Injustice

by Lee Goodman

  I doubted Henry would ever again spend a day as a free man.

  PART II

  CHAPTER 34

  My cabin feels different this morning. I didn’t stoke the fire last night. It burned out hours ago. I stick my head out from under the quilts and can see my breath. But it’s not only the temperature. The light is steely white and cold, and I know before even looking out the window that it snowed last night. Probably not much, just an inch or two, but enough to blend the landscape into a startling blur of sameness. It will melt by noon, as early snows always do, its flash of clean renewal turning immediately to gray and brown. But for now, everything feels erased.

  I wish Tina were here with me.

  I wish Barn and Lizzy were here.

  I’d even settle for Flora and Chip showing up at the other cabin to irritate me with their abundance of good cheer.

  I have spent the past month writing down everything that has happened. I’m done now. Finis. I have caught up to the present. This process has helped me keep it all straight in my mind, and the discipline I had to exercise, sitting here methodically going back through the murder, the investigations, the revelations about Henry, and the realization of how I’d so naïvely invited him into all corners of my life, has helped me traverse the emotional quicksand.

  Henry Tatlock is the very incarnation of evil and misery. He inserted himself into my life. He killed and debased the innocent Kyle Runion, he murdered my sister-in-law, he corrupted the integrity of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and with who knows what malevolent intentions, he positioned himself as ad hoc husband and father into my relationships with Tina and Barnaby during their time in hiding.

  I hate him. But “hate” is too weak a word.

  I get up and make a fire in the woodstove. Then coffee. I walk out to the end of the dock. The snow is nice. I take a deep breath of cold air and spend a minute reflecting on the feeling of renewal that arrived with the new snow.

  I go back into the cabin and sit at the pine-slab table. I have some of the Subsurface files with me. It’s time to climb into the saddle; time to do some work. I open one of the files, but the startling whiteness of the light distracts me. I get up and close the curtains partway.

  Better.

  But now it’s too cold, so I throw more wood into the stove.

  Better.

  But now it’s too hot. I damper the stove and crack a window.

  Better.

  But it’s a little dark, so I open the curtain.

  I call Tina. “What are you and Barn doing today?”

  “Birthday party for a little girl from day care. Remember I told you? It’s at the pool. Cake, ice cream, and lots of little bodies running around in water wings.”

  “Sounds great. Maybe tomorrow I’ll—”

  “Oh, crap,” she says, “gotta run. I’ll call you back.”

  I try working again, but after about twenty minutes, I scoop everything into my briefcase, shut down the stove, get in my car, and leave.

  I arrive in the city around four in the afternoon. It’s a ridiculous notion, but I drive over to the rec center, where the pool room reverberates with the ecstatic din of children who are deep into a sugar high. The event room is filled with ten-year-old girls. The kiddie pool is full, but I don’t recognize a single face among either the kids or the parental horde lining the edges. The party I’m looking for has been over for hours.

  It’s getting dark. I stop on my way “home” and pick up a pizza to go, then drive to Friendly City Executive Suites (Day, Week, Month).

  I call Sabin. We haven’t spoken since before Henry’s arrest. I want to know whether they’ve gotten any traction at all—any real evidence—connecting Henry to Lydia’s murder.

  “How about coffee?” I ask.

  “Do you one better,” she said. “How about a walk? We’ll go to Rokeby, linger at the site, see if the wind and trees will whisper their secrets to us.”

  We meet at the amphitheater parking. She has a brown bakery bag. I stopped over at “Tina’s” house to get ZZ. The sign says to keep dogs on a leash, but ZZ is obedient, and as long as you bag the poop, nobody seems to care. It is cold out. Yesterday’s puddles are today’s ice slicks. ZZ, zooming around happily, tries switching directions at the wrong moment and goes down on the ice, sliding across with four paws in the air. We both laugh.

  “I want to get another dog,” Sabin says.

  “You used to have one?”

  “Always did. But now, you know, work and everything.”

  “I know.”

  We find the site of Lydia’s murder and linger there.

