Licensed to Thrill: Volume 2

by Diane Capri

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Ocala, Florida

  Friday 1:30 p.m.

  JESS, MIKE AND DAVID MANSON huddled together in an Ocala bar. Necessity joined them for the moment, a fact that Jess and Manson seemed equally displeased about.

  Mike, on the other hand, was having the time of his life. “This is so amazing,” he said, as if he’d qualified for the Olympics. “I can’t believe we’re trying to stop an execution.”

  Jess stuffed her irritation. She wouldn’t give Manson anything more to crow about, even Mike’s innocent exuberance. “We’re not trying to stop the execution, Mike—”

  “Speak for yourself,” Manson cut in.

  “—we’re investigating a rumor,” she said with a scowl. “Don’t get carried away.”

  Mike was fairly bouncing in his seat. “But we think there’s some truth to this rumor, don’t we? We think there is some evidence that might stop the execution at least temporarily, right? I mean, otherwise what’s the point?”

  Manson’s patience, never long, snapped. “What did that scrawny old woman tell you, Jess? I have a judge standing by, but I’ve got to give him some details and it’ll take me a while to get the papers together and get them over there. It’s now or never.”

  Jess’s lips pressed into a hard line. “David, I wish to God I could do this without you. You are one heartless bastard. You know that, right?”

  “Whatever. Spill it.”

  She sighed. Jess had avoided this moment as long as she could. “Vivian suggested that Arnold had some physical evidence from the Crawford crime scene with the real killer’s DNA on it.”

  Manson’s face flushed with color. He started to rise from the booth. ”That crazy old bastard. I knew he was a liar. He didn’t really see Tommy that night, either, did he? I should have hauled his ass before the judge when I had the chance.”

  Jess motioned for him to sit down, which he did. “Vivian said you’d tracked it down and approached Arnold about it. She said that’s why Arnold wanted to kill you. Because he thought you’d figure out a way to use what you knew to get Taylor off again, and that meant Taylor would never pay for killing her boys.”

  Manson stared at her for a long moment without speaking.

  “You know what it is, don’t you?” Mike asked him, fairly leaping across the table toward Manson in excitement. “The evidence Ward had. So what are we gonna do about it?”

  Jess placed a restraining hand on Mike’s arm, but her eyes never left Manson’s face. “Whatever it is, David, you’ll never get it from Vivian without me. She hates you almost as much as she hates Tommy Taylor. Arnold died to protect that evidence and she’s not going to let her husband’s sacrifice go to waste. Vivian won’t see you, she won’t talk to you, and she most certainly won’t help you.”

  She let the truth of her logic sink into Manson’s thinking and waited for him to decide to meet her half-way. Moments passed like decades.

  She hadn’t realized she was holding her breath until her chest began to hurt. With a deep breath, she sat back in the seat and played her final card. “Mike. Come on. We’ve got work to do before we witness the execution at six o’clock.”

  She moved to rise from the booth, which seemed to stir Manson to full awareness.

  “Sit down,” he said, motioning with his head.

  Graceful in victory, she sat without comment, ignoring the increase in her heartbeat.

  “It’s the trace,” Manson said.

  “Trace what?” Mike asked.

  “The cigarette butt and the two hairs they found in Taylor’s trunk with Crawford’s body.”

  Jess had suspected as much. Nothing else would have galvanized Manson to action as quickly or made him handle her as he’d done this morning with the local cops. “Go on.”

  “You already know that the trace evidence wasn’t sufficient to test for DNA back then, using the old techniques?”

  “Right. The hairs and butt were never admitted into evidence at any of the trials because of that.”

  Manson raked a hand through his spiky short hair. “When newer DNA techniques were developed that could examine smaller samples of saliva and hairs without roots, my team tried to locate the trace evidence. That’s when we discovered the trace was lost.”

  “That’s fairly common,” Jess said.

  Manson nodded. “Unfortunately true. We’re busy with cases all over the country, so we moved on and gave up looking for the missing evidence in Taylor’s case for a while.”

