by Marti Green
Meeting the attorney who had handled the trial of a death-row inmate usually made for an uncomfortable situation. Most were defensive. Some started out cooperatively, but when the investigating attorney dug in deeper, they retreated into familiar justifications for the jury verdict. The worst was the one Dani had gotten from Wilson: His client was guilty.
She pulled up to Wilson’s address and found just what she’d expected: a storefront on a back street, with a peeling sign out front and worn furniture inside. Small-town defense attorneys usually weren’t well paid for their efforts. After introducing herself, his secretary pointed her toward an office down the hall. “Go on back, dear. He’s expecting you. Just knock on the door.”
Dani entered and they exchanged pleasantries. Wilson appeared to be in his late fifties or early sixties. He had on a light-gray suit, although his jacket was draped over a hanger on the back of his office door. Despite the deep crease lines in his face, he carried the reminder of someone who’d been attractive in his youth. His office was no different from the reception area, perhaps even more shopworn. A large walnut desk was littered with files, and a nearby wastebasket overflowed. Other than a diploma from Indiana University School of Law, the white walls were bare. Dani got down to business. “Bob, is there anything about this case I should be aware of that’s not in the files?”
“No,” he answered quickly. “It’s all there.”
“So, no one attempted to identify the child in the woods, other than by Sallie’s confession?”
“Well, they couldn’t do a run for finger- or footprints. The body was too badly burned.”
“And no DNA?”
“Keep in mind defense attorneys didn’t usually do DNA testing back then. And what’d be the point? Sallie said it was her daughter.”
“But George insisted it wasn’t.”
Wilson leaned back in his chair and looked her over. “Sweetie, you big-city, ivy-towered lawyers think money grows on trees,” he said with a smirk. “It costs big bucks for DNA testing, especially back then. When you do criminal-defense work, you get a sixth sense. You know when a client is hustling you and you know when they’re laying it all out. George was no innocent—I knew that right away. No point in throwing money away chasing dead ends. Sallie said that was their daughter, and no matter what any testing showed, the jury damn sure would believe her.”
Dani felt her anger rise. She wanted to throttle Wilson’s neck and shout, You were representing a man facing death. How dare you decide to give up on him? How dare you take his case if you weren’t going to do everything within your power to find the truth? How dare you practice criminal law, you worthless excuse for an attorney? Instead, she asked calmly, “Did you believe Sallie told the truth?”
“Well, I admit, she was harder to read. She couldn’t manage a sentence without bawling. But I had no reason to disbelieve her.”
“How about her mental processes? Did you try to have a psych evaluation done on her?”
“I keep telling you, these things cost money. I didn’t receive a whole lot of money for representing him, and he didn’t qualify for pauper status, so the court wasn’t giving away money for all these tests you think should have been done.”
“Tell me, then, if you were so convinced of George’s guilt, why didn’t you encourage him to take a plea?”
Wilson got up from his chair and looked out the window. After a moment, he turned back to Dani. The belligerence was gone from his voice when he answered. “I’d have got down on my knees and begged him to take a plea if that would’ve done any good. The D.A. offered life, no parole; took death off the table. But George wouldn’t hear of it. He sounded like a broken record, saying he didn’t kill that girl. Seemed to me that he had a death wish, the way he insisted on going to trial.”
Dani hesitated to come across as too condemnatory of Wilson—he had too much knowledge of the case for her to dismiss his value. But she had hard questions about his handling of the case. “I was surprised you put George on the stand, especially since you thought he was guilty. Did you think he was going to offer the jurors an explanation for his missing daughter?”
Wilson shook his head. “I knew he’d be a disaster. Didn’t matter how many times I told him he was putting the noose around his own neck if he took the stand. He just kept insisting he had to tell the jury he wasn’t a murderer. Finally I gave in. I figured he was going down anyway. Might as well let him have his say.”
