Blood of Angels (16 page)

Buchanan turns with a sneer. “Is that a threat, Mr. District Attorney?”

“You're damn right, it is,” he says. “And if there are footprints anywhere near this gun—assuming we find it—you better pray they're not your size.”

Buchanan gives him a shit-eating smile of contempt. “Vietnam. North Korea. Iran. Your death-penalty compadres. How proud you must be to share a legal philosophy with these paragons of liberty.”

Rayburn smiles back. “Obstruction of justice. Falsifying evidence. Perjury. If this is a scam, your compadres are going to be in Brushy Mountain prison. I'd suggest you try to shower alone the first year or two.”

Buchanan recoils, finally giving Rayburn the response he wants. It's a small victory, but Rayburn seems satisfied. He shakes his head in disgust, then nods toward me and Carl. “Let's go,” he says, leading us behind the barrier. Buchanan follows, and we move off in a group. The ID crew moves slowly, looking for signs of tampering. Rayburn looks at Buchanan and says, “It's not that we don't trust you, Professor. It's just that we don't trust you.”

It takes twenty minutes to satisfy the ID crew that the entrance to the barn has been adequately examined. The barn door is ten feet tall and opens with a wooden bar-type handle. An officer dusts it for prints and takes a sample of the wood, meticulously tweezing off a splinter. He pushes open the door, which creaks like it hasn't moved in years. The photographer takes a series of flash pictures of the barn's interior from the doorway, and the floor is checked for footprints and debris.

After ten minutes of searching the floor, an officer walks in with his metal detector. He walks toward the south wall, and the thing squeaks a high-pitched signal. The officer slowly advances, and the signal gets stronger. By the time he reaches the wall, the signal meter is pegged at maximum. He sweeps back and forth a little, isolating the strongest spot. Satisfied, he hands off the metal detector and picks up a narrow spade. He starts moving earth carefully, digging under the bottom timber. The spade sinks easily into the soft, powdery dirt. About six inches under the timber, the spade stops. He nods at two other ID officers, who come over to help. They get on their knees and start pulling dirt out from under the timber with their gloved hands, making little piles as they go. Eventually, one of them manages to get his arm underneath, and he says, “I got something.” They pull him out, and the first officer uses a crowbar to pull the bottom two timbers off the barn wall. The soft wood comes off easily, the boards splintering under the pressure. With the boards gone, the ID officer shines a flashlight into the hole. He reaches in and says, “I got it.”

Carl and I stare like stone soldiers while we watch the officer struggle with something in the hole. Then, slowly, he carefully lifts out of the dirt a sawed-off, pistol-gripped, Browning BPS shotgun. Photographers shooting through the open door are jostling each other for the money shot, the picture they hope will give them the Pulitzer. I hear a voice from outside. “Yeah, we're on. We got it live.”

I look at Carl, who is pale, washed out. Rayburn is staring silently, his face blank.
And so it begins,
I think. I don't know who's lying. But if it isn't Hale, we have killed the wrong man.

WE SIT INSIDE RAYBURN
'
S
car back at 222 West, but nobody moves. The shotgun, along with extensive soil and paint samples from the location, are in the police ID van, on their way to Paul Landmeyer's forensic lab for examination. Upstairs in the office, we have the staff to face. Rayburn shakes his head. “It's the system,” he says bleakly. “It's not perfect, which means somebody has to take the fall. And that somebody is us.” He looks at me. “You OK?”

“Yeah.” This is a lie.

“Look, we're going to stick together on this.”

“Sure.”

“I want everybody to get home as quickly as possible. When you're not here, they can't ask you questions.”

“We're staying,” I say.

“You're following orders,” Rayburn says. “If reporters think they can get statements from prosecutors one at a time, it'll be open season. We have to coordinate through the office.”

“He's right, Thomas,” Carl says. “Let's get inside before reporters find us out here.”

We slip through the back entrance into a tomblike office. It's late afternoon on Friday, which is slow anyway. But there's no denying that people have scattered. I don't blame them, nor do I interpret this as a lack of loyalty. It's just practical. I have no doubt that fifteen seconds after the live TV pictures of the shotgun were beamed onto Nashville TV screens, briefcases were being packed for the weekend. Dolores emerges from Rayburn's office, and hands Rayburn a note, which he reads stoically. He looks up. “The governor called.”

Dolores coughs and hands him a second slip of paper. “Also the state attorney general,” she says.

Rayburn nods. “You guys get outta here as soon as you can,” he says. “And take your phones off the hooks.”

I protest, knowing it's futile. “Listen…”

“That's an order, Thomas,” Rayburn says. “Paul is going to do his thing at the lab. I'll stretch that out as long as I can. Meanwhile, I don't want one word out of this office except from me.” He looks at Carl. “I'm sorry about this, Carl. It's a hell of a way to wrap up your career.” He turns and vanishes behind his door.

Carl nods at me. “He's right, Thomas. We're a target as long as we're hanging out here.”