  “And because you weren’t sure whether the evidence would help or hurt, right?” Mike piped in. “I mean, the trace could just have easily hammered another couple of nails in Taylor’s coffin. That’s why his lawyers objected to that evidence in the first trial, to keep it out, because they thought it would bury him. Right?” he said, looking back and forth between them.

  Manson shook his head and grinned. “Kid, if you’re gonna get anywhere in this business, you’ve got to learn to chill. Hold your water. Okay?”

  Mike’s face fell and he lowered his head. Manson must have considered Mike suitably chastised, for he continued. “When Sullivan signed Taylor’s death warrant, the case came across my desk again. I always get involved when the inmates are moved from death row to death watch.”

  He made it sound noble, but Jess knew Manson became involved late in the cases because the earlier stages of the work were simple drudgery. The American legal system, honed over hundreds of years, served by countless devotees, worked well in the vast majority of cases. Proving mistakes were made was a long, tedious, and mostly fruitless process. Usually, there was no rush, meaning no news cameras, until the execution is scheduled and all legal avenues had been exhausted. The time from sentence to execution could take more than twenty years, and only a small percentage of death row inmates were ever executed.

  Death watch inmates, on the other hand, presented high-profile opportunities for Manson. That’s when he would step into the limelight and steal the glory. It was all a high-stakes game to him, less about saving inmates from execution when it mattered, and more about making a good show of it when it was already too late.

  “I suppose you could call exculpatory DNA evidence my holy grail.” Like a practiced salesman, Manson presented himself effectively, the noble crusader seeking to prevent horrible miscarriages of justice.

  “So when I saw that there’d been trace evidence at one time, I got excited. I chased it down. I found the court clerk, retired now, who told me she’d returned all of the collected but unused evidence to the Crawford and Taylor families, respectively. Clothes to the boys’ parents, the hairs and cigarette butt to Taylor’s mother.”

  “Why?” Mike asked.

  “The stuff belongs to them. Usually it’s taken from them in the first place; when the courts don’t need it, they give it back. Anyway, Mrs. Taylor, Tommy’s mother, never opened the box, she said.”

  “You must have been pretty excited, right?” Mike asked.

  Manson gave him an indulgent smile. “Yeah. I was. But when I unsealed the box, the trace wasn’t in there. Meaning it had never been returned to Mrs. Taylor at all.”

  Mike listened as if this was the most exciting story he’d ever heard. And maybe it was. Jess could remember feeling that level of excitement during one of the many twists or turns that cases like this took.

  “Anyway, I went to the Crawfords, who weren’t all that happy to help me.”

  “I’ll bet,” Jess said.

  Manson’s irritation resurfaced. “But they did. Eventually. They let me look at their box, which was also still sealed, and also didn’t contain the trace when I looked. Meaning, again, the evidence had never been placed in their box either.”

  Jess’s pulse quickened and she felt too warm. Nausea sent bile into her mouth. Her stomach churned.

  Manson sensed her understanding and nodded.

  “What?” Mike asked.

  “I went back to the clerk. Pressed her pretty hard. She finally adm
itted that she’d given the trace to Arnold Ward directly. Why? Because he asked for it. She knew him, felt sorry for him. She said she didn’t think there was any harm in giving him what he wanted. When I asked Ward himself about it, he denied that she’d ever given it to him.” Manson’s tone remained subdued, but his stare had hardened.

  From there, for Jess, it was a simple step to the truth: Arnold Ward requested the trace evidence because he believed it would prove who really killed Mattie Crawford. Which meant he at least suspected that Tommy Taylor wasn’t Mattie’s killer. Quite possibly, he knew.

  Mike’s mouth hung open. Jess put her head in her hands and massaged her temples, grappling with what this meant. Arnold and Vivian Ward were good people. They’d been victims of imperfect procedures when Taylor killed their two children. Having been victimized once, they feared the system would never punish Tommy Taylor for what he’d done to their boys.

