Silent Witness

by Richard North Patterson

  “Are you?”

  “No. And I wouldn’t be too hard on the Calders, either. It’s understandable that they didn’t want me telling you, or anyone, that Marcie was pregnant.” She paused for a moment. “Until and unless it became evidence in a criminal prosecution.”

  Tony sat back, edgy now. “Is that why you called me?”

  “Uh-huh.” She folded her hands. “We’re indicting, Tony. Sam Robb’s the father.”

  Somehow her tone, casual and off the cuff, made this even worse. Perhaps because it was so clear that she had expected this.

  “You’ve got your motive,” Tony said.

  Stella nodded. “That Marcie told him she was pregnant. Your friend Sam lied to us—he’d been having sex with a sixteen-year-old girl, and now she was going to have his child.” Her tone held quiet contempt. “She didn’t believe in abortion, so there was no place for him to hide. His career, perhaps his marriage, would be out the window. So he took two lives instead.”

  There was no stopping this, Tony knew. It was only by reflex that he asked, “So why did Sam go to the cops when she went missing?”

  “Panic, guilt—his mind was probably a jumble. But I’m sure he didn’t know we could DNA a six-week-old fetus, and was afraid of getting caught.”

  Tony stood, hands shoved in his pockets; for once, he did not care if someone saw his own distress. “It would have been less of a risk to just let her lie there, murderer that he is. Or maybe he just forgot that she was dead the last time he saw her.”

  Stella regarded him impassively. “That’s your argument, all right. Maybe a jury will even buy it. But they’ll have to, because we’re trying this unless you plead him.”

  Tony could no longer fight off the images—Sam’s face when he told him; Sue, sitting in the courtroom. Perhaps it might be better, for everyone, if he loaned them the money to find a lawyer to whom this was less personal, whose feelings were less conflicted and complex. At length, Tony asked, “Plead him to what?”

  “Murder two.”

  It surprised him enough to grimace. “That’s not an offer, Stella—it’s the most you can get. Even if you could persuade twelve people that Sam killed her, you can never prove premeditation.”

  “So come back with a story that supports manslaughter—like that somehow he didn’t mean to kill her—and I’ll consider it. Though with several apparent blows to the head, it’s hard to imagine what that story would be.” Her gaze grew pointed. “Drunkenness, maybe. But your client would have to give the court a statement, spelling out exactly how it happened. In this kind of case, I don’t want to leave any doubts around. You, more than anyone, can appreciate that.”

  Tony drew a breath. He no longer had to decide whether to mention Ernie Nixon; the place for that decision, now, was at trial. Softly, he said, “I think I can beat this, Stella. I’m not sure you’ve got enough.”

  Stella gazed at him a moment. “I’m sorry,” she said at last. “I know this is difficult for you. But I have to try the cases I think should be tried, even if there’s a chance that I could lose.” She gave a fatalistic shrug. “If we do try it, Tony, I’m sure I’ll learn something.”

  Tony managed a smile. “Maybe I will.”

  Stella summoned a smile of her own, looking at him with level eyes. “Modesty,” she answered, “doesn’t always become you. But maybe you’ll learn a little something about Sam Robb. At least if you don’t already know it.”

  NINETEEN

  At around four-thirty, in a day that already felt achingly long, Tony found Sam Robb at the Lake City baseball diamond.

  Watching the Lake City team play Riverwood, Sam sat alone in the grass adjacent to deep right field, well away from the stands, where his presence would have excited comment or alarm. As Tony approached, he felt pity for Sam’s isolation, for what he had lost and was about to lose. In this elegiac frame of mind, Tony imagined that his friend was seeing his youth from some great distance, now barely able to hear the cries of the players, the crack of a bat, the slap of a baseball on a leather glove. Though perhaps the fatalism in Sam’s gaze as he looked up was a trick of Tony’s mind.

  “News?” Sam asked.

  Slowly, Tony nodded. “Marcie Calder was pregnant, Sam.”

  If this was not a surprise, Tony thought, Sam had the talent of turning pale at will. His eyes shut. “And they think it’s mine?” he said at last.

