Trace of Doubt (4 page)

Chapter 5

I
trained my gun on the paper silhouette at the end of the firing range. Six shots later I had nailed my target square between the eyes, twice in the heart, once in the belly, once in the shoulder and once pretty close to where his family jewels might be.

I knew I was a good shot. What troubled me was knowing that if I ever came face-to-face with someone, conditions wouldn’t be like the firing range, where I could concentrate and focus and aim ever so accurately. Guns were my father’s and Mikey’s territory, not mine. When I fired my handgun, I usually pictured myself coolly facing down my mother’s killer, channeling my anguish into something powerful and calculatingly devastating.

I took off my ear muffs and safety glasses, put my gun in its holster and checked my watch. It was time to go home. David and I had made plans to take Bo to the park.

As I left the firing range, I thought about Marcus’s case. And my mother’s. DNA isn’t done on every case. Now, more and more, it is, but there just isn’t enough money—particularly if you have a public defender, like Marcus did. Sometimes, in old cases, tests weren’t done simply because they didn’t exist at the time, or because the advances in technology were too new. For instance, now we can test with smaller fragments of DNA than ten years ago. The specimen doesn’t have to be as pure. The tiny drop of blood found in Marcus’s case didn’t belong to him or his victim. It opened a window for his possible release.

I walked the five blocks to my car. I had parked it down a side street. The neighborhood wasn’t the best; it was a warehouse district, and Saturday left it abandoned. I instinctively shook my head to clear my mind and pay better attention. I walked taller and deliberately appeared more confident. I had been in plenty of seedy bars in tough parts of town with Dad and Mikey. If you don’t look for trouble, but don’t appear afraid, you’re more likely to be left alone.

I reached my Caddy and started to climb in, but noticed a large brown envelope tucked under the windshield wiper blade on the passenger side. I walked around my car and retrieved it, opening it right away.

Then I screamed. Inside was a thick lock of human hair with what looked like dried bits of blood attached to it. I squinted and looked closer. The hair definitely had once been caked in blood. Someone had left me a “souvenir.”

I scanned the street. I didn’t see anyone, and it could have been left for me two hours before, when I first arrived at the shooting range. Then I got an eerie feeling. I couldn’t identify it precisely, but a cold chill tingled at the back of my neck. I had the sense I was being watched. I told myself it was because I was unnerved by the sickening present left for me, but I wasn’t so sure.

Hands shaking, I unlocked the car door on the passenger side and put the envelope on the seat. Then I took my gun from its holster and whirled around. No one was visible anywhere, but I spied an open bay on the warehouse to my left.

Quickly I dashed the few yards to the cement stairs leading up into the bay and climbed them to the open door. I went from the hot, blazing sunlight into the cavernous dark of an unlit warehouse. It was cooler, but also stuffy. I could smell old diesel fuel or gasoline, and could hear the scurrying of rats. Then I heard someone running in heavy boots or shoes.

“Who’s there?” I shouted. With my gun drawn, I ran in the direction of the footfall. The further I followed, the darker the warehouse was.

Boxes were stacked high all around me. I stopped for a minute, straining to hear where the person was running to next, but all I could hear was my own heartbeat in my ears, my breath ragged and seemingly loud enough to echo. I was both terrified and determined to discover who had left me the package.

As I rounded one set of boxes, I glimpsed a guy in black pants and a black jacket running away. It was hot as hell, and my first thought was he must be a drug addict to be dressed in dark colors with long sleeves on a day with the temperature hitting ninety-two in the shade. Maybe he had the damp chills of withdrawal. I couldn’t get a decent look at him in the darkness beyond figuring he was about five foot ten or eleven. I ran faster. A window was broken in the back of the warehouse, allowing light to come through a few cracks, almost like shards of sun. As I got a little closer to the person who’d obviously left me a souvenir, my heart pounded more wildly. He was wearing a mask. A creepy flesh-colored one that fit him like second skin, a Halloween-type mask.