  Jess could see how the Wards might think putting Taylor to death was more essential than executing him for the right crime. But that was not the only thing they wanted. Nor would they have allowed Matthew Crawford’s real killer to go free—unless they were forced to do so.

  Jess was as certain of these matters as she had ever been of anything. She understood Arnold and Vivian’s motives and their pain, felt it whenever she was in their presence, as well as when she wasn’t. They would not want to let a child-killer remain unknown or go unpunished indefinitely. In that respect, Jess knew, Arnold and Vivian Ward were much like her.

  Thinking this through, Jess realized something else that hit her solidly in the stomach, causing pain too sharp to ignore. She jumped up from the booth. “I’ll be right back,” she said.

  She hurried into the restroom, vomited bile into the toilet, then stood at the sink and splashed cold water on her face. Water dripped down her forearms as she pressed the lever on the paper towel dispenser and wiped the cool drops from her face and neck. She leaned against the wall to support herself, legs unsteady. How long had it been since she’d eaten? A long time, judging by what hadn’t been in her stomach.

  God, how could I have been so stupid? The question was indulgent, and her reasons didn’t matter now. She’d felt small, overwhelmed, a failure. Faced with her own impotence, she realized she needed help and she had no choice but to ask.

  When she’d decided what to do, Jess returned to the booth. Manson and Mike were both subdued, each dwelling in his own thoughts. She gestured to the waitress and ordered a tall glass of water, a large soda, and toast. The guys ordered full meals. Jess hoped she’d be able to eat more, if she could keep anything down.

  When the waitress had brought the water and soda and gone again, Jess said, “The good news is that Arnold didn’t destroy the evidence.”

  Mike’s mouth literally hung open. Manson’s countenance brightened.

  “The bad news is that we’ll never find it until after Taylor dies.”

  “But why not?” said Mike. “What do you mean? Where is it?”

  Manson’s sharp, “Quiet,” served as a slap-down, stopping Mike cold.

  “I agree with the first half and I don’t care to argue the rest,” said Manson. “But do you really believe there’s nothing we can do?”

  “You should keep looking, David. Mike can help you. But you won’t find Vivian. Not until after the execution.” She finished the soda and felt an immediate blood-sugar lift.

  The waitress interrupted to bring the food. Jess took a bite of the toast, chewed, and swallowed. Another. It tasted like cardboard. But she’d never get through the day without fuel in her stomach. She took a deep swig of the water to wash it all down and waited to see if it would stay there before she added more to her gut. She anticipated failure, but she had to try.

  “The only chance we have now is Helen Sullivan. If I can speak privately with her, I might be able to persuade her to stop this juggernaut temporarily, until we get everything sorted out. If I can reach her. I tried before and couldn’t get through her protection.”

  Manson must have reached the same conclusion on his own. He was a smart, if soulless man. He didn’t argue. Instead, Jess could almost see him moving ahead mentally, formulating his strategy for using Taylor’s death as an effective sword in his continuing battles.

  Mike’s attention span being what it was, he practically jumped with excitement. “Now you’re talking! Reach Helen Sullivan . . . I can fix that. No problem.” He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and pressed a speed-dial button.

  “Who are you calling?” asked Manson.

  If lives were not at stake, Jess might have laughed at the grin Mike flashed Manson, a look that conveyed supreme confidence, the rough equivalent of sticking out his tongue. “Just my college roommate’s dad. One Sheriff MacKenzie Green.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Tampa, Florida

  Friday 3:00 p.m.

  WITH OLIVER IN SURGERY, Helen took the time to shower and change into the jeans, shirt and boots Frank Temple had brought from the ranch the night before. The process had made her feel almost human again, although nothing about the woman she saw in the mirror looked familiar.

  Oliver’s seizure remained unexplained. The doctors had discovered that his glucose IV was not dripping correctly, and their best guess was that the seizure was caused by too much insulin in his blood stream. The question they couldn’t resolve was how such a large dose of insulin could have occurred. An adjacent room did house a diabetic patient, but if any nurse had made the mistake of injecting Oliver instead of the diabetic, no one was admitting it.

