Innocent kc-8

by Scott Turow

  'Why?'

  'God, Nat. Doesn't that seem like a lot to tell her in one breath, we're dating and then that we're living together? It will sound crazy. Can't you just tell her you're going to share space with a friend?'

  'You don't know my mother. "Who's the friend? What's he do? Where was he raised? Where did he go to school? What kind of music does he listen to? Does he have a girlfriend?" I mean, I wouldn't get away with that for a minute.'

  So we agreed that he would tell her. I insisted on standing by so I could hear his end of the conversation, but I buried my head in one of my sofa pillows when he described himself as 'a love zombie.'

  'She's thrilled,' he said when he hung up. 'Completely thrilled. She wants us to come for dinner.'

  'God, Nat. Please no.'

  I could tell from the way his brows narrowed that he was beginning to find my vehemence about his parents odd.

  'It's not like you don't know them.'

  'It would be weird, Nat. Now. With us so new. Don't you think we should socialize with some normal people first? I'm not ready for that.'

  'I think we should get it over with. She'll ask me every day. You watch.'

  She did. He begged off, using standard excuses, his work or mine. But day by day I am beginning to understand more about the weird symbiosis between Nat and his mom. Barbara hovers over his life like some demanding ghost without an earthly presence of her own. And he feels a need to satisfy her. She wants to see us together, but finds it trying to leave her home. So we must come to her.

  'You could just say no to her,' I told him last week.

  He smiled. 'You try it,' he answered, and indeed the next night, he lifted his cell in my direction. 'She wants to talk to you.'

  Fuck, I mouthed. It was a quick conversation. Barbara gushed about how exciting this was, how pleased Rusty and she were that Nat and I seemed to mean so much to each other. Wouldn't we come and let the two of them share our happiness for just an evening? Like a lot of brilliant people with problems, Barbara is great at putting you in the corner. The easiest thing was to agree to a week from Sunday.

  I held my head in my hands afterward.

  'I don't understand this,' he said. 'You're one of the cool kids. Little Miss Social Skills. My mom has been telling me for a year and a half to ask you out. You're the first girlfriend I've had she approves of. She thought Kat was weird and that Paloma was a bad influence.'

  'But how's your dad with this, Nat? Don't you think this will be strange for him?'

  'My mom says he's completely cool and totally thrilled.'

  'Have you actually talked to him?'

  'He'll be fine. Take it from me. He'll be fine.'

  But I cannot imagine that Barbara's enthusiasm about Nat and me, or the prospect of seeing us together, can do anything but set Rusty spinning. And as I fear, today at work, when I slip in to check my personal e-mail, my heart jumps to see two in my in-box from Rusty's account. When I open the messages, they weirdly turn out to be read receipts on e-mails I sent in May 2007, sixteen months ago.

  It takes me a while to piece things together. During my time with Rusty, I was the one who booked the hotel rooms, since he couldn't use his credit card. I would forward the online confirmation to him, receipt requested so I knew he'd gotten word and did not have to bother to reply. I often dispatched these messages in a series-the initial confirmation, a reminder that morning, and then a last e-mail giving the room number once I had checked in. Because I was getting the acknowledgments, I realized that often the only message he was opening was the last one, which he looked at on his handheld on the way over, without having to chance reviewing the other e-mails with somebody around.

  The two read receipts that arrived today are from those e-mails that went unopened last year. At first, I take this as a kind of perverse stalking, an effort to remind me where the two of us were not all that long ago. But with another hour's thought I realize he may not even know the messages are coming to me. When you open an e-mail on which the sender's requested a receipt, a little pop-up appears, warning you that the notification will be sent. The pop-up also contains a little box to check that reads, 'Don't show this message again for this sender.' He probably chose that option long ago. By the end of the day, I decide there may be a positive spin here: Rusty is finally doing what he should have done sixteen months before and deleting all my messages. It's a sign he's moving on, that he is happy to let Nat and me be.

