Aftershock (8 page)

“But you told her not to talk to anyone.”

“I told her not to talk to anyone unless I gave her the okay. And she hasn’t. I just have to get in there with this lawyer once. Then I can come back anytime I want. Without him, I mean.”

“What do I do?”

“I don’t know,” I told Dolly. “But I will. And real soon.”

“Y
ou’re not going out like that.” I knew Dolly wasn’t asking a question, but I couldn’t figure out what she meant. So I did what I always do when that happens—I just wait for whatever she’s going to say next.

“You have a perfectly good suit, Dell. The one I bought you. The one that’s been hanging in the cedar closet ever since.”

“You want me to wear a suit?”

“Yes, I want you to wear a suit. You’re not some visiting friend now, you’re a private investigator.”

“But the lawyer, his suit was like some corduroy crap. If I go in there looking like I make more money than him, maybe that wouldn’t work so good?”

“You wear more than just a suit, Dell. Sure, it’s a little fancy, but you want people to take you seriously. You don’t need a tie, okay? Just one of those—”

“—nice silk shirts you bought for me? The ones that have been hanging in the cedar closet all this time?”

“Don’t be such a smartass.”

“I know.… Just go put on the suit, right?”

She sat there at the long butcher-block table, tapping her fingernails.

I went into our bedroom and changed.

When I came back down, Dolly’s smile was a sunburst. She got up and walked over to me. Stood on her toes and kissed me on the side of my mouth.

“I didn’t mean to act so … bossy, Dell. It’s just that this is so important. The media, they’re making it even
more
important already. And MaryLou’s all alone.”

“No, she’s not,” I told her, knowing it was a blood promise the second it came out of my mouth.

T
he lawyer would have been waiting for me if I’d shown up at two. But I’d been standing in front of the jail since one-thirty, waiting for him.

“Let’s go” is all he said.

“Bradley Swift,” he said to the guard. “Counsel for MaryLou McCoy. This is Mr. Jackson. He works for me as an investigator.”

The guard gave him a “big fucking deal” look and buzzed us through.

The room they put us in was plenty big enough. Empty except for some chairs placed around a wood table.

MaryLou was brought in a few minutes later. Only one guard to escort her this time. And she wasn’t cuffed.

As soon as the door closed, Swift said, “MaryLou, this is—”

“I know who he is,” she cut him off. “And only my friends call me MaryLou. In here, I’m ‘Ms. McCoy.’ ”

She shot me a “Was that all right?” look, and I nodded. Then I told her, “Mr. Swift here had to bring me through. I’m his private investigator. Which means I can come back on my own. You understand, MaryLou?”

“Sure,” she said, flashing me just a little touch of smile, showing me she knew I got the “Ms. McCoy” bit.

“The Visiting Room, it’s okay for some things,” I went on. “But it’s not a safe place to talk about this case.”

“Got it.”

“Ms. McCoy.” Swift spoke up more to be part of the conversation than anything else—MaryLou had already made it clear where he stood with her. “Do you have any questions? Concerning the legal proceedings, I mean?”

“When will it happen?”

“When will what happen?”

“The trial. When will that get going?”

“Oh, not for a while. There are a number of options we have.”

“Like what?”

“Well, the facts don’t seem to be in dispute. You didn’t make any statement, true enough. But …”

“Yeah, I get it. So?”

“Well, if you were … coerced in any way, or acting under the influence of some drug, or—”

“Forget that.”

“Well, that still leaves us with some options, but if you’re going to stand mute the way you did in the courtroom today, I can’t really present much of a … psychological defense. The DA’s Office would have the right to have one of their own experts examine you, and if you won’t talk to them, it makes a very bad impression.”

“You don’t have to talk to anyone,” I said.

Swift gave me a look like I was overstepping my bounds, but he dropped it quicker than he’d brought it up. I don’t think he was smart enough to figure out who he was dealing with—not yet, anyway. But one thing he did know—I was a paying customer.

“The judge already put the not-guilty plea in for her, right?” I asked the lawyer, to let him save face.

