False Convictions (17 page)

Jake studied him. Marty’s eyes were on his plate as he traded his ear for a fork and pushed a lump of potato salad into a
pile of Jell-O. It looked like he’d clasped his fiancée’s hand under the picnic table.

“Don’t see why not,” Jake said, clearing his throat and enjoying the feel of the sunshine filtering down through the trees
onto his face. “Send me your tape and I can pass it on to some people if you like.”

“Tape?”

“You know, work you’ve done on TV,” Jake said. “Doesn’t have to be anything fancy, local news, cable shows, anything. Just
so they can see you.”

“But if you don’t have that?” Marty asked, looking up.

“Well, just go out and make one,” Jake said. “You can do it. Maybe take a class up at SU, or a community college or something,
but you gotta get on tape.”

“Then you can plug me in?” Marty asked.

“Happy to help.”

While they ate, Marty pointed out various Auburn dignitaries and VIPs, the Bombardier plant manager, the fire chief, a restaurant
owner, the cop who also played on the national paintball championship team.

Finally, Jake asked if Marty could direct him to the chief. Marty nodded and stood up, signaling for his fiancée to wait for
them. Jake followed Marty into the cottage itself, where the furniture of the front room had been pushed to the walls to accommodate
a green felt card table where eight old men sat smoking cigars and playing cards under the breeze of a box fan propped up
on an armchair. The room was a sanctuary amid the din. The band, screaming kids, and laughter of drunken adults became a muffled
backdrop to the box fan and the rattle of chips and the snap of cards.

“Hey, chief,” Marty said with a wave, walking right over to the balding, rigid-backed chief. “Look who’s here, Jake Carlson
from
American Sunday
. You’ve seen his show, right? Jake, Chief Zarnazzi.”

“Marty, refill these pitchers for us, will you, kid?” the chief said, offering Jake a nod before he turned his attention back
to the cards.

Marty hustled out with three empty plastic pitchers as Jake searched for a sign of the current that celebrity could create
in certain intimate groups, especially in a small town. People loved a face from TV, whether they’d seen it themselves or
not. But the other cardplayers kept whatever interest or excitement they had contained, glancing at the chief’s face just
as often as they examined their own cards. The chief clicked two blue chips down on the table, raising the stakes. After a
call around the table, the chief laid down three aces and everyone else groaned.

Jake waited for the chief to rake in the pot and when he still didn’t look up, Jake said, “Chief, I wanted to talk to you
about this Rivers situation.”

The chief narrowed his eyes behind the wire-rim glasses, peering through the screen door and out at the water. “River looks
a little high for this time of year, I guess. Other than that, we’re all good.”

“Patricia Rivers,” Jake said patiently, the codeine putting just the right emotional distance between him and the chief, “and
her son, Nelson. The one with the white BMW no one bothered looking into twenty years ago. Cassandra Thornton’s boyfriend.
I’m chasing that story and I’d love to find someone who worked the case, maybe someone who knows why so many questions got
left unanswered.”

“Can’t recall who worked that one,” said the chief, lifting the corner of his first card off the table just enough to identify
it.

“Martin Yancy,” Jake said.

“What?” the chief asked, looking up with cold blue eyes.

“The police report said Detective Martin Yancy,” Jake said. “I read it.”

The chief smiled. “Yancy left the force so long ago I can’t recall his face, so you’re out of luck, bub.”

“I’m sure there must be others who worked it,” Jake said, keeping his spirits up despite the chief’s obvious lack of interest.

The chief shrugged, called the first round of bets, and peeked at his second card when it came around as though Jake were
a puff of smoke.

“Marty told me his uncle said people are going to have to take sides on this one,” Jake said, standing firm, oblivious to
the tension that was quickly taking hold. “He’s right, and I don’t think you’re going to want to be on the losing side of
this, chief. It would look well for the department if it helped out on the back end because the way it’s looking, you’re going
to have a lot of explaining to do about the front end of this little story.”

The chief picked his smoldering cigar out of a glass ashtray, drew on it until the ember perked up, exhaled, then raised his
leg and passed gas. The table of old-timers erupted with adolescent chuckles.

