The Justice Project

by Michael Betcherman

  The engine started, and the car moved forward. It turned left out of the driveway. Burke still intended to visit his father in Leamington, Matt reasoned, but that was as far as logic would take him.

  He wondered if Burke had meant it when he said he wasn’t going to hurt him. He’d sounded sincere, but then again, didn’t psychos always sound sincere? How could Burke let him go when he knew what Matt knew?

  They had driven for what Matt guessed was half an hour—but it could have been half that or twice that—when the car turned onto a rough road and slowed to a crawl. Sheer terror engulfed Matt. He forced himself to breathe, trying to push away the panic. A short while later the car came to a stop. The trunk popped open. Matt blinked as his eyes adjusted to the light.

  Burke was silhouetted against the sky. Before Matt could see where he was, Burke slipped a hood over his head. Darkness descended once more. Burke helped Matt out of the trunk and steadied him on his feet. He cut the tape that bound Matt’s legs, led him a few steps forward and then stopped. A door creaked open. He steered Matt a few more steps, sat him down on a dirt floor with his back against a wall and retied Matt’s ankles with the duct tape.

  “This would never have happened if that stupid woman hadn’t jumped in front of the car,” Burke whined. “She came out of nowhere. What was I supposed to do? I’d had a couple of drinks. If I’d called the police, I would have gone to jail. And for what? It wouldn’t have brought her back to life. Nobody would have ever found out if Walter hadn’t seen the article and put two and two together.

  “Here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to do some work on Walter’s car, so nobody will be able to prove it was his. When I’m done, I’m going to go visit my dad. Then I’ll come back here, get the model car—the glue will be dry by then—and put it in my workshop. Then I’ll come back for you and drop you off on the outskirts of town. At that point you’ll have a choice to make. You can accuse me of murder without a shred of evidence, and have everybody in town think you’re a deranged nutbar, or you can keep your mouth shut and get on with the rest of your life.”

  Matt heard something—the duffel bag?—being unzipped, followed by sounds he couldn’t identify but which, he knew, meant Burke was putting his plan into motion. He didn’t know the techniques Burke was using to accomplish his task, but the end result was no mystery: no trace of red flocking, and a new license plate.

  Matt racked his brain, looking for a hole in Burke’s plan—something he had overlooked, something that would prove Burke had killed Walter and Gwen. But he came up empty. It would be his word against Burke’s, and without any proof to back him up, nobody would believe him. Burke would get away with his crime, and Ray would never get out of jail.

  “I’ll be back in a few hours,” Burke said after a while. “That should give you plenty of time to decide how you want to play this.”

  A few seconds later the car door opened and closed, and the engine started. Car wheels crunched on gravel, then faded away until the only sounds Matt could hear were birds chirping.

  FORTY-THREE

  Matt tried to figure out where he was. The rough road they had taken here, and the near-total silence, meant he was somewhere in the country, but that was as much as he could narrow it down. His fingers brushed against the rough planking of the wall he was leaning against. There was a musty smell in the air. He guessed he was in a barn. An abandoned barn. There were probably hundreds of them near Snowden. There was no way anybody would find him before Burke came back.

  A terrifying thought assailed him. What if Burke wasn’t coming back? He’d said he would return to get the Cadillac, but he could have taken it with him. Would he really risk Matt going public with what he knew? Walter’s car had been in his possession for over twenty years. Other people must have seen it. Why take the chance that somebody would remember the red flocking and come forward once Matt sounded the alarm?

  Sonya would call him when she got back from the prison. She would suspect something had happened if he didn’t respond, but she would have no reason to think Burke was involved, not when she had received a text from Matt’s phone saying that the Cadillac in Burke’s workshop wasn’t Walter’s. And even if she still suspected Burke, there was nothing to connect him to Matt’s disappearance.

