False Convictions (23 page)

“He burned the clothes he wore and changed into new ones,” the judge said, pointing into the empty drum whose sooty dirt couldn’t
grow even a weed.

“All this sounds good,” Casey said, sweeping a loose lock of hair behind her ear. “But none of it makes sense. If it’s true,
why wasn’t it in the trial record?”

Martin and the judge looked at each other before she said, “I told you, he was smart.”

A
BOVE THEM, in the peak of the roof, the hornet nest droned in the remnants of sunlight. Casey glanced up and saw that other,
smaller, fruit-shaped nests populated the eaves of the roof leading up to the main ball. The amber and black bees hovered
and swung lazily on soft air currents, waiting their turn to enter the nest.

“I was with Nelson when she called,” Judge Rivers said, her piercing gaze directed at Casey. “I could hear her through the
phone, completely hysterical, begging him to come. I knew he’d been following her around since she came back from college
and that her father made some calls asking him to stop, so I knew he was obsessed. Nelson was at Cornell the fall before for
about six weeks before he drove up to Potsdam and found her with someone else. She broke his heart, and you can imagine how
I felt about her.

“Nelson was struggling with grades and we were actually discussing his options when she called. I told him not to go to her,
but I could tell by the look on his face that nothing I said would stop him.”

The judge took a deep breath and Martin swished through the grass, standing close so he could clasp her hand. She bit her
lip and her face crumpled briefly before she regained her composure and said, “He called fifteen minutes later, screaming
that she was dead. I called the chief and went right over. By the time we got there, the father had arrived. That’s when we
realized she was still alive and we called an ambulance and I got Nelson out of there. The chief said he’d handle it. He knew
he could trust Martin.”

“I knew Nelson didn’t do it,” Martin said, “but it looked bad.”

“How could you know that?” Casey asked.

“The blood,” Martin said. “That was my thing, blood. Classes down at Quantico. Seminars. Blood can tell you a lot, and I knew
just looking at him that he didn’t kill her. She was a mess, and whoever did it would have been covered in it. He just had
some on the bottom of his shoes from going in the room. The dad was another story—covered from head to toe—but I knew he didn’t
do it because Nelson saw him come in.”

“Maybe Nelson burned
his
clothes,” Casey said.

“He wore the same clothes I saw him in when he left me,” Judge Rivers said flatly.

Casey glanced at Jake and saw the questioning look.

“So you just defaulted on all the other evidence and prosecuted Dwayne Hubbard because the blood didn’t fit the picture you
had in your mind?” Casey said. “Do you know how fast that would be thrown out in court?”

“Which is exactly why we had to do what we did,” Judge Rivers said, her chin high and trembling.

“She didn’t ask me to just sweep it under the rug,” Martin said, his nostrils flaring at Casey as he nodded toward the judge.
“She wanted the truth. She would have put her own son behind bars if he did it, but he didn’t. I knew that crime was done
by someone who’d done it before. It was too clean, too ritualized to be a first-timer. It took me a month, but I found those
other cases. They matched, and Dwayne had the chance to commit every one of them. Nelson was here when the Wyoming girl got
killed. It was Dwayne.”

“And we knew if he got away,” the judge said, “that Cassandra Thornton wasn’t going to be his last. He’s totally deranged.
Totally evil.”

“How do you know Nelson was here?” Casey asked Martin. “He wasn’t with you.”

Martin glanced at the judge. “Yes, he was. We were all there. It was Patricia’s birthday.”

“You said you met through this case,” Casey said.

“Around that time,” the judge said.

“But that’s not what you said,” Casey said. “How convenient that your boyfriend was investigating the case. Come on.”

“We did what was right,” the judge said. “We weren’t a hundred percent sure, and we were prepared to turn things around if
there was even a chance Dwayne was innocent, but he wasn’t. He couldn’t have been. Martin had a friend in the FBI look over
the crime scene photos and he said without a doubt these were all done by the same person.”

“Why didn’t you bring the FBI into it?” Casey asked. “Tie them all together and put him away that way?”

The judge hung her head for a moment. “We needed to keep it quiet. You know how these things go, the Feds, the media, look
at what’s happening now. We needed to keep it simple and get past it all.”