Dani wondered what it felt like to represent a man facing death when you believed he was guilty. She practiced in a rarefied world—HIPP represented a last-ditch hope for condemned men and women. If HIPP lawyers didn’t believe in their clients’ innocence, they walked away. Dani had never faced arguing on behalf of someone whose innocence she doubted. Defense attorneys were a different breed. Some were true idealists who viewed themselves as crusaders upholding the sacred tenet that everyone had a right to counsel; others started out as prosecutors and used the skills they learned to open a practice defending accused criminals. And a few—a very few, she hoped—just wanted to get through the day earning a buck. Wilson struck her as one of those.
“Isn’t it surprising for a guilty man to risk trial when his life is on the line?”
“Not in my experience. Some of these criminals are so deluded, they convince themselves they didn’t do the crime, even when they’re caught red-handed.”
Dani flashed back to a three-year-old Jonah, standing on a chair, his hand holding a cookie he’d just retrieved from the kitchen cabinet. “Jonah no take cookie,” he’d said when confronted by his mother, a look of total innocence on his face. Dani appreciated that Wilson’s assessment of some criminals was true. She switched to another line of questions. “You didn’t cross-examine Sallie for very long. How come?”
“I could see the jurors were believing her. A lot more than they were going to believe George. No sense in giving her more time to get their sympathy.”
“But still, you could have tried to impeach her. The state didn’t have any forensic evidence tying George to the victim, only Sallie’s testimony.”
“You forget the gas station attendant.”
“His testimony was questionable at best. And you did a good job showing that to the jury.”
Wilson chuckled. “Look, don’t waste your time trying to butter me up. It’s no secret you’ll argue ineffective counsel. My feelings won’t be hurt. I doubt it’ll get George a new trial, but you go ahead and try.”
Whether HIPP would even take the case was still to be decided. Even if Dani believed George’s claim of innocence, she would have to evaluate her chance of succeeding. Wilson was right—getting a new trial this close to a scheduled execution would be tough.
They talked some more, going over details of the trial and the appeals. Dani thanked Wilson for his help and gathered her notes to leave. On her way out the door, she turned back to him. “And you’re certain neither George nor Sallie ever explained what happened to their daughter, to Angelina?”
Wilson closed his eyes and rubbed them with balled-up fists. When he opened his eyes, they looked tired, worn out by years of eking out a living representing society’s outcasts. “Not once before trial. Not even during the appeals. Only later, much later, about five or six years ago—I think maybe when I worked on his last grab to the Supreme Court—George wrote me. Made up some cockeyed story about his daughter being sick and then rambled on about no one helping her. It was bunk—a desperate grab at reversing his fate. I threw the letter away.”
The shock on Dani’s face must have been apparent. “You didn’t follow up on his letter?”
“What for? Some prisoner probably helped him come up with the story. You wouldn’t believe how creative they get in there. Liars, all of them. There was no point in wasting my time anymore.”
“But what if it was true?”
“Then he would have told me
when it mattered.”
Wilson may not have been a bad attorney. He was certainly not a stupid attorney. Dani didn’t really know him, but she guessed he wasn’t even a lazy attorney. Plenty of all three types were defending clients in courts all over the United States. Wilson’s problem was not being paid enough by a client he believed was guilty—a toxic combination for a defendant facing the death penalty.
CHAPTER
9
Tommy kept the speedometer at just under fifteen miles over the speed limit. He knew from experience it was the safety zone, the gap between the speed posted as the maximum and the point at which he might be ticketed if he had the bad luck to pass a traffic cop. He arrived at the Hammond police station in just under two hours, and Hank Cannon was waiting for him.
“I don’t know that there’s much more I can tell you,” Cannon said. “I pretty much covered it on the phone yesterday.”
“Well, I don’t expect to come away with anything more by coming here. But our interview with Calhoun has been pushed back a day, and I never had the patience to sit on my ass, so I figured if nothing else, I’ll get to meet Jimmy’s friend.”
