Ernie didn’t ask whether Jensen had checked the seats to see if anybody remembered Sample. He would wait on that. It would just have pissed Jensen off being questioned about how thoroughly he did his job. Jensen did say that Sample had given him the ticket stubs and a program. He thought it had been booked into evidence at the time but once they got Foster’s ID of Harker, and Christine identified Harker, that had been the end of it.
Ernie’s next stop was the sheriff’s office file room. He stared at the banker boxes occupying an entire shelf and began pulling them down. Unlike the DA file, which was mixed with crime reports and DA investigative files, the sheriff’s file was sequential by date. It didn’t take long to pull Jensen’s reports from the crime scene as well as his report on Sample.
Jensen’s memory had been surprisingly accurate given the passage of time. He had picked Sample up and taken him to the station. Sample said that he and a friend, Jimmy Stack, had gone to the Dodger game with the Giants. His friend Stack confirmed the alibi, even producing a game program that he gave to Jensen. Sample gave him the ticket stubs and a parking receipt. They both claimed that the game had run late because it went into extra innings. They drove as far as Gorman, which was at the top of the State Route 99 from LA to the Central Valley, and slept in the car. Then they came home the next day, and that was when his mother told him about Lisa Farrow being murdered.
Ernie went back to the evidence room and asked for all the evidence in the Harker case. It didn’t take him long to locate the program from the game. The ticket stubs were paper-clipped to the brochure. It was enough to show that Sample couldn’t have been the one that killed Lisa Farrow. But Sample was dead and that meant he needed to talk to Sample’s mother if she was still alive and Jimmy Stack if he was still around. That would close the loop.
It didn’t take long to run a motor vehicle license check on Dolores Sample. Unsurprisingly, there was more than one in the state of California but only one in Tenaya. The same address on Jensen’s original report. Ernie pulled up in front of the house, instinctively surveying the yard and neighborhood for hidden threats. It was a well-kept area of nice tract homes and neatly kept yards. He walked up to the door, then waited for someone to answer the doorbell. A woman opened the door enough that she could see Ernie holding his badge in front of him.
With the exception of the effect of twenty-six years, Dolores Sample looked a lot like what Ernie expected from Jensen’s description. She was a full-figured woman, taller than he expected, almost five-seven with blonde hair. For a woman who had to be in her sixties at the very least, she managed to take advantage of what she had. Ernie could tell that she had once been striking in a way that would attract attention. She still carried herself with a sense of assurance. There was something about her that immediately told Ernie that Dolores Sample knew her way around men and men knew their way around her. She didn’t seem the least intimidated by his badge or his identifying himself as from the DA’s office, and, Ernie noticed, she didn’t seem surprised when he said he was there about the Harker case.
She stood at the open door staring at him. She didn’t invite him in. Before Ernie got much out of his mouth other than why he was there, she interrupted with a torrent of words. “I can’t help you. My son’s dead. He didn’t have anything to do with Lisa’s murder. He loved that girl. He was murdered, and you people didn’t do anything about it. You people made his life hell. His name was in the papers. People knew the cops accused him. I don’t blame that little girl, Christine. She was just a baby, didn’t know any better, but I blame Lisa’s mother, Barbara. She was always a bitch. My son wasn’t here when it happened. That’s it. Now unless you’ve got something else to talk about I want you to leave me alone.” She slammed the door. Ernie stood there for a moment thinking, That went well, and then walked back to his county car.
Jimmy Stack wasn’t very difficult to find. He was in jail.
As soon as Ernie ran the background check on Stack, he learned that he was doing a year for multiple petty theft convictions. His rap sheet was a litany of low-grade crimes and alcohol-related offenses with a few minor drug offenses mixed in, the poetic lines of a wasted life. His primary achievement appeared to be that he hadn’t done anything serious enough to earn straight prison time.