  One thing was clear: Whether accidental or deliberate, the overdose and resulting seizure would have been fatal if Helen hadn’t discovered it at the precise moment when she did. Seeing Oliver’s prognosis worsen with the incident had stretched Helen’s tension to the snapping point. Later today or tonight, once the doctors drained the hematoma and re-stabilized him, Helen planned to move Oliver back to the ranch, where she could control who got near him.

  Meanwhile, she’d already spoken to the people investigating the arson and Todd Dale’s death and expected an interim report later today, with a full report coming in the morning. That left nothing more to do, for Oliver or otherwise, except to stay strong and pray.

  A rap came at the door. “Come in,” she said, expecting to receive the food Frank had ordered minutes ago. When the door opened, her eyes widened for an instant.

  Jess Kimball entered with the tray. “Hi, Governor. I hope you don’t mind. They said I could bring this in for you.” She placed the tray on the bed table and stood back, taking in Helen’s battered face. “Don’t worry,” she said with a grin. “No cameraman, I promise.”

  Putting a smile in her voice, Helen said, “Mac said to expect you.” She gestured toward the one chair in the room, where Jess took a seat.

  Helen perched on the side of the bed, unwrapped the food and began to eat. Once she started, she realized how hungry she was. In no time the sandwich, which tasted as good as a five-star restaurant meal, revived her sagging spirits along with her energy.

  “You look like you’ve had a pretty rough night yourself,” Helen told Jess.

  “I think we both have.”

  “Well, we both know what I’ve been doing. What about you?”

  “How’s your husband?”

  Instinctively, Helen embellished the truth. “The doctors say he’ll be fine. But fill me in on your situation. Mac said it was urgent, and Oliver will be out of surgery soon. I don’t have a lot of time. What is it I can do for you?”

  “Not me, exactly,” Jess said. “It’s Tommy Taylor. I’m not certain, but I think there’s a good chance he didn’t kill Mattie Crawford, and I’m almost sure that relevant new DNA evidence exists. If I’m correct, either Vivian Ward has possession of it, or knows where it is. That’s why I’m here, to ask you to stay this execution for a few days while we track all this down and get it resolved, one way or the other.”

  “There’s a big diff
erence between ‘almost sure’ and the existence of new evidence,” Helen said. “With the evidence in hand I might be able to stop the execution. Otherwise, there’s no chance. But you must know that.”

  When she saw Jess’s deflated expression, Helen realized her tone was too harsh. She held all the power here. Jess was a straight-forward person who would not have come to her without good reason.

  “I’ve signed several death warrants during my tenure, Jess,” she said more softly. “Honestly, the Tommy Taylor warrant was one of the easier ones.”

  “I totally get that,” said Jess. “He’s a killer. But maybe not in the Crawford case.”

  With Jess’s gaze holding hers, Helen tried not to glance at the clock, her thoughts returning to Oliver.

  “So you’re not saying Taylor doesn’t deserve to die, but . . . what?”

  “That I’m scared,” Jess said. “If Tommy Taylor’s the wrong man, then someone else killed Mattie Crawford. I can’t ignore that, just walk away, and live with myself after. Could you?”

  The question was both naïve and profound. Entire treatises had been written on the subject for hundreds of years. Yet, Helen did need to be sure she was doing the right thing.

  “I met Tommy Taylor first when I was a young prosecutor. He’d already raped, tortured and killed at least four children, including Arnold and Vivian Ward’s two sons.” Unbidden, crime-scene photos flashed in Helen’s memory. After all the time that had passed, she could still recall them in far too vivid detail. “I stared into Taylor’s eyes back then, and you know what looked back at me? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

  Helen had finished the food and was feeling stronger. Her hands had stopped shaking. “Did you know that we offered him a plea deal in the Crawford case? Several times, actually. We offered to forego the death penalty if he would save the state the expense and uncertainty of trial. He chose to die.”

  “That supports my theory. Why would he give up a deal like that if he had really killed Mattie? His rejection only makes sense if he didn’t kill Mattie. Doesn’t it?”