The security guard checks my identification and I walk through the metal detectors in the lobby without setting them off. When I get to the fifth floor, the doors open right out to a large room full of cubicles.
A part of me expects to see large windows and wood-paneling like they have on Law and Order, not an average corporate office. The administrative assistant in the front tells me where I can find the DA’s office and I follow her instructions all the way to the back. There, another assistant tells me to wait until he’s ready for me.
Just when I take out my phone, she tells me to go on in. I grab my purse and walk in.
The DA is on the phone but he points to the chair in front of his desk for me to sit down. The nameplate in front of me reads Connor Keenan. Dressed in a white shirt and tie, his suit jacket is hanging on the coat rack next to his desk. He is stern and short on the phone, which he hangs up without saying goodbye.
I extend my arm and introduce myself.
“Thank you for reaching out to me, Ms. Kernes. How can I help you?”
I start with the lines that I had memorized earlier with Sydney.
It’s better to go in there prepared rather than just winging it, she advised me. So, we worked out a script.
First, I tell him my name. Then I reference the case and then I explain the investigation that I conducted on my own and give him all the pertinent details.
I talk for some time and the longer I talk, the more uplifted I feel.
He wouldn't let me go on like this if he wasn’t actually listening. No, this must be making sense to him. Maybe I can pull this off, after all.
“Thank you for coming in, Ms. Kernes,” Connor Keenan says. “I will take everything you said under consideration.”
Wait a second, what is going on here? I furrow my brow and stare at him.
He meets my eyes and doesn’t look away. He’s waiting for me to say something in return.
“So…what’s going to happen now?” I ask.
“I will take everything you said under consideration,” he says flatly. “But for now, I really need to get back to my work.”
I continue to sit there for a few moments, but he goes on with his day as if I’m not here.
He opens one of the files in front of him and then turns his attention to the large computer screen to the left of his desk.
“So…I don’t understand,” I mumble
“Like I said, thank you for coming,” he says. “Please leave.”
He’s so polite and cold, it takes me a moment to realize exactly what he’s doing. He’s blowing me off. He doesn’t give a fuck about anything I just said.
“Are you not even going to consider it?” I ask.
“Of course, I will.”
“But you didn’t even take any notes.”
“I took mental notes, please don’t worry about it. We’ll be in touch.”
“But—” I start to say when his assistant bursts in and ushers me out of the room. “Wait, I still need to talk to you—”
“Mr. Keenan is a very busy man. He will get back to you at his earliest convenience,” she says. “Now, please leave or we will be forced to call security.”
I walk out of the room dejected and disappointed. I thought that he would at least give me the decency of hearing me out. Now, I know that he only pretended to listen and was in fact waiting for me to stop talking so he could kick me out.
Uncertain as to what to do now, I hang my head low and walk past the cubicles. By the time I get to the elevator, a woman catches up to me.
“Olive Kernes?” she asks, trying to get a hold of her breathing. I nod.
“Okay, great, I need to talk to you,” she mumbles, putting her hand on her chest.
“Take your time,” I say.
Given her blunt haircut, immaculate and probably very expensive clothes and stilettos, I brace myself for some other barrage of disappointment.
“Sorry about that, I was just on the phone with an important client and I couldn’t just hang up on him but I needed to catch up to you.”
I shrug. I’m tempted to tell her to hurry up and tell me what it is she wants to tell me because I’ve had enough of this place for one day.
“Oh, I’m so sorry, my name is Meredith Clear. I’m a paralegal here and I have been following Nicholas Crawford’s case very closely,” she says.
This piques my attention.
“I’ve been watching all the crime shows and listening to the podcasts and the news reports along with reading all of the internal materials we have on the case,” she continues.
“Oh, wow, that’s…” I say. I’m about to say ‘great,’ but I’m not really sure if it is. She does work for the DA’s office, after all.
She offers to buy me a cup of coffee downstairs and doesn’t stop talking the whole way down.
She knows so much about his case she leaves my head spinning. She quotes information from different sources and then tells me which ones she believes and which ones are probably just speculations.
“Wait a second,” I interrupt her after we get our coffees and sit down. “How did you get so involved? Are you working on the case for your boss?”
“Hell, no,” she says, pushing her thick auburn hair from one side of her face to another. “I just know that Nicholas didn’t do it.”
22
Olive
When we talk…
A wave of relief rushes over me. Through my own research, I got to the point where I am certain of this fact, but to hear someone else say it is hard to describe. It’s like finally finding a kindred spirit, someone who is on your side when everyone else isn’t.
“So, how are you working this case?”
“Well, I’m just a paralegal here but I love listening to true crime podcasts and watching all of those shows like Dateline and 20/20. Actually, a lot of people do since there’s a big true crime community on the internet and his case has quite a following."
