Supreme Justice

Chapter Forty-five

The Willamette Valley Correctional Facility for Women had been selected by the Oregon Department of Corrections to house female death-row prisoners. Sarah Woodruff had the dubious honor of being the institution’s first and only death-row resident. A chain-link fence topped by barbed wire surrounded the low-slung, pastel yellow buildings. A service road circled the prison, and the land on the other side of the road had been ground down and stripped away. Anyone escaping would be visible to the guards until they made it to the evergreens that grew half a mile beyond the fence. In the distance were low green hills and a vast blue sky.

Dana was expected. After she signed in and passed through the metal detector, a guard led her down the prison corridors to the noncontact visiting room, where she waited for the institution’s most famous inmate. Fifteen minutes later, a thick metal door opened on the other side of the bulletproof glass, and Sarah Woodruff shuffled in dressed in a baggy jumpsuit and wearing manacles. Her complexion was pasty, a result of the starchy institutional food and lack of sunlight, but the former policewoman held her head high despite her depressing situation. Dana was pleased to see that the prisoner had maintained her dignity.

Woodruff eyed Dana warily while the guard took off her chains. When the guard left, she sat in an orange molded plastic chair and picked up the receiver that was affixed to the wall.

“Thank you for seeing me,” Dana said into an identical receiver.

“You’re a reporter, right?”

Dana nodded.

“And you’re here to do a story about my case?”

“Yes. We think we can stir up support for your cause by letting our readers know how the government kept you from getting a fair trial.”

“You might make some money off the papers you sell, too,” Sarah said.

“There’s that, too. Even reporters have to eat.”

“I hope exploiting me helps fatten you up, Miss Cutler.”

Dana found it interesting that Sarah had made no effort to mask her cynicism, even though Mary Garrett must have told her that Dana was there to help. It was a good sign that Woodruff was not trying to manipulate her. She looked straight through the glass and locked her eyes on Woodruff’s.

“Selling papers does put food on my plate. That doesn’t mean I don’t think you were fucked over. I’m in this for the money and because I think you got a raw deal.”

“Mary said you were a detective with the D.C. police. What did you work?”

“Vice and Narcotics. Now I’m an investigative reporter. You use a lot of the same skills. The big difference is that I can’t use a rubber hose to get people to talk to me.”

Sarah didn’t smile at the joke. “I wanted to be a detective,” she said. “That dream ended the minute I was arrested.”

Dana leaned forward. “We want to help you get your life back on track, and the first step is a new trial. There are so many unanswered questions in your case. Especially those involving the intelligence agencies. Hopefully, Ms. Garrett will get answers to them if the Supreme Court sends your case back on the national-security issue.”

“That’s where I was really screwed,” Woodruff said, her anger barely contained. “The government shut us down. They raised that state-secrets bullshit, and I never had a chance.”

“Why do you think the government worked so hard to keep the truth from coming out.”

Sarah laughed bitterly. “That’s easy. Can you imagine the uproar if the public found out its government was dealing drugs? Someone somewhere is scared to death of what would happen if the truth about the China Sea came out. I’m certain that John was killed by the CIA because he could prove hashish was smuggled in on the China Sea.”

“Before I ask you about the facts of your case, I’d like to talk a little about your childhood and how you ended up on the police force.”

“Why do you need to know that?”

“I’m writing an article that I’m hoping will help you get a new trial, so I’ve got to make our readers see you as a real person.”

“I’d rather not talk about my past. Can’t you get all that from Mary? She had me write an autobiography for the sentencing phase of my trial.”

“I need to hear it from you-how you see your life, not how an expert witness dissected it. All our readers know about you now is that you’re a convicted killer.”

“Nothing I tell you is going to endear me to them. My early life wasn’t pretty. I was lucky to escape from it in one piece.”

“There was testimony about abuse during the sentencing hearing.”

“Yeah, well, those were some of my earliest memories of dear old Dad, may he rot in hell.”

“How long did it go on?”

“Until he died, which fortunately was when I was nine. He was a trucker. There was a big pileup on an icy road in Montana. I hear he burned to death. I hope it’s true.”

Woodruff paused and caught her breath. Dana waited before asking about Sarah’s mother.

“Living with that bastard took its toll. He beat her when he was home. She was a dishrag. She never protected me, even when I told her what was going on. She screamed at me, accused me of lying. She was drunk most of the time, and she’d drink enough to pass out when he was home so she could claim she didn’t know what was happening. I got out of there as soon as I could.”

