The Law of Second Chances (3 page)

“The murder has already been committed,” he’d invariably tell her. “I’m just mop-up duty.” But Mary never bought it. Every time he walked out that door, she was afraid that he might not come back. All she had to do was read the papers to be assured of that possibility.

This night was no different. When the phone rang at a few minutes to eleven, Mary wouldn’t go near it.

“Can you get that?” Nick yelled from his seat in the bathroom. Mary picked up the phone without answering it and walked it to the bathroom. She opened the door and extended her arm and the phone to her husband without looking in.

“Here,” she said. Nick was able to reach out and grab the phone while maintaining his seat on the throne.

“Walsh,” he answered, just like he was in the squad room. That frosted Mary. The man was never off duty, even at home—even on the toilet.

“Nick, this is Severino.” Anthony Severino was Nick’s latest partner in homicide. They’d been together for almost a year. Nick was the senior man by about ten years.

“Yeah, Tony, whaddaya got?”

“Some high-powered guy got whacked about an hour ago on Seventy-eighth and East End. The captain wants us down there right away.”

“All right, I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

Nick and Mary lived in the same rent-controlled apartment on Ninety-seventh and Park where Nick had grown up with his parents and two younger brothers. It was the only way they could afford to live in the city. Mary’s dream was a house upstate, or in New Jersey or Rockaway Beach—they could never afford Long Island—but Nick wouldn’t hear of it.

“People get murdered all over the city at all hours of the day and night,” he told her. “I can’t be driving in from the suburbs like some commuter. I gotta be there right away. Besides, you’re living on Park Avenue.” It was a quip that had always made Mary laugh in the early years. The real Park Avenue ended at the imaginary line south of Ninety-sixth Street. Nowadays, after all the years of being a cop’s wife and making the necessary sacrifices, she simply ignored the remark.

Twenty minutes later Nick was standing over the body of Carl Robertson, his eyes exploring every detail of the dead man’s body—searching for the obscure clue. It was one of the things that separated him from the run-of-the-mill homicide detective. In this case, there was nothing subtle about the fact that Carl had met his demise as a result of a gunshot wound to the head.

The place was swarming with uniformed police officers, gawkers, and reporters from both print and television. Nick was the guy in charge, and he looked the part. He was a big man, a few inches over six feet, with broad shoulders and an ample waistline that he carried well, even though it seemed to be growing an inch or two each year. He was constantly telling himself that he was going to start working out “one of these days.” Tony Severino, on the other hand, worked out like a madman, but in some respects it did him no good. At the end of the day, Tony was still short and stocky.

A perimeter had been set up with tape before the two
detectives arrived. The perimeter was supposed to secure the crime scene, but too often everybody—cops included—just walked through like it was Disneyland. That wasn’t going to happen on Nick Walsh’s watch.

“Get those uniforms outside the tape line,” he told Tony. “I don’t want the crime scene destroyed. Have them do crowd control or something.” Technically, uniforms and detectives were the same rank, but at a homicide scene the detectives were in control. “And get the fuckin’ press as far away from here as you can,” Nick added. He hated the press. They had a tendency to report what they wanted to report, regardless of the facts—although Nick wasn’t above using a reporter from time to time to put out a story.

Tony set about giving the uniforms assignments outside the lines and moving the press and everybody else out of the way.

When he had finished his initial investigation of the corpse and the immediate area surrounding it, Nick strode over to the assistant medical examiner on the scene, Dan Jenkins, who was standing just a few feet away directing his people and making notes.

“Whaddaya got so far, Dan?”

“It seems open-and-shut, Nick, although you and I both know it’s never open-and-shut.” Nick nodded. They both had been doing this long enough to know that nothing was as it seemed. “It looks like death was caused by a single bullet to the brain. I don’t know if you have this yet, but the woman who called this in said she heard a noise that sounded like a gunshot a few minutes after ten. She looked out her window and saw the deceased there lying on the ground. She also saw a man—apparently the shooter—kneel over the deceased while he was on the ground, then get up and run away. She was too far away to give a description and she didn’t know if he took anything from the deceased or not.”