“You’re doing all of this investigation on your own?” I ask.
She smiles and nods, taking a small sip of her latte. “That’s what you have been doing though, right?”
“Yes, but he’s my boyfriend. I have something invested in him getting out,” I joke. This amuses her.
“Anyway, what I wanted to tell you is that there’s DNA evidence available the state is refusing to test.”
My mouth drops open.
“It’s a re-election year and Keenan is afraid of finding evidence that doesn’t fit their story. It will weaken their case, if not totally obliterate it.”
“So, the DA is fine with putting an innocent man in prison just for the sake of his career?”
She stares at me as if I had just appeared out of thin air.
“Of course. Nicholas Crawford is one of the biggest cases of the year, he can’t let it slip away. His opponents and enemies will never let him forget it.”
I shake my head, feeling disgusted and sick to my stomach.
“Besides, the FBI and the police know that Nicholas did commit other crimes, they just can’t necessarily prove those.”
I take a deep breath. This is difficult to argue with so I just let it go without either confirming or denying it.
“Do you know who the DNA might belong to?” I ask.
She shakes her head. She lays out everything she knows and I realize that I hold the pieces to the puzzle.
When I open my mouth, I hesitate.
Should I trust her, I wonder?
Do I tell her what I know?
My mind runs through the main eventualities.
Say I tell her and she actually is a spy for her boss, what then? Nothing.
Keenan will just get further confirmation of what I had already told him I knew. And if she thinks that Nicholas is innocent? Well, then I have even less to lose.
“I have to tell you something,” I say. “I’ve talked to two people about this and, it’s complicated, but once you hear me out, you will be even more convinced that Nicholas h
ad nothing to do with what they’re accusing him of.”
Meredith listens carefully, containing her excitement as I launch from one story to another. At the end, she is practically jumping up and down and wrapping her arms around me.
“This is huge. Huge,” she says over and over again.
“There’s one other thing,” I say at the end. “I think I know who did it.”
She stares at me.
I take a deep breath. This is it.
If I tell her then there’s no going back. Not that I want to, but a lingering feeling somewhere in the back of my mind remains. He was the person I thought of as my brother and someone who I thought would be in my life forever.
“Owen Kernes,” I finally say. Meredith narrows her eyes. “He’s my brother.”
To my surprise, a big smile comes over her face.
“That’s kind of who I thought it might be,” she admits.
“Really?”
“A few of the podcast hosts mentioned him as a possible suspect. He did time in prison. He was in the neighborhood. And most importantly, he was Nina’s ex-boyfriend.”
I shrug, still finding it hard to believe that this can be true.
“The way he spoke about Nina, I always thought that he was in love with her. He was so angry at Nicholas. When he first told me that he thought that Nicholas killed her, I almost believed him. He was so certain.”
“I’m so sorry,” Meredith says, putting her hand on mine.
“But now, I know the obsession that he must’ve felt for her. At least, that’s how he felt toward me. And if things hadn’t gone my way back in California…” I let my voice drop off, unwilling to finish the thought.
“What is it?” she asks.
“I might have ended up just like Nina,” I finally say after a few deep breaths.
Meredith doesn’t know what happened so I tell her.
This isn’t my first time relaying it and my words feel almost on autopilot. After going over the story with the cops and the detectives and then with Nicholas and Sydney, you would think that they would be less painful to say.
Unfortunately, they’re not.
That night still haunts me with flashbacks showing up at almost any time throwing me into a cold sweat.
“But how can we prove that it’s actually him?” I ask. “Especially if the DA doesn’t want to believe any of this?”
Meredith taps her hand on the table. “There is one thing we can do.”
I wait for her to explain.
“If we can somehow get Owen’s DNA and confirm that it’s a match to the evidence they have at the crime lab then it would be something big to take to Keenan. Then he’ll have to believe it.”
“But doesn’t the state have to authorize that?” I ask.
“I have a friend there who might be able to help,” she says. “But the most important thing would be to get a sample Owen’s DNA. Do you think you can do that?”
When Meredith lays out the plan of how I can get some of Owen’s DNA, it sounds so simple.
All I would need is a discarded cup that he drank from or a few strands of hair. But the problem is that Owen is all the way back in California and locked up in jail.
As if that weren’t complicated enough, there’s also the interpersonal situation between us.
He had attacked me and I had promised myself that I would never talk to him again outside of a court proceeding.
“So, you’re actually going to do this?” Sydney asks, walking into my room a few days later. I shrug, folding a pair of jeans into the suitcase spread out on my bed.
I have filled her in about the details and she even met Meredith who came over earlier and went over everything that I should do when I get there.
“I know that Meredith wants to help and I’m glad that someone at the DA’s office is at least willing to listen, even if she’s just a paralegal, but, Olive, this is insane.”
