt at normal conversation in spite of the fact that his face was flushed and his voice shaky. He sat in the old wing chair near the fireplace, the same chair he’d been sitting in for over forty years. Like the rocker, it had never been moved. She couldn’t recall that anything in this house had been moved out of place, ever.

“How’s he doing?” Dorsey responded, because she had to.

“He just sold his place up on Bay Road. You won’t believe how much.”

“How much?”

“Seven hundred grand. For that shack.” Matt shook his head. “Just think what you could get for this place. You could sell it, you know. Your grandmother left it to you, not me,” he reminded her without rancor. “You don’t need my permission.”

“It’s not for sale.”

“You’re never here. Why hold on to it?”

Because it is the only place I ever lived that when I left, I had only good memories.

“Sentimental value,” she told her father.

“Nice that you can afford to kiss off that much money for sentiment.”

She shrugged and rocked the chair slowly, knowing he was working up to what he really had to say.

His cell began to ring and he took it from his pocket and checked the number.

“Owen Berger,” he told her. “And Justice For All.”

“Don’t, Dad.” She shook her head.

“Owen’s a good guy. I’ve been on that show a dozen times.”

“That was then, this is now.”

“I’m not afraid of the media, Dorse. I’ve always gotten along well with those folks.”

“Yeah, when you had a good story to tell. Now, you are the story. Whole ’nother ball game.”

“Look, I’ve been thinking about this. There has to be a mistake.” He shut off the ringer, set the phone to vibrate, and stuck it in his shirt pocket.

She sighed and opened her mouth to speak, but he cut her off.

“I’m not worried. It’s only a matter of time before they realize…” He cleared his throat. “Dorse, it has to be a mistake. I figure I’ll call the director, tell him I’m going to come back on active and work this thing out.”

She stared at him in disbelief.

“Do you really think for one second they’d let you anywhere near this case?”

“I worked it the first time.”

“Which is precisely why you can’t work it now. Come on, Pop, you know better than that.” She stopped rocking. “And I’ve already spoken with John Mancini. I asked him to take me on, give me a place in his unit. I’d heard there was an opening, and I thought maybe…well, I thought maybe he’d hire me.”

“And?”

“And, he said he’d consider me for the unit but he couldn’t put me on this case. It would look really bad all around. If the press got wind I’d been assigned, well, it would not look good for the Bureau. Or for you, for that matter. Bottom line, if they’re not willing to put me on board, they sure as hell aren’t going to let you anywhere near it.”

Matt sat forward in his chair, his arms resting on his thighs, and stared at the floor. Finally, he said, “What are they doing to prove that it isn’t Shannon Randall?”

“Pop, there are fingerprints, dental records-they’re checking DNA right now. It’s her.”

“You think they couldn’t have made a mistake? Happens all the time, you should know that,” he said angrily. “Could we just consider they made a mistake? I’d think at the very least, you of all people, my daughter, would want to take a look at the evidence before accepting this as true just because they said so. Could you at least do that?”

She nodded but did not speak. Instead, she raised herself from the chair and patted the pockets of her jeans, looking for her car keys.

“Damn it, I’ll call Mancini myself. Son of a bitch, after all I did for him, he can’t help me out here?” Matt stood, his hands on his hips, his anger exploding.

“Let me tell you something about John Mancini.” Her father’s jaw tightened. “Seven, eight years back, John caught a case, Sheldon Woods. Homicidal pedophile. Murdered-tortured, mutilated-fourteen young kids before he was caught. Bastard used to call John, every day, taunt him. Would never talk to anyone but John. Finally got to the point where Woods called him while he was torturing a kid. John had to sit there, helpless, listening to this little boy being murdered.”

Dorsey had heard the story before. She knew where her father would be taking it this time around.

“John kept his head, tracked Woods down, brought him in. John was just as cool and calm as could be. And when it was over, he broke. Started drinking. Got so bad, they finally made him take a leave. Spent six months with a shrink the Bureau handpicked to work with him.” He paused for effect, the way he always did when he got to this part of the story. “And who do you think they called to take this wounded agent under his wing, huh? To find him-Christ, he was holed up in this cabin in the middle of nowhere for a while-talk to him, bring him in, bring him the hell back. Me, that’s who. I’d already retired, and they called me back to bring him around. And he can’t help me now?”

Matt was close to shouting.

“I spent six weeks with that man. And he’s going to shut me out of this? I don’t think so.”

