Face of a Killer

by Robin Burcell

  He had exhausted all his appeals and was supposed to be put to death for the murder, but the wheels of justice turn slowly, too slowly in his case. And though no one else might care, Sydney knew just why she’d made the trip. She wanted, needed to know what, if anything, this man had thought about during these past two decades.

  She wanted to know if he was sorry.

  That thought fled the moment she took her first real look at the entrance of San Quentin. She had never been there before. Had no wish to go. But she was there now, and what came to her mind was the absurd and surreal thought that the prison appeared to be a gothic fortress set on the shores of a windswept coastline. The picturesque effect was ruined, however, by the guard towers and fourteen-foot-high razorwire fences-and the fact she had to stop just inside the first gate and place her gun in a gun locker before driving through the second gate.

  Sydney parked in a lot adjacent to the bay, where the cold wind whipped the water into a froth of whitecaps and the waves pounded the retaining wall, sending white spray over the top and misting the air with salt. She pulled her blazer tightly about her and glanced up at the dark sky, hoping the rain would hold off until after she finished with her interview and was back in her car.

  Inside the building, after passing all security checkpoints, she ran her fingers through her windblown hair, in hopes of looking a bit more professional for the prison official who had agreed to help her when she’d called that morning. He was waiting in a conference room that smelled of coffee that had been percolating too long. He stood when she entered, his uniform neatly pressed, his shoes shined to perfection. “Thomas Sullivan?” she asked. “I’m Special Agent Sydney Fitzpatrick. I appreciate you seeing me through this.” “Not a problem.” He nodded at an empty pink bakery box on the table. “You just missed the last of the donuts. Or do Feds eat donuts?”

  “This Fed does. But after my late night, what I really need is coffee,” she said, anxious to get the interview started, yet willing to stall at all costs.

  “That we got plenty of,” he replied, and walked over to the counter. He poured coffee into two Styrofoam cups, then brought them to the table, indicating she should sit. “You ever been here before?”

  “Other prisons, not this one.” Not until today.

  “California’s oldest prison. I’m thinking if they had a crystal ball when they built the place back in 1852, they might’ve held out for condos. Think of the money they would’ve made. Four hundred thirty-two acres of priceless bay-side real estate, right here beneath our feet, not that the prisoners give a rat’s ass.”

  She smiled, then sipped at the sharp coffee, nervous. He must have sensed it, because he asked, “How do you want to do this?”

  “I’d like to interview him face-to-face with no partition.” “Anything else?”

  “What’re the chances of not giving him my name? I’m… not here officially.”

  “Don’t see a problem, long as we know who you are and log it. Not like you’re interrogating him or anything.”

  Not in the real sense, she thought, and before she knew it, she was being led into another interview room in a secured part of the prison. Their footsteps echoed down the long hallway, and she thought that if she were smart, she’d turn back, ignore the temptation to ask this man why he’d done what he’d done. What did it matter? It was not going to bring her father back. It was stupid on her part. He wasn’t worth the effort, and after what Scotty had dropped in her lap, she didn’t need the emotional turmoil. But then they led him in, shackled at his hands and his feet, and her heart started pounding.

  Johnnie Wheeler.

  This was the man who had changed her life forever.

  5

  The guards seated Johnnie Wheeler at the table across from Sydney. When they turned to leave, she stood, desperate, wanting them to stop. She’d changed her mind. She did not want to be alone, not with this man, this murderer, and she was about to call out, tell them to wait. But her throat went dry, her voice failed her. Suddenly she was thirteen again, finding her father dead, and his pizza parlor burning down around her.

  And now she was locked in the same room as the man who had killed him, and her lungs constricted. She sat, weakkneed, told herself to breathe normally.

  Just breathe.

  Slow and steady. Don’t give him the satisfaction of knowing his presence affected her.

  With considerable effort, she willed herself to calm, then truly looked at him. Even though she had seen his photograph in that newspaper article, she was surprised by the man before her. Dressed in prison blues, he was average height, early forties, thin face, dark skin, one dark eye that seemed to take in everything, the other eye clouded, bluishwhite; she wasn’t even sure he could see through it. One more thing she didn’t recall from the photograph. That and his tightly curled hair, short and peppered with gray. All she had apparently committed to memory from the photo was the scar she’d seen that ran across his right cheek. She’d pictured someone much bigger, but figured it had something to do with being only thirteen at the time the crime occurred.

  “You from the Innocence Project?” he asked when the guards left.

  She couldn’t believe she’d heard correctly. His cloudy eye seemed to focus on her, as though it could see right into her, know that his words struck directly at her heart. The Innocence Project. Reading in the newspaper that he was getting new attorneys was one thing. Nothing in the article had mentioned the Innocence Project, very selective attorneys and staff who took on cases that were practically sure things…

  Why the hell had she come here? She was only torturing herself, torturing her mother. But then she saw his hands scarred from the fire that he’d set to cover up the murder. The hands that had held the gun that had killed her father. Anger burned through her. She stood, forced her gaze to his, made sure he was looking right at her, and said, “I’m Sydney Fitzpatrick. The daughter of the man you murdered.” And when she knew she had his attention, knew that her name meant something, she continued. “My mother got her chance to speak her mind at your sentencing, but I wasn’t allowed to. And now I’m here to make sure you take my words to your grave.”

