After Dark (30 page)

Abbie stood up and unhooked her bra. Her breasts were full and high.

Her nipples were erect.

"Take off my panties," Abbie whispered. Her desire paralyzed Matthew.

How could a woman like Abbie want him? She read the confusion on his face and touched the tips of her fingers to his lips. Matthew began to shake. He had never felt such desire, had barely allowed himself to dream of it. Abbie's hand strayed to his penis and the fingers that had traced along his lips performed a different kind of magic. Then Abbie pushed him gently and he fell back onto the bed and into his dreams.

Matthew reached across the bed until he found Abbie's hand. As soon as his fingers touched hers, they entwined. They lay side by side without speaking. Matthew had never felt such peace. If this was all he could ever have out of this life, it would be enough, but he believed now that it was possible for him to have more than this single night with Abbie.

"If we win, will you go back to the district attorney's office?"

Matthew asked.

While Abbie thought about his question, Matthew stared at the ceiling.

With the lights off, the moonlight cast shadow patterns of the limbs of a giant elm on the white surface. The silhouette swayed gently in perfect rhythm with the calm pulse of Matthew's heart.

"It would be hard to go back, Matt. Jack and Dennis stood by me, but I don't know how I'd feel working there after being a defendant."

"Have you ever thought about defending cases?"

Abbie turned her head and studied Matthew.

"Why are you asking?"

Matthew kept his eyes on the ceiling. There was a tremor in his voice when he spoke.

"I love you, Abbie, and I respect you, more than you can imagine. You're an excellent lawyer. Together,' we would be the best."

Abbie realized what he was asking her. Matthew Reynolds had never had a partner and his law practice was his life. She squeezed his hand.

"You're already the best, Matthew."

"Will you consider what I've said?"

Abbie rolled over and stroked his cheek.

"Yes," she whispered. Then she kissed him softly, then harder, then harder still.

Tracy went directly from the courtroom to the Multnomah County law library and started researching the law governing the admissibility of prior-crime evidence. The words on the page were starting to blur when Tracy began reading State v. Zamora, an Oregon Supreme Court decision that discussed the prior-crime issue. For some reason the case sounded familiar, but she did not know why. It had been decided two years before she started clerking, so it wasn't a case she'd worked on, and she did not recall reading it before. Then the names of the cases on Laura's yellow legal pad flashed in her head and she recognized Zamora as one of them.

Tracy skimmed the case. The defendant had murdered a clerk and a customer in a convenience store in Portland. A 5-2 majority reversed the conviction because the trial judge admitted evidence of a prior, unconnected robbery in violation of the rule excluding evilence of prior crimes. Justice Lefcourt had written for the court with Justices Pope, Griffen, Kelly and Arriaga joining him. The public defender had handled Zamora's appeal.

Out of curiosity, Tracy pulled the volumes holding the other cases that Laura had listed on the sheet from the yellow legal pad that Tracy had found in Volume XI of the Deems transcript. State v. Cardona had originated in Medford, a small city in southern Oregon five hours' drive down I-5 from Portland. Tracy did not recognize the name of the attorney who argued the case. Justices Kelly, Griffen and Pope had joined in Justice Arriaga's majority opinion reversing Cardona's conviction for distributing cocaine.

Justices Lefcourt, Sherzer and Forbes had dissented.

The majority interpreted the search and seizure provisions of the Oregon constitution as forbidding the procedures the police had used when searching Cardona's apartment, even though the same procedures would not have violated the search and seizure provisions of the United States Constitution. There was nothing unusual about this. The United States Supreme Court had become increasingly conservative. Some state courts could not stomach its ideologically motivated opinions and had begun fashioning a jurisprudence based on interpretations of state constitutions that were frequently at odds with federal law.

In State v. Galarraga, Roseburg police stopped the defendant for speeding. After writing a ticket, they asked for permission to search Galarraga's car. According to the police, Galarraga consented to a search that revealed automatic weapons, money and cocaine. Justice Kelly reversed the conviction on the grounds that the search violated the provisions of the Oregon constitution.

