The Best Revenge

by Stephen White

  He walked back to stand beside her. Slowly, she pulled her arm straight up from the pipe. She’d managed only about two inches when a dull thud sounded.

  “Damn it,” Kelda muttered. “Lost it.”

  “It’s okay. We’ll come back tomorrow with the right equipment. We’ll get whatever it is. I’m thinking torches, maybe. That’d be fun.”

  “I’m going to try once more.” Again, she lowered her hand all the way into the pipe. “I think I’ve got it. Yes, yes, I do. And I have a better grip this time. Here it comes. Here she comes.” Slowly, her arm emerged from the pipe. “One second,” she said, “get ready to grab it!”

  “Got it,” he said. “Good work, Kelda. Bravo.”

  Kelda shook her arm from the exertion of having clamped down so hard with her fingertips on the wooden handle of what turned out to be an eight-inch kitchen knife. Even through the crusted dirt it was apparent that the engraved handle read “Chicago Cutlery.”

  “Wow,” Bill said. He was holding the knife by its wooden grip between his index finger and his thumb. The blade of the knife, which was pointing straight at the ground, was stainless steel and didn’t appear to be rusted, but the whole knife was coated in an uneven red-brown layer of grime.

  Kelda said, “Damn. Maybe Ivy Campbellis back from the grave. Is that dried blood, do you think?”

  Bill leaned over, moving his eyes to within six inches of the knife. But he didn’t respond to her question.

  She said, “I bet it is. We’ll know within a day or two.”

  “This won’t get examined locally, Kelda. The SAC is going to want to send this to the big lab in the sky. And since the crime in question has already been solved, and the perpetrator is on death row, I don’t think it’s going to be the highest of priorities for them.”

  Kelda knew that Bill was talking about the laboratory at FBI Headquarters. “Yes,” she concurred. “You’re right. The SAC will want to send it east. I’ll get a bag for it. Then let’s see if we can get anything else out of that pipe.”

  Bill said, “Want to get some dinner on the way back to town? Celebrate our find? There used to be a great bar in Morrison. And . . . if you promise to fill out the FD-620, I’ll spring for dinner.”

  “You hang out in bars in Morrison?”

  “Not hang out, exactly. But I’ve been once or twice. I have a Harley. I like to ride up there.”

  Bill placed the knife into a bag that Kelda was holding open.

  “You have a Harley?” she said.

  “I do.”

  “Is your cousin really the governor of Kansas?”

  He laughed.

  CHAPTER 17

  Indian summer was in rare form the September that Kelda and Bill found the knife.

  But by the time that Kelda received the first report with the analyses of the weapon that she’d sent to the FBI laboratory in D.C., the daytime temperature was still hovering in the sixties, the glory of the annual metamorphosis of the aspen trees from emerald to gold in the Colorado Rockies was complete, Halloween had passed, and the stores were screaming, “Thanksgiving’s almost here!”

  She’d collected case records and laboratory samples from the original case files and evidence records from the original prosecution and shipped them along with the knife to the attention of the DNA Analysis Unit in Washington, but her FD-620 had specifically requested that the laboratory provide “all appropriate analyses.”

  The agent-examiner in the DNA Unit had reviewed the circumstances involved in recovering the knife and determined that it should also make the rounds of many of the other forensic laboratories on the third floor of the FBI Headquarters building at Ninth and Pennsylvania in Washington, D.C. Ultimately, Fingerprints, Toolmarks, Chemistry, and Hair and Fibers had taken turns examining the knife.

  The report the lab provided back to the FBI’s Denver Field Office was packed with insights about the weapon.

  An attempt had been made to wipe the handle of the knife clean of prints, but two partials were recovered. A cursory attempt had also been made to wipe the blade clean of blood. No useful hairs or fibers were recovered from the weapon. Chemistry of residue from the surface of the knife was not remarkable. The toolmarks analysts found nothing idiosyncratic about the blade that could identify it as anything more than a likely weapon in the Ivy Campbell murder.

  The first surprise in the report? The partial fingerprints were not consistent with the exemplars from Tom Clone.

