by Greg Iles
Cantor waved his hand. “You don’t have to worry about Mitch. But this plea deal is signed, Penn. The Conley kid’s already gone before the judge. The film’s in the can. It can’t be edited anymore.”
“You’ve got to find a way, Joe. Get the plea vacated.”
Cantor’s mouth fell open. “You know I can’t do that! That’s like unbreaking an egg. Look, it’s a raw deal for the girl, but sometimes cases slip through the cracks.”
“Not often in your office, I was always proud to say. I saw you prosecute crooked bankers like they were crack dealers, and crack whores like they were human beings.”
I could see that my open respect for him was moving him, yet still he resisted me. He was hoping I’d give up, but I wasn’t about to. “Joe, listen. If that kid gets off this time, he’s going to do the same thing to some other girl.”
Cantor stared back at me without speaking, silently taking the measure of something within me. For a few seconds I saw what I thought he must have looked like as a soldier in Vietnam, peering into the shadowy depths beneath some jungle canopy. He was making a threat assessment.
“What’s really going on here?” I asked softly. “Conley’s old man has money, but I know that doesn’t mean shit to you. Mitch said you’ve got a big case coming down the pipeline, and suggested you don’t want the integrity of the DNA lab questioned just now. Is he right?”
Joe took a sip of lukewarm coffee. Then he laid his elbows on the table and leaned toward me. “I’ve wanted Victor Luna’s ass for a long time, you know that. And you know why. He’s a goddamn killer and worse. You couldn’t tally up the lives that drug-smuggling bastard has ruined.” Cantor’s eyes flashed cold fire. “Now I’ve got him by the short hairs, and I’m not about to let go. Yes, I need DNA evidence to convict him, but I believe the DNA lab is solid. Hell, you tried cases yourself based on their findings.”
“Yes, but I always brought in an outside geneticist to review them on capital cases, and to testify.”
Joe raised his forefinger. “Usually. Not always.”
I bristled at this implied threat. “I’ll stand by every case I ever tried. I doubt Mitch Gaines would be excited about doing the same.”
Cantor closed his eyes and slowly exhaled. “You’ve got to let this go, Penn. For the greater good.”
“I can’t do that.”
When his eyes opened, they were full of sincerity. “I‘ll check out the HPD lab, I promise you that. And if that Conley punk is guilty, he’ll get nailed down the road. They always do.”
This stunned me. “After how many more girls have been hurt? Maybe killed?” I shook my head. “This family’s suffering. Maribel Avila may never be able to have kids.”
“I didn’t know that,” he said.
At last, I thought, I’ve reached him. “Now you do.”
“What do you want, Penn?” he asked in a weary voice. “Seriously. I can’t try to vacate that plea agreement without setting off a firestorm in the defense bar. It’ll raise too many questions.”
In that moment, with those words, our relationship changed forever.
“Joe, you’re a good man. Probably a great one. Don’t let your legacy be tainted by something like this. It’s not worth it, not even to nail Victor Luna.”
His eyes hardened. “That’s not your decision to make, is it?”
“No, it’s yours.” I let some of my anger and disillusionment enter my own voice. “But I’m going to be straight with you. If I don’t hear within twenty-four hours that you’re moving to get that plea vacated, I’m going to call a press conference. We both know the media loves you, they always have. And not too many people seem to care what happens down in Gulfton these days. But Mirabel Avila is a very telegenic young lady—especially with the stitches in her face. And I’m not without a certain level of celebrity. If I take Mirabel in front of the cameras and talk about the crime lab, the Hispanic leaders in southeast Houston are going to pick up her cause, and that you don’t want.”
Cantor’s face went white, then red. It had been a long time since anybody challenged him. A DA in Harris County has a lot of power. He answers to almost no one. I gave him time to process what I’d said. He didn’t yell and scream. He thought about all I’d told him, long and hard. When he finally spoke, he said, “You don’t seem to care that a lot of your stellar cases were tried based on evidence that came out of that crime lab. But if you throw hundreds of convictions into doubt, you’ll create chaos for the office. You could clog up the appeals courts for years.”
