The Death Factory

by Greg Iles

  “Even without the DNA evidence?”

  “I think so. She was that compelling. But Mitch Gaines was immune to that kind of emotion. For him, it came down to a simple calculation. Could he win the case on the merits or not? Purely on the evidence.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I gave Rosabel some money and told her I’d look into it. I didn’t promise anything. I really didn’t think I could do much. The thing was done. Gaines would have been livid if he’d known I even visited that apartment, and Joe Cantor, too. I was way off the reservation. But like Felix Vargas, I couldn’t let it go.”

  At the northern edge of the Garden District, I start up the long, gradual incline that leads to the high ground of the Natchez City Cemetery. To our right, in a low hollow, an oil well pumps lazily in the first shadows of dusk, but then we crest the hill and break back into the sunlight, where the redbrick pile of the Charity Hospital once towered over the vast cemetery like a factory providing corpses for the hungry fields below. As an overly imaginative boy, I had nightmares of orderlies shoving newly dead patients into the old-fashioned tubular fire escapes and sliding them down to waiting gravediggers, or worse, body snatchers. As crazy as it sounds, I was almost relieved when an arsonist burned down the antebellum hospital in 1984.

  Passing the empty slab that once supported the massive building, I drive down to the second of four wrought-iron gates that offer access to the cemetery. This is the place where real life and my novels meet, deep in the overgrown shadows where the small stones of the anonymous dead trail out into the woods and the proud obelisks erected for forgotten bishops and generals rise into the rays of the dying sun. Taking one of the narrow lanes, I make for Jewish Hill, an earthen promontory that rises twenty feet above the rim of the two-hundred-foot bluff facing the Mississippi River.

  Jack is staring past me, into the seemingly limitless reach of space over the river and the delta lands of Louisiana, but his mind is still in Texas, which also lies in that direction. “So did you finally call your old boss?”

  “No. On my way home, I called a cop I knew and found out who’d worked the Avila case. Turned out to be a female detective, Eve Washington. I gave her a call, and Washington confirmed my instinct. She believed the Conley kid had done the rape. She didn’t buy his alibi about getting stoned out by the airport. She didn’t believe his friends, either. But she had no way to break their alibi. She’d searched every place she could think of for that Sony Mavica and the picture of Maribel, but it was nowhere on any property owned by Conley, his relatives, or his friends. ‘The forensic findings fucked us,’ she said. That’s what I remember. I asked her to go back over all the evidence and see if they might have missed anything, and especially to keep hunting for that picture. She promised to do it, and to keep quiet about my call—and she probably did, for a few hours. But most detectives at the HPD knew me, and after talking to me, Washington knew that I might be making some waves. If I was going to do anything quietly, I had to move fast.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I didn’t have any choice. I went home and took my shift at Sarah’s bed. I spent some time with Annie and my folks. Then I drove over to the motel and updated Sarah’s father, who was pretty close to the edge. Stone drunk and cold sober at the same time, if you can imagine. Like a drunk man facing a firing squad.”

  Jack looks out at the passing gravestones. “I can’t even imagine being in his position. Not really. When Frances’s attacks have been their worst, I’ve seen hints of what the end might be like. But to imagine my daughter dying before my eyes . . . no.”

  I could not speak of this with anyone other than my father or his brother. “You know what it was like?” I almost whisper. “When Sarah was in that half-drugged state, between sleep and wakefulness, and I looked into her eyes . . . it was like watching someone drift away from you in a boat on the open sea, with nothing you can do to reach them.”

  Jack nods slowly, saying nothing.

  “That night, as I sat by the bed, holding her clammy hand, everything I’d seen and heard that day went to work on me. And while I sat there, the unalterable reality finally settled into my bones. No matter what I did, Sarah was going to die. But Maribel Avila was different. I couldn’t turn back time and prevent that rape, but I could make sure she didn’t have to worry about that son of a bitch coming back and getting her again—which rapists sometimes do—or raping anybody else. And once I got that thought in my head, I felt a little like my old self. My younger self. Righteous anger, you know? A man on a mission.”