I was instantly conscious of my gun. I tried to think clearly.
Fire the gun, Billie, and you had better be prepared to kill him.
To kill another human being. For what? Leaving me a weird package. I decided that retreating and calling the cops was a much smarter option.

I turned and did a complete about-face, running the other way now, keeping my gun at my side. I bumped against a tall stack of boxes, which teetered and fell over on top of me. The cardboard boxes, heavy with—according to their labels—electronics, smashed against me, knocking me to the hard cement warehouse floor. One hit my head, and I felt like I chipped a back tooth. My gun clattered to the floor next to me.

Panic started to overtake me. I shoved my arms out as hard as I could, pushing off the boxes, grabbing my gun and standing up. My assailant was nowhere to be seen.

I climbed out of the pile of boxes and ran for the bay door. Looking out, I didn’t see him, but my eyes burned, and tears involuntarily formed from the sudden sting of bright sunlight. I leaped down and reached my car, opening my door with my left hand—shaking a bit, fumbling for the lock because I’m right-handed—one eye on the bay, aware of my gun in my right hand.

Gratefully I got the door open.

I hurriedly clambered in and shut the door, locked it, and put my gun on the seat next to me. I jammed the keys in the ignition, fighting the rising tide of panic, feeling like I was drowning in my own heartbeat.

Thank God, my Caddy is a dream. Her engine raced, and I pulled away from the curb with a screech of my tires. Looking in my rearview mirror, I saw him emerge from the warehouse, his masked face, almost like a burn victim’s, expressionless and waxy. His hair, I saw, was a cheap wig. I gunned the car and as I picked up speed, I looked again in my rearview mirror, but he was gone, almost as if it had been some weird nightmare. As if it had never really happened. I didn’t even dial the cops. They’d think it was some weird attempt to scare me. A stalker. I drove, pedal nearly to the floor, until I was ten or fifteen blocks away. Then I followed signs for the Turnpike. When I reached the highway, I pulled into the first rest stop. Only when I was parked and feeling safe, did I allow my sheer terror to bubble to the surface. My hands shook, my teeth chattered, and I wanted to scream aloud. I gripped my sides and rocked back against my seat until I felt the horror of that creep subside. Then I tried to think.

Was he the man who murdered my mother?

Or did he have something to do with a case?

Either way, I decided from now on, I was going to be armed. And I had a sneaking suspicion Tommy Salami was going to be visiting me very soon. Lewis was my best friend, and if I told him what happened, I knew he’d tell my Dad. It was the only time he ever betrayed a confidence: if he felt I was in danger. And for only the second time in my life, I had to agree. I really and truly was.

Chapter 6

I
n the predawn hours of Sunday morning, Bo leaped on the bed and licked David’s face to beg him to go out. David groaned but rose and slipped into shorts to take him. I rolled over and snuggled deeper under the covers, where I felt safe.

About fifteen minutes later David returned, dropped his shorts to the floor and slid back into bed with me. He spooned around me, his body like a perfect sculpture, like the statue of David. “I love you, Billie.”

“Love you, too,” I murmured.

“I really wish you’d call the police.” He kissed the nape of my neck and with tiny flicks of his tongue, kissed all the way to my shoulder, which was bruised from my fall in the warehouse.

“No.” After my attack, I had driven to the lab to have the souvenir in the envelope processed. “I think it has to do with my mother’s case. And they didn’t help my family before, so it’s not like I want their help now. You, more than anyone, should understand that.”

When David was arrested, he had an iffy alibi but impeccable character witnesses—and no visible motive. But the police seemed only too happy to consider the case closed. Of course, it turned out one of the men in blue had done it.

He kissed my bare shoulder. “I do.”

We lay there in silence for a while. Sometimes, David and I were like two islands, separated by the choppy waters of the tragedies that had happened to each of us. Sometimes we clung to each other desperately, like two survivors of a shipwreck.

The sun came up, and I rose and made a pot of coffee. I fed my cat and then showered and got ready for the long ride to see Marcus.