When this didn’t move me, he tried to make it personal again.
“Now that you’ve got another career, I guess you’re not worried about having your most famous cases reversed. But think about the two hundred good lawyers you left behind in my office. The people in the trenches.”
“I have, Joe. And I’d like to believe that none of them wanted to put anybody innocent in prison, or to let anybody guilty go free. You don’t want that, either. And look, maybe the lab isn’t that bad. But you need to find out, one way or the other.”
He just stared back at me like a disappointed older brother.
“By the way,” I added, “your office isn’t the trenches. Gulfton is.”
He knew I was telling the truth, but it didn’t matter. “Penn,” he said, “let the Avila case be the trigger that started us fixing whatever problems HPD has over there. That’s how we get blood from the stone on this one. But for God’s sake, be content with that. Don’t blow up years of casework that we both know is solid.”
“If the work was solid, the verdicts will stand.”
“But at what cost in time and money?”
“That’s not my problem,” I said. “It’s yours. If you don’t want to be buried in requests for retrials, then find a loophole in the plea-bargaining system. Use your influence. A hell of a lot of judges and lawyers owe you favors, and you can be pretty damned intimidating when you want to be. I don’t care how you do it, but find a way to balance the scales for the Avila girl. As for the crime lab, that’s on your head.”
I took out my wallet and left money on the table for our check. “Twenty-four hours, Joe. I’ve got to go. I’ve left Sarah alone too long.”
He started to get up and come after me, but in the end, he didn’t. There was nothing he could say, and he knew it.
“Penn?” Jack says. “Penn! Are you with me?”
“I’m here,” I mutter, not quite sure myself. Down on the river, the long barge has passed far downstream and is rounding the bend that leads to Baton Rouge and New Orleans. “I’m sorry, Jack. I’ve been losing it a little over the past few hours. Last week was pretty rough, and Dad’s coronary on top of it . . .”
“I know.” He squeezes my shoulder and gives me an empathetic smile. “You want to give the story a rest? Go back and see him?”
“In a minute. I need to get this out. Are you okay?”
“Hell, yeah. I want to know what happened. I’m betting Detective Washington found the picture of the girl. That’s how they nailed Conley, right?”
“Nope.” I wish I had a bottle of water to wet my throat. “When I got home from meeting Joe, Sarah was still out. After being out in the real world—even for just that one hour—I could see how exhausted everyone was, even Annie. Everyone sensed we were on our last lap. If we weren’t, some of us wouldn’t reach the finish line. Mom and Mrs. Spencer no longer looked like nurses tending a patient. They looked like old angels hovering by the bed, waiting to collect a soul.
“While Sarah slept, I took Annie outside to play with a neighbor’s dog. All I could think was that in a matter of days, maybe even hours, there would only be the two of us. She seemed to understand that, too, but she didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t, either. So long as Sarah’s heart beat, so long as there was one breath in her body, her presence filled that house.
“Late that day, she came out of her haze. With wakefulness came the pain—bone pain in her legs—and she got very agitat
ed again. Worse than the morning, even. Something had changed in her. The iron self-control I’d seen slip just after dawn had finally given way altogether. There was an animal fear in her eyes. Nobody knew what to do. There’s nothing worse than seeing someone you love in pain and being unable to take the pain away. Dad filled a syringe to knock her out again, but Sarah slapped it out of his hand. I think she was afraid that if he gave it to her, she’d never wake up again.
“That was the worst night. Annie was crying, and Mom had to take her upstairs. Sarah’s mother finally cracked. We were in the final stage of the struggle. The Avila case never once entered my head. Dad titrated morphine for pain, but Sarah refused to be fully sedated, and he was losing the battle by then. Half the time she wasn’t coherent, and when she was, she was terrified. I couldn’t understand it. She’d been so accepting all along, so heroically stoic. I think she was like an army that had finally outrun all its lines of supply and was disintegrating on the battlefield.
