Innocence (4 page)

“And in this case, the skin and blood recovered from under Officer Steele’s fingernails prove Salazar is innocent?”

Dobson shrugged. “We won’t know until it’s tested.”

Finn pushed the file back at the attorney across the table. “So test it. What do you need me for?”

“We’d love to, but the DA’s office and the city refuse to give us the samples to be tested. They say that the case has been decided, and they won’t open up the investigation again. We’re going in front of the judge in two days to argue our motion to force them to give us the evidence so we can run the tests ourselves.”

Finn shook his head. “I still don’t see why you need me.”

Dobson heaved a heavy sigh, folding his fingers together. “The motion’s going to be heard by Judge Cavanaugh.”

“Ah,” Finn said. It had suddenly become clear why Dobson had come to him. “Are you going to try and act surprised when I tell you that Cavanaugh was my mentor when he was teaching at Suffolk Law School?”

Dobson shook his head. “I wouldn’t insult your intelligence that way.”

“You think the argument will be better received by Judge Cavanaugh if it’s coming from someone he knows? Someone he trusts?”

“The thought had occurred to me.”

Finn waved his hand dismissively. “You don’t know Cavanaugh, then. He’ll see right through this. If anything, he’d be harder on me than he would on someone he doesn’t know. He’ll probably be so insulted, he’ll bounce me right out of the courtroom.”

“In which case, what have you really got to lose?” Dobson asked.

“You mean besides my credibility?” Finn responded. “I think the more relevant question is: What have I got to gain?”

“A chance to do something good?” Dobson offered.

The laugh that came from his throat almost choked Finn. “You clearly didn’t do enough research on me.”

Dobson considered this for a moment. “You’re still friends with Preston Holland, right?” Finn gave a noncommittal tilt of his head. “He was the one who sent me to you. He retired last year, but he still does some work in the legal community. He said he hadn’t talked to you in a while, but he claimed you were one of the best trial lawyers he’d ever seen. Preston isn’t someone given to overstatement. He said that with the right case, you could be one of the all-time greats.” Dobson looked around the plain conference room. “Are you happy doing what you’re doing now? Paying hookers to rat out husbands in divorce cases so your gold-digging clients can keep their homes in Weston? Getting drug dealers and thugs out on bail so they can run their scams while waiting to go up to the pen at Concord? Cleaning up some fat cats’ DUIs? Is this really what you were meant to do?”

Finn felt as if he’d been slapped, and he reacted angrily. “I’m not at Howery, Black anymore,” he spat out. “Principles can be expensive, and I’ve got to eat.”

Dobson’s look hardened. “Fine,” he said. “If it turns out Salazar’s innocent, I’ll give you the inside track on his civil rights case against the city for false imprisonment and deprivation of liberty. Cases like that seem to be settling out at up to five hundred thousand dollars for every year spent in jail. Salazar’s been in for fifteen. That could come to over seven million. Maybe more if you win at trial instead of settling. On contingency, you’d net well over two million. Not a bad take.” He pushed the file back toward Finn.

Finn opened the file and flipped through it once more, scratching his head. He was tempted, he had to admit; not just by the money but by the challenge. On the other hand, he recognized that it could be a rabbit hole, and he would likely spend endless hours running through a blind maze without anything to show for it. He couldn’t afford to give away his services with quite the abandon lawyers from the large firms could. And then there was Kozlowski. The private detective hadn’t spoken during the meeting, but he had acknowledged knowing Madeline Steele. Kozlowski was practically Finn’s partner, and Finn couldn’t risk upsetting his close working relationship with the man lightly. More than that, while neither of them would ever admit it, they were friends, and Finn had precious few real friends.

He looked up from the file. “One question,” he said.

“Shoot,” Dobson replied.

“Why do you care so much?”

“I told you, I do work with the Innocence Proj—”

“Don’t give me that bullshit,” Finn cut him off. “There must be hundreds of cases like this, where all you’ve got is a mere possibility of innocence. Why spend so much time and effort on this one case when you could just move on to the next?”

Dobson thought for a long moment. Then he stood up, put on his coat, and picked up his briefcase. He walked to the door and opened it. Looking back at Finn, he said, “You can answer that question for yourself tomorrow.”

