Robert Ellis - The Dead Room

On the second count, not even Andrews denied that he’d pointed a gun at Teddy and fired. His fingerprints were found on the weapon. Gunshot residue had been detected on his right hand. His story that he considered Teddy frightening, that Teddy was armed with a shotgun and wouldn’t put the weapon down, that under the circumstances he’d panicked-just didn’t gel.

Unlike Michael Jackson, the forensic scientist working in the police lab, Vera Handover, wasn’t offered a deal at all. Although Teddy was disappointed that Handover’s voice didn’t match his memory of Dawn Bingle’s, and how he was led to the boathouse remained in question to this day, the investigators didn’t need her to talk in order to figure out exactly what she had done. Nash and his students participating in his legal workshop pointed the way with their research. What they couldn’t resolve, Detective Jackson did as part of his agreement. The forensic scientist had taken payments from Andrews which had been recorded in the notebook found in his townhouse. In return for those payments she’d manufactured evidence and given false testimony in some of his most high-profile cases. She’d acted as part of the team responsible for sending a total of six innocent men to their deaths. In her defense, she said that she thought they were guilty, and at the time, thought she’d been doing the right thing by putting them away. The money amounted to gifts and bonuses from Andrews for a job well done. She hadn’t lied in court, she said. Her opinions, particularly in fingerprint analysis, were open to interpretation and she’d done the best she could. As the investigation against her deepened, twelve more bogus cases turned up. Nine men and three women were pulled off death row and set free, while Vera Handover went to jail.

Alan Andrews was about to be executed for a single murder. But everyone knew his death was a result of his professional life in toto. The decisions he’d made along the way. His knack for setting aside the truth in favor of a winning record. Terrorizing a city so that he could score points and look like a hero.

The plane landed smoothly, the drive to Rockview taking less than twenty minutes. Teddy spotted the line of protestors waving hand-painted signs in the air and chanting outside the prison walls. As the driver pulled through the gate, Teddy’s eyes stopped on a strange-looking man who stood off to the side. He was holding a flashlight to his Bible and reading the words aloud to anyone who might be listening. It didn’t appear that anyone was.

The car pulled to a stop and they got out, following their escort toward the execution complex. As they climbed the steps, Teddy noticed that Nash was walking with a slight limp. When he asked about it, Nash told him he’d slipped on the floor at his gym.

“It’s nothing, Teddy. Nothing that won’t heal with a little time.”

Their escort showed them into the building. After they checked in, they were taken down the hall to the witness room on the first floor. As they entered, only a few seats remained. Although the seats were together, they were in the front row, and Teddy hesitated a moment before following Nash down the aisle and taking his seat.

The witness room was fairly small. Enough seats to keep twenty-five people on edge for the rest of their lives. He turned and looked at the faces. Some he recognized as members of Andrews’s family. His mother and sister sitting beside their spiritual advisor. Andrews had never married and wasn’t leaving any children behind. Others he’d seen in the paper from the families of Andrews’s victims. Wives mostly, who claimed on the news on a nightly basis that they needed to see the man die just the way their husbands did. The rest of the audience was filled out with official witnesses and reporters. The young woman dressed in an Armani suit with big hair was a new face on one of the local TV stations. She’d replaced the woman before her who wore the same clothing, even the same hair, but refused to get a face lift when she began to look experienced and slightly middle-aged. As Teddy looked at the young replacement, he noticed her eyes were a little wider than usual tonight. Maybe she’d stepped into more than she could handle. Maybe life was more important than reading what she was told to read before the cameras just for the money.

He turned back in his seat and peered through the windows into the dead room. He was calling it the dead room, even though Nash had told him more than once that it was still called an execution chamber. As his eyes roamed back and forth, it felt more like a stage. More like an operating room with its tiled walls than a room that had been renovated and might once have housed a gas chamber or electric chair. In fact, Teddy had read somewhere over the past few weeks that the execution complex at Rockview had once been a field hospital.

He looked back through the bulletproof glass. A single chair was bolted into the floor, its design much like that of an airline seat reserved for first class. An electrical cord ran from a control box attached to the chair and was plugged into the wall. Teddy had expected to see a simple gurney. Instead, someone had built the padded chair specifically for the purpose of killing people. It looked cold and sterile and ultra modern-perhaps the work of Frank Lloyd Wright’s ghost. Beside a door on the far wall, a small shelf had been bolted into the tiles just large enough to hold a desk phone.

Why a desk phone? Why not a simple phone mounted to the wall?

A man entered the room. An older man dressed like a surgeon who might even double as a medical examiner. A face mask hung about his neck and he carried a pair of latex gloves. He stepped up to the chair, his eyes avoiding the twenty-five faces staring at him through the windows along the near wall. Then he pressed a button on the console. The chair tilted back and flattened into a lounge. When he pressed a second button, the curtains behind the windows closed.

“They’re bringing Andrews out,” Nash whispered. “It’ll only be a few minutes now.”

Teddy shivered in his seat, wondering if he could remain in the audience and watch the man die. He dug his hand into his pocket, pulling a small photograph out. It was a picture of his father. He’d taken it himself with a 35mm camera as they walked through the open field across the street from the house, rooting out pheasants hidden in the tall grass and watching the birds take flight. He looked into his father’s eyes and stroked his face with his finger. This is how he remembered him. Wearing a leather jacket with the collar turned up. The carefree smile on his face with the afternoon sun whisking through his windblown hair.

Teddy had found some degree of closure over the past six years. On a weekend during Andrews’s first trial, he’d removed the accordion file from his mother’s closet and taken it into his bedroom. He’d always known she had kept a record of what happened to his father, saved the stories that appeared in the newspapers, but he could never look at them before. As he read about his father’s arrest and eventual death in prison, questions remained. He sought out the prosecutor, an ADA named Stephen Faulk, but couldn’t find him. From what he’d read, his mother had been right. Faulk was young and trying to make a name for himself in Chester County. Teddy’s father had been a man of good reputation and looked like a big prize. When Teddy asked her about it, she said that the prosecutor died a long time ago. He saw the look in her eyes, the hurt flaring up again, and didn’t want to press her for details unless he had to.

And so he began searching out what had happened to Stephen Faulk on his own. He started with the local police department, but no one could tell him anymore than what his mother had. Faces changed with the passage of time, and those who remained didn’t appear very interested or talkative. This surprised Teddy. For almost half his life, every time he’d seen a cop pass the house, he thought the story was the only thing on their minds. After several weeks of getting nowhere, Teddy went to the library and spent a day going through microfilm archives from the Daily Local News , a newspaper based in the county. His mother had stopped saving press clippings on the day of his father’s death. But it was the next two weeks that told the story. Faulk had pressed the detectives working the case for an arrest. He’d held press conferences on a daily basis, and used every opportunity to try the case in the papers before a court date was even set. It was obvious to Teddy that Faulk had a chip on his shoulder, and one reporter described his voice as shrill. But after his father died, everything changed. The accountant came forward, overcome with guilt, admitting that he was the real murderer, not Teddy’s father. Faulk actually tried to discount the confession, but local and county detectives took issue with the prosecutor and fought back. The controversy went on for a week or so, spilling into the press until the county decided they’d had enough and fired the man. Three days after that, Faulk’s body was found behind the wheel of his car with the garage door closed and the engine running. The piece of shit took the easy way out and ate the pipe.