‘With respect, sir,’ I said, ‘you only think you do. I’m working for the Justice Now Initiative, and I need to ask you some questions about the case you prosecuted against Thomas LaFlora.’
The judge said, ‘Get inside, Andy.’ His son stared at him with cold eyes before obeying. The judge turned back to me. ‘I’ve dealt with Hank Cury and Jane Foley before. They should know better than to send a man like you to harass me at home.’ He closed the door, and again the lock clicked.
I knew men in prison who would bang on the bars if the guards ignored them – and others who would collect their piss and throw it at the guards until the guards tasered, pepper sprayed, and beat them, then dragged them to solitary where they could wallow for ninety days or a year or more. Me? I saved my energy for the law library, and except for the times when I pounded my head on the walls and rattled my cage after judges rejected my appeals, I left as light of a print on the prison as I could manage.
Now, in the heat of the July afternoon, I had two options. I could kick the judge’s door. Or I could walk to my car.
I walked to my car.
And then I drove next door to Higby’s house.
Shades covered the front windows. The outdoor furniture was shoved to one corner of the front porch. The little house looked like a clenched fist.
I guessed Higby’s wife had gone to stay with friends or family, but when I rang the bell, footsteps approached, stopped, and then went away. I rang the bell again, and the footsteps came back.
The door opened. Higby’s wife stood in front of me, her hair wet. She held a black pistol in her hand, but she aimed it at the floor.
I said, ‘If someone took eight years of your life – and tried to take the rest – wouldn’t you want to know everything you could about him?’
She gave me a tight frown. ‘I think I would want to stay as far away from him as I could.’
‘See, that’s impossible,’ I said. ‘Your husband is with me everywhere I go. Sometimes I think he’s as much a part of me as I am of myself.’
She held the pistol steady. I guessed she had practice shooting it, though I also guessed that, like most people, she would never shoot at a living man unless her own life was in danger. ‘What do you want?’ she asked.
‘That’s a long list,’ I said. ‘Most of it I can’t have. But you can tell me why your husband hit Andrew Skooner last night.’
‘He didn’t,’ she said.
‘At the time he arrested me, he wouldn’t do something like that,’ I said. ‘He calculated every move. He figured out every pressure point in my head and on my body, and he worked them all, one after another, until he had me where I would say and do anything he told me to. But the man who hit Andrew Skooner – and shot his brother – has lost control. He’s acting out of fear or something like it. Your husband twisted me into all kinds of shapes, but someone else is making him jump now. That’s what I think.’
She eyed me doubtfully. ‘And who do you think that is?’
‘The Skooners would make sense. But so far, he’s battering them more than they’re hurting him.’
Again, the tight frown. ‘It would be best if you got back in your car and left,’ she said.
‘I really need to talk with him. But since he’s in jail, I’ll settle for you.’
‘I have nothing to tell you,’ she said.
I stepped toward her.
She raised the pistol so it pointed at my chest.
‘I know everything you’ve done,’ she said. ‘My husband has told me.’
‘You know what he says I’ve done. But do you believe it?’
‘Every word.’
‘Then you’d better call your cop friends,’ I said, and I stepped past her into the house. Higby had locked me behind doors for eight years, and I was tired of his barriers.
The front hall reached straight back to the kitchen, where windows faced the dark water of Black Creek. I walked through the hall, with her close behind me, and sat at the kitchen table.
‘Does your husband keep copies of case files at home?’ I asked.
‘Of course not.’ She stood a few feet away, with the gun pointing at me.
‘Would you mind if I look?’
‘Yes, I would mind very much,’ she said.
‘Then tell me what he and Andrew Skooner fought about last night.’
‘You understand, don’t you, that you’re the last person he would want me to talk to?’
I said, ‘Unlike just about anyone else in this city, I think he might have been justified in shooting Joshua Skooner. I think Joshua had a gun. And I think your husband probably had a good reason, if not legal justification, to hit Andrew Skooner last night.’
