And had trouble breathing.
They were double-digit field box seats for tonight’s Yankees game. Tonight’s Yankees–Red Sox game. The first one of the season. The only bigger Yankee fan than me was Emma.
“Oh, Tom,” I said woozily. “Oh, wow. I’m…”
“Hungry?” my fairy god counselor said, winking as he lifted his menu. “Then try the steak frites. Best in the city. Fuggedaboudit.”
Chapter 53
YOU HAD YOUR GOOD DAYS, Peter Fournier thought from his loge-level seat in the unbelievably opulent and immense new Yankee Stadium.
And then you had your perfect days.
“Here we go, Boston! Here we go!” he yelled as loud as he could as Beckett retook the mound.
From the famous façade, to the flat-screen TVs at every turn, to the low bowl-like design that made it seem like you were watching the game from the batting circle, even a die-hard Sawx fan like him couldn’t deny the billion-dollar ballpark was baseball’s version of paradise on earth. Even after they’d dug up Ortiz’s jersey.
But to be here in the eighth inning, the Sox up by three and Beckett still on the mound in a perfect game, was nothing short of miraculous.
Actually, the true topper was having his family there, his gorgeous wife, Vicki, and his two sons, nine-year-old twins, Michael and Scott, with him. As on all their trips to Disney and last year’s incredible European jaunt, Team Fournier was having an unforgettable blast.
The Fournier family had been invited to the game by Tom Reilly and Ed O’Connor, two New York FBI agents Peter had met at the FBI’s National Academy course years before. He’d actually had them and their families down for a Boston–New York spring training game in Fort Myers, and now it was payback.
The two big, bearlike Feds sat on either side of the Fourniers with their Yankee-fan families. There was a lot of razzing back and forth, but it was all in good clean fun.
Funny the places life took you, Peter thought, smiling as he shook his head at his twin sons. The second oldest in a destitute family of ten in a South Boston project, Peter had abhorred the idea of ever having a kid.
To be clear, he liked being married just fine. After all, there was nothing more satisfying or fun or clean than having a faithful, monogamous woman in his life. But by age fifty, and now on his third wife, Peter had had the epiphany that he’d actually acquired enough money to completely buffer himself from all the smelly, human unpleasantness of child rearing with a huge house, nannies, and prep schools.
It had worked out even better than planned. He’d never smelled a diaper, let alone changed one. And it was up to him which meaningless ball games or Christmas plays he would attend.
All he needed to concentrate on now was creating as many unforgettable, fun, heartwarming moments as were convenient so his family would give him his space. Like tonight’s doozy. Being Daddy was easy.
Beckett started off the eighth with a four-seamer on the black that Jeter just gaped at. Peter squeezed Vicki’s hand as their usually sedate son, Michael, jumped out of his seat with excitement, delivering high-fives.
Beckett went up 0 and 2 as Jeter swung and missed a breaking ball.
Peter looked down at Beckett with spine-tingling reverence. What a warrior. Baseball immortality was now within his grasp, and not even fifty thousand screaming New Yorkers could take it away.
One more. C’mon, Josh. One more, baby. Please, Peter prayed.
Beckett threw another off-speed pitch down and away, and Jeter swung and got under it. Youk went all out from first, but it bounced off the top of the Yankee dugout into the crowd.
Damn. Just missed, Peter thought. But at least it was just a foul ball.
A beautiful teenaged girl’s face filled the JumboTron in centerfield a moment later. She was holding the ball and hopping up and down like she’d just won the lottery.
There was something familiar about the girl, Peter thought, squinting at the six-story-tall high-def screen. Something in her smile reminded him of his dearly departed mom’s high school yearbook picture. Peter had loved that picture and his mom, despite her inability to keep her legs closed.
Peter watched, riveted, as they replayed the girl’s one-handed grab.
They even froze the frame.
Then his Heineken fell straight down out of his hand, splattering his ankles.
Because the good-looking blond woman embracing the teen girl reminded him even more of someone else.
His dead wife, Jeanine.
