Injustice (36 page)

DETECTIVE BAUER:
Yes.

MS. BRILL:
Isn't it also true that Daryl Devaney, in his confession, was able to accurately describe what Kyle Runion was wearing that day: camouflage pants and a T-shirt that said
EVERGLADES
?

DETECTIVE BAUER:
Yes.

MS. BRILL:
I have a copy of that confession here, Detective. It has two signatures on it. One purports to be Daryl Devaney's, the other purports to be yours as witness.

Monica shows the document to Bauer. He concedes that he signed as witness and that he did in fact witness Daryl signing the confession.

MS. BRILL:
Were you called to testify at Daryl Devaney's trial?

DETECTIVE BAUER:
No.

MS. BRILL:
Why's that?

DETECTIVE BAUER:
There wasn't a trial. He pled guilty.

MS. BRILL:
And do you know the sentence he pled to?

DETECTIVE BAUER:
But that was before the DNA.

MS. BRILL:
DNA? Do you want to talk about DNA? Did you find DNA at the scene?

DETECTIVE BAUER:
No. We—

MS. BRILL:
And are you a scientist? Do you have training in DNA analysis?

DETECTIVE BAUER:
No, but I know that—

MS. BRILL:
And was DNA testing available seven years ago when Kyle's body was discovered?

DETECTIVE BAUER:
Yes. But—

MS. BRILL:
But you never searched for DNA evidence because you had your perpetrator?

DETECTIVE BAUER:
Well, we thought—

MS. BRILL:
And he confessed?

DETECTIVE BAUER:
Well, yeah, but—

MS. BRILL:
But what?

DETECTIVE BAUER:
I don't know.

Bauer stares at his hands. He is taking a beating. What he isn't saying—what he can't say—is that he and the other cops knew from the start that Daryl Devaney was trouble. They
knew
he was the one. In the torturous days and weeks after Kyle disappeared, they worked with the grief-stricken family. They made promises; they let the parents think progress was being made when it was stalled; they sat in the Runions' living room, holding the mother's hand and pretending not to notice as the father sobbed in the next room; they kept the pictures of Kyle on their bulletin boards at the station. Their lives became all about Kyle Runion and his family. They came to love the Runions in that paternalistic way you can love someone who is so thoroughly and helplessly at your mercy, as doctors might love patients, lawyers love clients, owners love pets. Bauer and the other investigators probably went home at night to their own children and felt physically ill at the knowledge that horrors like this were afoot in their own town, and it was only a roll of the dice that made this about the Runions instead of the Bauers. Sometimes they wished they'd never gone into police work. All the while, they knew with a cop's sense of knowing that the weird kid, the troublemaker, the continuously inappropriate, surly, angry, hormone-ravaged Daryl Devaney was just beyond reach. They knew he wasn't bright. He was a special-ed kid. So how dare he outsmart them on this? How dare he keep the Runions and everybody else in town waiting for the arrest, the conviction, the closure? Bauer and the other cops watched Daryl Devaney going about his life, not giving a shit about Kyle's parents or anybody else, feeling superior and believing he could get away with anything. But they knew he'd screw up eventually. He'd screw up, and when he did, Detective Bauer and the others would be there.

When Kyle's body was found, they swooped. They took Daryl in, held him, grilled him, threatened him, threatened his sister, pretended to have evidence they didn't have, and used every trick
in their arsenal. They fed him information without his even realizing it. Maybe they didn't realize it themselves: the camouflage pants; the Everglades shirt; the contents of Kyle's backpack. Maybe they mentioned particulars of Kyle's anatomy. They didn't let him sleep, didn't let him rest. They did the good cop/bad cop routine. And though he had only borderline intelligence, maybe he'd watched enough cop shows or understood his Miranda rights well enough to ask for a lawyer. These were experienced cops, so maybe they saw it coming and were able to shut off the video before the request actually crossed his lips. Or maybe he never did ask. Or maybe he did ask, but that part of the video got erased.

Years have passed. I have no doubt that on the long night of Daryl Devaney's interrogation, Bauer and his colleagues believed in what they were doing. On one side they had a bereaved family, and on the other they had a perverted, murderous half-wit without enough sense to know when the game was up. Bauer and the others probably thought of themselves as janitors of a sort. Tears had been shed, blood had been spilled. Now it all needed cleaning up. Some stains just take more scrubbing.

But Detective Bauer can't say any of this in court. Bauer knows DNA doesn't lie. And as a retired detective, he has probably read articles and exposés about false confessions. Maybe he understands now that poor Daryl was so confused and panicky and exhausted and desperate and in need of a kind word that he finally said whatever the detectives wanted him to say just to please them and get them to stop yelling at him and let him sleep and, yes, maybe get them to like him. To love him. Maybe Detective Bauer understands now that the boy he thought was a smug and calculating killer was really just a terrified child.

Detective Bauer is in a no-win situation. He has to either stand by Daryl's conviction or renounce it. If he stands by the conviction—if he professes his continuing belief in Daryl Devaney's guilt—he could be helping the real killer, Henry Tatlock, get away with it. But if he renounces Daryl's conviction, he is admitting to his part in forcing a confession from this developmentally delayed
teenager who had no lawyer and little understanding of what was happening to him.

MS. BRILL:
Detective, where is Daryl Devaney today?

DETECTIVE BAUER:
I think Fullerton State Pen.

MS. BRILL:
Doing life without parole?

DETECTIVE BAUER:
Yes.

