Unintended Consequences

by Marti Green

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2013 Marti Green

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  ISBN-13: 9781477818152

  ISBN-10: 1477818154

  Cover design by Derek Murphy

  Book design by Christopher Fisher

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013917255

  Dedicated to my father, Simon Silverman, who instilled in me a love of reading, and to my mother, Ruth Silverman, who taught me how to write.

  I miss you both.

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  It is Justice, not Laws that cures the society. And Capital Punishment is the only Justice that suits a murderer.

  —Saqib Ali

  The recent developments of reliable scientific evidentiary methods has made it possible to establish conclusively that a disturbing number of persons who had been sentenced to death were actually innocent.

  —John Paul Stevens,

  US Supreme Court Justice

  Capital punishment, like the rest of the criminal justice system, is a government program, so skepticism is in order.

  —George Will

  CHAPTER

  1

  Forty-Two Days

  I didn’t kill my little girl. The body in the woods—that wasn’t my daughter. The words on the page kept ringing in Dani Trumball’s ears. I loved my little girl and only wanted to help her.

  Most of the letters on her desk Dani went through quickly, spotting the scams easily enough and tossing them aside for a quick response from her secretary. “Dear (fill in the blank): We regret that the Help Innocent Prisoners Project is unable to assist you at this time.” Others rang true and might warrant some added sentences. “Although we appreciate your circumstances, the many requests for our limited services mean we can only accept a few cases. We wish you the best of luck in finding someone else to help you.” Only a few, a very few, were taken on.

  This letter—it stayed with her. I sure hope you can help me because they are going to kill me soon, and maybe I deserve to die, but it’s not because I killed my little girl. Six weeks until his execution. “Impossible,” she kept muttering to herself, shaking her head. She pushed her hair away from her face and wiped her forehead with a tissue. It was warm for early April, too early for the air conditioning in the office to be turned on, and she felt limp from the heat. She unbuttoned an extra button on her blouse and then reread George Calhoun’s letter. I kept telling them she wasn’t my daughter, but they didn’t believe me. I don’t know why Sallie—that’s my wife—said she was. She must have gone crazy from worry about Angelina. That’s our daughter’s name. We named her that because she was our little angel.

  The Help Innocent Prisoners Project—HIPP—operated out of a converted warehouse on 14th Street in the East Village. It received letters from inmates throughout the country, and each attorney reviewed some of them. Dani had been going through a stack of folders, each containing an inmate’s plea for help, when she came across the letter from Calhoun. She’d already scribbled, “Sorry, no,” across the top, put it in her out box, and moved on to other letters. For the third time, she rummaged through her pile of replies and pulled his letter out. After staring at Calhoun’s words once more, she started to put it back yet again but wavered. Finally, she stood up and strode out of the office, glancing up at the framed embroidery over the door on her way out. It read, “Everyone on death row claims they are innocent. Once in a while they are.” Her mother had sewn it for her after she began working at HIPP. Over time, Dani had witnessed the truth of the saying. The difficulty was in figuring out which ones really were innocent. Sometimes, when she felt most overwhelmed, she wished for a magic ball—perhaps in the form of DNA evidence—that could provide the answer. Without it, the truth was often elusive.

  “Busy?” Dani asked as she entered the office of Bruce Kantor, the director of HIPP. She slipped into the plastic chair opposite his desk.

  “Always. Too busy. I think I need a vacation.”

  “Didn’t you just have one three years ago?”

  “I think it was five, but who’s keeping track?” Bruce leaned back in his chair, its fabric as worn as the wood of his desk. His dark brown skin and shaved head glistened with beads of sweat. With his taut body, kept trim with regular ten-mile jogs, he looked like a warrior ready for battle. “So, what’s up?”

  “Take a look at this letter. I think it’s something that might be worth exploring.” She handed it to him and sat forward in her chair as he read it silently.

  “Six weeks?” he said when he was finished. “You do realize how difficult that is, don’t you?”

  She did know. Trying to halt an execution in only six weeks was like trying to run a marathon in two hours. “You’re right. But I keep putting it down in the ‘sorry, no’ pile and then pulling it out again.”

  Bruce looked over the letter again. “I thought you stayed away from child-murder cases.”

  “I do. I mean, I have. I can’t even imagine having to deal with that as a parent.”

  “So why this case?”

  Dani shrugged. “I’m not sure. There’s something about it. I mean, if this guy is being honest, his daughter wasn’t murdered, but a child’s body was found. Who was it? Where’s his own daughter?”

  “If we take this on, are you willing to head it up?”