“How?” Finn asked.

“It’s visiting day at Billerica. I’m taking you to meet Vincente Salazar.”

z

“You pissed?”

Finn was guiding his battered MG convertible through the streets of downtown Boston, toward the river and out onto Monsignor O’Brien Highway, headed toward Charlestown. It was gray out—the kind of deep, penetrating gray that only New Englanders know. The buildings and the streets and the sky blended together in a wall of slate as the impossibly impractical car dodged frozen puddles and potholes in the road, the darkened slush clinging to its wheels.

“About what?” Kozlowski asked, looking out the passenger window.

Finn knew he hated riding in the miniature vehicle, which could barely contain his large, square frame. The ratted soft top felt like it might actually give way to his shoulders, and the wind whistled through gaps where the canvas didn’t quite reach the steel.

“Okay,” Finn said. “I won’t take the case.”

“Your call.”

Finn took his eyes off the road for a moment and looked over at the man sitting next to him. The thick scar that ran down his face was hidden from Finn’s view, and seeing him in profile, Finn realized that the private investigator must have been handsome once. “I’m assuming you remember the Steele shooting?”

“Yeah,” Kozlowski replied, his eyes still scanning the streets outside his window. Then he went silent again.

“That’s it?” Finn asked. “‘Yeah’? That’s all I’m gonna get out of you? Any chance you want to elaborate a little?”

Kozlowski folded his arms. “It was a bad time for the department. Maddy—Officer Steele—was popular. She was a good young cop. She was a woman.”

“And?”

“As a cop, you can’t let that stand—particularly not with a woman. No one gets away with shooting one of your own. It’d be rough on the department if Salazar got out; it’d open a lot of old wounds.”

“So you want me to leave it alone?”

“Didn’t say that. I’m not in the department anymore; they forced me out, remember? The only person I’d feel bad for would be Maddy. The rest of them can fuck themselves, for all I care.”

“She lived, right?”

“She did. It was a long fight for her, and it wasn’t fun. The bullet hit the spine; she’s in a wheelchair now, and that’s where she’ll be for the rest of her life. It wasn’t the easiest thing to come to grips with.”

Finn raised his eyebrows. “Sounds like you knew her pretty well.”

“We were friends.”

“Friends?”

Kozlowski glared at him. “Just friends.”

“Okay. So what do you want me to do?”

“Like I said, it’s not my call.”

Finn pulled the little car into a parking space in front of a small two-story brick structure on Warren Street. The pointing was chipping away between the clay squares, and the entire building listed uneasily to one side. A small Historical Society plaque on the bottom corner near the doorway read circa 1769; a larger sign to the side of the entryway advertised scott t. finn, attorney at law, and below that, kozlowski investigations.

Finn pulled up on the hand brake and looked at Kozlowski again. “That’s bullshit, Koz, and you know it. I don’t have a dog in this fight—not yet. Could be an interesting case; lucrative, too, if Salazar’s actually innocent. But I can walk away just as easily. I’ve got no interest in pissing you off, particularly when I’d probably need your help with the legwork on the case if I take it. So you tell me, what should I do?”

Kozlowski opened the door and got out; Finn did the same. The older man leaned against the car’s top, and Finn worried briefly that it would collapse. “Meet the man,” Kozlowski said after a moment. “See what you think.”

Finn looked long and hard at Kozlowski, trying to read him. “You think I should talk to him?”

Kozlowski nodded. “Just one thing.”

Finn listened for the sound of the other shoe hitting the cobblestone. “What’s that?”

“I want to meet the man, too.”

z

Finn opened the door to his apartment, stepped in, and dropped his briefcase on the floor. It landed with a weary thud. As was his custom, he debated leaving the lights off and stumbling his way to bed in the dark. He had no plans to eat anything, and the thought of facing the apartment depressed him. He knew, though, that living in a world of denial and avoidance depressed him more.