“I need a few minutes.”

“I'll wait and walk you down.”

“Don't,” I say. “I'm OK.”

Carl gazes at me closely, but moves off. I walk down the hall and into my office. Stillman, for once, isn't anywhere around. I walk in, shut and lock the door. I lean back against it, trying to figure out what to do.
This is no academic exercise. This is a well-orchestrated attack by people who have figured this thing out from top to bottom.
The fact that Buchanan—and Towns, apparently—have gone to extraordinary lengths to discredit the death penalty doesn't make them bad people, in my opinion, at least as long as Hale is telling the truth. But that doesn't change the fact that Carl and I are the symbols who stand in their way, and if they prevail, we go down the drain.

The phone on my desk rings, and I let it go to voice mail. I check and see how many messages have come in since we left with Buchanan: eleven. I push “play.” First up is Dina Kennedy, anchor of the local NBC affiliate, followed by reps from all the other local networks. I punch through them without listening to the messages. The
Tennessean
has left three calls, each more urgent as the paper's deadline grows closer. There are two from fellow prosecutors; both are supportive, and one is an invitation to get pissed together. Then the one piece of good news for the day: I hear Jazz's voice, calling from Orlando. Of course. They left early this morning.

“Hi, Daddy,” she says. She sounds happy, and eleven years old, and not a part of all the shit of the world, not yet, anyway. “I'm leaving you this message at work so you have something fun to listen to for a change. We're already in line for Revenge of the Mummy. It's supposed to be really scary, but I doubt it. Michael isn't here. He had to go to a meeting. It's just me and mommy. Wait, she wants to talk to you.” There's a pause, and Rebecca comes on the line.

“Listen, I know this thing is gonna cut me off. Just wanted you to know we're fine. We'll be home on Sunday night. If you want to pick up an extra night with Jazz sometime, just let me know. Anyway, she'll see you soon.”

I lean back in my chair.
God, I love it when Jazz calls him Michael. You bet your ass it's Michael. Buy her the damn world, pal, but I'll always be Daddy.
But I also know that when Bec and Jazz get home on Sunday, they're going to find out that Daddy is in the middle of a firestorm. She's eleven, and she won't understand it. But she'll see my face on TV, and she'll know people aren't happy.
Eleven years old.
I stand up, wondering how long before we have to have the talk about what I really do, about the kind of people with whom I interact. The bodies I've looked at. The coroner's reports I've read. The crime scenes I've visited. This year? Next? It's not that I'm not proud of what I do. It's just that I know that the moment she understands what my job is really all about, a part of her childhood is over.

I pack up and leave the office, taking the back exit to the employee parking lot; the lot's empty, with only a few cars left. The temperature is finally easing a little; heavy clouds are streaming across the sky from the north, bringing a cold front and rain. A few drops hit the windshield as I get in, and by the time I'm out of downtown and on the interstate, I'm driving through a steady drizzle.

The traffic is manageable, and I make it home in forty minutes or so. The weather front is solidifying quickly, with dark clouds coagulating above the city. I pull inside the garage and come in the house, looking for Indy: he's not around, which isn't a surprise. The cat hates water, and he's probably crouched under a neighbor's porch until the rain stops. My answering machine is blinking, which I ignore. I go through the house and take all the phones off the hook, per Rayburn's instructions. I make dinner—salad from a bag, topped with some precooked shrimp—open the first of what I plan to be several Killian's, and flip on the news. The CBS affiliate leads with the gun story, and a quick check of the others shows they do the same. I flip back to CBS and watch Barry Dougherty's videotape of the DA being questioned in the ninth-floor reception area of 222 West. Carl and I are visible in the background. The video cuts to the site where the gun was found. The picture shows the police ID officer holding up the Browning and pans to Rayburn's stoic face. Dougherty comes back on. “We're going to have more on this in our ten o'clock report, including exclusive interviews with two jury members on the original Sunshine Grocery case. Stay tuned for more.” The show goes to commercial, and I flip the TV off.
The jurors.
I try not to think about them, because they're carrying their own truckload of weight at the moment, and carrying my own seems like a full-time job.

It gets dark about 8:30. I grab a couple of beers, open the sliding glass door that leads to the deck, and step outside underneath the protective overhang. I've put about a hundred man-hours into designing and building a pretty damn glorious, two-level deck with a covered spa. The backyard is fenced and there's nothing behind me but woods anyway, so the privacy is pretty close to total. Many is the night the spa and a couple of beers have leveled me out, and with the cool air finally giving the city a break, I decide to do the same tonight. I turn off the lights and pull off the heavy cover. The steam curls upward into the dark night. I strip naked, put the jets on low, and step into the warm water. The beers are lined up on the edge of the spa.

