Proof of Intent (20 page)

I shook my head.

“Beat a guy almost to death with a tree limb. The victim's been in a wheelchair ever since.”

“A tree limb?”

“Gets better.” Lisa raised her eyebrows suggestively. “There's one more conviction. Assaulting an officer. Guess where he served time?”

“Got me.”

“Yes, friends. Jackson State Penitentiary. Right here in the good old state of Michigan. Committed the crime over in Grand Rapids. Weapon of choice? Here's the beauty part . . . he beat his victim with the handle of a posthole digger.”

My eyes widened. “He really likes to swing a stick, doesn't he?”

“Yup. And guess when he got out?”

“Tell me.”

“Three months before the murder of Diana Dane.”

I leaned back in my chair. I wouldn't be surprised if my mouth was hanging open. “What did he change his name to?” I said finally.

She tossed her legal pad on my desk. In the middle, scrawled in Lisa's large, messy hand, was the name of Miles and Diana Dane's son.
Blair Dane
.

“Dane, huh?” I looked up and said, “So if we painted him as the real killer in trial, I guess he'd be hard-pressed to go with the Gee-I've-never-heard-of-Miles-and-Diana-Dane defense.”

Lisa smiled broadly.

“Well this is great work, kid,” I said. “This is terrific. Now all we need to do is find him.”

Lisa's face fell a little. “Yeah. Well, see, that's where I'm hitting a snag.”

It took her three more days, but eventually Lisa walked into my office with a grin on her face. “Success!”

As we drove out to the place where Lisa believed we'd find Blair Dane, I was comforted by the presence of my little Smith & Wesson.

It was an hour northwest of Pickeral Point, deep into farm country. We crested a low rise, and there in front of us, in the middle of a vast field, was a large, unpainted cinder-block building that looked something like a warehouse. From our view, it looked as though the building had no windows, and only one door.

“So this is, what, a cult kind of thing?” I said.

“Hard to say,” Lisa said. “They call themselves the Brothers of Christ, Reborn.”

In the field in front of the building a long row of men wearing shapeless brown clothes were bent over in a line, hoeing the hard, dark soil. If the men hadn't all been white, it could have been mistaken for South Carolina circa 1850, a gang of slaves chopping cotton.

I drove down the straight gravel road that bisected the field and rolled down my window when I came abreast of the line of men. “Excuse me,” I called. “Where can I find Blair Dane?”

The men kept breaking dirt clods with the hoes, ignoring me, not even looking up. There was something trancelike about their movements.

I called out again. One man looked up furtively, made a quick gesture toward the ugly concrete box of a building, then went back to his hoeing. “Nice folks,” I said to Lisa. “Very cheerful and welcoming. How much do you know about them?”

“Precious little. They're all men. Except the chief hon-cho. Her name is Sister Beatrice. She used to be a Catholic nun, but left the order after some kind of scandal that nobody seemed interested in talking about.”

I parked the car, and we got out and knocked on the door. Eventually it opened, and a young man wearing the same shapeless tan clothes as the men in the field looked out at us. On closer inspection, the clothes looked homemade—right down to the coarse homespun cloth. The young man had a very large necklace hanging on his chest—a cross made of welded horseshoe nails—and his feet were bare. He looked at us, but didn't speak.

“Good morning,” I said cheerfully. “My name is Charley Sloan, and this is my daughter Lisa. We're looking for Blair Dane.”

The young man still had the flat gaze of an inmate, the pale prison skin, the jailhouse muscles. “Wait here.” He closed the door.

We waited for about five minutes, then the door opened again. This time it was a different man. The second man wore the same necklace, the same homespun clothes—but on him they seemed to fit better, almost like a military uniform. He was about my age, late forties, with piercing blue eyes, gray hair, and a short gray beard. “My name is Jack. We've been expecting you,” he said, smiling pleasantly. His voice was gentle, but somehow commanding. He motioned us into an entry room lined with unpainted Sheet-rock.

“If you'd both take your shoes off, please, Sister Beatrice can spare ten minutes with you.”