  Burke could just wait it out, wait until the frenzy over Matt’s disappearance died down, and then come back here and put his corpse somewhere where nobody would ever find it. Matt recalled from something he’d seen on TV that a human being could survive for ages without food, but that you couldn’t last for more than a few days without water. After everything he’d been through, was it all going to end here? With him slowly dying of thirst? I want to live, he mutely screamed.

  Matt sat in the darkness, hooded, for what seemed like hours. He felt as if he was in a sensory deprivation chamber. Time lost all meaning. Eventually the birds fell silent, signaling the arrival of nightfall. His mind began to play tricks on him. He found himself having conversations—with Emma, with his mom and dad, with Anthony—that felt real until the moment he realized they weren’t.

  He was telling Emma it would be a mistake for her to move to Saudi Arabia when he heard a car drive up. He ignored it, certain it was his imagination. “Women aren’t allowed to drive there,” he told Emma. “You’ll have to walk everywhere, and it’s a million degrees in the shade.” A car door shut. Footsteps approached. Burke had come back. Matt felt absurdly grateful. Tears welled up in his eyes. He was going to live.

  “Matt. Matt.”

  It was a woman’s voice, not Burke’s. His heart sank. He had imagined it.

  The door creaked. A beam of light penetrated his hood.

  “Matt! Thank God.” The hood was yanked off his head. Sonya’s face was illuminated by moonlight. She removed the tape from his mouth. “Are you all right?”

  He took a couple of deep breaths. “I think so. It’s you. It’s really you.”

  “What happened?”

  “Burke caught me at the house. He has a gun. We’ve got to get out of here before he comes back.”

  Sonya tried to rip the duct tape off Matt’s ankles, but it wouldn’t tear.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said.

  Matt looked around. He was in a rundown barn, as he’d suspected. Walter’s Cadillac lay on the ground a few feet away, beside the duffel bag. Burke was planning to return after all.

  Sonya returned with a pair of scissors. Matt explained what had happened while she cut the tape on his wrists and ankles. When she was done, he took his phone out of the duffel bag and took some photos to document the scene. He put the phone in his pocket and then put the model car in the duffel bag. “Let’s go,” he said, slinging the bag over his shoulder.

  “Stop right there,” a voice commanded when they got outside. Dan Burke stood a few feet away, his gun pointed at them. “Put the bag on the ground and lie down beside it. Both of you.”

  Matt dropped the bag. “You’re too late,” he said. “I emailed pictures of the car to Jesse.”

  “Nice try.”

  “See for yourself.” Matt tossed his phone to Burke. The move caught Burke by surprise. He instinctively reached for the phone. Matt took two quick steps and launched himself at Burke, like a defensive back making a tackle in midfield. The gun went off. Matt felt the bullet whistle by his ear just before his shoulders hit Burke in the midsection. Burke grunted as he hit the ground. The gun dropped, but before Burke could reach for it, Matt was squatting on his chest, his knees pinning Burke’s arms. He made a fist with his hand and cocked his arm.

  “Don’t hit me,” Burke whimpered.

  Matt thought of Walter and Gwen, their lives cut short by this pitiful creature lying under him. He thought of all the years Ray had spent in jail because of him. Fury rose inside him.

  “It’s over, Matt,” Sonya said. “It’s over.”

  “I know,” Matt said.

  Then he smashed Burke in the face with all his might.

  �
�There’s one thing I don’t understand,” Matt said after he and Sonya had tied up Burke with the duct tape. They were waiting for the police to arrive. “How did you know where to find me?”

  “I tracked down your phone from your computer.”

  “But you can’t log onto my computer without—”

  “Statechamps. One word. Lower case,” Sonya said. “Lamest password ever.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  “Hot off the press,” Matt’s dad said, handing Matt the paper as he staggered into the living room the next morning, his body still stiff from the hours he had spent tied up on the barn floor.

  Matt read the headline.

  Mayor’s Husband Charged with 21-Year-Old Double Murder

  Former Falcons Star Player Turns Sleuth

  Underneath was a photo of Dan Burke flanked by two cops, his eye black and swollen shut.

