Innocent

  "Could be hers?"

  "Could be. There are points of comparison, but it looks like somebody else touched it, too, which may make DNA hard, distinguishing the alleles and getting enough to test."

  "That would be a tough argument for a defense lawyer," said Brand, "saying she got anywhere near the phenelzine, if her prints show up on every other bottle and not this one."

  Brand and Molto headed back to the same rear exit through which they'd come in. Tommy still didn't want to encounter the dozens of cops he knew who would be coursing around upstairs and would ask why the PA was down here off Mt. Olympus. At the door, Brand took a moment to thank Dickerman again and discuss the next round of examinations, while Tommy went out into the slashing wind to think over what he'd just heard. The steely sky that would prevail in Kindle County for the next six months, as if the Tri-Cities had fallen under a cast-iron pot lid, was closing around them.

  He did it again. The words, the idea, stretched out through Tommy like a piano key with the damper pedal compressed. Rusty did it again. The son of a bitch did it again. No "once burned, twice wise" for him. Standing here, Tommy felt so many things that he was having difficulty sorting them out. He was enraged, of course. Rage had always come easily to Tommy, although less so as the years passed. Yet it remained a familiar, even essential, place to him, like a firefighter who was most himself as he entered a burning house. But he also lingered with the thought of vindication. He had waited. And Rusty had shown his true colors. When it was all proved in court, what would people say to Tommy, the people who for decades had looked down on him as some law enforcement rogue who'd gotten off easy the way bad cops so often do?

  But the strangest part, amid all these predictable responses, was that as Tommy stamped his feet in the cold, he suddenly understood. If he could not have been with Dominga, what would he have done? Would he have murdered? There was nothing people wanted more in life than love. The wind came up and went through Tommy with the icy directness of a pitchfork. But he understood: Rusty must have loved that girl.

  CHAPTER 19

  Anna, September 24-25, 2008

  I love Nat. I Am Really in Love. Finally. Fully. So often before I thought I was on the brink, but now every morning I get up amazed by the unearthly wonder of it. We have been Velcroed to each other since the day he appeared in the supreme court, and we have spent every night together, except for a single trip I had to make to Houston. The New Depression, which has pushed the law biz off a cliff and in sober moments makes me worry about my job, has been a blessing for now, because I can depart work most nights at five. We cook. We love. And we talk for hours and hours. Everything Nat says pleases me. Or touches me. Or makes me laugh. We do not fall asleep until two or three a.m., and in the morning we can barely drag ourselves out of bed to get to work. Before he leaves, I look at him sternly and say, 'We can't keep doing this, we have to sleep tonight.' 'Right,' he says. I ache all day until I can return to him, when the whole blissful sleepless cycle starts again.

  Nat moved in the first week, and there really was no discussion about where he will live at the end of the month. He will be with me. It's like everybody always told me: When it happens, you will know.

  Dennis has asked, because that is his job, if the pure impossibility of the situation is part of it, if I've been able to give myself over only because I know I shouldn't and that disaster somehow lurks. I can't answer that. It doesn't matter. I am happy. And so is Nat.

  My plan, as far as Rusty is concerned, has been no plan at all, except to allow him a warning. As he sat on that banquette in the Dulcimer, he grew lethally angry. I was unsurprised, not because I was hoping for that result, as he claimed, but because I always sensed there is a molten core behind that taciturn exterior. But in time, we will both get accustomed to the bizarre way this has turned out. We have one essential thing in common. We love Nat.

  In the meanwhile, I have resolved to stay away from Rusty, which is not as easy as I might have hoped. Barbara calls Nat every day. He generally picks up and then tells her as little as possible. The conversations are brief and often practical--specials he might be interested in at a local grocery chain, news of family and the campaign, questions about his job search or his expected living arrangements at the end of the month. The last of those inquiries has meant that sooner or later he had to tell her about me. He warned me there was no choice because his mother seemed to be nurturing a hope he might move back home. Even so, I begged him to hold off.