  “They’re sure it is.” When Sam’s eyes flew open, Tony added, “With DNA, they can do that too. I guess you didn’t know that.”

  For a moment, Sam’s stillness was not the stillness of thought but the paralysis Tony had seen at the moment a person heard something that he could not accept—the sudden death of a parent, the murder of a child, the betrayal of a lover, the ruin of a life. Only Sam’s lips moved. “It’s over for me here.…”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Sue…”

  The name, spoken with sudden anguish, said much more than Sam could express. Tony felt his own chest tighten. “You’ll have to tell her, Sam. Before she hears it from the media.”

  Sam turned to him, his irises pale blue in the frozen white of his eyes. Softly, Tony said, “They’re filing charges tomorrow. Murder one, unless you plead. You’ve got twenty-four hours to decide.”

  Folding his arms, Sam stared at the ground. “Sue,” he said again, a whisper.

  It pierced Tony’s self-possession. “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “For both of you.”

  Sam did not seem to hear, nor could he seem to look at him. “You should have taken her away, Tony. After Alison died, all those years ago.”

  Startled, Tony wondered how much Sam knew, or guessed. Quietly, he said, “That was never a choice I had.”

  “Worse luck for her. Now she can look back at our life and see this at the end.” He shook his head, as if in awe at the devastation he had caused. “A broken rubber…”

  Tony waited a moment. “You didn’t know?”

  “She never told me.…” Sam’s eyes seemed haunted, distant, wondering. “I guess that must have been what the marriage thing was, what she said about giving me children. If I’d known, Tony, I’d have done it different. I’m not sure what, exactly. But I wouldn’t have let Marcie run off into the park at night.” Thoughts seemed to come to him in increments, one puzzle piece, then another. “No wonder she was so out of her mind…”

  Tony watched his eyes film over. The defense lawyer Tony Lord had an instinct for lies and evasions that the other Tony, friend of Sam Robb, seemed to have lost. What Tony saw now was either a man in shock, confronting for the first time a bitter, damning trick of fate, or a liar so gifted yet so troubled that he was able to convince himself. But if the latter was so, Sam’s greatest gift was that—at this moment—his first concerns seemed to be his wife and a pregnant teenage girl he had last seen alive and thus still could imagine saving. In his own sadness and confusion, Tony found it better simply to remain beside his friend, silent.

  From a distance, Tony heard a thin cry rising from the crowd, saw a Lake City player—all churning arms and legs—round first base as the left fielder ran toward the fence, pursuing an invisible ball. He and Sam Robb were in another world, their own.

  “I know how bad you feel,” Sam said at last. “But I don’t think there’s anything more you could have done.”

  The phrase combined sympathy with an odd detachment, as if Sam were consoling him for the lingering, expected death of some third person. “It’s not over,” Tony answered. “Maybe in Lake City, but not in court. They don’t have an airtight case.”

  “They can’t,” Sam said simply. “Because I didn’t kill her. For whatever that’s worth now.”

  Tony did not answer. Softly, Sam told him, “You’ve done enough, Tony. You came back, whether it was for Sue or me or both of us. You went through what happened with Alison, all over again. You saved my job for a while and did some things to try and save my ass that I know you didn’t like doing.” He turned to Tony, t
ouching his shoulder. “I couldn’t ask more from a friend, and if I’m still any kind of friend to you, I’ll send you back to Stacey and to Christopher. It’s time for me to let you go.”

  Tony felt the same whiplash of emotion he had first felt thirty years before: whenever he concluded that Sam was selfish and insensitive, his friend would touch him with some astonishing act of grace. It was all the more touching, Tony realized, because this was the person that some inextinguishable boy in Tony—the optimist, the Roman Catholic, the believer in redemption—had always wished Sam Robb to be, and that boy existed still.

  “What will you do?” Tony asked.

  “Find a lawyer. Borrow retainer money, I guess. That’s what people do, isn’t it?”