This particular Sunday I liked the quiet of the four-hour or so drive to Dannemora, which rises like a fortress in upstate New York. My family, anyone who’s spent time there, calls it Little Siberia. In the winter, Oneida County might as well be the real Siberia. Snowfall is measured in
feet,
not inches. The lake system means lots of white-outs, snow and fog blowing in off the water. It’s desolate and despairing. And in the midst of this harsh landscape, the stone prison rises, forbidding, like an evil queen’s torturous snow palace.

In contrast, during the summer, the area around Dannemora is green and lush. But it’s still isolated. No one else lives in Clinton, New York, except the prison guards, workers and their families. I mean, others do, but the town mostly exists for the support of Little Siberia.

I’ve spent much of my life visiting relatives in prison, including my grandfather. Each penitentiary has its own atmosphere and variations on the rules. My father and Mikey usually served at minimum-security facilities. I had uncles who served in Dannemora, Sing-Sing and Auburn. One of my more troubled cousins even got involved in a major drug-trafficking scheme and is serving in the escape-proof federal facility in Leavenworth, Kansas. He’ll be there a long time, thanks to minimum-sentencing guidelines. He’s gone practically mad from the lack of human contact there—his behavior’s earned him time in a lockdown section where no natural light ever makes its way in.

Prison has sounds like no other place. An echoing roar of male voices, almost like a buzzing hive of killer bees. Bars clanging, buzzers sounding, shouts, screams, catcalls, whistles, televisions blaring. If you watch carefully, you can see men communicating with hand signals. Gang signs flash. When I arrived at Dannemora, I waited to be processed, identified as one of Marcus Hopkins’s defense-team members. Eventually I was shown to a meeting room where Marcus and I could talk.

Guards in dark-blue uniforms brought him in. Marcus sat down and flashed me a half smile. He had two deep-set dimples and was still boyish despite packing on forty pounds of muscle in the prison yard over the years. In a world where justice worked perfectly, he would have been off at college, flashing that smile at girls, and spending his days in the library. His IQ was 139. He had a lock on a scholarship out of the projects until he was railroaded.

“Hi, Marcus.” I smiled back at him. I was a poor substitute for C.C., who had made prison ministry her life. I couldn’t quote the Bible or Camus or Sartre, or Buddha or Thich Nhat Hanh, or any of the thousands of wise words and quotations she had for these men. I knew she combed Emerson, C. S. Lewis, and the Bible for bits of hope. A phrase to hold on to when the nights were dark and the days seemed darker. I had only a passing acquaintance with God. C.C. and God, on the other hand, were on a first-name basis.

“Anything new on my case?”

“We went to the basketball court to retrace the crime. We tested the drop of blood—not a match for you or Kenora. So that’s something. We’re tracking her down to interview her. She left the projects. Any idea where she might have gone? You hear anything?”

He shrugged. “My grandmother died. Don’t have anybody living there anymore.”

“We’ll find her. You doing okay in here?” I internally berated myself. What was he supposed to say?

“Drives me crazy not being free. When I get out of here, it’s going to take me a long, long time to wash the stench of prison off me. I sometimes picture it. Taking a shower with near-boiling water and scrubbing my skin until it’s raw and bloody. But I still don’t know if that will do the trick.”

I thought of David. I could see the times he was far away from me. Back in prison—in his mind. Sometimes, I came home when he was in the middle of doing his sit-ups and push-ups. He could do five hundred of each without blinking. While he was doing them, his face was intense, stoic, as if he was in his cell doing them in a fury for the injustice done to him.

“Marcus.” I squinted at him. He was bouncing his leg up and down as he talked, fidgeting. “You nervous about something?”

He nodded and looked down at the table. Then he looked up at me. “I was in the library. Looking up some stuff pertinent to my case. Just reading up in some law books. Got to talking to another guy in there. Mentioned the foundation taking on my case.”

He fidgeted with his fingers. “Next day, I’m in the yard. I ended up being asked to go sit with some white guy who kind of runs The Mob boys.”