Jake twisted his lips and said, “I hope you don’t make a habit of writing notes on your hand.”

The chief wore a puzzled look. “Why’s that?”

“The network has this lawyer down in the city who specializes in Freedom of Information requests,” Jake said. “When he gets
done with this backwoods outfit, you’ll be handing over every Post-it and paper napkin you ever wrote on and if you scribbled
on your palm, I wouldn’t put it past him to have that flayed off your greasy mitt and delivered to my office in a manila envelope
along with everything else.”

Jake turned and shoved open the door, nearly causing Marty to spill all three of his pitchers.

“How’d it go?” Marty asked from behind him as Jake strode across the grass.

“Wrong side,” Jake said, waving his hand without looking back. “Thanks, anyway. Send me that tape.”

Jake reached the end of the driveway and went right. He’d nearly reached his car before he heard his name and looked back.
An old man with a full head of white hair and a crooked hip hobbled toward Jake holding a single bent finger up in the air.
Pale legs the color of skim milk flashed at Jake from beneath the man’s floppy shorts. Brown dress socks reached halfway up
his calves, and his sneakers scuffed the dirt road, kicking up little dust devils.

By the time the old man reached him, he had to bend over to catch his breath before he could speak and before he did that,
he extended a hand toward Jake, which he shook politely.

“Myron Kissle,” the old-timer said, looking up from either side of a flattened nose with two dark eyes. “Formerly Detective
Kissle, Auburn PD. Get kicked in the back of the head by a mule?”

“Hi, Myron,” Jake said, touching the wound on the back of his skull. “What can I do for you?”

Myron rose as high as his bent frame would allow. Looking Jake in the eye, he said, “It’s what I can do for you. I heard Marty
Barrone talking to the judge’s daughter about why you’re here. I worked that Cassandra Thornton case, and I can tell you some
things.”

G
RAHAM CONVINCED CASEY to stay an extra night on the island. He pointed out to her that the major’s courier service wouldn’t
get the sample to the lab in Syracuse in time to do anything until Monday morning.

So she stayed, getting on Graham’s jet the next morning at seven in order to be back by noon and hopefully get the results
fresh from the lab. Ralph picked them up in the Lexus and they headed straight downtown.

The forensic laboratory in Syracuse was just off the main highway, between the hospital and the psychiatric center. Ralph
pulled over to the curb in front of the five-story modern brick building. The lab’s director, a blonde woman in a white lab
coat, personally held the door open for them. Casey and Graham introduced themselves and she gave them each her card, identifying
herself as Helen Mahy.

“I spoke with the deputy director just a few minutes ago,” Helen said with a somber face as they crossed the lobby and stepped
onto the elevator, “and he knows we’ve got you covered.”

“Do they match?” Casey asked.

The lab director looked at her watch.

“We should have it the moment we walk in,” she said, lowering her voice with import. “I know this is a matter of national
security, and I’ve got to tell you, we’re very glad to be doing our part. My team really scrambled on this, especially Laurie
Snyder. She’s the one who’ll have the charts, so if either of you could give her an attaboy it’d mean a lot.”

“We’ll do that,” Graham said, his face grim.

“Are you…” Helen said, turning to Casey and tilting her head. “I’ve seen you before.”

Graham held up a hand. “I’m sorry. We can’t talk about who, what, or where. You understand.”

“Of course.”

The elevator rumbled opened and they took a short turn down a hallway before pushing through two heavy double doors and into
a lab that nearly filled the footprint of the building. Men and women in goggles, lab coats, and gloves worked at countertops
amid test tubes, beakers, open flames, and high-tech electronic equipment. Nearly all of them stopped their work to stare.

Helen led them to one of several desks in the midst of the lab where a mousy woman in glasses and hair pulled into a ponytail
with a red rubber band sat hunched over a computer screen. Helen asked if she had the results on their case.

The woman looked up and blinked at them several times before she said, “Yes. I have it. You can see right here.”

“We can’t tell you how much we appreciate all your work,” Casey said, earning a nod from the director.

