Stephanie’s eyebrows came together. “But—from what I read, there was no one else there but you.”
I shrugged. “When I got upstairs, I saw that there was a television on. I thought that explained the voices I had heard from the basement, but what if there was someone else there? If you read my statement, the sheriff was suddenly there and found me kneeling over the body. What if he’d been in the room the whole time? I mean, I thought he had come in the door, but when I look back on it, I should’ve heard the door open. I didn’t.”
She shook her head, as if to clear the cobwebs. “Mr. Jones, are you trying to tell me that the sheriff killed his own deputy?”
“I’m saying he’s the only other person that I know of who could have been close enough to do it,” I said. “That being said, I can’t be certain that there wasn’t someone else. I had heard voices above me while I was still in the basement, and now I’m not so sure it was just the TV. What if I was actually hearing an argument between the deputy and the sheriff, or someone else? Someone slashed his throat, and it wasn’t me. If I had done it, and then gone to the basement for some reason, stripped down and laid on that table, he would have been dead before I could possibly have gotten back up the stairs. His throat had to have been cut less than a minute before I found him, while I was in the bedroom getting dressed.”
She sat there and looked at me for a long moment, then began scribbling notes. “You may very well be on to something,” she said. “This isn’t going to change anything that happens right away, but it definitely gives us an approach to a defense if we end up going to trial. We can establish that his throat was cut because that’s included in the Sheriff’s own statement; however, he says he entered the house and found you over the body, not that he was already there. The question is going to be whether we can convince a jury that you’re telling the truth about waking up in that basement when you did. Any doctor or medical expert can verify what you’re saying, about how quickly he would’ve died, so if we can convince a jury that you’re not lying, then there’s a very good possibility that we can get you acquitted.”
She finished scribbling her notes, and then looked up at me again. “However, I don’t want you to get your hopes too high. When I present this to the prosecutor as our line of defense, which I have to do, I would guess that he’s going to laugh his head off at first. Then, after he gets a chance to think about it for a little while, he’s probably going to come back at us with a plea bargain offer. He’ll probably offer you a chance to plead to either murder two or manslaughter, either of which could get you a much shorter sentence and keep you from the death penalty. I’m going to be blunt and honest with you, Mr. Jones. If he offers you anything less than ten years, I’m going to strongly suggest you take it.”
I stared at her. “But I didn’t do it,” I said. “Why on earth would I plead guilty to something I didn’t do?”
“Because,” she said matter-of-factly, “while there is a chance we might convince a jury that you’re telling the truth and therefore could not have been the killer, it isn’t anywhere near a one hundred percent chance. I’d say it’s about a 50-50 shot, if I’m being honest, which means that it’s equally likely that they find you guilty and sentence you to die. I think the best you can hope for might be life in prison if you’re convicted. You’ve got to look at this realistically: if the prosecutor offers you a halfway-decent deal, you should seriously think about taking it.”
Chapter 14
It was just barely after nine o’clock when I got back to the cell block, and told Gunner about my visit with my attorney. I was excited that she agreed with our theory that I couldn’t have killed Deputy Johnson, but when I told him that she was hoping for a plea deal, he nodded.
“Makes sense,” he said. “She’s right about one thing: you’d have a hard time convincing a jury that you’re telling the truth, and it wouldn’t help that the sheriff would be sittin’ there insisting that you’re lying. I mean, you’re probably right about him being the one who killed the deputy, but you got no motive, and no proof. His word against yours.” He shrugged.
I nodded in agreement. “That’s the problem,” I said. “I’m gonna be sitting there on the witness stand telling a bunch of people who don’t know me from Adam that I don’t remember anything about what happened, and that somehow the sheriff is the real killer. He’s gonna tell them that he came in through a back door or something, and found me kneeling over Johnson. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out who they’re most likely to believe.”
“No. You got to be sensible about this. Your lawyer is right; if they offer you a deal that’s halfway decent, you better take it.”
“That’s what happened to the guy in the book I read,” I said. “He was innocent, but all the circumstantial evidence pointed to him, and a crooked cop insisted he was guilty. The prosecutor couldn’t be sure of the conviction, so he offered the guy a plea bargain that he ended up taking. Being innocent didn’t matter.”
“Now you starting to get it,” Gunner said. “The justice system is a big joke. Truth don’t matter, it’s all about getting a conviction. They tell you if you go to trial, you gonna go down big time, but if you make they job easier and plead out, then they go easy on you. People take it, cause then they got a chance to get out someday and get they life back.”
I sat there and just looked at him for a moment, trying to make myself come to grips with the fact that there was very little chance I was ever going to go free, or at least not for a long time. On the other hand, the people he was talking about had lives to go back to; I had no idea what my life had been, and no clue if I would ever remember it. Would it be worth taking a plea bargain to get a shorter sentence? Or should I just go all out for trial, and risk getting the death penalty?