  “Oh, hell. Nothing gets you in trouble quicker than self-righteousness.”

  “Yeah, I know. At about eleven, after Mom came in to relieve me, I called Vargas’s cell number. ‘I want to see the crime lab,’ I told him. ‘If it’s so bad over there, I want to see it with my own eyes.’

  “By that time Felix wanted no part of what he’d started. He was in survival mode. But I shamed him into going.”

  A faint smile touches Jack’s mouth.

  “He was scared shitless, but he took me up there. Hell, the security guard recognized me from the old days, waved me right in.”

  “How bad was it?”

  “It was a defense lawyer’s wet dream.” I shake my head at the memory. “In one room alone, the roof leaked so badly that specimens were obviously contaminated. There was diluted blood on the floor. Some evidence was stored in such a way that cross-contamination was inevitable. Houston’s hot as hell in the summer, and they had oscillating fans on the tables. In rooms where they analyzed hair and fiber evidence! It was a disgrace. I’d had no idea, really. None of us did. I guess Dr. Kirmani had the place cleaned up whenever he knew ADAs were coming over.”

  “But surely the police knew about this?”

  “They claim they didn’t.”

  “Shit.” Jack looks incredulous. “And you had no suspicions prior to this?”

  “I’d always had a weird feeling about Dr. Kirmani. He seemed to enjoy testifying a little too much. You know, putting on the suit and playing the part of condescending expert to a bunch of laymen on the jury. And about a year before Vargas came to see me, there’d been a public scandal over a guy who’d gotten left in the county jail for seven months while awaiting DNA analysis in his case. And he was innocent.”

  “Christ.”

  “Yeah. Anyway, because of that feeling about Kirmani, I’d always made absolutely sure of my forensic evidence. When I had DNA evidence in capital cases, I always made Joe pay for outside geneticists to do the testimony. I wanted my cases bulletproof, so that when Barry Scheck or Alan Dershowitz came down the pike with some pro bono appeal years later—which was inevitable in Harris County—they wouldn’t find one hair out of place.”

  “Penn, it really stretches credibility that no one in authority knew about this.”

  “Not as much as you think. Kirmani was a master at manipulation. He hired people who were either barely qualified or lacked credentials, so they didn’t have the courage to challenge him. He kept a few competent people to whom he channeled the bulk of the work he didn’t understand. And his superiors had less technical knowledge than he did. They were awed by his advanced degree. Think about it. How often do you look under your hood to check your engine? Only when some problem gets so bad you can’t ignore it, right? There’s a major independent investigation of that lab going on as we speak. But I honestly don’t think we’ll ever know who knew what, and when. I think Felix knew a hell of a lot more than he told me about, but he kept quiet for fear of incriminating himself.”

  I park the BMW at the top of Jewish Hill, and we get out and walk to the end of the promontory, where a wire bench stands beneath a lonely flagpole. Behind the well-tended brick walls up here stand the graves of the Jews who came to Natchez in the nineteenth century and did as much as anyone to build the thriving mercantile business that eventually competed with cotton farming. We sit on the bench, but the vast panorama laid out before us seems to hold
little interest for Jack.

  “Let’s hear it,” he says. “Tell me you blew the story wide open.”

  “Nope. By the time I got home from the crime lab, I was exhausted. Still, I couldn’t sleep. I went into Annie’s room and kissed her forehead, then went into the sickroom. Mom and Sarah’s mother were sitting on opposite sides of Sarah’s bed, hunched over her skeletal figure in the half-light. In that moment they looked like ancient women tending a leper in biblical times. I asked them to give me some time alone with her, and they vanished without a sound. Sarah was in that narcotized trance that substituted for sleep near the end. I’d wanted to talk to her, but she only had a few lucid moments before dawn. She couldn’t focus long. The brain metastases had initially caused only hand weakness, things like that. But by the end, her memory was severely affected. That was one of the most frightening things for her. For me, too, to be honest. It’s as though certain things you’ve done together never really happened, because they’ve been erased from the other person’s memory.