“Pop, when I spoke with John, he said he couldn’t assign me. I understand that. And you should too.” She held up a hand to delay the protest she knew would be coming. “But he told me if I just happened to stop at Shelter Island to say hey to an old friend from the academy, he couldn’t stop me.”

“ Shelter Island?” Matt frowned and shook his head. “What old friend of yours lives on Shelter Island?”

“ Shelter Island, Georgia, is the place where the body was found. And Andrew Shields would be the old friend from the academy.”

“You weren’t at the academy with Andy.”

She shrugged. “Guess John forgot.”

“John doesn’t forget anything.” Matt sat back down in his chair. “So he’s giving you an opening…”

“Not officially, no. But he’s made it clear he’d turn the other way as long as I was not publicly involved in the investigation and as long as no one knows I’m your daughter. If that gets out, I have to duck and run.”

“So, in other words, Andy can tell you what he finds out, but you can’t investigate on your own.”

“Right, but I can shadow Andy and I’ll know if there are any loose strings.”

“If there are, I’ll expect you to pull them.”

“Of course.”

Matt thought it over, then nodded slowly. “I guess that’s as good as it’s going to get.”

“And we’re damned lucky we got that much. I half expected him to tell me I’d be arrested if I set foot in the state of Georgia.”

“All right. Do what you have to do without getting fired. In the meantime…” He took his phone out of his pocket and checked the ID of the call coming in. He looked across the room to his daughter. “I can’t keep putting these guys off indefinitely. Sooner or later, I have to talk to them.”

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

“I’m no coward, Dorse. Don’t ask me to act like one. If I made a mistake…” His face went white, as the full implication of his having made a mistake sunk in.

“Just don’t talk to anyone for a while, okay?” She walked to him and knelt down. She understood what had just occurred to him, and knew he must be in terrible pain as a result. “We’re going to find out what happened, Pop, back then, and now. We’ll put it all together, I promise.”

“Jesus, Dorse, I can’t believe this is happening.” He ran a hand through his hair, then rubbed it across his chin. “I remember it like it was yesterday. Beale all but admitted that he’d killed her.”

“After how many hours of questioning, Pop?”

He shot her a look.

“Listen, the first thing I was told when I showed up in Hatton was that the cops knew who did it, that the kid had all but come right out and confessed. They told me this kid, Beale, had had the hots for Shannon Randall big time, but other than let him drive her home from school once in a while, she didn’t have any use for him. We spoke to her girlfriends, they all said the same thing. And he admitted to having picked her up late that afternoon; one of her friends said she saw the girl in his car an hour or so after he claimed to have dropped her off, and that the car was heading out of town, in the direction of the lake. He finally admitted the girl had been in his car-he couldn’t keep denying it because we found her things in his car. But he said he never left town, so we know he lied about that.”

“Because a witness saw him.”

“Right. And you know yourself, one lie leads to another. A suspect lies about one thing, chances are he’s lying about something else.”

“Did he ever confess, Pop?” she asked softly. “You were there when he was executed. Did he ever admit that he killed her?”

“No.” Matt suddenly looked like a balloon that was leaking air. His voice dropped and he could not meet her gaze. “No, even then, at the end, he didn’t admit to a damned thing. Still swore he was innocent.”

“Pop, we’re going to have to consider that he was telling the truth.”

“Jesus, Dorse, if I made a mistake,” he whispered, as if he’d not heard a word she’d spoken. “If I was wrong back then, that means…”

He looked at her through eyes dark with growing despair. “If Eric Beale did not kill Shannon Randall…dear God, I sent an innocent kid to his death. God forgive me, I watched an innocent boy die…”

Matt stood at the end of the drive and watched his daughter’s car grow smaller and smaller, then finally disappear around the first bend on Dune Road. He sighed and looked up at the sky as if hoping to see something other than what he saw every time he’d closed his eyes since Dorsey had given him the incredible news: Eric Beale’s face moments before his execution, eyes wide with fear and confusion, skin so pale as to be almost transparent, mouth moving in prayer.

His stomach wrenching, Matt went into the house and directly to the bathroom, where he dry heaved for the fourth time that day.

When he was done, he went back outside, hoping to find a place to sit and figure out what to do next, but he was uncomfortable everywhere he went. He set out on foot down Dune in the same direction Dorsey had driven. The cattails grew twelve feet tall along this side of the marsh, and he was just as glad for it. There’d be little traffic this time of day, but he had no desire to stop and chat with whoever might be driving through.

