My Sister's Grave

by Robert Dugoni

  “We’re already getting hit here. I can hear the trucks out sanding the roads. I hate it when they do that. After a while it’s like driving through a cat-litter box. Let me call this in so I can start for home. I’ll let you know when I hear something.”

  No sooner had she hung up when her phone rang.

  “I’m heading over to the jail,” Dan said. “We’re going to hold a press conference when House is released.”

  “Where’s he going to go?”

  “I haven’t talked to him about that. Kind of ironic, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “His first day of freedom and the weather has made prisoners of us all.”

  CHAPTER 50

  Roy Calloway did not go home after the hearing. He went where he always went, where he’d gone nearly every day of his life for the last thirty-five years—rain or shine, weekday or weekend. He went where he felt most comfortable, more comfortable than his own living room, and why not? He spent far more time in his office than he did at home. He sat behind his desk, the desk with the nicks and scrapes on the corner where he had a habit of resting his boots. The desk at which he told people they’d find his dead body, because he wasn’t leaving until then, or until someone got a crane to haul his ass out from behind it, kicking and screaming.

  “Hold all my calls,” he said to the desk sergeant. Then he sat back at his desk, propped his feet on the corner, and rocked in his chair while considering his mounted prize trout. Maybe it was time he acceded to his wife’s wishes and retired. Maybe it was time to catch some more fish and lower his golf score. Maybe it was time to step aside and let Finlay take over, let a younger man have his turn. Maybe it was time for Calloway to go and spoil his grandkids.

  It sounded good. It sounded right.

  It sounded like a cop-out.

  And Roy Calloway had never copped out. He’d never run from anything in his life. And he wasn’t about to start now. He also wasn’t about to make it easy on them. Call him stubborn, obstinate, proud. Pick one. He didn’t give a shit. They could call in the feds, the Justice Department, the Marines, whoever the hell they wanted. He wasn’t ceding his desk or his office to anyone, not without a fight. They could speculate. They could opine about the evidence being questionable. They could intimate about wrongdoing. What they couldn’t do was prove it.

  Not one damn thing.

  So let them come with their accusations and their pointed fingers. Let them come with their high-and-mighty attitudes. Let them come with their speeches on the integrity of the judicial system. They didn’t know. They had no idea. Calloway had had twenty years to think it all through. Twenty years to ask whether he’d done the right thing. Twenty years to confirm what he’d known the moment they’d all made the decision. And he wouldn’t change a thing, not one damn thing.

  He reached for the bottle of Johnnie Walker in his lower desk drawer, poured himself two fingers, and took a sip, feeling the burn. Let them come. He’d be right here, waiting.

  Calloway had no idea how much time had passed when his cell phone rang, bringing him back from his reminiscing to the present. Few people had his cell phone number. Caller ID said “HOME.”

  “Are you on your way?” his wife asked.

  “Soon,” he said. “Just finishing up.”

  “I saw on the news. I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “The snow’s really starting to come down heavy. Best you get on home before you can’t. I made stew out of the leftovers.”

  “That sounds appropriate on a night like this. I won’t be long.”

  Calloway disconnected the call and slipped the phone in his shirt pocket. He slid the empty glass and the bottle from his desk back into the lower drawer, about to slide it closed when the distinctive shadow passed along the smoked-glass windows. Vance Clark didn’t knock when he reached the door. He stepped in looking like he’d gone three rounds blocking punches from a heavyweight—shirt collar unbuttoned, the knot of his tie pulled low and askew. He dropped his briefcase and overcoat into one of the chairs as if his arms were too weary to hold them any longer and slumped in the other chair, the worry lines across his forehead prominent. As the County’s Prosecuting Attorney, Clark was obligated to appear before the cameras and speak to the media following a big trial. The county had mandated it, though it had only happened a handful of times that Calloway could remember. Twenty years earlier, after Edmund House’s conviction, Calloway had joined Clark at the podium. Tracy had also been there. So had James and Abby Crosswhite.