“Yes. But if we’re going to be using a … psychological defense, we have to give notice to the—”

“You can stop talking like I’m not in the room,” MaryLou told him. “And I’m not telling anyone I’m crazy. Then or now.”

“It’s not necessarily—” Swift cut himself off, seeing MaryLou’s face harden. She let it happen slowly, like plaster of Paris setting.

“I’ll be back,” I told MaryLou.

“I’ll be here,” she said, twisting her lips into something like a smile.

“L
ook, I understand you have some sort of prior friendship with the girl,” Swift said once we were back outside. “But when you hired me, it was to be her lawyer. What did you think you were buying?”

“Time,” I told him. “As much of it as possible.”

“Oh, I can do that for sure. A case like this, there’s no way the DA isn’t going to farm it out.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means they never try big cases down here. The DA’s Office, I’m talking about. Unless there’s going to be a plea, they’ll go crying to the AG’s Office, like they always do. That way, if there’s a guilty verdict, they can take credit for it. And if it goes the other way, they blame it on whoever comes in to actually try the case.”

“How would that work? Bringing someone else in, I mean.”

“They get someone from the AG. Or even from another office. What they call a ‘special prosecutor.’ ”

“And that takes time?”

“Sure. But that’s not the only way to stall this thing. I’ve got all kinds of discovery motions I can make. Nobody on their side is going to be in a hurry to try this one, that much I can practically guarantee. And that’s not even counting plea negotiations.”

“Plea negotiations? What could they possibly offer MaryLou?”

“They could take the death penalty off the table, for openers.”

“They execute kids here?”

“She’s eighteen. An adult. But you’re right—executing someone her age would be a political mistake.”

“Political?”

“Plenty of people in this part of the state are opposed to the death penalty, especially in this county. And not just people—people who vote. That scares the DA to death. He spends all his time pleasing
people. That’s the only thing he knows how to do. Hell, they may not even farm this one out—the locals already feel too strongly about it, like it’s
their
case, not one for an outsider to handle.”

“So what
could
they offer her?”

“It depends on what excuse they could give.”

“That’s why you mentioned the psychological stuff?”

“Yes. The more we give them, the more they could live with a life sentence.”

“If they’re not going to kill her anyway, how’s that such a great deal?”

“This is a Measure Eleven case. The judge doesn’t have that much discretion. She’d have to go to prison, and, remember, it’s not just one murder charge, it’s a whole laundry list of felonies. Provided nobody else dies, that is. Under the best of circumstances, we could try for a manslaughter on top, with the rest to run concurrent. That would be the deal of the century. But, who knows, if it turns out she was an abused child or something …”

“You heard her.”

“That she won’t cooperate? Yes. But it’s still my obligation as an attorney to thoroughly investigate any avenue that might—”

“You’re not getting paid by the hour.”

He gave me a long look. At least he was facing me: hard to see his eyes under that pageboy haircut.

“I assume you won’t be turning in any written reports,” he finally said.

“No.”

“Okay,” he said, like I’d asked him for permission.

D
riving back, I was trying to make sense of it. Realized I couldn’t, not without asking some questions.

I don’t know how to do that, not really. The only time I’d seen men questioned, the only question was how much pain they could take.

I didn’t like seeing that, but I knew I couldn’t look away—the men I was with would take it as a sign of weakness. Some of those men chased weakness the way other men chased women.

The only thing I learned from watching was that, if you put a man in enough pain, he’ll scream.

Actually, I learned something else. One man finally screamed. When they made the pain stop, he told them where his outfit’s base camp was. Then they shot him.

When we hit where he’d said the base camp was, it was just a clearing hacked out of the jungle. Not big enough for a camp, but plenty of room for the trip wires surrounding it. The strike team got blown to chunks of flesh and bone. Nobody followed them. The man they’d tortured must have been laughing under all those screams.

I can do a lot of things, but most of them aren’t much use to me now. Being with Dolly, that was all I wanted.

And whatever Dolly wanted, I wanted to get for her. I had learned some new things to be with her; if that’s what it took to stay with her, I could learn some more.

“H
ow far do you want to go with this?” I asked her late that same night.