The lab woman smiled and turned back to her screen. Using a mouse, she manipulated two white brackets around a yellow rectangle
covered with what looked like the inky rungs of four ladders. The patterns of the rungs and their thickness didn’t seem to
match and Casey felt her heart in her throat.

“You see here and here?” The woman said, moving the brackets from one ladder to another. “This is just one example. We use
thirteen different loci to differentiate or identify individuals.”

“And they don’t match?” Casey said.

The woman shook her head and moved the brackets up and down the rows. “No. Your guy in prison isn’t the one you want. Now,
here. Take a look at this. This is the sample we got this morning.”

The woman brought up a new screen with an all new set of ladders.

“They don’t match, either,” Casey said.

The woman looked up at her and blinked. “Well, the ladders don’t match.”

“What?” Graham said, frowning, and his face drained of color.

“But that’s because the original slide sample you sent us—the old one—was so damaged,” the woman said, nodding in agreement
with herself. “That happens, usually with old samples, or if it wasn’t stored right. Heat or other climatic conditions can
degrade the cells and the DNA, too. The ladders from that sample are incomplete. That’s why I started to say that law enforcement
looks for a match of thirteen standardized loci. Here we can only match nine of those.”

“So they do match?” Graham said, his voice harsh and nasal.

“Nine of the thirteen loci do,” the woman said.

“Does that prove it?” Casey asked. “Is nine enough for us to take to a judge? Is this the same DNA?”

“Oh, I have no doubt,” the woman said, nodding vigorously. “These samples? They don’t match exactly, but they definitely came
from the same person. The odds of this being someone else are about one in five million. No, you got your guy.”

C
HRIST, I FEEL LIKE an idiot,” Casey said as they climbed into the backseat of the Lexus.

“Why?” Graham asked.

“Did you see those people’s faces? Did you hear what she said? National security? They sure as hell didn’t know they were
looking at a twenty-year-old semen sample for the Freedom Project, I can promise you that. They acted like we’re trying to
stop another nine-eleven.”

Graham waved a dismissive hand through the air. “Relax. No one got hurt. We’re working the system. We just got our case moved
to the top of the pile. It’s nothing they wouldn’t have done anyway, just sooner.”

Casey rode in silence, digesting his words.

“So,” Graham said, “you get with the judge to press him about setting Dwayne free, and I’ll get the media whipped up, pour
a little gas on the flames that are already beginning to spring up around Patricia Rivers.”

Casey didn’t respond.

“Come on, will you?” Graham said, touching her shoulder. “This is important. Okay, I grant you, it’s not another nine-eleven.
Maybe I shouldn’t have played the terror card to get them to make this such a priority, but no one got hurt and we
are
righting a pretty big wrong here.”

Casey exhaled through her nose and said, “And that son-of-abitch Rivers has dodged this thing too long.”

“Good,” Graham said with a single nod. “Why don’t you get with Marty and give Judge Kollar a chance to pile on? If he’s smart,
he can be a part of this.”

“What kind of gas?” Casey asked.

“We’ve got an innocent man in jail for twenty years,” Graham said, ticking off his fingers, “a corrupt district attorney whose
son is the
real
killer and is hiding out on a desert island, oh, and did I mention that that same DA is about to become one of the most powerful
judges in the entire country? This thing is a bonanza. Ralph told me the little blurb this weekend in the
Auburn Citizen
already has tongues wagging. Right, Ralph?”

The folds of skin in Ralph’s neck bulged as he looked up at his boss in the rearview mirror and grunted his agreement.

“That’s right,” Graham said, “
American Sunday
is interested—blood in the water—and now it’s time to start the feeding frenzy.”

Casey shivered.

“What?” Graham asked.

“I was thinking of our dive and that feeding frenzy,” she said. “What kind of a person does something like that?”

“Same kind that rapes and murders his prom queen girlfriend,” Graham said, his face and voice somber.

“I honestly didn’t know if Rivers’s DNA was going to match,” Casey said. “I hate to say it, but part of me wouldn’t have been
surprised if it
was
Dwayne Hubbard who killed her. I hate to say it, but there’s something… I don’t know, weird about him. I know he’s our client
and I shouldn’t say that, but either way, what you just said might be a problem for us.”