Chapter 54
“CAN I BORROW THOSE, SON?” Peter said calmly, despite his galloping heart.
“Sure, Dad,” Scott said, immediately handing over the binoculars that one of the Feds had brought.
Raising the glasses, Peter ignored the thunderous cheer that rose up as Jeter hit a liner into the gap, ruining Beckett’s perfect game. He slowly searched into the crowd behind the Yankee dugout, where the foul ball had landed.
He panned over people in suits. Billy Crystal. A bunch of pudgy Yankee fan goons pointing at a little black girl in a Boston cap. The new and improved Rudy, without the comb-over.
He scanned up and down the rows and sections, one by one, methodically. Looked through the crowded aisles.
He didn’t spot her. Even after five meticulous minutes. There were too many people, too many faces. None of them was Jeanine.
The woman had only looked like her, and he’d jumped to conclusions, he decided as he handed back the binoculars to his son. It made sense.
He’d been thinking more and more about Jeanine over the last year for some inexplicable reason. He’d even dreamed about her a few times.
In one of the dreams, he was eating dinner with her again by the seawall in their backyard like on their first date. In another, he had his hands around her throat, holding her down under the water on an empty beach as she tried to scratch at him.
All in his head.
When he lowered the binoculars, he saw that A-Rod was on first and Beckett was heading for the showers.
“Now that just sucks!” his son Scott yelled.
Tom Reilly, the Fed beside them, began to do a little victory dance as he giggled uncontrollably.
You know what’s even funnier, Tom? Peter felt like asking his FBI pal. The way you let me pump you for information about any large upcoming federal drug interdictions. You know what I do with that information and the other information I casually collect from all your asshole buddies at the DEA, Tom? I sell it to the cartels. Have you heard of air traffic controllers? Yeah, I’m like a drug traffic controller. Beckett might have just blown a perfect game, but I made seven figures last year, Tommy Boy. Tax free. Not bad for a hick Florida cop. Tee-hee.
Peter scruffed his tan son’s blond head with a grin.
“Don’t worry. It’s not the end of the world, Scott,” he said. “A man takes disappointment in stride. And what did I tell you about using the S-word?”
“Sorry, Dad,” Scott said sheepishly. “I meant to say stinks.”
“There you go,” Peter said, patting his son gently on his shoulder as he gave Reilly a wink. “Much more appropriate. Always remember, the words we choose reveal our true character.”
Chapter 55
IT WAS A QUARTER TO NINE on Thursday morning when I stepped into a gleaming black glass office tower at 57th Street and Third Avenue. With a temporary security pass hanging off my lapel, I smiled at the dozen or so other young Global 100 lawyers who sat as fresh and crisp as sharpened pencils in the twenty-third-floor conference room for the multifirm pro bono meeting.
I scanned the impressive corporate firm names on the place cards, some of which actually represented countries. It was heartening to see lawyers about to do some pro bono work.
If, in fact, that really was what we were going to do.
I hoped it was.
Unfortunately, I’d done pro bono initiatives before in which there were a lot of long expense-account lunch meetings and high-minded dialogues but not too much leg
it legal work that affected anything or anyone.
Whatever the case, the only thing I knew was that I was going to work my ass off for my boss, Tom Sidirov.
For the Derek Jeter foul ball Emma had snagged last night and for the front-row privilege of watching the Bombers turn a Beckett perfect game into a ninth-inning come-from-behind walk-off Cano grand slam?
I was prepared to work forty hours a day.
I was gathering up coffee and info folders when I caught a bright flash of red hair in my peripheral vision.
“No way!” I squealed.
“Yes way, José,” my pretty porcelain-skinned friend, Mary Ann Pontano, said as we bear-hugged. “Thank God. I just might be able to get through conference hell after all.”
I laughed as I hugged her again.
She’d been my first New York friend. She was my next-door neighbor in the crappy apartment I’d gotten on 117th Street in Spanish Harlem two weeks after I’d gotten off the Greyhound at the Port Authority.