Gunner had a family waiting for him, so I could see why he took the deal they offered him. I had no one, as far as I knew. I had no job to go back to. No wife or child waiting for me. No life waiting for me to pick up where I had left off. With that being the case, did I have anything to live for? What would I do, eight or ten years from now, when I got parole? I’d be just another ex-con out there trying to find a way to fit into a society that didn’t want me.
We hashed it out between us for about an hour, and while I could see both sides of the argument, I couldn’t come to a firm decision. I wasn’t sure what I would do if a plea bargain was offered.
“You know, Sal, one thing you ought to think about is that they got vocational schools in prison. Depends on where you go, but they got schools that teach you how to do lots of different jobs. That way, when you get out, you got a chance to get a decent job and make a living. They got schools that teach you how to cook, you know, like in a restaurant. They got schools that teach you about cars, and about business and all kinds of stuff. My brother, he did time in the feds, and he learned how to write books while he was there. He making good money, now, writing books about what it’s like on the street. Urban novels, they call it, and he got some company sells his books and pays him lots of money for them.”
I chuckled. “There you go,” I said. “Maybe I can take that course, and write some novels about people who don’t know who they are. You’re supposed to write about what you know, right?”
He laughed at that, and was about to say something else when I heard my name called over the speaker again. I grinned and said, “Here we go again,” then got up and went to the door.
The jailers were waiting for me again, but this time there were three deputies with them. “Sal Jones? We’ve got to take you to see Doctor Wilmington; he’s a medical doctor. They want to get you all checked out, see if they can find out what makes you tick.”
They marched me down to where I had come in, and then one of the deputies put shackles on my legs and a chain around my waist, one that had a single handcuff on each side. Once they had the chain locked on me, they put my hands into the cuffs, and two of the deputies took hold of my arms and walked me out into that big gar
age. They put me into the backseat of a car, with one of the deputies sitting beside me while the other two got in the front.
The driver picked up a microphone. “SCDC, this is Transport. We’re secure and good to go.”
“Transport, ten four.” A big garage door in front of us began to roll upward, and we drove out of the detention center’s garage.
The ride to the medical clinic took about twenty minutes, and I spent all of it looking out the window. I guess a part of me was hoping I’d see something familiar out there, but I was disappointed. This city was not one that I knew, and though I was able to recognize, in a general sense, the different types of businesses and buildings that I saw, there was nothing that jogged any memories.
When we pulled into the clinic, the deputy driving the car took us around to the back of the building. There was a back door that we used to go inside, apparently so that we wouldn’t upset any of the patients who might be waiting for an appointment in the front lobby. I was taken directly into one of the examination rooms, while one of the deputies went to tell someone that we were there. A nurse came in a few moments later.
She took one look at me, and turned to the deputies. “We’re going to need his chains and shackles off,” she said. “He’s scheduled for an MRI, and there can’t be any metal going into the machine.”
The deputies looked at one another, and one of them shrugged. “Take them off,” he said. One of the deputies moved to do so, while the other two stood back against the wall with their hands on their guns.
The nurse glared at them. “Is that really necessary?”
“Lady,” one of the deputies near the wall said. “That man can move faster than anyone I’ve ever seen in my life, and yesterday he took on more than a dozen cons by himself and whipped them all. I have absolutely no intention of giving him the chance to escape, so yes, it’s necessary.”
The nurse just stood there for a moment, then turned back to me. She stuck a thermometer in my mouth, and then took my blood pressure. When she was done, she had me stand on a scale to get my weight, and measured my height while she was at it. I was surprised to see that I stood a touch over six feet tall and weighed a hundred and eighty pounds. I hadn’t thought I was quite that big.
“Have you had any surgeries?” she asked.
I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know of any.”
She nodded her head, so I figured she had been told that I was claiming to have amnesia. “Well, I need you to get out of that jumpsuit. Have you got underwear on?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and I unzipped and climbed out of the jumpsuit, which left me standing in the boxer shorts they had given me at the jail. She looked me over for scars, but didn’t find any, so she offered me a gown, and I put it on backwards, the way you usually do with those things.
“Okay, we’re going to take you down for an MRI,” she said. She looked at the deputies. “You guys can follow along, but you have to stay out of the MRI room, itself. You got enough metal on you to disrupt the thing, or get yourself dragged into it. There’s an observation room you can stand in, where you can watch him through the windows the whole time.”
The deputy in charge nodded his head, and we all followed her down the hall and through a doorway. She pointed into another room, and the deputies all went into it while she took me to the machine and had me lie on the sliding table that would take me into the big metal doughnut.
“Okay, what we want you to do is just lie here and don’t move at all, once the test starts. Keep yourself as still as you can, and if you start to feel any discomfort, like a hotspot or anything, yell out. That would mean there’s metal inside your body, and if it’s big enough, this thing can literally drag it right out of you.”
“No problem,” I said. “I’ll lay as still as I possibly can, and scream if some metal flies out of my body.”
