Trace Of Innocence

“A nun who follows football?” Lewis cocked an eyebrow.

She laughed and continued. “I promised to try to get him an autograph or a letter of encouragement. I’m sure Joe thought I was crazy, but I tracked him down. I hadn’t realized he had gone into law. I told him about Thomas, and one thing led to another and Joe took his case pro bono and won an appeal. Thomas is now the file clerk for Joe’s firm. Has a new baby daughter and a pretty young wife who’s a paralegal.”

“A happy ending,” I said dryly. C.C. nodded. “But for every happy ending, there’s an innocent man languishing. More like ten innocent men. If they’re of color or they’re Hispanic or foreign-born, the number rises.”

A waitress came over and Joe ordered a pitcher of margaritas and a basket of chips with salsa.

“No offense, Sister,” I began. “But we just process the evidence. It’s not for us to determine if some guy is guilty or innocent.”

“Please call me C.C.” she said. I wanted to dislike her because she gave off an aura of such kindness my instinct was to think she was a fake, but I couldn’t make myself. She just seemed that nice.

The waitress returned with a pitcher, four glasses and a basket filled with freshly warmed tortilla chips.

“Look,” Joe said, leaning on the table with both elbows. “Walter Leighton used to advise us. But now that he’s a super celebrity, he’s forgotten us. We need you two to help us look at cases to see if there’s even the possibility that new evidence might reverse a conviction or win a new trial.”

“I always knew that Walter’s swelled head would get the best of him,” Lewis said.

Walter Leighton had written the forensic bible. When he consulted on a couple of really huge cases, his face time on Court TV, Dateline, Primetime Live and the Today Show increased until he was pretty much a household name and a celebrity. Then he had a ghostwriter pen two novels about a forensics investigative team and a police detective, sold about a million copies of each, and now he was famous and rich. Lewis hated the sight of Walter. I used to think it was professional jealousy. After I got to know Lewis better, I realized he saw the arrogance in Walter. It would be just like that guy to abandon the Justice Foundation. If Walter had walked away from C.C. and Joe, I knew just what Lewis was going to say before he even said it.

“We’ll be happy to offer our professional opinions where we can,” he said.

We. I’d gotten used to that, too. It was as if he thought of us as one person in that lab.

C.C. took out a folder from her briefcase. Her eyes were moist when she looked at us. “You have no idea how grateful we are.” She absentmindedly patted Joe’s forearm. “This work…it’s our lives.”

She slid the folder across the table.

Staring up at me from the mug shot was a man who made me blink slowly several times. He was beautiful. But beyond that, his eyes were soulful. Large and dark. He had a small scar on his left cheek, right near the corner of his eye, which brought my gaze to rest right at his pupils. His eyelashes were dark and made his eyes appear almost angelic. His hair was black and thick, with curl at the ends. He held up his processing number, and he looked stunned.

“What’s pretty boy’s story?” Lewis asked.

“David Falco is serving life for a rape-murder. The suicide king case,” C.C. replied.

“I don’t remember that one,” I said.

“About ten years ago. A woman murdered in her apartment. She was an acquaintance of his. She was splayed out, and the suicide king from a deck of playing cards—you know, the one with the knife through the head—was left by her side. A knife had been plunged into her temple.”

“Oh yeah.” I nodded. “Now I remember.” I had learned not to shudder anymore. Too many depraved cases.

“Evidence tying him to the murder?” I asked. For reasons I couldn’t explain, I had a knot in my belly, as if I wanted to believe that the man whose face was so innocent-looking had to be, in fact, innocent.

“Not much. He admitted he had been in her apartment, so his fingerprints were there, but no fingerprint on the knife or the playing card. He was seen leaving her apartment in the window of time when she was likely murdered—but so was another man who was never found or questioned. David said the three of them had been hanging out together.”

“So who was the other man?”

“He doesn’t know. Said it was a friend of hers. But he never got the guy’s name.”

“Sounds fishy,” Lewis said.

“I know,” said C.C., “but there was possibly semen on her panties—panties lost by the police. The case was botched from the word go. And I don’t know…he just doesn’t give off a dangerous vibe.”

“None of them do,” Lewis said, pouring himself another margarita.

