by Lee Goodman
Everything was in wait-and-see status. On Saturday morning, Tina and Barn and I went on that field trip Tina had talked about. The guy she wanted to interview lived near the reservoir seventy miles west of the city. We brought ZZ, of course. It was a gorgeous day, with the first bite of fall detectable in the September air. Tina seemed in good spirits, which put me in good spirits. In the car, we sang “Itsy-Bitsy Spider” and “Baby Beluga” and “All the Pretty Horses.” Barnaby kept adding “Happy Birthday” to the mix, so we went with it, even though it wasn’t anybody’s birthday.
The guy Tina wanted to talk with had found a body eight years earlier—actually, he said his dog had found it—in a shallow grave partially excavated by animals.
I remembered the case. I hadn’t been able to finish reading the news reports. It was too close to home: an eight-year-old boy had gone missing from Orchard City, a couple of hundred miles away. For most of a year they never found anything. Then, here at the reservoir, a local guy was out in the woods with his yellow Lab. He reported that the dog had found something of interest, so the man had walked over to see what it was.
Lizzy was ten or eleven years old. My foster son, Kenny, was in his early twenties, and my son, Toby, who had died, was forever just nine months old. I hated reading about crimes against children. I was okay with the legal and procedural details, but I avoided reading the narratives of what had actually taken place. As for this particular case, I was just here to hang with Tina. I didn’t want to be too involved.
Tina wanted to see where the body had been found, and to ask the man if he remembered whether there had been any clothing or other evidence.
“Why don’t you petition for production of evidence?” I said. “Why travel all the way out here?”
“Because I’d rather state the facts right in the petition. It’s better if I can assert that there was testable evidence, and demand that they produce it, rather than asking if such evidence existed.”
“In other words, you don’t trust the state?”
“Would you?”
“I’m a prosecutor,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “Too much of one sometimes.”
The Drowntown Café, out near the reservoir, is indistinguishable from thousands of other rural eateries. Eggs, burgers, short stack, long stack. The place is decorated with old photos of the towns that existed in the valley before it was dammed for the reservoir back in the early 1900s.
“Are you Arthur?” Tina said to a man alone in a booth with a cup of coffee in front of him.
He stood, shook Tina’s hand, then mine. He seemed shy during introductions, the kind of guy who isn’t sure whether he should be meeting your eyes or looking into the air to the side of your face.
“And this is Barnaby,” I said. “Barn, can you shake hands with Mr. Cunningham?”
Barn confidently shook the man’s hand, getting a bit goofy about it, shaking too hard. The guy laughed and loosened up a bit.
“So, what’s this all about?” Cunningham said. “Are you writing a book or something? It was a long time ago now.”
“Something like that,” Tina said. “Doing some research.”
“I try not to think about it anymore,” Cunningham said. “It was pretty disturbing.”
“Barn,” I said, “let’s you and me go look at the reservoir while Mommy has a meeting.” I took him outside; we didn’t need him exposed to talk about decomposed corpses. Tina and Arthur Cunningham didn’t talk long. They were out within fifteen minutes. We got into our car and followed Cunningham to the site where he’d found the body.
“Do you really need to see the place?” I asked Tina.
“No,” she said. “But I’d rather this guy thinks I’m a reporter or something. I’ve been vague with him. If he knows I’m a lawyer, he might call the state prosecutor and say that a defense attorney has been poking around. They might be tempted to hide something. Nobody wants to have their screwups uncovered.”
“I think your job is making you paranoid,” I said. “How was the conversation? Did you learn anything?”
She glanced over the seat back at Barnaby. “Later,” she said.
Cunningham led us down old logging roads through the woods to an open area that had once been a hay field but was being taken over by weeds and willow saplings. At the edges of the clearing were alders that already had a few tinges of autumn yellow. I could see a stone wall through the trees. ZZ and the guy’s yellow Lab jumped out and started sniffing each other’s butts and running in growly circles. The Lab brushed against Barnaby, knocking him down, but Barn bounced back up laughing. I put him on my shoulders and started trotting after the dogs so Tina could talk to Cunningham.