  That was true, Tony knew from his own practice; it was the first lesson he had learned from Saul. And there was no question—but for guilt and history and a justified belief in his defense lawyer’s skill and coolness—that Tony’s peace of mind would best be served by his putting as much distance as he could between himself and the death of a teenage girl. As if reading his mind, Sam said, “Besides, you still wonder if I killed her, don’t you? Maybe more than ever.”

  There was no point in lying. “Yes,” Tony answered. “But so will any lawyer, until he shuts it off.”

  For the first time, Sam’s voice rose. “You’re not any lawyer, Tony. I’ll be better off not watching you at trial, wondering if I’m capable of murder—”

  “You’re right,” Tony heard himself snap. “I’m not any lawyer. I’m much, much better, and you’re going to need every fucking bit of that.”

  Sam’s eyes widened, and then he smiled, perhaps in surprise at Tony’s burst of ego and arrogance, surprising to Tony himself. “Still a competitor,” he said softly. “Aren’t you?”

  Tony stared at him. “I’m not a whole different person, Sam. And neither are you.”

  Sam’s smile faded. “That’s what I’ve been saying, pal. Before you leave this place, I just wish you’d believe it.”

  Tony exhaled. “There’s something else I have to tell you,” he said at last. “We have an offer from Stella Marz.”

  Sam’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “What is it?”

  “She may be willing to consider manslaughter. But only if you can persuade her that you acted out of some reflex, not meaning to kill Marcie Calder. Which requires a public confession, in open court.”

  “Lie, you mean.” Sam stood abruptly, voice taut. “I won’t fucking plead to this. I’m going to lose my house, my career, my kids’ respect, and maybe my marriage. All I’ve got left is that I’m innocent. I’m not going to barter that to get a lighter sentence. I’m not going to lie to get it.” His jaw worked. “I’m going to fight this, and I’m going to win. And then I’m going to give Sue the best life I can possibly give her, try to make up for all the damage I’ve done. After I’m found innocent, maybe she can believe somehow that our life is worth another try.”

  Sitting in the grass, Tony looked up at him. “You’d be risking life in prison, Sam.”

  “Take your deal, Tony, and I’d be risking more than that.” His voice hardened. “We’re not that different. You still need to win, and I still need my self-respect. But this time it’s not your call.”

  Tony stood to face him. “It’s not my deal, either. And if it were my call, I couldn’t take it. No matter how bad this looks for you, there’s a chance a jury would believe that someone else killed Marcie Calder, or that she wasn’t murdered at all. Cases like this need defending, which is why Saul Ravin defended me. That’s what I told Stella Marz.”

  Sam gazed at him, quiet now. There were tears in his eyes; seeing this, Tony knew how much Sam needed the slightest sign that Tony might believe him innocent. But he did not know what to say or do.

  Silent, Sam extended his hand. It was an oddly formal gesture, perhaps a goodbye, and it reached a pool of feeling within Tony much deeper than the present. And then Tony remembered when they were eighteen, and had said goodbye by shaking hands.

  Instead of shaking Sam’s hand, Tony embraced him.

  All at once, Tony felt Sam’s arms envelop him, holding him tight. Softly, Sam said, “Maybe we can fix this, Tony. Maybe we can.”

  TWENTY

  Alison Taylor froze, caught in the light from her parents’ back porch, black hair swirling around her face. Her eyes widened in surprise, and then the purse dropped from her hand.

  “Why?” she asked.

  In this, what surely must be the last moment of her life, she seemed so vulnerable that it was heartbreaking. Tears welled in her eyes. Her bare legs could not seem to move.

  “Please.” Her voice was husky with knowledge of his betrayal. “Please, don’t do this to me again—”

  Tony bolted upright, awakening from his dream.

  There was sweat on his forehead. He stared at the room around him, heart pounding. Piece by piece, the knowledge of who and where he was came back to him: forty-six, a lawyer, the husband of Stacey and father of Christopher, alone in a motel room in the hometown of his youth, returned to protect Sam Robb from the charge of murdering a girl who, from her pictures, had looked something like Alison Taylor. After telling Sam that Marcie Calder had been pregnant with his child, Tony had returned to the refuge of this room and fallen into exhausted sleep; from the edges of the curtains, pale with blocked sunlight, he saw that not too much time had passed. His watch read seven-thirty.