“That’s not so. Even men who are innocent, after a time in prison, they start to smell of violence. They give off that feeling. But not him.”

“So where do we come in?” I asked, still fascinated by the picture.

“Well, the panties surfaced after the trial in a paper bag in another evidence file. They were well preserved and I figure we have one shot at testing what may or may not be semen. I mean, we think it is. And we just need a break on this one.”

I sipped my margarita and stared down at the picture. I wondered what the years in prison had done to that innocent-looking face.

Chapter 3

I drove a drunken Lewis home. He was a goner, and I don’t mean just drunk—though he was that, too.

“Isn’t she amazing?”

“Who?”

“Don’t give me that—C.C.” He pressed the electric button to move his seat way back in the car so he could stretch his legs.

I tried to avoid swerving off the road. “You can’t be serious.”

“What? You don’t think she’s beautiful?”

“Yes, I think she’s stunning. She’s also an N-U-N. Lewis…she’s not available.”

“I know.” He smacked his forehead with his hand. “My luck I finally meet a woman besides you that I’m interested in and she’s a nun. A beautiful nun, not one with a hairy mole on her chin.”

“I’m not even going to ask why that would be your impression of nuns, because I’m sure there’s some demented Lewis LeBarge story having to do with a decrepit old nun and I’m not in the mood.”

“It’s a good story.”

“Save it,” I snapped. “Lewis, be straight with me. Is the reason we’re doing this consulting work revenge against Walter Leighton or is it because you’ve got a crush on a nun?”

“A combination.”

“But it really has nothing to do with wanting to see justice served.”

“Not really, no.”

“You drive me nuts.”

“I know. Listen, do you recall whether the lid was closed on Ripper’s tank?”

About once a week, Lewis lost his tarantula.

“I think it was closed.”

I eased my car into a space on the street.

“You want to crash here tonight?” Lewis asked, looking at me.

“As long as Ripper is in his tank, yeah.”

We climbed out of the car and went into Lewis’s house. I was tired, but I was still thinking about the whole crazy night. Lewis gave me a drunken hug, which for him also usually means planting a very loud kiss on my cheek—an exaggerated form of affection.

“There’s pork rinds and Slim Jims if you’re hungry, and your usual in the fridge.”

“I’ll pass on the snacks, but I think I’ll have a Dr. Brown’s.”

I had long ago developed an addiction for Dr. Brown’s Black Cherry soda—not always easy to find. The addiction was nurtured by my father, who used to take me and my brother to every diner between Rahway Correctional, where we visited my uncles, and home in Montclair, New Jersey, as well as every town we ever visited that had a diner, for that matter. Lewis always kept a supply of black cherry soda on hand, along with his sickening snack choices.

I heard Lewis climb up his stairs, and then I heard first one boot, then the other hit the floor as he pulled them off. I wandered into the kitchen and pulled a Dr. Brown’s out of the refrigerator. I walked back into the living room. A soft chenille blanket was draped over the back of the very comfortable leather couch. I settled a pillow on the arm of the couch and took the remote and clicked on to Comedy Central. Part of me wanted to laugh. I popped the top on my soda and started drinking. It hit the spot, but then, like the soda often did, it made me start thinking about my father, my brother, my mother and me. It was entwined with my memories of childhood. And then, inevitably, I thought of the night she disappeared.

The lights of a cop cruiser reflected through the window and onto the walls of my bedroom. Red pulsated and filled my room. I rubbed my eyes and sat up as a police officer entered my room, the beam from his flashlight hitting my face. The cop lowered the flashlight immediately.

“Hey, sweetie,” he soothed. “You okay?”

I nodded sleepily.

“Okay, then. You go back to sleep, honey.”

“Is Mommy okay?”

“Why?”

“I heard them arguing.”

“Who?”

I shrugged.

The cop came closer to me. “Think, honey. Can you remember what they said?”

I shook my head. “Where’s Mikey?”

“Your brother?”

I nodded.

“He’s downstairs with Officer Martin. You want to come down there?”

I nodded, and my teeth started chattering. Something was wrong, and I had no idea what. The cop came to my bed, and I saw the shadow of pity cross his face, a shadow I have learned to recognize many times since then. He scooped me into his arms and carried me down in my nightgown to the kitchen where my brother, Mikey, sat eating cookies with Officer Martin. They were dunking Keebler chocolate chip cookies into milk, and Mikey was talking a mile a minute.

