The Truth About Love (15 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Y
ou two sure make a nice-looking couple,” Terri said once Gina got back into her apartment and carried the pie plates into the kitchen.

She spun to look at her mom. “Me and Landon?” No way could Terri know how much time she spent thinking about him. “You’re the one who invited him to dinner.”

“It’s not a problem between the two of you?” Her mom scraped some leftover crust into the trash can. “The man you’re trying to get out of prison?”

“It’s not like we’re dating or anything. For God’s sake, I’m pretty much the enemy.” She didn’t want to be, but that’s what it felt like most of the time.

“He wore your pants home the other morning.” A hint of crimson crept up her mom’s neck as she nodded toward the sweatpants Landon had apparently brought with him tonight. “That’s how you treat your enemies?”

Gina’s eyes widened. Her own mother—the woman who’d stammered through “the talk”—assumed they were sleeping together? All they’d had were a couple of fantastic kisses. Sure, she’d thought about more—his hands gliding over her body, his lips exploring her collarbone, her breasts. The hard parts of his body touching the soft parts of hers. The scent of him as she held him close, her hands greedily caressing those rounded shoulders. That strong neck. That gorgeous stomach.

But each time she thought about that, reality set in—that she’d thrust his life into shambles. He’d gone from certainty about his testimony to uncertainty. From a sad but predictable relationship with his father to practically accusing the guy of murder. And Gina was in the middle of it all. “We’re not dating. Or . . . that.” She followed her mom’s lead, referring to sex in vague, delicate terms. “Not now. Probably not ever.”

Terri gave her a knowing smile. “I’ve seen the way he looks at you.”

“With hatred and contempt?”

“He couldn’t keep his eyes off you during dinner.”

Gina shook her head. “He doesn’t want to date me.” As hard as it was to admit, his retreat the other night had convinced her of it. “He wants my help with his mom’s murder case, but that’s all.”

“You never know.” Her mom wiped the kitchen counter. “If it was meant to be, it will happen between the two of you. Your father and I . . . had an obstacle when we first met. He was engaged to marry someone else.” The crimson rose again on her neck.

“Really?” Gina tried to imagine a younger version of her mom stealing a guy from another girl.

“I knew the minute I saw him in economics class that he was going to be someone special in my life.” Her mom got a dreamy look on her face. “Did you ever get that feeling?”

Gina thought about the way the crime scene photos had haunted her. The way her own eyes had been drawn to Landon’s haunting gaze, despite everything else going on in the pictures around him. “Yeah,” she said. “I think I have.”

“Then something will happen between you.”

“That’s what you said with Christopher.”

“He never looked at you the way Landon does.” Her mother folded the dish towel and placed it on the counter.

“You only met him once.” Granted, it was two weeks before Gina had caught him sleeping with another girl, but she’d never told her mother that. It was just too embarrassing.

“You give it time.” Her mom patted her hand. “I think something will happen between the two of you.”

“I’m only in Tallahassee for a couple more weeks.”

And that’s when it hit her. In two short weeks, she wouldn’t see him again.

As quickly as he’d entered her life, he’d be gone from it.

And nothing in law school had prepared her for that.

Gina sat at her desk at Morgan’s Ladder and tapped the down arrow on her keyboard, moving from one e-mail to another. She should be working, but couldn’t concentrate on anything. She’d stayed up late with her parents last night, trying to enjoy their company before they left this morning. But she’d had a hard time thinking about anything except the Barbara Landon case. Any day now, they’d have the results of the DNA—Landon’s, Cyrus’s, and from the crime scene. A sudden noise, a spilled cup of coffee, an angry word might send her into a nervous breakdown, whatever that looked like. Maybe she was already there. Or at least at the tipping point.

And to make matters worse, Suzanne had been in her office for fifteen minutes on the phone. With the door shut.

And Suzanne rarely shut her door.

Finally, her boss opened her office door and called Gina inside.

Gina took a deep breath as she took in Suzanne’s drained, pale expression. She sank into the chair across from Suzanne’s desk. She w
anted to scream
at her boss to speak, to blurt out whatever
she’d found out from the lab. But Gina’s sudden nausea told her she didn’t want to know the a
nswer. Her eyes darted aro
und the room, looking for a trash can. She was going to need it if her belly didn’t stop rumbling.

Finally, Suzanne spoke. “They don’t know if Cyrus is the killer or not.”

A cold chill swept down Gina’s body, like an elevator plummeting down its shaft. “What?” This was the day they were supposed to get answers, not more questions. The day that was supposed to clear everything up.

“The DNA from the crime scene is too deteriorated. The results were inconclusive.”

Gina closed her eyes and swallowed, willing herself not to throw up. This wasn’t an answer she’d even contemplated. What did it mean? For Cyrus, it meant more prison time. For Landon, it meant no answers. This was the worst possible scenario. It didn’t help anyone.