Jimmy Stack was a bottom-feeder, fairly harmless but a constant irritant to the law enforcement community. Like a lot of his ilk, he accumulated a number of minor offenses and when a judge decided that he needed to clear the file and consolidate the sentences to run concurrent, Jimmy would pull a year or so in jail, then be out for a year only to earn his way back in again. He was a familiar jail resident and wasn’t a problem prisoner, which garnered him almost immediate trustee status and put him on work crews or other menial jobs necessary to the business of a jail.
For a person doing county jail time that was as good as it got. It was symbiotic in many respects. The jail got a reasonably good worker and Jimmy got to spend the winter in the relative comfort of the jail with extra privileges as opposed to the street, dried out for a while, giving his liver a chance to revive, and got three meals a day. Or as he would call it, “three hots and a cot.”
Ernie was waiting in a sheriff’s interview room when Jimmy was brought in. From the information in his file, Jimmy Stack was in his early fifties. He wore those years hard, because from his appearance he looked like he was seeing the back end of his sixties. Time, cheap booze, and life on the street aged a man. Years of sleeping in the rough and sitting in the sun had made his skin look like tanned leather. Ernie had seen it too many times to be shocked or even sympathetic. Many people chose that life, despite the best efforts of social services and well-meaning citizens to provide alternatives.
Stack’s expression was one of resignation. No one had told him why a detective wanted to see him, and he couldn’t think of anything he had done that merited a detective. Experience likely told him that whatever it was it probably wasn’t good and that he should just sit down and wait. There was no reason to hurry bad news. Eventually someone would tell him what was going on or what to do or what was going to happen to him. That was the story of his life.
“You want to sit down?” Jimmy Stack slumped in the only other chair. Ernie didn’t try to be friendly or unfriendly. He knew that street people like Jimmy would be suspicious and would view an overt effort to be friendly as weakness to be exploited. Treating him with respect was the best approach. “What do they call you?”
“Jimmy, everybody calls me Jimmy.” His voice had the gravelly sound of a longtime smoker. A coughing fit reinforced the reason for his voice. He shuffled around in his chair until he was comfortable.
“Jimmy, my name is Detective Ernie Garcia. I’m an investigator with the district attorney’s office.” Jimmy’s eyebrows went up a fraction. It had been a long time since anyone from the district attorney had even acknowledged his existence other than to call his name at a misdemeanor arraignment. He wasn’t going to ask what Ernie wanted.
“I’ve been told that you used to run with Rick Sample. Is that correct?”
“Long time ago. Why?” Jimmy’s eyes narrowed, and Ernie caught the guarded reflex telling him that there was a nerve close to the surface.
“I’m not here because you’re charged with anything. I need to ask about whether you know anything about Rick Sample and a murder that happened twenty-six years ago, Lisa Farrow. You remember that?”
Jimmy’s posture stiffened. “I didn’t have anything to do with that. I’ve never been into anything really bad. Violence isn’t my thing—booze, drugs, and an occasional desperate woman.” Stack shrugged with a forced smile, unembarrassed by the admission.
Ernie nodded. “Do you remember being questioned by sheriff’s detectives regarding you being with Rick Sample the night of Lisa Farrow’s murder?”
“I told you I didn’t have nothin’ to do with that.”
“I didn’t say you did. You told detectives that you were with Rick Sample the day
of the murder and you both were at a baseball game in LA. I want to talk to you about that.”
“Sample’s dead. Why are you askin’ now?”
“Because I need to know if he really was at that baseball game.”
Jimmy sucked in his lower lip, chewing on it. “I told those cops that he was. Why you askin’ me again?”
“Because somebody says he wasn’t.”
“That was a long time ago. I said what I said.”
Ernie’s patience was growing thin with Stack’s dancing around the question. “I need you to testify in court.”
“No. Rick’s dead and none of it makes no difference. I’m not gonna go to court.”
“You will if you get a subpoena and a judge orders you to. All I’m asking is whether you and Rick Sample went to that ball game. If you did, then that’s that.”
