by Tim Green
She stumbled back and into Jake, who caught her by the elbow.
“The coroner said he mutilated her face, first,” the judge said quietly, pointing the light at a mirror on the wall above some dresser drawers, “the nose, ears, and lips right over there. Evidently, he wanted her to see it. After that, he tied her to the bed and carved out her eyes. That’s when he raped her, and when he was done, he stabbed her eleven times in the lower abdomen, circling the navel in a three- to four-inch radius. I’ve heard two different theories from psychologists on that one, both agree that he was angry with his victim.”
“No shit,” Casey said.
“I know what you’re thinking,” the judge said, “but with most serial killers, it’s about them, not the victim. He wanted to punish his victims personally, for some kind of insult, real or perceived we have no idea.”
A chill crept up Casey’s spine like a small spider.
The judge stood staring at the bed for a minute, her light resting on the dusty gray mattress, stained nearly black in places, before she turned to them. “In thirty-five years as a prosecutor and a judge I’ve seen some crazy things, and heard some crazy things. Nothing like this.”
Casey cleared her throat and spoke softly. “How does this prove your son’s innocence?”
Her words startled the judge from her trance. “Oh. Right. The cutting was the same in the other three cases I showed you, and this, here.”
The judge stepped toward the wall and pointed the light at a smear of blood. “You see this?”
“Like a football,” Jake said.
“It’s an eye,” the judge said, pointing the flashlight at other spots on each of the other walls. “See? Four of them. Watching. Now, look at these again.”
Casey saw now that the judge still held the folder she’d shown her at the lake house in her other hand. The judge shone her light on the file and found a photo with her finger. Casey studied the black-and-white photo of a blood-spattered wall, seeing now the same football-shaped smear amid the gore.
“That doesn’t look much like an eye,” Casey said.
“They’re eyes,” Martin said, as if she’d insulted him. “We had a couple different psychiatrists look at them.”
“And you figured that the night of the murder?” Jake asked.
Martin looked confused.
“Myron Kissle said the word came down you were looking for a black man,” Jake said. “How did you get that kind of a lead from this?”
“Kissle?” Martin said.
“It’s what he told me when I interviewed him,” Jake said.
“For TV? Kissle’s gone loopy,” Martin said. “He used to be a decent cop, but he’s lonely out there living with his crackpot wife. The man craves attention. Patti heard that he showed up at a PBA meeting a year or two ago in his pajamas.”
Patricia Rivers nodded.
Jake looked around the room. “Well.”
“Well, nothing,” Martin said. “No one put out word for anyone but a killer covered in blood.”
“But he wasn’t covered in blood,” Casey said.
“No,” the judge said, “he was too smart for that, and too smart to get caught.”
“But you caught him,” Jake said.
“Chance,” the judge said, leaving the room and walking slowly through the rodent shit toward the front door.
“Which is a bitch,” Casey said, thinking of Graham’s words.
The judge gave her a funny look and said, “Someone saw him pull his knife outside Gilly’s, and the fight. The police got a call and put it together with the APB.”
“We figured he was headed for the bus station,” Martin said. “Black guy with blood on his shirt.”
“But not covered in blood,” Casey said, pointing her thumb back inside the house.
Judge Rivers nodded and motioned with her head for them to follow. She pushed through the knee-high grass to the side yard where a charred oil barrel stood in a tangle of weeds. Around the perimeter of the yard, trees and scrub grew wild with their obvious intent to swallow up the yard as well as the house itself if given the time. Casey followed, walking gingerly to keep her heels from sinking into the soft earth.
“He burned the clothes he wore and changed into new ones,” the judge said, pointing into the empty drum whose sooty dirt couldn’t grow even a weed.
“All this sounds good,” Casey said, sweeping a loose lock of hair behind her ear. “But none of it makes sense. If it’s true, why wasn’t it in the trial record?”
Martin and the judge looked at each other before she said, “I told you, he was smart.”
46
ABOVE THEM, in the peak of the roof, the hornet nest droned in the remnants of sunlight. Casey glanced up and saw that other, smaller, fruit-shaped nests populated the eaves of the roof leading up to the main ball. The amber and black bees hovered and swung lazily on soft air currents, waiting their turn to enter the nest.
“I was with Nelson when she called,” Judge Rivers said, her piercing gaze directed at Casey. “I could hear her through the phone, completely hysterical, begging him to come. I knew he’d been following her around since she came back from college and that her father made some calls asking him to stop, so I knew he was obsessed. Nelson was at Cornell the fall before for about six weeks before he drove up to Potsdam and found her with someone else. She broke his heart, and you can imagine how I felt about her.
“Nelson was struggling with grades and we were actually discussing his options when she called. I told him not to go to her, but I could tell by the look on his face that nothing I said would stop him.”
The judge took a deep breath and Martin swished through the grass, standing close so he could clasp her hand. She bit her lip and her face crumpled briefly before she regained her composure and said, “He called fifteen minutes later, screaming that she was dead. I called the chief and went right over. By the time we got there, the father had arrived. That’s when we realized she was still alive and we called an ambulance and I got Nelson out of there. The chief said he’d handle it. He knew he could trust Martin.”