Being the only single women and non-Spanish-speaking people in residence, we gravitated toward each other. Especially when we had to do laundry in the Silence of the Lambs–style basement laundry room. She’d helped me find a waitressing job and a pediatrician for Em. She was actually the one who’d encouraged me to become a paralegal all those years ago.
“It’s been way, way too long, Mary Ann,” I said.
Mary Ann smiled. She still looked more like an Iraq War news anchorette than a combat Iraq War vet and ex-NYPD cop. She’d parlayed her toughness and good looks into a plum international-law-firm investigator job.
“That’s fine,” Mary Ann said. “I know you greedy, capitalist corporate-lawyer types. Not a minute to spare counting all that filthy lucre. No time for the peasants.”
“Well, Mary Ann,” I said. “We can’t all be keeping it real in the hood up there in Scarsdale with our dentist husband and two toddlers.”
“It’s Bronxville, OK?” Mary Ann said. “Get it right. Bronxville eats those soccer-mom bitches from Scarsdale alive. Anyway, what are we doing here again?”
“We’re here to save some lives, that’s what,” said a short, friendly-looking man with an unruly mop of black hair, who burst into the conference room with a legal box.
“Welcome to Mission Exonerate NYC, everyone,” he said, dropping the box onto the table with a tremendous thud. “Since time is money, I won’t waste any. I’m the initiative cofounder and director, Carl Fouhy. You are the brightest legal minds in New York City, I take it. Or at least, New York’s currently most dispensable legal minds. Whatever the case, I need you and, more important, the men and women who are right now facing imminent execution need you even more.”
He hit the lights as a bright PowerPoint board hummed out of the ceiling.
The faces of tough yet defeated-looking men and women began to slideshow.
“You would not believe the amount of witness misidentification and forensic-science misconduct that we’ve found in some of these capital cases,” Fouhy explained. “That’s even before getting into some of the flat-out shitty defense lawyering we’ve uncovered.
“There are cases of counselors failing to investigate witnesses or call experts. Of defense lawyers actually being intoxicated and falling asleep during trial. That’s where you folks come in. You will level the playing field for these mostly poor, mostly uneducated men and women.”
He lifted the lid of the box, took out thick yellow envelopes, and began to drop them one by one in front of us.
“These are your assigned cases. You can open them momentarily, when you leave. On the first page, you will find the accused’s current attorney. We want you to work in conjunction with him. Your job is advisory, to go and do a face-to-face with each defense attorney. See that everything has been covered, the police report, the appeals. We’re looking for mistakes, people. Catching a mistake may save someone’s life.
“Now, if someone will hit the lights, I’ll go over a couple of test cases in which we’ve overturned executions. We’ll review the process and then, basically, you’re on your own. Any questions, myself or the initiative’s policy advisers, Jane Burkhart and Teddy Simmons, can be reached. Otherwise, I’m confident you guys will figure it out. Improvise and overcome, people. Save a life!”
Chapter 56
“AND I THOUGHT speed dating was fast,” Mary Ann said as we unloaded at Starbucks on Third Avenue half an hour later with Jane Joyce, a lawyer at Mary Ann’s firm.
“On your mark, get set, go,” I said as we all pulled out our assigned cases.
I flipped through a thick mound of pages. My case concerned a man named Randall King who was on death row for murdering two armored-car guards in a Waterbury, Connecticut, holdup. I showed Mary Ann the mug shot of the bullnecked, malevolent, cornrowed convict.
“Wow, they gave me a bank robber,” I said. “Lucky me. This is going to be fun.”
“I got a drug dealer who killed his family!” Jane Joyce cried out. “In Texas!”
“You think yours sucks?” Mary Ann said, gaping at her case. “I got a loser they caught on a cold homicide case in South Florida!”
As always, my stomach tightened at the mention of Florida.
“A fricking serial killer, no less,” Mary Ann said. “Check this out.”
I almost bit through my latte cup. A burning line of coffee sprayed from my nose onto my chin.
