The Dead Room (10 page)

The librarian behind the checkout desk found Nash’s address in the faculty directory, confirming that his office and workshop were in the same building. It was five blocks west. Rather than return to his car, Teddy buttoned his jacket and set out on foot. The truth was that he needed Nash as much as Barnett or even Holmes did. He needed the case to go away, needed his nightmares to sink back into the past so that his fresh wounds would have time to heal.

The light turned green and he started across the street. It was a small, two-story brick building set on the corner. Teddy guessed it had been built sometime in the early 1900s, but undergone a major renovation in the last few years. The mortar between the bricks looked fresh, and the windows on the second floor were too large and modern to fit the period.

He found the front door unlocked and entered a central hallway. There were three rows of unmarked doors on each side of the staircase. The smell of fresh plaster caught his attention. When he glanced inside one of the rooms, he saw sheets of blue board stacked on the floor and realized the building’s renovation was still underway.

He climbed the staircase, greeted by the smells of fresh paint and polyurethane. Directly before him were a set of glass doors opening to a small library. Skylights had been installed in the ceiling, flooding the rows of books with overhead light. When he checked the doors he found them locked. On the other side of the hall were two classrooms. Then Teddy noticed a door to the right of the library and opened it. Construction was complete, but the walls remained unpainted and it looked as if the room was being used to store the construction workers’ more expensive tools.

The door at the other end of the hall opened. Teddy turned, watching a middle-aged woman start for the stairs.

“I’m looking for Professor Nash,” he said.

The woman smiled. “Are you a student?”

“I used to be. I’ve never been here before.”

She pointed to the door she’d just exited through. “In there,” she said. “The signs aren’t up yet.”

Teddy watched her vanish down the stairway. Then he swung what seemed like an unusually heavy door open and stepped across the threshold.

It was a lobby. No one was at the desk, and Teddy figured the woman he’d just met was Nash’s assistant on her way to an early lunch. When he heard someone begin speaking, he looked through a second doorway into Nash’s office. He was on the phone, staring back at Teddy from his desk at the far end of the long room. It was an odd look, piercing at first, followed by the slightest of smiles, as if the man recognized him and had been waiting for him.

Nash waved him in, motioning Teddy to take a seat beside his desk. Not wanting to invade the man’s privacy, Teddy hesitated a moment before finally deciding to enter.

The walls were more red than orange, the wood planked floors, a light beech. He spotted a set of open doors leading to the library on his right and realized the books belonged to Nash. To the left, oversized windows had been cut into the wall offering a view of the campus on the other side of the street. He passed a long table set in the middle of the office, thinking it looked a lot like the kind found in a jury room. When he sat down, he counted the number of chairs and hid his smile. There were twelve. Nash worked at his desk each day facing a jury room.

Although the office had been newly renovated, the place had the look and feel of being used and broken in. Files were strewn across the jury table and piled against the walls. Teddy noticed the media center beside Nash’s desk. The cabinet was open revealing a TV switched to a local station with the sound muted. Numerous videotapes were stacked on the floor, labeled by hand.

From what Teddy could tell, Nash’s telephone call wasn’t personal. It sounded more like an interview. Nash was talking about his press conference yesterday. District Attorney Alan Andrews had questioned the results of the students participating in his legal workshop, Nash was saying. Unfortunately for Andrews, the DNA results spoke for the themselves and the science couldn’t be discounted. Andrews prosecuted the wrong man, pressed for the death penalty, and now an innocent man was dead. This wasn’t the time for political posturing, but for someone to step up and do the right thing. If Andrews couldn’t, then Nash told the reporter he’d be more than willing. And, yes, because of these results, Nash and his workshop would be reviewing any past cases the district attorney handled in order to rule out what he thought might be a trend.

Nash may have been in his late fifties, but his voice matched his overall appearance remaining young and virile. He was dressed in a black turtleneck sweater and black slacks. His face was lean and angular, his blond hair mixed with gray sweeping straight back from his forehead. But it was his eyes that Teddy thought probably worked best in a courtroom. They were cobalt blue and had a definite reach about them, his pupils dilated slightly as if a cat’s. Nash didn’t
approach
hostile witnesses in trial, Teddy imagined. He saw through them and
sprung
.

Nash finally hung up the phone, lifting a cigar out of the ashtray and relighting it.

“Actually, there are five,” he said, toking up. “Five more cases Mr. Andrews has to account for. There could be others, of course. But we’re just getting started.”

Teddy didn’t say anything. He’d just noticed the poster-sized lithograph hanging on the wall by the door to the lobby. It was an empty prison cell with afternoon light feeding in through a small window. The cell door stood open, and a blanket had been left behind.

“Do you like it?” Nash asked. “It’s called
Free At Last
.”

Teddy nodded, watching Nash gaze across the jury table at the image of the empty cell.

“It’s by one of my former clients,” Nash said. “He was a bank robber in Los Angeles. A safe cracker. Now he’s an artist living in New York City. Who would’ve guessed the man had so many talents?”

Nash laughed and shook his head. From the dreamy smile he bore, Teddy knew that at least part of what Jill had said was true. The man loved his work, was morally complex, and could easily generate fear in others because of his enthusiasm and intelligence.

Nash checked his cigar and tapped the end in the ashtray, his eyes drifting across the desk and settling on Teddy with weight.

“Your boss is in over his head,” he said. “But you already know that, don’t you.”

Teddy wondered how the man knew who he was. Nash spoke up before he could ask.

“I often take long walks,” he said. “I used to watch you row from the bike path by the river. Barnett mentioned your name last night on the phone.”

He sat back in the chair, savoring the rich smoke. Teddy opened his briefcase, pulled the murder book out and passed it across the desk.

“Then you know why I’m here.”