“We're here to see Blair Dane,” I said.

“Yes. That's what Sister will talk to you about.”

“I want to talk to
Blair
.”

“Take your shoes off, please,” he said again. Friendly but firm.

When in Rome. We did as we were told, sliding our shoes into a large wooden rack full of identical work boots.

“This way,” he said, turning toward a staircase made of bare concrete block stairs that ran up the inside of the front wall. I can't say what it was, but there was something ominous about the place, as though we were entering a prison or a fortress. At the top of the stairs we turned and found ourselves in an open, barrackslike room with no ceiling, just open joists holding up a corrugated steel roof.

Along one wall was a long row of bunk beds, while along the other wall stood a row of crudely built plywood cubicles, each with a desk and a chair inside. The windowless room was very dimly lit by two rows of bare incandescent bulbs hanging from the joists. The bulk of the floor was covered by a large straw mat of the sort seen in Japanese houses. At the far end of the mat a small white-haired woman sat cross-legged, reading a book. We approached and she looked up.

“Thank you, Jack,” she said.

Jack walked back downstairs without another word.

“Please. Sit.” She gestured at the floor in front of her. She was a wrinkled, brown-skinned woman of somewhere between sixty-five and eighty. Either she had a lot of wrinkles for a sixty-five-year-old, or she exuded an awful lot of physical energy for an eighty-year-old. I couldn't quite tell which was the case. Her eyes were green and canny. She wore her glossy white hair in a bowl cut, and she was clothed in the same drab homespun as the others.

I grunted a little as I lowered myself to the floor.

“I find sitting on the floor to be excellent for the posture,” the old woman said, her tone chiding but jocular. “It keeps the joints limber, too. Even when you're an old crone like me.” She smiled almost imperceptibly. “So you're here about Miles Dane's son.”

My eyebrows went up.

“We may look like flaky religious nuts to you, Mr. Sloan, but that doesn't mean we don't read the newspaper.”

“I was surprised you knew that he was Miles Dane's son. How did you find out?”

“That's what he told me when he first came to live here.”

“Ah. Well, I appreciate your taking time away from your studies, but I won't take up another minute of your time if you could just point us to Blair. As I'm sure you heard, we're here to talk to him, not you.”

The sprightly little woman nodded. “Sure. Unfortunately, that won't be possible.”

“With all due respect, Sister,” I said, “that's not your decision to make.”

“True enough. I'm simply conveying Blair's wishes to you.”

“Where is he?” I said sharply.

“I'm afraid I'm one of these crazy old bags who doesn't intimidate easily.” Sister Beatrice laughed. “Let me tell you a little about this community. Back when I was still in the Church, I was involved in prison ministry. What I saw was lacking in the lives of most of the boys I met in prison was discipline. Oh, prison offers discipline, but it's a discipline based upon threat and punishment. What I recognized was that once these boys left prison, they needed a regime with the sort of austerity and lack of choice that is found in prison. But it had to be motivated by other means. Lacking the lash and steel bar here, we find our discipline in the teachings of Jesus Christ.” She held up her Bible. “The Gospels are a rather stringent and radical set of teachings, if one bothers to really read them. Here we
do
read them. And we act upon them.”

“That's fascinating.”

“Sarcasm will not help your cause here, Mr. Sloan. Please listen. You might learn something.” The little woman's smile faded for the first time. Her bright green eyes seemed quite cold once her teeth stopped showing. “To participate in this community is to renounce things. I understand you're an alcoholic, Mr. Sloan.”

“How did you find that out?”

“Pay attention please, Mr. Sloan. I already told you I read the newspapers. As a recovering alcoholic, you have made a choice to renounce certain temptations the world has to offer. I gather that you have the sort of personality which allows you to pull that off successfully. Most of these boys”—she waved at the long row of empty bunk beds—“do not. Their renunciation of the world requires a shepherd. I am that shepherd. I don't make choices for them, I simply provide a herd in which they can live, protected, in essence, from themselves.”

“You've protected Blair from himself?”

