Conviction

by Richard North Patterson

  At the entry to the row of booths, Carlo saw a large black man with his hands shackled behind his back, flanked by two guards in bulletproof vests. "Rennell," Terri said softly.

  Silent, Carlo watched them approach.

  Briefly, Terri touched his arm. "Just remember this: as long as we're in this cage, and no matter what we think, there's never a reason to doubt Rennell's innocence. Never give him one. Not in your words, or your expression—for you to help him, he has to believe in you. No matter what."

  How, Carlo wondered, could she control her thoughts with such discipline, or even believe she could? Then the guard opened the cage, and Rennell stepped inside.

  The guard locked the door behind him. Rennell stood over them, an otherworldly gaze dulling his large brown eyes. His wrists thrust backward through a slot in the door, as though schooled by habit. Then the guard unsnapped the cuffs.

  Rennell flinched. "Hi, Rennell," Terri said. "It's good to see you."

  * * *

  In the next few moments, Carlo tried to absorb as much about Rennell Price as his senses allowed.

  The big man settled across from them with painful deliberation, as though he had to think hard about the act of sitting. Carlo flashed on his maternal grandfather after his first stroke; Carlo Carelli had never again trusted his body, and to move his hand, or take a step, had seemed a willful act of memory. But this man's face, younger than his years, lacked all emotion—except that his gaze was so fixed on Terri that Carlo felt invisible.

  "This is Carlo," she told Rennell. "My stepson. He's also a lawyer, and he's going to help us."

  Smiling, Carlo held out his hand. It took Rennell a few seconds to grasp it, his grip as lifeless as his fleeting look at Carlo.

  "How's your television working?" Terri asked. "Okay, I hope."

  "Good."

  The deep voice conveyed far less emotion than the word. "How's Hawkman doing?" she asked.

  Rennell's brief glance at Carlo conveyed discomfort with his presence, perhaps distrust. "Good. Like I told you. But mostly same is same."

  That much, Carlo believed. "What else have you been up to?" Terri asked.

  Still Rennell did not look at Carlo. "I've started making a book," he said in an oddly stubborn tone. "Of my life."

  Carlo heard this as a kind of narcissism, reminding him of an odd fact recalled by his father: that Lee Harvey Oswald's mother had once proposed to write a book entitled "A Mother's Place in History." But perhaps, Carlo amended, beneath this was a sad hope that his life mattered to anyone at all.

  "What kind of book?" Terri asked.

  "With pictures, for Grandma. Next time I want you to bring a camera."

  The demand, both childish and peremptory, bemused Carlo further. He found nothing in Rennell's eyes to give him any clues as to whether his client suffered from a poverty of thought, feeling, or both.

  "She wants to come see you," Terri said in a sympathetic voice. "But she's way too sick."

  For the first time, Rennell's expression became probing. "Is she dead?"

  Terri shook her head. "No," she answered softly. "Just old and sad and worried for you."

  Rennell laughed softly. "Worry," he said. "Like she always done."

  Carlo could not tell whether he heard disdain or merely fact. But Terri nodded her understanding. "That's because she loves you." She cocked her head, eyes expressing curiosity. "What else do you remember about her?"

  "Chicken dinners."

  What about the time she lost her house for you? Carlo wondered. But Terri smiled. "Did Payton like those, too?"

  "Guess so."

  "How's he doing, by the way?"

  Rennell shrugged. "He say follow the rules and you be all right."

  "Sounds like good advice, Rennell."

  "Guess so." His stubborn tone returned. "Long as Payton be here, they don't give me no trouble in the yard."

  At this, Carlo glanced at Terri: Payton's execution date was twenty-five days away, and his lawyers now had little hope—whatever else, no one believed Payton Price to be retarded.

  "He say they going to kill him," Rennell continued softly. "Say he in a race with Grandma for the grave. Won't see him in the yard no more, he say. I got to keep my head down when he be gone."

  Terri considered him. "When you were kids," she ventured, "I guess Payton looked after you."

  For the first time, Rennell seemed to smile, the slightest change in his eyes, and at the corners of his mouth. "Yeah, he done that. Took me to school, maybe sometimes to the store."