  “That bad?” Calloway asked.

  Clark shrugged, which appeared to be all the energy he could muster. His arms hung from the chair like limp noodles. “About what you’d expect.”

  Calloway retook his seat and retrieved the bottle. This time he set two glasses on the desk, poured two fingers in one, and slid the full glass to the corner where Clark sat. Then he poured himself another drink.

  “You remember?” he asked. They’d drunk a toast in his office twenty years earlier, after Edmund House’s conviction. James Crosswhite had been there too.

  “I remember.” Clark picked up his glass and tipped it toward Calloway before throwing back the alcohol and grimacing. Calloway lifted the bottle, but Clark waved off a refill.

  Calloway spun a bent paper clip like a helicopter blade between his thumb and index finger, listening to the clock on the wall tick and to the low-pitched hum of the fluorescent lights, one still flickering and ticking.

  “You’ll file an appeal?”

  “It’s a formality,” Clark said.

  “How long before the Court of Appeals denies it and grants a new trial?”

  “Not sure it will be up to me to decide. New prosecuting attorney might want to cut his losses,” Clark said, apparently already resigned to losing his job. “He’ll have a built-in excuse, blame it on the old guy, say I screwed it up so bad he can’t win a retrial. Why waste the taxpayers’ money? Why blemish his own record for someone else’s shit pile?”

  “Speculation and innuendo is all it is, Vance.”

  “The media is already running with their stories on corruption and conspiracies in Cedar Grove. God knows what else they’ll come up with.”

  “People in this county know who you are and what you stand for.”

  Clark smiled, but it had a sad quality to it and quickly dimmed. “I just wish I did.” He set the glass on the desk. “You think they’ll come after us, criminal charges?”

  Now it was Calloway’s turn to shrug. “Could.”

  “I suppose I’ll be disbarred.”

  “I suppose I’ll be impeached.”

  “You don’t seem concerned.”

  “What’s to be, will be, Vance. I’m not about to start second-guessing myself now.”

  “You’ve never thought about it?”

  “Whether it was the right thing to do? Not once.” Calloway finished his drink and thought of his wife’s admonition about the storm. “I suggest you get on home while you still can. Go kiss that wife of yours.”

  “Yeah,” Clark said. “There’s always that, right?”

  Calloway looked again to the trout. “That’s the only thing.”

  “What about House? Any idea where he’ll go?”

  “Don’t know, but he won’t get far or anywhere fast in this weather. You still got that .38?”

  Clark nodded.

  “Might want to keep it close by.”

  “I already thought of that. What about DeAngelo?”

  Calloway shook his head. “I’ll keep an eye on him, but I don’t think House is that smart. If he was, he’d have filed an appeal based on inadequacy of legal counsel. He never did.”

  CHAPTER 51

  Tracy backed up her Subaru, put it in drive, and gunned the engine a third time. This attempt, the tires bounced over the lip of snow and ice at the edge of Dan’s driveway, followed by an ugly scraping sound beneath her car. She plowed far enough forward to leave room for Dan to par
k his Tahoe behind her. The noise awakened the alarm system, a chorus of yelps and barks erupting inside the house, though she could not see the dogs because of the plywood still covering the shattered plate-glass window.

  When Tracy stepped from the car, her boots sank to midcalf in the snow that had buried the stone walkway. The partially buried lawn lights created pools of liquid gold. She found the spare key that Dan kept above the garage door and called out to Sherlock and Rex as she undid the deadbolt to the front door. Their barking had reached a fevered pitch. When she opened the door, she expected them to burst out and stepped to the side to avoid the impact, but neither dog came at her. Rex showed no interest, and Sherlock only stuck his head out the door, apparently to see if Dan was trailing her. When he realized Dan was not coming, Sherlock retreated.

  “I don’t blame you,” she said, stepping in and shutting the door. “A hot bath sounds a lot better.” The adrenaline that had fueled her for the week had dissipated, leaving emotional fatigue and stress, though her mind continued to struggle with the letters and numbers of the license plate of the flatbed truck.