  The report saved the blood and DNA analysis for last.

  Despite the UNSUB’s efforts to wipe the blade clean of blood, traces remained on the knife blade. Modern forensic techniques permitted a wealth of analyses to be performed on the limited blood residue that was recovered.

  Kelda and Bill weren’t surprised to learn that the lab wizards had managed to isolate the DNA from the blood.

  But they were surprised to learn that the DNA of two individuals was discovered in the blood residue on the knife. The analysis revealed that some of the blood was, indeed, Ivy Campbell’s. The identity of the person whose blood ended up on the knife along with Ivy Campbell’s was, of course, unknown to the FBI examiner.

  But Kelda and Bill assumed it might belong to Ivy’s killer.

  Bill, look,” Kelda said. She’d copied some pages from the records of the initial investigation of Ivy Campbell’s murder. The page that she shoved in front of Bill Graves’s eyes was the write-up of an interview that Detective Prehost had conducted with Tom Clone two days after the girl’s murder.

  “What?”

  “You have a minute? I want to talk about the knife.”

  He marked a spot on a column of figures with his fingertip. “Huh?”

  “Stay with me, here, okay? We have blood from an UNSUB on the knife along with the victim’s blood, right?”

  “This is about the Ivy Campbell knife, right?”

  “Right. The one we found? Remember? Hello. The big lab in the sky found the victim’s blood and they found blood from an UNSUB on the knife.”

  “Yeah, I saw the report, too, Kelda. I’ve moved on. You should think about doing the same.”

  “Well, I’ve been doing a little more investigating. Just a little—come on, Bill. Anyway, here’s what I know today that I didn’t know yesterday: Two days after Ivy’s murder, the detective from Park County who was investigating the murder—his name was Prehost, in case you don’t remember—”

  “I remember.”

  She put a second page in front of him. “Good. Two days after the murder, Prehost observed a cut on the heel of the thumb on Tom Clone’s left hand. Look at the next page—Prehost even traced his own hand and drew in the precise location of the cut. I kind of like this guy, Prehost, the way he thinks, you know. In case you don’t recall, Clone’s the guy sitting on death row for the murder.”

  She was teasing him. He knew that, and she thought he liked it. “Yeah.”

  “At the time of the interview, Clone’s explanation for the wound was that he cut himself at work. At the time, he was a med student who worked in various clinics at the Health Sciences Center.” She placed another sheet of paper in front of Bill. “Now look at the third page.”

  Bill lifted the second sheet off his desk.

  “Well, it turns out that Detective Prehost was thorough; he followed up on Clone’s story. He interviewed the nurse who Clone said witnessed the accident at the hospital.”

  Bill made a “go on, go on” motion with his right hand.

  “The quote-accident-unquote happened in a treatment room in the orthopedic clinic the day after Campbell was murdered. The nurse told Prehost that she helped Tom Clone clean and dress the wound on his hand, but she didn’t actually see the incident occur. She remembered he told her he’d slipped with an instrument or something. A scalpel, maybe.”

  Bill looked up at Kelda and smiled warmly. “This is sure a fun story but we’re getting near the punch line, I hope.”

  She slapped a final sheet of paper on Bill’s desk
. “Prehost also talked to one of Clone’s classmates who thought he’d seen a Band-Aid on Clone’s hand the morning before the accident in the treatment room, but the witness wasn’t one hundred percent sure. Now, what do you think of that?”

  “You’re thinking that Clone cut himself on the murder weapon and then tried to cover up the wound by faking an accident at the hospital?”

  “Exactly. Watch this.” Kelda turned and lifted a long, thin box from the top of her desk. She raised the lid off and exposed an eight-inch Chicago Cutlery French knife. “This is the same model as the one we found in the pipe. I found it at a garage sale. And it’s the same model as the one missing from the kitchen where the murder occurred.”

  He sat back on his chair, finally acknowledging to himself that Kelda’s intrusion was going to last a while.