  “At some point during the night, I fell asleep. After dawn, I started awake in a cold sweat, certain that Sarah was dead. I leaned down over her face, the way you do with an infant sometimes, and I heard nothing. But when I touched her face, she stirred, then gasped.

  “‘Everything’s okay,’ I told her. ‘Are you there? Are you with me?’

  “She nodded uncertainly. ‘Is Annie all right?’

  “‘Yes, she’s sleeping. What about you? Are you all right?’

  “Somehow, through the thick fog in her eyes, I saw the girl I’d married. ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘I see you.’

  “She stared back at me for a long time. Then she said, ‘This isn’t fair.’

  “This was literally the first time she’d said anything like that.

  “‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘It fucking sucks.’

  “‘Did I do something to deserve this?’ she asked, looking as though she really believed she might have.

  “‘Absolutely not,’ I told her. ‘What you deserve is to live to be ninety-five and have ten grandchildren.’

  “What she did next almost killed me. Her eyes were as clear as they’d been in weeks. She clenched my hand weakly and whispered, ‘Penn, I’m scared.’

  “I pretty much lost it then. I wanted Dad to knock her out. I was like her father, in a way. I could stand seeing her in pain, but I couldn’t stand seeing her afraid.”

  Jack touches my arm and says, “I’ve been there, brother. Believe me.”

  His understanding gives me a feeling of comfort I don’t quite understand—the luxury of not having to explain, I suppose. “Not long after that, Mitch Gaines called me back. He said he’d heard I was talking to cops about the Avila case, and he was doing me the favor of saving my ass by warning me off it. He actually told me that if I persisted, I might be charged with obstruction of justice. As you might imagine, I was in no mood to be threatened. I told him he was the one whose ass was hanging in the wind, and he’d better stay out of my fucking way. Then I hung up. I was raging mad, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave Sarah’s bedside.

  “About ten that morning, her pain worsened significantly. She was moaning and crying, and Annie got freaked out. Dad could no longer keep the pain at bay without drugging Sarah senseless, which would have been a blessing. At this point, Mrs. Spencer was worn down to a shadow of herself. Only Mom and Dad were holding it together. It really looked like Sarah was going to die that day, but somehow she held on. About three P.M., she lapsed into what looked like a coma. But her vitals were still reasonably strong.”

  While Jack stares at me, waiting, I let my eyes track a quarter-mile-long string of barges moving downstream far below us. The burnt-orange containers are riding low in the water, and the rumble of the massive engines of the tugboat pushing them is but a hum from this height. Yet that steady hum enters into me like a tranquilizer, and I feel my mind coming unmoored from the present again.

  “Penn . . . ?” Jack prompts.

  “Sorry. I was going crazy just waiting, so I took that chance to call Joe Cantor. I’ll give Joe credit: he didn’t try to avoid me. We met in a quiet restaurant near my house, one we used to use during murder trials. The owner gave us a private table in the back. Joe told me it was good to see me, and he meant it. We’d tried some major cases together and put some very bad guys behind bars. It was sort of like two old soldiers meeting years after a war. He asked about Sarah, and I soft-pedaled that. I didn’t want to get into it.”

  “What kind of guy is Cantor?”

  “Unique. He’s half Jewish, but nonpracticing and fully assimilated. About the only thing Jewish about Joe Cantor is his Old Testament sense of justice. He’s not a big guy, but he’s a Texan down to his boots and bones. He looks like Rod Serling. Black hair, iron jaw, and as steely a pair of eyes as you ever saw. He never had much accent, either, which was surprising. His paternal grandfather was a Texas Ranger, and the other was a lawyer who became a judge up in Abilene. Joe himself served two tours in Vietnam before going to Rice and majoring in history. He was decorated for bravery.”

  “I guess he came by his legal philosophy honestly.”

  “He doesn’t mince words about it, either. He’ll tell you he doesn’t know whether the death penalty’s a deterrent or not, and he doesn’t care. He sees capital punishment as legal retribution by society.”

  “Got it. So how’d he take your bad news?”