  Tracy locked the deadbolt and left her boots, gloves, and coat on the rug by the door. She found the remote control on the sofa and turned on the television, surfing channels for news of the hearing and Judge Meyers’s unexpected decision as she made her way into the kitchen. She settled on Channel 8, which had been running Manpelt’s reports as the lead story every evening, and grabbed a bottle of beer from the refrigerator, popping the cap. Returning to the family room, Tracy slumped into the cushions on the couch and felt her muscles immediately relax into the material. The beer tasted better than she could have imagined, cold and refreshing. She put her stocking-clad feet up on the coffee table and examined the scrape on her knee, which was just superficial. She should probably clean it, but Tracy didn’t feel like getting up and going to the trouble. Dan might have to carry her upstairs to bed.

  Her mind again drifted to the license plate. The V that could have been a W and the three that could have been an eight. Had it been a commercial plate? She couldn’t be certain.

  Tracy sipped her beer and tried to quell her thoughts. Everything had come to such a sudden and dramatic conclusion that she hadn’t had time to absorb the implications of what had happened. Like everyone else, she’d thought that Judge Meyers would end the proceedings and issue a written ruling at a later date. She’d never imagined that Edmund House would leave the hearing a free man. She’d envisioned him being sent back to jail to await the Court of Appeals’ decision on granting him a retrial. Her mind flashed again to that day at the Walla Walla prison when she had seen House’s shit-eating grin. I can already see it, he’d said. The looks on the faces of all those people when they see me walking the streets of Cedar Grove again.

  Now he’d get that chance, though not immediately. Nobody would be walking the streets of Cedar Grove right now—not tonight, maybe not for a few days. As Dan had said, the storm had made prisoners of them all.

  But House was no longer her priority. She didn’t care what might happen at House’s new trial, or if there even was one. Tracy would turn her attention to getting Sarah’s case reopened, which had always been her goal. She doubted that decision would be up to Vance Clark. After Meyers’s reprimand from the bench, Clark would likely resign his post as county prosecutor. Tracy took no pleasure in Clark’s demise. She’d known the man and she’d known his wife. Clark’s daughters had attended Cedar Grove High. Retirement also seemed Roy Calloway’s best option, though Tracy knew the man to be just stubborn enough to refuse. It wouldn’t matter whether or not Tracy was successful in lobbying the Department of Justice to devote its resources to investigating whether or not Clark and Calloway had participated in a conspiracy to convict Edmund House. She wasn’t sure that such an investigation would include DeAngelo Finn, who was too old and too frail, though he might prove to be a valuable witness.

  She sipped her beer and found herself thinking again of her conversation with Finn, as she had stood on the back steps to his home.

  Be careful. Sometimes our questions are better left unanswered.

  There’s no one left to hurt, DeAngelo.

  But there is.

  Roy Calloway had been equally pensive the evening he’d driven to the veterinary clinic. Your father . . . , he’d started to say, before something had made him stop.

  She had wondered if, perhaps, George Bovine’s horrific recounting of his daughter’s suffering had somehow convinced her father and the others that, if they could not find Sarah’s killer, the next-best alternative was to put an animal like Edmund House behind prison walls for the rest of his life. For years, she’d considered this the most plausible theory. Her father had always been a man of such high integrity and morals that it was hard to fathom him doing such a thing, but that man had not existed in the weeks following Sarah’s abduction. The man she’d worked alongside in his office in their frantic search to find Sarah had seemingly been possessed of a different spirit. That man had been angry, bitter, consumed by Sarah’s death. And, Tracy supposed, his own guilt that he had not been in Cedar Grove, had not gone with them to the shooting tournament, had not been there to protect them as he’d always been—as was a father’s duty.

