Not in the Heart (25 page)

I stopped the DVD and focused on what she carried. Even though it had been enhanced, the picture looked grainy and in some places I couldn't make out her face. It was weird seeing Diana move. She was a still photograph in my mind, an image captured and frozen in time. Something for the bookshelf or the pages of a photo album. But the video showed how she walked, how frightened she was of this man, the way she pushed her glasses onto the bridge of her nose with the back of her hand, her awkward gait. Instead of confidently striding forward, she had more of a self-conscious shuffle that leaned toward the wall of the stores. Timid. Like a cat wanting to get something floating on the water but unwilling to stick a paw in for fear of getting wet.

Her purse was slung over her shoulder but there was nothing in her hands. Perhaps it was in her purse. Or perhaps the person who killed her also took the journal. It was tossed into the trash. Maybe the police discovered it and disregarded it. Or destroyed it by mistake. No matter what happened, it was a dead end.

I took one more look at Terrelle as he came back into the picture. He was headed to the other side of the street, yelling, flailing his arms, as if in defeat. I was about to pop the DVD out of the player when a thought occurred. As Diana walked, she kept looking back. I thought it was toward Terrelle.

I hit the forward button on the DVD but didn't find the full video I was looking for. I wanted the longer version of the events of the day the trial transcript talked about. I dug back into the bag and found the second DVD. There was only one long file on this recording, shot from the angle that showed the top of Diana's head. But that angle also gave the best view of the street. The video began a full forty-five minutes before Diana came out of the shop and I fast-forwarded until I saw Terrelle shuffling back and forth across the street. He leaned against a chain-link fence with one foot up behind him, then sat on the curb and put his back against the fence. His head dipped in a stupor or perhaps in slumber; then he leaned to one side on the hot concrete slab until he lay stretched out. People who walked by went out of their way, even crossing the street, to avoid him.

Just as I was about to fast-forward again, a shadow passed in front of Terrelle. Someone just out of view of the camera. Terrelle stirred, propping himself up on one elbow, speaking to the shadow. His head lolled back and then he sat fully up, shaking his head and pointing a finger. The shadow lingered, straight as a telephone pole, and if I hadn't seen it move there, I would have thought it was a sign or a tree.

Terrelle stood and moved out of the picture, then back in, bobbing, weaving, walking back and forth like a prizefighter waiting for his title match. I strained to see him, wishing I could reposition the camera after all those years. He would return for a few seconds, then shuffle out again. When he returned to the right side of the screen, I paused the DVD. Instead of talking in his stream-of-consciousness rant, he seemed to be listening now. I hit Play again and he shifted out of view. It was agonizing. The sun went behind a cloud. Cars parked and people hurried along the sidewalk.

I hit fast-forward and kept my eye on the right side of the screen and the two shadows that now lingered. A car pulled close to the curb and parked. Terrelle moved into the picture, gesturing, smiling, then pushing back on a man who slowly walked toward the car. I stopped the DVD and tried to see the man's face. He was dressed in a polo shirt and jeans, a baseball cap pulled low. Terrelle followed him to the car, nodding and smiling, rubbing his hands together, almost gleeful. The man opened the rear door of the car, pointed toward the next street, and Terrelle pointed as well, nodding and saying something.

Something about the man in the hat seemed familiar. Perhaps it was the way he carried himself or a gesture that sparked something in the back of my mind. From this angle it was impossible to see the license plate and the windows were tinted, so I couldn't see the driver. It wasn't until the man took off his baseball cap as he entered the vehicle that I saw the blond hair that reached his shoulders.

I backed the DVD up and got the best, clearest view of his face. My heart racing, I knew I had stumbled onto something others had missed. Some connection between Terrelle and this mystery man.

The car pulled away and Terrelle seemed energized, pacing across the street from the salon and watching the front door. The car disappeared from view. A few minutes later, Terrelle walked into the parking lot, behind the chain-link fence, and gestured toward the street as if acknowledging someone.

