False Convictions

by Tim Green

  Casey studied the faces of the people walking past on the sidewalks and in the cars they passed. Not one of them looked up to see her desperate expression. They drove at an easy rate with the flow of the evening traffic down a boulevard that ended in a traffic circle at the park beside the lake. They took the first spoke, going south on Route 34, climbing a long curving hill until they could see the lake below, now dark green and still glittering beyond the shadows of the trees on the steep hillside. It couldn’t have been much more than two miles before they turned off the road and headed downhill toward the lake, passing through a colonnade of sturdy and gnarled oak trees whose canopy extinguished the sky.

  Muttonchops glanced at her as they rounded a final curve and the trees gave way to an elegant Second Empire mansion with a slate mansard roof and a multitude of dormers and intricate brick chimneys surrounded by a carefully manicured lawn. Pea gravel crunched under the tires as they circled a large fountain, coming to rest beneath a wide set of stairs leading up to the double-door entrance.

  Muttonchops cleared his throat and, raising the pistol, said, “I’m sorry about the gun. We don’t know what the hell is going on, who’s behind all this.”

  “Oh, I’m fine,” she said icily, “kidnapping is part of my Southern culture.”

  “Just relax,” he said. “Nobody’s kidnapping you.”

  “Keep saying it,” she said. “That’ll work.”

  The man shook his head and pointed at the steps. “Just go in. She’s waiting.”

  “She?”

  He hung his hands on the steering wheel and directed his eyes ahead. “Judge Rivers. She has to see you. I’ll wait and take you back.”

  “Thanks, but I’d just as soon call a cab,” she said. “Or maybe I’ll swim.”

  He gave her a funny look.

  “You want to turn off the child lock, or let me out?” she asked.

  He got out and rounded the truck, opening her door and staring up at one of the third-floor gable windows as if she weren’t there. Casey got out and slowly mounted the steps, looking around at the abandoned grounds with their carefully sculpted shrubs, hedges, and flowering trees. Thick beams of light bore through the trees and they flickered with insects.

  When she reached the double doors with their oval centers of leaded glass, she turned around to look at Muttonchops. He motioned her to go in. Casey turned the cast-iron knob shaped like a lion’s head and swung open the door. The smell of old leather, musty Oriental rugs, and wood polish filled her nose. The spacious foyer contained a large carved staircase and a suit of armor. Old oil landscapes and portraits covered the walls. On one side, a doorway opened into a posh sitting room, on the other, a dining room paneled in rich wood.

  Casey walked straight ahead where the opening led to a large room that bowed outward toward a broad covered porch and the lake. On either side of the room, marble fireplaces faced each other across low leather couches, chairs, and tables covered with books and pictures. By the window, in a high-back wing chair, sat a white-haired woman facing the water. In her hand was a cut-glass tumbler, and she swirled the ice in a deep bath of scotch and it glittered in the light reflecting off the lake. While the pale skin of Judge Rivers’s cheeks had been pulled back tight enough to make it shine, flaccid wattles hung from the cords in her neck. When she turned her cold blue eyes, Casey hesitated at the sight of their wounded arrogance.

  Judge Rivers forced a smile, but her eyes changed with emotions like a spinning kaleidoscope from hope to hatred and everything in between. She set down her drink atop the manila file that rested on the small table beside her, then rose from her chair and extended a hand.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said, her voice deep and as solid as her nearly six-foot frame.

  Casey looked at the hand, liver-spotted and bejeweled with elaborate gems from another century. “I had a choice?”

  Judge Rivers cleared her throat and retracted her hand, motioning to the chair opposite her own. “I love this view. It always changes. Look at the sunlight on the water. Different, but always there. Millions of years, and millions more after we’re all gone. Can I offer you a drink? Or tea?”

  “I’m fine,” Casey said, glancing out the window before sitting down and searching her pockets for her cell phone and then remembered. “What I’d really like is to get my purse back and call a cab.”

  “Do you know what you’ve done?” Judge Rivers asked, her voice rising as her face soured suddenly.

  Casey leaned forward. “Righted a wrong.”