A big smile broke out on Cannon’s face as he swung his arm over Tommy’s shoulder. “Yeah, I bet we could share some pretty wild stories about Jimmy. C’mon into my office.”
Tommy followed Cannon down the hallway. The once-stark white paint on the walls was now a dingy gray and peeling at the corners. The industrial carpet underfoot was well worn.
The mixture of voices, ringing telephones, and keyboard typing created a familiar hum, and a wave of nostalgia for his FBI days washed over Tommy.
Cannon brought him into a large open space filled with desks and a row of three rooms at the far end. “This here’s my office,” Cannon said as he pointed to one of the twenty or so desks in the room. “Take a load off your feet.” Cannon dropped himself into the chair behind his desk and waited for Tommy to get comfortable in the plastic chair beside it.
“So, what’s this visit really about? I could jaw all day about Jimmy, and I’m sure we’d yuk it up, but I don’t believe you drove out here just for the heck of it.”
“Nah, you’re right. I just got to thinking maybe you wouldn’t mind taking me to meet Stacy’s parents.”
Cannon stared silently at Tommy for a moment. “You thinking I got too close to them and overlooked some key evidence?”
“No, nothing like that. It’s just, sometimes a fresh pair of eyes can’t hurt. I don’t expect it’s their daughter they found in Indiana back in ’90. But if it was, wouldn’t they want to know?”
“And just how do you think meeting the Conklins will help you find out whether it was Stacy buried in those woods?”
“Look, I’m trying to be straight with you. I’m kind of hoping the Conklins held on to something of Stacy’s. Maybe a comb or hairbrush. Maybe her favorite doll might have some of her stray hairs. Then we could compare it to any DNA left in the evidence kit over in LaGrange.”
“LaGrange?”
“Yeah, that’s the precinct that grabbed the case of the kid found in the woods, over by Orland.”
“So they have DNA from the kid?”
Tommy shifted his eyes downward. “I haven’t talked to them, but I’m figuring they’ve got to. I mean, don’t they always in a murder case?”
“Maybe you guys at the Bureau routinely kept DNA evidence back in ’90, but us local guys, it wasn’t necessarily on our radar. Don’t you think you should check with LaGrange before we go bothering the Conklins?”
Tommy gave Cannon his warmest smile. “You know, I’m here now. It’s a beautiful day outside. This’ll give us an excuse to get out of the office. Besides, maybe the Conklins will be encouraged to know someone else is trying to find out what happened to Stacy.”
Cannon eyed Tommy quizzically. “You sure you’re not trying to pin this rap on the Conklins? ’Cause if you are, I’ll tell you right now you’re off in left field. No way, no how.”
“Relax. I’m not thinking they did this. I’m not even saying our guy didn’t do it. All I know is, Calhoun insists the girl in the woods wasn’t his daughter. I haven’t even met him yet. When I do, maybe I’ll come away thinking he’s full of crap and he’s going to get exactly what he deserves. Frankly, that’s what I expect will happen. But in the meantime, I just want to be thorough. If there’s even a small chance that Calhoun is telling the truth and the girl in the woods wasn’t his daughter, she has to be somebody else. Maybe that somebody is Stacy Conklin. If I were her parents, I’d want the person responsible for putting her there to rot in hell for it. And the one thing I’m sure of is that George Calhoun didn’t murder Stacy Conklin.”
“The Conklins eyeballed that little girl’s body. It wasn’t Stacy.”
“From what I’ve read, the burns were pretty extensive. They could’ve been wrong. I mean, if it were my daughter, I’d want to believe it wasn’t her.”
Cannon shrugged. “I think this is a wild goose chase, but I don’t have anything pressing today. Let’s give it a go.”
Thirty minutes later, Tommy shook the hand of Mickey Conklin. The man’s grip was as strong as he looked. A bodybuilder, Tommy thought to himself as he eyed the muscles bulging against Mickey’s tight-fitted cotton sweater. Janine Conklin stood by his side, her arms crossed in front of her slim body.