She opened her eyes. “So they’ll never be able to use it? They’ll never be able to compare it to anyone else’s DNA? It will never tell them who the real killer was?”

Suzanne shook her head. “Not with the current technology.”

“So we accomplished nothing.” The second the words escaped her mouth, she wished she could take them back. The look on Suzanne’s face must mirror her own—disbelief, sorrow, defeat. She would never want her boss to think she thought badly of her. “I . . . I didn’t mean we didn’t try. I meant that . . .”

Suzanne held her hand up to interrupt her. “It’s disappointing.”

“Yes.” Disappointing. A huge understatement. “So what do we do now?”

“We continue to look for other evidence. Eventually, we decide if it’s worth pursuing.”

Gina’s head whipped up. “We would drop the case?” Panic surged through her body. She’d expected a conclusion, but now it felt like she’d been thrown into a tumultuous ocean of doubt.

And she was quickly drowning.

They couldn’t just give up on Cyrus.

They couldn’t give up on Landon.

“We’ve got limited resources,” Suzanne said. “We’ll eventually have to weigh whether or not it makes sense to keep this one going if we’re never going to find any exculpatory evidence. There are too many others out there who need our help.” She stood.

“But we’re his only hope.” Gina wasn’t sure if she was talking about Cyrus or Landon.

“I’m as committed to this case as you are, but there are dozens of prisoners who want our services. People we might be able to help.”

“Unlike Cyrus” was the implication. But Gina would have to worry about this another day, once she’d had a chance to think everything through. “I need to go talk to Landon.”

Any other day, she’d be concerned with what her boss thought about her relationship with him, but today transcended that. This news had so many implications. She needed to be with him.

“Take the rest of the day off.” She motioned toward the door. “Go help him get through this.”

Gina moved to her desk and turned off her computer, but it felt like someone else was in control of her body. She knew what she had to do, but the news was so overwhelming that nothing beyond rote motion was possible for her.

As her computer powered down, she remembered that she had forgotten to turn on her out-of-office message, but what did it really matter? It all seemed futile now. Yes, she felt this way because of the blow she’d just taken, but if justice couldn’t be served—if an innocent man really was in prison—then the back-and-forth e-mails with attorneys and crime labs—the minutia of every day seemed so . . . trivial. So unnecessary. So unimportant.

As she pulled her phone from her pocket to call Landon, it struck her that his was the only number from one of her cases that she stored in her personal cell phone. Yes, she’d met him before she knew he was part of one of her cases, but his involvement in her life transcended the case.

She sat back in her chair as the phone dialed his number. If Morgan’s Ladder ever did drop the case, would he still be a part of her life? She didn’t want to think about that possibility.

Landon’s voice on the phone interrupted her thoughts. “Hey,” he said, sounding rushed and harried.

“You busy?”

He scoffed. “You don’t even know.”

“I need to talk to you.”

“Can it wait ’til tonight?”

“I think this is something you’ll want to know.”

He hesitated. “About . . . you know?”

She was pretty sure he hadn’t told anyone at work about the DNA tests, so she understood his not wanting to say the words in an open workspace. “Yes.”

The silence on the other end of the phone told her that, he, too, knew this was important information. A game-changer.

A
life
-changer.

Finally, he spoke. “Tell me where to meet you.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

L
andon glanced toward the entrance of the park. Again. He couldn’t stand still. Not with everything at stake. Not with his entire life about to change. He pushed himself off the side of his truck and paced to the other side of the parking lot. He checked the time on his cell phone. Twenty minutes since Gina had called him to say she had the results of the DNA testing.

Where the hell was she?

He should have made her tell him right then and there, over the phone. No, he wouldn’t have wanted to get the news in the office—not with the open workspaces that offered no privacy. Not with all those people around. He wasn’t sure how he’d react, depending on what the news ended up being.

If Cyrus was guilty, he’d feel a huge sense of relief. The right man had been in prison the entire time and Landon’s eyewitness testimony had helped put him there. That would be the best outcome. To know his mom’s murder had been vindicated all those years ago. But if the DNA showed that Cyrus didn’t do it . . .

That was the outcome Landon dreaded. That the wrong man had been in prison all those years.

Or, worse yet—if Landon’s own DNA closely matched the DNA on his mother’s clothes. He closed his eyes as the possibility flooded his mind. The same one that had kept him awake the last several nights—that the DNA could show a close relative of his had committed the murder.

And everything in his life would change.

He opened his eyes and kicked a rock beneath his feet. It ricocheted off the tire of his truck and slammed against the curb. If his dad was guilty, then he’d lose him. Not that he’d ever really had him. But the pain, the hatred, the feelings of not belonging would be immediately surrounded by a hard outer shell that would likely never go away.

You killed my mother, you son of a bitch.

He could see himself looking his old man in the face, his own eyes filled with contempt, telling him once and for all he was finished with him.