  Judge Rivers snorted and wagged her head in disgust. “You have no idea.”

  “Actually, I have a pretty good idea,” Casey said.

  “Of what? Who killed that girl?”

  “That, too,” Casey said.

  “No,” the judge said flatly. “You don’t.”

  “Why are you wasting your time on me?” Casey asked. “Shouldn’t you be threatening the new DA? He’s the one who’ll prosecute your son.”

  “No one’s prosecuting anyone,” the judge said.

  Casey considered her a moment. “That’s why he went to Turks and never came back, isn’t it?”

  Judge Rivers stared back at her before asking, “What is it you want?”

  “I don’t want anything,” Casey said. “I’m out of here tonight.”

  “Money? Attention? Another TV movie?”

  Casey stood up. “I think you should get some help. You’re obviously distraught.”

  “To prove how smart you are?” the judge said. “To manipulate the law? Because I know it’s not justice you’re after.”

  Casey twisted up her face. “You’re ridiculous.”

  “Do you honestly think my son killed that girl?” the judge said, gripping the arms of her chair.

  “I saw the lab reports,” Casey said. “DNA doesn’t lie.”

  “No, but people do.”

  43

  PEOPLE LIKE YOU,” Casey said. “Everything about you is a lie.”

  “Do you have any idea the good I’ve been able to do?” the judge asked. “Have you read a single decision? My work on women’s rights? The environment? Unless you’ve seen my body of work, you should know better than to stand there sounding like some hick from Texas.”

  “I know your kind,” Casey said, lowering her voice. “Happy to punish anyone who does anything against the law, unless it’s you or your own.”

  “And I know yours,” the judge said bitterly. “A gunslinger. You think the law is a contest, winning and losing. Box scores. Who cares about the truth? Justice? Well, I do, and sometimes the law needs some help. That’s what a judge does, she inserts common sense into the equation to get justice in the end.”

  “You?” Casey said, snorting. “You call putting an innocent man behind bars for more than twenty years justice?”

  “Dwayne Hubbard?” the judge said, her brow darkening. “He killed that girl like he killed the others.”

  “Others? You need more help than I thought.”

  Judge Rivers nodded her head fervently. She picked up her drink and removed the file from beneath it, handing it to Casey. “Good. You have no idea. So I’ll show you the others.”

  Casey accepted the file and opened it, fascinated at the ranting of a woman of Patricia Rivers’s stature, wealth, and power and believing more every minute that she’d come completely unhinged. The first page was a copied newspaper article from 1988.

  “Another rape and murder,” Casey said as she read.

  “Keep going,” the judge said. “Read the details. Pretend you found out that someone planted my son’s DNA in those hospital records.”

  Casey’s stomach soured as she read on. The murdered girl had been not only stabbed but mutilated. Pictures showed that her ears and nose had been sliced off, her eyes gouged out with the point of the same razor-sharp knife before the killer unleashed a frenzy of stabs into her lower abdomen. The coroner said the rape took place between the mutilation and the stabbing.

 
“Horrible,” Casey said, noting the location of the crime as Wyoming, New York, “but I don’t see the relevance.”

  “Look at the other two,” the judge said.

  Casey sat back down and read on. They were similar to the first, varying only in location and time and that one was a teenage boy, also sodomized after his face had been mutilated but before he’d been stabbed. The murders were spread out across the two years previous to Cassandra Thornton’s, all at varying towns in New York that Casey hadn’t heard of. Cassandra Thornton would have been the fourth if the crimes were put into sequence.

  “These happened close by?” Casey asked.

  The judge remained rigid, her chin tilted up. She blinked and nodded. “Small towns, small police forces. Each of them just far enough apart. Small media markets. None of them overlapping. No leads in any of the cases, although we believe that the killer had some kind of personal contact with each of them. No one ever connected the dots.”

  “How did you find these?” Casey asked, handing back the file of police reports and crime scene photos. “What do they have to do with Dwayne Hubbard? There was nothing about any of this in his case.”

  “Because I didn’t let it,” the judge said.

  Casey shook her head. “You’re talking even crazier.”