“What about time of death?” Nick asked.

“It’s a little early to say definitely”—it was a disclaimer Nick always expected and usually received—“but rigor mortis has not set in yet, and from the coagulation of the blood in
the ankles I’d say offhand that everything shut down about ten o’clock.”

Coroners
, Nick thought.
They have such an interesting way of describing death
.

“Thanks, Dan. I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot of each other in the next few days and weeks.”

“Yeah,” Dan groaned. “You know, Nick, I was scheduled to be off tonight. Just my luck to get one of these high-profile cases where everybody is breathing down your neck.”

“I’m with you,” Nick replied. “Who the fuck was this guy anyway?”

“Some super-rich oil guy.”

“Jesus. Let’s see if we can put this to bed as quickly as possible.”

“Sure thing, Nick. Okay if I take the body? I want to get it out of here before the reporters start sticking their heads down his shorts looking for a scoop.”

Nick laughed. It wasn’t far from the truth. “He’s all yours.”

“Thanks, Nick.”

As Nick watched Dan Jenkins assemble his people and equipment to transport the body to the morgue, the assistant chief, Ralph Hitchens, sidled up next to him.

“Looks like a robbery gone bad,” he said, trying to sound like he knew what he was talking about. In twenty years in homicide, Nick had never seen Ralph Hitchens at a murder scene before.

Nick stifled the urge to say,
No, Sherlock, it looks like a murder
. Instead, he just nodded in agreement as he watched Dan Jenkins’s young assistant load the body onto a stretcher. He didn’t like to miss any of the details, especially in a high-profile case like this.

“Any thoughts so far, Detective?” Hitchens asked.

Nick couldn’t bring himself to ignore the question. The assistant chief was nothing more than a glorified pencil pusher: they had entered the academy together and graduated at the same time, but while Nick went directly to the street, old Ralphie boy became some captain’s clerk. Nobody who knew Ralph Hitchens back then would ever have picked him as a
leader of men. They might have picked him as the guy most likely to piss his pants in a gun battle, but that was about it. He rose in rank the way most of them did, sticking their nose up enough asses until they were rewarded for the endeavor.
Politics
, Nick thought with that exact picture in his mind.
No wonder it stinks!

“Well, it’s definitely a homicide, Chief. Bullet wound to the head,” Nick deadpanned. Over to his left, Nick noticed that Tony Severino, recently returned from his crowd-management duties, was fighting to keep from laughing out loud.

Ralph Hitchens’s jaw tensed. He clearly was not amused by the remark.

“I want this case wrapped up quickly, Walsh. You’ve got an eyewitness.”

Is this shithead for real?
Nick fumed to himself.
Yeah, Chief, there’s an eyewitness who saw someone next to the body. That narrows it down to eight million people, you schmuck!
He decided to pull the prick’s chain a little longer.
What the hell, I’m vested
.

“I’ll get right on it, Chief. An unidentified male shouldn’t be too hard to find.”

As he said the words, Nick realized all he needed was a description to solve the case. Whoever did this crime was probably in the system somewhere.

Thanks, Chief!
he said to himself.
I wouldn’t have thought of that right away if I hadn’t been busting your balls
.

3

Florida, 1998

Clang!
The gates of the maximum-security state prison in Starke, Florida, slammed shut behind Jack Tobin as he entered. It wasn’t an unfamiliar sound. This had been his work for the last two years—representing people on death row. There were aspects of the endeavor that he loved and aspects that he hated. One of the things he hated most was entering the prison, with its dank odors and its chaotic sounds bouncing off the bare walls and steel bars and ricocheting up and down the corridors. The racket reminded him of the Central Park Zoo when he was a kid, when it was the sounds of animals that rang in his ears and the smells of their excrement that filled his nostrils. Zoos had changed since then. Apparently, some experts decided that animals thrived in a more open, natural environment.
Maybe someday a lightbulb will go off somewhere and they’ll realize that a better environment might work for human beings as well
, Jack thought as he walked down the corridor and into the visiting room accompanied by a uniformed guard.