  “Are the trees whispering?” I ask.

  “Not to me. Are they to you?”

  “You’re the detective.”

  We continue down the path and stop at the bench where I hung out sometimes in the weeks after the murder. Sabin hands me a chunk of coffee cake.

  “Have there been any developments?” I ask.

  “No, Henry was careful. I don’t think we could convict him of Lydia’s murder without the Kyle Runion thing. But now Lydia is just icing. You knew we searched his house again, right?”

  “Find anything?”

  She shook her head. “We hoped to find a memento.”

  “Memento?”

  “Of Kyle Runion. You know, pervs and psychopaths sometimes keep something of the victim’s.”

  “Maybe Lydia found the memento. Maybe that’s how she figured it all out,” I said.

  “That’s what we think. She took the memento, he chased her down, killed her. Took the memento back, whatever it was, and got rid of it.”

  “It all fits,” I say. ZZ is barking at a squirrel on a branch. “ZZ, shut up.”

  “Now it makes more sense that Lydia was stepping out,” Sabin says.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Her affair: It fits the profile,” she says. “Guys like Henry, lots of times they have a girlfriend or wife for cover, but it’s never sexual. So Lydia Trevor was finding comfort someplace else.”

  “I didn’t think of that. You’re right. It all starts to make sense,” I say.

  “And the other thing,” Sabin says, “a lot of them were bullied as kids. Socially isolated.”

  “I think that fits him. It seems to, from what I know.”

  “Everything fits,” she says. “You still can’t think of who she might have been having the affair with?”

  I consider this in the context of our new information. It doesn’t have to be someone she was in love with, just somebody who could fulfill that need of physical intimacy. Nobody comes to mind.

  We get up from the bench and start walking back. Sabin has gloves on but no hat. She is wearing a waist-length jacket, looking more like a skier than a detective. When we reach one of the frozen puddles, she takes my arm. When we’re back on solid pavement, she doesn’t let go.

  “Do you have a first name?” I ask.

  She laughs. “Rachel. But Sabin works just fine.”

  In the afternoon Lizzy comes to my office to talk about the gas tax legislation that caused the Subsurface scandal. “I’m a little stuck,” she says.

  “How’s that?”

  She hands me her notes. “I’ve learned all the easy stuff about who sponsored the legislation, who supported it, who opposed. How everyone voted. It’s all public record. Easy breezy.”

  “Well, that’s all I was looking for, Liz.”

  “No, it’s not,” she says.

  “It’s not?”

  “No. You want to know the backroom stuff.”

  “Not really; I mean, sure, if you hear anything, I’d love to know, but I’m not asking for that. That’s the Bureau’s job. I just want to make sure I understand the basic who, what, and where of this legislation.”

  She gives me the look of a long-suffering daughter. “Boring,” she says. “I could have had that to you in one afternoon. It’s all right here.” She waves her sheaf of notes at me. “But let me keep going. It’s interesting.�
��

  “Sounds like maybe politics is your calling.”

  “Oh, please!” she says in a voice of exaggerated revulsion. She sits here in my office looking happy and confident. It bothered me at first when she bagged her plans to go traveling. I worried she’d mope and let a year pass without anything to show for it. But now she seems to be in gear again. She is planning to fly off someplace within the next month or two, though she hasn’t settled on a destination. And she says she intends to start college a year from January.

  “How’s it going with Ethan?” I ask.

  “I thought this was a business meeting.” She laughs.

  “You’re right,” I say. “So let’s get dinner later? We can dish then.”

  “It’s a date. Now back to business?”

  On a slip of notepaper, I write a name and phone number. “Call this guy. He’ll be the best source to start with if you really want to go deep into the sausage factory.”

  “Sausage factory?”

  “The old saying: The two things you never want to see being made are laws and sausages.”

  “Calvin Dunbar,” she says, looking at the note. “Isn’t he one of the legislators who got charged in the whole mess?”

  “He is. But he’s remorseful—turned himself in. We’ve become friendly. Just tell him you’re my daughter.”