The lights came on eagerly as he flipped the switch, as though they’d been waiting to torment him. They threw shadows off those items that hurt him most: the couch he had purchased with her and struggled to cram up the narrow staircase and into the apartment, laughing through the entire ordeal; the antique globe she’d had since college, on which they’d traced the paths of all the trips they’d planned to take together; the watercolor she’d bought on their first vacation together down on the Cape. He faced them all as adversaries now, with the respect and grim determination owed worthy opponents. He’d considered getting rid of them, taking them to Goodwill or putting them out on the street . . . or burning them. But that would constitute an admission that it was over, and he refused to wave that white flag.

The sharp metallic cry of the phone on the wall interrupted his internal tug-of-war, and he turned to regard it with suspicion. He knew who it was without checking the caller ID. Somehow it rang differently when it was her.

After the fourth ring, his ancient answering machine picked up. The greeting finished and the tone sounded. Finn held his breath, wondering whether she would leave a message. His apartment was quiet for several seconds, and he thought she might have hung up. Then, finally, she spoke.

“Finn? It’s Linda.” There was another stretch of silence. “Finn, please pick up. I want to talk to you.”

Chapter Fou
r

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

The Billerica House of Correction lay in uneven humps of brick and concrete, like architectural roadkill by the side of a dead-end offshoot near Route 3 in a secluded part of the suburban enclave twenty miles northwest of Boston. Originally built in the 1920s to house three hundred inmates, it was one of Massachusetts’s oldest prisons, now home to nearly twelve hundred convicts. Those unfortunate enough to become well acquainted with the correctional system regarded Billerica as one of the worst places to be sent following conviction, and its buildings sprawled brown and red and seemingly lifeless across several acres well removed from the eyesight of what was, otherwise, a picturesque middle-class New England town. The locals had grown accustomed to their nervous disregard of the prison, acknowledging the institution only when pressed. It was the uneasy trade all prison towns made in exchange for good jobs and state funding.

Dobson led Finn and Kozlowski through the security check. The process was eased somewhat by the fact that both Dobson and Finn carried state bar cards identifying them as attorneys, and Kozlowski carried the ID of a retired detective. A trip through a metal detector and a brief pat-down were all that was required, and because Kozlowski had locked his gun in the glove compartment, there was no trouble.

The visiting room was large and crowded, with prisoners and their families sitting at open tables, watched over by several guards around the room. There before him, Finn saw a panoply of human emotions played out on a dim concrete palette. Wives and girlfriends leaned across tables to touch the hands of men in prison garb, holding on with all their might to tamp down their desperation, and anger, and loneliness. Children, some shy, some scared, some seemingly carefree, sat on the laps of the fathers they saw only on rare occasions, and only under the careful eyes of armed guards. Parents and grandparents of the incarcerated forced small talk, trying to feign normalcy with the grown children they would always love, regardless of their transgressions.

“He’s over there,” Dobson said, pointing to the far corner of the room.

Finn looked over and saw him. At first glance, there was little to set him apart from most of the other prisoners. His long black hair was better kept than most, brushed back from a severe widow’s peak at the top of his almond-brown forehead, and the shirttail of his prison fatigues was tucked in neatly, but other than that, he appeared to blend in. With a longer look, though, a sense of strength and confidence emanated from the man. Finn couldn’t put his finger on what it was about him, but there was something in the set of his shoulders, or in his posture, that was compelling.

Beside him, a teenage girl was leaning in toward him as they spoke. On the other side of the table, an older woman, heavier in both carriage and countenance than her two companions, sat watching quietly as Salazar talked with the young girl.

Finn took a step toward the table, but Dobson put a hand in front of him, holding him back. “It’s his mother and his daughter,” he said. “He gets only forty-five minutes with them each month. As his attorneys, we can stay later. Let’s give him a few more minutes.”

“I’m not his attorney yet,” Finn pointed out, and then regretted it.

Dobson scowled at him. “Just a few more minutes.”

Finn looked at Kozlowski, who nodded, and the three of them eased their backs against the wall to wait. From that spot, Finn watched the ongoing exchange between Salazar and his daughter. Finn easily saw that, young though she was, she would soon be a beautiful woman. She was still caught in the awkward shadow of adolescence, and she held her head low, at an angle that made her look painfully shy and disinterested, but her face had a refined Spanish grace to it, and her features were nearly flawless. Once she gained the confidence to meet the world with greater poise, he thought, there would be few young men who would be able to resist her looks.