  The next morning by ten, there are three more. Far worse, I realize that deleting the messages wouldn't trigger the receipts. The point is to show the e-mail was read. It is a disturbing, even sickening, image, of Rusty in his chambers, reliving these details. Feeling there is little choice but to have it out with him, I pick up the phone and dial his inside line. It rings through and is answered instead by his assistant, Pat.

  "Anna!" she cries out when I say hello. "How are you? You don't come around enough."

  After a minute of pleasantries, I tell her I have a question for the judge about one of our cases and ask to speak to him.

  "Oh, he's been on the bench all morning, honey. He went up more than an hour ago. They have arguments back to back. I won't see him until half past twelve."

  I have the self-possession to say to Pat that I will call Wilton, my coclerk, for the information I need, but when I put the phone down, I am too panicked and disoriented even to take my hand off the receiver. I tell myself I have gotten this wrong, that there must be another explanation. On my screen, I examine the read receipts again, but all three were sent from Rusty's account less than half an hour ago, when Pat says he was on the bench and nowhere near his PC.

  And then it comes, the dreadful realization. The catastrophe that was always in the offing has happened now: It's someone else. Somebody is systematically reviewing the record of my meetings with Rusty. The hotels. The dates. For a breathless second, I fear the very worst and wonder if it's Nat. But he was himself last night, gentle and utterly adoring, and he is too guileless to keep this kind of discovery to himself. Given his nature, he would just be gone.

  But my relief lasts no more than a second. Then I know the answer with an absolute certainty that turns my heart to stone. There's one person with the savvy to invade Rusty's e-mail account, and the time to be making this painstaking inspection.

  She knows.

  Barbara knows.

  CHAPTER 20

  Tommy, October 31, 2008

  After their meeting with Dickerman in McGrath Hall, Tommy and Brand did not speak a word until they were in the Mercedes.

  "We need his computer at home," Brand said then. "It's the only real chance we have to find the girl. I want to issue a search warrant today. And we need to interview the son pronto to see what he has to say about what was cooking between Mom and Dad."

  "That's page one, Jimmy. He'll lose the election."

  "So what? Just doing our jobs," said Brand.

  "No, damn it," said Tommy. He stopped to gather himself. Brand had done great work here; he'd been right when Tommy was wrong. There was no reason to get angry at him for charging ahead. "I know you think this is a really bad, pathological, fucked-up guy, a serial killer who's sitting on his throne at the right hand of God, and I get it, but think. Think. You blow Rusty off the court and you're just feeding the theory of defense."

  "The vengeful prosecutor crap? I told you how to deal with that."

  He was referring to the DNA, testing the sperm fraction from the first trial.

  "That's what we do next," said Tommy.

  "I thought you don't want to get a court order."

  "We don't need a court order," Tommy said.

  Brand looked at the boss narrowly, then pushed the auto's start button and began easing the Mercedes into the traffic. On the street near police headquarters, six kids were being herded back to grade school after lunch by a couple of moms. Everybody was in costume. Two of the little boys were in suits and ties, wearing masks of Barack Obama.

  To
mmy had first thought of what he was about to explain to Brand a decade ago. In those days, he had moved back in with his mom to take care of her in the last years of her life. Her noises-the coughing from the emphysema, most often-would wake him on the cot he slept on in the dining room. Once she was settled, Tommy would think about everything that had gone wrong in his life, probably as a way to convince himself he'd be able to withstand this loss, too. He'd ponder the thousand slights and undeserved injuries he'd borne, and so he would think now and then about the Sabich trial. He knew that DNA testing would answer to everybody's satisfaction whether Rusty had been tooled or literally gotten away with murder. And he'd tempt himself with the thought of how it could be done. But in the daylight, he would warn himself off. Curiosity killed the cat. Adam, Eve, apples. Some stuff you were not meant to find out. But now he could know. Finally. He rolled out the plan again in his head one last time, then detailed it for Brand.