He was visiting an inmate named Henry Wilson. Jack did not know the complete details of the case. He knew that Wilson, who was black, had a rap sheet about six miles long, that he had been a criminal and a drug addict his entire adult life, and that he’d been convicted seventeen years ago of murdering a drug dealer named Clarence Waterman.

Jack had been a very successful civil trial lawyer in Miami for twenty years. He had started his own firm, and
when it grew to one hundred lawyers and he could no longer stand it, he had negotiated a twenty-million-dollar buyout of his interest. He had planned on retiring to the little town of Bass Creek near Lake Okeechobee and becoming a part-time country lawyer and a full-time fisherman. Other matters intervened, however. First, the governor offered him the position of state’s attorney for that county. Even though he didn’t want the job, he couldn’t say no. And then he learned that his best friend from his childhood years in New York, Mike Kelly, had died, and that Mike’s son, Rudy, was on death row in Florida. Thus began a quest to save Rudy from the electric chair. It was through the process of representing Rudy that Jack realized he had a calling and that his particular calling was to represent death-row inmates.

The visiting room was as stark and uninviting as the rest of the facility, with nothing in it but a steel table and steel chairs bolted to the ground. Jack took his seat and waited for the sound of Henry Wilson coming down the hall. It was always the same. You heard them long before you saw them: chains clanging, feet shuffling. Still, Jack was shocked when Henry Wilson walked in the room. He was an imposing figure, standing at least six feet, five inches tall with a wide, thick, muscular frame. His brown eyes were dark and inset, and the corners of his lips turned downward in a perpetual scowl. He looked like he could break his shackles, overpower the guards, and walk through the walls to freedom anytime he wanted.

Jack also noticed that there were three guards with Henry Wilson instead of the usual two and they were watching Wilson’s every move. Jack took his cue from them.

Henry shuffled in and stood in front of the bolted chair on the opposite side of the table. “Hello, Mr. Wilson, I’m Jack Tobin,” he said rising from his seat. He did not offer his hand because he noticed that Henry’s cuffs were shackled to a waist belt. “I’m a lawyer.”

Henry Wilson looked across at the man standing on the opposite side of the table. He appeared to be in his late forties, early fifties, and he had a tough, weathered look about
him—kind of like an old marine. At six-two, Jack was not quite as tall as Henry; his thinning gray hair was short and he looked fit, even muscular. Henry Wilson said nothing in reply to Jack’s introduction. He simply gave the lawyer a bored look.

They both sat down, Henry filling his chair and then some. Jack could feel his disdain.

“I’m with Exoneration. It’s a death penalty advocacy group located here in the state of Florida,” Jack continued. The mention of Exoneration seemed to strike a chord with Henry. He finally spoke.

“I’ve dealt with your organization before, Mr. Tobin. They handled my second appeal approximately six years ago. I guess my name has come up because my execution date is two months away, am I right?”

“I expect so,” Jack replied, somewhat surprised. The man was articulate. “No matter what the reason, they’ve asked me to look at your case again. I haven’t really reviewed your file. I wanted to meet you first.”

“I see,” Henry said. “You’re trying to get your own read on me.”

“Something like that,” Jack replied. That was certainly part of it. He wanted to see and feel the man’s own commitment to his innocence. It wouldn’t affect whether he took the case or not. The evidence, or lack of it, would make that decision.

“Well, you do what you gotta do.”

“You don’t sound too enthused,” Jack said.

Henry smiled at Jack like he was a schoolboy about to learn a valuable new lesson.

“It’s like this, Counselor. I’ve been here for seventeen years. I’ve talked to more lawyers than I care to remember. I’ve heard more promises than a priest in the confessional. And only one thing remains constant: I’m still here.”

Jack had heard a version of that line a time or two in the recent past. Anybody who had been in prison that many years had long ago lost any realistic hope of release. “Let me tell you this, Mr. Wilson: I will make no promises to you—
ever. I will review your file thoroughly after this conversation and I will conduct my own investigation. If I believe there is a basis for requesting a new trial, I will discuss that with you, and we’ll decide together whether to move forward or not. If I don’t think there is a basis, I will tell you that as well. Fair enough?”