Injustice (8 page)

H
enry and I drove back to the office. I didn't believe for a second he was up to something nefarious. I could see him being stupidly innocent—hiring a scumbag without bothering to think it through—but not intentionally criminal, and definitely not complicit in any violence.

“And notice there was no talk of motive,” I said when we'd ridden too long without speaking. “It's just that you didn't have anybody to vouch for your whereabouts. That's what caught their attention. They poked around, found the Pursley thing. But they'll figure out pretty quick they're fishing a dry hole. And trust me; those two are homicide dicks: As soon as they decide you're clean on the shooting, they'll drop the Pursley bullshit. But we will still need to brief Pleasant.”

Pleasant Holly. Our boss.
The
U.S. attorney. Whether it was innocent or not, she needed to know that an assistant U.S. attorney had gotten entangled with a guy like Pursley.

“There goes my career,” Henry said.

“It'll work out, Henry. Trust me.”

I had worried about Henry imploding after the murder. He never struck me as a conqueror; he seemed vulnerable, even fragile. It was one of the things I liked about him. But he
was
surviving. He was depressed—who wouldn't be?—but he kept coming in to the office and did his job well enough not to get sent home. Maybe I had underestimated him.

Now I was concerned all over again. Because if a guy loses his fiancée and then his career, he might be left wondering who he is and what he's got left to live for.

Next morning at the Bureau, Upton and I sat in on the questioning of a guy named Calvin Dunbar. He was a former legislator who wanted to turn himself in on corruption and bribery violations. Chip was there, along with a DOJ lawyer from the public integrity section.

Dunbar showed up with his wife and his lawyer. It was perplexing. We were investigating a number of legislators for taking bribes from Subsurface, but Dunbar wasn't one of them. He'd simply called the Bureau one day and confessed.

We talked to Dunbar in the conference room. “I lost my soul,” he said.

“Can you be more explicit?” I asked.

His wife held his hand, gazing at him as though he were taking the oath of president.

“I profited from the public trust. I took money for influencing legislation.”

“Why are you coming forward?”

“I've been tormented,” he said. “I'm not making excuses, but I was in desperate financial straits. They don't pay legislators squat. You know that, right? And the cost of campaigns; and it's a full-time job; more than full-time. And I put so much time into it that my insurance business—that's what I do, I have a brokerage—was in trouble, and I'd let my clients down, and like I say, I lost my way. The money was offered, and I took it. I mean, I'd have voted how I voted regardless; I think I would have, but I let my state down; I let my wife down”—he turned to look at her—“and I let myself down.”

“Yes, Mr. Dunbar,” Chip said, “but—”

“You have this corruption probe under way,” Dunbar said, “and I see all these legislators I served with getting subpoenaed, getting called in, and at first I was terrified, certain I'd be next. It ate me up. I couldn't sleep, could barely eat. Then one day my phone rings and I realized I
wanted
it to be you guys. I wanted to stop being afraid,
and I wanted to . . . I don't know, I wanted to confess. I'd become someone I loathed.”

Calvin Dunbar wept. Then he tried to collect himself, and he gazed into his wife's clear eyes. “Whatever you do to me,” he said, “it will be better than what I'm doing to myself. The night after I called you guys last week, I actually slept for the first time in forever. I mean, I'd actually thought of taking my life. And other things: It wasn't just the money from Subsurface. It's like, when you're a legislator, everybody loves you. You feel powerful. Like the rules don't apply to you. Everybody wants something, and they're willing to pay. Money, sure. But women, too. Young girls, even. I've seen it. I can name names. And I proved myself weak. I mean not the underage ones”—he looked at his wife, his eyes pulpy, his words coming out staccato—“never the underage ones. I've confessed everything to Kelly. She's heard all this. She's forgiven me.”

Their hands were knit together. Kelly was small and pretty, young, with wavy blond hair. She wore a red Scandinavian vest over a white shirt, unbuttoned at the neck. On the open market, she'd be gone in a second. I wondered about Tina: If I were this transgressor, would Tina . . . ?

“I'll go to jail,” he said. “I almost want to go to jail. I'll name names, tell everything I know. Not that I know much: They were clever, Subsurface was. It was all very subtle, you know? Hard to pin down.”

All this came out with intermittent tears. The rest of us waited for him to finish before starting in with questions.

I had no idea whether Tina would stick by me in similar circumstances. Things were out of kilter between the two of us. It had been worse since her lumpectomy and worse yet in the wake of Lydia's death. I knew that, with everything going on, I needed to pay more attention to her and to be more present. I wanted to leave the interview that very moment, to drive to Tina's office and wrap her up in my arms with a promise of enduring love and commitment.
Save that thought,
I told myself.

Calvin's lawyer finally laid a hand on his shoulder. “Enough for
now, Cal,” he said. He handed around some papers. The top sheet was a bank statement showing a deposit of forty-five hundred dollars. The next two were the same.

“In good faith,” the lawyer said, “Mr. Dunbar is offering this confirmation. Three years running, he received forty-five hundred dollars from someone he believes was with Subsurface Resources, Inc. And yes, we do assume that restitution will be part of whatever agreement we make here.”