Justices Arriaga, Pope and Griffen had joined in Justice Kelly's opinion. Bob Packard represented Galarraga.

Tracy skimmed the cases again, but could not see a connection between them, other than the fact that all three cases had been reversed. One was a murder case and two were drug cases.

They were from three different parts of the state. Two involved state constitutional law issues, but Zamora was reversed because of a violation of Oregon's evidence code. Different lawyers had represented the defendants.

The librarian told Tracy she was closing up. Tracy reshelved her books and drove to the office, where she dictated a memo on prior-crime evidence for Reynolds. She placed the cassette on his secretary's desk with a note asking her to type it first thing in the morning. Barry was cooking her dinner at his apartment. Tracy called to let him know she was on her way and turned out the lights.

Barry served her spaghetti with meat sauce, garlic bread and a salad, but all Tracy could do was peck at her food. Barry saw how exhausted she was and insisted that Tracy sleep at his place.

Tracy didn't argue. She staggered out of her clothes, collapsed on the bed and fell into a deep sleep as soon as her head hit the pillow. Soon she was lost in a dark forest. The trees were so high and the foliage so thick that only stray rays of sunlight were able to fight their way through the black-green canopy. In the distance, Tracy heard a muffled sound, strong and constant, like whispered conversation in another room.

The dark woods terrified her. She felt trapped and her breathing was labored. Tracy struggled toward the sound until she broke into a clearing and found herself on the shore of a river that raged and swirled downstream toward an unknown destination.

As often occurs in dreams, the landscape shifted. The trees were gone and the land around the river was flat and barren.

Someone called to her from the opposite shore. It was a man. She could not hear what he was saying because of the roar of the river. She strained to see him clearly, but his features were blurred by the reflected sunlight. To reach him, she would have to swim the river, and suddenly she was fighting a current that swept her downstream.

Tracy panicked. She sank below the surface, then bobbed up again. She was drowning, dying, when she splashed into a calm section of the river.

She gasped for air, still unable to swim to shore, but no longer in immediate danger. The current spun her toward the far shore, where the man miraculously appeared. He shouted to her, but the water roared in her ears, baffling the sound. Then she saw that he was holding something. She watched his arms fly upward. The object sailed toward her. Tracy reached up to catch it and saw a ball rotating slowly through the air. The minute the ball touched her hands, Tracy bolted upright in bed, jerked out of sleep by a truth that frightened her more than any nightmare she'd ever had.

The offices were dark except for the reception area, where the lights were kept on all night. Tracy let them in with her key and Barry punched in the alarm code.

"It's in here," Tracy said, leading Barry to the small room next to Matthew's office where they were keeping the defense evidence.

"I hope you're wrong about this," Barry said.

"I hope I am, too."

The evidence was arranged on a table. Tracy looked through it until she found the photographs and negatives in the FotoFast envelope. She set the negatives aside and shuffled through the photographs. There were shots of Abigail Griffen, pictures of the beach and the ocean, exteriors and interiors of the cabin and the photo of the shed Matthew had used on cross-examination to destroy Charlie Deems. Tracy checked the dates stamped on the negatives. Some of the early pictures on the roll had been taken in June, but the bulk of the negatives, including the photo of the shed, were dated August 12, the day Deems testified that he had met Abbie at the cabin and the day Abbie claimed she had been attacked.

Tracy studied the photograph of the shed. Barry looked over her shoulder. The photograph showed the interior of the shed.

Tracy could see the volleyball net, the tools and the space where a box of dynamite could have sat. In the middle of the space was the volleyball.

"I'm right," she said dispiritedly.

"Are you certain?"

"Yes. While you were looking around, I walked over to the edge of the bluff and sat on the stairs. On my way, I looked in the shed. The volleyball was resting on the volleyball net. You had the ball when you found me sitting on the stairs, and we played with it on the beach. On the way back to the car, you tossed the ball into the shed. I have a very clear mental picture of the ball coming to rest in the empty space.

