by Greg Iles
“That’s Tom, right down to the ground.”
I nod, thinking of my father lying helpless in his own hospital bed. “You know how people joke about doctors’ handwriting? Well, Dad’s prescriptions always looked like chicken-scratch, sure enough. But I still have a page of those drug calculations. And they look like they were written by a seventeenth-century mathematician, they’re so precise.”
“He loved Sarah like his own daughter,” Jack says. “He’s told me that.”
“Well . . . it was near the very end of that struggle that the other thing happened.”
“Which was?”
Even now, a shudder of dread goes through me at the memory. “A Hispanic guy knocked on our front door. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him. He was about thirty, tall, light-skinned, nerdy-looking. Turned out he was a serology technician from the Houston PD crime lab. Felix Vargas. I’d dealt with him on a few cases. Vargas was a chain-smoker, but I could smell alcohol on him the second I answered the door.”
“What did he want?”
We’ve reached the flat riverbank at the bottom of the mill road. Where the Magnolia Queen once floated in its movie-prop majesty, now only broken mooring cables trail into the river. The Mississippi is still wearing its summer colors, the muddy brown tide rolling through sandy banks thick with green willow oak and kudzu, and white fields of cotton stretching away over the flat Louisiana delta. I pull to the edge of the asphalt and park at the edge of the gray anti-erosion rocks that slope down to the water.
“You want to get out and dip your foot in the water?” I ask. “You’ll have to climb down the riprap.”
“I can still manage that,” Jack says, gazing out at the slowly falling sun. “But the river can wait. Tell me about the Hispanic guy, Vargas. What did he want from you?”
“Help. He started apologizing as soon as he saw me. He knew the shape Sarah was in. I could hardly get him to stop apologizing long enough to find out what he was doing there. He hadn’t called ahead, because he thought I’d refuse to see him, which I would have. But by then, of course, he was there. I was politely asking him to go home and sober up when he grabbed my arm and said, ‘A rapist nearly killed a girl, Mr. Cage, and he’s about to walk free because of a lab screwup. I think you’re the only one who can stop it.’
“That got my attention. I didn’t invite him in, but we had a porch swing outside, and I sat on that while Vargas paced around and smoked and told me his story.”
“Which was?”
“A Latina girl had been raped and beaten half to death the previous week. Raped with a beer bottle. Her name was Maribel. She was twenty-one years old, fresh out of junior college, a bookkeeper at a trucking company. The alleged perp was the son of the owner. A couple of months before, this Maribel had gone on a few dates with the kid, but she’d ended it after a couple of weeks because she sensed there was something off about him. He had anger problems, and some sexual issues, apparently. Difficulty getting it up, for one thing. And he was only twenty-four.”
“Was this guy Latino?”
I shake my head. “Anglo. Last name Conley. And his family had money. Within an hour of his arrest, Wes Conley Jr. had one of the top criminal defense attorneys in the city representing him.”
“Go on.”
“The girl’s story was straightforward. She would have stopped dating Conley much sooner than she did, but she was afraid she’d lose her job, since Conley’s dad owned the company. But when she finally got up the nerve to end it, that didn’t happen. The kid stalked her a little, called her fifty or so times, but then he seemed to resign himself to it.
“Everything seemed fine. Then Maribel goes to a company party. The Conley kid is there, and he starts talking to her. He’s drunk, and hitting on her pretty heavy. Lots of people see it. Later on, though—after the assault—their memories get hazy on that point.”
“Employment anxiety?”
“You got it. So, Maribel goes home from the party around eleven, alone. She lives with her mother, but her mother’s staying across the complex with a sick friend. Fifteen minutes after Maribel gets home, Wes Conley shows up at her door.”
Jack is shaking his head in what looks like dread.
“She talks to him through the door, tells him to leave. He won’t. She’s reluctant to call the police because of her job situation. She decides to answer her cell phone, talks to him while looking through the peephole. Conley’s got a half-empty bottle of Corona in his hand. He seems calm enough, and he says he needs to give her something. A present he bought her before they broke up. Hoping to avoid a big scene, she opens the door.”
“Oh, no.”
“Well . . . so far, so good. The kid gives her some gold pin he claims to have bought months before. Then he wants to come in, make out, you know the drill. But Maribel actually talks him out of it and gets him to leave. Jumpy as hell, she calls her sister in Miami and tells her what happened, but she decides not to call the police, even though her sister told her she should.”
“I don’t think I want to hear this.”
“It could be worse. But it was bad enough. Maribel finally goes to bed. Close to an hour later, a loud noise wakes her up. When she gets to her den, there’s a guy standing there in a black ski mask and gloves. Before she can even scream, he coldcocks her. Then he picks up Conley’s beer bottle from the counter. Maribel had brought it in after he left it on the porch. The masked man beats her with the bottle, which doesn’t break, thank God. But then he rips off her panties and rapes her with it. Both holes. Serious trauma, but mostly in the back.”
Jack closes his eyes. “I think I’d have quit your job long before you did.”
“The guy never penetrates her with his penis, but while she’s lying half conscious on the floor, he masturbates over her.”