  "What else did he do?"

  Rennell's eyes clouded. "Sometimes, if things was bad, he'd take me out to hide."

  Once more, Terri cocked her head. "Hide from what?"

  Rennell folded his arms.

  "Your father?" Terri asked.

  Rennell's shoulders hunched. "Sometimes he'd take a belt to me."

  "Your daddy? Or Payton?"

  Rennell shook his head. "Sometimes he'd hit me a lick, keep me in line. But mostly he'd look out for me."

  Carlo saw Terri hesitate, trying to interpret this. Then she asked, "Did Payton ever get you in trouble?"

  "No."

  The stubborn tone had returned. Quietly, Terri prodded. "Not even about selling crack?"

  Rennell looked up at her. "Payton never did nothing," he said in a stone-cold voice.

  To Carlo it was as though, quite suddenly, Terri were a stranger. Sifting his impressions, Carlo tried to imagine how Rennell would seem to someone who, unlike him, did not strain to sympathize.

  "I'm just trying to understand things," Terri told him. She paused, eyes silently seeking trust. "I want to bring another friend to see you, Dr. Lane. He can help me tell the judge what you're really like, and why you're innocent."

  Rennell's eyes watched her closely. "Then get me some of that DNA. Man on TV told me about that."

  "You ask Payton about it?"

  Rennell nodded. "He say don't bother. They won't never be spending money on no gangbanger."

  It was as good a rationalization as any, Carlo thought. "Sometimes it's not money," Terri said. "Sometimes DNA doesn't work. If it doesn't, what should I tell the judge?"

  Rennell sat back. In a tone even wearier than before, he repeated, "I didn't do that little girl."

  It was as though, Carlo thought, Rennell Price were talking to himself. He could not begin to guess whether this was a statement of enduring truth, or all that a guilty man had ever known to say.

  "I know that," Terri answered. "Is there anything else you can tell me to help the judge believe us?"

  Rennell's eyes closed. Silent, he rocked in his chair, seemingly beyond words. "I'm a respectful man," he murmured at last. "I wouldn't do that to no child."

  To Carlo, the statement had a rote quality, something learned very long ago. But Terri's gaze grew more intense. "Who taught you to be respectful?"

  "Grandma."

  Whose authority, Carlo thought, seemed to have expired long before Thuy Sen's death.

  Terri leaned closer. "Did you always try to do what your grandma said?"

  Rennell's eyes shut tighter. "Yes, ma'am."

  Terri paused. Softly, she asked, "Is Payton a respectful man?"

  For a long moment Rennell would not answer. "Payton never did nothin'," he insisted.

  This seemed to be ingrained—the point Rennell would uphold, whatever the accusation. But it was Terri and Carlo's job, perhaps contrary to Rennell's most basic instinct, to separate him from Payton on pain of death. Still quietly, Terri inquired, "Did Payton say that Tasha Bramwell would help you? Or maybe Jamal Harrison?"

  At last Rennell opened his eyes. "Payton didn't say nothin'," he said. "Took care of me, is all."

  SIX

  THE BAYVIEW DISTRICT IN LATE AFTERNOON ENVELOPED TERRI in the deceptive lassitude of danger awaiting night to bloom: cleaning women returning home to lock their doors; aimless youths playing pickup basketball or loitering on the streets; a squad car with a shattered si
de window cruising down Third Street past a clump of girls sharing a cigarette no doubt laced with crack; a burglar alarm jangling that no one seemed to notice. The bus in front of her belched exhaust.

  Turning, Terri drove up a narrow street past what had been Flora Lewis's house, a peeling remnant with missing shutters. But she did not stop until she reached the neatly tended stucco home to which Thuy Sen had never returned.

  * * *

  The door was protected by a wrought-iron security gate, for Terri a disturbing echo of death row, made more unsettling by her hope that the Sens' desire for Rennell Price's death might have lessened through the years. She rang the bell.

  After a moment she heard someone stirring inside, the rattling of a chain. The door cracked ajar. A small Asian woman regarded Terri through the bars with eyes more scared and stricken than the appearance of a female stranger would account for.

  "Are you Chou Sen?" Terri asked.

