False Convictions (12 page)

Sweat poured down Casey’s face and she breathed deep. When she reached the modest outlying homes on the fringe of the small
city, she saw a man with the hood of his sweatshirt pulled closed coming her way at a serious clip. She averted her eyes and
focused on the road in front of her. The other runner closed in fast and by the time Casey looked up again, he was nearly
on top of her. She felt a small jolt of fear in her core and pulled up sharp. As she did, she saw him pull up short, grin,
and tug at the string that held his hood close.

The hood flew back and there stood Robert Graham.

M
IND COMPANY?” Graham asked.

“Were you trying to run me over?” Casey said, frowning and setting off again, as though the intrusion were only a mild annoyance.

Graham laughed, shaking his head and falling in alongside her.

“My ex-wife used to tell me I had to grow up,” he said, “but when you act young, you stay young, and don’t we all want that?
Nice pace you’ve got. About a six-minute mile?”

“It used to be six-ten,” Casey said, huffing and wiping the sweat from her eyes with the back of her arm. “When did you get
into town?”

“Late,” Graham said, revealing nothing more than the smile on his unshaven face.

Casey nodded and said, “Because this whole thing is feeling like a game that I walked into the middle of.”

“Meaning what?” he asked, casting her a quizzical look.

“Things going on behind the scenes,” Casey said, dodging a cluster of trash cans someone had left near the end of their driveway.
“This whole thing has an odor.”

“We’re making people think,” Graham said. “Challenging a mind-set. You think most people really care about a black man from
the ghetto who got locked up two decades ago?”

Casey said, “Let’s talk about Jake Carlson.”

“I think that Sunday morning piece is going to come out real nice,” Graham said.

Casey kept up her pace, studying the profile of his face and the look of smug satisfaction she couldn’t decipher.

She let some road go by.

“Look,” Graham said, pointing up ahead at a decaying clapboard building on the corner by the next traffic light, “the place
where Hubbard ran into those hillbillies twenty years ago. Maybe Hubbard stops to tie his shoe, or one of those bastards decides
to take a leak before he leaves for the night. A million things that could have let him walk right by. Chance is a bitch,
isn’t it?”

They passed the old corner bar and its plastic sign, hung crooked above the door and advertising Pepsi and a new name. They
crested the hill and the walls and watchtowers of the prison appeared. A tide of human shadows ebbed and flowed in the early
morning light, guards changing shift.

“Jake,” Casey finally said.

“It went well.”

“He overheard you talking at your offices,” Casey said, puffing from the effort to speak and run. “Who’s Massimo?”

Graham grabbed her arm and stopped. He gave her a look of shock, finding her eyes with his. In the early light their dark
brown looked almost black and beetlelike.

“You’re spying on me?” he said.

Casey set her jaw and shook free from his grip. “I don’t want to dance around with you or anyone. Jake heard you talking about
taking care of someone—a her—like you should have before and ending some charade. What charade? Me? The Project?”

“No good deed goes unpunished, right?” Graham said, looking slightly hurt. “All I did was offer to give you a million dollars
a year for your clinic to get some help with another good cause.”

“So I work for you and that means I don’t get to think or ask questions?” Casey asked, the words sounding weak and confused.

Graham inhaled and pushed the air out through tight lips. “Do you know how unprofessional this is of Jake Carlson? Does he?
You don’t sneak around a man’s office listening to phone conversations when he’s welcomed you and agreed to do an interview.”

“You think I give a shit about Jake Carlson’s manners?” Casey asked.

“Don’t you think, as a lawyer,” Graham said, “that listening through a keyhole or behind a wall or whatever he was doing,
you could mix things up?”

“Of course,” Casey said, still keeping her chin high.

“So, he heard me talking with Massimo?” Graham asked.

“Apparently.”

“A ship,” Graham said, nodding.

“What ship?”

“That’s the
her
I should have taken care of,” Graham said, splaying his fingers and holding up his hands. “Do you see how ridiculous this
is, now?”

“I don’t see anything,” Casey said, her voice wavering.

Graham grimaced and shook his head, then turned and began walking away, down the hill. “The
Charade
is a ship anchored in Lake Erie.”