  Lizzy pockets the note and gets up to leave. I walk her out. Upton’s office door is open. “Hi, Upton,” she says.

  “Hi, Lizzy. Come say hi to Cicely.”

  Lizzy goes into the office. Cicely is busy at something on her desk. “Hey there, Sis,” Lizzy says. The girls have known each other for years, though they were never friends.

  “Are you in college yet, Lizzy?” Cicely asks.

  “Not yet. Next year, maybe.”

  “Me, neither,” Cicely says. “Maybe next year for me, too. Right, Dad?”

  “We’ll see, sweetie.”

  “Do you have a boyfriend yet?” Cicely asks.

  “Yes. Do you?”

  “No. Maybe next year.” She laughs.

  Lizzy hugs her good-bye, and we leave. I walk Liz out to her car.

  CHAPTER 35

  Not long after she got back from hiding, Tina petitioned the court for a trial in the Daryl Devaney case. Usually, when you find undiscovered evidence like the DNA implicating Henry and vindicating Daryl, you ask for a new trial. But since Daryl confessed and pleaded guilty, there was never a trial in the first place.

  The morning of the hearing is déjà vu. The hallway fills again with Kyle Runion’s family and friends, all of them still seeking justice for his memory. But there aren’t as many spectators as last time, and the ones who do show up are less sure what to think. At the first hearing, they were quietly outraged at the idea of Tina manipulating the system to get Daryl Devaney out of prison on some technicality. But today I see uncertainty in their faces, and I hear it in their voices. They don’t want to go through it all again. They want to be convinced of Daryl Devaney’s guilt; they want to go to bed tonight convinced that he is justifiably rotting in prison. Kyle’s parents, neighbors, aunts, and uncles, they’re all eager for Gregory Nations to tell them the DNA thing is a hoax.

  Among the people waiting for the hearing is a familiar man. Not Arthur Cunningham—he’s here too—but a fortyish guy who looks out of place. He has made an effort to dress appropriately, but he missed the mark. He wears khakis, clean running shoes, and a shirt that looks like he came from yoga class. His hair is shaggy, and he has an almost invisible blond goatee, more peach fuzz than whiskers. I can’t place him.

  We all enter the courtroom. Judge Matsuko comes in and announces the case: “. . . petition to reverse guilty plea . . . new evidence . . . DNA analysis . . .”

  Tina stands. Again I see the tidy line of her hair across the back of her dress. For a split second I puzzle over why I can’t seem to remember her picking out that dress. Of course I can’t: I don’t live with her, I live at Friendly City.

  I see Tina’s hands on the lectern. (Grab the lectern, they told us in law school. When you don’t know what to do with your hands, grab the lectern.) I slide over a few inches to get a better view of her left hand. I see she still wears her ring, but things feel different; she feels more gone than before. I suddenly realize who the guy outside the courtroom was. I turn in my seat and see him in the back row, far off to the side, trying to be invisible. It is Craig, Tina’s first husband who lives on the West Coast. I recognize him from old photographs.

  Tina gives her argument: “While DNA evidence is not always able to identify who should be considered a suspect, in many cases it can determine with absolute authority who is not among the population of possible perpetrators. In the Kyle Runion case, DNA testing has conclusively eliminated Daryl Devaney.”

  She goes on to describe the DNA results in technical language: short tandem repeats; alleles; markers; tetranucleotide repeats. She goes into a bit too much detail but moves quickly and then summarizes with an aggressive conclusion: “All of which means there is a zero percent possibility that Daryl Devaney was the source of the DNA.”

  “But, Ms. Trevor,” Judge Matsuko says, “not only did the defendant—or strike that, he’s not a defendant, he’s a convict—not only did he confess to this crime, he also pleaded guilty. And then he slept on his rights, he failed to make timely appeals, and the statute of limitations for the introduction of new evidence expired long ago. In your own brief, you cite no controlling statute allowing me to consider this evidence.”