“Blair is not a fool. He has been a career criminal, but he was rather a good one. He has recognized these flaws in himself, and he's here to fix them. If he can't fix them, he'll stay here until he dies. If he does fix them, marvelous, then he will return to the world.”

“This is all laudable,” I said, “but I'm attempting to save an innocent man from false imprisonment. I believe Blair can help me achieve that.”

“No, Mr. Sloan. Let's not be naive. What you want is a sacrificial goat. You want to hand the jury a plausible alternative suspect. You want to drag him down. And I won't let you do that.”

“Ah. So now it's your choice, not his.”

“That's ultimately immaterial. If he goes back to the world, he'll lose his soul again, as sure as I'm sitting here.”

“I can subpoena him.”

The cool green eyes locked onto mine. “And I can hide him.”

“You'll go to prison if you do.”

This got me a big smile. “Look around you, Mr. Sloan. I live in a house made of bare cinder block. No windows, no doors, no TV, no family, no privacy, and precious little ventilation. I've lived here for thirteen years. Do you honestly think the idea of a few weeks in the poky frightens me?”

I had to admit, it probably didn't.

“That may be. But do you want to destroy all of this, Sister? All the good works you're doing here?” I made a wide sweep with my hand. “I
can
make that happen. If I have to.”

“I'm sure you're a good lawyer, but no you can't. This endeavor is bigger than me.”

Seeing I was making no progress, I decided to shift gears. “I'm sorry, Sister. I don't mean to be overbearing. I've got a lot of weight on my shoulders right now. If I'm barking up the wrong tree here, I'd like to know so I can move on to something else. Can you at least tell me your impressions of Blair?” I said. “What kind of guy is he?”

“He's like a lot of men here. Troubled. His upbringing was wretched and loveless. He doesn't trust easily. Like most criminals, he's overly impulsive. He's easy to anger. That's the bad part. But he's also very bright and very articulate. More self-aware than your run-of-the-mill thug. That's why he's here: He recognized, during his latest sojourn in the penal system, that the reason he had such a tough time was not that the world was unfair, but that he had a problem dealing with the world. He is determined to fix that problem. He has come to understand that only through work, discipline, renunciation of desire, and faith in Christ can he hope to become a happy and productive person.”

For the first time, Lisa spoke. “Let's put it out in the open then, Sister. Do you think he killed his mother?”

She shook her head. “Absolutely not.”

“We have very compelling evidence to indicate he was in the house the night of the murder.” This was a bit of a stretch, but I figured I'd see how she responded. “If he didn't do it, why not go to the police, explain his presence there, and tell what he saw?”

Sister Beatrice studied my daughter for a moment. “Let me put this in simple English: That's not going to happen.”

“Can I ask you one question?” Lisa said.

“What's that?”

“Does he own a black Lincoln, midsixties model?”

Sister Beatrice studied her for a while. “
I
drive an old Continental. I've loaned it to him on occasion.”

“The kind with the rear doors that open backward?”

“I think we've about clarified our positions here, hm?” Sister Beatrice looked back down at the book she'd been reading when we walked in, and her lips began to move.

“Sister . . .”

She didn't look up from the book.

I raised my voice. “Sister.”

She was still looking at the book as she said, “I know I'm being a pain-in-the-neck old religious crank, but if I look up again and you're still sitting there, I'm going to have some of my boys hustle you out. They don't get treats like that very often, and I'm afraid they're liable to make the most of it.”

We made fairly good time back to the car.

There is probably nothing grimmer or sadder than a jail on Christmas Eve. Every peeling gray-painted steel door, every rusting steel bar, every slipshod weld and deteriorating caulk joint, every crumbling slab of concrete amplifies the message of hopelessness and shame, the life-stops-here quality so central to what jail is all about. It is not just that a jail is a hard place to escape from, but that even barriers erected with such apparent disinterest and negligence are nevertheless so easily capable of hemming in a life. Jail says this: The wild freedom of the individual is nothing in the face of even the most careless and inefficient bureaucracy. In this place, you are a nullity: Get used to it.