“So you cooked the evidence to put Hubbard away,” Casey said, shaking her head. “You kept it simple, all right, a two-day
trial with a hack for the defense.”

“He was
guilty
,” Judge Rivers said, raising her voice only to have it swallowed up by the thick overgrowth of trees.

“But that’s not for you to decide,” Casey said. “That’s for a jury.”

“A judge sometimes has to overrule a jury,” Judge Rivers said. “That’s not just a judge’s prerogative, it’s her duty if she
sees a miscarriage of justice. You know that.”

“Well, you weren’t the judge back then,” Casey said. “You were the prosecutor. And even if I bought all this, we know for
a fact that your son was the one who raped that girl.”

“He never did,” the judge said, shaking her head with a clenched jaw. “He was with me.”

“You say, but you also said you didn’t know Martin until this case.”

“I said it was around that time.”

“You’re lying.”

“That DNA is a
scam
,” the judge said. “Whoever is behind all this cooked that up.”

“How do you cook DNA?” Casey asked.

“You buy someone off,” the judge said.

“What if you switched slides?” Jake asked.

Casey cringed. “Whose side are you on?”

“I’m just thinking of the possibilities,” Jake said with a shrug. “And I’d like to ask something else.”

The judge nodded her assent.

“Why did you give back a hundred thousand dollars from your fund?” Jake asked.

“What fund?” the judge said without blinking.

“I know about your campaign fund and how you’re lining pockets on both sides of the aisle in Washington,” Jake said.

Judge Rivers’s pale cheeks went red. She glanced at Martin and chewed her lower lip. “My political donations are hardly anyone’s
business. It’s all perfectly legal.”

“But problematic,” Jake said. “You remember getting a hundred-thousand-dollar check from CJD, Citizens for a Just Democracy?”

Her face clouded over.

“A PAC, right?” Jake said. “But who are they?”

“Some businessmen from Buffalo,” she said haltingly. “Massimo D’Costa. An environmental group.”

“Environmental cleanup,” Jake said, nodding, “and what did they want that made you refund their contribution? A hundred grand
buys a lot of goodwill. Why give it back?”

“That has nothing to do with my son being innocent,” the judge said, directing her attention to Casey. “I’ve shown you what
you need and I hope you’ll help set the record straight. I hope you’ll put Dwayne Hubbard back where he belongs, even if it
embarrasses some people. He’ll do this again. They always do.”

Judge Rivers clasped Martin’s hand tighter and tugged him past them, swishing back through the high grass that had gone cool
and damp in the late shadows of the day.

“You didn’t answer my question,” Jake said, trailing them with Casey. “Why’d you give it back?”

Judge Rivers kept going. As she climbed into the Suburban, she said, “I’ll play the game to a certain extent, but if it goes
against everything I believe in, then I’m not for sale.”

“What does that mean?” Jake said, hurrying to grab hold of the passenger door before she could close it.

“What were they buying?” Jake asked. “Please. It might help me sort this all out.”

The judge scowled at him. “Nothing to do with Dwayne Hubbard. I know what you want. Scandal for your TV show. Any scandal,
just pile it on. Parking tickets, boyfriends, political contributions, things everyone does. Things that your kind twist into
something perverse.”

“I know you don’t know me,” Jake said, “but I’m not like that. Yes, a scandal is good TV, sure. But I think there really is
a link between that PAC and everything that happened with Dwayne Hubbard. Please.”

She sighed and stared, then said, “
The Nature Conservancy v. Eastern Oil & Gas
.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Jake asked.

“The Marcellus Shale Formation,” she said. “Billions of dollars in natural gas, but they need to use hydrofracture drilling
to get to it.”

“Can you tell me about it?” Jake asked, letting go of the door.

“Pumping poison into the ground. It breaks up the rock and frees the gas. Look it up, Mr. Carlson,” she said. “That’s what
I did, I looked it up, and that’s why I gave back the money. Every judge who dreams of sitting on that bench knows she has
to do more than be a brilliant jurist. She has to be connected and you don’t get connected without greasing the skids. That’s
just the way it is. If you dug deep enough, you’d find it with every one of them.”

“Would you be willing to sit down and talk with me about all this on camera?” Jake asked.

The judge gave him a dirty look and slammed the door.