Casey followed him. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s full of machines from an assembly plant that got shut down in Michigan,” Graham said. “I told the city they can either
give me the tax breaks I want and pay for the environmental cleanup of this old mill or the equipment and all the jobs that
go with it can keep going to China, where the government has a
new
facility waiting if I want it. I’ve left the damn thing there for almost a year, thinking they’d be hungry for the deal.
It’s a publicity stunt to get the politicians off their asses, but I still don’t have a deal. I should have shipped her off
to Shanghai a long time ago, but I thought I’d try to save some American jobs.”

Casey walked with him and asked, “What about this Massimo?”

“Massimo D’Costa runs an environmental cleanup company,” Graham said. “He’s supposed to be making this whole deal happen and
if it does, he’s got about ten million in cleanup work. He’s supposed to be using his contacts to make the whole thing happen.
You see, now?”

“And you had to meet them yesterday?” Casey asked, her face flushed now from more than just the run.

“That was one of several meetings I had,” Graham said. “Evidently, the only one Carlson could hear about through the door,
or however he heard. Maybe he’s tapping my phones. I don’t know.”

Graham stopped again and touched her arm. “Was that—he didn’t follow me to the warehouse, did he?”

Casey felt her throat tighten.

Graham snorted in disgust, shaking his head.

Casey pressed her lips together and kept up with him, dodging the shift change and hustling between cars queued up to get
out of the guards’ parking lot. They crossed the bridge over the Owasco River, then the railroad tracks before passing Curly’s
Restaurant.

As they turned left onto the sidewalk that ran along Route 20 toward their hotel, Casey said, “I am
so
sorry. Do you know how stupid I feel?”

Graham reached down and gave her hand a small squeeze. “Forget it. He’s charmed a lot of other people, too. I’m sorry I haven’t
been as involved as I’d hoped.”

“I don’t know how much you’ve gotten from Ralph,” she said eagerly. “But I think by the end of the day I’ll have a swab sample
from the hospital here in town that will give us the DNA we need to set Dwayne Hubbard free.”

Graham took her hand again and stopped, looking intently at her. “He did tell me, and how good would that be?”

“I still feel stupid.” Casey said, letting her hand linger before removing it from his. “Can we just put that behind us?”

Graham smiled warmly, reached out with his other hand, and touched her shoulder. “For you? It’s already done.”

J
AKE AWOKE WITH a groan, not knowing where in the world he was. His mouth felt like dry dirt and the back of his collar was
sticky and damp. The pain in his head brought back the scene in the drainpipe, and he touched the oozing wound, removing a
red-stained finger as he sat up and fumbled with the bottle of Advil lying on the floor of his rented Cadillac. After gulping
down four tablets with the help of a warm bottle of water, Jake studied the narrow and crooked city home from across the weedy
park and its rusty chain-link fence.

The house belonged to a twenty-seven-year-old punk named Anthony Fabrizio, who owned a marijuana possession charge at eighteen
and a third-degree assault at the age of twenty-three. Fabrizio earned a modest income at a security company, too modest to
afford the G55 he kept parked in the detached garage behind the crooked house. Jake knew all this after a late-night phone
call to Don Wall. He had berated his friend for not coming up with the information on Massimo.

“I already got a job, you know,” Wall had said hotly. “And enough bosses for a dozen agents.”

Jake knew he hit a nerve, though, and because he came up with nothing on Massimo, Wall had agreed to run a quick check on
Fabrizio before going back to bed.

The G55 hadn’t shown up until just before three in the morning, when the enormous Fabrizio stopped in the street and got out
to piss on his neighbor’s trash before pulling behind the house. Even though Jake detected a wobble in Fabrizio’s gait and
suspected it would be some time before the young man got up for work, he hadn’t taken any chances, and so he spent his night
in the Cadillac’s backseat.

The car now smelled of Burger King. Jake looked around him, then slipped the bag of trash out onto the curb before climbing
over the seat to take up his position behind the wheel. He checked himself in the rearview mirror and realized he’d need to
change into one of the other shirts from the Marshall’s bag in the passenger seat before he returned to the BK around the
corner for a quick coffee and the bathroom. He winced as he pulled the shirt over his head but a silver flash caught his attention.