“At that point I asked everyone to leave her room. With just the two of us, I tried to bring Sarah back to herself, to get her centered again. I talked about the simplest things from our past, things I didn’t think she could ever forget. I realized then that a lot of her fear was caused by the brain mets, terror generated by having no control over anything, not even her thoughts. After a while, she let Dad give her a shot of fentanyl. She calmed down a little then. I felt enormous relief, but when the pain subsided, she took my hand and in a very clear voice said, ‘I don’t think I can do it anymore.’
“‘Do what?’ I asked.
“‘This. Being awake is . . . worse than nothing. I don’t want Annie to see me like this.’
“I said everything I could think of to reassure her, but nothing was getting through. I don’t know how much time passed, but when the pain started climbing the scale again, she asked me to get Dad. I did. Then I went upstairs and watched The Little Mermaid with Annie. She fell asleep on my shoulder. Very carefully, I put her to bed, then went down to check on Sarah.”
“She was gone?” Jack asks quietly.
“No. The opposite, in fact. Dad seemed to have worked some kind of miracle, because all her anxiety was gone. Her pain, too. I found out later he’d rolled her over and given her an epidural, like they do for pregnant women. He wasn’t an anesthesiologist, but he knew how to do it, and he got my mother to assist him. It was an extraordinary measure, trying that at home—crazy by any conventional standard—but God knows he wasn’t worried about any rules at that point. And the result was miraculous. It was as though this doom we’d all been fighting had magically been lifted, as though fate itself had been suspended, and time stopped. I woke Annie, and we all gathered around the bed. Sarah smiled and smiled, and even laughed a couple of times. Then our parents went out, and it was just the three of us. Annie was euphoric, seeing her mother like that, with the terrible weight lifted, the pain gone from her eyes. For an hour we were just a normal family, the family we’d been in Disney World four months earlier, before the diagnosis.
“Eventually, though, Sarah tired. I asked Mom to take Annie, and then it was just the two of us. For the thousandth time, Sarah made me promise to take care of Annie. And I did, like I’d never said the words before. She told me she loved me. And then she said I shouldn’t let her death be an excuse to stop living. That I needed someone, and Annie would need a mother in her life. You’d think we would have talked about that long before, but we hadn’t. I tried to stop her, but she wouldn’t let me. She seemed to feel this was her last duty, to give me that permission. She was speaking straight from the heart, pure truth, without fear or regret.”
I shake my head, trying to push away the memory. “You don’t need to hear all this.”
“It’s okay,” Jack says. “Was that the last time you spoke to her?”
I nod slowly. “I didn’t know it, though it seems obvious now. Dad spelled me after a while, and I fell asleep on the sofa, watching an old Sherlock Holmes movie. Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. I’ve always remembered that.”
“There’s nothing like a mystery to distract you from reality.”
“Dad woke me about five hours later. The second I saw his eyes, I knew she was gone. Then I felt it. There was an emptiness in the house that hadn’t been there when I lay down.”
“Who was with her when she died?”
“Dad. Just Dad.”
Jack nods slowly. “And Annie?”
“Asleep, thank God, which gave me time to prepare for telling her. It also gave me a little time alone with Sarah. I just sat on the bed and held her hand. I’d thought it was cold the night before, but death brings a coldness all its own. After a while, I felt somebody beside me. I looked up, and it was Dad.
“‘She stood it as long as she could,’ he said, and I heard a crack in his voice. Then he said, ‘She was a trouper, son.’ ”
“Jesus,” Jack whispers. “You know what that means, coming from Tom?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What do you think he meant by that first line? Do you think . . . he helped her at the end?”
“Yes. She’d been suffering so much the night before, and then after she spoke to Dad, she was almost blissful. I think she made her decision right before that epidural. That procedure alone could have killed her, given her brain metastases and the possibility of elevated pressure in her spinal canal. And Dad would have told her that. She wanted a few last hours of clarity before she left us.”
Jack considers this for a while. “Whatever happened, it was her choice.”
