The Last Dead Girl (8 page)

The gray dust floated in the air. I tried not to breathe it. The dog barked. I reached into the bag for another handful and my fingers closed on something flat and round. Somehow the barking grew even louder and more feverish.

My fingers lost their grip on the round thing, and found it again, and the barking moved closer to me, ascending the stairs. My hand pulled free of the bag, and as I brushed the dirt from one of Jana's buttons, I turned to see the dog in the doorway, with Roger Tolliver holding him on a leash.

R
oger doesn't like you,” Roger Tolliver said.

I got to my feet and tried to make sense of that. Either Tolliver had the habit of talking about himself in the third person or—

“The dog's name is Roger,” Tolliver said. He tugged on the leash, and the barking gave way to a low growl. “My wife named him. She thought it was a funny joke. Gives you some idea of the marriage. Are you going to put the knife away?”

Last I knew, my pocketknife had been on the floor, but now it was in my hand.

“Are you going to keep hold of the dog?” I asked.

“He probably wouldn't bite you, even if I let him go,” Tolliver said. “He'd knock you down, surely. Keep you down, I imagine. He'd put his teeth on you, but he wouldn't bite. You see the distinction?”

I nodded, though I wasn't clear about the distinction. I knew I didn't want to see it demonstrated. The dog barked, showing his teeth. I'm not sure he realized he wasn't going to bite me.

“I'll keep hold of him,” Tolliver said. “I haven't called the police yet. I don't know what I'd tell them. That someone broke in in order to savage my vacuum cleaner—but who would believe it?” He patted the dog absently. “How did you get in?”

I glanced at the bedroom window, which was open a few inches, the way I'd found it.

“I used a ladder.”

“That's resourceful,” Tolliver said. “And if that's your truck in the driveway, then you're David Malone. Which means you're here about Jana. But if you wanted to talk about Jana, I would've welcomed you. I would've let you in through the front door.”

I folded my knife and slipped it in my pocket. Then held up Jana's button so he could see. “I'm here about this,” I said.

He gathered the leash until he had the dog by the collar. Reached for the button with his free hand. Confusion in his eyes, then recognition.

“Oh, for heaven's sake,” he said, offering it back. “Come on, then. We'll talk.”

•   •   •

W
e talked outside. Tolliver had a dog run in his backyard: a patch of ground fifteen feet by sixty, enclosed by a chain-link fence. He led Roger the dog in through the gate and set him free of the leash. I stayed on the other side of the fence.

“I've tried keeping him out here while I'm gone during the day,” Tolliver told me. “But if no one's with him he goes crazy.”

He looked fairly crazy now, even though Tolliver was with him. The dog dashed from one end of the enclosure to the other, stopping now and then to jump up and put his paws on Tolliver's shoulders. When he did, Tolliver pushed him down again and sent him on his way.

“If he's alone out here for too long, he starts digging under the fence,” Tolliver said, and from the state of the ground I could see it was true. “So he's better off inside, in the crate. It keeps him calm.”

The dog sprinted to the far end of the run, spun around, and came back. He remembered he didn't like me, barked at me through the fence. Tolliver had brought a sack of toys from the house: rawhide bones and tennis balls. He picked out a ball and tossed it toward the far end. The dog raced after it.

“It's terrible,” Roger Tolliver said, “what happened to Jana.”

“She was here, a week and a half ago,” I said. “On the twentieth. Wasn't she?”

“That's true.”

“She left here missing some buttons,” I said, “and with a bruise.”

“I know. That was Roger's fault.”

The dog came back with the ball in his mouth. Tolliver pried it away and tossed it down the length of the run.

“That night was the first time Jana came to the house,” he said. “I had the dog in the crate, like I sometimes do when I have company. When Jana saw him locked up, she didn't like it, even after I explained the reason. I let him out and he took to her right away. He's playful, as you can see.”

As if on cue, the dog ran up with the ball. Tolliver tried to grab it and the two of them started a tug-of-war.

“He's playful,” Tolliver said again, “but he plays rough. And it's worse when there's someone around who really wants to play. Someone who loves dogs. Like Jana.”