  'Why?'

  'God, Nat. Doesn't that seem like a lot to tell her in one breath, we're dating and then that we're living together? It will sound crazy. Can't you just tell her you're going to share space with a friend?'

  'You don't know my mother. "Who's the friend? What's he do? Where was he raised? Where did he go to school? What kind of music does he listen to? Does he have a girlfriend?" I mean, I wouldn't get away with that for a minute.'

  So we agreed that he would tell her. I insisted on standing by so I could hear his end of the conversation, but I buried my head in one of my sofa pillows when he described himself as 'a love zombie.'

  'She's thrilled,' he said when he hung up. 'Completely thrilled. She wants us to come for dinner.'

  'God, Nat. Please no.'

  I could tell from the way his brows narrowed that he was beginning to find my vehemence about his parents odd.

  'It's not like you don't know them.'

  'It would be weird, Nat. Now. With us so new. Don't you think we should socialize with some normal people first? I'm not ready for that.'

  'I think we should get it over with. She'll ask me every day. You watch.'

  She did. He begged off, using standard excuses, his work or mine. But day by day I am beginning to understand more about the weird symbiosis between Nat and his mom. Barbara hovers over his life like some demanding ghost without an earthly presence of her own. And he feels a need to satisfy her. She wants to see us together, but finds it trying to leave her home. So we must come to her.

  'You could just say no to her,' I told him last week.

  He smiled. 'You try it,' he answered, and indeed the next night, he lifted his cell in my direction. 'She wants to talk to you.'

  Fuck, I mouthed. It was a quick conversation. Barbara gushed about how exciting this was, how pleased Rusty and she were that Nat and I seemed to mean so much to each other. Wouldn't we come and let the two of them share our happiness for just an evening? Like a lot of brilliant people with problems, Barbara is great at putting you in the corner. The easiest thing was to agree to a week from Sunday.

  I held my head in my hands afterward.

  'I don't understand this,' he said. 'You're one of the cool kids. Little Miss Social Skills. My mom has been telling me for a year and a half to ask you out. You're the first girlfriend I've had she approves of. She thought Kat was weird and that Paloma was a bad influence.'

  'But how's your dad with this, Nat? Don't you think this will be strange for him?'

  'My mom says he's completely cool and totally thrilled.'

  'Have you actually talked to him?'

  'He'll be fine. Take it from me. He'll be fine.'

  But I cannot imagine that Barbara's enthusiasm about Nat and me, or the prospect of seeing us together, can do anything but set Rusty spinning. And as I fear, today at work, when I slip in to check my personal e-mail, my heart jumps to see two in my in-box from Rusty's account. When I open the messages, they weirdly turn out to be read receipts on e-mails I sent in May 2007, sixteen months ago.

  It takes me a while to piece things together. During my time with Rusty, I was the one who booked the hotel rooms, since he couldn't use his credit card. I would forward the online confirmation to him, receipt requested so I knew he'd gotten word and did not have to bother to reply. I often dispatched these messages in a series--the initial confirmation, a reminder that morning, and then a last e-mail giving the room number once I had checked in. Because I was getting the acknowledgments, I real
ized that often the only message he was opening was the last one, which he looked at on his handheld on the way over, without having to chance reviewing the other e-mails with somebody around.

  The two read receipts that arrived today are from those e-mails that went unopened last year. At first, I take this as a kind of perverse stalking, an effort to remind me where the two of us were not all that long ago. But with another hour's thought I realize he may not even know the messages are coming to me. When you open an e-mail on which the sender's requested a receipt, a little pop-up appears, warning you that the notification will be sent. The pop-up also contains a little box to check that reads, 'Don't show this message again for this sender.' He probably chose that option long ago. By the end of the day, I decide there may be a positive spin here: Rusty is finally doing what he should have done sixteen months before and deleting all my messages. It's a sign he's moving on, that he is happy to let Nat and me be.