  The woman froze. When it came, her nod was barely perceptible, as though this admission stripped her of defenses. Her eyes drilled Terri's like a bird's, both penetrant and deflective.

  "I'm Teresa Paget." With deep reluctance, she finished, "I represent Rennell Price."

  The woman's face was so taut that the only sign of comprehension was a brief flutter of eyelids. "What you want?"

  The words seemed barely to escape her throat. Briefly, Terri bowed her head in a gesture of respect. "I was hoping we could talk."

  "About what?"

  "The case." Terri paused. "Rennell's scheduled to be executed in forty-one days, Payton in twenty-five."

  Crossing her arms, Chou Sen clasped both shoulders tightly. "They just tell us that. Years since they tell us anything. Now you."

  Terri was unsurprised: over time, as memories faded and personnel changed, the District Attorney's solicitude for survivors too often lapsed into forgetfulness, no less unkind for its inadvertence. "I'm sorry to come here," Terri said. "But there'll be publicity, hearings where we try to stop the execution. I expect that people from the Attorney General's Office will ask you to attend."

  The tight mask of Chou Sen's face began to crumble. "Fifteen years," she said.

  Her voice was etched with incredulity. "I know," Terri answered. "I'm sorry for that, too."

  "You don't know sorry." Each word held sibilant precision. "Sorry is a picture of a child who never gets older. Sorry is a father looking at his living daughter with questions she can never answer."

  Terri felt the tremor of a long-ago psychic explosion, still reverberating, which this woman would feel in her bones until she died. Cautiously, she asked, "How is your daughter Kim doing now?"

  Chou Sen stood straighter. "Leave Kim be," she hissed at Terri. Tears in her eyes, she softly shut the door.

  * * *

  Alone, Terri stood on the desolate spit of land where—in Eddie Fleet's telling—Thuy Sen had begun her journey to Candlestick Point.

  The druidical piles of sand were gone. But enough remained—the stunted shrubs, the tallow factory with its stench of burning animal remnants. The neglected pier was now a few worn posts sticking from the water like rotted teeth, and the old, wrecked barge was a ghost of Terri's imaginings. Across the steady current of the channel, loading cranes cast fading shadows on black water.

  Walking to the dirty sand along the channel, Terri tried to envision a large black man bearing the frail body of a child, waist-deep in the current. But she could not summon Rennell's face. Perhaps that was because of the darkness she imagined—she could not fault Fleet's description of the place itself, as chilling as the water which had borne Thuy Sen away. As chilling as Terri's own memories.

  * * *

  In the dark of her bedroom, Terri awoke.

  Shirtless, Chris slept beside her, his face still softened from their lovemaking. But though long hours of work separated Terri from her meeting with Chou Sen and her visit to the water's edge, Terri could not stop thinking of Elena.

  With a mother's intuition—or perhaps the incessant worry, she acknowledged, of a woman who believed, despite Chris's generous heart, that she alone truly loved this damaged child—Terri went to her teenage daughter's room.

  The door was cracked open, the inside dark. Uncertain of her purpose, Terri opened the door, pausing at the threshold of Elena's room to hear the whisper of her breathing.

  Her daughter spoke from darkness. "Why are you defending him?"

  Terri felt gooseflesh on her skin. Words of answer sticking in her throat, she crossed the carpet to sit at the edge of her daughter's bed, then reached for Elena's hand.

  Elena snatched it away. Jerking upright, she snapped on her bedside lamp and scrutinized her mother, steadily and fiercely, as Terri blinked at circles of yellow from the sudden flood of light.

  "What do you know about him?" Terri asked.

  "I went to your library," Elena answered without apology. "There were papers on your desk."

  Terri felt her stomach clench. "And?"

  "I read about the dead girl, and what he did to her." Elena's voice filled with fury. "How can you do this? How can you not care?"

  Terri felt a moment of disbelief, the wish to turn back time, followed by a hopeless sense that no words could be adequate. "I do care," she tried. "More than you can ever know. But Rennell Price doesn't have anyone else."

  "He could have," Elena snapped back. "Don't be such a fucking martyr. Like you're the only lawyer in America, and nothing's more important than you and him."

