False Convictions (9 page)

“Only if you throw in another run,” she said, patting her stomach.

Jake touched her shoulder lightly, wished her luck of her own, and said good-bye. Casey watched him walk away before she headed
upstairs. After a shower and some coffee, she went over her notes again before allowing Ralph to drive her to the courthouse.

“The problem is narrowing it down,” Ralph said without taking his eyes from the road. “I got a person to do it, but they came
up with over seven thousand white BMWs on the road in 1989. It’s a matter of pulling the ones from this area and they have
to go through the list one at a time. We’ll get it eventually, but this guy’s been in the can, what? Twenty years?”

“Be nice if it didn’t get to twenty-one, though, right?” Casey said.

Ralph’s eyebrows lifted for a second and he gave a slight nod.

“You found Cassandra Thornton’s people pretty fast, I’ll tell you that,” Casey said, tapping the folder Ralph had delivered
to her at the law offices around nine the previous evening. “Nice work.”

He pulled over in front of the old limestone courthouse. “I’ll be in that spot across the street.”

As she made her way up the steps, Casey looked back at Ralph, who sat watching her with a blank face from the pewter Lexus.

The judge’s chambers had high ceilings. The dark-stained oak had faded under years of neglect. It smelled of aging books and
moldy paper, but the high window behind Kollar’s desk shone across the room onto a wall busy with a framed collection of butterflies,
brilliant with color. Casey stared for a minute, then turned toward Kollar, trying to reconcile the collection with the granite-faced
judge.

“These are beautiful,” Casey said, turning back to the specimens. “This blue is electric.”

“A lot of people use ethyl acetate in their kill jars,” Kollar said. “Cyanide makes them squeamish—the way the little suckers
thrash around a bit—but it’s the best way to keep the colors bright.”

Casey looked at the judge for a deeper meaning before she shook hands with the hospital’s lawyer, William Flynn, a tall, angular
man in a tan suit with thinning brown hair and gold-rimmed glasses. She handed both the lawyer and the judge copies of the
brief she had prepared, then sat in the other leather-upholstered wooden chair facing Kollar’s desk. The big judge folded
his hands and used them as a resting place for his chin. The judge asked Flynn to present his argument first, flipping open
the hospital lawyer’s brief.

“Judge, as much as we’d like to help Ms. Jordan, giving out these samples would be an egregious invasion of privacy, plain
and simple,” Flynn said in an even voice so full of confidence that it bordered on condescension.

Kollar looked at him and nodded.

“State law is very clear that outside a subpoena in a criminal proceeding, the medical information of a patient is sacrosanct,”
Flynn said, pointing to his brief. “The case law supporting patient privacy laws is extant, but the court of appeals decision
in
Marley v. New York
is the most commonly accepted authority.”

The judge compressed his lips as if this were common knowledge.

Flynn held up a hand, looked at Casey, and said, “I’m sure Ms. Jordan will argue that this is a form of criminal proceeding,
but I have to point out that case law is clear on that as well. Her client has already been tried and convicted. He has exhausted
all avenues of appeal provided for by the state, so his standing isn’t one of the accused. He’s guilty. He’s a prisoner of
the state serving a life sentence. The only rights he has are the recent rulings that compel the state to provide any evidence
used in the case against him. What Ms. Jordan is asking for is simply and obviously
not
state’s evidence. It is the private property of a hospital patient. I’m afraid the law is cut and dry.”

J
AKE ATE BREAKFAST alone and allowed his sweat from the run to dry. His phone chirped and he read the text message from his
son, Sam. Sam wanted to know if he could go right from camp to visit with a friend in the Hamptons for a few days. Jake answered
with a text of his own, giving him permission and resisting the temptation to ask Sam why in the world he couldn’t come home
for a few days first, but didn’t because Sam had a tough time making friends. He also wanted to ask why Sam didn’t give him
more notice, because he already knew the answer. Sam didn’t like to plan things and, he claimed, neither did his friends.
Sam being away would allow Jake to return from his Rochester interview with Graham and take Casey up on dinner. He wasn’t
sure, but he had the feeling—if he didn’t rush it—something might be there between them.