  “Clone’s right-handed, by the way. But let’s say he’s getting ready to wipe the blood off the knife—he’d hold it in his left hand and use his right hand to do the wiping, right? I’m right-handed and I would.” She demonstrated, first holding the knife by the handle and wiping the blade with an imaginary cloth, and then by the blade and wiping the handle the exact same way. “See, if he held it like this, blade down, the base of his thumb is exactly where the butt of the blade would be. If he wasn’t careful, he could cut himself.”

  “That’s what you think happened?”

  “Yes. That’s why his blood’s not at the murder scene. He didn’t cut himself until later, when he was trying to clean the knife. Maybe he even did it right where we were a few weeks ago, at that pipe.”

  “What’s the point of all this? This Clone guy is already on death row, Kelda. How much worse can we make it for the guy?”

  “He still has appeals left. Anything can happen in these cases, you know that. He’s trying to get his lawyer to get him a new trial as we speak.”

  “So what do you want to do? See if Clone will volunteer a DNA sample so we can hang him with it? Something tells me that there are some Fourth Amendment issues that we should be considering here.”

  She sat on the corner of Bill’s desk. Across from her a hinged frame held a picture of his daughter on one side; the other side—the side where his ex-wife’s portrait had been—was empty. His wife Cynthia’s affair was still an open wound for Bill.

  “Kelda, we have a lot of unsolved cases.” He gestured toward the top of his desk, which was cluttered with paperwork. “More than we have time for. I don’t see any reason to waste any more time on one that’s already been solved. I don’t think the SAC will authorize another minute for you to waste forging yet another nail that’s going to serve no other purpose than to secure this guy’s coffin.”

  “Maybe Clone gave some blood or tissue samples during the initial investigation. We could send those back to the lab for comparison.”

  “Why? What’s to be gained? The right guy has been convicted. He’s on death row.”

  “We could short-circuit his appeals.”

  Bill raised his eyebrows. “Again, why? My experience is that the courts will do what the courts will do. If his appeals get out of hand, we can always play the trump card. Keep it up your sleeve for now. There’re lots of bad guys out there who deserve our attention more than Tom Clone does.”

  “What he did was vicious, Bill. He sliced that girl all the way to the bone. You’ve seen the pictures.”

  “So that means we should convict him twice? That means we should kill him twice? Come on, Kelda. It’s not like you to spin your wheels.” He lifted a file from his desk. “Pull up a chair—we have money-launderers to catch.”

  She didn’t move.

  “Anyway,” he said, “there’s always the possibility that the blood on the knife isn’t Clone’s. The partial prints on that knife aren’t Clone’s. What are we going to do then?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if we go for a DNA match with the UNSUB’s blood on the knife and it doesn’t match Tom Clone? What then?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Well, I have.”

  “Look at the evidence against this guy, Bill. It’s overwhelming. Everything points to Clone. Everything.”

  “If the prints on the murder weapon don’t match and the DNA of that blood doesn’t match, the rest of the evidence is crap. You know it and I know it. We already have a conviction. We already have a death sentence. Everybody involved thinks it’s the right guy. We should be patient and let his appeals evaporate.”

  “What? You think running the DNA is just a roll of the dice?”

  “No, of course not. I think there’s a ninety-nine percent chance the UNSUB blood on the knife will match Clone’s. But if I told you that there was a ninety-nine percent chance that you wouldn’t be killed in the elevator as you left work today, I bet you’d take the stairs.”

  CHAPTER 18

  I eyed Tom Clone. He was slumped on the chair across from me in my office. The cocky energy that I’d witnessed during the previous week’s session as he’d talked about his ride home from the penitentiary with Kelda James was absent. He appeared weary, and frustrated. I suspected that he was going to be one of those patients who offered the promise of surprise every time he walked through my office door.

  “It’s not going as well as I’d hoped. Being out of prison, I mean. People are more suspicious, less forgiving than I’d anticipated. I thought people would seem happier for me, you know? But everybody acts wary, like they’re not really sure I should have gotten out at all. I’m not sure that all the news coverage my lawyer arranged was that good an idea.”

  Although nothing that Tom said particularly surprised me, I still didn’t know what to make of him. That alone made him interesting to me. I used my silence as bait.