I nod silently. “I think her mother sensed it, too. When Mrs. Spencer left to get her husband, she hugged Dad and said, ‘Sarah was so lucky to have you through this, Tom. We’ll never forget you.’ ”
I shake my head, almost unable to continue. “After Mrs. Spencer left, I woke Annie and told her. That was the hardest thing I’d ever done, up to that point. Sarah had prepared her as well as she could. Not by saying she was going to heaven or any of that. Believe it or not, she used The Lion King to explain it. How she was going back to be part of the earth and then the grass and finally the stars again. Annie seemed okay with it. At first, anyway. But that’s another story.”
I get up and wipe my eyes on my shirt. “It’s getting kind of cold. You want to get back in the car?”
“Can we pull it out here on the grass?” Jack asks. “Watch the sun go down with the heat on?”
“We’re not supposed to. But I did it all the time as a teenager. Hey, the mayor ought to get some perks, right?”
Walking back toward the car, I say, “We were waiting for the funeral home people to collect Sarah’s body, and the doorbell rang. When I answered it, I found Joe Cantor standing there. Joe had no idea Sarah had died. I’d finessed her condition the day before. He was stunned. He asked to come in and pay his respects, but I told him no. I took him over to the porch swing where I’d sat when I talked to Felix Vargas two days earlier. That already seemed like weeks ago.
“‘I’m so goddamn sorry,’ Joe said. ‘To intrude like this, I mean. But you gave me that deadline. I wanted you to know I’m moving to get that plea vacated.’
“‘What do you mean, “moving to”?’
“‘You know that’s not an overnight process. But I’ve spoken to Conley’s defense lawyer, and I’ve spoken to the judge, and I can tell you we’re going to get to a new result.’
“‘Which is . . . ?’
“‘I think they might be willing to take a seven-year sentence for aggravated battery.’
“I forced myself to think about that. ‘No sexual component? No registering as a sex offender?’
“Cantor shook his head. ‘No. But a sure seven years in Huntsville. No federal country club. The alternative would be to try the case. I told them that’s what would happen if they didn’t take the prison deal. In fact, I told him I’d try the case personally, and I’d nail the kid’s ass to the barn door. Between you and me, though, I’d rather not do that, if I can
avoid it.’
“‘So you don’t risk the crime lab being looked at too closely?’
“‘For a lot of reasons, honestly. For one, I hinted that we might have that picture.’
“My heart thumped in my chest. ‘They didn’t start screaming that was impossible?’
“Cantor gave me his cagey look. ‘Not as quickly as they should have, in my estimation. But I’d like to close this out before Evan White gets too curious and starts calling my bluffs.’ ”
Jack stops beside the passenger door of the BMW and looks at me over the roof. “Who’s Evan White?”
“One of the top criminal defense lawyers in Houston. I told Cantor that White must be curious already. Then I asked him how the hell he was getting this new deal arranged. ‘You can’t really get a plea vacated simply by calling in favors, can you?’
“‘Let me worry about that,’ he said. ‘You just give me the okay.’
“I thought about it. The offer was tempting, but it wasn’t up to me to say yes or no. ‘I’m not sure the Avilas would settle for the guy not admitting the rape.’ I told him.
“‘Surely you can influence them on that?’
“‘That’s not my place, Joe. Maribel Avila was the one who got raped, not me. And not you, either, no matter how you may feel right now.’
“Joe was about to argue with me when a long black hearse rolled down the street and turned into our driveway. He shook his head, then got up and started to give me a hug, but I couldn’t do it. ‘Christ,’ he said awkwardly. ‘I can’t tell you how sorry I am about Sarah. I wouldn’t have come if I’d known.’ ”
“Goddamn,” Jack says, opening the passenger door and climbing into Dad’s car.
I get in and start the engine, then pull the big sedan out within a few yards of the edge of Jewish Hill and park, leaving the motor running. In the distance, the sun seems to be dropping faster, flaming orange filling the clouds above the river where it winds through the still-green fields.
“The next days were a blur,” I recall aloud. “Sarah’s wish was to be cremated, and Annie started having nightmares about fire. I wasn’t sure what to do. I comforted her as best I could, and we all tried to explain that Sarah was beyond feeling any physical pain, but it was tough. That was a harbinger of things to come.
