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Authors: Paul Cleave

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BOOK: Joe Victim: A Thriller
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Chapter Eight

I’m left sitting in the interview room by myself for a few minutes until Adam and Glen come back in.

“Your choice,” Adam says. “Your lawyer is due here soon. You can either wait here for half an hour or we can take you back to your cell.”

It’s all the same to me. Almost. The difference is that here is a little bigger and I don’t have to listen to other prisoners. “I’ll wait here.”

Adam shakes his head. “You don’t get it, do you,” he says.

“Get what?”

“You don’t get to make choices. I heard you’ve already fucked up one test today, and now you just fucked up another. Come on, let’s go.”

They lead me back to my cell. We go through more doorways and pass other prison guards, more concrete walls and concrete floors and no daylight, no escape, no future. They make fun of me along the way, innocent kind of fun, really, especially compared to the fun I’ll have with them when my lawyer gets me out of here. When I was unfairly arrested, I was inundated by offers from lawyers all wanting to become my best friend. They wanted to defend me and they wanted the fame and business that came along with it. My trial is going to be the biggest the country has ever seen, and whoever defends me will become a household name. I couldn’t afford a lawyer, but that didn’t matter. My first lawyer’s name was Gabriel Gabel, a forty-six-year-old partner of Gabel, Wiley, and Dench. Apart from having somewhat of an unfortunate name, Gabel was my lawyer for six days when news of the death threats against him were made public. He was my lawyer for six more days after that before he disappeared off the face of the earth.

After that, a second lawyer jumped at the chance to defend me, the case somehow having become more famous since Gabel’s disappearance. Again it was six days before the death threats started flooding in, and this time my lawyer didn’t simply disappear, but was found in a car parking building with his head caved in by a hammer. I’m not sure how hard the police looked for his killer. I can’t imagine task forces hanging out in the conference room at the police station coming up with big ideas, I can’t imagine much overtime was put in. I doubt any of them lost any sleep.

No more lawyers wanted to be my best friend anymore. I was assigned a lawyer by the courts, and the death threats stopped. My lawyer was a man who didn’t want to defend me, but who had no choice, and that was made clear to the public. If the public kept killing my lawyers there would be no trial, and ultimately the public wanted a trial more than they wanted another dead lawyer.

Since then I’ve seen my lawyer less than half a dozen times. He doesn’t like me. I just think he needs to get to know me better. The trial starts in a matter of days, and I’ve been in jail twelve months and the wheels of justice seemed to have ground to a halt, only now they’re slowly moving forward again. Or wheels of injustice, really.

I think about what Schroder offered and I wonder if this is it for me, this cell, this part of the jail, if this is the best I can hope for. I wonder if fifty thousand dollars can make my life any better and decide that it can’t make it worse. The two prison guards send me through a final door to my cellblock and leave me to it. The cell doors are open, and the thirty of us who share this cellblock are free to roam around as far as the room allows, which isn’t far. We can chat, we can sit around a communal area and play cards or share stories, or sneak into one another’s cells for some fucking or some fighting. I sit in my cell and stare at the ceiling and suddenly I’m no longer alone.

“What makes you so popular?” Santa Kenny asks, and he’s standing in the doorway leaning against the wall. I haven’t been in the mood any other time to make conversation, and now is no different. I ignore the question, and a few moments later he fires off another one. “What do they want? Are they still trying to make you look guilty?”

I pick up one of the romance novels. I’ve read them all a couple of times, but there isn’t much else to do. This one I’m reading backward, trying to kill some time, enjoying the happily-ever-after becoming corrupted as the man with the abs and chiseled jaw and the woman with the beautiful hair and fantastic boobs drift apart to a time before they ever met.

“They just don’t get it,” Santa Kenny says. “They see us, the city is in a state of paranoia, and they see us and they target us for their blame. They can’t find the real guys, but they hate us because somebody always has to pay.”

I put the book down and look up at him. “It’s crazy the shit that makes us look guilty,” I tell him. “Hell, just because you were caught in a stolen car wearing a Santa suit with an eight-year-old boy locked in the trunk,” I say, “that doesn’t mean anything.”

“Exactly,” Santa Kenny says.

“And the fact it was in April didn’t help. It made you stand out.”

