by Mark Gimenez
5:33 P.M.
Elizabeth pointed the remote at the TV and increased the volume. The reporter was saying, “A convicted sex offender sits in jail this Tuesday night, arrested in the early morning hours for the abduction of Gracie Ann Brice last Friday. Gary Jennings worked for the victim’s father, where he apparently became acquainted with Gracie. He made nine calls to Gracie in the week preceding her abduction. Gracie’s jersey was found in his truck, along with child pornography. Although not confirmed, sources tell us that traces of blood were also found in his truck. DNA tests are underway to determine if it is in fact Gracie’s. Jennings will be charged with kidnapping, murder, and possession of child pornography. While this community holds out hope, authorities concede privately that Gracie Ann Brice is presumed dead.”
8:05 P.M.
She’s alive.
Their bond was unbroken.
She had come to him. She was showing him the way. She’s up north, where it’s cold. Where there’s snow on the ground. Where the trees stand tall.
But where up north?
Ben had found the weather channel on the pool house TV. The entire northern part of the country was under a blanket of snow from a late spring snowstorm. Was Gracie in Washington or Montana or Minnesota or Michigan or Maine? He didn’t have time to cover three thousand miles. He needed to be pointed in the right direction.
Ben was hoping the FBI’s computer printout of leads would do just that. After returning from the police station, he had spent the rest of the day reading 3,316 lead sheets for sightings of blonde girls. None sounded promising. All were in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Arizona, and New and Old Mexico, where there was no snow on the ground in early April and nowhere near timber country. Ben turned the page to sighting number 3,317: Idaho Falls, Idaho.
Clayton Lee Tucker had just about gotten the wheel bearings back in when the phone rang. Well, it was just going to have to ring. It did. Ten, fifteen, twenty times—whoever it was, they weren’t going away.
He was working late, as usual. Since the wife had died, he didn’t have much else to do. The phone kept ringing. Hell, some old lady might be broken down somewhere. Clayton Lee Tucker had never failed to help a little old lady broken down in his part of Idaho.
Clayton slowly pushed his seventy-five-year-old body up off the cold concrete floor, looked around for a rag, gave up, and wiped his greasy hands on the legs of his insulated overalls. He limped the twenty feet from the repair bay to the desk inside the shop; his arthritis was inflamed by the cold. He picked up the phone.
“Gas station.”
“Is Clayton Lee Tucker available?”
“You got him.”
“Mr. Tucker, I’m calling about the girl.”
“Hold on a minute, let me wipe some of this grease off.”
Clayton set the phone down on the desk and stepped over to the wash bin. He squirted the industrial-strength cleaner on his cracked hands and washed them under the running water. After fifty years of fixing cars, his hands looked like road maps; the black grease filled every wrinkle line. They would never come clean. He wiped his hands dry and picked up the phone again.
“Sorry about that. You with the FBI?”
“No, sir. I’m the girl’s grandfather. Ben Brice.”
“Got three grandkids of my own, that’s why I called the FBI number.”
“You saw the girl Sunday, with two men?”
“Yep, they come dragging in here, maybe eight, eight-thirty, leaking oil like a busted pipeline. I’m the only fool open on Sunday night. Got nothing better to do, I guess.”
“Can you describe her?”
“Yellow hair, ratty, short—thought she was a boy at first, but she was too pretty to be a boy. And she was wearing pink.”
“Why do you think it was her?”
“Seen her picture, online.”
“Did you call because of the reward?”
“I don’t want your money, Ben. I called ’cause the girl looked like the picture and ’cause she looked scared and cold.”
“What’s your weather like?”
“Colder’n a well-digger’s ass. Up in the panhandle, they got upwards of three foot of snow.”
“What kind of vehicle were they driving?”
“Blazer, ’90 model, four-wheel drive, 350 V-8, white, dirty. They were on the road a while, said they was heading north. They were in a big hurry, wanted me to work through the night. I told ’em, you can’t hurry a ring job. Finished up last night, Monday, about nine, got it running pretty good. I ain’t got no help, so that’s the best I could do. Big man, he picked it up first thing this morning. Paid cash. After they left, I was checking my Schwab account and I saw an Amber Alert on my homepage, with her picture. That’s when I called.”
