Innocence (24 page)

“Shit, you’ve got a fingerprint match positively confirmed by our own expert, as well as an eyewitness identification, and you still can’t bring yourself to allow for the possibility that the man’s guilty. That’s fucked up.”

“Great. You’re going to throw the eyewitness identification at me now? They actually
have
done studies on the accuracy of eyewitness testimony. Do you know what they found? They found that people get it wrong much of the time. Even with a good, solid look at someone, people who ‘positively’ identify someone in a lineup are often wrong. Does it matter? No. You put a victim on the stand, or an eyewitness, and have him point at the defendant during a trial and say, ‘That’s him; that’s the man,’ and a jury buys it every single time.”

“I hear you, but what’s the alternative? You take away fingerprint analysis and eyewitness testimony, and how are you going to prosecute anybody? How are you going to prevent or punish crime at all?”

“Have you ever heard the expression that it’s better to let ten guilty men go free than put one innocent man in jail? That’s one of the fundamental principles our system was based on. That’s why we require guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

“Fine,” Kozlowski agreed. “Let ten guilty men go free to protect one innocent man. How about one hundred? Is it better that a hundred guilty bastards go free than one innocent man goes to jail? How about a thousand? Or ten thousand? How many killers and rapists and child molesters are you willing to let out on the streets to protect that one innocent man?”

“You’re taking it to its illogical extreme.”

“No, you are. You want to wipe away the basic tools that allow us to be reasonably sure that we’ve got the right guy.”

Finn pulled into the parking lot across the street from the station house for Division B-2, where the latent fingerprint unit was located. He whipped the car into a spot and turned off the engine. “I don’t know,” he said, unbuckling his seat belt. “What I do know is that someone tried to kill our client this morning. I know that the last lawyer who represented him was hacked to pieces. That says to me that something is very fucked up here, and it all comes back to the fingerprint evidence. I need to know that you’re on board with what we’re doing here.”

“I am. But you also need to know that things aren’t always the way they seem.”

Finn opened the door, and a blast of cold air filled the little car. “Trust me,” he said. “No one knows that better than I do.”

z

Lissa Krantz stood on the front porch of the small, neatly kept Cape where Juanita Sobol—formerly Sanchez—lived in West Roxbury. By all indications, it was a solid middle-class neighborhood where working families piled into minivans and cooked out on their barbecues during the summer.

Lissa rang the doorbell, checking her watch as she waited quietly. She should have called first, just to make sure Mrs. Sobol was there. She was going to be annoyed with herself if she’d wasted the trip. She was sure the woman was home, though—Dobson’s notes indicated that she was a stay-at-home mother, and the telltale three-year-old Grand Caravan was sitting in the driveway. Dobson’s notes also indicated that fifteen years earlier, when Sobol was still Sanchez, she was an illegal immigrant living a few blocks from the apartment Vincente Salazar had shared with his family. She was giving birth at the time Madeline Steele was shot, and according to what she had told Dobson, Salazar was there helping with the delivery. At the time of Vincente’s trial, she had been unwilling to come forward because of her fear that she would be deported, but now that she was married to a U.S. citizen, she had agreed to tell her story.

This was what Dobson had indicated in his notes, but it was now Lissa’s job to lock in the woman’s story and get her to sign an affidavit. Lissa looked at her watch again and rang the doorbell a second time. At last the door was unlocked from within and pulled open a crack. Lissa could see a sliver of a woman in her late thirties with straight black hair and nervous eyes.

“Yes?” the woman said. She had a heavy accent.

“Hi. My name is Lissa Krantz, and I’m looking for Juanita Sobol.”

Lissa’s friendly tone did nothing to chase the nervousness from the woman’s eyes. “I am Juanita,” she said.

“Great. I work with the attorney who represents Vincente Salazar, and I just wanted to go over your statement with you—get it all down on paper and have you sign it. Can I come in?”

“There’s been a mistake,” Juanita blurted out.

“A mistake?”

“Yes. I am sorry, I can’t help you.”

Lissa was stunned. “I don’t understand. How has there been a mistake?”

“There just has. I was wrong.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know whether I was with Mr. Salazar. I can’t help you.”