  This state, like most states, had a law mandating the assembly of a DNA database. Genetic materials collected in any case where evidence was offered of a sexual offense were supposed to be added and profiled. Rusty had been accused only of murder, not rape, but the state's theory allowed that Carolyn might have been violated as part of the crime. The state police, without a court order or any other form of permission, could withdraw the blood standards and sperm fraction from Rusty's first trial from the police pathologist's massive refrigerator and test them tomorrow. Of course, in the real world the cops had too much trouble keeping up with the evidence being gathered today to bother going back to cases dismissed two decades ago. But the fact that the law was there and applied without time limit meant that Rusty had no legitimate expectation of privacy in the old samples. He could hoot and holler at trial if the results implicated him, but he'd get nowhere. To give them some cover, Brand could tell the evidence techs to forward all specimens from before 1988 to the state police, explaining that they wanted the oldest first to prevent further degradation.

  Brand loved it. "We can do it now," he said. "Tomorrow. We can have results in a few days." He thought it through. "That's great," he said. "And if he shows up dirty, we can go for the full download, right? Search warrant for his computer? Interviews? Right? We can roll by the end of the week. We have to, right? Nobody will ever be able to say boo? That's great," said Brand. "That's great!" He threw his heavy arm around Molto and gave him a shake as he drove.

  "You got it wrong, Jimmy," Tommy said quietly. "That'll be the bad news."

  The chief deputy drew back. This was what Tommy had been up thinking about for several nights in the past week.

  "Jimmy, we got bad news and worse news here. If," said Tommy, "if we don't match, we're screwed. Screwed. Case closed. Right?"

  Brand looked at Molto without overt expression but seemed to know he was playing from behind.

  "It's too thin, Jimmy. Not with the history. I just want you to understand before we go running down to the lab that it's make or break."

  "Christ," said Brand. He went through all the evidence again, until Tommy interrupted.

  "Jimmy, you were right all along. He's a wrong guy. But if we basically prove he didn't commit the first murder, we can't indict now. We'd just be a bunch of vengeful shits trying to recast a truth we don't like. Everything inside the courtroom and outside would be about my grand obsession. This case is paper thin. And if we have to throw in the fact that Rusty was falsely accused once before by the same office, combined with him being the chief judge of the court of appeals with everybody but God testifying as a character witness, we will never get a conviction. So we need to know what the DNA shows now. Because if it exonerates him on the first case, we're stone-cold end of the road."

  Brand stared into the traffic, thickening as they passed closer to Center City. Today, Kindle County was halfway to Mardi Gras. The office workers were out for lunch in all kinds of getups. Five guys were walking along with burgers in their hands, each one dressed like a different member of the Village People.

  "How's he get good DNA results into evidence?" Brand asked. "Even if the DNA cleans him up twenty years ago, so what? Okay, so we're sore losers. The prosecutors' motives are irrelevant."

  "But the defendant's motives aren't. You want to put on a circumstantial case and argue the guy would risk cooling his wife? You think he's not entitled to show that he was once prosecuted for a murder he didn't commit? Doesn't that make it far less likely that he would take that kind of chance now?"

  "Fuck, I don't know with this creep. Maybe it makes it more likely. Here's a guy who understands the system completely. Maybe he's clever enough to think that we can never go on him because of the first case. Maybe he thinks that DNA gives him a free shot this time."

  "And he'd be right," Tommy said to Brand. At a light, they stared at each other until Brand finally broke it off to look at his watch. He swore because he was late. Molto thought of offering to park the Mercedes for him, but Jim was too upset now for jokes.

  "We're gonna make him on the first case," said Brand. "I got fifty that says we make him."

  "That'd be the worse news," Tommy answered. "The best thing that could happen to us would be having an excuse to walk away from this case. The really bad news will be if it turns out to be Rusty's spunk twenty years ago. Because if he was the doer, this isn't a go case. It's a gotta-go case. We can't let him sit on the supreme court knowing he's a two-time killer. We can't."