I looked around the kitchen, teeth still chattering, and was handed a glass of Dr. Brown’s Black Cherry soda in a highball glass with ice cubes. The officers asked me questions that I no longer remember. All I do remember is the look on my father’s face when he got home that night.

She would never have left them alone, he screamed. He shouted what I already knew. In the instant I saw the red lights reflecting on my bedroom walls, in the moments of sipping Dr. Brown’s, the bubbles tingling my nose, I knew. Whereas Mikey always had about him the belief that the world was a safe place, I knew differently.

Like Ripper on the prowl, even as a little kid I knew that sometimes bad things escaped from their hiding places.

Chapter 4

I spent that Monday at work testing a shipment of heroin to determine its purity level. Lewis called me into his office at around four.

“Here’s the file on the suicide king case. We’re supposed to look for something, anything, missed, in terms of DNA evidence.”

“You looked at the file?”

He nodded.

“And?”

“And there was a tiny bit of what could be sperm on the panties. Too small to have been tested that many years ago.”

“Anything else?”

“Well,” he drawled. “I’m no lawyer.”

I howled with laughter. Lewis’s IQ hovered near 170, which I only found out one night over many shots of tequila and a poker game with my father, brother, uncle and Lewis. As I recall, I lost a bundle—and Lewis lost more. When Lewis lost even his watch that night, he bemoaned a man of his IQ being at the mercy of Lady Luck—and the Quinns. And he accidentally cited his IQ score. Like most geniuses, he could be prickly. And like most geniuses, he knew better than anyone else. And that included attorneys.

“And?”

“And the man had completely incompetent counsel, Billie. Guess who his court-appointed lawyer was?”

“Don’t tell me….”

Lewis nodded. “Cop-a-plea.”

Lewis and I may have been scientists residing in a world of DNA. However, we got to know the different cops and attorneys and prosecutors on the basis of their reputations. Cop-a-plea Fred? He had the worst rep of all. He had a serious comb-over, wore sweat-stained polyester suits, and bottles rattled around inside his briefcase.

“If Cop-a-plea was his court-appointed attorney, he didn’t stand a chance in hell. Fred doesn’t care about guilt or innocence, just avoiding actually showing up for a trial.”

Lewis nodded. “This case is a textbook example of how to send an innocent man to prison for the rest of his life.”

“So now what?”

“Now we test the tiniest of specks, evidence that was unable to be tested before. With the newer tests, I’m pretty sure if it’s not too degraded, we can get results. Most of this guy’s chances are pinned on that…we have to hope it’s not so degraded as to be useless.”

“Lewis?”

“Hmm?”

“You read the file, do you think he’s innocent? Or are you still just doing this because you have a crush on the ultimate unattainable woman?”

Lewis didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he swept a hand at his “wall art.” His office also had crime-scene pictures, as well as some scientific prints of cells and blood under microscopes. “You know, it would be real easy, as a man of science, to remain forever detached from what it is we’re actually doing. Over here—” his hand gestured to a crime scene with a body lying under a sheet “—we have the worst of what man can do. And over here—” he swept his hand to a cell photo that had been taken with an infrared camera “—we have cells, DNA and what they tell us. And never the twain shall meet. I mean, that’s how it can be. We just remain in this world—the lab. We can be lab rats. But sometimes, maybe, we have to emerge and go into the other world…. Yes, it’s very possible he’s innocent, Billie. And maybe it bothers me. And if I can do something about that, then I suppose I should.”

“Dear God, does this mean you’re getting a conscience?”

“Don’t let it get out.”

I knew, of course, that when the bayous of Louisiana released a floater who was once his childhood love he had had a determination to do right, using science. But I also knew he and I were both guilty of keeping our universe microscopic and not seeing the bigger picture. Maybe life was easier that way.

“Billie?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you think, if we do this, we’ll be doing God’s work?”

“I thought you didn’t believe in God.”

“I don’t, but I thought…I don’t know. Do you think we’d be doing God’s work?”