The water envelopes me, and I lean back, wanting a few minutes of freedom from the day.
My father fixed things.
I thought about him constantly while building the spa. It's when I'm making things or working on the truck that I feel closest to him. The house didn't really suit me at first—Bec picked it out, and it was always more her than me—but in the last eighteen months or so I've made it my own. My father would have loved this spa, and I imagined him swinging a hammer with me while I built it, telling me about a loose fitting on an F-18 Tomcat hydraulic line or what it was like to check an aileron the size of a man on a C5 Galaxy transport.

Looking west from underneath the protective overhang, I can see a smattering of stars where the clouds haven't filled in the sky. The rain is falling steadily now, and I let myself doze off.

Sometime later—I'm not sure how long—I become aware of a tapping on the door behind me. I listen a second to be sure, and the tap ping happens again, harder. I turn to look; there, standing behind the glass, dressed in jeans and a black, tucked-in T-shirt, is Fiona Towns. I practically levitate out of the spa in surprise until I remember I'm naked. Towns isn't smiling, and she doesn't look particularly embarrassed. She slides the door open halfway and steps out of the house under the covering. “Your phone is off the hook.”

I scrunch down into the water, grateful it's dark. “What are you doing here?”

“I just told you. You're not answering the phone.”

“So you invited yourself in?”

She shrugs. “I knocked. Three times.” She doesn't move, like she's willing to stand there all night.

“Look, if you'll go back outside a minute, I'll put some clothes on.”

She looks at me like I'm nuts. “It's raining, Dennehy.”

“Then go into another room, for God's sake. There's an office off to the right.”

Her eyes briefly move down into the water. A smile flickers, and she walks back into the house, disappearing down a hallway. Cautiously, I climb out of the spa, making sure the coast is clear.
A towel would make a lot of sense right now.
I trot naked and dripping through the living room to my bedroom. I dry off and throw on some pants and a shirt. I walk back out, dressed but in bare feet. Towns is standing there, looking impatient. “You have a habit of walking into people's houses like this?” I say.

“When there's something more important than being polite, yes.”

“So what is it, then?”

She looks at me calmly. “You had a bad day today, Dennehy.”

“You could say that. I wonder if you had anything to do with it.” She walks across the room and helps herself to a chair. “Have a seat, Ms. Towns. Seriously. You look tired.”

She looks around, taking in my living room. “You've got taste, Dennehy. I wouldn't have figured on that.”

“Thanks.”

She smiles. “The pine armoire is nice. Kind of southwestern touch.”

“It was my wife's. She's from San Antonio.” I pause. “Ex-wife.”

“Gone?”

“Not that it's any of your business.”

“Well, she had good taste.”

“Why are you here, Towns? Come to gloat over my office's embarrassment?”

She fixes me in her gaze. “I'm here about Moses Bol. I think you're going to win, Dennehy.”

I shrug. “Rita West is a good lawyer.”

“She's a marvelous lawyer, but she can't save Moses.” She tilts her head. “I looked you up, Dennehy. You always win, even when you shouldn't.”

“You mean the Sunshine Grocery murders. Wilson Owens.”

She nods. “Like I said, you had a bad day.”

“So you did come to gloat.”

She shakes her head. “I came to invite you to church.”

I look at her skeptically. “It's a little late for me to get religion, Towns. But the minute I decide to make confession, you'll be the first to know.”

“It's ten o'clock at night, Dennehy. I'm not exactly inviting you to regular services.”

“So what is it?”

“I drove all the way out here. It's the least you can do.”

“Guilt,” I say. “No wonder you're a preacher.”

She smiles softly. “So how about it? Come to church, Dennehy.”

“No thanks.”

“Why not?”

“For starters, because you're a key witness for the opposition. And because I've got a fairly good idea you're behind everything shitty that's happened to me over the last week. But mostly because I'm pretty damn sure you're a few days away from obstructing justice and committing perjury. That being the case, I'd like to keep my distance.”

She stares back at me quietly. “If you had any sense, you'd realize those are all excellent reasons to come.”

“I don't follow.”

“Come with me or stay, Dennehy. But I can promise you one thing. It won't be a waste of your time.”

I still don't move. But then I think about the notes I've been finding on my car, and it hits me that somebody very smart and very determined is fucking around with me and my office lately, that I don't understand exactly who or what that thing is, and that the woman in front of me almost certainly does. “OK,” I say flatly. “I'll come.”

She looks up, a little surprised. “Why the sudden change of heart?”

“No questions, Towns, or I might change my mind.” I walk across the room and pick up some shoes near the door that leads to the garage. “I'll drive,” I say. “It's dangerous around there at night.”

She rolls her eyes but follows. We walk into the garage, and she slows by the old Ford. “You have two trucks,” she says.

I stop by the '82. “The new one's my daily driver, but this older one is special; 1982 Ford F-150, belonged to my father.”

“So you own the same kind of truck?”

I shake my head. “This is actually his truck. I tracked it down through the DMV nine years after he died. It had changed hands a few times. Flew out to Kansas, gave the guy who owned it four grand, and drove it home.”

She looks at the pickup thoughtfully. “That's fairly human of you, Dennehy. Once again, I'm surprised.”