  The next morning by ten, there are three more. Far worse, I realize that deleting the messages wouldn't trigger the receipts. The point is to show the e-mail was read. It is a disturbing, even sickening, image, of Rusty in his chambers, reliving these details. Feeling there is little choice but to have it out with him, I pick up the phone and dial his inside line. It rings through and is answered instead by his assistant, Pat.

  "Anna!" she cries out when I say hello. "How are you? You don't come around enough."

  After a minute of pleasantries, I tell her I have a question for the judge about one of our cases and ask to speak to him.

  "Oh, he's been on the bench all morning, honey. He went up more than an hour ago. They have arguments back to back. I won't see him until half past twelve."

  I have the self-possession to say to Pat that I will call Wilton, my coclerk, for the information I need, but when I put the phone down, I am too panicked and disoriented even to take my hand off the receiver. I tell myself I have gotten this wrong, that there must be another explanation. On my screen, I examine the read receipts again, but all three were sent from Rusty's account less than half an hour ago, when Pat says he was on the bench and nowhere near his PC.

  And then it comes, the dreadful realization. The catastrophe that was always in the offing has happened now: It's someone else. Somebody is systematically reviewing the record of my meetings with Rusty. The hotels. The dates. For a breathless second, I fear the very worst and wonder if it's Nat. But he was himself last night, gentle and utterly adoring, and he is too guileless to keep this kind of discovery to himself. Given his nature, he would just be gone.

  But my relief lasts no more than a second. Then I know the answer with an absolute certainty that turns my heart to stone. There's one person with the savvy to invade Rusty's e-mail account, and the time to be making this painstaking inspection.

  She knows.

  Barbara knows.

  CHAPTER 20

  Tommy, October 31, 2008

  After their meeting with Dickerman in McGrath Hall, Tommy and Brand did not speak a word until they were in the Mercedes.

  "We need his computer at home," Brand said then. "It's the only real chance we have to find the girl. I want to issue a search warrant today. And we need to interview the son pronto to see what he has to say about what was cooking between Mom and Dad."

  "That's page one, Jimmy. He'll lose the election."

  "So what? Just doing our jobs," said Brand.

  "No, damn it," said Tommy. He stopped to gather himself. Brand had done great work here; he'd been right when Tommy was wrong. There was no reason to get angry at him for charging ahead. "I know you think this is a really bad, pathological, fucked-up guy, a serial killer who's sitting on his throne at the right hand of God, and I get it, but think. Think. You blow Rusty off the court and you're just feeding the theory of defense."

  "The vengeful prosecutor crap? I told you how to deal with that."

  He was referring to the DNA, testing the sperm fraction from the first trial.

  "That's what we do next," said Tommy.

  "I thought you don't want to get a court order."

  "We don't need a court order," Tommy said.

  Brand looked at the boss narrowly, then pushed the auto's start button and began easing the Mercedes into the traffic. On the street near police headquarters, six kids were being herded back to grade school after lunch by a couple of moms. Everybody was in costume. Two of the little boys were in suits and ties, wearing masks of Barack Obama.

  Tommy had first thought of what he was about to explain to Brand a decade ago. In those days, he had moved back in with his mom to take care of her in the last years of her life. Her noises--the coughing from the emphysema, most often--would wake him on the cot he slept on in the dining room. Once she was settled, Tommy would think about everything that had gone wrong in his life, probably as a way to convince himself he'd be able to withstand this loss, too. He'd ponder the thousand slights and undeserved injuries he'd borne, and so he would think now and then about the Sabich trial. He knew that DNA testing would answer to everybody's satisfaction whether Rusty had been tooled or literally gotten away with murder. And he'd tempt himself with the thought of how it could be done. But in the daylight, he would warn himself off. Curiosity killed the cat. Adam, Eve, apples. Some stuff you were not meant to find out. But now he could know. Finally. He rolled out the plan again in his head one last time, then detailed it for Brand.