Again, they didn’t talk long. Tina called me back to the car. We thanked the guy and drove away.
“Cunningham told me about a paddleboat and canoe rental ten miles up the shore,” Tina said.
“Barn, you want to go try a paddleboat?”
“Yeah yeah yeah.”
So we drove up the shore to a place with a yard full of boats. “Just in time,” a woman said, “we close for the season tomorrow.”
She put us in a blue plastic paddleboat. Barn sat on my lap in his huge life jacket, and we pedaled out toward the other side of the reservoir, which was remote and undeveloped. I’d once been present at a crime scene over there when the troopers dug up the body of a young informant who’d been executed. That was a long time ago, though. Now I thought it would be fun to explore the reservoir sometime in a canoe. Maybe even bring a tent. Tina and I occasionally talked about going canoe camping. I took Tina’s hand and held on to it as we pedaled our way across the water to the other side. Then back.
On the way home, we took a detour to the south through Lukus County to visit a crafts shop that Tina had heard about.
Lukus County, along with its county seat, Lukusville, is notorious in our state. Originally located fifty miles to the north, Lukusville was settled by northern European immigrants. They farmed the fertile floodplain of the Slippery River Valley. But then the river was dammed for the reservoir, and all that good farmland became lake bottom. Thousands of residents moved south onto the unfarmable wetlands the state offered them in compensation. Poverty ensued and brought with it all the predictable social problems.
State and federal officials had turned a blind eye for most of the century. Even as recently as twenty years ago, Lukus County led the state in alcohol and drug abuse, domestic assault, high school dropouts, fetal alcohol syndrome, suicide, incest, and STDs. The increasingly resentful, poorly educated, and unhealthy residents of Lukus County were suspicious of any intrusions by police, social workers, public health officials, and anyone else connected to the government. It was our own little piece of Appalachia. I knew lawyers who’d done public interest law in Lukus County back then. They had stories of the region that would curl your toes.
Things were improving, though, and Lukus County was coming into the modern age. Locals used to have to drive almost two hours to the city if they needed a hospital; school kids got bused an hour each way to high school. But now they had a top-notch medical clinic and a modern new high school. There were jobs programs. There was an extension branch of the university.
The new craft shop near the reservoir was one of Lukus County’s attempts to create some regional pride. It was a tiny place off the highway. I was sure it couldn’t stay open if it weren’t subsidized. The crafts were old-world stuff: beaded hangings, ceramic bells, hand-knit mittens and sweaters, painted eggs, glass wind chimes, nesting dolls. Tina picked out some Christmas-tree ornaments.
An elderly woman sat behind the counter knitting with arthritic hands.
“You have some lovely things,” Tina said.
“Yes, well, it’s a community endeavor,” the woman said. “Anybody in Lukus County can sell here.”
That explained the variability of quality.
We heard a crash. Tina and I ran back around the corner and found a large staine
d-glass lampshade ruined on the floor, and Barn standing there, deciding whether to deflect any recriminations with a tsunami of tears. Tina snapped him up into her arms, and I started pushing the wreckage into a pile with my shoe. The woman brought a dustpan, brush, and wastebasket. “There, there,” she said to Barn. “These things happen.”
“We’ll pay for it,” Tina and I said in unison.
When everything was cleaned up, the woman went in the back and got a home-baked chocolate chip cookie for Barn.
Barnaby fell asleep on the way home.
“Okay, so tell,” I said. “What did you learn from Mr. Cunningham?”
“Quite a bit,” Tina said. “I learned that the boy’s body was clothed and wrapped in a sheet when the dog found it. Shallow grave. Some animals had disturbed it. Dirt had been dug away, and Cunningham could see perfectly well that it was a body.”
