Innocence

by David Hosp

  “Excuse me, señor,” the orderly said.

  Kozlowski looked at him. He was probably in his early twenties, with black hair and a dark complexion. He looked nervous, and Kozlowski was sure he hadn’t seen the man on duty in the ward before.

  “That’s okay,” Kozlowski said, staying between the man and the door. He looked over at Finn, who was lying perfectly still on the bed.

  The orderly tried to step around him, heading out of the room. Kozlowski put his arm out to stop him. “Hold it,” he said.

  “What is it, señor?” the orderly asked.

  “Stay right here.” Kozlowski took two quick strides over to Finn’s bedside. He put a hand on his chest and leaned down to try and listen for his heart.

  “Please, señor, what is wrong?” There was real fear in the orderly’s voice now.

  Kozlowski couldn’t tell for sure whether Finn was breathing. His ear was down close to Finn’s mouth, and a sense of panic was starting to rise in his own chest. He turned his head to look at Finn’s face, their noses only inches apart.

  Suddenly, Finn’s eyes snapped open.

  “Shit!” Kozlowski grunted in shock, jumping back from Finn.

  Finn frowned sleepily. “What the fuck?” he asked. “Are you trying to make out with me or something?”

  Kozlowski looked from Finn to the orderly. Then a doctor appeared at the door.

  “Is there a problem, Juan?” he asked the orderly.

  The man shrugged, looking relieved to have the doctor there to take control of the strange situation.

  The doctor looked at Kozlowski, the question still showing on his face. “Sir?” he said, redirecting the inquiry.

  Kozlowski looked at all three of the other men in the room, feeling foolish. “Everything’s fine,” he said. “I must be jumpy, that’s all.”

  Finn turned his face back into the pillow and closed his eyes again. “Relax, Koz,” he said. “The danger’s over for tonight, at least. Get some sleep.”

  The doctor nodded to the orderly, and the two of them left. Kozlowski shook his head and sat down in the faux-Naugahyde recliner at the foot of Finn’s bed. He was being absurd. And yet he couldn’t seem to dismiss a profound feeling of danger.

  He scratched his chin and sat there, trying to shake the feeling. It took several minutes, but gradually, he, too, became weary, and he closed his eyes. After a few more minutes, he fell into a fitful, tortured sleep.

  z

  Lissa was still fuming at Mrs. Snowden as she closed the door to her apartment. She walked through the place to the kitchen, feeling the need for a little wine to calm her nerves after the evening she’d had. A half glass of chardonnay would take the edge off the two Scotches she’d had at the bar with Ian the horny bartender, and might even allow her to get a decent night’s sleep.

  She went to the cupboard and took out a wineglass. As she turned toward the refrigerator, she noticed a light on in the pantry, projecting an uneven trapezoid of light on the floor.

  That’s strange, she thought.

  She walked over and pushed the pantry door open, leaning her head in. It was a small closet, four feet deep and six feet wide, and there was no place inside for anyone to hide. Still, she lingered with her head in the space, looking closely into all the corners. She reached her hand up to the light switch, letting it hang there as she tried to remember how she could have left the light on. Then she flipped the switch, and the room went dark.

  She carried the wineglass back to the refrigerator and put it down on the Corian countertop, then grabbed the handle to the fridge door. She was looking forward to her wine, but the feel of the handle gave her a start. It was wet and sticky-slick, and she pulled her hand away quickly, holding it up to her face. Even in the semilight, she could make out the dark red stain of blood on her palm.

  “I needed some water.”

  The voice came from behind her, and as she turned, she knocked over the wineglass. It tumbled across the counter and crashed to the floor, but she hardly noticed. There, standing before her, was a young man with jet-black hair. In his right hand, he held a bottle of spring water; she recognized it as the brand she kept stocked in her refrigerator. He lifted the bottle and took a sip. She looked down and saw that a machete dangled from his left hand, blood still drying on the blade. Following his arm up back to his face, she saw that he was bleeding from his shoulder.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” he said.