  This state, like most states, had a law mandating the assembly of a DNA database. Genetic materials collected in any case where evidence was offered of a sexual offense were supposed to be added and profiled. Rusty had been accused only of murder, not rape, but the state's theory allowed that Carolyn might have been violated as part of the crime. The state police, without a court order or any other form of permission, could withdraw the blood standards and sperm fraction from Rusty's first trial from the police pathologist's massive refrigerator and test them tomorrow. Of course, in the real world the cops had too much trouble keeping up with the evidence being gathered today to bother going back to cases dismissed two decades ago. But the fact that the law was there and applied without time limit meant that Rusty had no legitimate expectation of privacy in the old samples. He could hoot and holler at trial if the results implicated him, but he'd get nowhere. To give them some cover, Brand could tell the evidence techs to forward all specimens from before 1988 to the state police, explaining that they wanted the oldest first to prevent further degradation.

  Brand loved it. "We can do it now," he said. "Tomorrow. We can have results in a few days." He thought it through. "That's great," he said. "And if he shows up dirty, we can go for the full download, right? Search warrant for his computer? Interviews? Right? We can roll by the end of the week. We have to, right? Nobody will ever be able to say boo? That's great," said Brand. "That's great!" He threw his heavy arm around Molto and gave him a shake as he drove.

  "You got it wrong, Jimmy," Tommy said quietly. "That'll be the bad news."

  The chief deputy drew back. This was what Tommy had been up thinking about for several nights in the past week.

  "Jimmy, we got bad news and worse news here. If," said Tommy, "if we don't match, we're screwed. Screwed. Case closed. Right?"

  Brand looked at Molto without overt expression but seemed to know he was playing from behind.

  "It's too thin, Jimmy. Not with the history. I just want you to understand before we go running down to the lab that it's make or break."

  "Christ," said Brand. He went through all the evidence again, until Tommy interrupted.

  "Jimmy, you were right all along. He's a wrong guy. But if we basically prove he didn't commit the first murder, we can't indict now. We'd just be a bunch of vengeful shits trying to recast a truth we don't like. Everything inside the courtroom and outside would be about my grand obsession. This case is paper thin. And if we have to throw in the fact that Rusty was falsely accused once before by the same office, combined with him being the chief judge of the court o
f appeals with everybody but God testifying as a character witness, we will never get a conviction. So we need to know what the DNA shows now. Because if it exonerates him on the first case, we're stone-cold end of the road."

  Brand stared into the traffic, thickening as they passed closer to Center City. Today, Kindle County was halfway to Mardi Gras. The office workers were out for lunch in all kinds of getups. Five guys were walking along with burgers in their hands, each one dressed like a different member of the Village People.

  "How's he get good DNA results into evidence?" Brand asked. "Even if the DNA cleans him up twenty years ago, so what? Okay, so we're sore losers. The prosecutors' motives are irrelevant."

  "But the defendant's motives aren't. You want to put on a circumstantial case and argue the guy would risk cooling his wife? You think he's not entitled to show that he was once prosecuted for a murder he didn't commit? Doesn't that make it far less likely that he would take that kind of chance now?"

  "Fuck, I don't know with this creep. Maybe it makes it more likely. Here's a guy who understands the system completely. Maybe he's clever enough to think that we can never go on him because of the first case. Maybe he thinks that DNA gives him a free shot this time."

  "And he'd be right," Tommy said to Brand. At a light, they stared at each other until Brand finally broke it off to look at his watch. He swore because he was late. Molto thought of offering to park the Mercedes for him, but Jim was too upset now for jokes.

  "We're gonna make him on the first case," said Brand. "I got fifty that says we make him."

  "That'd be the worse news," Tommy answered. "The best thing that could happen to us would be having an excuse to walk away from this case. The really bad news will be if it turns out to be Rusty's spunk twenty years ago. Because if he was the doer, this isn't a go case. It's a gotta-go case. We can't let him sit on the supreme court knowing he's a two-time killer. We can't."