Lissa took out a copy of the affidavit she had drafted from Dobson’s notes. “But you spoke with Mark Dobson. Didn’t you tell him that Vincente Salazar was with you at the time the police officer was shot?” She waved the draft affidavit in front of the woman.

“I’m sorry,” Juanita said as she started to close the door, but Lissa stuck her foot in the way.

“They can’t deport you anymore,” Lissa said. “You’re an American citizen.”

Juanita shook her head. “I can’t be sure it was the same night,” she protested.

Lissa crossed her arms in front of her chest. “What’s your son’s birthday?”

“What?”

“I’m sure you know your son’s birthday, right? And Vincente Salazar was there to deliver your son? All we have to do is match up the dates.”

The woman’s look went from nervous to scared. “Leave, please,” she said.

“No.”

“I will call the police.”

“Why won’t you talk to me?”

“I have a family. I have a husband. I have children.”

Lissa took a step back and looked at the woman carefully. “Did someone threaten you? Did someone tell you to change your story?”

“I have a family,” Juanita repeated.

“I know. Including a son that Vincente Salazar delivered.”

She shook her head. “I am sorry, as I said. But I will call the police if you don’t leave.”

She closed the door, and Lissa was left standing on the front steps of the neat little Cape. “Fuck,” she said. She slapped the door once. “Vincente Salazar has a family, too, you know!” she yelled.

She waited another minute to see whether that fact might move Juanita Sobol to change her mind, but the door remained closed. At last she picked up her bag and walked back to her car.

z

B-2 was an old cement structure built in the 1950s, with all the postmodern utilitarian warmth of the period’s architecture. As cold as the December winds were, Finn didn’t really feel the chill that morning until he stood outside the police station.

“Charming,” he commented.

“Yeah,” Kozlowski replied. “It’s worse on the inside.”

They walked into the station house, and Kozlowski headed straight for the front desk. The man behind the desk was a roly-poly specimen in his fifties with huge jowls and a double chin that looked like it was competing for goiter status. “Koz,” the man greeted him genially. “They didn’t let your sorry ass back on the force, did they?”

“No such luck for you, Sarge,” Kozlowski replied. “They figure they got to give the bad guys a fighting chance, I guess.”

“Good to see you. How’s everything going?” The man held out a flabby hand, and Kozlowski shook it.

“Good. How’s everything here?”

The sergeant shrugged. “You know, same shit, different decade. It never really changes; we just keep fighting the tide. What brings you down?”

Kozlowski nodded toward Finn. “This is Finn, a guy I work with. We need to talk to Eddie Fornier, down in the fingerprint unit.”

The desk sergeant’s face darkened. “’Bout what?”

“Nothing serious,” Kozlowski replied. “Just an old case. We need some details.”

The frown hung in on the man’s face. “Okay,” he said skeptically. He looked over the roster behind the desk. “He’s downstairs. Checked in an hour ago or so.”

Kozlowski looked at his watch. “It’s almost noon. They pulling night shifts down there these days?”

The sergeant shook his head. “That’s just Fornier. Always has been.” Finn had the distinct impression that the man would have said much more had he been alone with Kozlowski. Finn made a mental note to have Kozlowski follow up with him later to get the whole story. “You know where the unit is, right?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Kozlowski replied. He shook the sergeant’s hand again and turned to head through a door toward the back of the lobby.

Finn followed Kozlowski down the hallway to a steel door, saying nothing. As Kozlowski pulled the door open, Finn was assaulted by a wave of warm, humid, putrid air.

“What the fuck is that stench?” he asked.

“Mold, for the most part. That and car exhaust. The motor pool is attached to the fingerprint lab, and they have to keep the door open to get any circulation.”

They walked down the concrete steps, along another corridor, to a dark door with white stenciling that read latent fingerprint unit, chipping at the edges. Kozlowski pulled the door open, and the two of them stepped inside.

It took a moment for Finn’s eyes to adjust. The jaundiced fluorescent lights pulsated, giving the small room a strangely cinematic quality that made it difficult to focus. There were no windows, and the aging ventilation system delivered a steady stream of mildewed air that choked his nostrils. Finn wondered what manner of sins an officer had to commit to be sentenced to this dungeon.