Nash took the binder, but didn’t open it. “Not really,” he said.

“We’re trying to take the death penalty off the table. We’re trying to make sure Holmes gets the psychiatric treatment he needs.”

“What did Oscar Holmes do to win over so many good friends?”

Teddy noted the cynical tone in Nash’s voice. He reached for the murder book and thumbed through the pages until he found the picture of Holmes wearing Darlene Lewis’s blood on his face. When he passed it back, Nash examined the photo without any visible reaction, then held the notebook closer noting the flecks of blood between the man’s teeth.

“It’s the help his family wants and thinks he needs,” Teddy said.

Nash grimaced, setting the binder on his desk. “I’m not particularly interested in what his family may or may not think he needs.”

“All we’re doing is seeing Holmes through the system. I’m willing to do the leg work. It shouldn’t take much of your time at all.”

“That’s exactly what I was afraid you’d say.”

Their eyes met. He’d put Teddy down again and wanted him to know it. He settled back into his chair, appraising Teddy by the inch.

“You graduated at the top of your class,” he said after a moment. “I’ve often wondered why someone with your ability avoided criminal law. You should’ve been drawn to it, yet you stayed as far away from my classes as you possibly could. You look scared, Teddy. Why are you frightened if the case is as straightforward as you say? It must have something to do with your past.”

Teddy flinched. Nash gave him a long look with those cobalt-blue eyes of his, then swiveled his chair around to the window behind his desk. He was staring outside at a view of West Philadelphia digging out of the snow. He was looking at the long line of row houses mixed with larger homes from the neighborhood’s grander past. But Nash wasn’t seeing them. Instead, he puffed on the cigar with his eyes turned inward as if the window had become a looking glass.

“Teddy Mack,” he whispered. “Teddy Mack.”

Teddy could see Nash’s mind sifting through the smoky past. After a moment, a look of wonder bloomed on his face, and Teddy assumed that Nash had answered his own question—Teddy Mack, son of Grace and Jonathan Mack, a man who stood accused of murder. It had been a long time ago, with Teddy Mack on the run ever since.

The chair swiveled back.

“I’d like to show you something,” Nash said.

He stood up and walked over to the jury table, sorting through a stack of files. When he found the one he was looking for, he motioned Teddy over and opened it on the table. It was background information on the murder case the district attorney had prosecuted and botched.

“Derek Campos is a classic example of being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Nash said.

There were a series of family snapshots included in the file, and Nash laid a photograph of Campos with his wife and young daughter on top. They were at a picnic, enjoying a summer afternoon in the park.

“An elderly woman had been raped and bludgeoned to death in Mount Airy,” Nash said. “Campos was a landscaper, working in the churchyard across the street. The police saw him weeding the flower beds and thought he might be a witness. But Derek Campos had grown up in North Philadelphia and had a natural fear of the police. He was a simple, uneducated man with a low IQ. After speaking with him, detectives asked for hair and blood samples. Campos was nervous. He didn’t know any better and agreed. Within twenty-four hours, the lab claimed they had a match.”

Teddy only had a sense of the case from what he’d seen on television at lunch yesterday, and Nash’s findings and a transcript from the press conference printed in the paper today. Campos had been executed before the use of DNA analysis became routine and could have saved him.

“It was the forensic scientist that clinched it for the jury,” Nash said. “Vera Handover. Her testimony, her assurance and confidence that Campos was guilty. Now we know that everything she said at the time was a result of bad science. Lousy detective work. A prosecutor without any talent working his way to the top. Derek Campos died for no other reason that on the day the body was found, someone looked out the window and saw him working in a flower bed.”

Teddy could hear the deep-seated anger in Nash’s voice. The contempt for everyone involved. He guessed at that moment that there was no way Nash would agree to help. He gave the photograph of the Campos family a last look, the wife and daughter, and stepped away from the table. Nash closed the file and placed it on his desk.

“This is how I’m spending my time,” Nash said. “The focus of my workshop. Looking for what’s slipped through the cracks. Lending a hand to the forgotten. So what makes you think I’d have any interest in getting involved in the Holmes case?”

“Alan Andrews,” Teddy said without hesitation or much hope. “It’s a chance to keep your story in the papers. A chance to keep what he did to Derek Campos alive.”

Nash smiled. “You mean the use of my name gets you and Barnett off the hook. That’s why you’re really here, isn’t it? You need to think about what you’re offering, Teddy. It’s not enough.”

Nash had seen through him as if he was wrapped in cellophane. Nash didn’t have any interest in holding their hand, or prepping the ground for negotiations with the district attorney. He wasn’t going to budge, and that piercing look in his eyes was back. Teddy felt like an animal caught in the headlights of an approaching car. As he glanced away, his eyes skidded off the lithograph of the empty prison cell, then dropped to the floor, his nightmare surfacing again.
Free At Last
. The cell was empty because his father was dead. He could see the guards grabbing his father’s feet and dragging the body away. They’d left his blanket behind. Teddy tried to get a grip on himself.

“A few words of advice,” Nash said.

Teddy leaned against the jury table, watching the man strike his lighter and toke on the cigar again.

“I don’t think your plan to avoid a trial will work,” Nash said. “Andrews’s motives are obvious. He’s a political animal, and thus his motivations in life are transparent. In the end, you’ll have just as much trouble with ADA Carolyn Powell. She’ll be the brains behind the duo while Andrews takes all the credit. But make no mistake about it. The crime they allege Holmes committed is egregious. And the pressure on them to prosecute will be substantial, particularly because the girl came from a family of means. To put it more bluntly, Teddy, I believe they’ll want your client’s head on a stick and nothing less will suffice.”

Nash was beaming. Teddy didn’t find the pep talk all that reassuring. He wondered how Barnett would take the news and hoped he had a
plan B
in mind.