“Well, I did so that’s that. I told you, I ain’t gonna go to no court.” Ernie could see the ember of defiance beginning to glow in Jimmy Stack’s eyes. Now wasn’t the time to push. He had very little leverage.
“Suppose I got your sentence reduced and you could be out on the street?”
“I got nothin’ on the street that’s better than what I got here. I gotta live here and people that live here don’t help cops, not if they want to sleep through the night.” Jimmy Stack looked at Ernie with tired eyes. “No cop never did anything good for me. Look, I’m too old to jail fight and I don’t want to. I talk to you, it gets around. Everything in here gets around. Someone will start rumors and next thing I’ll get the shit kicked out of me by some punk with nothin’ better to do. You do what you have to do, and I’ll do what I have to do, but you got nothin’ that does anything for me.” Stack stood up. “Are we through?”
Ernie stood up and rapped on the table, summoning the guard. “Maybe—maybe not. Jimmy, if we need you, you will testify. Don’t make me show you what will happen if you don’t. You have privileges inside that make life easier. They can also disappear and make life inside a lot harder for a man your age. I’m not asking you to lie. I’m asking you to tell the truth.”
“You’re asking me to say what you want me to say. That’s what cops always want. The truth? I been down this road before.” Jimmy turned when the guard entered and walked out.
Ernie walked back from the sheriff’s office to find O’Hara and Jamison talking about their contact with Dr. Levy. As usual, O’Hara didn’t waste any breath on greetings. “You got anything?”
Ernie deposited himself in a chair next to O’Hara. “Well, it didn’t take me long to do what you wanted,” he replied, addressing Jamison. “I talked to Jensen. He was relatively sober, I guess. He told me he checked out Sample’s alibi. Sample was at a Dodger baseball game in LA and didn’t come home until the next day. Jensen got the ticket stubs from him and they were still in evidence. I looked. They’re there. He put me onto Sample’s mother, Dolores. She basically told me to put a stick up my ass but she did confirm that her son wasn’t in town. According to the information, Sample was with a friend named Jimmy Stack. I talked to Stack. Wasn’t hard to find. He’s in the county jail. He wasn’t very cooperative, but he did tell me that he told Jensen that he was at the ball game with Sample. That’s it.”
O’Hara leaned in. “Okay, so we bring in Jensen and this Stack guy and they close the door on the girl’s testimony. That’s it.”
“Maybe.” Jamison was shaking his head. “Just like I stopped Gifford from getting in the prior statements of Foster, I can’t get in what Sample told Jensen about being at a baseball game. But I can use this Stack. What do you think, Ernie? You talked to him.”
“I think we’re going to have to give him some incentive to testify. He wasn’t straightforward about anything. The only thing he would say is that he told Jensen that he and Sample were at the game. Other than that, he wouldn’t say much of anything.”
“Why not? There’s no downside for him.”
“That’s from your perspective, Boss. From his perspective, he thinks he’ll get a snitch jacket for talking to cops, and then he’ll have a rough time. He has a point. I mean, I get it. If you want him to testify you’re probably going to have to try to force the issue. But I wouldn’t be sure exactly what he’ll say or even if he’ll say anything.”
Jamison was thoughtful, considering his options. “Dr. Levy says he thinks Christine Farrow was hypnotized. For now, we go with making Gifford put on his case. The only thing he has so far is her and we’ll see how that plays out.” He swiveled in his chair and looked in Ernie’s direction. “You say there were baseball tickets?”
“Yeah, two ticket stubs, a program, and a parking receipt.”
“The tickets have the times on them? How about the parking receipt?”
“Yeah. There’s no doubt they’re from the game.”
“That may be enough with Jensen’s testimony that he got them from Sample. We’ll play it by ear.”
O’Hara looked puzzled. “I thought you said you couldn’t get in what Sample told Jensen?”