  It was the question Dani had expected, the one she’d dreaded. She wrote and argued appeals after others had investigated the facts. Cases came to her when the office had already gathered the available evidence. Bruce had tried for years to involve her in cases at the investigation stage, and she’d always resisted. Writing appeals allowed her to leave the office at three and work from home, with a minimal amount of traveling. That way, she was home when Jonah got back from school. Taking on a case from the beginning meant being away from her family, sometimes for weeks at a time.

  Suddenly she became aware t
hat she’d twirled the ends of her hair in her fingers, a nervous habit from childhood. The thought of taking the lead had triggered a sense of disquiet.

  “I’ll think about it, okay?”

  “Sure. Just don’t take too long. This guy doesn’t have the time for that.”

  Dani sighed. “I know. Tomorrow. I’ll let you know tomorrow.”

  That evening, Dani curled up next to her husband, Doug, on the down-filled couch in front of their living room’s marble fireplace, where the last embers were dying. The room had the smoky smell of burning wood. The heat from the day had disappeared with the setting sun, and now the air outside felt raw, with a damp cold that permeated the thinly insulated walls of the old house. The fire brought welcome warmth to the living room. They called this time together the “honeymoon hour,” and no matter how busy either of them was, they always set aside an hour to talk about Jonah, about their day, about nothing and everything. If one of them traveled, they spent the hour on the phone. Of course, they were together much more than an hour a day, but when deadlines loomed and pressure built, it was easy to work straight through the night, and after many nights of that, it had begun to take a toll on their marriage. So they had their one hour, no matter what. And it made them feel, after fifteen years of marriage, as if they were still on their honeymoon.

  “What makes you think he’s innocent?” Doug asked as he stroked the long, dark waves of Dani’s hair.

  “I don’t know that he is. But wouldn’t you expect him to just deny that he killed the little girl who was found in the woods? Why would he also insist it wasn’t his daughter? And if that’s true, if the girl wasn’t his daughter, what would have been his motivation for murdering the girl found in the forest?”

  “Maybe he’s a psycho. Maybe his daughter died, and out of rage he murdered another child.”

  “But there’s no death certificate for his daughter. And if his daughter didn’t die, then what happened to her?”

  “How about this: He murdered his daughter first, buried her in a secret place, and then started on a spree of murdering little girls.”

  Dani took a sip of Chianti. It was her second glass and she felt warm and tingly. “You’re certainly being ghoulish tonight.”

  “These are the clients you represent. They’re capable of horrible deeds.”

  “So you think I shouldn’t take the case?”

  Doug turned Dani’s face toward his. His eyes looked black in the darkened room. They were deeply set, framed by bushy eyebrows above and a soft puffiness below. Crow’s feet had begun to appear at their edges. It hit her that they were approaching middle age, an epoch they’d kept pushing farther away, as if they could remain young simply by redefining the age of entry.

  “You should at least investigate his claims. You won’t be comfortable until you’ve satisfied yourself that he’s guilty. Or not guilty.”

  “But I could be away from home for weeks. That’ll be hard on you and Jonah.”

  “Hmm. Yes, I see your dilemma,” Doug said with his most professorial face, a look he’d mastered after years of teaching law. “Despite my ability to manage a horde of law students, I am clearly unqualified for the rigors of meeting the needs of a twelve-year-old, or my own needs, for that matter. Yes, that certainly is a problem.”

  Dani hit him playfully in the arm and they laughed. The thought struck her, suddenly, how lucky she’d been in marrying Doug. “Two peas in a pod,” her mother often said, one of the many clichés she often spouted. It was true and yet not. They weren’t the same, Doug being more pragmatic and she, more emotional. But both were fierce advocates for their sense of justice; both shared the same values; both were devoted to family. Dani wanted to believe they’d chosen each other because of those attributes, but she knew it wasn’t true. They’d been too young then to realize the people they would become and what would be important in their lives. She knew it was luck that the choice they’d made so many years ago turned out to be so remarkably right.

  “We’ll manage,” Doug said. “Besides, I always have Gracie to cuddle up with at night.” Gracie was their cat, fat and affectionate. Usually, she’d have no one but Dani, purring loudly as she nestled herself in the crook of her arm at night. But in Dani’s absence, she made do with Doug.

  “Well, then…”

  “So, it’s settled.”

  “Yes, I suppose it is.” It wasn’t her fear of leaving Doug and Jonah that held her back. It was the case. When she handled only the briefs, HIPP had already decided the defendant was innocent. As an investigator, she’d have to make that decision. And to do so, she’d have to relive the brutal murder of a little girl. She wasn’t sure she was prepared for that.