  She tried to speak but found no air in her lungs. She just stood there, an expression of fear and incomprehension on her face.

  “About the water,” he said, shaking the bottle in front of his face. “I hope you don’t mind that I helped myself.”

  It took another moment for the reality of her predicament to set in. “What do you want?” she asked finally.

  He laughed, and it seemed as though the sound got caught in his throat. “To live,” he said. “Your boss has put my ability to do that in some doubt. When the people I work with find out that he’s still alive, they will be very disappointed.” He put down the bottle and transferred the machete to his good hand. “They are not the sort of people you want to disappoint.”

  She looked closely at him and saw that he was pale, with a thin, shiny layer of sweat covering his face and neck. “What do you want with me?” she asked.

  He took a step closer to her. “I need you to take a message to Mr. Finn.”

  She tried to move away from him, but she was already up against the counter, and there was no place for her to go. “What’s the message?” She could barely breathe.

  “In good time,” he said. He put the blade to her chest, slicing off one of the buttons on her blouse. “First we should get to know each other better.” The tip of the machete gently traced its way up through the cleft of her breasts, over her collar bone, and came to rest under her chin. He put some additional pressure on it, lifting her head so she was looking him in the eyes. “Perhaps,” he said, “we can even be friends.”

  He turned the blade, and the sharp edge grazed her throat. She closed her eyes as she felt the tears running down her cheeks.

  Chapter Thirty

  Friday, December 21, 2007

  Finn awoke feeling better than he had in weeks. His arm ached heavily, but it was his first decent night’s sleep in a long time, and the first time his mind had felt clear since he’d gotten involved in Vincente Salazar’s case.

  Miguel had slept in one of the doctors’ bunk rooms and examined Finn first thing in the morning, declaring him fit enough to leave the hospital and discharging him by eight o’clock. Kozlowski, who had slept sitting up in the chair in the hospital room, accompanied Finn to pick up his car in Roxbury, where it took twenty minutes to dig the vehicle out from under the snow that had been plowed over it during the evening’s storm. Then the two of them set out for the office.

  It was just past nine o’clock when they walked up the steps to the brownstone off Warren Street in Charlestown. Finn was surprised to find the door still locked; Lissa was usually in and working by eight. He unlocked the office, and Kozlowski followed him in. As Finn flipped through his mail, the detective briefly disappeared into the back office, then reappeared and sat on a chair against the wall, looking at Finn.

  “What now?” Kozlowski asked.

  “Gotta go back to Steele, right?” Finn said. “Find out what she was working on out there in Roxbury when she got attacked.”

  Kozlowski rubbed his chin. “You think that has something to do with all this?”

  “I don’t know. Right now it’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  “Maybe. Still, even if you’re right, you’re talking about an investigation from over fifteen years ago. The chances we’d be able to pick up any trail—assuming Steele would tell us what she was working on—are almost nonexistent.”

  Finn frowned back at Kozlowski. “I know you’re skeptical by nature, Koz, but what the fuck?”

  “No fuck. Just seems like a serious long sho
t, that’s all.”

  “Fine. You see any closer targets, just call ’em out. Besides, I’ve got a good feeling about this case today, and I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t piss all over my mood, okay?”

  “That’s not your mood, it’s the painkillers.”

  “Yeah, well, whatever it is, it’s giving me a good outlook on shit, and I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t bring me down.” The phone on Finn’s desk rang, and he picked it up. “Finn here.”

  “Finn, it’s Smitty.”

  Finn recognized the voice of his fingerprint expert. “Hey, Smitty. You got more bad news for me?”

  “Actually, no. Just the opposite. This call might make your day. Hell, it may even make your whole year.”

  Finn felt his adrenaline start pumping, and he tried to keep his optimism in check. “Don’t go messin’ with my head just to break my heart, Smitty,” he said. “Tell me you’ve got something good. Did you get the new prints we took from Salazar?”