"We were at the cabin in September, Barry. The ball was on the net when I opened the shed door. If the ball was in the empty space on August 12, how did it get onto the net? And how can the ball be in the exact position we left it in September in a photograph taken in August? The only answer is that this photograph was taken after we were at the cabin and it's been phonied up to look like it was taken in August. Only I don't know anything about photography, so { have no idea how it was done."

"Well, I know a lot about cameras. I have to on this job. Let me see the negatives and I'll try to figure this out."

The negatives were in cellophane slipcases. Each strip contained the negatives for four pictures. Tracy handed the stack of negative strips to Barry. He held up the strip with the picture of the shed to the light. All four negatives were dated August 12.

Barry sat down at the table and picked up the Pentax camera.

He turned it over and studied it. Then he looked at the strip of negatives again. Barry frowned. His brow furrowed. He examined the negative strips for all of the photographs. Then he laid down the strip with the negative of the shed and placed another strip directly above it. He studied the two strips, then he removed the strip without the picture of the shed and put another strip in its place. He repeated this with all of the negative strips. When he was done, Barry's shoulders sagged and he closed his eyes.

"What is it?" Tracy asked.

"You're right. The picture of the shed was not taken when the rest of these pictures were."

"How is that possible if the negative is dated August 12?"

"That's the easy part," Barry said, picking up the camera and pointing to a digital readout on the back. "The Pentax 105-R camera has a mechanism for setting the date that is similar to the mechanism you use to set the date on a VCR or a digital watch.

The person who took the picture simply reset the date to August 12, took the pictures he wanted, then reset the camera to the correct date."

"But there are pictures of Mrs. Griffen on the roll of film. The roll had to have ,been taken before she was confined to her house."

"It was. When FotoFast developed the film, it was in one strip.

Fotofast cut the strip of negatives into several strips, each with four shots on them. The strip with the shot of the shed was the only strip that was not taken on the date stamped on the negative."

"How do you know that?"

"When film is placed in a camera it's blank. It doesn't have any frames demurking where each photograph will be. The frames are formed when you take a picture. But each roll of film does have numbers imprinted on it that don't appear on the photograph but do show up on the negatives below the frames when a picture is taken. These numbers start at 1 and go 1, 1A, 2, 2A, and so on. You can see them here," Barry said, pointing out the numbers.

"These numbers are spaced along the bottom of the roll of film at a set distance from each other. The distance doesn't change, because the numbers are imprinted on the film when the film is produced.

"Whoever did this went to the coast after we were there. He had the negatives of the film Mrs. Griffen gave you. He took out one strip that would be in the natural sequence on the roll for the shot of the shed to appear. In this case it was the strip with the numbers 15 to 16A. Then he took photographs with the Pentax using the same brand of film Mrs. Griffen used. When he came to the shot that would be numbered 15, he copied the shot Mrs. Griffen had taken at that point on the strip. 15A is the fake shot of the shed. He took the shot showing the shed without any dynamite. Then he duplicated shots 16 and 16A, finished the roll, had it printed by the same FotoFast store that printed the roll Mrs. Griffen took and switched the single strip.

"Look at the strips," Barry said, holding up two he picked at random.

"Each row of film from the same company is manufactured like every other roll. If you take two rolls of film from the same company and lay them side by side, the numbers will line up. If you take a ruler and measure from the tip of one roll to 1A and from the tip of a second roll to 1A, the distance will be identical. But there's a little piece of film at the end of each roll of film called the leader that you place in the camera when you roll the film into it to get the film into a position where a shot can be taken. Every person does this differently. That means that the numbers will be in a different place in relation to the frames that are formed when each picture is taken on one roll than they will be on another person's roll."

Barry put down one of the strips he was holding and picked up the strip with the shot of the shed. Then he held one strip directly over the other.