Face of Betrayal (12 page)

He ran his hand from left to right over the series of photographs—a baby sucking its thumb in the womb, a swaddled newborn, a toddler with a teddy bear—that ended with a six-year-old with blonde pigtails and a gap-toothed grin.
Could she be any more perfect?

“This shows the development taking place that led to Ellie here.” He tapped her photograph, then trailed his fingers back to the clump of cells. “If you destroy her here, you don’t get Ellie here.” Fingers back to tap on the smiling girl. “That’s key. If they had destroyed Ellie and used her cells for research, then this little girl wouldn’t be alive today. And Ellie knows how important that is. That’s why she drew this.”

Katie stepped up to take the first poster as he removed it, revealing the second poster, a series of a child’s drawings.

Fairview knew that he could be pontificating about unsubstantiated claims of imminent scientific breakthroughs from embryonic stem cell research or rattling on about how adult stem cells or even skin cells had actually been shown to be useful in a variety of cases.
But who would listen to that?
he thought.
Show them a kid. A real live kid. How could they vote to kill a little girl with pigtails and a Band-Aid on her knee?

He pointed at the circle on the far left, filled with a scrawled happy smile. “Ellie drew this to show herself when she was adopted as a frozen embryo. She is what they call a snowflake. The couple that adopted Ellie had infertility problems. They could not conceive, so they adopted her as an embryo. She was implanted, and now we’ve got Ellie, and she’s already quite the artist.

“She drew these three pictures for me. As the Bible says, out of the mouths of babes comes great wisdom. In this first picture, Ellie is smiling because she got adopted and she got a chance to continue living her life. In the middle is another frozen embryo.” He pointed at a circle that showed not a smile, but a straight line for the mouth. “He’s sad because he’s still sitting in a frozen state. And this one on the end?”

This circle was frowning, with huge tears drawn running down the page.

“As Ellie told me, this one is saying, ‘Are you really going to kill me?’

“You see, Ellie knows that this is not just a clump of tissue. This is not just a random group of cells. This is not a hair follicle. This is Ellie. And if nurtured, she grows into this beautiful child who is in our gallery today with her mother and father.”

People craned their necks to see. The cameras pivoted. Ellie waved, just as Fairview had asked her to.

“These boys and girls are not spare parts. We absolutely can’t use federal money to kill children like Ellie.”

As the gallery burst into applause, Fairview dipped his head in acknowledgment.
Today Fox News, tomorrow YouTube. And in the future?
Inside, he smiled.

NORTHWEST PORTLAND

December 22

A
s she drove back to the office after having briefed the Converses on the total lack of progress in the hunt for their daughter, Nic’s cell phone started to buzz on her hip. She gritted her teeth. Her phone rang all the time now. It was starting to feel like a leash she could never be free of.

She lifted it to eye level. The display read
LEIF LARSON
. Why would he be calling her? She thought of how they had bantered in between answering hotline calls. Something about Leif slipped past her guard.

Flipping open her phone, she said, “Nicole Hedges,” sounding efficient and professional. Sounding like she hadn’t been wondering about Leif at all.

With no preamble, Leif said, “It’s Leif. Meet me over at Twenty-seventh and Vaughn. We’ve got a twenty-two-year-old guy, Michael Cray, no priors, but his stepsister is saying that on the night Katie disappeared he came home with a swollen eye and what looked like scratch marks on his chest and hands. She also says there’s dirt on the floor of the family basement—like someone’s been digging. I’m bringing in some of the ERT until we know exactly what we’ve got.”

Leif was the team leader for the FBI’s Evidence Recovery Team.

“I’m on my way,” Nic said.

Taking the next exit, she went right back on the freeway, doubling back the way she had come. The address was only a few blocks from where the Converses lived—and where Katie had disappeared. Mentally, she began to rehearse how she might break the news to the Converses that their daughter had been found buried in a basement.

There were a half dozen police cars parked in front of the old yellow Victorian house. On the lawn, a young woman with spiky yellow hair hugged herself, a cigarette in one hand. She wasn’t wearing a coat, despite the cold—just jeans, a T-shirt, and a brown cardigan sweater.