  “What the fuck? I’m gonna call the-”

  “Shut up!” She crashed her fist onto the metal table. He jerked back, his eyes going wide, his jaw dropping. “It’s my turn, and by God, I’m taking it, because you need to know what you stole from me, and for what? A few dollars?” She let that sink in, then leaned in closer, to make sure he heard every word. “Two months after you killed my father, I was the only girl on my soccer team who went to the fatherdaughter dinner with her mother. My father taught me how to ride a motorcycle and drive a car, even though I wasn’t old enough, but he wasn’t there to see me get my license. He didn’t get to see me graduate from high school, or accept an athletic scholarship to college. Or watch me graduate with honors and go to the police academy, and then the FBI academy. Because of you, he can’t walk me down the aisle if I get married. And now-now my mother and I fight every year because of you…” She pushed away from the table, but kept her gaze pinned on him. “ Yo u did that to me. You killed him, and you stole a huge part of my life. My mother’s life. We have never been the same. And it’s not fair that my father’s dead, and you’re sitting here, and that’s what I came to tell you.”

  He stared at her for several seconds, not moving, just watching her, as though he couldn’t understand, even now, why she came. And then, so quiet, he said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry it all happened to you, but you gotta understand. I didn’t do it.”

  This time it was her turn to stare. How could he still deny it? “Don’t tell me you’re sorry. You contacted the Innocence Project.”

  “You one crazy bitch, you know that? You give that speech to them? That why they turning me down?”

  “They’re turning you down?” Elation swept through her. He wasn’t getting out.

  Wheeler made a scoffing sound. “That why you coming ’round here now
, when they’re about to do me? Go fuck yourself.”

  She leaned against the door, eyeing him as though it mattered little whether he talked or not. “I want the truth.” “The truth ain’t never changed. Yeah, I was there that night, but why the fuck I wanna kill the guy when he giving me money? I told ’em it had to be the guy sitting in the car when I got there. That officer did one of those pictures of the driver from my description. They find that guy, they got a killer. He the one set me up, no doubt in my mind.” A setup. How original. And the picture of the killer he was referring to had been an Identikit picture, plastic overlays, a technique that often produced terrible results. It hadn’t been an actual sketch-not that anyone ever believed there had been another person there. His story had too many holes in it. “Then how did you get those burns? Those scars on your hands?”

  “I didn’t touch him,” he said, avoiding the question entirely, just as he’d done when he’d been arrested. “How many times I gotta tell everyone that? I liked him.”

  “You liked him?” She slammed her palms on either side of his cuffed, scarred hands, pinning her gaze on him. Her father should have been sitting on his fishing boat down in Baja. That had always been his dream, even before he was forced into early retirement as a civilian contract employee from that stupid accident, building some set for a recruiting poster he was photographing. Part of her wanted to blame someone, anyone, for that accident, because if not for that, he’d still be snapping photos, he’d never have opened the pizza parlor, and never been there that night.

  She held Wheeler’s gaze a moment longer, then straightened, moved back to the door, assumed her couldn’t-give-ashit-persona. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Fuckin’ believe what you want. It’s the truth.”

  “Why, then?” she asked, meaning, Why did he kill him if he liked him?

  “ ’Cause he was helping me get a job, go straight,” he said, misunderstanding. “My old man, he was in the army, got killed, and Kev, he said he knew what it was like, so he was gonna help me. Clean me up, got my name from his church, you know? Clean eight weeks. I had a kid, a baby. That’s the only reason I was there.”

  She wasn’t moved. That had always been his claim, that her father had befriended him, was trying to help him go straight, a claim that the prosecution disputed. Their contention was that Wheeler had made up the phony relationship, the tenuous military connection, to cover for his being in the pizza parlor, and to come up with this “lent me the money” defense that he’d used to explain his print on the cash register.

  His defense attorney had never been able to locate the supposed church charity that was allegedly responsible for hooking up Sydney’s father with Wheeler. In fact, her father didn’t even attend church, and no one ever recalled seeing Wheeler at the pizza parlor before that night. “What time did you get there?”

  He shrugged. “Late is all I remember. Place was empty. He was walking out of the back office when I got there.”

  She tried to reconcile her thoughts to Wheeler’s claim that her father had just left the office when Wheeler said he’d walked in. She’d been in the office, asleep, which meant her father had just left her. This was it. The last moments… “And then what happened?”

  Wheeler shifted. “Told him I came by just like he told me. To get the money.”

  “He told you to come by?” For someone who’d had twenty years to think up a good story, he wasn’t coming up with anything innovative.

  “Yeah. Said he ain’t giving me nothing unless he see my face, wanna make sure I ain’t working my game, make sure I ain’t high, before he give me the green, you know? Gonna help me out.”

