“Now and then,” he said. “She’s not as into it as I am.” A bad sign, I thought.
Dave’s PI business had grown, and he’d hired an assistant. “Brad Irwin. Sharp kid, working toward his license. I’ll probably have him do some work on this case.”
After lunch, we moved inside to work. Dave gave a brief laugh as he looked into my office. “Just like at the state defender’s,” he said, shaking his head. “I guess some people work better in chaos.”
“Sometimes I’d like to just throw a match in here and run,” I admitted. “Most of what I have in Andy’s case is on this thumb drive,” I said, pointing to it, “courtesy of Jim’s paralegal.”
“Ah, the modern paperless office.”
“If only.”
We settled down to work at my dinner table.
“I keep thinking of these guys as the Hardy Boys,” Dave said, with another, more rueful laugh. “Gallows humor. Jim sees this case as pretty hopeless, as far as guilt goes.”
“Great,” I said. “Just what we need, support from above.”
“Come on, he’s probably right about the guilt phase, what with the confession and all. But there’s something strange about the release of the third girl, don’t you think?”
“We’ll have to try to find her and ask her about it—assuming she’ll talk to us.”
“And the brother—Emory.”
“I should take you to meet Andy right away,” I said. “And we should both meet Eva.”
We talked about witnesses for the mitigation case. We’d definitely need to make trips up to Washington and Shasta City, probably more than once, but it was better to wait to interview people until we had some more paper history.
By the time we finished, it was close to six o’clock. I convinced Dave to stay for dinner, and threw together some linguine with a marinara sauce from the freezer and a salad. I had a glass of wine, but Dave stuck with water. He turned down my offer of the sofabed. “Change of plans. I have a reservation at a B&B in Mendocino, and Marisol is driving up tonight after work to meet me.” I was disappointed, but relieved, too, because I had no idea what to do to entertain him. Go to Vlad’s pub down the highway for a beer and then sit at home and watch DVDs—that was night life in Corbin’s Landing.
As he left, Dave gave me another hug. “See you at the ‘Q.’ And you take care of yourself.” I watched from the door as his car rolled down the driveway and turned onto the road. The sky was clear and still light, though the sun had set. A breeze sighed overhead in the redwood trees like the beat of a giant wing, and in the distance I could hear the rhythm of the surf. After the sound of the car engine faded, I stood outside for a while, unwilling to move inside and filled with sadness and confusion. Seeing Dave again had stirred the fragments of memories, and I felt a raw emptiness inside, an echo of how I had felt when my grief and anger about Terry still made a charred and hollow place inside my chest.
A couple of planets were hanging between the redwoods and the ocean by the time I finally walked back into the house.
9
“Bad day to visit, Monday,” I apologized, as I put down the plastic tray, heavy with food, canned soda, bottled water, and coffee. “Visitors on the weekend just about emptied the machines. No hamburgers, so I got you a cheese steak.”
Dave, Andy and I were huddled, elbow to elbow, around a tiny table in one of the smaller cages. As we sat, I could see a larger one, empty, across the narrow passageway.
Dave, armed with the information in my notes, did his usual magic. With quiet questions, he drew out the sordid and all-too-commonplace details of Andy’s childhood: his father Len’s intermittent rages, fueled by alcohol and probably meth; the fear Andy felt when he came home drunk and pissed off and looking for something to blow up about, someone to hurt; the late-night fights between him and Eva, as Andy and Emory lay tensely in their beds, listening to the shouting from their parents’ room, the confused thuds and crashes of bodies and furniture, and Eva’s crying. There was the Christmas when Len gave Andy and Emory bicycles and then wrecked them in an alcoholic rage when he felt the boys weren’t grateful enough. The dog he shot to punish the kids for not cleaning the yard up after it. “I was glad when Dad went to prison,” Andy said, “’cause we didn’t have to be afraid all the time.”