As Nic got out of the car, she heard the girl say to a cop who was writing down her words, “After I heard about Katie disappearing, I thought back to how he looked that night. And that was the nail in the coffin for me. That’s all it took. I knew then and there what he’d done.” She took a deep breath. “Because that’s the kind of person he is, see? The kind of person who would do something like that.”

Her bright blue eyes met Nic’s for an instant, but they were blank, unseeing, as if what they saw existed in some other time, some other place.

Nic flashed her badge at the cop guarding the front door. Inside, another cop gestured toward the kitchen, where an open door led to the stairs to the basement. But even before she set foot on them, she could hear people cursing downstairs. When she rounded the corner of the banister, the first person she saw was Leif. His face was twisted with disgust.

“Another waste of time. How could she think Katie was buried down here? You know what we’ve got? A concrete floor. Concrete! And as old as the house. Hundred-year-old concrete that hasn’t been touched.”

“What about the dirt?” Nic asked. “Didn’t she say there was dirt, like someone had been digging?”

“It’s potting soil! There’s even a stack of empty plastic pots in the corner. Man, I knew they would come out of the woodwork when the Converses upped the ante to a half million. I just didn’t think it would happen so fast.”

“They’ve raised the reward?” This was the first Nic had heard of it.

“Yeah, they told that blonde reporter on Channel Four about it this morning. Five hundred thousand dollars if she’s found alive. They got some of the dad’s business friends to kick in, and took out a second mortgage on their house. You can imagine what that’s going to do to the volume of tips. I just didn’t know some girl would rat out her own brother just for cash.”

“It’s her stepbrother,” Nic corrected. Thinking of the distance in the girl’s gaze, she added, “And maybe she had her reasons. Maybe she really thought it was true. Maybe she knows her stepbrother is capable of doing bad things.”

She turned on her heel and went back up the stairs, leaving a startled Leif gaping after her. The girl was sitting on the porch now, her head in her hands. As Nic walked past, she squeezed her shoulder.

Later that day, the task force released a statement. “All indications are that Michael Cray received those injuries at a time well before Katie Converse’s disappearance.”

MARK O. HATFIELD UNITED STATES COURTHOUSE

December 23

T
he two grand juries met for two days on alternate weeks in a large room located on the third floor of the federal courthouse. This particular group, twenty-three private citizens from all over Oregon who received a whopping forty dollars a day from Uncle Sam, had already worked through eleven of the eighteen months they would ultimately serve together. Over the past year Allison had watched them become friends and comrades, celebrating birthdays, handing around photos of pets and babies, swapping paperbacks. At breaks they gathered in the kitchen to share snacks and make tea and coffee.

As she hurried into the grand jury room, Allison’s nose was assailed with the smell of greasy leftover pizza. Swallowing her queasiness, she put her things on the prosecutor’s table and turned toward the grand jurors’ expectant faces. The group never knew what they might be asked to investigate—domestic terrorism by extreme environmentalists, hate crimes against a local synagogue, men using the Internet to meet teenagers for sex. By now they had heard over a hundred cases.

The grand jury was Allison’s—and any prosecutor’s—investigative arm. Even when they weren’t in session, in their name Allison could issue a search warrant or a subpoena compelling a witness to testify before them.

“Good morning,” Allison said. “Today I’m going to bring you a case about a missing girl. We want to find out if there was foul play. The girl’s name is Katie Converse.”

As she spoke, she held up the poster of Katie and saw several nods of recognition. Grand jurors weren’t banned from watching the media, which meant they often had a passing familiarity with any headline cases she brought them. But now that they knew they would be considering the case, they would have to stay away from any fresh news about it. And no matter how high-profile the case, they were sworn to keep secret what went on inside the grand jury room.

While a grand jury might consider dozens of cases over the course of a year, they never saw a single one through until the end. Instead, they served only to investigate various criminal cases and formally indict any suspects. In some cases, they voted not to indict. Because they weren’t asked to determine guilt or innocence, only decide whether charges should be officially filed, their standards were looser than those of a trial jury. And the grand jury didn’t even need to be unanimous: only eighteen of the twenty-three needed to agree.