I was familiar with the way the yard worked. Mob boys—Italians. Mob boys—Irish. Black guys. Black Muslim guys. Gang bangers divided by gang. Mexicans. Mexicans who identified themselves as Chicano. Prison was really a microcosm for how most of the world worked. Everyone stayed with their own kind. Land of the free, home of the brave, but most people wouldn’t break bread with someone from another race in their day-to-day lives.

“Okay. What did he want?” I presumed it was for us to take his case, too. And I thought it would be a very hot day in January in Little Siberia before I got involved defending The Mob.

“His name’s Marty O’Hare. And he wanted me to give you a message. Says to tell you he’s your old man’s rival, and everyone knows your old man isn’t your old man.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Means, Billie, that Marty says your mother was having an affair when she died. And your father isn’t really your father.”

The already-close, drab walls of our meeting room started feeling closer.

“What is he talking about?”

“He said to look into it.”

“I’m not in the mood for another wild-goose chase. Who does this asshole think he is?”

“Billie,” Marcus held up his hands. “Don’t shoot the messenger. I didn’t even want to deliver the message. But they said they’d watch my back a little if I did.”

I blushed, feeling ashamed at lashing out at him. “I’m sorry, Marcus. I didn’t mean to give you a hard time. I just don’t understand.”

He shrugged. The two of us chatted for a while. Then my visiting time was up. When C.C. left on her retreat, I swore to her I would visit “our boys”—the cases we took on. I rotated who I visited and tried to see one or two a month to offer hope, offer contact, to let them know the world had not forgotten them.

“You know you can call collect anytime,” I said as I bid him goodbye. It always hurt to leave him there, believing in my heart he was innocent. I remembered leaving David in prison and driving away, feeling a steady ache in my chest. Sometimes, and I never even told Lewis this, I used to cry when I left David. I never knew how C.C. did it. All those lost men, falsely imprisoned. But she got her strength from something far greater than herself.

I got back in my car and settled in for the long ride home. It would be well after dark by the time I got there, but I was grateful for the drive. It gave me a chance to go over things in my mind before I had to deal with Lewis—or my Dad. I turned the dial to a jazz station—music without words that would let me turn over things in my head.

I had assumed my mom was murdered by a serial killer. Was it possible that all this time it was a personal murder?

Statistically people are killed by those closest to them. It’s personal. It’s vengeful. It’s that moment someone snaps. Or it’s that cold, calculating moment when a man decides he doesn’t want to pay out child support for the rest of his life and he strangles his pregnant wife to death. That’s what got Scott Peterson. He was a cold-blooded murderer, and he was having an affair, and the minute those cops took the call, they knew. They may have kept an open mind, but they knew. The stats were on their side. And if they were patient long enough, they’d nail him. And they did.

I hadn’t thought, in all these years, that my mother had been anything but what I saw. I had never asked my aunt if my mother had been having an affair. If it was true, I didn’t hate her. She was human. No one was perfect. But I would be upset with myself for neglecting the obvious. I guess it had seemed disrespectful to my parents’ marriage to even think about it.

I swallowed hard as I drove down the New York Thruway. Upstate, it’s so clear and perfect. I passed by lakes and signs for cabins. A person could chop up a body and bury it up here and no one would ever find it. That’s what my work made me think. Not
What lovely scenery.
No, I thought,
Wonder how fast the maggots would invade up here.

I shook my head, and my thoughts shifted back to my parents. Does every child believe in the fairy tale of their parents’ love until divorce or some other dirty secret? I firmly believed they were the loves of each other’s lives. But maybe the police weren’t totally wrong. Maybe she had tired of the life. Maybe one too many calls at 3:00 a.m. to bring bail money, or one too many times that he came home with a bag of cash that she couldn’t ask any questions about.

I knew the O’Hare name. He and my father had been rivals, until Marty got caught in a major sting having to do with fake lottery scratch-offs. When cornered, Marty opened fire on the cops—thus earning him a nice, long stretch in Little Siberia. Was this just Marty’s way of exacting a little revenge on Dad? Or was it true? Did my mother’s lover have something to do with her disappearance? Could it be that after spending my entire life with the Quinns, the rowdy, rough but ultimately loyal clan, that I wasn’t really a Quinn at all?