In Mary Ann’s hand was a photocopied Miami Herald article. She gave it to me.
It had a three-word headline: “Jump Killer Caught?”
Chapter 57
May 17, 2001
JUMP KILLER CAUGHT?
Palm Beach County cold-case detectives placed a state corrections officer into custody for the 1993 murder of a Boca Raton woman Monday night. Police sources confirm that a DNA match led to the arrest of Florida City resident Justin Harris.
Murder victim Tara Foster was still in college in June of 1993 when she was reported missing after volunteering as an office worker at the Homestead Correctional Institution in Florida City. Her remains were found wrapped in plastic in Everglades National Park a year later.
With DNA evidence originally retrieved from Foster’s body, cold-case detectives restarted the investigation this month with an effort to obtain DNA from likely suspects. Because she’d been tied with paracord, the same ligature linked to the infamous Jump Killer disappearances in the early 1990s, cold-case officers cross-referenced original witnesses in the Foster case with former paratroopers.
Justin Harris, a veteran of the 101st Airborne and a guard at the Homestead prison, provided DNA that matched samples found on Foster’s clothing.
He is currently being held without bail.
My pulse hammered in my throat, against my temples. The photocopied article in my lap wavered in my vision like something seen through old glass.
As I sat there with Mary Ann and Jane, the traffic beeping outside on Third, the shouted coffee orders, the jet engine whoosh of the milk frother, all began to fade. In their place came a rush of images and sensations I’d thought I’d successfully blocked from my memory.
The Jump Killer’s strange dark eyes, the pungent smell of cologne in his car, the ache in my arms as I hung on for dear life as he crashed through the surf behind me.
“Hey, Nina,” Mary Ann said, looking at me with worry. “You OK? You look almost as pale as me.”
“Fine,” I heard myself saying. I braced myself and thumbed to the next page. I found another newspaper article that listed all the women whose deaths the Jump Killer was believed to be responsible for. I scanned the faces until I got to the second one from the bottom.
Above the caption “Victim 20” was a vaguely familiar face. I guess it should have been, since it was my high school yearbook picture.
Sitting there, I felt like you do in that dream where you’re back at school, and you have to take that one last test you never studied for. That sour, pit-of-your-stomach, panic-attack realization that the jig
is up. The worst thing of all has happened. You’ve been found out.
“Earth to Nina,” Mary Ann said. “Hey, if you’re so interested, why don’t we switch? Connecticut’s what? Two hours away at the most. How am I going to arrange everything with my kids if I have to go to Florida? Besides, I’ve got red hair. Fluorescent bulbs give me blisters. Do ol’ Mary Ann a favor. This is a media case as well. Think of the publicity for your firm. You’ll make partner.”
A media case? It was worse than I thought. Why the hell hadn’t I heard about it?
“A media case? Really?” I said.
“Justin Harris? That’s right. I heard about it on Channel Four,” Jane said. “Get out of here. You got the Jump Killer case?”
“Yes,” Mary Ann said, annoyed. “Do you want to switch?”
“Spend some personal time with a sexually sadistic serial killer? Gee, let me think about that. Uh, no,” the tall brunette said.
Mary Ann turned back to me. “Please? For old times’ sake?”
That’s when I noticed on the cover contact sheet that Harris’s lawyer lived in Key West. Fear of Mary Ann recognizing my photograph was replaced instantaneously with fear of death. My mind flashed on a memory. Elena’s bullet-riddled, bloody body splayed out on the gas station floor.
Go back to Key West? I thought, failing to banish the image with a sip of latte.
Not after seventeen years. Not after seventy.
If I bumped into Peter, I’d be the one receiving the death penalty.
I handed the case file back to her as if it burned my fingers.
“I can’t,” I said emphatically. “Sorry. Emma’s got the SAT coming up.”
The lies came as easily as always. I guess I should have felt guilty. I didn’t.
“Fine,” Mary Ann said. “Fine. Of course, I’d get the short straw. I always get the short straw.”
No, I felt like saying to her. I’d just missed it for once.