He was still working on getting past denial, to a phase where he could think. He’d lain awake all night trying to make sense of it all. How could something that had seemed so certain, so sure, have been so insanely wrong?

He walked along the sandy shoulder to where Dune met up with Hook Road, and took a right onto Hook, barely noticing what he was doing and giving no thought to where he was going. His pace quickened as he neared the inlet where the old lighthouse lay in ruins. The road narrowed to one wide dirt lane and a bit more, and the tall reeds on either side gave him little shelter from the sun overhead. Some slight breeze set the grasses dancing, their hushed rattle the only sound other than his breathing and his footfalls.

The lunch spot that had once been housed in the base of the light was gone now, pushed down in a hurricane several years ago. The roof had collapsed to one side, and swallows had come to build nests almost as soon as the rain had stopped falling and the wind had ceased to blow. They swooped around Matt as if they barely noticed his presence. He walked past the lighthouse to the sturdy pilings that still stood like fearless sentinels and looked across the inlet to the bay.

He exhaled deeply and blinked back the tears behind his dark glasses.

He walked to the end of the rickety pier with no thought that it could very well collapse under his weight and lowered himself so that he was sitting with his feet dangling just above the water. He remembered another time, a lifetime ago, when he’d sat in this very spot with Bernie. He’d been nervous as all get-out, the engagement ring in his pocket and his heart in his throat. He tried really hard, but he couldn’t see her there anymore. He remembered how she looked, her dark auburn hair pulled back in a ponytail, sunglasses perched on the edge of her nose, her legs long and tan-but he just couldn’t see her there.

All he could see in his mind’s eye was Eric Beale sitting at the table between two public defenders-both fresh out of law school, the low men on the county’s legal totem pole-as the trial had progressed.

Matt squeezed his eyes shut against the image, but it was still there. The boy’s mother and father sat next to each other but apart, a void between them, the kind of void that sits between strangers. Matt had never seen them speak to anyone, not even each other, so detached were they from the proceedings. He remembered thinking how odd it was, the way the parents had never turned to each other for comfort throughout the entire trial, as if each had shut out everyone else. Someone had told him that they were both alcoholics, and he had wondered if that might explain the sense of disconnect he had when he looked at them. Especially the father. Matt had never gotten the feeling that the father was actually there in the courtroom with the rest of them the way the mother was.

Jeanette, her name was, Matt just remembered that. Jeanette Beale sat through every minute of every day as if watching a movie she wasn’t enjoying. Her eyes rarely left her son. The father, on the other hand, showed up sporadically, and even then hadn’t seemed to be affected by what was going on.

Matt was aware it was only a matter of time before his phone began to ring and he’d have to answer it. He’d told Dorsey he wasn’t afraid to face the press, that he wasn’t a coward, and he’d meant it. What he hadn’t said was that he was afraid he’d have to face Jeanette Beale and explain to her how he’d been so wrong. That his mistakes had caused the son she’d obviously loved to die.

There was just no damned way he could make this right. The best he could hope for was to figure out where he’d gone wrong-and God knew that wouldn’t be consolation to anyone.

The box with his notes on this case was in the attic back home. He needed to get his hands on the old files, find some quiet place where no one could find him, where he could go over every word of every report without being disturbed by ringing phones, so he could reconstruct the entire thing in his head, until he understood and could explain to himself how he could have been so far from the truth. Then maybe he could explain to her-to Jeanette Beale, whose eyes had never left her son. Those eyes had expressed no shock when the conviction was read, nor when the death sentence had been announced, almost as if she’d expected no less than this from her life.

Matt needed to understand, not so that he could offer excuses when the cameras caught up to him and the microphones were shoved in his face, but so that he would have the strength to face her, to tell her what had gone wrong, to explain to her how he and the system had failed her son. How he had failed her. How regardless of what else in life had let her down, she should have been able to count on him to find the truth, and on justice being done.

He reached up and grabbed one of the pilings, pulled himself to his feet, and stood for one moment more to watch the gulls dive for the small fish that swam close to shore. On the way back to the house, he took his cell phone from his pocket and dialed a number. He knew just the place where he could hide out and relive the past for a few days.

“Hey, Diane? Matt. Yeah, great, thanks. Yes, I got your message. You said something about taking your boat out on the Chesapeake for a few days? I think I changed my mind. Yeah, sure. I can be ready to leave in the morning…”