Dana consulted her notes. “You ran away several times.”

“They’d bring me back, and I’d plot my next exit. When I turned sixteen, I took off for good. I’d heard Oregon was a good place to go, and that’s how I ended up here. I lied about my age. That was easy. I always looked older than I was. Got a job waitressing and soon found out that waiting tables was not what I wanted to do all my life. So I got a GED, worked my way through community college, scholarship to Portland State, and on to the police academy.”

“Do you ever talk to your mom?” Dana asked.

“She died. I found out about that by chance. After I left, I never called, and to the best of my knowledge, she never tried to contact me.”

“What made you choose law enforcement as a career?”

“It gave me a chance to arrest scumbags like my father,” Sarah answered without hesitation.

Dana couldn’t help admiring Woodruff’s strength. She was impressed by Sarah’s ability to hold herself together through the isolation and despair she must be experiencing on death row, and she was starting to like the woman. But before she got carried away, Dana reminded herself that with the right circumstances, even women of good character could kill.

Dana spent twenty more minutes on background before asking Sarah her first question about the incident that had put her on death row.

“I’ve read the transcript of your first trial, and I’ve got a pretty good grasp of what happened the first time you were accused of killing John Finley. I’d like you to tell me what happened the night he was really killed.”

“Yeah, well, that was interesting. It was a repeat performance. I was sleeping, and a noise woke me. I got my gun and went downstairs, and there was John, looking guilty as hell. I wanted to kill him. I really did, because of everything he’d put me through.”

“Did you?” Dana asked.

“No, I did not,” Woodruff answered without flinching. “John was alive when he left my house.”

“Did he tell you why he broke in?”

“Yes. He told me everything.”

“Why?”

Woodruff smiled. “When I came downstairs, I was furious. I fired a shot into the floor. He could see how mad I was, and he was desperate to talk me out of shooting him, so he spewed out his story to distract me and to convince me that he had no choice when he let me go to trial.”

“Why did he return to your house? He had to know you wouldn’t be very happy to see him.”

“He was on the run, and he needed the passports and phony ID in his duffel bag.”

“The one that was found with his body?”

Woodruff nodded. “He’d stashed it at my house the night he was kidnapped. I didn’t know the damn thing was there until he told me.”

“What was his version of what happened on the China Sea?”

“John was the ship’s captain. He was using a false name, and the crew knew him as Orrin Hadley. John told me that the China Sea rendezvoused with a freighter that sailed from Karachi, Pakistan, with a load of hashish. The Pakistanis transferred the load to the China Sea midocean. The hashish was supposed to be off-loaded at the dock in Shelby where the ship had been moored.

“The evening he was kidnapped, a crew member named Steve Talbot killed all of the other crew members and tried to kill John. John got lucky and killed Talbot in a gunfight. He assumed that Talbot was after the hashish and figured out that he couldn’t be acting alone because there was too much of it for one man to get off the ship. He knew he had to get away before Talbot’s accomplices arrived. He took the duffel bag with him when he escaped.”

“Why did he stash it in your house in the first place?”

“John was wounded in the gunfight on the ship, and he had to get help. He drove to my condo because I was the only person he felt he could turn to. He was hoping I would help him and keep my mouth shut, for old times’ sake.”

“You said that John was on the run the evening he was really murdered,” Woodruff said.

Sarah nodded.

“Who was he running from?”

“I never found out.”

“What happened when he got to your condo on the evening he was kidnapped? I’m talking about the first time.”

“He’d lived with me and still had a key. He hid the duffel bag as soon as he got inside. Then he started for the stairs. He was going to my bedroom to wake me so I could help him with his wound. He was halfway to the stairs when two men broke in and attacked him. That’s when I came down and was knocked unconscious.

“John told me he was locked in the trunk of a car and driven to the place where the men planned to kill him. He was pulled out of the trunk and forced onto his knees. John was certain he was going to die. Then the man who was behind him collapsed and knocked John to the ground. As he was falling, he saw the other man’s head explode. Moments later, several men appeared and removed his restraints. They were CIA operatives. John told me that the smuggling operation was run by the CIA.”

“How did the CIA know where the kidnappers had taken Finley?”

“The Agency had the China Sea under surveillance as soon as it docked, but the men who were watching didn’t realize what had happened on the ship. When they heard shots and saw John drive off, they followed John to my house. Then they heard more shots and saw the kidnappers leave with John. They followed and rescued him. John was driven to a safe house where his wounds were treated. When he recovered, he helped set up the sale of the hashish.”