‘Then you must be happy about the injustice,’ she said.
I said, ‘I have mixed feelings.’
‘Even if I thought your opinion mattered, I wouldn’t tell you anything.’
‘What if I’m the only one who can help him?’
‘Why would you be? And if you were, why in the world would you do it?’
In truth, if I helped him – if – I would do so only because I could show power over his life as he’d had power over mine. He would live every day knowing I had that power. ‘I hate what happened to me,’ I said. ‘I never want to see it happen again. To anyone. I’ll do anything to stop it.’
She considered me. Maybe she put my words into balance with all her husband had told her about me and whatever faith she had in him. She said, ‘No. Just no. You need to leave my house. You need to never come back.’
So I got up from the table. But instead of walking back out through the front hall, I crossed to a door that led into a home office. Inside, a coffee table was covered with magazines. The desk was bare except for an electric bill and a car insurance renewal notice. I went to the file cabinet next to the desk and opened the top drawer.
Higby’s wife said, ‘I can’t let you do that.’
‘It seems to me that you and your husband have enough troubles without you shooting me.’ I felt her heavy presence as I leafed through a file of travel brochures for Jamaica and Key West, another of credit card receipts, and a third of statements from Higby’s police pension.
I closed the drawer and opened the second.
Higby’s wife said, ‘I told you, he brings none of his work home.’
The first folder in the drawer contained an old photograph showing Higby in his mid-twenties, standing on a fishing dock with a rod and reel, another photograph showing him when he was still younger, alongside two other teenage boys, and a third showing him and his wife at their wedding ceremony. The next folder – thicker than the others – contained medical records. Folder after folder held only his personal and financial records. When I looked up again, the pistol was quivering in his wife’s hand. ‘Satisfied?’
‘Hardly,’ I said, but I went back through the kitchen to the hallway, with her following close behind me. I glanced into the living room. Then I headed for the front door. ‘I’m sorry I had to do that,’ I said.
She aimed the gun at my back. ‘Get the hell out of my house.’
‘Tell your husband I came by,’ I said. ‘Tell him I offered to help.’
She said, ‘If I told him I even saw you, he would destroy you.’ She slammed the door.
I smiled as I walked to my car. I would count her silence as a betrayal of Bill Higby.
When I got back to the JNI office, Jane and Hank were gone, though Thelma still drummed her fingers on her computer keyboard. She’d tracked down the brother of one of the witnesses against Thomas LaFlora, and Jane and Hank had gone to surprise him at the Long Oaks Apartments on the northwest side of the city.
Now, she peeled a Post-it note from her desk and gave it to me. ‘For you. Andrew Skooner just called. But he left no return number.’
‘Huh,’ I said.
‘What did the judge have to say?’
‘He told me to go to hell.’
‘You expected anything differen
t?’
‘I hoped.’
‘You should know better by now.’ And she drummed and she drummed.
I dialed directory assistance and got the Skooner’s home phone number. When I dialed again, Andrew answered, and I said, ‘It’s Franky Dast.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said.
‘What doesn’t?’
‘Thanks,’ he said, and hung up.
I stared at the phone. ‘Screwy boy.’
I left the office at four o’clock. Cynthia was working at the Cineplex until midnight, and so I drove back to the Cardinal Motel. As I approached, I saw a squad car parked by my room. Once again, my door was gone – kicked or knocked off. The motel owner, Bill Hopper, stood inside the doorframe, blocking two cops who seemed to want to get inside. I started to drive past, fought the impulse, turned into the lot, and parked next to the squad car. When I got out, Hopper was yelling at the cops, and the cops were trying to peer around him.
‘What the hell!’ Hopper said to them. ‘What’re you thinking?’
One of the cops leaned in, his hand at his holster. ‘We got a call that he was—’
‘You broke my fucking door,’ Hopper said.
‘We thought—’
‘It was a new door!’
‘Sir,’ the other cop said, ‘you need to calm down.’ His fingers brushed against gun metal.