With only his head and one arm in the shirt, he fired up the Cadillac and took off after the G55, impressed with Anthony Fabrizio’s
work ethic. Fabrizio didn’t appear to be in a big hurry, though, and he proved it by stopping at a Spot Coffee on his way
through the city, giving Jake a chance to finish dressing. Coffee in hand, Fabrizio continued to an exclusive city street
out near Amherst where the homes sat well off the road, each boasting several acres and trees as thick as tractor tires. Jake
kept going past the yellow Spanish-style hacienda with its red clay tile roof and gaping wrought-iron gates, making note of
the street numbers for the next several houses so he could know the address Fabrizio had gone into.

“Twenty-seven fifty-five Middlesex,” Jake said aloud to himself, pulling over where he could keep an eye on Fabrizio coming
out.

Jake dug into his bag and started his computer, waiting patiently for the wireless card to give him Internet access. His headache
began to ease. He punched the address into the White Pages Reverse Directory and came up with two names: Iris and John Napoli.
Using Autotrak and a couple other services Jake subscribed to through the TV network, he dug into everything he could find
about the two Napolis but came up with nothing more than an old mortgage and a couple civil disputes from the past that looked
like home contractors up to their usual tricks. When he Googled John Napoli and Buffalo, he got 631,000 hits. He went through
the first three pages, mostly doctors and dentists named John Napoli, before he realized how common the name was and quit.

Frustrated, he dialed Don Wall again.

“What? Don’t you sleep?” Wall said, his voice raspy and broken.

“It’s after nine.”

“And you told me last night when we spoke at midnight that you were working the overnight shift like me.”

“Well, I did.”

“And you found what you were looking for,” Wall said, yawning. “So you need something else.”

Jake gave him the name, John Napoli, and the address, knowing the FBI had wells of information much deeper than anything to
be found on the Internet.

“And after you run that,” Jake said, “see if you can ask around and find me someone who knows about the organized crime scene
in western New York. An old-timer or something. There are about a million John Napolis and I need someone who can link the
one with that address and maybe some criminal activity.”

“Okay, when I get up I’ll get you the info and make a couple calls.”

“When you get up?”

“Jake,” Wall said wearily, “when I dole out the signed face shots to the relatives over the holidays, you are the light of
my life, but I’m working a Muslim cleric with a band of brothers interested in a cache of automatic weapons right now. So
you’ll forgive me if I don’t act like the intern peeing down her leg to get you a cappuccino.”

Jake sighed.

“Seriously,” Wall said. “I’ll call you when I’m up.”

Jake said good-bye. He didn’t have to wait long before the G55 pulled back out onto the street, heading downtown. Jake set
his computer down and took off after it. Only three cars back at a light on Elmwood, he was certain he could see the top of
a small white head peeking out from the side of the headrest in the backseat. It had to be the old man from the abandoned
mill, John Napoli. Jake’s heart began to pound and he told himself to relax, that he was a long way from any kind of breakthrough.

When the G55 pulled over at the curb in front of an Italian bakery, Jake pulled over, too, watching carefully. When Fabrizio
disappeared inside, Jake jumped out and sprinted across the street to a bistro, now in desperate need of the bathroom. It
didn’t take him long, but when he came out, the G55 was already pulling away from the curb.

Jake jumped into his car and took off, nearly smashing into a delivery truck. The G55 turned at the light and disappeared.
Jake blew through a red light amid a blast of horns and followed. Up ahead, he just caught the glint of silver as the SUV
veered onto an on-ramp. Jake crossed a double yellow, nearly colliding with an oncoming car before cutting off a long line
to the on-ramp and cruising up the shoulder and onto the highway where the Mercedes surged ahead into the passing lane. Jake
went nearly a mile and topped a rise in the road before he saw the G55 pulled over on the shoulder, idling.

Jake had no choice but to blow his cover, or just keep going. He kept going, eventually getting off at the next exit, pulling
down the ramp, turning right, pulling a quick U-turn, then driving halfway up the on-ramp that would get him right back onto
the highway. He spun around in his seat so he could see not only the oncoming traffic but the G55 if it got off at the same
exit he did. Less than two minutes later, the silver SUV shot past him in the passing lane on the highway. Jake took off,
keeping his distance this time, his heart thumping at the thought of having been discovered.