  Alison Taylor had been dead for twenty-eight years.

  Tony ran his hand across his face and realized that it was trembling.

  In that twenty-eight years, his only dream of Alison had been as the dead girl he had found, her face distorted by pain and horror. Now she was alive, accusing, and yet in this dream, unlike the others, he had no sense of his own presence, except as the eye of a camera. Throughout the dream, the camera seemed to move closer: in the last instant, her face—the pale skin, the high cheekbones, the wrenching look of fear—had seemed close enough to touch.

  A shiver ran through him.

  In his seventeenth year, Tony Lord had learned that to push aside his feelings, focusing on the task at hand, was the price of his survival. Later, it became the price of his survival as a lawyer. Yet he had never doubted that this left a residue in the well of his subconscious, the corners of his conscience, those places where he kept feelings so inconvenient that it had taken years for his own wife, his best friend, to realize that they existed at all. Sometimes the price he paid was dreams.

  He was too honest with himself to pretend that this dream meant nothing. But that Marcie Calder’s death was a haunting echo of Alison’s, at least for him, was something so apparent that it hardly required a dream to surface his warring sympathies, his profound ambivalence about representing Sam. Especially a dream that, moments later, still coursed through him like a fever.

  He got up, went to the bathroom, splashed water on his face. When he collected himself, he would call home. Christopher’s baseball game would be over; their conversation, a father getting the news from his son, would reestablish contact with the normal. Then he would talk over with Stacey what he should do about Sam and, if he felt up to it, his dream. He wondered what it meant that part of him feared to mention it.…

  The telephone rang.

  Perhaps it was her, Tony thought. Right now, he needed it to be.

  “Hello.”

  “Tony?” Sue’s voice was muffled, drained. “He’s told me everything. I really need to talk to you, I think.” She paused a moment, and her voice became tentative, as if she were no longer sure of anything. “Is that okay?”

  She sounded as lonely and confused as he, Tony thought, but with far better reason. “Of course it is,” he answered. “For you, it’ll always be okay.”

  * * *

  On his way to meet her, Tony mustered the rigor to confront what her call might mean: that Sue knew, or had learned, something that pointed to Sam’s guilt, and now could not withhold this in good conscienc
e.

  She wanted to have a private dinner, Sue had told him; she could not stand staying in their house, and whatever their embarrassment now, the shame that would commence tomorrow—the humiliated wife, the assistant principal who had first impregnated, then perhaps murdered, a girl who had trusted him—would make going out impossible. In some distant way, it reminded Tony of the night that Sam had gotten drunk, leaving Tony as the person Sue relied on; perhaps, for a moment, had loved the most. As he pulled into the driveway of the Lake City Country Club, the echo of that night grew stronger.

  It was three hours or so since Sam had told her. Tony found it hard to imagine how Sue felt now.

  Pulling up in front, Tony got out and handed his keys to the valet. For a moment, he stood there, gazing at the grounds and building, part of him dreading his meeting with Sue, another part remembering that evening twenty-eight years earlier when it had seemed possible to him, were they ever to visit this place again, that it would be as a couple.

  It was strange, slipping back in time like this, viewed through the prism of Marcie Calder’s death. Yet the club itself maintained the same placid facade: a rambling white wooden structure from the 1920s, the manicured grass of the eighteenth hole fading in the dusk. This illusion of security and permanence, Tony supposed, was part of the allure for the worthies of Lake City, offering them the insular sense of being where it mattered to be. Though it had been many years since Tony had aspired to belong here, or envied those who did, the sense of being excluded came back to him, surprising in its power. Perhaps Dee Nixon was right, he thought: in some crevice of our souls, we are always seventeen. The thought of her, then Ernie, unsettled him even more.

  Taking a last look around him, Tony went inside.

  * * *

  The hostess, a plump, friendly blonde with a run in her stocking, took Tony to the dining room. It was where Sue and he had danced that night, but with, he discovered, one unpleasant difference—the same malign fate that seemed to have designed this day had ordained that, tonight, John and Katherine Taylor would be dining here.