“Exactly. So what, it’s a crime now to wear a Santa suit around Easter?”

“Shouldn’t be,” I tell him. “You think it’s a crime to wear an Easter Bunny outfit during Christmas?”

“And how the fuck was I to know that kid was even in the back?”

“No way you could have.”

“And I wasn’t stealing the car, I thought it was mine. Looked like mine. And it was dark. People make mistakes.”

“Things look different in the dark,” I tell him.

“That’s my point. That kid, he thinks I’m the one who took him, but how could he know that when I put a blindfold over his eyes?”

“Right,” I tell him, and we’ve had this conversation before, quite a few times actually. I guess I could use some of the fifty thousand dollars to pay somebody to shut him up permanently.

“Play some cards?” he asks.

“Maybe soon,” I tell him.

He shrugs, like
soon
is an insult to him. “Lunch in twenty minutes,” he says, and then he disappears. I pick the romance book back up. I stare at the pages and read some of the same words over and over. If I ever write a book where men and women fall in love, it’d be real, it’d be the kind of thing I had with Melissa. I miss her. A lot.

The two prison guards come and get me again. They really seem to have taken a shine to me today.

“Good news,” Adam says.

“I’m going home?”

“See? Sometimes you do catch on quick,” he says.

They lead me back out of the cellblock. Weirdly I’m thankful for the break in the routine. These next few days are going to be like that because of the trial. A month ago, and a month before that, and a few more before that were all the same. I wake up. I stare at stuff. I eat. I stare at more stuff. Then it’s lights out. Next week I’ll be put in front of a jury, and there’s no way they’ll convict me. I’m Joe. People like Joe.

I’m taken back to the same interview room. My lawyer is waiting in there already. He props his briefcase up on the table and for a moment I wonder if it’s full of knives. He’s in his late fifties. He has just the right amount of not looking so young that he’s cocky, and not looking so old that all the experience and wisdom he has gained will be spilling into a coffin along with the rest of him before Christmas. His name is Kevin, and Kevin is wearing a nice suit that I would never wear, cologne that makes me feel sick, and has an overweight wife that I would never touch. The photo of her clipped inside the lid of his briefcase must weigh as much as the briefcase itself.

The guards handcuff me to my chair. Then they leave.

“I got some news for you,” Kevin says.

“Good news I assume?”

He shakes his head and frowns. “Bad news.”

“I’ll have the good news first.”

“Err . . . you’re missing the point, Joe,” he says. “It’s bad news, worse news really.”

“Then the bad news first.”

“The prosecution is making you an offer.”

“That’s good news,” I tell him. “They’re letting me go?”

“No, Joe, they’re not. But they do think in the interest of expediting things, of saving taxpayer money, and of avoiding the risk of turning this whole thing into a circus, they are offering you life in jail without the option of parole. They’re trying to avoid what is looking to be a streetful of people protesting for or against the death penalty.”

“Death penalty? I don’t get it,” I say, but I’m afraid that I do.

“That’s the worse news, and I’ll get to that in a second.”

“No, no, you’ll get to it now,” I say, wanting to wave my hands in the air, but unable to. What are you talking about?”

“I said I’ll get to it, Joe. First there’s more bad news. There’s been a hiccup with the insanity defense.”

“What kind of hiccup?” I ask.

“Benson Barlow.”

“Who’s that?”

“He’s the psychiatrist the prosecution sent to speak to you. He hasn’t submitted a formal report yet, but I’ve been given a heads-up, and it’s very damning of you. Basically he’s going to say you’re faking everything.”

“It’ll be his word against mine.”

“Well, Joe, we can argue that at a trial, but I don’t see much hope in this. Barlow is an extremely respected psychiatrist, whereas you’re an extremely reviled serial killer. Whose word do you think will carry more weight?”

“Mine,” I say. “Nobody likes psychiatrists. Nobody.”

“I know the plan is to plead an insanity defense,” he says, “but here’s the thing, Joe, and this is what I’ve been telling you since I’ve been your lawyer—it’s not a great defense. You got away with murdering these women for so long that you had to be sane to do that.”

Schroder said a similar thing. “Then why can’t I remember any of it?” I ask, remembering each woman in turn, the horror in their faces, the blood, the sex. Mostly I remember the sex. Good times. “You’re talking like you think I’m guilty,” I say. “And I still want my trial. Now, what the hell is this death penalty you’re talking about?”

