Dina Santorelli (35 page)

"Then
what are you saying?"

"I'm
saying that it was... unexpectedly... nice."

"All
right," Phillip said. "So you had a conversation with a man in an art gallery,
and you liked it." He smiled. "Katherine, that's okay."

"But
that's not all."

"It's
not?" Phillip's smile faded.

"A
few days later, he called the switchboard and asked for me and left his number.
I called him back from my cell phone, and we talked a bit. Although I wasn't
doing anything wrong, I knew it was wrong. It
felt
wrong. He asked if
I'd like to meet him for lunch. Apparently, there was another gallery opening
somewhere."

"What
did you say?"

"I
told him no."

"Did
you want to go?" Phillip fumbled with the phone in his hands.

Katherine
shook her head.

"But
you liked him?"

Katherine
shrugged her shoulders. "I think I liked the attention." She crouched down in
front of her husband. "You know, most men are afraid of me... I can't imagine
why."

Phillip
laughed.

"I
love you, Phillip. I just need you to know that. You do know that, don't you?"

Phillip
nodded. "Yes, and I've loved you from the moment you stormed into my life." He
kissed his wife on the mouth. "Maybe it's my fault. Since Charlotte came..."

"It
doesn't matter," she said. Under normal circumstances, Phillip volunteering to
shoulder the blame for another person's indiscretions would infuriate
Katherine, but this time, when those indiscretions had been her own, she felt
comforted and protected. "As long as we can get past this."

"I
think so." He smiled. "Baby steps."

There
was a loud cheer from the crowd outside, a collection of diverse faces lit up
by the line of street lamps along Eagle Street.

"Looks
like the power's back on," Phillip said.

"There's
actually something else I have to tell you..."

"Katherine..."

"I
mean, no, this is something different entirely. But come with me downstairs."
Katherine held his face in her hands and ran her thumbs over his graying
eyebrows. "You've been up here all night and haven't eaten a thing." She
smiled. "I found a box of Oreos hidden in the pantry. You can dunk while I
talk."

"I
will." Phillip looked at his watch: 11:30 p.m. "But just give me a few minutes
first."

"Okay,"
she said. "I'll wait for you in the kitchen."

As
Katherine went downstairs, Phillip hurried to his private office across the
hall and shut the door.
Just stay the execution
, Phillip told himself.
Don't
give a reason. Just do it, and worry about the rest later.
He dialed the Stanton death house.

"Hello,
this is Governor Grand," he said into the telephone, just as his cell phone
vibrated in his pants pocket.

The appeals process in the
United States was not only expensive, but time-consuming. The procedure took so
long that nearly a quarter of deaths on death row in the United States occurred from natural causes. Gino remembered when triple-murderer Joe Stock
had arrived on death row at Stanton in the late 1980s, far earlier than Gino
had; Stock awaited execution for more than twenty years—He finally died of
heart failure at age ninety-four.

Gino
stood shackled before the execution chamber, four Department of Corrections
officers, including Hank, around him. Three years earlier, New York had
implemented lethal injection as its primary method of execution after
protestors sought to rid the state of its electric chair, citing "cruel and
unusual punishment." Gino was surprised to learn there were still states, like Utah and Oklahoma, which, not very long ago, used firing squads as their form of execution.
Although lethal injection was now the primary method, inmates who were
sentenced to death in those states before the new law was enacted had the
option of dying at the hand of a row of gun-toting do-gooders.
Now there was
a way to go
, Gino thought.

Like
virtually all capital punishment states, New York used three drugs in its
lethal injection executions: sodium thiopental, a fast-acting sedative; pancuronium
bromide, which caused paralysis; and potassium chloride, which caused cardiac
arrest. When it was reported recently that the lone US manufacturer of sodium
thiopental had decided to halt production—and the European company asked to
step in as supplier would not sell the drug to the US if it was to be used in
executions—Gino thought perhaps the firing-squad option would be on the table.
But that smarty-pants Phillip Grand, in anticipation of a possible shortage,
had stockpiled sodium thiopental and apparently had enough to carry New York State's capital-punishment program into the next decade, maintaining lethal
injection as the quickest, cleanest method of ridding the world of its
undesirables; the whole process was said to take less than ten minutes.