  The memory of that meeting is burned into my cerebral cortex—not merely the words, but the unsettling feeling of seeing the face of one of my heroes revealed to be a mask of sorts. “Not well.”

  I remember sliding into the chair in the little private room, watching those eyes I had always seen as the personification of tough-but-fair. Joe started with small talk, some office gossip, and I sat listening to that voice the reporters loved, the one that never dodged a question, that fired off million-dollar quotes faster than you could scribble them down. The voice that even defense lawyers trusted. I was listening the way I listened to witnesses, alert to the slightest emotional dissonance, the faintest tell.

  “What put a burr under your saddle over this Avila business?” he asked suddenly.

  “I know the family,” I said. “That Conley kid raped Mirabel Avila, and Gaines pled it down because it didn’t look like a slam dunk.” Cantor didn’t look surprised, so I gave it to him straight: “You’ve got problems at the crime lab, Joe. Real problems. Daman Kirmani’s an asshole. I don’t think he’s even qualified to be doing the science he’s doing.”

  “Are you qualified to make that judgment?” Joe asked gently. “Dr. K has a Ph.D., for God’s sake.”

  “Not in chemistry. And he had no forensic experience when he was hired for that job. If I’d known that when I worked in the office, I’d have been screaming about it back then. When was the last time you went over there?”

  “The HPD crime lab? Hell . . . it’s been a good while. Years.”

  “Take my advice: pay them a visit. An unannounced visit.”

  Joe looked wary. “Why would I do that?”

  “Because I went up there last night, and it’s a mess. Rainwater is leaking through the roof, contaminating samples. I saw blood on the floor. Open samples, overheating, you name it. Flagrant violation of standard procedures for preserving the integrity of evidence.”

  Cantor was clearly perturbed, but he held himself in check. “You went to the crime lab last night? How the hell did you do that?”

  “Is that really the issue here, Joe?”

  “It might be. Penn, you resigned from my office. You’re no longer part of my staff, and you have no right to be in that crime lab.”

  I felt my face getting hot. “Who gives a shit? Wes Conley’s semen is on that carpet. Dr. Kirmani fucked up. That’s a scientific fact, like it or not.”

  “What makes you say that? The kid has a solid alibi, and the cops never found any trace of the perp’s Sony camera or the photo he shot. If Conley had taken th
at picture, he’d keep it close, so he could use it to whack off.”

  I thought about Felix Vargas, who was probably swallowing Valium by the handful in the crime lab restroom. “My word isn’t enough anymore, Joe? I tell you what I just did about your crime lab, and this is your response?”

  “It’s not my crime lab. That’s HPD, and you know they’re always stretched for resources over there. If they have problems, they’ll be fixed in due course.”

  “No, they won’t. Kirmani has set up a fiefdom that operates on the Peter Principle. Everybody rises to his or her level of incompetence. Obvious problems are being ignored, and cases are being tried on their findings. The Avila plea is a perfect example of that negligence!”

  “Negligence is a pretty strong word, Penn. I need more than unsupported accusations.”

  I told him about Dr. Kirmani failing to chemically test the carpet. Then I continued, being careful with my pronouns. “A tech in that lab saw Kirmani’s mistake and couldn’t live with it. They confronted Kirmani and got threatened with termination. This person knew that would be the likely response, but they did it anyway. The case meant that much. When that failed, and Mitch refused to do anything, the tech came to me.”

  Joe smiled, his eyes filled with a strange mixture of goodwill and regret. “To Penn Cage, the white knight.”

  “Hey, you’re the one who let everybody call me Marshal Earp.”

  A waitress came into our private room, but Joe brusquely waved her away.

  “How do you know this whistle-blower is trustworthy?” he asked.

  “Gut feeling. And you always trusted my gut, boss.”

  “Did you gut-test his alcohol level?”

  As I looked back into Joe’s eyes, my head began to spin. “You already know about this. All of it.”

  Cantor shrugged noncommittally. “I found out this morning. Mitch Gaines is shitting M-80s, he’s so pissed off. He wants to charge you with breaking-and-entering and obstruction of justice, and that’s just to start.”

  “I know you cut that idea off at the knees.”