Injustice (25 page)

Better.

But now it's too cold, so I throw more wood into the stove.

Better.

But now it's too hot. I damper the stove and crack a window.

Better.

But it's a little dark, so I open the curtain.

I call Tina. “What are you and Barn doing today?”

“Birthday party for a little girl from day care. Remember I told you? It's at the pool. Cake, ice cream, and lots of little bodies running around in water wings.”

“Sounds great. Maybe tomorrow I'll—”

“Oh, crap,” she says, “gotta run. I'll call you back.”

I try working again, but after about twenty minutes, I scoop everything into my briefcase, shut down the stove, get in my car, and leave.

I arrive in the city around four in the afternoon. It's a ridiculous notion, but I drive over to the rec center, where the pool room reverberates with the ecstatic din of children who are deep into a sugar high. The event room is filled with ten-year-old girls. The kiddie pool is full, but I don't recognize a single face among either the kids or the parental horde lining the edges. The party I'm looking for has been over for hours.

It's getting dark. I stop on my way “home” and pick up a pizza to go, then drive to Friendly City Executive Suites (Day, Week, Month).

I call Sabin. We haven't spoken since before Henry's arrest. I want to know whether they've gotten any traction at all—any real evidence—connecting Henry to Lydia's murder.

“How about coffee?” I ask.

“Do you one better,” she said. “How about a walk? We'll go to Rokeby, linger at the site, see if the wind and trees will whisper their secrets to us.”

We meet at the amphitheater parking. She has a brown bakery bag. I stopped over at “Tina's” house to get ZZ. The sign says to keep dogs on a leash, but ZZ is obedient, and as long as you bag the poop, nobody seems to care. It is cold out. Yesterday's puddles are today's ice slicks. ZZ, zooming around happily, tries switching directions at the wrong moment and goes down on the ice, sliding across with four paws in the air. We both laugh.

“I want to get another dog,” Sabin says.

“You used to have one?”

“Always did. But now, you know, work and everything.”

“I know.”

We find the site of Lydia's murder and linger there.

“Are the trees whispering?” I ask.

“Not to me. Are they to you?”

“You're the detective.”

We continue down the path and stop at the bench where I hung out sometimes in the weeks after the murder. Sabin hands me a chunk of coffee cake.

“Have there been any developments?” I ask.

“No, Henry was careful. I don't think we could convict him of Lydia's murder without the Kyle Runion thing. But now Lydia is just icing. You knew we searched his house again, right?”

“Find anything?”

She shook her head. “We hoped to find a memento.”

“Memento?”

“Of Kyle Runion. You know, pervs and psychopaths sometimes keep something of the victim's.”

“Maybe Lydia found the memento. Maybe that's how she figured it all out,” I said.

“That's what we think. She took the memento, he chased her down, killed her. Took the memento back, whatever it was, and got rid of it.”

“It all fits,” I say. ZZ is barking at a squirrel on a branch. “ZZ, shut up.”

“Now it makes more sense that Lydia was stepping out,” Sabin says.

“How do you mean?”

“Her affair: It fits the profile,” she says. “Guys like Henry, lots of times they have a girlfriend or wife for cover, but it's never sexual. So Lydia Trevor was finding comfort someplace else.”

“I didn't think of that. You're right. It all starts to make sense,” I say.

“And the other thing,” Sabin says, “a lot of them were bullied as kids. Socially isolated.”

“I think that fits him. It seems to, from what I know.”

“Everything fits,” she says. “You still can't think of who she might have been having the affair with?”

I consider this in the context of our new information. It doesn't have to be someone she was in love with, just somebody who could fulfill that need of physical intimacy. Nobody comes to mind.

We get up from the bench and start walking back. Sabin has gloves on but no hat. She is wearing a waist-length jacket, looking more like a skier than a detective. When we reach one of the frozen puddles, she takes my arm. When we're back on solid pavement, she doesn't let go.

“Do you have a first name?” I ask.

She laughs. “Rachel. But Sabin works just fine.”

In the afternoon Lizzy comes to my office to talk about the gas tax legislation that caused the Subsurface scandal. “I'm a little stuck,” she says.

“How's that?”

She hands me her notes. “I've learned all the easy stuff about who sponsored the legislation, who supported it, who opposed. How everyone voted. It's all public record. Easy breezy.”

“Well, that's all I was looking for, Liz.”

“No, it's not,” she says.

“It's not?”

“No. You want to know the backroom stuff.”

“Not really; I mean, sure, if you hear anything, I'd love to know, but I'm not asking for that. That's the Bureau's job. I just want to make sure I understand the basic who, what, and where of this legislation.”

She gives me the look of a long-suffering daughter. “Boring,” she says. “I could have had that to you in one afternoon. It's all right here.” She waves her sheaf of notes at me. “But let me keep going. It's interesting.”