  CHAPTER

  2

  When she arrived at HIPP the next morning, Dani saw through Bruce’s open office door that he was sitting behind his desk. She hung up her coat and settled into her office, sipping the lukewarm coffee she’d picked up at the corner deli. Behind her functional, brown, laminate desk was a black swivel chair, its thin cushions flattened from years of overuse. Yesterday’s stack of folders had been reviewed and now sat on her secretary’s desk for follow-up. One folder remained. Inside was a single sheet of paper, the handwritten letter from George Calhoun. She stared at his folder while she finished her coffee and then walked to the office Xerox machine to photocopy a legal brief she’d written at home. With a copy of the document in hand, she marched into Bruce’s office and dropped it on top of his already cluttered desk. Bruce had the only window office in HIPP’s spartan space. The other attorneys were housed in a row of small boxlike rooms, and the investigators and paralegals sat at desks on the open floor. It was as far removed from a Wall Street firm as a lawyer could get.

  “Here’s the Brigham brief,” Dani said.

  Bruce looked up from his computer, startled. “Already? That was fast. It’s not due for another week.”

  “I know. This’ll give you more time to go over it.” As director of HIPP, Bruce reviewed all the filings that came out of the office. He rarely marked up Dani’s work, though, and she’d gotten into the habit of turning in her drafts only a day or two before they were due. “Besides, I’ve been thinking more about the Calhoun case.”

  Bruce leaned back in his chair, and with his arms behind his head, fingers entwined, he smiled like a fisherman who’s reeled in his catch. “You want HIPP to take his case, don’t you?”

  Dani took a deep breath. She’d tossed and turned for much of the night as she wrestled with her decision. Finally, she’d given up on sleep, crept downstairs to the kitchen, and after brewing a cup of coffee, begun a list. On the left side were the reasons to reject Calhoun’s request; on the right, the reasons to follow up on his letter. She had easily filled the left side. The right column contained only one entry: Find out what happened to Angelina Calhoun. “I do.”

  “Are you willing to handle it from the start?”

  Dani nodded. “I think it’s time. Can I pick my team on this?” Considering HIPP’s nonprofit status, with underpaid and overworked staff, an impressive roster of credentials was attached to the attorneys, paralegals, and investigators on salary. Even though everyone there was top notch, Dani had her favorites.

  “Who’ve you got in mind?”

  She knew just who she wanted. “Tommy and Melanie.”

  “Should be okay. I’ll check their assignments and see if they can free up some time.”

  Dani walked back to her office and busied herself with paperwork until she could put in a call to State Prison in Indiana, where George Calhoun was incarcerated. She’d already researched the head of State Prison and knew that Jared Coates counted as one of the new breed of prison wardens—smart, tough, and fair.

  When she reached the prison, Dani identified herself and asked to be put through to the warden. A few minutes later she heard a deep voice say, “Good morning, Ms. Trumball.
How can I help you?”

  “Good morning, Warden Coates. I’m a staff attorney with the Help Innocent Prisoners Project in New York City. I’m calling about George Calhoun. I’ve received a letter from him.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ll be overnighting him a retainer letter, and once it comes back, I’d like to meet with you first. I’m just calling to give you a heads-up, since his scheduled date of execution is only six weeks away. We’ll need to move quickly on this.”

  “George Calhoun contacted you? That’s interesting.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad he did. It’s just that he’s seemed resigned to what’s coming. Most of the others on death row fight as hard as they can to get out. They go through lawyers like chicken feed. But George stuck with the same lawyer from the beginning. It always seemed like he didn’t care what happened.”

  That surprised Dani. Innocent prisoners, especially those on death row, were usually persistent in their fight for freedom. “Do you think he’s guilty?”

  “Can’t say I don’t; can’t say I do. The jury spoke and they said he was.”

  “I’m confused. If that’s how you feel, why are you glad George wrote us?”

  “As far as I can tell, George has always insisted he’s innocent. The way I look at it, if a man keeps saying he didn’t do the crime, he should have every chance possible to prove it. That’s why I’m glad he contacted you.”

  “That’s refreshing coming from a warden.”

  Dani heard a soft chuckle on the other end of the line. “I suppose it is. But I sleep better at night knowing something wasn’t missed.”

  Dani got off the phone relieved that she wouldn’t get the runaround from the warden. HIPP had worked with enough prisoners in enough prisons for her to know that with one word from the top man, the job could become easier or tortuous. Given the short time they had, an obstructionist warden would make the task truly impossible.

  She turned to her computer and logged in to Lexis/Nexis, the online research tool for lawyers. She typed in The People of Indiana v. George Calhoun and began reading the earliest appeals court decision, handed down six months after his conviction.