We talked about the murder charges and Andy’s confession. I knew from Dobson’s notes that Andy had told him the confession was a lie and that he’d confessed to the murders because the officers had played Emory’s taped statement and told them they believed Emory’s story and had threatened to arrest Eva if he didn’t admit to killing the girls the way Emory said he had. “I didn’t even know Em killed those girls,” he told us earnestly, shaking his head, “and that’s a fact. But no one believes me.”
Dave asked him why he’d let Nicole, the last one, go. Andy hesitated for a moment. “I had a feeling something was going to happen to her.”
“But why?” Dave asked, “If you didn’t know what happened to the others?”
Andy looked confused, then downcast. “I don’t know,” he said. “It was just a feeling…” His voice trailed off.
Dave went back to the confession. “What did the officers say about arresting your mother?” he asked.
“That they didn’t believe she didn’t know about the girls,” he answered. “That she helped us hide from the police. They said they could arrest her, too, and she was as guilty as we were.”
“But they didn’t arrest her.”
“No.”
“But you thought they could.”
“If they said they could, I figured they could.”
We were all a little surprised when the guard came by to tell us the visit was up. Andy had forgotten the ice-cream sandwich I’d bought for him. “Can I have a minute to finish this?” he asked. The guard nodded and went on to the next cell. Andy gave me a grateful smile. “I haven’t had one of these in a long time,” he said, pulling open the end of the plastic package.
“You think you can still eat it?” I asked, looking dubiously at the sagging plastic wrapper.
“Oh yeah.” He leaned his head back, tipped the end of the package to his mouth, and half-drank the contents, stopping every now and then to chew a mouthful of cookie. When he had finished it, he tossed the package delicately into the wastebasket and cleaned his mouth and hands on a brown paper towel from the tray. “Sticky,” he said, his mouth still half full.
The guard came back, and Andy backed to the door of the cell to be handcuffed. “I’d shake hands,” he said, “but I got ice cream on mine.”
“No problem,” Dave and I said together.
“See you soon,” I added.
“Yeah, see you soon,” Andy echoed, as the guard unlocked the padlock and slid the cell gate open. Dave and I followed down the passageway as Andy and the guard, clanking with chains and keys like a pair of Marley’s ghosts, walked toward the painted metal door to the cell blocks.
The first of the two gates to the outdoors opened with a metallic clatter. Dave stood back to let me go first into the sally port, then followed me. The first gate rattled shut and the second opened, freeing us into the late-morning sun.
“Well,” Dave said, as we crossed the service road, “he seems like a pleasant enough guy.”
“He is.”
“Not the stereotype of a serial sex murderer,” Dave said. “I think he’d be a big disappointment to a TV audience.”
“So would we all.”
“So,” Dave asked, “when do we meet Eva?”
“She’s coming down to see Andy a week from Saturday. Could we meet her here in the parking lot and go someplace to talk?”
Dave sighed. “Marisol made plans for us to go with a couple of her friends to Angel Island for a bike ride and picnic. I’ll just have to tell her I’ve got to work.”
Something in his tone hinted that Dave’s work hours didn’t always sit well with Marisol. “She won’t be leaving the prison until after two,” I said, tr
ying to be helpful.
Dave looked a little less beleaguered. “Well, maybe I can go and just leave early.”
10
On the Saturday, Dave’s little SUV was at the far side of the visitors’ parking lot when I drove in. Eva had told me she drove a blue minivan, and one was parked in the row nearest the door. As I pulled into a space near Dave, he jumped out and walked over to my car.
“How’d the bike ride go?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Didn’t go on the ride. They started too late.” He changed the subject. “Why didn’t Eva testify at Andy’s trial?”
“She told me the prosecutor was threatening to charge her as an accessory.”
“On what grounds, do you think?”
“My guess is that she gave her boys money to get out of Dodge.”
“If she did that, they must have told her something about Nicole.”
The idea caught me by surprise. “Jeez,” I said, “I hadn’t really thought of that.”