Roger the dog won the war and lay down to gnaw on the ball.

“You've seen how he runs,” Tolliver said. “He's the same way in the house. He'll charge from one room to another and back. That Sunday night, Jana got him all riled up. When he's like that, he's nothing but momentum. She was bending down to pick up one of his toys and he barreled into her. The top of his head collided with her cheek.”

Tolliver stood facing me across the chain-link fence. I tried to decide if I believed him.

“What about the buttons?” I asked. “The dog did that too?”

He nodded. “Like I said, Roger plays rough. I couldn't begin to tell you how many missing buttons he's responsible for, how many torn sleeves, how many chewed-up pant legs. I was mortified by the whole thing, but Jana put some ice on her cheek and laughed it off.”

He shrugged his shoulders as if the incident embarrassed him, and I looked in his eyes and tried again to decide if he was lying. He had bright, keen eyes and a pleasant face, brown hair that had begun to thin on top but was thick and curly on the sides. He was a couple of inches shorter than me, maybe forty years old, a bit heavy in the middle, though he carried it well enough. His clothes were casual: twill shirt, no tie, khaki pants, Timberland boots.

He didn't look like a man who would make rough passes at his students and rip the buttons from their blouses and slap them around, but looks didn't mean anything. And he was a law professor, which meant he was a lawyer, which meant he was trained to speak persuasively. It was his job to be convincing.

So it was too soon to decide if he was telling the truth. In any case, I had more questions.

“You said that night was the first time Jana came to your house.”

“That's right.”

“What was she doing here?”

Tolliver turned away from me, looked down at the dog at his feet.

“Well,” he said, “that's a long story.”

•   •   •

H
ave you heard of the Innocence Project?” Roger Tolliver asked me.

“It sounds familiar,” I said.

We were sitting in white plastic chairs on his deck. Roger the dog was trotting from one end of the dog run to the other, watching us, trying to decide how he felt about being left behind.

“It's an organization that tries to help people who've been wrongly convicted, tries to get their sentences overturned,” Tolliver said. “That's something lawyers have been doing for a long time, of course. And you don't have to be part of an official organization to do it.” He paused, looked away shyly. “Well, for the past few years I've been running my own small-scale Innocence Project at the university.”

A big flowerpot sat on the deck by his feet. Nothing growing in it but some clover. I watched him brace one of his boots against the rim.

“We've had some success,” he said. “There was a case from the late seventies in Syracuse: a string of sexual assaults against college students by a young Hispanic man. A twenty-year-old named Hector Delgado was convicted after some of the women picked his image out of a photo array. There was DNA recovered at the time—semen and saliva from the perpetrator—but it was never tested. The technology wasn't sophisticated enough back then. We won an appeal two years ago, after the DNA finally got tested and the tests proved it didn't match Hector Delgado. He was released from prison after serving sixteen years.

“The
Syracuse Herald
ran the story, and it got picked up by the Associated Press.
Newsweek
did a feature. They sent a photographer to take my picture. My colleagues at the university still tease me about that. But that kind of publicity helps draw students to the law school—students who want to make a difference.”

“Like Jana,” I said.

“Exactly,” said Tolliver. “I usually don't work with first-year students, but Jana was eager. She joined the project when the new term started, in January. I rely on students to take care of a lot of routine work: basic research on cases, responding to inquiries from prisoners and their family members—people looking for help.”

He clasped his hands over his stomach, interlacing his fingers. “The truth is,” he said, “we have requests coming in all the time, by phone or letter or e-mail, far more than we can possibly take on. The number of criminal convictions that wind up being overturned in this country is remarkably small, and each appeal takes a huge commitment of time and resources, so you have to be very selective. Some of the students have a hard time understanding that.

“Jana was one of those. She felt drawn to one case in particular, a local case—Gary Dean Pruett. He was convicted of murdering his wife. The evidence was thin, but Pruett made a lousy defendant. He was a high school teacher and he'd been having an affair with one of his former students, which was enough to make him unsympathetic to a jury. His wife, Cathy, had found out about the affair, and he admitted that they had argued about it. But according to him, she just disappeared one Saturday afternoon—drove away and never came back.