  “I did, but they just confirmed that the prints used to identify him as the shooter were really his prints.”

  “My year’s not getting any better yet,” Finn whined.

  “Give it a minute. I started thinking about what you asked me—how would someone go about screwing with the fingerprint process if they wanted to frame someone? I ended up going through Salazar’s whole file with a magnifying glass, looking for anything unusual.”

  “Tell me you found something.”

  “I think I did. There were two prints that the police said were on the gun. One was used preliminarily to get the warrant to go after Salazar and make the arrest. The other one was the one they used at trial.”

  “That’s weird, isn’t it?” Finn asked. “Why not use both prints for the warrant and the trial?”

  “Yeah, I thought that was weird, too, so I started looking a little harder at those two prints. The first one—the one they used to get the warrant—was a full print, complete in pretty much every detail.” Smitty paused as though he’d said something important.

  “So?” Finn pressed him.

  “So full prints are pretty hard to come by in the real world. Usually, when we pick something up or touch it, we’re not being careful to make a full fingerprint. Our hands move around, and only part of the finger touches the gun or the glass or whatever. You end up with partial prints, smudged and incomplete, almost all the time. The only time we really get a good, full print is when we book someone and roll a full set carefully on the booking sheet. Even then it can take a couple of tries to get a good set of prints. And yet here was this perfect print they picked up off a gun lying in an alleyway in the rain after a struggle, and it’s got this perfect crystal-clear print. It didn’t make any sense.”

  “They got lucky. So what? How does this help?”

  “It was weird enough that I kept digging through Salazar’s files. Turns out, when his wife died in the hospital, he was arrested by the INS. They let him go, but they did process him, and they took his prints.”

  “Standard procedure, I’m guessing,” Finn said slowly, wondering where the conversation was headed.

  “Absolutely. So I compared the print they used to get the warrant to the one that was taken when the INS busted him.”

  “And?”

  “They’re a perfect match.”

  “That’s bad, right?” Finn was confused.

  “No, it’s great. When I say they’re a perfect match, I mean they’re identical. I mean you can put one over the other, and there is no difference whatsoever. I told you before, no two prints are ever identical, even if they are from the same finger on the same person. The only way that happens is if you make a photocopy of the same print—and that’s what I think happened here.”

  “I’m not sure I follow you,” Finn said. This sounded good for his client, but he needed to understand it better if he was going to try to explain it the judge.

  “The gun probably came into the lab without any usable prints. They knew they wanted to nail your boy because they thought he did it, and so they go to the computer, make a copy of the print already in his file, slap it into a report, and say they found it on the gun. That’d be plenty for a warrant. Then they arrest the guy, and they get a new print off a glass—a partial this time, something that’s going to look normal at trial in case the defense comes up with a fingerprint expert with half a brain—and they plant that on the gun. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  Finn took a deep breath. “Smitty, would you be willing to put all that in an affidavit?”

  “You still gonna pay my bills?”

  “With a nice Christmas bonus.”

  “I’ll have it to you by noon.”

  “You’re the best.”

  “Did I make your year?”

  “There’s still a week left in the year, and I’ve gotta see the affidavit, but you’re in the running.”

  Finn hung up the phone and looked at Kozlowski. The older man was leaning back in his chair, his eyes on Finn, narrowed in curiosity.

  “Good news, I take it?” he asked.

  “You bet your ass.” Finn smiled. “That was Smitty.”

  “I gathered.”

  “He says that the first print they claimed was on the gun—the one they used to get the warrant for Salazar’s arrest—was a copy of an old booking print they had for him. That means the second print was probably planted after they arrested him.” Finn tried to keep the “I told you so” tone out of his voice. He knew it was a pointless effort.