Dave shook his head. “Whoa—imagine how that must have gone over. ‘Mom, we kidnapped this girl, and she got away, and now we need to leave town fast.’”
I couldn’t help coming to Eva’s defense. “Maybe they didn’t tell her what it was about. Maybe they made up some other reason why they needed to leave town. We don’t really know.”
“Maybe that’s why they didn’t prosecute her; they didn’t really know, either.”
Visitors were trickling into the parking lot, alone or in small groups, and getting into their cars. I saw a woman leave a small knot of people and walk toward the blue van. I motioned to Dave and walked toward her.
“Mrs. Hardy?”
She turned and looked at me.
“Oh, there you are. Ms. Moodie?”
“Call me Jan, please. And this is Dave Rothstein, the defense investigator.”
“How do you do?” She stretched a thin, tanned arm out to shake my hand, then Dave’s. Her hands were small, with freckles on their backs, the nails cut short. “You can call me Evie; everybody does.”
I’m not tall, but Evie was an inch or two shorter than I am. The contrast between her and Andy was striking. She was small-boned, almost birdlike. Her face was without angles and smooth, except for some smile lines around her eyes as she narrowed them in the bright sun, and her complexion was fair, almost as pale as Andy’s. Her mouth and nose were small, her eyes blue and a little widely set, like a doll’s. Her wavy hair, brown going to silver, was cut in a practical bob. She looked, I thought, like the mother out of a childhood fantasy, waiting in the kitchen when you came home from school, with a glass of milk and a dish of oatmeal cookies.
“Well, it’s been quite a day,” she said. “I’m always sorry to say goodbye to Andy, but I’m glad to leave that prison.”
“Believe me, I understand. How’s Andy?” I asked.
“Oh, he’s as good as always. He’s always so pleased to get a visit. I wish I could get here more often, but it’s a long way, and it’s gotten so expensive, with gas prices and all. Two hundred and twenty miles. I started at seven this morning to get here by twelve. Then I stay in Sacramento tonight and go see Emory tomorrow and drive back, so’s I can be at work on Monday morning.”
“What kind of work do you do?” I asked.
“I keep the books at the Sunnyside Center. It’s an old-age home. And most weekends I wait tables at Mary’s, in Redbud. Helps make ends meet.”
I got the feeling that she was waiting for a word of sympathy. “You work awfully hard,” I said.
“I do what I can.”
There wasn’t much point in standing in the parking lot making conversation, so I suggested Gaia’s Garden as a place where we could talk.
“You lead the way,” Evie said.
At the restaurant, we settled ourselves in a booth far enough away from the nearest occupied table that we could talk without being overheard. A waitress—not the girl with the pink hair, but another, just as young, with huge hoop earrings and a Betty Boop face framed in a red-streaked bob—took our orders. I had iced tea and a Greek salad and Dave ordered black coffee and a vegie burrito. Evie gave the girl a bright smile and said she’d just have coffee, thank you. When I asked her if she wanted something to eat, she shook her head. “My doctor keeps telling me I should eat more, but I just don’t have much of an appetite. Never have. Anyway, I had lunch with Andy. He made me eat one of those cheeseburgers with him.”
“He does love those, doesn’t he?”
“That’s what he always wants. This time he really wanted me to have one, too. He said he didn’t think I was eating enough.”
“He really cares about you,” I answered.
“I couldn’t finish it,” she said.
Betty Boop brought us our tea and coffee and disappeared again. Evie picked up her coffee mug and drank, holding it in both hands as if to steady it. “The place I work at—Mary’s—looks a little like this. You should stop there if you come up. The girl who runs it, Carol Ann, her mother’s a patient at Sunnyside. She says I should quit my job and come work for her full time. Said I’d make better money, and she’s probably right. But I waitressed for a while when Len was in prison, and I wouldn’t want to go back to it full-time. Two mornings a week is plenty.” She took another sip of her coffee. “But you wanted me to tell you about Andy.”
“Yes—and no,” I answered. “We’d like to learn as much as we can about his family, too.”