Twenty minutes later Diana walked out of the salon and the ugly scene played out again. This time I watched all the way through. When Terrelle went out of view of the camera, there were people on the street walking to the other side, avoiding his verbal tirade, shocked and appalled at what they heard. In that pool of people no one had noticed the solitary figure who stood like a sentinel, baseball cap pulled low, observing the scene from the chain-link fence across the street. As soon as Terrelle followed Diana, yelling obscenities and threats, the man exited, hastily heading out of the picture in the other direction.

Terrelle came back into the picture once again after the altercation, walking purposefully, as if in search of someone, but his gait betrayed him and he wound up pacing again on the hot sidewalk. The DVD ended with many more questions than answers. Had the police disregarded this? Had they even noticed it? Could this video jog Terrelle's memory? And was this blond guy linked with both Diana and Curtis Tompkins?

I wanted to call someone, anyone—Abby or Ellen, the police; I had to tell someone what I'd found. But who? And if this meant what I thought it did . . . could I reveal this new information knowing that it might mean the end to any chance of life for my son? Wouldn't it be better for everyone if this evidence just slipped through the cracks?

I sat back and hit the Off button on the DVD player. Time was running out for Terrelle. Time was running out for Aiden's ailing heart. And I suddenly felt a shudder of fear. Time was running out for me to decide what to do about both.

C
HAPTER
39

I was attempting to get back in the zone, pecking away at the computer and filling in much of what Terrelle had told me, trying to get the image of the blond-haired man out of my mind, waiting for a return call from Detective Sawyer, and having this pain in my gut that wouldn't go away. They call it hunger. But it was more than that. A growing realization that I had to make more important choices than cuisine.

Every few minutes I would get up and go to the refrigerator and see the same thing I had seen fifteen minutes earlier, which was six eggs, a head of cabbage, and some frozen chicken. What can you make with those ingredients? I calculated how long it would take to drive to the nearest fast-food place but that seemed like a huge time waster, so I trudged back to the room.

I was considering the ramifications of breaking in to a neighbor's house and stealing lunch meat and bread when the door to my room flew open and Abby burst in with a wild look in her eyes, a black book in one hand and a Pizza Hut box in the other.

“I found something,” she said, thrusting the book in front of me.

“Sausage or pepperoni?”

“No, Dad, this.”

“Her diary?”

“No, it's one of those time management books—a calendar on steroids they had before cell phones took over the world.”

My daughter. A chip off the old block.

“Look at this,” she said.

She opened a page and pointed at a dark circle around January 22 while I opened the pizza box and saw almost an entire thin-crust cheese pizza inside. Who in their right mind orders only cheese? And thin crust? Made me wonder if this chip off the block could possibly be related to me.

“Throughout January and February there are dates circled every two or three weeks.”

“Back up,” I said. Actually it sounded more like “Bmmm ummmm” because I had a mouthful of pizza that was putting a serious dent in my hunger pangs. “How did you get this?”

“Diana's mom had a plastic bag in her closet. All of the evidence that was returned after the trial. She never touched it. Just put it in the closet and kept it there. Diana's purse and all of its contents.”

“No diary.”

“No, but this is interesting.” She opened the calendar and held it in front of me, presumably so I wouldn't get pizza sauce on the pages. That just enabled me to use both hands, but I'm not that uncouth.

“Early on, back in January, she has notes down at the bottom of the page. Grocery lists, supplies for the salon, that kind of thing.”

“‘Freelance,'” I said, staring at the dead girl's note. Her handwriting wasn't that much better than mine. Squiggly
F
and no real form if you ask me. The word had a question mark beside it.

“Now look at February,” Abby said. “The twelfth has a big circle around it and
Freelance
is written at the bottom.”

“At four thirty,” I said. “Probably one of the days she asked to leave early. But it doesn't give any clues about what she was doing.”

Abby flipped the page. “Then at the end of February you see the initials
CT
. And again here, on March 4.”

“Curtis Tompkins. This proves his whole story to you was made up. He knew exactly what her freelance was. But what was she doing for him?”

“Who knows? Making a delivery. Running drugs. Whatever it is, I think it got her killed, because look at the frequency before she died. As you get into March and then April, there are more circles, more meetings. Only a few days separate the jobs.”

My mind raced with the information and I jammed the rest of the piece of pizza in my mouth, wiped my fingers on my shorts, and took the calendar, flipping ahead to April 28, the day Terrelle accosted her outside the salon. There was a circle around the date and again the initials
CT
were scribbled underneath.