“I’d like to call to the stand FBI Special Agent Nicole Hedges.”

After being brought in from the anteroom and sworn in by the court reporter, Nicole explained to the grand jurors who Katie was, how the page program worked, and what steps authorities had already taken in their efforts to find the girl.

“We recovered a computer that belonged to Katie,” Nicole said, “and found that Katie had been keeping a blog, which is like an online diary. In the blog, Katie talked about a boy from either the House or Senate page program, but that relationship ended several months before her disappearance. She seemed to be having a tumultuous relationship with someone, but we don’t know who. As time went on, she talked more and more about someone she called Senator X. Senator Fairview was Katie’s sponsor in the page program. We believe that there is a good chance that he is actually Senator X.”

“Do you have any questions for Special Agent Hedges?” Allison asked the jurors. She liked to hear what regular people wanted to ask. If there had been foul play—and she prayed that there hadn’t—then the grand jurors’ questions could help shape Allison’s approach to any future trial. And sometimes the jurors even thought of angles she had missed.

The foreman, a retired hardware store owner, was the first to speak. Allison knew she could always count on Gus Leonard to ask questions. Lots and lots of questions.

“What’s this girl’s family like?” He tilted his head to the side, looking like a curious old bird regarding a hole that might or might not contain a worm. “Any chance one of them could be involved in this?”

“The dad is a well-known contractor,” Nicole told him. “The mom does volunteer work. There’s also a younger sister. They are beside them-selves with grief.”

Gus and a few of the other jurors asked a half dozen more questions. Once they had satisfied their curiosity, Allison excused Nicole and stood to address them again. “There is a chance that Katie may still be alive, but we have so few clues to go on. Given Katie’s blogs, I’m asking you to issue a trap and trace on Senator Fairview’s phones to see if there is any evidence of a relationship between them.”

Unlike a wiretap, which recorded the contents of a conversation, a trap and trace was merely a record of calls made and received. The trap and trace on Katie’s phone had turned up little that was suspicious. In fact, it had hardly turned up anything at all. And that in itself had raised Allison’s suspicions. A girl that age would be on the phone all the time. Maybe Fairview had called her in her dorm room.

“Are you saying Senator Fairview is a suspect?” a grand juror named Helen asked.

“No. He’s a person of interest.”

Ever since the Atlanta Olympics bombing debacle, when Richard Jewell had been declared a suspect and turned out to be a hero, law enforcement had shied away from calling anyone a suspect until they were certain.

Allison let her gaze sweep the room, taking a few seconds to look each juror in the eye. “But if the trap and trace comes back with a lot of activity that seems out of line when you consider that he’s a senator and Katie’s just a kid in high school, then yes. At that point, I will consider Senator Fairview a suspect.”

LAW OFFICES OF STONE, HUTCHENS, AND LANGFORD

December 23

M
ichael Stone always made it a practice to meet potential clients in his own office, where he was clearly the top dog. No matter who the clients were, no matter how rich or how powerful, he always made them wait at least twenty minutes in the reception area.

He made no exception for Senator Fairview. When his secretary ushered Fairview in, Stone apologized effusively for making him wait.

“I was on a conference call with a client. I can’t mention the name, but you might have seen him on the front page of the
New York Times
last week.”

In reality, Stone had spent the twenty minutes instant messaging his kids to remind them to do their homework, as well as making arrangements for a fourth for golf on Saturday morning.

“Let me just say, Senator, that I feel honored to be chosen as the attorney for someone I have always admired.”

As he spoke, he could see the tension ease from Fairview’s shoulders. Stone took a seat behind his desk while his client settled into one of the guest chairs. Stone’s chair was six inches higher than anyone else’s—a little ploy he had learned from Johnny Cochran.

He sat back in his chair, smiling congenially. “So, Senator, were you making it with this girl or what?”

“What?” Fairview looked too shocked to be angry.