“Can you describe the two men?”
“Didn’t get a good look at the driver. He stayed in the car with the girl.”
“The other man, what about him?”
“Looked like that California governor, Arnold Schwarzenberger, real muscled-up fella. Crew cut, fatigues, Army boots, short gray hair. We see them types every now and then, militia boys wanna play GI Joe.”
“Did you get a license number?”
“No. But they was Idaho plates.”
“Anything else?”
“Well, I ain’t much at reading lips, but I’d swear she said help me.”
“Mr. Tucker, do they grow Christmas trees in northern Idaho?”
“Biggest industry up there.”
“Mr. Tucker, I appreciate your time … How did you know the second man was muscled-up?”
Clayton chuckled. “Hell, it’s about fifteen degrees outside, and he ain’t wearing nothin’ but a black tee shirt.”
“His arms were bare?”
“Yep … had the damnedest tattoo I’ve ever seen.”
9:16 P.M.
John was eating dinner with a spoon: a dozen Oreo cookies crushed in milk. It was his favorite meal, but he didn’t taste anything.
Because he was no longer living. He was just going through the motions of life, like one of those creations in the MIT Humanoid Robotics Laboratory. All day, he had engaged in what appeared to be human activities—eating, walking, taking the FBI to the office—but they weren’t. There was no conscious human thought behind his actions.
His only thoughts were of Gracie.
He spat a mouthful of the mushy Oreos into the kitchen sink, a black blob of nothing. Like his life.
“You want refried beans with that?”
Coach Wally was working the late Tuesday shift in the drive-through window at the Taco House out on the interstate. He stood in the small booth, taking orders from motorists hungry for a quick burrito, chalupa, or taco, bagging the orders, making change, and asking each customer the same question: You want refried beans with that?
Over the intercom: “No!”
Into the intercom: “That’ll be seven-twenty-three. Please drive up to the window.”
Wally Fagan clicked off the intercom’s transmit button, grabbed a bag, and went back to the kitchen.
“Hey, Wally, you da mon, mon!” Juaquin Jaramillo, the night cook, said. “Puttin’ that kid fucker in jail, that’s real good, mon.”
Juaquin gestured at Wally with a large spoon dripping refried beans on the cement floor.
“Mon, some mu’fucka wanna try an’ stick his dick in one a my girls …”
Juaquin continued his nonstop rant, which came out in a kind of rap rhythm, as he scooped refried beans onto two flour tortillas, dropped a handful of grated cheddar cheese on top of each, folded the bottoms, rolled them into neat burritos, then wrapped them in the Taco House trademark serving paper.
“… make a fuckin’ burrito outta it, pour some chili over it, feed it to my dog, mon.”
Juaquin thought that was real funny.
“Ya understan’ what I’m sayin’, mon?”
Wally nodded at Juaquin, then he filled the bag with the two bean-and-cheese burritos,
chips and salsa, and two Dr Peppers. He returned to the drive-through booth and reached out the window for the customer’s money; he handed the change back to the customers, a man at the wheel and a woman passenger leaning over and looking up at him.
“You’re Gracie’s coach, right?”
Wally nodded. “Yeah.”
“Good job, getting that pervert off our streets,” she said.
The man gave him a thumbs up.
Wally held out their bag of food. They took it, waved, and drove off; they had taped Gracie’s missing-child flier to the rear window. Wally gave them a weak wave. He felt slightly nauseous and not because he had eaten three of Juaquin’s burritos for dinner—because his gut was stewing with doubt. Something wasn’t right about Gary Jennings. He just couldn’t put his finger on it.