She didn’t laugh.
“How long does it take?” I added. Mainly to break the awkward silence.
“Just a few minutes. Lay still, now.” She turned and went into the room where the deputies were waiting, and I watched through the window as she sat down at a computer. A moment later, I heard the machine start to hum, and I could tell that the big magnet was spinning. A couple of seconds later, the table started moving me inside it.
I didn’t feel any discomfort, but the closer I got to that big round doughnut, the more I started to feel just a little disoriented. I had no idea why, so I tried to concentrate on the tiny, jerking movements of the table. It seemed to be moving me about a centimeter at a time, like a slight bump, a pause for a couple of seconds, then another bump. But again, the closer I got, the dizzier I became.
I wondered if I should call out and tell them about it, but then the machine bumped once more, and I suddenly was unable to even think clearly. My thoughts were rambling, and I was seeing flashes of things in my head. I saw Gunner’s face float through my imagination, and then saw an image of my own face, but with longer hair. There were flashes of historical images, like pictures from World War II and Vietnam, images of presidents, then visions of hospitals, laboratories, big buildings. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I can remember thinking that these were memories that were hidden from me, but I couldn’t make any sense of them.
Another bump, and suddenly I was simply not there anymore.
I have no idea how long the test went on, because I suddenly woke to find myself out of the machine, with the nurse calling my name.
“Mr. Jones? Mr. Jones, can you hear me?”
I came awake, and nodded my head. “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I can hear you. I guess I blacked out or something.”
She smiled down at me, but I could see concern in her face. “Yes, you did,” she said. “That’s not exactly normal. Do you feel okay?”
“I do now. While I was going into that machine, I could feel myself getting dizzy, and then it was like my mind just sort of wandered for a while.” I suddenly remembered the flashes that had gone through my mind, and tried to focus on them, call them back up. Most of them were easy to visualize, but the only one that seemed like it might be a personal memory was the one of my face, with the long hair. I guessed that it must’ve been an image of myself in the mirror, from before I had gotten the haircut I was sporting. “I think I may have actually seen a few memories, but I’m not sure, and I can’t seem to remember anything more right now. Right after that is when I blacked out, I guess.” I looked into her eyes. “Did you see anything on the scan?”
The concern suddenly came back into her eyes. “Doctor Wilmington will go over that with you in a few minutes,” she said. “Can you get to your feet?”
I sat up and swung my legs around so my feet were touching the floor. “Yeah, I think so,” I said, and stood. There was a brief second of dizziness, but then it passed. “Yeah, I’m okay.”
She motioned for the deputies to come on out, and we walked back down to the examination room. She told me to just sit on the table, and that she and the doctor would be in shortly.
The deputies all took their positions again, backs against the walls. Other than to tell me what to do, not one of them had spoken to me, but since they believed I had killed one of their colleagues, I could understand that. I sat on the table and tried to make myself appear as unimposing as possible. The last thing I needed to do was to antagonize these men. For all I knew, they might think it would be easier if I were “shot trying to escape,” rather than standing trial. I didn’t want to give them the slightest reason to act on any such impulses.
We were there for about ten minutes before the doctor came in, followed by the same nurse. She stepped close and stood beside me while the doctor looked over a sheet of paper in his hand.
“Mr. Jones, I’m Doctor Wilmington,” the doctor said, extending his hand. I shook it, and then he reached up and took hold of my head and began looking it over. “Do you get any headaches? Any dizziness, other than when you were in the scanner?”
“No, sir,” I said. �
��At least, not that I know of.”
He twisted my head all around, looking it over thoroughly, even bending it down so he could run his fingers and eyes over the back of it. “There isn’t anything obvious that suggests you had any kind of head trauma,” he said, “but there is a small lesion on the scan, which appears just below the left temporal lobe of your brain. When we first spotted it, it looked a bit like a tumor, but it’s pretty dense. I don’t think it’s a tumor, because it actually appears to be quite solid. Now, it’s possible that it’s some sort of calcified tissue, or it could even be a bit of bone that’s grown in an odd place. I can’t find anything in particular that would suggest it might be connected to your memory loss, and I don’t think that it’s in any way dangerous. A lesion is what we call it when we see a shadow on a scan like this, something we don’t expect to find, and we have a tendency to automatically suspect a tumor when we see that. Yours, on the other hand, is pretty dense. It’s about the size and shape of an almond, and for a moment, there, I even wondered if it might be a bullet lodged in your head. But you don’t have any kind of scar that might be from an entry wound. The only kind of scar I see on your head is a tiny little mark just under your left ear, and that’s so old it probably happened when you were a baby. If you got shot back then, you’d be dead, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
My eyes were wide. “But you don’t think it’s a tumor?” I asked.
Thriller: I Am Sal - A Mystifying Crime Thriller (Thriller, Crime Thriller, Murder Mystery Book 1) Page 7