“Cathy Pruett was a teacher too, and when the police started looking for her they found her car parked on a street near her school. They found her body three weeks later, dumped in a field on the outskirts of the city. She'd been stabbed and then smothered. Their suspicions fell on Gary Pruett early on, and when they searched
his
car they discovered strands of his wife's hair in the trunk. But that was the only physical evidence they ever found to link him to her death. And it was far from conclusive. Pruett's lawyer argued that the hair had come from a blanket that was also found in the trunk, one that Pruett and his wife had used on a picnic.”

“If that was all the evidence they had, how did they convict him?” I asked.

An unexpected smile wrinkled the corners of Tolliver's eyes. “It wasn't all they had,” he said. “They had Napoleon.”

“Napoleon?”

“Napoleon Washburn, believe it or not. Goes by the nickname Poe.” Tolliver looked off westward, where the sun was lowering toward the tops of the trees. “Poe Washburn was a small-time crook,” he said. “Shoplifting, petty theft. He was known for stealing bicycles. Then he got picked up for something more serious: he stole a car. He was facing real prison time. He was in the county jail awaiting sentencing—at the same time Gary Pruett was awaiting trial. They were locked up in adjacent cells. Washburn claimed they got to talking one day and Pruett confessed to killing his wife.”

“Do you think Washburn was telling the truth?”

“It's hard to say. But the lesson is, if you're suspected of a crime, you should talk to your lawyer and nobody else. Not your best friend, not the police, not some guy you meet in jail. It's a commonsense rule, but people ignore it all the time.”

He spread his hands, inviting me to agree. I nodded. I didn't mention that I'd talked to a detective for hours the night before.

“So Washburn testified at the trial about this alleged confession,” Tolliver said. “And the jury voted to convict. Now Gary Dean Pruett's serving a life sentence.”

“Do you think he's innocent?” I asked.

“I don't know. He claims to be.”

“And he turned to you for help—he contacted your Innocence Project?”

The smile came back to Tolliver's eyes. He shook his head. “That's the strange thing,” he said. “The bicycle thief called us.”

“Washburn?”

Tolliver nodded. “Jana was the one who answered the call—around the middle of February. Apparently, Poe Washburn suffered an attack of conscience. He told her there was no jailhouse confession—he made it up. She did some research on the Pruett case and saw how flimsy it was, and she brought it to me. I told her we'd have to pass.”

“Why?”

Tolliver ran a palm over his hair. “Because there are certain realities you have to accept. You can't save everybody. You have to weigh the odds. In most of these cases, when a conviction is overturned, it's because of DNA evidence. It's hard to argue with DNA. If it doesn't match, you've got the wrong guy. But there was no DNA from the perpetrator in the Pruett case. Pruett's wife wasn't sexually assaulted.

“So it comes down to the confession. Suppose Washburn made it up. You have to convince a judge that he lied about it before, but he's telling the truth now. Then you have to prove that without the confession, the jury wouldn't have convicted Gary Pruett. That's not a sure thing. But even if you can prove it, Pruett doesn't walk free, not yet. At best you get him a new trial.

“On top of all that, there's the element of time. Pruett's wife was killed less than two years ago. Pruett was convicted last spring. If he didn't do it, then he's been suffering a terrible injustice. But there are others who've been suffering the same kind of injustice for decades. Time shouldn't matter, but it does. If you can't help everybody, you try to help the ones who've been waiting the longest.”

Tolliver took his foot down off the flowerpot and leaned toward me. “I made all these arguments for Jana, back in February,” he said. “She wasn't happy. I couldn't blame her. I'm not happy about it either.”

“But she didn't let it go,” I said.

“No. That's why she came here, the Sunday before last. To try again to convince me.” He frowned. “And she got a black eye for her trouble, because Roger wanted to play.”

“But you didn't change your mind?”

“Yes and no,” he said, looking down at the deck. “I didn't commit to anything, but I said I'd talk to Poe Washburn. I thought it was the least I could do.”

“So you talked to him?”