“Thanks for seeing us,” Cannon said after introductions were made. “I promise we won’t take up much of your time. How’ve you folks been doing? It’s been a while since we last talked.”
Janine stood impassively at the front door, in contrast with Mickey, who rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. “We’re good, good. Right, Janine?” Mickey said, the words tumbling quickly from his mouth as he eyed Tommy.
“Would it be all right if we came in for a bit?” Cannon asked.
“Sure, of course; pardon my manners, Hank. It’s just that we weren’t expecting you,” Janine said and stepped aside for the two men to enter her home.
“Please, make yourself comfortable,” Janine continued as she motioned toward the couch. “Can I get you something to drink? There’s a fresh pot of coffee made.”
“Love some, Janine. Thanks. The usual way,” Cannon said.
Tommy shook his head. “None for me.”
As Janine left the living room, Tommy turned to Mickey. “Detective Cannon has told me about your daughter’s disappearance. My sympathies to you and your wife.”
Mickey nodded silently.
“Would you mind showing me the room she was taken from?”
“What business is it of yours?” Mickey asked.
“Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. I represent a man who’s about to get the needle for murdering his daughter. When the body was discovered, there’d been some thought it might have been Stacy, and you were brought in for a possible ID. You said it wasn’t her. I’m just doubling back to make sure that’s the case.”
Tommy saw Mickey’s back stiffen. “Don’t you think I’d know my own daughter?”
“I think that any father would want to believe it wasn’t his daughter who’d been murdered and set on fire,” Tommy said, his voice soft. “And I think the mind can trick us into seeing what we want to see.”
“I know what I saw. I know it wasn’t Stacy.”
“What do you want from us?” Janine stood in the doorway, a cup of coffee in each hand. “Haven’t we been through enough?”
“I don’t want to cause you any suffering, Mrs. Conklin. I just thought maybe something remained in Stacy’s room that had a strand of her hair. That way we could know for sure that it wasn’t her.”
A gurgled sob came from Janine’s throat as she turned and retreated into the kitchen.
Mickey stood up. “Look, there’s nothing left in Stacy’s room. It’s our office now. We threw away anything of hers years ago. I th
ink you’d better leave now.”
Tommy and Cannon stood and walked to the front door. “I know this is unpleasant. But if it is Stacy, wouldn’t you want her killer found? Wouldn’t you want him put away?”
“No,” Mickey said. “I just want our nightmare to be over.”
CHAPTER
10
It had been three days since Dani flew to Indiana and she already missed home. How could Jonah possibly handle being away from his family for four weeks when she’d been away from him and Doug only a few days and yet even now felt the tugging of an addict going through withdrawal? She’d forgotten about the teenage urge for independence that she’d felt herself when she became a mother, the one left at home to worry about the dangers lurking in the shadows. As a child, she’d thought she was indestructible. No harm could befall her, no illness could overtake her, no risk was too great. How sad that everyone learned, as they grew up, that they were as vulnerable as the neighbor hit by a car or the grandparent who succumbed to a lingering illness or the friend’s parent who underwent chemotherapy for breast cancer and then died anyway. There were times when she longed for that dreamy ignorance, that certitude that she would live forever, that nothing could sabotage her happiness. No wonder she wished to protect Jonah from growing up too fast and learning that nothing was certain. A chance happening, be it illness, accident, a careless decision, or an extra chromosome, could change one’s life forever.
Despite her longing for home, Dani felt tingly with excitement—today they’d sit down with George Calhoun for the first time. She didn’t know what to expect. There was nothing ambiguous in Bob Wilson’s assessment of George. Yet something was missing, something unexplained that only George could answer. Whether he would provide the answer was still unknown.
She met Melanie and Tommy for breakfast in the hotel lobby. Again she poured herself a cup of coffee, picked out a plump blueberry muffin, and settled into the plastic chair at a table in the corner.