  “Come with me,” the judge said, standing up and motioning for Casey to follow. “Let me show you.”

  44

  JUDGE RIVERS went out through the front doors and down the steps with the folder in her hand.

  “And we’re going where?” Casey asked.

  “Cassandra Thornton’s.”

  “Her grave?”

  “Her home,” the judge said, and climbed into the front of the Suburban.

  “Twenty years later?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Casey got in back.

  “You met Martin already,” the judge said, twisting around.

  “I met a guy with crazy sideburns and a chrome-plated forty-five,” Casey said.

  The judge’s face darkened. “Christ, Martin. I told you to keep it in your pants.”

  Martin’s face colored as he started the engine and put the truck into gear. “And I told you about the kind of people we’re dealing with.”

  Judge Rivers just shook her head.

  “Don’t worry, I had a crazy aunt worried constantly about being abducted by aliens,” Casey said, getting a sharp glance from Martin in the mirror.

  “Martin and I met because of this case,” the judge said. “Martin Yancy?”

  “The investigating officer,” Casey said, recalling the name on the police report she’d read and studying him in a different light. “Pretty sloppy work.”

  “Actually,” the judge said, “Martin was the best, but I was able to convince him to hold off on anything thorough until he looked into the other possibilities. We went through a lot together and we learned the truth. We’ve been together ever since. He’s as protective as he is reliable, though. I’m sorry about the gun.”

  “I mean, he just jumps me on the street and forces me into the truck,” Casey said, still steamed.

  “Christ, Martin.”

  “I told you I wouldn’t hurt you,” Martin said defensively, addressing Casey in the mirror as they pulled up the long gravel drive. As if to prove his goodwill, he handed her purse back.

  “Right. Ten minutes into my abduction,” she said, snatching it.

  “This is a dangerous situation,” Martin said.

  Casey folded her arms across her chest and said, “I’d like to bring a friend, too, if you don’t mind.”

  “Not from the Freedom Project?” the judge said.

  “No, but why not?” Casey asked.

  The judge glanced at Martin, who said, “The people pulling the strings are using the Freedom Project to destroy Patricia.”

  “Are you saying Robert Graham?” Casey asked.

  The judge turned around. “We’re not saying him or anyone. I’m not as concerned as Martin, but someone dredged this case up to get at me.”

  “Why? Who? Why would they wait this long?” Casey asked.

  “The court of appeals,” Martin said, entering the traffic circle and heading back into town through a steady flow of people returning home from work.

  “Maybe some fanatic pro-life group? I don’t know,” the judge said. “The court right now is more conservative than it’s ever been. My appointment wouldn’t help their cause. Wouldn’t have helped, I should say. It’s over for me now. I know that.”

  “Patricia is Supreme Court material,” Martin said, his teeth clenched. “She’s got all the qualifications. This was the next step. Anyone who would mess with that is dangerous enough to carry for.”

  “Martin, if someone was going to kill me,” the judge said, explaining to him, “they would have done that instead of going to all this trouble.”

  “What trouble?” Martin asked with a skeptical look.

  “Hiring Ms. Jordan to come up here all the way from Texas,” the judge said, “working the media. Christ, they had Brad Pitt at the press conference. That doesn’t just happen.”

  “So, I can bring someone?” Casey asked.

  “Who?”

  “Jake Carlson,” Casey said. “He’s the one doing… Hubbard’s story for Twenty/Twenty. The Project gave him the exclusive on Dwayne, me, all the inside information. You should want him to see this, if it’s real.”

  “Of course it’s real,” Martin said, an edge to his voice.

  “She’ll see,” the judge said, calmly patting his leg. “Go ahead.”

  Casey removed the phone from her purse and dialed Jake’s cell phone, telling him as much as she could without mentioning Martin’s.45 or sounding as skeptical as she felt.

  “It’s Graham,” Jake said when she’d finished.

  “I thought you were off that?” Casey said, annoyed. “It could be anyone inside the Project, or someone outside who promised support, or a friend of Robert’s who turned him on to the case.”