“Far? You mean … what, Dell?”

“Break her out, that far.”

“No.”

I waited. I knew there was more to come; Dolly did this when she wanted to make sure I understood whatever she was going to say.

“She couldn’t live underground,” Dolly finally said, already
accepting that I might be able to break her out. “Not MaryLou. She’s not built for it.”

“She looks like she is. She’s in jail, and she’s just a kid. But nobody’s even so much as tried her.”

“How do you know that?”

“Not a mark on her. Not on her face, not on her hands. That means either she rolled over or nobody pushed. And she’s not the kind to roll over.”

“Oh. Well, that’s not what I meant. Even if she could get around her looks—I know there’s ways to do that—she’d die of loneliness. She needs … people. Friends. Sports. She needs to be connected.”

“There’s places where she could make new friends.”

“Overseas, you mean?”

“Yeah. She couldn’t just disappear. Not in America, but there’s places that’d take her.”

“No,” Dolly whispered, roadblocking the idea.

“MaryLou’s not crazy. So she had a reason. But she’s not telling—not so far, anyway. It’s like all we have is this big chunk of granite. So you start boring your way in from one side, and I’ll take the other.”

“I can do that.”

“It’s not just boring in, baby. You and me, we have to cut a tunnel.
One
tunnel, so we meet in the middle, yes? And we have to make sure the stone doesn’t crack while we’re working through it.”

“So—go slow?”

“It’s not so much that as making sure we’re headed toward the same light. The one in the middle.”

“What’s there, Dell? What’s in the middle?”

“MaryLou,” I said, real soft.

I held her until she drifted off. Drifted off for real. When Dolly thinks I’m going someplace after she goes to sleep, she stays tense, even asleep.

“T
hey have to tell you what they’ve got, right?”

“They’re supposed to,” Swift told me. “There’s a Supreme Court case that says, if they don’t turn over everything that’s exculpatory, any conviction gets thrown out.”

“Exculpatory?”

“Anything that might prove her innocence. Or even what might make the case against her look weaker to a jury.”

“What about the gun?”

“What about it?”

“Don’t they have to match the ballistics?”

“Well … sure. But that’s probably not going to help us. When the police got there, she was just sitting on the floor. The gun was right next to her.”

“Couldn’t we get the gun itself, too? Not to take away or anything, but to have our own ballistics guy run tests?”

“I suppose so. You don’t see a lot of expert testimony in cases around here.”

“Too expensive?”

“That’s probably part of it. But challenging experts is a tricky business. It could backfire easily enough.”

What you mean is, you’ve never had your own expert. On any case, ever. Probably never even asked for one
, I thought. But all I said out loud was “So who’s their expert? Some cop?”

“Probably.”

“And they’re never wrong?”

“I know, that doesn’t mean they
couldn’t
be, but …”

“The fee we agreed on? I understand that doesn’t include whatever you’d have to spend on experts, okay?”

Little clots of red popped up on his round face. Bull’s-eye.

“And no matter what, they
have
to tell you everything about the gun they found?”

“Certainly,” he said, back to where he felt safe. “In fact, that’s one of the motions I’m going to file.”

“When?”

“Uh … today, in fact.”

“And they can’t refuse?”

“No. Not for something like that.”

“Okay. I’ll see you later, then.”

“You could just call, if you want.”

“I don’t like talking on phones,” I said, “but sometimes speed is more important than safety. So here’s my cell-phone number, in case something comes up.” I handed over the number of the prepaid on the back of an index card.

The writing for the phone number wasn’t mine. It wasn’t anybody’s. Nobody uses pantographs much anymore, I guess, but they were perfect if you wanted untraceable “handwriting.”

S
ince I was already dressed for the part, I went over to the jail. They put MaryLou and me in that same lawyer’s room, so I guessed there weren’t going to be any arguments over that in the future.

When the guard brought MaryLou in, there was something about the way she handled the job that made me think. I’d have to run it past Dolly.

MaryLou sat down. I put my finger to my lips. Then I took out a pad and wrote, “Why them?” in soft pencil.