But then what would he say to Cyrus? How do you apologize to a man who’d spent fifteen years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit? A man you helped convict? Could Cyrus file a civil suit against him? And was that what Landon deserved after putting an innocent guy in jail?

The crunching of tires on gravel came up over the ridge as Gina’s SUV turned onto the road and into the park. He stood, waiting for her to pull up beside him and get out. Glad this was one of the days he’d been able to wear a golf shirt to work, since the Tallahassee heat bore down on him. He wiped his hand across his forehead and rubbed the sweat off on the pants fabric at his hip.

“So?” he said the second she got out of the car.

She motioned to a picnic table under a live oak. “Let’s go over in the shade.”

“Can you just tell me?” But she’d already taken off, striding in front of him toward the tree. He followed, his eagerness to hear her news rising with each step he took. He wanted to grab her shoulder, twirl her around, and demand that she tell him the results of the test.

She reached the picnic table, brushed her hand across the end of it, and sat down, facing him. One sandal-covered foot rested on the seat below her. Somehow he knew he’d remember that toenail polish for the rest of his life. Dark red. Like the blood on the floor of the country store. That color would always haunt him.

“So what’d you find out?” He paced in front of her, unable to rein in his nervous energy.

“It’s . . . not what we expected.”

He stopped midstride and spun to study her face. “What does that mean?”

“The DNA is too deteriorated.” He hated that goddamn look of pity on her face. “They can’t use it.”

“Mine? I’ll give them another sample.”

She shook her head. “Not yours. The DNA on your mom’s clothes. They can’t use it.”

The tremor in his jaw seemed like a harbinger of things to come. “What do you mean, they can’t use it? It’ll never be able to tell us who did it?”

“That’s what the lab said.”

The tremor spread to his shoulders, which now shook so much he was sure Gina could see it. “But the science. You just don’t understand the science.”

She reached for his hand and held it. “Suzanne got the head of the lab on the phone to make sure he agreed. He’d already verified it. He explained everything to her.”

Landon sank onto the bench of the picnic table next to Gina’s foot. His entire body trembled.

“Suzanne’s seen this a couple of times before.” She wrapped her arms around his shoulders. “Where the DNA is inconclusive. I wish . . . I wish I had known it was a possibility. I would have at least told you this could happen. So you might . . . be prepared.”

Landon couldn’t respond. He just shook. His world was upended, yet again. The oppressive heat intertwined with Gina’s news, and he knew what purgatory must be like. It was as if he’d done something to deserve this. To be forever condemned to the madness created by this confluence of events.

“I wish I had something different to tell you.” Gina rubbed his back with the palm of her hand. “I didn’t want you to be in the office when you got the news.”

“So what happens to Cyrus Alexander?” His words were barely a whisper, but it was all the energy he could muster. His throat was so dry he could barely swallow.

“He was convicted of the crime. The DNA didn’t exonerate him . . .”

Her voice trailed off. She didn’t have to say it. He knew. Cyrus Alexander would stay in prison. Landon hoped to God the right guy was sitting in that cell.

He sat back against the table, his shoulders resting on Gina’s leg. The connection with her comforted him. She ran a hand through his curls, just like Mama had done when he was little. Did she know what she was doing? How significant the gesture was on today of all days?

“What can I do to help you?” she said as her fingers wove through his hair again.

“Nothing.” He didn’t want her to know how much the gesture shook him.

“Why don’t you come over tonight? I don’t want you to be alone.”

He shook his head.

“Dinner. A couple of beers. We can talk about anything you want to talk about. Or nothing at all.”

He ignored her invitation. He took a deep breath and his chest shuddered involuntarily. “Are you going back to work?” he asked. He wasn’t facing her, but somehow he felt closer to her than he’d felt to anyone in a long time. Maybe in his entire life.

“No.” The word was unsteady.

So the news had jarred her, too. Probably not as much as it had him, but he heard the pain in her voice and knew that she, too, needed some time alone. He turned to face her. “Does it ever get any easier?”

Tears glistened in her eyes. “I’m not sure. It hasn’t yet.”

He rested his arm on the table, running it the length of her thigh. His fingertips brushed the fabric of her pants near her butt. Any other time, it would have seemed too familiar, too intimate. But now, it was comforting.

“That really wasn’t the answer I was looking for,” he said. Maybe someday he’d ask her the details about the guy she’d sent to prison, but not now. Not today. Maybe not ever. All he knew was that he couldn’t talk about any of it today.

“If you do get some answers,” she said, “be sure to let me know.” She brushed a hair from her face. “Because I sure as hell don’t have any, either.”

He wasn’t sure if she was talking about Cyrus Alexander or the guy she sent to prison. Hell, she might have been talking about how she felt about Landon himself. Regardless, he knew how she felt. Because he didn’t have any answers, either.

All he had was confusion. And frustration.

And emptiness.