He adjusts his tie, making me think that out of all the ways to kill somebody I’ve never strangled anybody with a tie. I’ll put it on my bucket list. “Here’s the thing, Joe. Since you’ve been in here things have changed out there. In a way you’ve made that happen. People don’t like the way Christchurch has gone, and you’ve become, well, you’ve become the poster boy for that. People try to figure out how it all started, and you’re the guy they point to. There’s a referendum taking place. The government is spending nine million of the tax payers’ dollars to get their opinion on whether or not to bring back the death penalty.”

I exhale hard through my nose, almost scoffing. I’ve seen that on the news, but it’s not going to lead anywhere. It’s all bullshit.

“They’re sending out voting forms to everybody on the electoral roll. The country wants to be heard, Joe, and everybody over eighteen years old is going to get that chance. I have to be honest with you. Judging by the climate that isn’t good news for you. So the prosecution is offering you a deal. Plead guilty now, accept you’re never going to get out of prison—”

“But I’m innocent!”

“Again, or they’re going to push for the death penalty.”

“But the referendum . . .”

“You ever read the Bible, Joe?”

“Only for the recipes in the back.”

“An eye for an eye,” he says, ignoring my answer. “That’s what this referendum comes down to. And it will pass. Trust me on that. And if it passes, you’re going to swing.”

“Swing?”

“That’s how they used to do it here, Joe. They used to hang people. Hasn’t happened since nineteen fifty-seven, but if you don’t take this deal you’re not only going to go down in history as being the Christchurch Carver, you’re going to go down as the man who brought back the death penalty.”

“But—”

“Listen to me, Joe,” he says, and his tone is the same as the one I grew up with, and I don’t like it any more now than I did then. “Listen to me. They want to start hanging people. Okay? They think it’s the only path back to a civil civilization. It’s an election year. And the politicians are listening to the voters. They’re being asked if they’ll pass the law if the public votes for it, and they’re saying they will because they want the votes. It’s a minefield. You need to take this deal. You have to listen to me when I tell you it’s the only way of saving your life.”

“You can save my life by getting me out of here,” I tell him. “I can’t help what I did. It wasn’t my fault. With drugs and counseling I can . . .”

He starts tapping his fingers on the table, starting with his pinkie and rolling on down to his thumb, over and over. “I tell you to listen to me, but you’re not listening.”

“What?” I ask.

“Let me put this to you more simply, Joe. You,” he says, and he stops rolling his fingers so he can point one of them at me so I know exactly who he means. “Are. Completely. Fucked,” he says, pointing hard with each word. “So take the deal and tell the police everything they need to know about Melissa, about where Detective Calhoun is buried. Let the city avoid an unpleasant trial. There are going to be masses of people protesting. Half want to kill you, the other half only want you in jail forever—but all of them hate you. It will get ugly. You have no supporters here, Joe. Nobody on the jury is going to be on your side.”

“I can’t do life in here. I can’t do twenty years,” I say, and I begin to imagine it. I imagine being in my fifties, my hairline sliding back the same way my father’s did. I imagine trying to steal a car. I imagine the mechanics of stuffing somebody who I wasn’t getting on well with into the trunk with bad hips and perhaps a dash of arthritis too. I try to imagine sneaking up somebody’s set of stairs with a knife in my hand and a bad back, having to use a cane. The world comes out with brand-new, twenty-five-year-old women every year that I’d like to visit, and I imagine spending some quality time with one of them in her bathroom then leaving my hairs in her sink. I’m used to these women looking at me with fear in their eyes. What will they look at me with in twenty years? Humor?

“No deal,” I say. “I want the trial. At least I have a chance. There’s no difference between twenty years and the death penalty. What if I die in jail in eighteen years? It all would have been for nothing. I want another option.”

The whole time Kevin is slowly shaking his head, scratching the side of it at the same time. Small pieces of dandruff land on his spotless suit jacket. “No, Joe, you’re missing the point.
Life
is life in this case. It’s not twenty years. It’s not thirty years.
Life
is you never stepping beyond these walls again. Take it, or in a year’s time you’ll be getting fitted for a noose.”

BOOK: Joe Victim: A Thriller
8.13Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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