  "That's what I'm telling you. But everybody will understand. They'll know we're not chasing ghosts."

  "But we'll lose. That's the really, really bad news. We have a case we gotta bring that we're going to lose. Because the DNA never comes in for the prosecution. Never. It's a one-way street. He was acquitted. We can't use the old evidence against him now. It wouldn't make sense without retrying the old case, and no judge will allow that. And besides, there were so many questions about the specimen by the end of that trial, nine judges out of ten wouldn't admit it now anyway. If the DNA is good for Rusty, it sails in. And if it makes him a killer, it's out. So we've got the same thin case, even with the DNA, where we're going to have our fingers crossed that we don't get directed out on corpus delicti, because we don't have enough proof to show murder."

  "No." Brand shook his head hard on his thick neck. "No way. You're laying a mattress, Boss. We all do it."

  "No, Jimmy. You said it before. This guy is smart. Way smart. The bad news is that if he killed her, he thought it all through. And he figured out how to do it and walk again. And he will."

  They were at the courthouse. Brand finally looked at Tommy and said, "That would be really bad news."

  CHAPTER 21

  Nat, September 28, 2008

  You're not really in a relationship until you see each other's stuff-the way I sometimes can't talk for an entire hour after dealing with my parents or how she goes off completely if I so much as mention Ray Horgan, the geezy guy she had a thing with. Sometimes it takes a while to get a peek into the little corners of craziness every person tries to hide. I had been going out with Kat nearly a year and sometimes worried she was just too normal for me, until she got out of bed one morning, complaining about her knee. When I asked how she hurt it, she looked at me, no trace of humor, and said, 'I got hit with a mace when I was a Crusader in one of my prior lives.' At that point, it's all about how well your junk fits with hers. Can you still take each other seriously despite it and stay in tune?

  My life with Anna has been, no lie, pretty much paradise, but the one thing that has made her a total whack-job all month has been my parents. I think the way my mom sometimes overwhelms me tends to bug Anna as much as me, and she also seems unsure about her relationship with my dad, convinced, perhaps, that he'll never get beyond seeing her as one of his minions. Privately, I've also wondered if her fling with Ray has something to do with it. My guess is that she assumes my father knows and she's even more embarrassed to be around him, since he would have expected her to exhibit better sense.

 
But because of all of that, Anna pretty much had a cow when I told her I was going to have to out us to my mom, who was relentless about asking where I would be living at the end of the month. And I really wondered for a second if I would need to dial 911 after I told Anna my mom had invited us to dinner. In the end, my mom, who can be the irresistible force, got on the phone with Anna and cornered her the same way she corners me. But even after Anna said yes the prospect has seemed to make her unbelievably tense.

  I came back from school last Thursday night, only a few days before our date with my parents, and found her home already, sitting in the dark and crying, with a pack of cigarettes beside her and at least eight butts in an ashtray. It's a no-smoking building, too.

  'What?' I asked, and received no answer. She was frozen at the kitchen table. When I took the chair beside her, she reached for both my hands.

  'I love you so much,' she said. She could barely choke out the words.

  'I love you, too,' I answered. 'What is this about?'

  She gave me this disbelieving look, searching my face for a long time, the tears welling over her green eyes like jewels. 'I so, so, so don't want this to get fucked up,' she said. 'I would do anything to keep that from happening.'

  'It's not happening,' I told her, which didn't seem to do much good. She seemed to get a grip for a couple days, but today when we get ready to go to my parents', she's in a state again.

  As we cross the Nearing Bridge on the way, Anna says, "I may be sick." The suspension structure is known to boogie in heavy winds, but it's a great day, still more summer than fall, and the late sun has thrown a gold net on the water. We barely make it to the other side before Anna pulls her new Prius into the public forest and dashes from the car. I get there in time to hold her from behind while she vomits into a rusted oil drum used as a garbage can.