Andrew Klavan - True Crime

But I did. I knew. It was him. It was the shooter.

Warren Russel. 17-yrs. 4331 Knight Street. Intvwd July 7th at own request. Drove to Pocum’s lot for soda as NL left. Saw nothing .

For seconds, I just knelt there, the notebook clutched in my hand, the sweat from my fingers making the ink at the page ends run.

Michelle, god damn it , I thought. You idiot. You dumb, dumb broad. You would’ve been so good. You would’ve been one of the best .

Then I read the scribbled note again. Warren Russel. Seventeen. That was him, all right. It had to be. No one else was there. If Frank Beachum was innocent, then Russel must have come in after he left and pulled the trigger. I gazed at the name on the page as the writing blurred. Warren Russel, I thought. Warren Russel. I’d found him. I’d found the bastard who gunned Amy Wilson down.

I drew in a deep breath, trying to calm myself. The air was full of dust. I could feel it coating my windpipe. I tried to think clearly. Knight Street, I thought. Knight Street. Up near Olivette. I could be there in fifteen minutes, twenty tops.

I slowly lowered my hand. My eyes roved the room aimlessly until they came to Mr. Ziegler. He was slumped once again there on the edge of the bed, his head drooping, his shoulders hunched, his hands clasped between his thighs. His mouth was moving, silently. He was talking to himself. I stared at him without really seeing him.

And then what? I thought. Once I got to Knight Street. What would I do then?

There was no question in my mind of calling in the police. I had a few friends on the force, but they weren’t going to lose their jobs for me. They wouldn’t move on something like this without the say-so of the CA. But to go there alone, confront this guy, a gunman, a killer, alone. What would I do? Wag my finger at him and say, “Come on now, boy-o, fair is fair.” On top of which, the address was six years old. How many seventeen-year-old kids stay at one address for six years?

I worked my way to my feet, the notebook still clutched tightly in my hand. No matter, I decided. No matter what, I would have to try. What else was there for me to do? I would have to go out there and hope he was still around, and hope he wouldn’t shoot me, and hope he would confess. Or something.

It was after seven-thirty. I only had four and a half hours left. It didn’t leave me a lot of time to get creative. I would have to try.

“I found it,” I said, but the words hardly came out, hardly made a sound.

Still, Mr. Ziegler lifted his head. “Is that so much to ask?” he said, continuing his silent conversation out loud. “With all their fancy education, all their gadgets. Fancy medical big shots. Just one minute they could make her hear me. So I could tell her.”

I removed my glasses for a second and massaged my temples with my hand. I was getting a headache now too. “I have to go,” I said.

The energy just went out of him. His head dropped back down.

I walked to the door, pausing, bending to scoop up my tire iron as I went. I straightened then, half turned toward the bed, toward the old man. I couldn’t think what to say. I gestured with the notebook.

“I found what I needed,” I told him. He didn’t answer. “I knew she’d have it. She would’ve been a great reporter one day, she …” My voice trailed off. I stood there uselessly. I lifted my eyes to the ceiling, the cracked, filthy plaster. Jesus , I thought. And I thought of Luther Plunkitt. In the parking lot outside the prison. With that smile stuck on his face, with that terrible knowledge buried in his eyes. Nobody ever really knows what’s right, but somebody always has to press the button. That’s the way of it.

“I think she would understand, Mr. Ziegler,” I said finally. The words tasted like ashes in my mouth-how did I know whether she would? — but it was all I could come up with for him. “I think she would understand.”

The old man just let his breath out with a harsh pah . “So angry,” he murmured to the floor. “Things happen in this life. We can’t control everything, Michelle.”

I started to speak again, but I don’t think he was listening anymore. So I said nothing and, after another moment, I left.

Suddenly, the Death House was full of life. Men hurried up and down the halls outside the prisoner’s cell. They walked in and out of the execution chamber. The chamber-where the gurney stood-was crowded with men. So was the storage room adjoining. In the storage room, Arnold McCardle-who could crowd a room single-handed-was testing the phones. There were four of them on a shelf against the room’s back wall. Each was a different color and each had a Dyma-tape label stuck to its base. The red phone was an outside line, the white phone went to the Corrections Department and the tan phone went to the communications room. The black phone was the open line to the governor’s office. At the end of the shelf was an intercom that would connect to a radio set in the death chamber.

Arnold briskly lifted the handset of each phone, puffing his fat cheeks as if playing a tuba and whispering a little tuba tune as well. The usual sparkle of humor was gone from his eyes, however. They were focused and clear, all his attention on the task at hand. He spoke into each phone for a few moments, checking the line, then hung up and moved on to the next.

Behind him, Reuben Skycock was at the delivery module of the lethal injection machine: a metal cabinet on the supply room wall. The door to the cabinet was open exposing the three syringes inside. Each syringe was wedged into a metal holder, each fed down into a tube that ran through a hole in the cinderblock wall and into the execution chamber. Reuben was testing the manual delivery system now: the third backup system in case both the electrical delivery and battery backup went down. That had never happened at Osage but Reuben went about his job with silent intensity nonetheless. He pulled out the metal pins that held the plungers in place. He glanced from the machine to a stopwatch as the plungers sank slowly into the syringes. Each time he pulled the metal pin, there was a loud sound: chunk . Each time the chunk came, Arnold glanced back at Reuben over his shoulder, holding a handset to his ear, puffing out a tuba tune on his fat cheeks.

Pat Flaherty was next to Reuben, standing at the one-way window. He was squirting Windex on the glass and wiping it off with a paper towel. He’d done that yesterday too. The glass was spotless and so was the mirror on the other side.

You could see clearly through the glass into the execution chamber. There, two members of the Strap-down Team were refastening the straps on the gurney. To their right, was the window of the witness room. The blinds here had been temporarily lifted and two other guards could be seen through it. They were setting out the plastic benches where the witnesses would sit. Two benches went on the floor just in front of the window, the other two went behind these on a raised wooden platform.

In front of the gurney, Luther Plunkitt was talking to Haggerty, who would be stationed outside the chamber door. Luther was gesturing calmly with one hand, keeping the other in his pocket. He was smiling blandly. “You want to double-check personally at the door,” he was saying. “Make sure the covering sheet is in place before he comes into the room so the witnesses won’t have to see the straps.” Luther’s eyes were marbly and expressionless. He was thinking about Frank Beachum, imagining his face looking up as he was strapped down onto the gurney. Innocent , he was thinking.