“Strange,” I said. “Had he—the body—had he been, you know, sexually . . . ?”
“Yes.”
“But still the perp clothed him and wrapped him up in a sheet before burying him?”
Tina nodded. “They say it means remorse. The perp felt guilty.”
“Who’d they convict?”
“The guy’s name is Devaney. Daryl Devaney.”
“Yes. I remember that now. What makes you think he’s innocent?”
“I don’t. I don’t have an opinion yet. But the guy’s sister has been trying to get our attention for years, so I finally looked at the record.”
“What’s the evidence against him?”
“He lived in Orchard City, close to where the kid disappeared. Neighbors said they’d seen a red truck casing the neighborhood. Devaney’s sister had a truck that fit the description. Daryl didn’t have a license, but he used to drive the truck around on their farm. Daryl lived with his sister. And Daryl is odd. He has borderline intelligence and apparently was inappropriate sometimes.”
“Inappropriate how?”
“Modesty, grooming, hygiene. So the police questioned him a couple of times but couldn’t get anywhere. A year later, when Cunningham’s dog found the body, the police immediately took Devaney in for questioning again. This time he confessed.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“Lots of problems: They questioned him for fifteen hours before he confessed. And his sister claimed that, given his limitations, there was no way he could have driven those two hundred miles from Orchard City up here to Lukus County to bury the body, then gotten home again without her knowing he was gone. And who knows if he even understood that he could stop the questioning and ask for a lawyer.”
“Did his trial lawyer try to get the confession thrown out?”
“No. The state offered a deal. If he’d plead guilty, they wouldn’t go for the death penalty.”
“Ouch. So you’re arguing against a confession and a guilty plea?”
“Right. That’s the thing. The guy is persuadable.”
“Was there physical evidence?”
“I don’t think so. I have the impression the cops didn’t look too hard once they had the kid’s remains. When the body turned up, they swooped in, questioned Daryl all night long, got the confession, arrested him, pled him, sentenced him.”
“What about corpus delicti?” I asked. Corpus delicti is the legal principle that someone can’t be convicted solely on their own confession. The confession needs corroboration of some kind.
“Right,” Tina said. “Apparently, Daryl knew details that hadn’t been released to the press. Stuff about where and how he was buried.”
“Then that resolves it, right? He must be guilty.”
“For Christ’s sake, Nick, think like a lawyer,” Tina said. She was genuinely irritated. “They questioned him for fifteen hours. Fifteen hours! And he’s cognitively impaired. How easy would it be for the cops to feed him those details, get him all confused about what he knew and what he didn’t? So when they finally convince him that he must have done it, he works all this new information into the narrative. Problem solved.”
CHAPTER 17
It was evening. I put Barnaby to bed and read him Henry Hikes to Fitchburg, his favorite—or maybe it’s my favorite. I took ZZ to Rokeby Park for our run, then home and up to the office, where Tina was drafting her petition to have the state turn over all physical evidence it had collected in the Kyle Runion case.
“How’s it coming?” I asked.
“Not bad.”
“Do you think you’ll . . .”
“Please,” she said, “I just want to . . .” And she dove back into it.
I took out my file on the Subsurface probe. “Want some ice cream?” I whispered.
Tina shook her head. I went down and got a bowl for myself; back at my desk, trying not to clink my spoon against the bowl too loudly, I ate ice cream and read transcripts of the previous grand jury witnesses.
Morning. I went into the personnel records and pulled Henry Tatlock’s file. Anyone applying to work in the U.S. Attorney’s Office has to survive a background check. I recalled Henry mentioning some trouble when he was in his teens, but I never knew all the details. There was nothing about it in the official record. I called him at home to ask about it.
“The record was expunged,” he said.
“Did you have a lawyer?”
“Yes. Public defender.”
“What was his name?”
“It was twenty years ago, Nick. What’s this about?”
“I’m going to stick my neck out for you, Henry. I don’t want surprises.”