I sat with that for a moment, waiting for the realization to kick in. Waiting for the images of Diana walking down the sidewalk to clear my head. Wondering what her last moments were like and who had pulled the trigger.

My phone buzzed—Detective Sawyer. As I explained what Abby had discovered, I pulled up the video on my computer. Abby hovered over my shoulder, which I knew she would do because she was as interested in the shadows and faces of the past as I was. I skipped forward a little, telling the man what I saw and mapping out linear observations of Diana's last day on earth. Terrelle's final day as a free man.

“Did you review this video after Terrelle's arrest?” I asked.

“Yeah, we saw it. It just confirmed what Chandler believed. Made the case that much stronger.”

“But did you see what happened with the guy who approaches Terrelle? The blond-haired guy?”

The man sounded annoyed. “What are you talking about?”

I explained what I'd found on the surveillance video and told him I believed I had seen the man caught on tape in the past few days.

“What's his name?”

“I don't know who he is, but it looks like he's telling Terrelle to do something, and then he keeps watching him.”

“Wait, didn't Conley already confess to this?”

“He did, but it was the only way the transplant for my son could go through.”

“And you're trying to get the governor to change his mind?”

“Detective, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just telling the truth as I get the information and this guy on the street doesn't look right to me.”

“So what do you think he says to Conley? You think he says, ‘Go up to the girl when she comes out of the salon and tell her you're going to kill her'?”

“I don't know what he says, but he's talking with Terrelle for a long time. It's really suspicious.”

“Suspicious doesn't get you much at this point, Mr. Wiley. It may have at the trial or a few years ago as new evidence, but at this point it will just look like grasping.”

“I don't know if he did it, Detective.”

The man sighed heavily as if he had just eaten an entire pizza. Wait, that was me.

“Have you talked to Terrelle?” he said. “Does he remember the guy?”

“He said he only remembered what happened that day because he saw the video.”

“Show it to him. See if it jogs something. You'll probably have to work through his lawyer to get him to see evidence. My guess is, this changes nothing, and you'll only endanger your chances of the transplant if you go further.”

“One more thing. You know anybody who can run a license plate for me?”

“Wiley, I think it's time to give this up. I'm sorry to say that.”

I hung up. Abby stared at the screen watching the time code. “You have to take this to the police. His lawyer. The judge. Somebody.”

“We just talked to the investigator who agrees with us. The police and prosecutor used this to convict Terrelle.”

“Yeah, but there's no way they saw that. They didn't look closely enough. And if the police aren't going to help, go to the governor.”

“Abby, Terrelle confessed. He waived all of his appeal rights.”

“Then why are you showing me? You can't spike this.”

“You think I plan to?” I got up and walked to the window and looked out on our backyard. The old swing set was back there. The one I had sunk in the ground with concrete. It had settled at a weird angle. Abby's handprints were out there along with Aiden's. Swinging was one thing he could do and I remembered pushing his little back as gently as I could and the squeak and squawk of the metal on metal.

For some reason I thought of my father. Maybe because I remember sitting on the swing set behind our house in the dark. He would come home drunk or would get that way downstairs watching football on Sundays and come upstairs. I learned to hate Sundays. But then Sundays turned into Mondays and just about any day of the week was a good one to drink and things spiraled down, out of control.

Though I had tried to live my life differently, never taking Aiden to an NFL game or watching much more than the play-offs and Super Bowl because of my father's rabid and drunken obeisance, I saw the swing set as a monument to my own mistakes. I hadn't inflicted pain on my family with drugs or booze, but I had damaged my wife and children by crawling into something equally as damaging. My work. My ambition. Myself. And the swing set was the sullen reminder of all I had missed, all I had sacrificed so I could chase fame and wind up alone in a room typing a story. As my father before me, I had escaped pain, or at least numbed it for a while with gambling and my work, but I had ultimately lost what I was really looking for.

“What are you going to do?” Abby said.

I tried to think of something snappy, something humorous to say. I wanted to give her a steely look, like in one of those men's magazines, and assure her everything was going to be okay. But the only thing that came out when I opened my mouth was “I don't know.”