MS. BRILL:
For the murder, kidnapping, and sexual assault of young Kyle Runion?

DETECTIVE BAUER:
Yes.

MS. BRILL:
Detective Bauer, when you took Daryl Devaney's confession, were you absolutely convinced of his guilt?

Bauer doesn't look at Monica or at anybody else. He stares at his hands. He doesn't look big and burly anymore. He looks haunted. His voice is barely audible. He bends toward the microphone like an old man. In answer to Monica's question, he says that yes, he had been absolutely convinced of Daryl's guilt.

Monica is too good a lawyer to ask the next question: whether Bauer still believes that Daryl was guilty. She ends her questioning. It was a good show. She got Bauer to confirm that he believed Daryl was the actual perp, and she got to hammer home the fact that Daryl confessed and pleaded guilty to the crimes that Henry is charged with. I'm impressed with her. She is earning her paycheck, after all. But she'll need a lot more than this to trump the DNA evidence against Henry.

Gregory Nations tries to smooth over some of the doubt Monica might have created.

On the way out of court, Monica hands me a document. I have been subpoenaed to appear as a witness for the defense the next day of trial.

U
pton and I meet in his office to talk about Subsurface and the Jimmy Mailing murder. It's around six in the evening. Most everybody has gone home. I bring beer. Ties are loosened, collars unbuttoned. We have two boxes of files.

“Where shall we start?” Upton says.

I open two beers and hand him one. “I've been otherwise involved,” I say. “You take the lead, brother, show me what you've got.”

“Well . . .” He takes a long drink of his beer. “What I've got is a question.”

“Fire away.”

“None of my business, really,” he says.

He drinks.

I drink.

“What's the deal with you and Tina?”

I embark on a halting monologue about what seems to be going on between Tina and me, but I repeatedly interject a disclaimer that I know only what I know, which might be fundamentally different from what Tina knows. And what either of us thinks we know might have little in common with what is real and true if, in fact, there are such things as reality and truth.

“Reality and truth,” Upton says. “Aren't you and I, as ass-kicking federal prosecutors, the guardians of reality and truth?”

“I don't know,” I say. “Maybe we're just practitioners of illusion and deception. Besides, marital relationships and criminal law aren't exactly interchangeable.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Beg to differ,” he says.

“Go ahead,” I say. “Differ.”

“Here's my thinking. What really matters in both crime and love is intention. Am I right?”

“No.”

“Like if you could see into someone's heart, would we need trials? Would we even have lovers' squabbles?”

“Yes.”

“No,” he says, “but since we don't have that window, that crystal ball, we confuse actions with intentions. We forget that they're not the same thing. We assume actions are always evidence of intentions. We make it all about actions, right?”

“Wrong.”

What Upton and I are doing here, blurting out half-baked philosophies of love and law, is an unconscious attempt to start a chain reaction—priming the pump for an effusion of insightful and heartfelt observations. But no effusion ensues. The observations become increasingly sophomoric.

Upton goes to piss. When he comes back, he says, “Are you going to save it?”

“Save what?”

“Your marriage. Relationship?”

“Don't know.”

“Do you want to?”

I pretend to be thinking it over, but what I'm really doing is steeling my composure. I grab two more beers and open them. My thoughts flit between Tina and DNA. Farquar said that only a small percentage of those mind-boggling strands have any genetic meaning; the rest is just filler. And of the tiny percentage that
do
have relevance, we're interested in only two molecules, the base pairs, which form the connecting rungs of the double helix. He said the laboratory process of electrophoresis is essentially clearing out all the junk to get at these base pairs and reveal the source's true identity.

So maybe what Upton and I are doing here, having beers while we talk about love and crime, is like electrophoresis—hoping to clear away the junk so that something real can emerge. I'd like to explain
this burst of insight to Upton, but it feels too complicated for me to hold in my head as we talk.

“Do you?” he asks again. “Do you want to save it?”

“My marriage? Of course.”

“Wasn't sure.”

“What do you mean you weren't sure? What should I do? Should I cry like a little girl?”

“Please don't.”

Upton looks deep in thought. I'm deep in thought. I'm rummaging through the conversation, both what has been said and what remains in my head. I want to find a meaningful nucleotide strand, but it all looks like junk to me. A meaningful strand would be any shred of an idea that might bring Tina back.

I leave Upton's office for the men's room. When I return, I lift a handful of files from my box and plop them on his desk.

“Subsurface,” he says.

“Jimmy Mailing,” I say.

“A bubble chart,” he says. He walks over to his whiteboard, which is mounted on a flimsy aluminum tripod.

“Bubble chart?” I say. “What the hell is a bubble chart?”

Upton bumps against the tripod, and it tips over. He rights it. “It's about relationships,” he says.

“I really think I'm done talking about my marriage. I want to do some work.”

“Yes, yes. Relationships between facts: evidence; events.” He writes on his board “Mailing murdered” and draws a circle around it. Then he writes the names of the legislators we're investigating or prosecuting for taking bribes: O'Leary, Thomas, Alvarez, and a few others. He draws smaller circles around these. He writes “Calvin Dunbar” and circles it.

“No,” I say, “Dunbar jumped ship. Copped to everything. He's with us.”

Upton erases Dunbar but writes it in small letters way off to the side, then puts a little circle around it.

“Stubborn,” I say.

He chuckles. “I'm the bubble master,” he says, “you can't argue with me.”

I say, “Accounting of Billman and Subsurface shows five point two million missing.”

Upton writes “5.2 Mil” near the center of the board and puts a big circle around it.