  I watch Kyle Runion’s supporters. Family and friends of a victim usually like to see the defense take a scolding. But this is different. They don’t want legal complexities, they want their doubts quieted. I see the woman I assume is Kyle’s mother. She watches Tina, listening with her head cocked sideways. She looks like a PTA mom in skirt and blouse, her blond hair showing enough of a wave in front that you can’t be sure if it’s natural, kept out of her eyes by a quick comb-through with her fingers, or done at a salon. She is serious-looking, her face revealing that she understands most of what she hears. I have no doubt that she reads everything Gregory Nations sends her and calls him up with questions when something doesn’t make sense.

  Peggy Devaney sits near me. A striking contrast to Kyle’s mother, Peggy is burly, has raw, chapped hands, and the complexion of an old shingle on the side of a barn. Her hair is white and braided. She wears new jeans and two button-down shirts. The inside one is white and buttoned one shy of the top. The overshirt is blue plaid and quilted and opened to the waist, tucked into the jeans, giving her more bulge below the beltline than she can take credit for. She is very much a farm girl. Both women listen as Tina answers the judge’s comments, and I wonder if they could ever be friendly. What if Daryl’s “conviction” is overturned; what if Henry is legally proved to be the perp? These two have endured such trauma—not just losing a loved one but also the agony of clinging for so long to the most meager scraps of hope. Until Kyle’s remains were discovered by Arthur Cunningham a full year after the boy disappeared, his mother clung, no doubt, to the hope that he might yet be found alive. And Peggy Devaney has clung for eight years to the hope of a reversal that will vindicate her brother and set him free. I wonder if, when it’s all over, one will ever reach out to the other.

  Now Gregory Nations stands to argue. He talks about protecting the finality of verdicts.

  The judge interrupts. “But in the case of newfound compelling evidence of innocence—”

  “Your Honor, while analysis of this new evidence indicates that it was not Daryl Devaney’s DNA, we would argue that the person who kidnapped and murdered Kyle Runion might not be the one who actually left the DNA. Additionally, there could have been a laboratory error in analysis of the sample, or chain-of-custody problems, or contamination of the sample. So if—”

  Matsuko interrupts again. “So why not have a trial? Let a jury decide those questions?”

  “I’ll tell you why, Judge,” Nations sa
ys. He squares his shoulders and straightens to maximum height. The message of his body language is obvious: He wants to remind us that he speaks for the people. For society.

  Gregory Nations is an empty suit. He is unimaginative and unexplored. He is a zealous prosecutor, and he believes that being a prosecutor means he is also philosophical, and wise, and insightful about the human condition. But whenever we get together, our conversation withers the second we get off the subject of current prosecutions. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t think about anything besides convicting accused perps, and he doesn’t ponder or anguish over the tragedies that we are called upon to redress. It doesn’t surprise me that he seems unmoved by the possibility of Daryl’s innocence. “It’s not about innocence,” I heard him say once, “it’s about order and consistency.”

  Gregory Nations says in a voice a bit deeper than a moment ago: “As you just pointed out, Your Honor, there was a confession, a guilty plea, a sentence. Mr. Devaney never requested, within the prescribed time frame, to withdraw his plea, and he never filed a timely appeal, and there is no statute or case law specifically allowing a new trial.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Matsuko says, “but I’m not talking about points of law, I’m talking about innocence. Actual innocence.”

  Gregory shakes his head at the judge’s apparent naïveté. “Your Honor,” he says, “do you really want to open your court docket to every convict who claims he didn’t do it?”

  CHAPTER 36

  The hearing ends. Judge Matsuko is in no hurry to make a decision. He and Gregory Nations are playing the same game. They want to be certain somebody fills the prison cell of Kyle Runion’s murderer. They’d prefer it to be the right person, but until they have more confidence in the case against Henry, they don’t want Daryl Devaney going anywhere.

  At the last hearing, Kyle Runion’s people got out of the courtroom as quickly as possible, not wanting to risk an encounter with Tina or me or Peggy Devaney. This time they are in less of a hurry. They’re uncertain what to think.