Wally had played and replayed Friday night in his head, trying to figure out why his ID of Jennings didn’t feel right: He’s standing with the team at the concession stand after the game, getting down on his cherry snow cone … Gracie comes running past, heading around back … The man, blond hair, blue eyes, black cap, plaid shirt, walks up and says, “I’m Gracie’s uncle. Her mother, my sister, sent me to get her. Her grandma had a stroke. Where’s she at?” Wally answers, “Around back.” “That way?” the man says, and he points with his right hand, his fingers …
The intercom buzzed with another drive-through customer. Wally extended his right arm and with his right index finger he flicked on the transmit button and said, “You want refried beans with that?”
And he froze.
“That’s it!”
9:35 P.M.
Vic Neal, a sixth-year associate recently relocated to the Dallas office of Crane McWhorter, a prestigious 1,900-lawyer Wall Street firm, gazed upon his newest client curled up in a fetal position on the cot in the jail cell and facing the concrete wall.
“Jennings,” the guard said. “Your lawyer’s here.”
Jennings didn’t move. The guard shrugged, opened the cell door, allowed Vic entry, and then closed and locked the door behind him. Vic pulled the metal chair over near the cot, sat down, placed his briefcase in his lap, opened it, and removed a yellow pad and a pen. He closed the briefcase and wrote at the top of the pad: Gary Jennings/State of Texas v. Gary Jennings/99999.9909. The client’s name, the client matter, and the client billing number, in this case the firm’s marketing number. It was a habit ingrained from his first day at the firm; a Crane McWhorter lawyer didn’t take a crap without writing down a client billing number first.
Of course, this client would never get a bill. The firm had taken this case pro bono: for the good. For the good of Crane McWhorter’s marketing program, that is. A high-profile death penalty case guaranteed invaluable publicity for the firm and the lawyer handling the case. As Old Man McWhorter had said on more than one occasion, “Clients can’t hire you unless they know you.” And as the number of lawyers trolling for clients from D.C. to L.A. had reached three-million-plus, the need to get known had reached epidemic proportions among the learned members of the bar.
So now you can’t turn around and not bump into a lawyer trying to get known. In the name of marketing, lawyers insinuate themselves into and onto every city council, county commission, civic committee, charity, church, club, conflict, crisis, controversy, commotion, corridor of power, or cause célèbre. Vic Neal had chosen causes célèbres, in particular, death penalty cases; he had recently transferred to the Dallas office because Texas was executing prisoners faster than Saddam Hussein in his heyday. When the call had come tonight, he had jumped at the opportunity to represent a sexual predator facing death by lethal injection.
Crane McWhorter, on the advice of its marketing consultant, had begun accepting death penalty cases a year after Vic had joined the firm. At first, the firm took only appeals, the sanitized version of the crime. Reading the transcript of a gruesome murder trial was considerably less painful than reading a legal thriller, and the firm’s Ivy League-educated lawyers didn’t have to personally meet face-to-face with a stone-cold killer. Appeals courts address only legal technicalities, not whether the defendants were actually guilty, which of course they always were. But, to the firm’s dismay, appeals cases generated minimal publicity, not all that surprising since the cases were argued a year or two after the verdict, long after the victim had faded from the public’s short attention span. The time to reap the full publicity value of a vicious murder was at trial, when emotions and media interest ran the highest. So the firm began taking cases at the trial stage.
Vic had tried his first death penalty case four years ago and his sixth last summer, a black man accused of raping and murdering a white woman in Marfa, Texas—in godforsaken West Texas. The trial had lasted ten days: ten days of hundred-degree heat, ten days of popping Tums after Tex-Mex and chicken-fried lunches, ten days of media briefings on the Presidio County Courthouse steps after each day’s testimony, dozens of reporters and TV cameras—even the BBC—all focused on Vic Neal, defender of the oppressed.
He had especially enjoyed the BBC reports, whose correspondent had always said something like: “Ian Smythe reporting from Marfa, Texas, a desolate spot in a vast desert frontier known as West Texas, a dusty locale whose only claim to fame is that Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson filmed the American movie Giant here in 1955. Now, fifty years later, another American drama is being played out here in a Presidio County courtroom, starring a dashing young American lawyer from New York, Vic Neal, fighting to prevent the State of Texas from executing yet another impoverished black man …” That case had made Vic Neal a “prominent” trial lawyer. The defendant—what was his name?—had been convicted and executed last year. Which was surely the fate of this defendant.