“Leaving DNA?”
“Yes. Most of it hits her nightie, but some hits the floor. Carpeted.”
“Okay.”
“Once the guy finishes getting off, he stares at her for half a minute, breathing hard. She believes he’s getting ready to kill her. But instead, he pulls a camera out of his pocket and shoots a flash picture of her. He leans over her and hisses that if she calls the police, he’ll paste the photo all over ‘Spick Town.’ Then he vanishes, leaving her alive but seriously injured. Once he leaves, she manages to call 911, and the paramedics and cops show up.”
“It was the Conley kid wearing a mask?”
“Maribel has zero doubt. First, his size was right. Second, he talked to her while he was raping her—mostly a furious, guttural whisper—but she recognized his voice. Third, the guy smelled like Conley. And that’s something we all know, what a lover smells like. Fourth, she recognized his dick. He was uncircumcised, which is rare among white males in Texas. So was our masked perp.”
“Goddamn. What happened?”
“The cops listened to her story, then arrested Conley.”
“But he told a different story.”
“Oh, yeah. He admitted coming on to her at the party, even to going to her apartment. He wanted to get laid, he told the detectives. Who doesn’t, right? Maribel didn’t want sex, Conley said, but he’d given her the gold pin, and she seemed to feel bad for him, so he laid a guilt trip on her. Probably to get him to go away, he claimed, she gave him a hand job on the porch.”
Jack groans. “Which explains the semen.”
“On her nightie, anyway. Maribel denied that, of course.”
“What about the carpet?”
“The carpet became all-important. Because Conley claimed he never went inside the apartment. He told detectives that after the hand job, he was satisfied, so he split, then went to get stoned with some friends and watch the jets land and take off at the end of the runway out at Hobby Airport.”
“The friends backed him up?”
“To the hilt. Five guys, all from affluent families. And because they admitted getting stoned, the cops gave them credibility points for candor.”
/> “What about the camera? The flash photo? The cops never found those?”
“Nope. Maribel identified the camera from pictures as a Sony Mavica, an expensive digital camera, which was unusual for the time. She’d never seen Conley with one before, and she admitted that.”
“The cops searched all his computers at home and work for the image?”
“Yes. They found nothing.”
Jack shakes his head thoughtfully. “So this crime lab tech, Vargas, must have come to see you about the carpet.”
“Exactly. Maribel had showed them the spot where Conley had raped her. The tech at the scene had looked at the carpet under a special light and seen no signs of semen. So they cut out the patch where the girl said the perp ejaculated, bagged and tagged it, and took it down to the crime lab.”
“Okay.”
“Here’s where the problem starts. The head of the DNA section of the crime lab, Dr. Daman Kirmani, decided to handle the carpet analysis himself. He went over the swatch with a light and saw nothing. Then he did a microscopic exam of a random sample of the fibers. Finding nothing, he declared there was no semen on the carpet and reported that to the DA’s office. That report became the key factor in what would be the plea agreement. Because the lack of semen on the carpet seriously damaged the credibility of Maribel’s story. Forensics had ‘proved’ there was no semen inside the apartment, other than that on Maribel’s nightie. The semen on the nightie did belong to Conley, but he’d already covered his ass in his original statement.”
“But the medical exam of the girl—”
“Definitely proved a rape occurred. Serious trauma from the bottle. Maribel also had a shattered orbit beneath the eye, a concussion, a broken jaw, two broken teeth, defensive injuries of the hands.”
“Christ!” said Jack. “So somebody had obviously beat the living shit out of her.”
“Right. And nobody disputed that a violent rape had occurred. But as regards Wes Conley, it was a he-said/she-said deal. As a result, once the cops sifted through all the evidence, the assistant DA saw a fairly weak case against the kid for aggravated rape, which is what the charge should have been. Conley’s prints were on the beer bottle, but he’d admitted bringing that with him, and Maribel had admitted bringing it inside the apartment herself. Another tenant of the complex, a Brazilian man, had seen a pickup truck like Conley’s parked near her apartment during the time of the attack, but when the cops went back to that guy, he decided he’d been wrong about the time.”
“Conley’s old man got to him?”
“Probably. But you can almost never prove that kind of thing. Did they buy him off or scare him off? It doesn’t matter. His testimony wasn’t going to help the state.”
“Hey, look,” Jack says, pointing upriver.
A long string of barges is rounding a bend in the distance, the deep rumble of the pushboat’s engines only a faint hum as yet.
“How long until he reaches us?” Jack asks.
I hear myself answer “He’ll be here before you know it,” but my mind is already operating on two planes. Speaking about the Avila case is like opening a door, or more like lifting a lid off a sealed well, dark and dank and filled with forgotten things. Jack apologizes for interrupting and asks me to continue my story. I do, speaking on autopilot, droning probably, but my voice is only incidental, for at bottom I am reliving this transformative event in my mind, the very thoughts I had during that time rising from the newly opened well, while my mouth relates some abbreviated version to my uncle, in the way that my hands and eyes often drive while my mind focuses on some deeper thought.