“Okay. I guess. What happened was—”
“Wait,” I said. “I just want to read the file and transcript, get the unbiased perspective. And I don’t want to have to go through the court to have it officially released—I’d hate to draw anybody’s attention to it. So just track down your lawyer, see if he or she still has a file, and give your authorization to let me look. Okay?”
“It was a nightmare, Nick. I’d hate to dredge it up again.”
“Eyes only. Promise.”
I walked into Upton’s office. Cicely was at her desk doing a jigsaw puzzle. I looked at the box. It was a picture of kittens. “You like cats, Sis?” I said.
“I’m allergic.”
“You like puzzles, though, don’t you?”
She didn’t answer.
Upton said, “She’s a woman of few words today, aren’t you, Sis?”
She didn’t answer, just kept working.
“She gets engrossed,” Upton said.
“Jimmy Mailing,” I said to Upton.
“I’m ready for him.” Upton took a legal pad from his desk and thumbed through page after page of questions. Jimmy Mailing was scheduled to appear before the grand jury in about twenty minutes. We’d given up trying to convict him of something; now we were hoping he could tell us who arranged the payoffs, who made them, and who received them. Jimmy would be given immunity for his testimony, so he couldn’t plead the Fifth. The info Calvin Dunbar had provided was fine as far as it went, but Calvin’s knowledge of the facts was narrow. He was just a legislator who’d taken a bribe; he knew little about the larger workings of the scandal. With Bud Billman gone, Jimmy Mailing probably knew more than anyone.
Upton packed his briefcase. “You stay here, Sis,” he said. “Mom is going to pick you up in a little while. Okay?”
“Bye, Dad. Bye, Nickel-pickle.”
In the elevator, Upton said, “I think she’s doing better. Just, you know, bit by bit.”
“That’s wonderful.”
“I mean, you know, nobody expects miracles. Right?”
“She’s so sweet,” I said. “Have you guys had any luck finding a group home yet?”
He shrugged. “She’s such an easy keeper. I hate to.”
I couldn’t tell whether he didn’t want to talk about Cicely or was focused on getting ready for questioning Jimmy Mailing.
Upton’s footsteps and mine echoed down the courthouse hallway. It was stark but
for several benches along one wall, and I saw there a familiar solitary figure: Kendall Vance, Jimmy Mailing’s lawyer. Kendall stood. He smiled pleasantly and said, “Mr. Mailing has been held up.”
“For how long?”
“Difficult to say.”
“Do you expect him at all?”
“I have no reason to think Mr. Mailing will fail to appear.”
Upton said, “You have no idea where Mailing is, do you?”
Kendall ran a hand over his knobby head. “Mr. Mailing has not been in touch this morning. But it’s probably just traffic.”
“I’m sure that’s it,” I said. I went into the courtroom, followed by the other two. The eighteen grand jurors sat waiting for something to happen, and they waited another hour until the judge released them for the day. A warrant was issued to pick up Jimmy Mailing and detain him for contempt.
“Golly darn,” Upton said on our way back up in the elevator. He fanned the pages of his yellow legal pad—all his questions there in tidy penmanship and arranged by subject. “I was so friggin’ prepared.”
Tina, Barn, and I went to the lake for the weekend. We had planned to go the weekend following July 4, but there was the murder and everything in its wake, and then Tina and I were struggling to catch up on all the details of work and life that had gotten brushed aside. Now, mid-October, we were finally getting away.
Flora and I had bought the property at the lake when we were first married. We lived in the little cabin there for a few years. Flora was a full-time mom to our son, Toby, and I was the assistant DA, soon to become acting DA, in that small rural county. We moved to the city after Toby died and Flo and I split up. We built a second cabin for Flora, and I kept the original one.
Tina was quiet for most of the drive. Usually, she and I would chatter through the two hour trip, but not this time. I kept thinking she was asleep, but every time the music ended, she’d pop out the CD and put in a new one.