Jake changed into a suit and headed out. Robert Graham kept his Rochester offices outside the city in a nondescript two-story
office building just down the main road from the big shopping mall in Palmyra. A savings bank occupied the ground floor of
the white building surrounded by parking lots and locust trees. Jake parked in the shade next to the rented van belonging
to Dora and her crew and bypassed the glass doors of the bank to enter a side door marked Graham Funding by a modest black-and-white
sign. In the small entryway, as he waited for a private elevator, Jake spied the surveillance camera in the corner. He tried
the fire door to the stairs, but it was locked, so he waited for the elevator. Inside the car, Jake stared into a second camera
until the door rumbled open and he stepped into a small lobby. Behind a panel of glass sat a pretty young receptionist with
bright red lipstick and short dark hair. When she got up, her black tailored pantsuit gave away her excellent shape.

She smiled at Jake, obviously expecting him. Jake heard a hum and the muffled clank of a heavy metal bolt before the receptionist
swung open the door, greeting him with a sultry look and a thin cool hand.

“I’ve seen your show,” she said. “This is all very exciting. Can I get you something?”

Jake cleared his throat and said, “Just my crew. Thank you, though.”

“They’re in Mr. Graham’s office. Right this way,” she said, leading him around a corner and down a brightly lit hallway to
a very large corner office looking out into the trees.

A big cherry desk sat in the corner facing the leather furniture, stained-glass lamps, and Oriental rugs. Books and Remington
sculptures lined the shelves that framed the spaces taken up by richly painted seascapes blazing with three-masted battleships.
Jake looked but saw not a single photograph of loved ones, their absence making the space feel sterile.

Dora smiled up at him from her monitor and motioned impatiently for him to come see.

“No water? Nothing at all?” the receptionist asked him, barely whispering and toying with her gold hoop earring.

Jake looked at her a moment, his eyes distracted by the red smudges across the face of her pearl-white teeth. “No, I’m good,
but thanks.”

“Maybe something later,” she said.

Jake waited until she’d gone before he said hello to the crew, then looked at the shot before asking Dora directions to the
bathroom.

“Get made up, too,” Dora said, directing him around the corner, down a hallway, then around another corner. “The makeup girl
is AWOL, so it’s a good thing you’re multitalented. I’d like to start this thing.”

“Is he here?” Jake asked, looking around.

“Flew in from Philly at six this morning,” Dora said. “The legend lives on. He’s on some call in the conference room, supposedly
until twelve-thirty, but let’s be ready in case it ends early.”

“It never does with these guys,” Jake said. “You can set your watch depending on how much money they have. They keep you waiting
a half hour for every billion they’ve got.”

“Good,” Dora said, looking at her watch, “I should still make my flight back.”

Jake followed Dora’s directions to the bathroom, walking slowly through the hallways and wondering at the quiet and the well-heeled
offices without a sign of workers past or present, no cups of coffee, no framed pictures of loved ones on either a desk or
a wall anywhere. When he came to a short hallway ending in a broad mahogany door, Jake realized he must have misunderstood
Dora. He turned to go but froze when he heard someone shouting from the other side of the heavy door. Jake looked around without
seeing any security cameras in the corners of the ceiling and eased himself toward the door, placing his ear gently against
its cool smooth grain so that he could smell the hint of varnish.

He heard voices talking and strained to decipher the words, his instincts telling him that, if he could, he’d quickly have
something to turn the puff piece on Robert Graham into something juicy. But no matter how hard he listened, he couldn’t understand
a single word. Jake moved away from the door, turned, and was startled by someone at the other end of the hall.

“What are you doing?” the man asked.

F
LYNN, THE HOSPITAL’S lawyer, let his hands come to rest in his lap. His eyes glittered and his lips tugged ineffectively at
his smile. The judge turned his attention to Casey.

She took a deep breath and said, “I agree with Mr. Flynn completely on his findings in regards to New York State law, Your
Honor.”

Both men gave her affirmative nods, their faces grim.