N
othing happened in Lydia's murder case for several weeks. Presumably the troopers were still investigating the Aaron Pursley matter, and I assumed they had brought Pursley himself in for questioning. But if they found anything, they didn't tell us about it. Pleasant Holly returned to town. She'd been in D.C. for a nationwide meeting of U.S. attorneys. Henry and I briefed her.

Lizzy, it turned out, liked my idea about having Ethan bike along with her when she ran. They were living in Turner with Flora, biking and running every day. Ethan was starting back at the university in a couple of weeks. Lizzy was taking a gap year. She'd had big ideas about traveling and volunteering on distant continents, but with a new boyfriend, and now with Lydia's murder, she didn't seem in any hurry to leave.

Tina and Henry were both holding their own.

And me: Several mornings a week, I went to the pistol range for twenty minutes before work; a few evenings a week, I'd take ZZ to Rokeby Park, where I recorded license plate numbers in the parking lot and kept an eye out for suspicious characters. Between times I was immersed in the Subsurface matter. It was an exciting case, a big case. The grand jury was cranking out subpoenas and indictments. They had just subpoenaed Bud Billman, the CEO of Subsurface Resources, Inc.—our main target, the quarry, the trophy that we all wanted stuffed and hanging on the wall. We had also subpoenaed Jimmy Mailing, the Subsurface “fixer” who had been acquitted of burgling the EPA offices.

I often took work home. Tina and I shared an office on the third floor of our house. We each had a desk. Hers looked out the front window. The house is on a hillside, and she could see the sprawling
city across the river and the rooftops of the Aponak and, slightly to the west, Rokeby mill buildings. Her desk is always tidy and clear. She keeps on the desk only what she is working on at the moment. My desk is different. I have two, actually, one pushed endwise against the wall and the second at right angles abutting the outside end of the first. It creates a cul-de-sac, a harbor where I have everything close at hand. Tina calls it my cockpit. “Are you planning to be in your cockpit all evening, or are you going running?”

It's nice when we're both working there in the evening. Barnaby is in bed a floor below; ZZ is snoozing on the rug and occasionally thumping his tail as he chases bunnies in his sleep. We like to work with the overhead light off, just our desk lamps creating two commingling spheres. I'll often watch Tina when she's at her desk, her back toward me. Sometimes, in the reflection from her window, she sees me watching her, and several times this unplanned game of peekaboo has ended in the bedroom. But not so much anymore.

I was in our office one evening a week after Henry was questioned about Aaron Pursley. Tina put Barn to bed, then came upstairs with her briefcase.

“I had a habeas petition denied today,” she said.

“Which case?”

“Devaney.”

“Grounds?”

“Exhaustion. The judge says we still have a remedy in state court.”

“Do you?”

“Yes and no. The DA keeps coming up with procedural obstacles, so we tried going to federal.”

“What obstacles?”

“Chain of custody, statute of limitations, harmless error, absence of a constitutional error. You name it. It's been going on for years. The guy languishes in prison, and the state won't let us test for DNA.”

“So you're not even sure if there is DNA?”

“No, state says it's irrelevant because the guy confessed.”

We continued talking in this legal shorthand. Tina works for the
Innocence Project. Actually, she
is
the innocence project here. It's a one-lawyer office, the only one in this part of the country. She's poorly paid and overworked. The Innocence Project takes cases in which justice has been subverted and an innocent person has been convicted. It's hard work, Sisyphean work. She is always pushing a boulder up the hill, always having it roll back down over her. The justice system doesn't treat kindly continued claims of innocence once the jury has ruled and appeals have all been exhausted.

I worry about her. She cares too much. New cases stack up and old ones go on for years and years. “Do you want to come on a field trip?” she said. “I'm going to talk to a witness. It's out near the reservoir.”

“When?”

“Whenever you can. No hurry. The interview will be short. Just a drive in the country.”

“Sure, babe.”

Tina's cell phone rang. She looked at it and squinted. Then she answered, sounding perplexed, and listened for a few seconds before smiling. It was a cautious smile. “Craig,” she said, “it's been a few years.”

The world is full of people named Craig, but I could tell from the strange combination of familiarity and wariness in her voice that this was her ex-husband. Tina crossed her legs, shifted in her chair, brushed hair from her eyes. “Oh, you heard,” she said. “Yes. It's been horrible. And we'd gotten so close again these past couple of years.” Her voice cracked. Tears started down her cheeks for the millionth time since the murder. Then she laughed sadly. “I remember that. Lydia always liked you. She used to say, if I ever cut you loose . . .”

Tina laughed again, stood up, and made her way out of the room. “He's fine,” I heard her say as she disappeared down the stairs. “Growing like a weed.”

I waited in the office for about twenty minutes. When she didn't come back, I changed clothes and went down to the kitchen, where she was still on the phone. “Running,” I said to her. She waved but didn't look up. I took ZZ and left for the park.

Saturday morning. I made pancakes in various shapes. I made a dog for Barnaby, but it looked like a pig. He started eating the head. Tina was still upstairs. I tried pouring batter in the shape of a heart for when she came down.

“Make a giraffe,” Barn said. His plate was empty already, and ZZ was licking something up off the floor.