  The words made Terri flinch. She gazed at her daughter, trying to remember the bright-eyed child with the riot of curls and elfin face, unsullied by the knowledge of violation, of solitude and secrecy and boundaries betrayed, resurrected, again and again, in weekly visits to a child therapist. Now Elena's face and body seemed an external map of her confusion—new breasts and a woman's roundness emerging from a gangling frame, a lineless face at war with burning eyes. She would not be a classic beauty, Terri guessed, but hers would become a face hard to forget.

  "There are other lawyers," Terri answered as calmly as she could. "But I'm good at what I do."

  "That's because you don't do anything else."

  This indictment, so unfair in its starkness, resonated with a years-old accusation. How can I not have known? Terri asked herself yet again. That Richie and she had been separated when he started on his daughter—perhaps his twisted means of revenge for Christopher Paget—would never soothe her pain.

  But that guilt was hers to bear. Softly, she said, "I know I work hard, Lainie. It takes too much time from us."

  This acknowledgment, with its absence of excuses, seemed to still Elena's wrath. "But why for him?" her daughter asked, an undertone of plaintiveness beneath the vehemence.

  "Because I don't think the State should kill people, no matter what they've done, or what we think they've done." Pausing, Terri sifted the arguments Elena might accept. "There's too big a risk of innocence. And some of my clients have suffered in ways it's hard for a lot of people to understand, and harder to get over." But not, I hope, too hard for you.

  "I read about what he did," Elena repeated flatly. "What he made her do."

  Terri looked into her adolescent daughter's brown eyes, too reminiscent of Elena's father's. Richie had betrayed Elena, and now, in her daughter's mind, Terri had betrayed her, too. Quietly, Terri amended, "What the jury believed he did."

  Elena closed her eyes. "I hate him," she said with quiet vehemence. Only when she spoke again was Terri certain that Elena was referring to her own father. "I remember it all now," the girl continued. "I still dream about it. I am so damned glad he's dead."

  So am I. Though Terri's stomach wrenched at the truth of this, she could not slow the current of her thoughts. We never have to see him. He'll never show up at your wedding with his little boy's smile, expecting the forgiveness to which he'd feel entitled. Demanding that Chris and I welcome him for your sake.

  "Forgive me," Terri said at last. "I don't know what
Rennell Price did. That's part of why I'm helping him." After pausing, she finished. "Sometimes it's hard to explain, even to myself. Like loving you more than I can tell you but still working like I do."

  Eyes hooded, Elena turned her face on the pillow. Terri reached for her hand again. Elena said nothing. But after a time, her fingers curled around her mother's, perhaps from need, perhaps from a pain too deep to express.

  Terri lay on the bed beside her, and after a time, Elena slowly drifted into sleep, perhaps to face her troubled dreams. Awake, Terri faced her memory of where her daughter's dreams had come from.

  * * *

  It was night, and Elena had been seven then. Terri had pulled the comforter beneath her daughter's chin, placed the book they had read on the child's bedside table. Turning out the light, she kissed Elena's cheek. The girl's skin felt soft, her hair and face smelled fresh and clean. At that moment, Terri could not imagine loving another person as much as this child, the vulnerable life Terri once had carried inside her.

  On the table, the elephant night-light flickered, casting light and shadow across Elena's face. The light was dying, Terri realized; tomorrow she would replace it. "I love you, Elena."

  "Can you stay with me, Mommy?" The little girl's arms reached out for her. "Just for a while, okay?"

  Terri smiled at the child's bargaining. How many times, she wondered, had Elena said "just a minute" or "one more time"? And how often had Terri spent the time Elena needed?

  "Okay," she said and lay down on the comforter.

  "Get inside the covers with me, Mommy. Please."

  Terri slid beneath the covers and turned on her side. Automatically, Elena turned and curled her legs and back against her mother, waiting for Terri to put her arms around her. Terri felt an almost primal familiarity: she and Elena called this "making spoons," just as Terri's mother had, lying next to Terri when she had been so young that she now remembered little else. Lying beside Elena, Terri remembered her own father's angry voice, could still feel the rage that had driven her mother to Terri's bed, until Terri herself had not known who was giving or receiving comfort.