  “But you robbed him.”

  “No!” He struck his manacled hands on the table, and she started at the sound of metal hitting metal. The guard peeked in the window, checked on her, but she ignored him, intent on Wheeler’s statement.

  “ He told me to take the money.”

  “From the cash register? That was where your print was found and identified.”

  He hesitated. “Wasn’t enough, just some change was all he had in some little flowered can he kept under the counter. Got ‘raided,’ he said, joking like, you know? I needed more. Kev told me to get it out of the register.”

  And suddenly everything she’d believed these past twenty years started to unravel. Raided had been one of her father’s favorite words pertaining to her and her habit of dipping into that small metal canister for video game money. And on that particular night, she’d nearly emptied the thing. With that thought came another, more frightening question: Would her father still be alive if she hadn’t taken the money?

  Her parents kept that canister beneath the counter, throwing odd tip money in it. There was usually no more than twenty-five or thirty dollars within, if that, a petty cash fund for whatever might come up. Sometimes that whatever was her wanting quarters to play the video games in the back room of the restaurant. Sometimes it was her father’s pet projects, anything from handing out money to the Girl

  Scouts selling cookies, or even a homeless person digging through a Dumpster.

  Or, possibly, a drug addict, needing money for a job…? “Why didn’t you mention this canister with the money when you were arrested?”

  “They was already saying I stole money. I ain’t never touched the can. He did. But he sent me to the register, just like I told the cops.”

  “Why would he send you to the register?”

  “ ’Cause he already put the money in the safe. But he tells me he got a double-saw in the cash register. Says it’s always there after he close out. Underneath, you know?” Sydney told herself that this could all be coincidence, that he was simply a con, good at his game-something he’d had two decades to perfect. Knowing why there was a twenty under the till after closing was not something that appeared in the police reports. “You didn’t think that important enough to mention?”

  “Have your ass dragged to the joint on a life jolt, see what you remember. Me, I been meditating ’bout it twenty years, you know? All they cared about was finding my print on the register, and the moment that happened, I was guilty. So I quit talking.”

  And she wondered if it would’ve made a difference. She doubted her mother would’ve said something, even if she’d had the presence of mind to think clearly at the time, because what cop would think such a trivial detail was important enough to ask about? Leaving a twenty beneath the till was something her father did-at her mother’s request.

  She’d said if the place was ever burglarized, it was better to give them something to steal, to keep them from looking for something else. But if Wheeler was pointing a gun at her father, he could’ve told him to take the twenty, that there was always one there after closing. That didn’t mean a thing. She started pacing again. “A twenty under the till?”

  “Yeah. Told me to get it and-and I could pay him back.”

  “Pay him back, when?” She glanced over.

  His gaze narrowed ever so slightly as he seemed to contemplate her question, then as though he were surprised he even remembered, he said, “On Tuesday.”

  She stopped in her tracks. Several heartbeats passed before she responded. She heard him, but her brain was doing a double take. “Tuesday?” she finally repeated.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re sure that’s what he said?”

  “Yeah.”

  Her thoughts raced. Tuesday… It couldn’t be true. Her father could have lent him the money and Wheeler killed him anyway. At least, that’s what she told herself.

  But the thought came too late.

  The damage had been done.

  A seed of doubt planted because of a few minute, trivial details that did not appear in any police reports. Details that only someone close to her family would recognize. Anyone might know her father had been in the army. And they certainly knew he helped out people all the time, handed out a few dollars. But Sydney could count on one hand the number of people who knew of the l
ittle flowered canister her father kept beneath the counter at the pizza parlor, or that he often chided her for “raiding” it to get video money. Even fewer were those who might have known that he kept a twenty beneath the till after he closed out.

  And fewer still were those who knew what it meant if her father requested a loan to be repaid on Tuesday.

  Sydney banged on the door to alert the guard, then left without speaking. What could she say?

  She needed to know the truth. If this man was going to be executed, then he better damned well be guilty.

  And if he wasn’t guilty…

  Her father’s killer was out there still.

  6

  Sydney went through the steps of signing out of the prison, thanking everyone, returning her visitor’s pass, then finding herself in the parking lot, standing next to her car, grateful to be outside. She stared out over the bay, the wind rushing in her ears, not sure if it was the first few raindrops that hit her face or the sea spray. She didn’t think she’d ever felt so alone as she did in that one moment, and she had nowhere to go, no one to turn to.

  It wasn’t like she could take this to her mother, not yet. In fact, everyone Sydney knew, her mother, her stepfather Jake, even Scotty, they all believed that Wheeler was guilty without a doubt. Who was going to believe a few trivial, though in her mind critical, details that came from a convicted killer and could only be verified from the traumatized memory of a girl just thirteen at the time?

  Her thoughts consumed her for most of the drive. When she approached the Golden Gate Bridge her cell phone rang, and she was relieved when she saw it wasn’t her mother’s number on the screen.