“God and I are distant friends, Lewis. But yeah, maybe.” I took the case file and turned to leave his office, and over my shoulder, I said, “She really got to you, didn’t she?”

He didn’t say anything, but Lewis LeBarge, the most rascally man I knew, definitely was doing some thinking.

My desk was piled three inches high with papers and files, and I sighed and looked at my watch. I’d be leaving after dark. The end of daylight saving time the previous weekend guaranteed that. I opened the Justice Foundation’s case file and began poring over every detail. Police reports, evidence analysis, witness interviews. My heart raced a bit. I had to admit, like Lewis, that there was definitely something about piecing together a puzzle that was exciting.

Cammie Whitaker was the suicide king’s victim—his only victim.

I took out a pad and pen and started writing questions as they came to me.

Why the suicide king playing card?

Suicide?

King = Power?

Cammie Whitaker was a beautiful redhead, a former college cheerleader for St. John’s with blue eyes and pale, freckled skin. In her college yearbook photo there was an aloofness, something unknowable to her as she stared at the camera. In the crime-scene photos, her blue eyes stared upward, and a knife was plunged into her temple. Her body was perfectly arranged, and there were thumb-prints and finger marks in mottled red-purple around her neck. She had been strangled, as well. Everything else about her, though, was serene. Her nightgown was beautifully splayed out just so, as if, when the detectives walked in, she had simply been sleeping.

Her apartment was in Ft. Lee, a town that faced Manhattan and was an easy commute from Jersey. Rents weren’t cheap—and her apartment reflected that. The place was stunning. The furniture was all French country, tasteful. If they weren’t actual antiques, they looked like pretty good reproductions. She was twenty-three. Pretty expensive stuff for someone that young.

Old money?

I looked through the file folder. Occupation…bartender. That place would need a hell of a lot of tips, but then again, I tended bar at Quinn’s Pub every once in a while when they were short a bartender on a shift, or to cover for my cousins when they took vacation. I never ceased to be amazed at how much cash I took home.

I read interview after interview, some of them new ones done by Joe Franklin or C.C., about David Falco. Each one focused on how gentle he was, how he always took care of his neighbors—the kind of guy who, when it snowed, shoveled the walkways of the elderly woman next door as well as his own, throwing down rock salt and making sure there was no remaining ice that could cause her to fall. It was hard to reconcile that image with the one of Cammie, knife plunged in her head. Then again, my uncle Sean could regale a roomful of nieces and nephews with stories and amateur magic tricks, help us catch fireflies and give me a quarter for every A on my report card—and then go out and shoot a man in the head. I knew about men who could compartmentalize their family lives with their mob lives, keeping them separate.

I looked at photo after photo of David Falco, from his trial, his mug shot, family photos of him as a boy, as a teen. He was sent away when he was twenty-two. He had worked as a stonemason, and on the side he did restoration projects. He was apparently a very talented painter. Rough childhood, from the wrong side of the tracks, but he had made something of himself. Until he met Cammie Whitaker.

Lewis dropped by my desk. “Want to get a bite?”

“Nah,” I said. “I want to go home and put on my pj’s. I’m really beat. What time is it?”

“Seven-thirty.”

“Ugh. Yet another twelve-hour day. How is it that you manage to work me like this?”

“You’re in love with me.” He winked at me.

“Uh-huh. Yeah, that’s it…. Go on home, Lewis. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“See you, Billie.”

After Lewis left, I shoved the Falco file into my briefcase and grabbed the keys to my monstrosity of a souped-up Cadillac. I headed to the parking garage. My heels echoed on the cement. A few pipes overhead dripped dirty water.

My Cadillac was easy to spot. It even had a little orange pom-pom attached to the antenna that I kept forgetting to take off. I walked to it and inserted my key into the lock when I heard the unmistakable sound of a clip being inserted into a gun. I froze, my back to whoever had the gun.

“Turn around real slow, Billie Quinn.”

Ordinarily, it really pisses me off when someone tells me what to do. However, a gun changes things in direct proportion to how likely it is I think the person might use it.

I turned around very slowly, my arms in the air. Whoever it was knew my name, so it wasn’t a random mugging. When I finished turning around, I recognized the twin brother of Cammie Whitaker. I couldn’t remember his first name. He had sat front and center at the trial and was in photo after photo. And he was the last person I wanted to see with a gun.