  “Could it have been an oversight? Maybe they just put the wrong print in the file?” Kozlowski looked oddly shaken. Finn knew how much he hated to be wrong, particularly in a debate with Finn, but the depth of his anguish in this case was unusual. Finn began to wonder whether Kozlowski really wanted their client to turn out to be guilty.

  “You’ve got to be shitting me,” Finn said, rising out of his chair. “Skepticism is one thing, but this is really bullshit, Koz. The man is innocent. What the fuck is going on with you?”

  The phone rang.

  Kozlowski shook his head but said nothing.

  “Salazar is innocent,” Finn said again. “And with or without your help, I’m talking to Steele this morning to find out what’s going on.”

  The phone rang a second time.

  Finn continued to stare at Kozlowski. He was angry now, and he wanted to make that clear. He wanted to make it clear that he wasn’t backing down. “Are you with me, or are you going to bail?”

  The phone rang a third time.

  “Answer the phone,” Kozlowski said.

  Finn glared at the ex-cop for another brief moment. “You sure you want me to? The way this case is going, this is probably more good news. If it’s the president with a pardon for our client, are you going to object?” He picked up the handset. “Finn here,” he barked, redirecting his anger. He listened to the voice on the other end of the line, feeling the blood drain from his face. “N-no . . .” he stammered once, but the voice kept going. Finally, when it was over, he said, “We’ll be right there.”

  He hung up the phone, looking at Kozlowski and seeing the question already on the older man’s brow. “What is it?” Kozlowski asked.

  Finn shook his head, almost unable to talk. “It’s Lissa,” he said. “She’s at the hospital.”

  There was a pause as the two men looked at each other, seeing nothing but their own worst nightmares mirrored in the other’s eyes. Then they were both moving toward the door at full speed.

  PART III

  Chapter Thirty-one

  They spoke five words between them on the drive back to Mass General. In places, the roads were still covered with fresh-packed snow from the prior evening’s storm, and Finn’s tiny MG skidded and skittered around corners on the edge of control as he pushed the car well beyond speeds that could be considered safe given the conditions. As they passed the Museum of Science, Kozlowski, who hadn’t been able even to look at Finn since they got in the car, asked,
“How bad?”

  Finn gripped the wheel tightly as the car slid into a turn. “They didn’t say.” There seemed no point in further conversation.

  They parked illegally on a side street near the hospital to avoid the hassle of the parking garage, and ran to the emergency room. It had been under three hours since Finn had been discharged.

  Kozlowski was first through the hospital doors and moving fast. He reached the ER intake desk at a gallop and spat out, “Lissa Krantz. Where is she?”

  A young nurse sitting at a computer station behind the desk stood just as Finn caught up. She had real sympathy in her eyes. “She came in an hour ago,” she said. “She’s not talking much; just told us to call Tom and Finn at work. Are you them?”

  Kozlowski nodded.

  “How is she?” Finn asked.

  The nurse’s eyes went to the floor. “We think—” she began, but then she stopped as a doctor appeared from behind her. “You should talk to Dr. Cregany.”

  Hearing his name, the doctor looked up. “Can I help you?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Finn said. “We’re friends of Lissa Krantz’s. She was brought in this morning.”

  “What happened?” Kozlowski asked, his voice rough.

  The doctor looked to the nurse for confirmation.

  “Bay four,” she said, identifying Lissa by location.

  “Yes, right,” he said. “Ugly scene. A neighbor found her this morning and called 911. One of those awful things that you think happens only to other people until it happens to you. You’re friends, you say?”

  “Yeah,” Finn confirmed.

  “Good. She’ll need friends now.”

  “Please, Doctor, can you tell us how she is?”

  He looked startled by the question. “In the grand scheme of things, she’s fine, actually. At least she will be. She was beaten pretty badly; cut in a few places, too. But there’s no permanent damage. It’s mainly cosmetic.” He said it in the cold, matter-of-fact tone that only those doctors who deal with the worst medical traumas have perfected.