“I’d like to ask the court to find some loophole here,” Casey said with a sigh, “to use its discretion and compassion to apply
some common sense to the fact that the privacy we’re talking about is for a woman who’s been dead for twenty years.”

“I don’t think that’s for you to say,” Flynn said, clearly affronted and looking at her over the rims of his glasses. “There’s
a family involved here, too.”

“I know,” Casey said, reaching into her briefcase, taking out the report Ralph had given her the night before, and holding
it up to emphasize her point. “While her father is dead, the victim has a mother in a nursing home in Oregon suffering from
advanced stages of Alzheimer’s. There’s a sister whose last known address, as of April 2006, was Sydney, Australia. That’s
her family. Those are the people whose privacy we’re trying to protect. I know because I took the time to try to find them,
hoping I could get their permission and save the court the trouble.”

The two men looked at each other, then at her.

“Given the mother’s state and the complexity of her own competence to sign a release and given the sister’s inaccessibility,”
Casey said, “a waiver isn’t possible. But given the same circumstances, I think it’s reasonable to suggest that neither one
would know or care about the privacy issue involved here.”

“The presumption—” Flynn began before Casey cut him off.

“I understand the presumption of privacy,” she said, “and I’m not going to ask for the court’s compassion or commonsense application.
The judge said he’d make his decision based on the law, and that’s the only standard. I agree.”

“Good,” the judge said, placing a hand flat on his desk and starting to rise.

“Because I’m not going to ask you to apply state law,” Casey said.

The judge froze, then lowered himself into his chair, narrowing his eyes at Casey.

“Fortunately,” Casey said, angling her nose at the brief she’d given the judge, “if you look at the second, third, and fourth
pages of my brief, you’ll see that I’m relying entirely on federal law to compel you to give me those samples.”

“This is a state court,” the judge said.

“But the court’s actions in this case—if you deny my request,” Casey said, trying not to sound too pleased with herself, “will
give me standing in the federal system based on the minority status of my client and the racial composition of the jury that
convicted him. If you take a look at
Ashland v. Curtiss
and maybe even more important,
Knickerbocker v. Pennsylvania
, you’ll see the authority is clear.”

“It’ll take years to fight that,” the judge said, smirking.

Casey nodded her head and sighed, “And I’ve got years. So does the Project. So does Dwayne Hubbard; he’s done twenty already.
In the meantime, given the current political sentiment of the American public, and given that you’ll be ripped up one side
and down the other in every newspaper and law journal across this country for the racism you’ll be accused of harboring from
your bench, I’m guessing your replacement will act quickly. You are up for election the year after next, right, Your Honor?
I thought that’s what they said at the Rotary lunch.”

Kollar bunched his hands into white-knuckled fists and his jaw tightened. When he spoke, his voice rumbled like low thunder.
“This is that TV guy, isn’t it?”

Casey shook her head. “I’m a lawyer, judge. I haven’t even figured the TV part of it into the equation. That’s a network decision,
but if they did, it would make it all the more interesting, wouldn’t it? Like cyanide? A bit of thrashing around?”

“If you think you can threaten me with politics,” Kollar said, hunching his wide shoulders and leaning forward, “you’re in
the wrong place, doll. And I’ve got a few contacts of my own. My wife’s brother is an editor at the
New York Post
.”

“So, I should file my complaint in the federal court?” Casey said, as pleasant as if they were playing a friendly game of
checkers.

She began to rise.

“You sit down,” Kollar said, stabbing a finger at her, keeping his voice soft. “I’ve heard what you both have to say and I
will look at your briefs and consider the validity of the arguments.”

Flynn’s smile faltered. “Judge. I thought we—”

“I will consider the
law
,” Kollar said, turning his finger on the hospital’s lawyer to silence him.

Casey studied them both, then smiled and asked, “Do you have an idea when you might be able to reach a decision, Your Honor?”

The judge’s lower lip disappeared beneath his upper teeth.

“Because I’d like to know tomorrow,” Casey said. “I think you’ll find the precedent is quite clear. I’d hate to have word
get out and someone cause a big stir and then you come to the right decision, anyway. Why go through that?”