C
ASEY SWATTED at a stray wasp as the Suburban roiled the dust on the shoulder of the road and disappeared around the bend up
ahead.

“Why didn’t you tell her?” Casey asked.

“Tell her what?”

“That Graham was behind that PAC,” Casey said.

“Robert Graham?” Jake said with a grin, his eyebrows disappearing up under the wisps of blond hair. “The Savior from Seattle?
He would never be involved in something like that. It’s all just coincidence, I’m sure.”

“Well, if this story doesn’t pan out for you,” Casey said, “I’m sure you’ll be able to get a gig with
The Daily Show
. Comedy works for you. Shows off your dimples. Go ahead, say it.”

Jake dropped his smile and opened the Cadillac’s door. They both got in.

“Honestly?” Jake said. “I don’t believe anything she says any more than I do Graham. You think because she’s singing the sad
mommy song that she’s not capable of fabricating all this shit, too? I don’t trust her as far as I can spit.

“In a way,” Jake continued, starting the engine, “I’m not unlike a lawyer. I hold my cards close and play them when they’ll
have the most impact.”

“How about that bull about swapping DNA samples?” Casey asked, climbing in beside him.

“I felt like a matador,” Jake said.

“You’re on a roll.”

“Except it’s something I could see Graham doing,” Jake said.

“Be serious. How?”

Jake shrugged and pulled away from the decrepit house. “Lots of ways.”

“Name one.”

“How about he has his one-legged buddy zip down to Turks and get a semen sample from Nelson Rivers?” Jake said.

“How?” Casey said, wrinkling her brow.

“Do I really have to explain?”

“Ralph? Yes, you do. How does Ralph get a semen sample?” Casey asked, her mouth souring with the thought.

“Even if his cornucopia of talents doesn’t include something like that, he only needs two things: a condom and a hooker,”
Jake said. “I happen to know that Graham’s plane flew to the Caribbean the night before the hospital produced the slide.”

Casey narrowed her eyes at the road ahead. “The same night Ralph went missing. Graham gave me a ride that morning.”

“And before that, Ralph stuck to you pretty damn tight,” Jake said, nodding.

“But how could they have switched the slides?” Casey asked.

“I’ve seen ten thousand dollars in a paper bag go a long way with those watchman types,” Jake said. “And with these morons,
it could have been a handshake palming a fifty-dollar bill.”

“Could they have done it that fast?” Casey asked, remembering Ralph’s exhausted face.

“Fastest nonmilitary jet in the world,” Jake said, “and I’m quoting from my interview. I love the modesty of a guy in flannel
shirts and Timberlands. I bet you he has a loyal dog that loves him.”

“There are still a lot of loose ends in this story,” Casey said, shaking her head.

“So now we close them.”

“We?”

“Well, I do,” Jake said, glancing at her. “You’re welcome to join me. I know you’ve got other worlds to save.”

Casey’s face felt warm at the thought of kissing Graham in the moonlight and nearly going to him in the middle of the night,
wanting to go to him, but not going because she thought it could become something special.

“Special, all right,” she said in a mutter. “Goddamn, I can pick ’em.”

“What’d you say?” Jake asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “Except that if what Patricia Rivers says is true, I just turned loose the second psychotic killer in
my illustrious career.”

“Can’t we
un
do it?” Jake asked.

“God, what kind of a shit pile did I kick up with this one?”

“Nothing we can’t tamp back down,” Jake said. “Come on. We’ll get it worked out.”

“How?”

“Find the connection between Graham and the Marcellus Shale Formation,” Jake said. “We pull that thread and his whole flannel
shirt comes unraveled.”

“So,” Casey said, “we start with
The Nature Conservancy v. Eastern Oil & Gas
.”

“Know any good law libraries around this place?” Jake asked, smirking and turning onto the main road and heading into town.

“You know, Marty works for Graham,” Casey said.

“Wouldn’t it be beautiful if that fat money really ended up funding a good cause after all?”

“What’s the good cause?” Casey asked.

“Putting his ass in jail.”

L
OOK,” CASEY SAID, “I’m not as gleeful about this as you, and I’m not as certain, either. The web is pretty thick here, and
you know from TV as much as I know from the law that when things get sticky, the truth has a funny way of losing itself in
the slime.”