  Matt lowered himself into a chair and began reading. The article took up all of the front page and a good chunk of page two as well. The reporter had interviewed Matt and Sonya after they left the police station the night before, and they had given him the entire story—with one minor omission. They had seen no need to muddy the waters by mentioning their initial belief that the Chief was the culprit.

  “It reads like a thriller, doesn’t it?” Matt’s dad said when Matt put the paper down.

  “It’s definitely got a lot of fiction.”

  Matt barely recognized himself. The reporter had transformed him from a trembling teenager, petrified that he was going to die, into a fearless young man who had courageously handled a situation that would have challenged James Bond.

  After breakfast Matt and Sonya went to see Jolene. Ray’s grandmother was standing in the doorway of her room, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. As soon as she saw them, she burst into tears.

  Matt had read the expression tears of joy in books, but he’d never seen them in real life until now. They must have been contagious, because Sonya started crying too. It wasn’t long before Matt’s eyes welled up as well.

  The three embraced. “Ray’s coming home,” Jolene said over and over, as if the news hadn’t quite sunk in.

  After they said goodbye to Jolene, Matt and Sonya dropped by the Justice Project office. There had been a couple of developments with the case, and Jesse and Angela brought them up to date.

  Dan Burke had pled guilty to the murders and accepted a life sentence with no possibility of parole. Matt felt a twinge of disappointment. This was one time when he wouldn’t have had a problem with the death penalty. Jamie Jenkins had held a live press conference to explain her involvement in the hit-and-run and to announce that she was resigning as mayor of Snowden.

  “She took full responsibility for not reporting the accident. She could have blamed Burke—she was so young at the time—but she didn’t,” Angela said.

  Jamie had been waiting for Walter when he came to work the morning after the hit-and-run. When he asked about the damage to the car, she told him she had driven into a parking meter. She said her dad would go ballistic if he found out she’d taken the car without permission, and Walter agreed to cover for her.

  “Remember when Jamie said how kind Walter had been?” Sonya recalled. “That’s what she was talking about.”

  They knew the rest of the story. Walter went home, read the article in the Sentinel and realized Jamie had lied to him. That’s when he made the call to Burke, a call that ended up costing him and Gwen their lives, and Ray his freedom.

  “Jamie seemed relieved that it was all out in the open,” Angela said. “Imagine living with that for all these years.”

  “Is she going to get charged?” Matt asked.

  “No,” Jesse said. “It happened too long ago. The state has to file charges within a few years from the time a crime is committed. Except for murder. There’s no time limit there. That’s why they can still charge Burke.”

  “They should put Burke in Ray’s cell,” Matt said.

  “Now that would be justice,” Jesse agreed.

  Three weeks later Matt and Sonya sat beside Jolene in a Snowden courtroom jammed with Ray’s supporters. A huge cheer erupted when the judge apologized to Ray, on behalf of the state, for his wrongful conviction and told him he was free to go.

  Words couldn’t begin to describe the joy in Jolene’s face when Ray wrapped her in an embrace. She held on to him like a drowning person clutching a life preserver.

  Everybody started crying. Even Jesse had tears rolling down his face.

  A mob of reporters swarmed Ray when he came outside, thrusting microphones in his face. Someone shouted out the one question reporters never seem to tire of asking.

  “How do you feel?”

  “I feel great,” Ray said with a big smile. He summoned Matt and Sonya to join him and told the crowd he owed his freedom to them. He stood between them and raised their arms in the air in a victory salute. Ray’s supporters clapped and cheered.

  Ray was asked what he was going to do with the $420,000 the state was paying him in compensation—$20,000 for each year he had been in jail. He didn’t bother mentioning the obvious—that no amount of money could compensate for the years he’d lost. The first thing he was going to do, he said, was find a nice apartment for him and Jolene. Then he was going to buy back his dad’s model-car collection from Ralph Ellison.

  Then he and Jolene got into a car and went to the cemetery so he could finally pay his respects to his mother and father, twenty-one years after they had died.