For
the last twenty-four hours, security had been so tight that Gino couldn't piss
without an audience, making him feel like some inadvertent performer, and he
longed for the virtual solitude of his six-by-six death-row cell. Gino knew
that Grand, even with his daughter in jeopardy, would wait until the very last
minute to make a decision—the governor was a master of debating issues not only
in the courtroom but in his own mind, and Gino had no doubt that the phone call
would come in the execution room.

The
officers led Gino to a sterile gurney in the center of the small room, where a
thick, heavy curtain had been drawn across a panel of four long windows, behind
which were seated, Gino assumed, the witnesses—an assortment of people that
most likely included family members, his and his victims'; law-enforcement
officials; and curiosity freaks who just signed up to watch this sort of thing.
Inside the room, in addition to the prison staff and his assigned priest, there
were several people he didn't recognize, and Gino wondered who among them was the
civilian executioner whose name Bailino had been unable to determine.
You
don't know how lucky you are, buddy
, he thought to himself.

"Lie
back, please," the prison warden said.

Gino
complied, and the guards began fastening the thick leather straps to his body.
The guards moved in step, and as they circled the gurney to check one another's
work, he caught the eye of Hank, who nodded. They swabbed his arms with alcohol
and inserted two IVs, one in each arm. Gino knew only one was needed; the other
was a backup—no reason to let an air bubble hold up an execution. He found it
humorous that such precautions against infection were being taken while putting
a man to death, although the routine was probably done more to protect the
prison personnel. When the guards were done, there was an annoying squeak as
the curtain was opened, revealing rows of solemn faces, both men and women,
sitting on tiered seats as if at the opera. Gino scanned the crowd and thought
he recognized a few individuals from the trials, but was thankful that Leo and
ToniAnne had stayed away.

The
warden stepped forward. "Gino Cataldi, you have been sentenced to death by
lethal injection. Do you have any last words?" he asked.

As
if on cue, the red phone—direct line to the governor of New York—rang.

A
man, who had been standing next to the red phone for the very purpose of
answering it, looked for a moment as if he didn't know what to do. He picked up
the receiver.

"Yes,
Governor," he said and listened. His eyebrows furrowed.

A
smile crept over Gino Cataldi, as he thought of how they'd write about him in
the history books—the first stay of execution of Republican governor Phillip
Grand's tenure. He thought of Grand's tea-party constituents going nuts,
considering all the time and taxpayers' money he'd spent to put Gino there, and
of the conflicted man on the other side of the telephone who had to choose
between the death of a man he detested and the death of the daughter he loved.

The
man hung up the phone and took a step forward.

"The
governor said he sees no reason for this execution to not take place as
planned," he said and returned to his place next to the red phone.

The
men in the room looked at one another. The phone call had created an odd twist
to an otherwise routine procedure and had caused mild confusion among the
usually unflustered prison personnel. But they continued as if nothing had
occurred.

The
warden repeated: "Any last words, Mr. Cataldi? ... Mr. Cataldi?"

The
tautness of the leather straps tore into his wrists and ankles. The room lost
its air. Gino looked through the thick windows of the execution room and, for
the first time, wished he could see a familiar face on the other side of the
glass.

"Gino?"
the warden asked again. Then, with a slight nod, he stepped away from the
gurney.

"Son
of a bitch," Gino muttered to himself as the first plunger, filled with sodium thiopental,
fell.

"Where are you?" Phillip
asked, dialing Detective Nurberg on his other line.

"We
are on our way to the police station," Reynaldo said into Rosalia's phone,
which he'd found at the bottom of her pocketbook underneath Miss Beatrice. "Phillip
Grand's private line" was listed fourth on her contact list.

"No!"
Phillip shouted into the phone. The governor stood up, his face red. "I don't
know if that's the safest course of action. That's what he'd expect."

"Who?"
Reynaldo asked.

"I'm
dialing Detective Nurberg. He'll tell us what to do. Stay on the line, please.
Is my daughter all right?"

