David Ellis - The Wrong Man

“Maybe checking the merchandise. Making sure the weapons work okay.”

She looked at me. “Is that what you really think?”

I was trying to downplay what I’d just seen. But it wasn’t going to work. Tori saw it for what it was.

“No,” I admitted. “It looks like they’re training for something.”

Randall Manning and Bruce McCabe walked along the floor of the domed building. Everything had been restored to normal, the shell casings picked up, the farm machinery returned to its rightful place. The men were finishing up their shooting practice outside.

Manning had considered having the target practice inside to maintain cover, but decided against it. The operation would take place outside, and he wanted the men accustomed to the elements. If it was sunny, he wanted them used to shooting with the sun in their eyes. If it was raining, they had to be prepared for that. Today the sky was clear and the sunlight was strong. Three weeks ago, they’d practiced in wind and snow.

Everyone had eaten. It had been a full Thanksgiving feast that Manning had catered in. Like Manning himself, none of these men had anyplace else to be. None of them had family to speak of. That was no accident. It was why they’d been chosen. It had been a slow, methodical search for months, finding just the right candidates-disaffected, angry, violent individuals with no familial connections and either nationalistic or outright racist views. Finding them, to Manning’s surprise, had been the easy part. It was winnowing them down to the best among them that had taken more of his time.

“I need you to take me seriously,” said McCabe, a little looser after a couple glasses of wine. The soldiers hadn’t touched the alcohol, but McCabe and Manning had.

“I’m taking you very seriously, Bruce.”

“We have a chance to do this right, but this lawyer Kolarich is a threat.”

“Then we deal with the threat.”

“We deal with the threat and then we wait and let things pass,” McCabe insisted. “We can’t get rid of him and then turn around days later and carry out this thing.”

“We didn’t choose the timing, Bruce.”

“But we did, Randy. I understand the symbolism of December seventh. I do. But there are other dates that could work. We shouldn’t do this now.” McCabe stopped walking and waited for Manning to do the same. Manning turned to face him.

“I’m deadly serious, Randy.”

“What about your wife, Bruce? What about her?”

McCabe frowned. Color came to his face. “Don’t tell me about my wife. I’m not saying we shouldn’t do this. I’m saying not now.”

Behind McCabe, Manning saw movement. Patrick Cahill, one of Manning’s recruits, slipped out from behind a large tractor.

“Okay,” said Manning. “Okay, Bruce.”

“Really? You mean it?” McCabe breathed out. His posture relaxed.

Then Patrick Cahill moved in. He used a rope, snapping it over McCabe’s head and around his throat in one fluid motion. Manning heard a sickening crunch and desperate, gargling pleas from McCabe. McCabe struggled, his hands first going for the rope and then vainly swinging out behind him. But he was no match for Patrick Cahill, who lifted McCabe off his feet while he squeezed the life out of him.

Manning watched the whole time, until the last twitch of McCabe’s leg, until his body went entirely limp and Cahill dragged him away. He was surprised at the numbness he felt. Bruce had been a friend, after all. A friend who had sworn an oath to the cause and then gone back on it, but a friend no less.

Manning had come a long way in eighteen months.

Then his cell phone rang, and he answered it.

“Mr. Manning,” said the head of security. “We had visitors today.”

Tori and I went back to my law office and worked for most of the rest of the evening. She was doing research online while I worked through the witnesses and wrote up an outline of my closing argument at trial. A trial lawyer, after assessing the evidence, starts his case preparation with a closing argument. That’s the last thing you say to the jury, your final pitch, and you think about all the things you want to be able to say to them in that closing. Then you work backward, making sure that you put into evidence all the things you wanted to say, the individual bricks for the completed house you show them in closing.

My closing argument was now changing dramatically. This was no longer an insanity case. It was an innocence case. And most of the closing was going to be about things and people having nothing whatsoever to do with First Lieutenant Thomas Stoller. And most of it I didn’t yet know. So the whole exercise devolved into a series of questions that I had.

Which meant I was back to being pissed off and flustered at day’s end.

“I need more time,” I said to Tori as I drove her home. “I know there’s something here, but I don’t have the time to figure it out. I’m letting this kid down.”

“You’re not. You’re giving him your best, Jason.”

“It’s not enough. It’s not even close.”

She didn’t answer right away, but I sensed she was watching me.

“What?” I said, not hiding my irritation.

“A lawyer I know once said that you do your best for your client, and when you go to bed at night, you sleep, because all you can do is your best. And in the end, it’s your client, not you, that will do the time.”

“I don’t know what kind of an asshole would say that.” Again, she was quoting my words back to me. “I’m clocked out, Tori. I have a client who wants to go to prison, who wants to be punished, not for killing Kathy Rubinkowski but for shooting that girl in that tunnel in Mosul. He’s no help to me. He doesn’t remember anything about that night. So I’m left trying to convince a jury of something not even my own client will say, which is that someone else committed this murder and framed him. Isn’t that grand? My argument is my client was framed, but my client won’t even testify to it. And I have next to no proof of it. I have questions, and I have theories, but unless I can link them in some kind of tangible way, Judge Nash isn’t even going to let the jury hear about-”

“Jason, slow down. You’re feeling overwhelmed.” Tori touched my arm. “There’s still time. There’s still a chance.”

I took a deep breath and tried to relax. She was right. I was letting the situation get the better of me. It wasn’t like me. This was when I was usually at my best.

I made great time through the deserted city streets. I pulled up to her condo. Then I dropped my head against the steering wheel and closed my eyes. There had to be something I was missing.

Tori took my hand and held it. Her hand was small and warm, and it felt good to connect with her. We sat like that for what must have been ten, fifteen minutes. I was tired and wired. I needed sleep, I knew, but this case wasn’t going to give me that kind of peace. What lay ahead was nights of fitful sleep, eyes popping open in the middle of the night, tossing and turning.

“I used to be married,” Tori said to me.

I snapped out of my funk and looked at her. I wasn’t sure why she was telling me this right now. An intimate moment, I guess.

“When did it end?” I asked.

“Five years ago,” she said. “Five years ago today. November twenty-fifth, 2005. It was a Friday that year. The day after Thanksgiving.”

Funny that she’d know the date. But I guess it was tied to a holiday.

But a marriage ended with a court order dissolving the marriage. And you’d be hard-pressed to find a court open on the Friday after Thanksgiving.

Tori let go of my hand and stared out the window of the car.