“Did John tell you who his kidnappers were working for?” Dana asked.

“He thought that Steve Talbot was dealing with a Mexican drug cartel and probably didn’t realize that the CIA was behind the smuggling operation. The people that tried to kill John were part of this cartel.”

“Why did John wait so long to come forward?”

“Everything that happened on the China Sea was hushed up so the people who were going to buy the hashish from John wouldn’t know about the killings on the ship and the cartel’s attempt to steal the goods. John was undercover during my arrest and most of my trial. He told me he would have come forward, but he couldn’t risk blowing his cover. He said he insisted on clearing me as soon as the deal was complete.”

“Your neighbor told the police that she heard a loud argument the night Finley died. Did you argue?” Dana asked.

Woodruff nodded. “At one point, we were yelling at each other.”

“You told everyone that you fired one shot into the floor before you realized that John was the person who’d broken in.”

“That’s right.”

“Your neighbor thought she heard two shots.”

“She was mistaken. One bullet was dug out of the floor in the entryway. I didn’t fire again.”

“How do you explain the coincidence of the murder weapon being a gun that was connected to one of your cases?”

Woodruff looked directly at Dana. “Remember who you’re dealing with. The people who want this hushed up control the most powerful intelligence agency in the world. If they wanted me to be the fall guy for John’s murder, how difficult do you think it would be for them to steal a gun from the police property room?”

“I see your point. Did Mary tell you about the men who were found on the logging trail?”

“Yes. Mary showed me autopsy and crime-scene photographs. I only saw the man in the leather jacket briefly before I was knocked unconscious, and my memory of the fight is hazy, but one of the men could be the man who was fighting with John.”

“There were rumors that the drug dealers were after a quarter-million dollars that Finley was using to finance the smuggling operation. Did John talk about that?”

Woodruff’s brow furrowed. Then she shook her head. “Mary mentioned it to me, but John never did. If he had that much money, he wouldn’t want anyone to know about it, would he? I guess it could have been in the duffel bag. I never saw inside it. And he was pretty shaken when he was telling me what happened. I’d caught him breaking in, and I’d fired a shot into the floor. He had to be worried that I was going to kill him, because he could see how angry I was. John blurted out everything he told me. It wasn’t orderly, the way I just said it. He was just saying things as quickly as he could think of them to convince me to let him go.”

“Do you think he made up what he told you because he was desperate? Could the CIA story have been an invention?”

“If it was, who killed him?”

“What if the smuggling operation was John’s idea or the idea of someone he worked with who had no connection to American intelligence?”

“You’re forgetting the men from Homeland Security who made the China Sea and the hashish disappear.”

“They may have pretended to be from Homeland Security so no one would question them when they took the hashish away. We could just be dealing with two different gangs of dope dealers.”

“Dana, I don’t know who killed John. I can only guess. The only thing I know for certain is that it wasn’t me.”

“Exposed is going to put as much pressure as we can on the Supreme Court so it will send your case back for a new trial and give you a chance to prove that.”

“If they don’t, I want to die as soon as possible.”

“Don’t give up hope.”

The determination that had suffused Sarah’s features faded away, and she looked tired.

“I don’t have any hope, Dana. All I have are days that stretch on and on and are always the same. Do you have any idea what it’s like to sit in a small cell all day with nothing to keep you occupied but your thoughts? I had a life. I’ve stood on mountaintops that pierced the clouds. I’ve skydived through space, floating like an eagle. Now I see the sky once a day for a half hour. Now all I have is the strong possibility that I will die for something I did not do.”

During the return trip to Portland, Dana couldn’t stop thinking about Sarah Woodruff. Everything about her was impressive: her self-possession in the face of so much adversity, the way she’d survived her childhood and made something of herself when it would have been so easy to give up, and the way she’d confronted Dana when most people would have tried to curry favor. Dana knew the danger in drawing conclusions about guilt or innocence. She had not been in Sarah’s condo on the night Finley was murdered, but she couldn’t help but feel that had she been, she would have seen Finley leave the condo alive.

Whether Sarah was guilty or innocent, Dana found it hard to believe that a jury would convict if it was in possession of all of the facts. There would have to be a reasonable doubt in the mind of a fair juror who learned about the China Sea and the drug dealers who were found murdered in the forest. She hoped that Exposed could raise a big enough stink to sway public opinion, and she prayed that her investigation would help take Sarah Woodruff off death row.