  The local news began. Not surprisingly, Judge Meyers’s decision to free Edmund House was the lead story, as the hearing had been the preceding three nights. “Shocking developments today in the post-conviction relief hearing of Edmund House in Cascade County,” the news anchor said. “After twenty years, convicted rapist and murderer Edmund House is a free man. For more on the story we go live to Maria Vanpelt, who is braving a snowstorm and standing outside the Cascade County Jail where Edmund House and his attorney held a news conference earlier this afternoon.”

  Vanpelt stood beneath an umbrella in the glow of a spotlight. All around her, the snow swirled, nearly obscuring the Cascade County Jail, her chosen backdrop. Gusts of wind tugged at her umbrella, threatening to turn it inside out, and the fur lining of her hooded parka shimmered like a lion shaking its mane. “Shocking is exactly the word to describe today’s events,” Vanpelt said. She recounted Tracy’s testimony, as well as the testimony of Harrison Scott that had led to Judge Meyers’s decision to release Edmund House. “Calling the trial ‘a travesty of justice,’ Judge Meyers implicated everyone involved, including Cedar Grove’s sheriff, Roy Calloway, and the county prosecutor, Vance Clark,” Vanpelt continued. “Earlier this afternoon, I attended a news conference inside the building behind me. That was just before Edmund House walked out a free man—at least for the time being.”

  The camera switched to the earlier news conference. Dan sat beside House, a bouquet of microphones on the table between them. Their disparate sizes had been evident at counsel table but the difference seemed even more pronounced now with House dressed in a denim shirt and winter jacket.

  Tracy’s cell phone rang. She retrieved it from the couch and hit the “Pause” button on the television.

  “I’m just watching you on the television,” she said. “Where are you?”

  “I had a few other interviews with the national media,” Dan said. “I’m on my way, but I thought I better let you know the freeway’s already a mess. There are spinouts everywhere. It’s going to take me some time to get home. There are reports of power outages and downed trees.”

  “Everything’s fine here,” she said.

  “I have a generator in the garage if you need it. All you need to do is plug it into the socket beside the fuse boxes.”

  “Not sure I have the energy.”

  “The boys are all right?”

  “Lying here on the rug. You might have to carry them outside to go to the bathroom, however.”

  “And what about you?”

  “I can make it to the bathroom myself, thank you very much,” she said.

  “I see someone’s sense of humor has returned.”

  “I think I’m punchy. What I see is a hot bath in my fut
ure.”

  “I like the sound of that.”

  “Let me call you back. I want to watch the news conference.”

  “How do I look?”

  “Still fishing for compliments?”

  “You know it. All right, call me back.”

  She disconnected and hit “Play.” Dan said, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. I suspect the Court of Appeals will act swiftly given the miscarriage of justice. After it does, we’ll have to wait and see what the prosecutor decides.”

  “How does it feel to be a free man?” Vanpelt asked House.

  House flipped his ponytail off his shoulder. “Well, it’s like my attorney said, I’m not free just yet, but . . .” He smiled. “It feels good.”

  “What’s the first thing you’ll do now that you are free?”

  “The same as all of you; step outside and let the snow and wind hit me in the face.”

  “Are you angry about what transpired?”

  House’s smile waned. “I wouldn’t use the word ‘angry.’ ”

  “So you’ve forgiven those responsible for putting you in jail?” Vanpelt asked.

  “I wouldn’t say that either. All I can do is correct my past mistakes and try not to repeat them. That’s what I intend to do.”

  An off-camera reporter asked, “Do you have any idea what motivated whoever was responsible for fabricating evidence to convict you?”

  Dan leaned to the microphones. “We’re not going to comment on the evidence—”

  “Ignorance,” House said, talking over him. “Ignorance and arrogance. They thought they could get away with it.”

  Vanpelt drew Dan’s attention with another question. “Mr. O’Leary, will you seek the involvement of the Department of Justice to investigate, as Judge Meyers intimated?”

  “I’ll confer with my client and make that decision.”

  But House again leaned forward. “I’m not looking to the Department of Justice to punish anyone.”