"She
seems fine. Jamie has her."

"Who
has her?"

"She's
okay," Reynaldo stressed, looking over at Jamie, whose eyes were glued on him.
"Please, governor, the police station is only a few miles away. We need to know
if you want us to go in another direction."

"Hold
on, it's ringing, but no one is answering. Damn, the call went to voice mail."
Phillip ended the call and redialed. The ringing was distorted, and Phillip
stood closer to the window, hoping that would give him better reception. The
phone rang and rang on the other end, and just as Phillip feared he'd get voice
mail again, the ringing stopped.

"Hello?
Hello?" Phillip said into the phone, but he couldn't hear anything. "Nurberg?
Can you hear me? If you can hear me, my daughter is safe and in a red Escort on
its way to the police station on... hold on..."

Phillip
spoke into his cell phone. "Reynaldo, where are you? ... Going south? Okay,
hold on..." He switched back to the cordless and gave the car's location.
"Should I have them keep going? ... Hello? Nurberg?" The line was dead. He
picked up his cell phone.

"Reynaldo,
I lost Nurberg... Reynaldo?"

But
the cell-phone screen showed that the call had ended.

"Hello? Hello?" Reynaldo
yelled into the phone.

"What
happened?" Jamie asked, adjusting the seat belt across Charlotte's chest.

"I
don't know. Reception's still iffy. Might have hit a dead zone." He put the
phone down on the console between them.

"What
did the governor say? Can we go to the station?"

"I
don't know. He didn't get a chance to say."

"Shouldn't
we call him back?"

Reynaldo
was looking into the rearview mirror, scrutinizing it in a way that looked as
if it were a riddle that needed unraveling.

"What's
the matter?" Jamie asked.

"I
think somebody's following us."

The
words floated to Jamie as if in slow motion, their meaning coating her in a
thick blanket of alarm. She held Charlotte tighter to keep her own body from
shaking and turned around slightly to peek behind them. "I don't see anyone,"
she said.

"The
headlights are off."

Jamie
watched Reynaldo's eyes jump from the mirror to the road and back to the
mirror. "What kind of car is it?" she asked.

"I
don't know. It's hard to tell."

She
took a breath. "Is it a Ford Flex? A truck? Is it white?"

Reynaldo
looked into the mirror and then at Jamie. "Yes, it might be."

Jamie's
eyes grew wide, and that was all the confirmation Reynaldo needed. He slammed
his foot onto the accelerator, the wheels sliding on the slippery pavement, but
within seconds the Ford Flex was right behind them, crossing the double yellow
line and coming up on the left-hand side.

"Go
faster!" Jamie yelled. "Please!"

"Hold
on," Reynaldo said, jamming on the brakes and forcing the Escort into a vicious
skid. The Ford Flex also came to a screeching halt, but not before Reynaldo was
able to turn left onto an unpaved side road. An avid bike rider, Reynaldo knew
these streets, most of them not even found on maps of the area, like the back
of his hand, but it didn't take long for the white truck to recover and follow
behind.

The
narrow lane rocked the Escort, which was no match for its jagged, rocky
terrain, over which the Ford Flex seemed to glide with ease, coming steadily
toward them. Reynaldo glanced at Jamie who, despite the hard bounce of the car,
had Charlotte tucked under her arms, her legs planted on the dashboard, her
head bent down so that her hair fell around the little girl as if it were a
protective seal.

Up
ahead, the Albany County Bridge came into view behind the racing trees, and
Reynaldo made a quick right onto an even narrower bike path hoping to use the smallness
of his car as an advantage against the goliath following behind. Branches
slapped and scraped against the windows as Reynaldo careened through the
thicket of trees, jumping from one path to another, hoping to slow down the
truck or perhaps force it into a ravine, but the Ford Flex seemed undeterred,
following like a hungry predator intent on reaching its prey, the beams of its
headlights framing the Escort's every move. Reynaldo made a hard left, turning
toward the paved road once again, and sputtered his way around a short
guardrail and up onto the wide street. He started for the bridge just as the
Ford Flex crashed through the rails behind him, its brakes screeching with
anger.