  “No. Listen,” Jake said. “Forget about me and my instincts. Six months ago, Graham and his buddies Massimo and Anthony Fabrizio-another guy I saw him meeting with-tried to pump a hundred grand into Judge Rivers’s campaign account. She’s not even supposed to have campaign money, but she’s been funneling it to Washington on both sides of the aisle. I’m told it’s a good way to grease the track to the US Supreme Court. Except she didn’t want their money. She gave it back.”

  “Okay,” Casey said, drawing out the word and eyeing the judge suspiciously.

  “And… you’re with her?” Jake asked, incredulous.

  “We just passed the Seward House,” she said, drawing a guilty look from Martin. “Can you meet us?”

  “I’m walking out of Marty’s office as we speak,” Jake said. “I’ll get my car and follow you. Don’t mention Graham. Let’s keep that card close.”

  “Where should he meet us?” Casey asked the judge.

  “Where is he now?” Martin asked.

  “Parked behind the Barrone & Barrone building on Genesee Street,” Casey said.

  “Tell him we’ll wait for him in front of the Auburn Theater.”

  “I heard him,” Jake said. “Either way, I want in on this. If Judge Rivers is as bat-shit crazy as it sounds, damn, they’ll sign me to a ten-year contract. If she’s not, then…”

  “Then what?” Casey said, studying the back of the judge’s silver head.

  “I don’t even want to think about it.”

  45

  MARTIN PULLED over onto the gravel shoulder of the road and they got out. Jake pulled in behind them, joining them on the road’s shoulder. Not far off the road in a nest of waist-high grass sat a small red ranch whose remaining paint had faded to a deep shade of pink.

  “I bought the place from the father,” Judge Rivers said, her voice as somber as her face. “He never set foot inside it again. I felt bad for him.”

  “And getting him out of the way kept things quiet
,” Casey said.

  “He knew Nelson was innocent,” the judge said. “We showed him why.”

  “But you still had to buy him off,” Casey said. “How much?”

  The judge closed her eyes for a moment. “Nearly everything I had. Quite a bit. He took the money and moved down to Tallahassee and Martin boarded it up.”

  “Martin was the investigating officer,” Casey said, raising her eyebrows at Jake.

  “Martin Yancy?” Jake said.

  Martin nodded.

  “They said you dropped off the face of the earth,” Jake said.

  “Here I am,” Martin said. “I don’t see anybody from the old days, though. I make a point of it. I work for a defense contractor in Rochester. I’ve got a boat on Lake Ontario that I normally go to if Patty comes here for a weekend.”

  The mailbox listed atop its metal post and Casey could still make out the name Thornton in the flakes of rust. The windows of the house had been patched over with plywood boards, warped and faded to gray. The late rays of sunshine lit the roof and its peak hung with a droning, basketball-size nest of hornets. Out back, the skeleton of a swing set sagged under the shadow of a massive willow tree, split down the center by lightning or rot or both.

  “No one’s been inside since that night?” Casey said, following the judge up the sun-bleached driveway.

  “A couple people since that night,” the judge said. “People who needed convincing.”

  Martin passed them all with a flashlight in one hand and jangling the keys that hung from a chain on his belt in the other. He stepped up onto the porch and undid the padlock holding down a metal bar blocking the door. Warm musty air from inside wafted out at them and with it the fetid odor of something dead inside a wall. Martin sniffed and kicked at the scattered droppings on the floor.

  “Mice.”

  The judge pushed past him, snatching up his flashlight and flicking it on before leading them down the gloomy hallway and into the last bedroom. Casey sniffed at an odor so old that the kick had gone out of its stink. She looked around the bedroom of a teenage girl, the curling poster of Van Halen on the wall, lace curtains, a Rubik’s Cube next to a corroded lava lamp, and the velvet painting of a white stallion. Photos tacked to a corkboard bore ghostly images faded beyond recognition. It took Casey’s eyes a moment to adjust to the flashlight beam and the dim light seeping through the gaps in the boarded windows. As they did, the chocolate brown mess on the naked mattress and spattered over the wall materialized. Casey realized it was dried blood, a stain that never leaves without help from human hands.