“I know,” I mumble.
“What if you can’t get access to him? I mean, what if you have to talk to him through plexiglass?”
“I tried to find out what the situation was at the jail where he is being held but I couldn’t get any details,” I say.
“Exactly! So it might be a waste of your time.”
“It might be but I have to try,” I say. “What else can I do?”
“You can do what Nicholas’ lawyer told you to do. Just not interfere with anything.”
I clench my fists.
I went to speak to Nancy Leider, Nicholas’ lawyer, and she acted just about as cool toward me as Conner Keenan.
She barely wanted to listen to what Robert Bortham and Ricky Trundell told me and I had to practically force her to write down their names and contact information so that she or someone at her office could follow up on those leads.
“I don’t know what he’s thinking about using her, but she must be working for the prosecution. She doesn’t give a fuck about Nicholas,” I say through my teeth.
Sydney sits down on the bed next to me. She has, of course, heard all of this before.
“I just wish I could get a chance to see him,” I mumble through the tears. “He’s back here but they won’t let me talk to him.”
Sydney wraps her arms around me.
“Why won’t they? Isn’t he entitled to visitors? What are they trying to hide?”
These questions are rhetorical, of course, because I already know the answers.
Nancy Leider told me that they are holding him in solitary confinement and it’s policy to not let prisoners in that situation have visitors.
“They said that he was badly attacked when he was with everyone else,” Sydney says. “This is probably for his own good.”
“But some inmates are in there for years. Do they never get visitors?” I ask.
“I think that’s after they are convicted and there may be different rules for them, I don’t know.”
I take a deep quick breath and wipe my tears with the back of my hand.
I don’t like thinking about this for long, otherwise I feel too helpless and overwhelmed.
“You see, this is exactly why I need to go to California and do this. If we can find out for sure if Owen is a match then it will make all of the pieces of the puzzle fit together.”
“But you still don’t know if Robert and Ricky will testify about what they saw,” Sydney points out.
It’s a long shot, I know. The district attorney wants Nicholas’ head on a spike to make his career.
The two witnesses are more than a little bit reluctant because they have committed crimes of their own that they don't really want to get in trouble for.
And even if they were to come forward, it’s unclear whether the jury will even believe them.
And that’s exactly why I have to find out if the DNA is a match. It’s the missing link. It’s my only hope of proving that Nicholas had nothing to do with either of those murders.
23
Olive
When I go back…
The flight the following morning to Palm Springs International Airport is long but uneventful.
Josephine picks me up and helps me load my carry-on into her BMW. After a brief hug at the curb, we head over to her house, about a twenty minute ride.
She is, of course, my other reason for coming back here.
I was in such a bad place when I took off, I didn’t know how to make things right.
I wanted to apologize so much and yet I couldn’t find the words.
We’ve talked a few times since I got back to Boston but every time I felt like there was this space between us that was only getting bigger and bigger with each conversation.
No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t get through.
Josephine knows why I’m back here and she knows what I want to do. Since Owen was arrested for attacking me, his bail has been denied and he is awaiting trial.
I’m not entirely sure what will happen if, or rather when, he is convicted. He will probably
get some time here and then he will have to serve the rest of his sentence in Massachusetts for fleeing the state and breaking the rules of his parole. The two states will probably have to decide where he will serve his sentence or maybe he will have to do them consecutively.
This is not what I want to talk to Josephine about though.
Instead, I want to apologize for not being open.
I want to thank her for opening her home and heart up to me.
I want to thank her for not turning me away when I first came to see her.
I want to thank her for introducing me to her husband and her children.
I want to thank her for never stopping looking for me. And mainly, I want to ask her if I can call her ‘Mom.’
But as we drive up into the hills and I lose myself in the blueness of the sky and the warmth of the sun on my skin, I can’t bring myself to say any of those things.
Instead, I just look at her and blink away a tear that threatens to run down my cheek.
Later that evening, while we are drinking wine and laughing over Thai takeout, I finally tell her the whole story.
Her husband’s brother is in town and they took all the kids to see a car race, leaving us alone in the house.
She gasps as I lay out everything that happened in Montana and how it felt to reconnect with Nicholas only to have him be torn away from me so abruptly.
She listens with her hand over her mouth as I tell her about going to see his mother and then Ricky and then my mother and taking the trip to Maine and finding Pink Eye, a recovered gangbanger living the life of a psychology professor and family man.
“This is one hell of a story, Olive,” she says, opening another bottle of wine. I take a bite of a cracker, nodding my head.
“And you should know,” I add.
“Have you ever thought about writing it down?” she asks.
“Writing? I don’t know. I love to read novels but I don’t know if I could write one.”
Tell me to Lie Page 9