  A reporter cornered Matt. “How does this compare to winning the state championship?”

  Matt caught Sonya’s eye. She burst out laughing. They’d just restored a man’s freedom, and this fool was wondering how it compared to winning a football game. Snowden was never going to change. Matt resisted the urge to mock the reporter. Instead, he answered the question honestly. “Winning the championship was special, but this is even better.”

  The reporter had one more question. “How do you feel?”

  Matt looked him in the eye. “How much time do you have?”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Jesse Donovan’s wrongful conviction for the murder of two men is based on the true story of Larry Hicks.

  In 1978 Hicks, a nineteen-year-old man living in Gary, Indiana, was convicted of two counts of murder and sentenced to death. At his trial he was represented by a public defender who failed to examine both the dark-red stains on Hicks’s jeans that the prosecutor claimed were blood and the knife he said was the murder weapon. Two weeks before Hicks’s scheduled execution, a volunteer lawyer took over his case. He proved that the supposed bloodstains on Hicks’s jeans were rust stains, and that the knife was too short to have been the murder weapon. The two eyewitnesses who claimed they had seen Hicks threatening the victim admitted they had lied because they were afraid of the real killer. Hicks was found not guilty at a second trial and released from jail after serving two years on death row.

  Bill Matheson’s wrongful conviction for the murder of his wife is based on the true story of Michael Morton.

  In 1987 Morton, a supermarket manager in Texas, was convicted of murdering his wife, Christine, and sentenced to life in prison. Eighteen years later, in 2005, Morton’s new lawyers applied for DNA testing of a bloody bandanna that had been found on a construction site one hundred yards from the Mortons’ home the day after the murder. (At the time, neither the prosecution nor Morton’s original lawyers thought it had any connection to the case.)

  The district attorney claimed that a DNA test would “muddy the waters” and fought the motion in the courts for five years before a judge finally ordered the test. The test revealed that the blood of Christine Morton was on the bandanna, along with the DNA of Mark Alan Norwood, a drifter with a long criminal record. In 2013 Norwood was convicted of killing Christine Morton. At the request of Michael Morton and the rest of Christine’s family, Norwood’s prosecutor agreed not to seek the death penalty, and Norwood was sentenced to life in prison.


  Michael Morton was released in 2012, after serving twenty-five years in prison. He had been denied parole in 2007 because he refused to lie and falsely admit he had killed his wife.

  The Justice Project is a fictional organization, but similar real-life organizations exist in many states and provinces and around the world, fighting on behalf of the wrongly convicted. The Innocence Network (innocencenetwork.org) has a list of these organizations and more information.

  At the time this book was written, over 2,250 falsely convicted men and women had been exonerated in the United States since 1989. Visit the National Registry of Exonerations (law.umich.edu/special/exoneration) for details.

  There have been 162 death-row exonerations in the United States since 1973. Information is available at the Death Penalty Information Center website, deathpenaltyinfo.org.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to express my gratitude to the many people who helped me during the writing of this book. First, thank you to my family and friends who read the manuscript and whose feedback was invaluable: my wife, Claudette Jaiko; my daughter, Laura Betcherman; and my good friends Jake Onrot, David Diamond and Bill Kelly. Special thanks go to my publisher, Ruth Linka, my wonderful editor, Sara Cassidy, and the rest of the team at Orca Book Publishers. And a huge thank-you to my agent, Amy Tompkins at Transatlantic Agency, for her faith in me and in my story.

  MICHAEL BETCHERMAN is an award-winning author and screenwriter. He is the author of the young adult mystery novels Breakaway and Face-Off, both published by Penguin Canada. Breakaway was a finalist for the John Spray Mystery Award. Face-Off was short-listed for the Arthur Ellis Best Juvenile/YA Book Award. Michael has numerous writing credits in both dramatic and documentary television. He is also the author/creator of the groundbreaking online novels The Daughters of Freya and Suzanne. Michael lives in Toronto with his wife, Claudette Jaiko.