“Gary.” No response. “Gary, I’m Vic Neal, your lawyer. The court appointed me.”
Jennings slowly rolled over and sat up.
“Shit, what happened to your face? The cops beat you up?”
Jennings shook his head.
“The FBI? That’s even better.”
Another shake of his head. “The mother,” he said.
“The mother? Elizabeth Brice kicked your … did that to you?”
A nod of the head. “She kneed me in the balls, too.”
“Ouch.”
Vic knew of Elizabeth Brice—white-collar defense, tough as nails, foul-mouthed, great body. Criminal defense was man’s work and she fit right in.
“Well, guess we can’t make anything of that.” Vic thumbed through his notes. “Did you really have stock options worth a million bucks?”
Jennings nodded.
“And you threw that away to have sex with your boss’s ten-year-old daughter? Well, I suppose we could plead insanity.”
A little gallows humor to break the ice. Vic chuckled; Jennings didn’t.
“Our goal, Gary, is to keep you off death row. To do that you must show remorse. Juries like that. And you can start showing some remorse by telling the police what you did with the girl’s body.”
“I didn’t take the girl!”
Vic leaned back in the chair and sighed. How many times had he heard that? Every death penalty defendant he had represented was utterly and completely innocent—I was framed!—right up to the moment they strapped him to the gurney and inserted the needle, then he’s begging God to forgive him for brutally killing a family of four because he wanted a new stereo.
“You know, Gary, if you lie to your lawyer, I can’t help you. Understand, this case isn’t a question of acquittal or conviction, it’s a question of life or death. Your life or your death. Life without parole would be a great victory, given the overwhelming evidence against you.”
“I want a lie-detector test!”
“Well, yeah, Gary, you could do that. And when you fail and the D.A. tells the world you failed, you will absolutely get the death penalty because every juror will know you’re guilty before the trial even starts. We won’t have a chance for any sympathy from even one juror to get you
a life sentence.”
“But I didn’t do it! I was framed! Why don’t you find who put that picture in my truck, and her jersey, and made those calls? I’m innocent!”
“Her blood in your truck, but you’re innocent?”
“Gracie’s blood?”
Vic nodded. “FBI confirmed it’s hers with DNA tests. Media’s already got hold of it, but it’ll be officially announced tomorrow morning, right before your arraignment. So don’t even think about bail. This is home sweet home, pal.”
“But how did Gracie’s blood get in my truck?”
What an innocent face this guy could put on! Vic couldn’t help but laugh.
“Save the O.J. imitation for trial, Gary. Nobody planted blood in the white Bronco and nobody planted blood in your black truck.”
Vic checked his watch and stood.
“Look, I gotta go, I’ll see you at the arraignment. I’m gonna be on Nightline, railing against the death penalty. Time I’m through, I’ll have that McFadden broad crying like a baby wanting a bottle.”
10:38 P.M.
Network television that night was like election night, all focused on one subject: Grace Ann Brice. Strangers abduct children for sex. A child abducted by a stranger has a life expectancy of three hours. Grace’s blood in Jennings’s truck. Presumed dead. Every channel, the same words, over and over again. Elizabeth was in bed crying when John walked into the master suite. She muted the TV and quickly wiped her face.
John disappeared into his bathroom without saying a word. She hit the volume and switched channels. She stopped again on Nightline. Jennings’s court-appointed lawyer wasn’t claiming his client was innocent, only that the death penalty was barbaric. How can he represent a guilty pedophile? Her guilty clients had only stolen money, not a child’s life.
Fifteen minutes later, John reappeared in plaid pajamas; his hair was wet and combed back. With the black glasses, he looked like a skinny Clark Kent. She again muted the TV. He walked to the bed and paused as if he wanted to say something, then decided against it and continued to the door.