A young woman was sitting at a desk near the door, hunched over a stack of greasy, inky fingerprint reports, moving a magnifying glass back and forth from sheet to sheet with passionless assembly-line efficiency. She looked up at her visitors. “Can I help you?” she asked. She was dressed in a gray pantsuit, her jacket slung over the back of the chair to reveal a white cotton dress shirt that flickered yellow under the fluorescents.

“We’re looking for Fornier,” Kozlowski said in a neutral tone.

“In the back,” she replied. She turned back to her task.

She reminded Finn of an automaton from some Orwellian nightmare. “Thanks,” he said. She didn’t acknowledge him.

The room was partitioned into four separate areas by large gray dividers. Finn noticed that the fabric was stained and fraying and falling off in numerous spots. As they moved back, deeper into the space, Finn saw a half-eaten meatball sandwich sitting deserted on a desk. Two flies jousted above it.

They passed into the back area and found a diminutive man in his late forties sitting with his feet up on his desk, staring at the ceiling with a vacant expression. A can of Coca-Cola was wedged into his crotch.

“Fornier?” Kozlowski asked him.

It took a moment for the man to react, and Finn wondered briefly whether he was dead. Then he spoke. “Who wants to know?”

“Officer Fornier, we have a few questions to ask you about a case you worked on awhile back,” Finn said.

Fornier pulled his legs off the desk, and the shift in his balance pulled his body forward, snapping his head upright. He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose between a thumb and forefinger, then rubbed his eyeballs as though attempting to focus. “Why?” he asked.

Kozlowski opened his wallet and displayed the card identifying him as a former police detective. “It’s just routine,” he said. He sounded like he was still a cop.

Fornier crossed his arms. “Fine. Ask away.”

“Do you remember the Vincente Salazar case?” Finn asked.

Fornier’s posture stiffened. “No.”

“Your testimony put him away,” Finn said.

“My testimony has put away a lot of scumbags,” Fornier retorted. “I can’t be expected to remember every one of them.” His eyes were lined in red, and what little was left of the whites shone a sickly yellow-gray, but he seemed determined to hold his own.

“We have reason to believe the testimony you gave in this particular case was wrong,” Finn said, instilling his tone with confidence. “Are you going to talk to us, or are we going to have to get a subpoena and do this under oath?”

“Who the fuck are you?”

“I’m Mr. Salazar’s lawyer, and I can assure you that we’re going to have this conversation one way or another.”

Fornier’s resolve seemed to slacken. “It was a long time ago,” he said. “What the fuck do you want to know?”

Finn glared at him. “I thought you said you didn’t remember the case. Now you know it was a long time ago?”

“Fuck you. He shot a cop. I do maybe twenty cases a week, but I remember the ones who shoot cops.”

“So, you want to tell us about the prints?” There was a threat in Finn’s tone, though he had nothing to back it up with.

Fornier studied Finn closely, sizing him up. Finally, he said, “Fuck you. You’ve got shit. I can see it in your eyes. I did my job.”

“What I’ve got,” Finn said, “are the results of a DNA test that show Salazar didn’t do it. He’s innocent. You talk to us, and maybe you can get out ahead of this thing before it ruins your career.”

Fornier sneered. “Bullshit. If you had DNA tests that backed you up, you wouldn’t be wasting your time here. Besides, even if you did have test results, you think I give a shit? Check the prints yourself. They match, so you can get the fuck out of my face. Besides, the cop he shot identified him, right?”

“Are you saying you were told about the ID before you ran the prints?” Finn pushed.

“What I’m saying is that I’m done talking to you.” Fornier stood up and started walking around his desk to get out. Kozlowski took two quick strides and stood in front of him, trapping him behind the desk. The size differential between the two men was comical, but Fornier wasn’t backing off.

“Careful, big boy,” he said. “You’re in a police station now, and the word ‘retired’ is printed in big bright letters across that fucking ID you showed me. You want a world full of trouble, you just keep standing there.”

Kozlowski leaned in close to the man, meeting him eye to eye. Then he closed his eyes and gave a sniff. “I smell fear,” he said, opening his eyes again.

Fornier shoved the bigger man in the chest. Kozlowski didn’t move, and Fornier managed only to push himself back farther behind the desk. “Motherfucker,” Fornier said. “You got any issues, you take them upstairs. Like I said, I’m done talking. Now back off and let me out, or I swear I’ll call the desk sergeant and he’ll have a SWAT team down here in a matter of seconds.”