I nodded. “Hello,” I said softly, cautiously.

His eyes were bloodshot, and I thought I smelled scotch. “You’re a whore. You know that? You’re a fucking whore.”

I inhaled and tried to exude calm. “I’m sorry…” I struggled to recall his name. Harry. That was it. “I’m sorry, Harry.”

“You’re not.” He started to cry, and the gun shook in his hand. “You’re not sorry. You’re working to free that freak from prison.”

“How would you know that?”

“Those Justice Foundation people have been snooping around. I followed them. And now they’ve got you and that LeBarge guy on the case. Well, I’m telling you to drop it.”

“Look, Harry… I can understand your pain—”

“You can’t understand anything about that!” he snarled at me. He was a good-looking guy, but I could see the toll grief had taken on him. Whereas Cammie was forever twenty-three in death, Harry had grown older, and living without his murdered sister, coupled with, I guessed, alcohol, left wrinkles crisscrossing his face. His cheeks were mottled. His eyes empty.

“I can. My mother was murdered. And putting the wrong guy away for it isn’t the way to peace, Harry.”

“He’s the right guy. The jury found him guilty in under three hours.”

In my mind, I thought that was more a testament to his incompetent counsel than guilt or innocence, but I didn’t say that to Harry.

“He may very well be the right guy—and science doesn’t lie, Harry. People do. So if he’s the right guy, the tests I run will tell us that.”

Part of me understood Harry’s reaction. Cammie’s family, poor Harry here, had to live with the fact that if the cops had caught and maybe sent away the wrong man, then the real guy was out there—somewhere. If that proved true, who did they have to hate, to be angry with? If Falco was innocent, then they needed someone new to despise. That left the Justice Foundation. And now, thanks to Lewis’s ego and his fascination with C.C., that left me.

“Harry…I don’t know who did it. I just know that I want the truth.”

“You see him?” His eyes were deranged. “You see him on TV? He never said anything. So quiet. Maybe a friend of his did it, and he stood around and watched. I get the feeling he’d like that.”

Harry, his hair prematurely gray from the stress of his loss, his eyes sunken, started sobbing. I moved a step closer to him, and he cocked the gun and steadied it at me.

“No…no, you’re a bitch. You don’t care that my sister was murdered. That someone raped her. You don’t give a shit about anything but proving your case. Being famous. You and those Justice Foundation friends of yours. You’re all going to rot in hell.”

“Look, Harry…put the gun down. You want to murder me? Will that bring back Cammie? Will imprisoning the wrong guy bring her back? Leaving him there won’t bring you peace, Harry. It won’t take away that gnawing panic inside.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s not bullshit, Harry. I know better than anyone that peace is elusive. And revenge isn’t as sweet as people say it is.”

Harry, his face ruddy from crying, rubbed at his nose. “Just leave the case alone.”

Harry shook his head and then took his free hand—the one not holding the gun—and covered his eyes. And that’s when I knew I had to move. I just didn’t like the idea of my life being held in the balance by a man who was probably three sheets to the wind and grief stricken. So while Harry was distracted, I swiftly took my right hand and grabbed his, the one holding the gun. I took the palm of my other hand and smashed it against his neck, and then twisted his gun hand and forced him to drop the gun with a clatter to the cement floor of the garage.

Harry started to bend over to retrieve his weapon, and I kicked it under my car and then elbowed him with all my might in his ribs. My dad, when I became a teenager, insisted that I take a self-defense course. It was always there, unspoken between us, that what had happened to her could happen to me. I actually had a carry-and-conceal permit and could fire nearly as well as anyone I’d ever met at the firing range. The self-defense course, well…you can never replicate what happens when you really confront an assailant. But according to my instructor, Mr. Ichita, my elbow-to-rib move could snap a rib. Harry doubled over with a gasp. Perhaps Mr. Ichita had been right. Harry was trying to inhale, and I guessed the little popping sound I’d heard was bone breaking. I brought my fist down on top of his head and then backed up three paces and took a running dive under my car, retrieved the gun and commando-crawled to the other side of the car, rolled out from under it and trained the gun on poor, bereaved—and fucked-up—Harry.