  He took it.

  “The first few days were real exciting. I did lots of news interviews. But that gets old fast, you know? Talking to those people, answering the same questions over and over and over. It’s okay with me that they’re gone. Anyway, my lawyer wants me to keep a low profile now while he’s making decisions about the lawsuit we’re going to file. Hopefully there will be a lot of money coming my way. I want somebody to pay for what they did to my life.”

  Since he’d walked through the door I didn’t think a minute had passed that he hadn’t stolen a look behind him. He did it again right then. I tried to imagine what life was like when the ghost of somebody with a shank was always in your rearview mirror.

  “I may take a job working as a pharmacy aide at the Kaiser clinic. You know the one. It doesn’t pay much but I can walk there from my grandfather’s house. It would give me something to do while my lawyer twiddles his thumbs and I decide about applying to finish med school.

  “I think they’d have to take me back into school, don’t you think? I mean how could they not? They’d probably make me repeat some coursework; I mean, I would have to catch up on thirteen years of medical progress. There have been lots of developments. AIDS, biotechnology, this whole Internet thing, too. Who would have thought?” He nodded to himself, as though he appreciated the cogency of his own argument.

  He looked around my office again as though he was seeing it for the first time. I watched his eyes scan the corners where the walls met the ceilings. “I thought of doing this years ago, you know that? When I was still at the Health Sciences Center, one of my supervisors suggested I consider therapy, and I really did think about it. But . . .” His voice trailed away.

  “But?” I repeated after him. It was my first word of the session. I’d been tempted to query him about the supervisor’s rationale for suggesting psychotherapy, but I decided instead to follow Tom’s lead. Early on in treatment, the path of least resistance was sometimes the best path to take.

  “I didn’t want to get into all that shit with someone who worked at the same place I did. It didn’t feel safe.”

  “What shit was that?” I asked, my voice absent of inflection. I often thought that if psychotherapists had been in the Californ
ia gold rush, a strike into the mother lode would have been greeted, not with “Eureka!” but with a carefully modulated version of “I wonder if this is what we’ve been looking for.”

  “The stuff when I was growing up,” he replied. “I’m sure you’ve read all about it. Or at least the public version of it. People like to make a big deal out of shit they really don’t understand.”

  “No,” I said. “I haven’t read about it.”

  I actually hadn’t. My tolerance of what the modern media considered “news” had been diminishing as I aged. O.J. had been the first straw, Chandra Levy one of the last. JonBenét had come somewhere in between. Perhaps the Gulf War and the September 11 travesties had deserved nonstop cable TV coverage. It was hard for me to believe that so many other things did. But I did find it interesting that Tom Clone assumed I was learning about his life through the media.

  I said, “Tell me.”

  “My mom was bipolar.” Tom put a big, fat period at the end of the sentence. It was his way of exclaiming, “Enough said.”

  When a patient turns the traffic signals in therapy from green to yellow, few therapists can resist the urge to put the pedal to the floor and run the light. I leaned forward on my chair just a little bit as I prepared to gun the engine. The gesture caused me to have to readjust the position of the arm with the cast on it. “Wow, that must have been something. What was that like for you, Tom? Growing up with a manic-depressive mother?”

  I could tell that my questions had disarmed him a little. They didn’t shake him; they just surprised him. I don’t know what he had expected me to say, but I guessed it was probably some version of “Really? What was her disease like?” or “Really? Was she stable on lithium?”

  “It wasn’t all bad,” is how he replied. “She and I had some great times when she was ‘feeling good.’ That’s what she used to call her manic phases when I was little, you know. She’d say, ‘I’m starting to feel good, Tom,’ and all of a sudden she’d rush into my room and put both her hands on my face and tell me, ‘You have two minutes to grab your stuff and get in the car,’ and before I knew it we were off on a road trip to visit relatives in Illinois or we were going to the Grand Canyon or we were going to Las Vegas. That was one of her favorite places when she was ‘feeling good.’ She loved Las Vegas. But when I climbed in the front seat with her, I knew we could be going anywhere.