She gave me a questioning look from across the table. “That’s what Mr. Christie said. But I don’t understand why. You all said something about getting Andy a new trial, but I just couldn’t follow it all. I don’t know all this legal stuff.” She shook her head. “You’d think I should, after all of it I’ve been through.”
“What we’re trying to do here,” Dave said, “is show that Andy’s trial lawyer, Mr. Dobson, didn’t do a good enough job of representing him at trial. We have to find helpful evidence that Dobson could have put on and didn’t, and show it to the state and federal judges. Information about Andy and his family can help show his human side, show that there were things about him and the influences on him in his life that might have made the jury sympathize with him and decide he didn’t deserve the death penalty. The sort of thing Mr. Levenson did at Emory’s trial.”
“Oh,” she said, more out of politeness than understanding, I thought.
“So we’re looking for any information we can find that might help Andy,” Dave went on. “I don’t want to embarrass you or anything, but did you have any medical problems while you were pregnant with him?”
I wasn’t sure about beginning with anything quite so intimate, but Evie seemed delighted to have someone interested in her travails. She bent confidingly toward Dave and me. “Morning sickness. I was so sick with both the boys. Couldn’t keep anything down for months. I didn’t gain much weight either time.”
“How was Andy’s birth?”
“Hard. I was in labor for thirty hours with him, and he was born with the cord wrapped around his neck. They had to give him oxygen because he wasn’t breathing. He was a big baby, though, nine pounds.”
So, I thought, Andy could have suffered some kind of brain damage from lack of oxygen during his birth. As far as I could tell, Dobson hadn’t done anything to explore that possibility.
“What was he like as a child?” Dave asked.
“Good as gold. I remember he almost never cried as a baby. Emory was the opposite, fussy. He had colic. He cried day and night.”
“Do you remember when he began to walk and talk?”
“Andy? I think he was a little late talking. But you know, I sometimes get him and Emory confused, because they were just two years apart.”
“What about school?” I asked.
“Oh, lord, Emory was the class clown, always cutting up. Andy was the quiet one.”
“And what about childhood illnesses?”
“Just chicken pox. They had shots for mumps and measles.”
“Who was your doctor back then?”
“We moved around so much, we didn’t really have a regular one. I took the kids to clinics, hospitals.”
“Was Andy ever seriously ill?”
“He had pneumonia when he was three, and they put him in the hospital for two days. And he had his tonsils out when he was four. Emory had to have his appendix out when he was ten or eleven.”
I asked her for the names of the hospitals and the clinics where the boys had been born and treated, and she told me the names of the ones she could remember. Then I asked her to sign authorization forms so that we could get medical records for her care during her pregnancy, if they still existed. She glanced at the forms, signed them rapidly, and handed them back to me.
Dave and I spent a while asking about the schools the boys had gone to and the towns where the family had lived. She gave us the names of some teachers and counselors but struggled to remember any children who had been friends of Andy’s. “He didn’t have a lot of friends,” she said. “He mostly hung around Emory and them kids. But he always was a good boy. He was never any trouble.” If the irony of her words crossed her mind, she gave no sign of it.
“How did he do in school?” Dave asked.
“Not as well as he should have. His teachers were always trying to put him into special ed, but I told them that was a lot of hooey, and they just needed to be more patient with him.”
“There was evidence at Emory’s trial that Mr. Hardy, your husband, was pretty abusive,” Dave said.
“He was that.”
“How?”
“Well, Len drank a lot. And when he drank he got vicious. He’d hit the kids, just backhand them for nothing, really—if they made a noise while he was watching TV or didn’t do their chores when he told them to.”
“Did he hit you?”
“Oh yes.”
“Hard?”
“Hard enough.”
“How often?”
“Oh, it must have been at least once a week. He’d get drunk and pick a fight over some little thing. Come home from the bar and wake me up yelling because the boys had left toys in the living room or there wasn’t any milk in the refrigerator.”
Two Lost Boys Page 5