This was one of the problems with trying to rebuild twenty-five-year-old cases. It was fine for appellate judges self-righteously sending cases back years after the fact, but the reality was that it meant trying to find witnesses and facts that were almost impossible to rebuild. “I can’t unless Gifford is asleep at the switch. But I can get in the tickets and they have dates and times on them, right?” Ernie nodded. “Okay, so that’s just maybe enough to show Sample couldn’t have been there. We bring in Jensen to say he got the tickets from Sample, and we bring in the tickets themselves. We’ll show that Sample was investigated, and nobody ignored him or just relied on the testimony of a three-year-old and Foster. It will certainly undermine Christine’s story. I feel bad about her, but I think she’s been screwed up even more by that psychiatrist, Vinson. I’m not going to let Harker get off the hook because of some psychological bullshit.” Jamison felt bad for Christine Farrow, confident that she was just being victimized one more time.
Chapter 32
Judge Wallace asked Christine to retake the witness stand, reminding her that she was still under oath. She had on the same blue dress from the day before and the same tired eyes looked out on the courtroom full of spectators. On the way into the courtroom a reporter asked her how she felt. She thought to herself, How do I feel? She felt drained, exhausted by the questions and the stress of reliving the worst moment of her life in front of strangers. But she had relived that moment a hundred times in her dreams, waking drenched in cold sweat.
Dr. Vinson had told her that doing this would help bring an end to those nightmares. Christine couldn’t help but wonder whether what would be left of her life would be better. It had to be better. God help her, it couldn’t be worse. Her life had been spent on her feet, shoving plates in front of people barely better off than her, and on her back, trying to find moments where she could hope that the man she had met only hours before could be the one that would give her a better life. So far that hadn’t happened.
She looked at the man sitting at the counsel table with Sam Gifford. It wasn’t the face that she remembered, but those faces from her past were simply blurred images. She thought she remembered what her mother looked like but even that memory was nothing more than fogged images. What she did remember was the terror. Now as she looked at the prosecutor sitting and staring at her, she could feel the terror rising again.
Wallace’s voice rumbled. “Ms. Farrow, you are reminded you are still under oath. Mr. Jamison, you may cross-examine.”
Jamison walked around the counsel table, finally standing about ten feet from Farrow, enough for him to be her primary focus but not so close that he would intimidate her by closing in on her. “Ms. Farrow, may I call you Christine? It might be a little easier.” She nodded but didn’t answer. “I’m sorry, the court reporter has to take down what you say so we need an answer.”
“Yes, call me Christine. That’s okay.” She kept watching him with a wary expression on her face,
like watching a dog that you weren’t sure was friendly.
“Christine, I don’t want to go back over what happened the night your mother died. I understand how painful that memory is. What I want to talk about is when and why you came to the conclusion that the man standing over your bed was Rick Sample.” Christine nodded understanding. “You testified that for a long time, years in fact, you didn’t remember who was standing over your bed. But you did testify very close to the time this happened that it was the defendant, Rick Harker. Did anyone help you remember now that it was Rick Sample?”
“Dr. Vinson, he’s the one who helped me. I went to see him because the nightmares were happening all the time. I kept seeing it in my head, faces staring at me but they were like blurs, you know? I’d wake up screaming and sweating. It was like I did something bad but I didn’t know what it was. I can’t explain better than that. There was a man who came into the diner where I work and I found out he was like a social worker or something and I told him that I needed to talk to somebody. He’s the one who told me to go to Dr. Vinson and that maybe he wouldn’t charge anything. I don’t have any extra money.”
“And you did do that? You went to see Dr. Vinson?”
“Yes, I called his office and explained. He saw me and said he thought he could help me, that he studied these kinds of cases.”
“You say Dr. Vinson helped you. How did he help you?” Jamison waited for the objection to come from Gifford regarding a privileged communication between a psychologist and a patient, but nothing came. He knew the law. Farrow wasn’t Gifford’s client but still she had a right to assert a privilege. He wasn’t going to push that issue, deciding that it was better to hear what she had to say and deal with the issue if the court or Gifford raised it. He pressed forward, waiting for an answer.
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