“I knew Nelson didn’t do it,” Martin said, “but it looked bad.”
“How could you know that?” Casey asked.
“The blood,” Martin said. “That was my thing, blood. Classes down at Quantico. Seminars. Blood can tell you a lot, and I knew just looking at him that he didn’t kill her. She was a mess, and whoever did it would have been covered in it. He just had some on the bottom of his shoes from going in the room. The dad was another story-covered from head to toe-but I knew he didn’t do it because Nelson saw him come in.”
“Maybe Nelson burned his clothes,” Casey said.
“He wore the same clothes I saw him in when he left me,” Judge Rivers said flatly.
Casey glanced at Jake and saw the questioning look.
“So you just defaulted on all the other evidence and prosecuted Dwayne Hubbard because the blood didn’t fit the picture you had in your mind?” Casey said. “Do you know how fast that would be thrown out in court?”
“Which is exactly why we had to do what we did,” Judge Rivers said, her chin high and trembling.
“She didn’t ask me to just sweep it under the rug,” Martin said, his nostrils flaring at Casey as he nodded toward the judge. “She wanted the truth. She would have put her own son behind bars if he did it, but he didn’t. I knew that crime was done by someone who’d done it before. It was too clean, too ritualized to be a first-timer. It took me a month, but I found those other cases. They matched, and Dwayne had the chance to commit every one of them. Nelson was here when the Wyoming girl got killed. It was Dwayne.”
“And we knew if he got away,” the judge said, “that Cassandra Thornton wasn’t going to be his last. He’s totally deranged. Totally evil.”
“How do you know Nelson was here?” Casey asked Martin. “He wasn’t with you.”
Martin glanced at the judge. “Yes, he was. We were all there. It was Patr
icia’s birthday.”
“You said you met through this case,” Casey said.
“Around that time,” the judge said.
“But that’s not what you said,” Casey said. “How convenient that your boyfriend was investigating the case. Come on.”
“We did what was right,” the judge said. “We weren’t a hundred percent sure, and we were prepared to turn things around if there was even a chance Dwayne was innocent, but he wasn’t. He couldn’t have been. Martin had a friend in the FBI look over the crime scene photos and he said without a doubt these were all done by the same person.”
“Why didn’t you bring the FBI into it?” Casey asked. “Tie them all together and put him away that way?”
The judge hung her head for a moment. “We needed to keep it quiet. You know how these things go, the Feds, the media, look at what’s happening now. We needed to keep it simple and get past it all.”
“So you cooked the evidence to put Hubbard away,” Casey said, shaking her head. “You kept it simple, all right, a two-day trial with a hack for the defense.”
“He was guilty,” Judge Rivers said, raising her voice only to have it swallowed up by the thick overgrowth of trees.
“But that’s not for you to decide,” Casey said. “That’s for a jury.”
“A judge sometimes has to overrule a jury,” Judge Rivers said. “That’s not just a judge’s prerogative, it’s her duty if she sees a miscarriage of justice. You know that.”
“Well, you weren’t the judge back then,” Casey said. “You were the prosecutor. And even if I bought all this, we know for a fact that your son was the one who raped that girl.”
“He never did,” the judge said, shaking her head with a clenched jaw. “He was with me.”
“You say, but you also said you didn’t know Martin until this case.”
“I said it was around that time.”
“You’re lying.”
“That DNA is a scam,” the judge said. “Whoever is behind all this cooked that up.”
“How do you cook DNA?” Casey asked.
“You buy someone off,” the judge said.
“What if you switched slides?” Jake asked.
Casey cringed. “Whose side are you on?”
“I’m just thinking of the possibilities,” Jake said with a shrug. “And I’d like to ask something else.”
The judge nodded her assent.
“Why did you give back a hundred thousand dollars from your fund?” Jake asked.
“What fund?” the judge said without blinking.
“I know about your campaign fund and how you’re lining pockets on both sides of the aisle in Washington,” Jake said.
Judge Rivers’s pale cheeks went red. She glanced at Martin and chewed her lower lip. “My political donations are hardly anyone’s business. It’s all perfectly legal.”
“But problematic,” Jake said. “You remember getting a hundred-thousand-dollar check from CJD, Citizens for a Just Democracy?”
Her face clouded over.
“A PAC, right?” Jake said. “But who are they?”
“Some businessmen from Buffalo,” she said haltingly. “Massimo D’Costa. An environmental group.”
“Environmental cleanup,” Jake said, nodding, “and what did they want that made you refund their contribution? A hundred grand buys a lot of goodwill. Why give it back?”
“That has nothing to do with my son being innocent,” the judge said, directing her attention to Casey. “I’ve shown you what you need and I hope you’ll help set the record straight. I hope you’ll put Dwayne Hubbard back where he belongs, even if it embarrasses some people. He’ll do this again. They always do.”