Hopper said, ‘I need to calm down? You kicked down my fucking door. I get along with the police. You just had to come to my office—’
‘We believed an assault was in progress,’ the first cop said.
‘“In progress”? How the hell?’ And now Hopper saw me. ‘He wasn’t even home. How could he in progress anyone? Jesus Christ – look at my door.’
The second cop asked me, ‘Are you Franklin Dast?’
And the first cop said, ‘We got a call—’
The second cop said, ‘Show him.’
The first cop gestured at a pair of boy’s underwear on the concrete walkway a few feet from my doorway. They looked bloody – like the pair I found hanging from my doorknob shortly after I moved in.
The second cop said, ‘Why’d you put those on your door?’
‘I wasn’t here,’ I said. ‘It’s an ugly prank.’
The cops exchanged a glance. One said, ‘We still got to check the room.’
Hopper said, ‘If you don’t have a warrant, you sure as hell don’t.’
‘Sir,’ the cop said, ‘you need to step aside.’
Hopper said, ‘Unless a crime is happening, you can’t go in.’ He reached into my room and hit the light switch. ‘You see a kid in there? You see an assault?’
The cop started toward him, as if he would go in anyway, but the other one pulled him aside. They went to the squad car and talked for a minute, and then the first one came back and, ignoring Hopper, talked to me. ‘Do we have permission to look inside your room?’
I had nothing to hide. I’d never had anything to hide. But that hadn’t kept me off death row. ‘Get a warrant,’ I said.
The second cop came at me, as if I’d given the wrong answer.
But then a black Mercury Grand Marquis drove on to the parking lot and stopped next to the squad car. Higby’s partner, Deborah Holt, opened the car door, flashed her badge at the patrolmen, and said, ‘Get out of here.’
The first cop looked confused, the second angry.
The first said, ‘Ma’am?’
‘Go on,’ she said. ‘It’s a misunderstanding. You’re done here.’
‘No, ma’am,’ the second cop said, and he seemed about to take a stand, but she got in close to him and mumbled a word or two, and then he backed down and slunk toward his squad car.
‘What about the door?’ Hopper said. ‘Who’s going to pay for it?’
Holt turned to him and said, ‘I’m betting if we kicked down a couple more doors, we’d find meth or coke. Then we could take legal possession of the motel and put your scumbag flock on the street. Do you really want to worry about this one?’
He said weakly, ‘It was a new door.’
‘Go back to your office and let me talk to Mr Dast.’
He said to me, ‘You cover my ass, and I cover yours.’
As he walked away, she said, ‘Make sure Mr Dast has a stronger door this evening.’
Then we were alone. I stared at her. The beginning of a smile hung on her lips. Suddenly, everyone was trying to be my friend. I said, ‘Why did you do that?’
‘You wanted to talk to the street cops?’
‘But why?’
‘Can we go inside?’
I wondered if she was setting a trap. I stared at my broken door.
She said, ‘We can talk in my car instead if you want.’
I stepped over the pieces of my door and she came in after me.
‘Sit, if you want,’ I said, but she stayed standing and so did I.
‘I’ll deny I ever told you this,’ she said, ‘but Higby is responsible for the underwear. He has a few friends in the department who are glad to help.’
A wave of nausea passed through me. ‘He can get to me from jail?’
‘You deserved it,’ she said. ‘He talked on the phone with his wife this afternoon. You scared the hell out of her.’
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘I thought I told you to stay away. I warned you.’
‘Eight years ago, when I did what he told me to do, I ended up on death row. I mostly try to do the opposite of what cops tell me to do now. It seems safer.’
‘Safer unless you like having a door on your room,’ she said. ‘And you know from experience that there are a lot of worse things that can happen than losing a door. Plenty of people would be happy to make those things happen for you. Why risk it?’
My stomach turned as I realized how close I’d come to having cops tear through my room – how easy it would be to set me up with more than a couple of pairs of bloody underwear.