In a Jack Webb monotone I say, “Maribel Avila would have made a compelling witness, but given all the facts, the ADA was reluctant to charge Conley with aggravated rape. The kid had no priors other than a DUI, and he had a top-flight criminal lawyer. Without DNA evidence proving Maribel’s story of the post-rape masturbation inside the apartment—by his client—that lawyer would have torn the state to shreds in front of a jury. But there was another side to the coin. The kid was scared. He didn’t know what evidence the cops had from inside the apartment, and his father didn’t want the family name dragged through the mud. The ADA on the case was a tough son of a bitch named Mitch Gaines. Former JAG Corps in the army. I never liked him, but Gaines could get the job done in court. So ultimately Conley’s lawyer agreed that the kid would plead guilty to a stalking charge. The sentence was two years, suspended, and he didn’t have to register as a sex offender.”
“That doesn’t sound like a deal a tough son of a bitch would cut,” Jack says.
“Yeah . . . well. Mitch was getting pretty senior by then, and he had his mind on bigger cases. As the lab tech put it, ‘Since you left, Mr. Cage, Mr. Gaines is the alpha dog over there. He’s got his eye on the headlines, and he’s got some big cases coming up.’ A Latina girl raped in Gulfton wasn’t exactly CNN headline material. Plus, Conley’s dad had some political stroke. Joe Cantor wouldn’t have cared about that, but Gaines might’ve.”
Jack murmurs as he processes my summary, but it’s not enough to hold me in the present. The memory of Vargas’s visit, and my resulting confrontation with Joe Cantor, finally tips me over the edge of the well and pulls me down into the dark water of the past like lead weights strapped around my waist.
“Why have you come to me, Felix?” I asked, watching him pace from the porch swing.
He lit another cigarette and said, “I was out sick when they brought the carpet in. But when I got back to the office the next day, a colleague told me she didn’t think Dr. Kirmani had done a chemical test on the carpet sample. He just looked at it through the microscope and reported it clean.”
“Is a chemical test required in that situation?”
“I sure as hell would have done one.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Legally required? I don’t know. But by common standards and protocols, any reputable crime lab in the country would have done it. And I’ll tell you something else. Another case almost exactly like this happened three years ago. Again with a semen stain, and Kirmani saying the cloth was clean. By the time anybody figured out what had happened, a plea had already been cut and signed.”
I was still with the DA’s office three years ago, at least for a few months. With guilty relief I thank my stars that I was probably gone by the time this happened, or at least never heard about it. “Okay. Did you confront Dr. Kirmani?”
Vargas looked at the ground. “Not then, no.”
“Why not?”
“Dr. Kirmani doesn’t respond well to having his decisions questioned,” Vargas said. “Especially by underlings. Kirmani has a Ph.D. in biology, but not molecular chemistry. He’s twenty years older than me, but I have more forensic experience than he did when he took that job. So do half the other techs.”
“So what did you do?” I asked, though I suspected I knew the answer already.
Vargas shrugged. “I waited till that bastard was gone, then did the chemical test myself.”
“And?”
“Positive for semen. And I had a colleague observe all this, to preserve the chain of evidence.”
“Did you get a DNA match with Conley?” I asked, though I didn’t think I wanted to hear the answer.
“Only basic serology, so far,” he said. “But everything matches for the defendant on that level. I should have the DNA finished tomorrow morning. But I’m telling you, Mr. Cage, Wes Conley is the guy. He raped that girl.”
“You don’t know that yet.”
“Yes, I do,” he said. “I know.”
“How?”
“The same way you knew things when you were a prosecutor. Sometimes, you just get an intuition. No, more than that—a certainty. Like you know before you know—before the facts back it up. Like knowing the basketball is going in the hoop the second it leaves your hands.”
Like knowing the X-ray is going to come back with a death sentence, I thought. “All right. What did you d
o next?”
“I got up my nerve and asked Dr. Kirmani about it. Shouldn’t he have done a chemical test?”
“And?”
“The question caught him off guard, so he did his patronizing-uncle routine. Assured me everything was fine. No sign whatsoever of semen on the carpet. Chemical test unnecessary.”
“Did you tell him you’d done the chemical test yourself?”
Vargas lit another cigarette and nodded.
“And?”
“He blew up. I mean, he went totally ballistic. Threatened to fire me on the spot. He told me my test had to be wrong, because he’d already proved there was no semen on the carpet. He accused me of being drunk on the job, and drunk right then.”
I gave Felix a hard look. “Were you?”
He looked away. “I’d had a couple of beers. I was scared to death, man. He was threatening my whole career!”
At this point I was wondering what the hell I’d taken on by even hearing Vargas’s story. “Did you go over his head, talk to the director of the crime lab?”
Vargas shook his head. “No point. Those two guys hate each other, but Kirmani has the director cowed because of his Ph.D. Besides, the director doesn’t want anyone poking their nose into his quality control. Because it’s a fucking mess down there.”
“Christ. Did you talk to Mitch Gaines?”
“I thought about it. But in the end, I didn’t.” Felix shook his head helplessly. “You know that guy.”
I nodded. I didn’t blame him for not going to Gaines.