Judge Rivers clasped Martin’s hand tighter and tugged him past them, swishing back through the high grass that had gone cool and damp in the late shadows of the day.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Jake said, trailing them with Casey. “Why’d you give it back?”
Judge Rivers kept going. As she climbed into the Suburban, she said, “I’ll play the game to a certain extent, but if it goes against everything I believe in, then I’m not for sale.”
“What does that mean?” Jake said, hurrying to grab hold of the passenger door before she could close it.
“What were they buying?” Jake asked. “Please. It might help me sort this all out.”
The judge scowled at him. “Nothing to do with Dwayne Hubbard. I know what you want. Scandal for your TV show. Any scandal, just pile it on. Parking tickets, boyfriends, political contributions, things everyone does. Things that your kind twist into something perverse.”
“I know you don’t know me,” Jake said, “but I’m not like that. Yes, a scandal is good TV, sure. But I think there really is a link between that PAC and everything that happened with Dwayne Hubbard. Please.”
She sighed and stared, then said, “The Nature Conservancy v. Eastern Oil & Gas.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Jake asked.
“The Marcellus Shale Formation,” she said. “Billions of dollars in natural gas, but they need to use hydrofracture drilling to get to it.”
“Can you tell me about it?” Jake asked, letting go of the door.
“Pumping poison into the ground. It breaks up the rock and frees the gas. Look it up, Mr. Carlson,” she said. “That’s what I did, I looked it up, and that’s why I gave back the money. Every judge who dreams of sitting on that bench knows she has to do more than be a brilliant jurist. She has to be connected and you don’t get connected without greasing the skids. That’s just the way it is. If you dug deep enough, you’d find it with every one of them.”
“Would you be willing to sit down and talk with me about all this on camera?” Jake asked.
The judge gave him a dirty look and slammed the door.
47
CASEY SWATTED at a stray wasp as the Suburban roiled the dust on the shoulder of the road and disappeared around the bend up ahead.
“Why didn’t you tell her?” Casey asked.
“Tell her what?”
“That Graham was behind that PAC,” Casey said.
“Robert Graham?” Jake said with a grin, his eyebrows disappearing up under the wisps of blond hair. “The Savior from Seattle? He would never be involved in something like that. It’s all just coincidence, I’m sure.”
“Well, if this story doesn’t pan out for you,” Casey said, “I’m sure you’ll be able to get a gig with The Daily Show. Comedy works for you. Shows off your dimples. Go ahead, say it.”
Jake dropped his smile and opened the Cadillac’s door. They both got in.
“Honestly?” Jake said. “I don’t believe anything she says any more than I do Graham. You think because she’s singing the sad mommy song that she’s not capable of fabricating all this shit, too? I don’t trust her as far as I can spit.
“In a way,” Jake continued, starting the engine, “I’m not unlike a lawyer. I hold my cards close and play them when they’ll have the most impact.”
“How about that bull about swapping DNA samples?” Casey asked, climbing in beside him.
“I felt like a matador,” Jake said.
“You’re on a roll.”
“Except it’s something I could see Graham doing,” Jake said.
“Be serious. How?”
Jake shrugged and pulled away from the decrepit house. “Lots of ways.”
“Name one.”
“How about he has his one-legged buddy zip down to Turks and get a semen sample from Nelson Rivers?” Jake said.
“How?” Casey said, wrinkling her brow.
“Do I really have to explain?”
“Ralph? Yes, you do. How does Ralph get a semen sample?” Casey asked, her mouth souring with the thought.
“Even if his cornucopia of talents doesn’t include something like that, he only needs two things: a condom and a hooker,” Jake said. “I happen to know that Graham’s plane flew to the Caribbean the night before the hospi
tal produced the slide.”
Casey narrowed her eyes at the road ahead. “The same night Ralph went missing. Graham gave me a ride that morning.”
“And before that, Ralph stuck to you pretty damn tight,” Jake said, nodding.
“But how could they have switched the slides?” Casey asked.
“I’ve seen ten thousand dollars in a paper bag go a long way with those watchman types,” Jake said. “And with these morons, it could have been a handshake palming a fifty-dollar bill.”
“Could they have done it that fast?” Casey asked, remembering Ralph’s exhausted face.
“Fastest nonmilitary jet in the world,” Jake said, “and I’m quoting from my interview. I love the modesty of a guy in flannel shirts and Timberlands. I bet you he has a loyal dog that loves him.”
“There are still a lot of loose ends in this story,” Casey said, shaking her head.
“So now we close them.”
“We?”
“Well, I do,” Jake said, glancing at her. “You’re welcome to join me. I know you’ve got other worlds to save.”
Casey’s face felt warm at the thought of kissing Graham in the moonlight and nearly going to him in the middle of the night, wanting to go to him, but not going because she thought it could become something special.
“Special, all right,” she said in a mutter. “Goddamn, I can pick ’em.”
“What’d you say?” Jake asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “Except that if what Patricia Rivers says is true, I just turned loose the second psychotic killer in my illustrious career.”
“Can’t we undo it?” Jake asked.