‘Hold on,’ I said. I went into the bathroom and closed the door. I turned on the cold water in the sink, ran it over my hands and wrists, and splashed it on my face. I looked in the mirror. The water dotted my pale skin like a death-sweat. I splashed my face again and again until I figured my legs would hold under me.
When I went back into the room, Holt was sitting on the side of my bed. She stared at me curiously. I said, ‘Why did you wreck Higby’s plan to set me up? I thought you guys worked together.’
‘You know what?’ she said. ‘You’ve wormed into my head. I see why he wanted to put you away.’
‘Why did you wreck his plan?’
Again, she stared. ‘I’ll deny I ever told you this.’
She waited for a response, so I said, ‘OK.’
‘After I came to talk to you last time, I was looking through his old files,’ she said. ‘We share a caseload. You had a fascinating case. I’ve spent the last few days reading about it – and about you. I know you now, Franky. I could write a book. I think if I’d seen the same evidence Higby saw, I would’ve done exactly what he did. And, by the way, that track coach of yours – Ernie Kagen – he is a predator. We’ll bust him sooner or later. But he had nothing to do with the deaths of the Bronson boys.’
‘How do you—’
‘The night they died, he was in jail in New Orleans, charged with soliciting an underage prostitute. He used a phony name, and the connection came out only after the Gainesville incident. So you would still look good for the Bronson killings, except for one thing. Five years before the Bronson boys died, another boy got killed in a way that looked a lot like them but in a state park down in Putnam County. A fourteen-year-old runaway. Raped. Bite marks. A single twenty-two-caliber bullet in the forehead. DNA recovered but untested. Higby date-marked the report when it came in. He had it in his hands before you went to trial. He either read it or should have.’
‘I was thirteen when that one happened?’ I said.
She nodded. ‘And the Putnam investigator put notes at the bottom about simi
larities to still another killing. A ten-year-old boy went missing from a family campsite three years earlier. No rape, but he had the bite marks and bullet wound.’
‘I was ten.’
‘Yes.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘Everything else in the case file tells me you did the Bronson brothers,’ she said. ‘Or maybe you and someone else who left the DNA, but definitely you.’
‘Did the bullets match the ones that killed the Bronson boys?’
She gave me a pained smile. ‘They’re missing from the evidence file. The guys in Putnam—’
‘Missing? How?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It happens more often than it should.’
I thought about what she’d told me. ‘But you know I didn’t do it.’
‘Yes.’
No other cop had ever believed me.
‘Detective Higby made a terrible mistake when he withheld that report,’ she said. ‘He’s a good investigator, and I believe he thinks you’re guilty. I can’t see how he gets there, but I believe it.’
‘Believing him can cause a lot of pain,’ I said.
‘That’s why I broke up his racket today. He means well—’
‘No, he doesn’t,’ I said. ‘He means to hurt me.’
‘For him, that’s the same as meaning well.’
Hot air and highway fumes breathed in through the broken door. ‘I need the files on the other boys,’ I said.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘You deserve to see them.’
‘Thank you.’ It hurt to say that to a cop, but I said it.
‘I’ll deny I gave them to you. But if anyone investigates, they’ll know. If you can, I would appreciate your keeping quiet about how you got them. My job’s on the line.’ When I said nothing, she added, ‘I’m trying to do right by you.’
‘It’s too late to do right.’
‘I know that too.’ And she brought in the files from her trunk.
When she left, I spread the report about the earlier killings on my bed. The first kid, whose name was Jeremy Ballat, had just turned fourteen when he died. He’d been dead for forty-eight to seventy-two hours when a park ranger found his naked body in a ditch in the Etoniah Creek State Forest. Insects had torn into his eyes and mouth, though the medical examiner said the bite marks on his legs were human. Swabs showed that he’d been raped – tissue analysis suggested, repeatedly. The killer had shot him through his tender forehead, probably pointblank, but the skin had deteriorated too much for the examiner to say more.
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