“Sounds like maybe politics is your calling.”

“Oh, please!” she says in a voice of exaggerated revulsion. She sits here in my office looking happy and confident. It bothered me at first when she bagged her plans to go traveling. I worried she'd mope and let a year pass without anything to show for it. But now she seems to be in gear again. She is planning to fly off someplace within the next month or two, though she hasn't settled on a destination. And she says she intends to start college a year from January.

“How's it going with Ethan?” I ask.

“I thought this was a business meeting.” She laughs.

“You're right,” I say. “So let's get dinner later? We can dish then.”

“It's a date. Now back to business?”

On a slip of notepaper, I write a name and phone number. “Call this guy. He'll be the best source to start with if you really want to go deep into the sausage factory.”

“Sausage factory?”

“The old saying: The two things you never want to see being made are laws and sausages.”

“Calvin Dunbar,” she says, looking at the note. “Isn't he one of the legislators who got charged in the whole mess?”

“He is. But he's remorseful—turned himself in. We've become friendly. Just tell him you're my daughter.”

Lizzy pockets the note and gets up to leave. I walk her out. Upton's office door is open. “Hi, Upton,” she says.

“Hi, Lizzy. Come say hi to Cicely.”

Lizzy goes into the office. Cicely is busy at something on her desk. “Hey there, Sis,” Lizzy says. The girls have known each other for years, though they were never friends.

“Are you in college yet, Lizzy?” Cicely asks.

“Not yet. Next year, maybe.”

“Me, neither,” Cicely says. “Maybe next year for me, too. Right, Dad?”

“We'll see, sweetie.”

“Do you have a boyfriend yet?” Cicely asks.

“Yes. Do you?”

“No. Maybe next year.” She laughs.

Lizzy hugs her good-bye, and we leave. I walk Liz out to her car.

N
ot long after she got back from hiding, Tina petitioned the court for a trial in the Daryl Devaney case. Usually, when you find undiscovered evidence like the DNA implicating Henry and vindicating Daryl, you ask for a
new
trial. But since Daryl confessed and pleaded guilty, there was never a trial in the first place.

The morning of the hearing is déjà vu. The hallway fills again with Kyle Runion's family and friends, all of them still seeking justice for his memory. But there aren't as many spectators as last time, and the ones who do show up are less sure what to think. At the first hearing, they were quietly outraged at the idea of Tina manipulating the system to get Daryl Devaney out of prison on some technicality. But today I see uncertainty in their faces, and I hear it in their voices. They don't want to go through it all again. They
want
to be convinced of Daryl Devaney's guilt; they
want
to go to bed tonight convinced that he is justifiably rotting in prison. Kyle's parents, neighbors, aunts, and uncles, they're all eager for Gregory Nations to tell them the DNA thing is a hoax.

Among the people waiting for the hearing is a familiar man. Not Arthur Cunningham—he's here too—but a fortyish guy who looks out of place. He has made an effort to dress appropriately, but he missed the mark. He wears khakis, clean running shoes, and a shirt that looks like he came from yoga class. His hair is shaggy, and he has an almost invisible blond goatee, more peach fuzz than whiskers. I can't place him.

We all enter the courtroom. Judge Matsuko comes in and announces the case: “. . . petition to reverse guilty plea . . . new evidence . . . DNA analysis . . .”

Tina stands. Again I see the tidy line of her hair across the back
of her dress. For a split second I puzzle over why I can't seem to remember her picking out that dress. Of course I can't: I don't live with her, I live at Friendly City.

I see Tina's hands on the lectern. (
Grab the lectern,
they told us in law school.
When you don't know what to do with your hands, grab the lectern.
) I slide over a few inches to get a better view of her left hand. I see she still wears her ring, but things feel different; she feels more
gone
than before. I suddenly realize who the guy outside the courtroom was. I turn in my seat and see him in the back row, far off to the side, trying to be invisible. It is Craig, Tina's first husband who lives on the West Coast. I recognize him from old photographs.

Tina gives her argument: “While DNA evidence is not always able to identify who
should
be considered a suspect, in many cases it can determine with absolute authority who is
not
among the population of possible perpetrators. In the Kyle Runion case, DNA testing has conclusively eliminated Daryl Devaney.”

She goes on to describe the DNA results in technical language: short tandem repeats; alleles; markers; tetranucleotide repeats. She goes into a bit too much detail but moves quickly and then summarizes with an aggressive conclusion: “All of which means there is a zero percent possibility that Daryl Devaney was the source of the DNA.”

“But, Ms. Trevor,” Judge Matsuko says, “not only did the defendant—or strike that, he's not a defendant, he's a convict—not only did he confess to this crime, he also pleaded guilty. And then he slept on his rights, he failed to make timely appeals, and the statute of limitations for the introduction of new evidence expired long ago. In your own brief, you cite no controlling statute allowing me to consider this evidence.”