James Grippando - Afraid of the Dark

“Do you wear eyeglasses?”

“No.”

“Are you in jail?”

“Yes.”

“Is your prison jumpsuit orange?”

“Yes.”

“Were you in the United States at the time of McKenna Mays’death?”

“No.”

“Are you glad this test is over?”

Jamal almost answered, then realized that he was being toyed with. He almost seemed to smile as his gaze slowly shifted from Jack to the examiner.

“I guess so,” he said.

Swenson disconnected the monitors. “I’ll need a few minutes to interpret the results,” he said as he packed up the equipment.

Neil summoned the guard. The door opened, Swenson left the room, and the lawyers were alone with their client.

Jack looked at Neil and said, “If that test shows any signs of deception, I’m out.”

“Understood,” said Neil.

“Even if the test is clean, I’m probably still out.”

Jamal spoke up. “I didn’t kill McKenna.”

Jack glanced over. “You shouldn’t have waited until today to tell me that.”

“Last time we talked, I hadn’t been charged with anything.”

“The guy has a point,” said Neil.

Jack and Jamal had locked eyes again. “You don’t deny the fact that you were McKenna’s boyfriend, do you?”

“I don’t deny that.”

“So you knew you were the prime suspect in McKenna’s murder.”

“Yes,” Jamal said. “I knew.”

“And that never once came up in our conversation at Gitmo, even after we switched to English.”

Jamal paused, then said, “That wasn’t my fault.”

“Whose fault was it?”

“Yours.”

“Mine?” said Jack, incredulous.

Jamal’s expression was completely serious. “I thought if I started speaking English to you that it would help build trust between us. The opposite happened. The way you reacted, you just shut me down.”

Jack replayed the moment in his mind. The English had definitely come as a surprise, and in hindsight Jack probably could have handled it better.

“I don’t remember shutting you down,” said Jack.

“I’m not saying you did it intentionally. That’s just the way it played out. You mentioned your grandfather was from the Czech Republic, and I told you I’d been there.”

“You told me in English,” said Jack.

“And from that point on, the whole conversation was all about my native tongue. We never followed up about Prague.”

“What was there to follow up about?”

Jamal gave him an assessing look. “That’s where I was when McKenna was murdered.”

The words came over Jack like an arctic front. Before he could speak, there was a knock at the door. Neil opened it, and Swenson entered the room. The lawyers and their client looked at him with anticipation, and Swenson delivered the news without delay.

“The test shows no signs of deception in any of the three areas of examination,” said Swenson.

Neil was openly smug about it, and he couldn’t help summarizing: “He didn’t kill McKenna, he doesn’t know who did, and he was outside the country when it happened.”

It was a bit of theater orchestrated by his old boss, but Jack had to admit that it was pretty effective.

The examiner’s work was finished. Neil thanked him, and Jack did likewise, and when the door closed, Jack’s gaze shifted back to the young man seated at the table before him. There were definitely still signs of prolonged incarceration-the thin face, the skin tone a bit off, the unhealthy fingernails. But Jamal was becoming more of an enigma with each passing minute.

“Something is missing here,” said Jack. “The police have a recording of the victim saying in her dying breath that you killed her, but you were in Prague?”

“That’s right,” said Jamal.

“Am I to believe that this case is as open and shut as handing over your passport to the state attorney?”

“My passport won’t show that I went anywhere.”

“Were you traveling illegally?”

“You could say that.”

“What about an airline ticket?”

“I can’t help you there.”

“Credit card statements or cell phone records?”

“Nothing like that.”

“Any photographs of you out of the country?”

“No.”

“Travel records of any kind?”

“Unfortunately, no.”

Jack puzzled for a moment, then asked, “Were you traveling with someone?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“That’s not really clear.”

“Are you being a smart-ass?”

“Not at all.”

“How did you get there?”

Jamal glanced at Neil, apparently seeking a green light-as if to ask, Do you think Swyteck is ready for this? Jack followed the prisoner’s gaze toward Neil, who simply pulled up a chair for his co-counsel.

“It’s a long story,” said Neil.

Jack didn’t move. Then finally, he came to the table and took a seat.

“All right,” he told his client, “let’s start at the beginning.”

I was born in Somalia,” said Jamal, “my father’s homeland. My mother is a U.S. citizen, so I am, too. She and my father never married, and she took me to Minneapolis when I was a baby. Lots of Somali immigrants there.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Jack.

“Somalis, Scandinavians-who can tell the difference?”

A sense of humor. That’s new.

“My father still lives in Mogadishu,” said Jamal, “so I speak Somali as well as English. I lived with my mother until I dropped out of high school and got the hell out of the freezer. I hopped on a bus to Florida and took an apartment in Miami Beach. I waited tables for about a year, then finally got a job with Mr. Mays.”

“I presume that’s how you met McKenna,” said Jack.

“Yup. He’s a self-taught computer whiz who never finished high school. Just like me. We hit it off. He introduced me to his daughter. I was nineteen. She was sixteen-but very mature for her age.”

Neil popped open his briefcase. “I have pictures,” he said as he laid them out on the table.

The difference between Jamal’s appearance then versus now was not as dramatic as Jamal-the-client versus Jamal-the-Gitmo-detainee, but it was striking nonetheless. Not so long ago, Jamal had sported nothing short of movie-star good looks. Even so, one’s eyes naturally gravitated toward McKenna.

“Pretty girl,” said Jack.

“Beautiful,” said Jamal. “I used to kid her that she was the perfect blend of obnoxious blond father and stunning Bahamian mother that modeling agencies looked for.”

Jack held his next question, choosing instead to observe for a moment. Jamal was unable to look away from the photograph, his eyes moistening. It was the first real show of emotion Jack had seen from his client.

If it was real.

“Did you get along with her mother?”

“It’s funny. I thought we were going to get on just fine. McKenna told me that her grandfather was Muslim, like me. But I guess her mother had rejected Islam.”

“Did she reject you?”

“It wasn’t anything specific. I just got a vibe that she wasn’t nuts about me.”

Jack checked his watch. The arraignment was less than an hour away, and he needed to speed things up.

“Let’s fast-forward a bit,” said Jack, “to the time before McKenna’s death. Tell me how you came to leave the country.”

“I was abducted.”

“Abducted?”

“Yes,” he said with a straight face.

“By whom?”

“I don’t know for sure. But I believe it was the U.S. government.”

“Okay, I’m outta here,” said Jack as he pushed away from the table.

“No, no, listen,” said Neil.

Jack shook his head. “I took this case pro bono because you were right, Neil: Everybody deserves a lawyer. But I’m a sole practitioner, and I don’t have time to talk spy novels to a circuit court judge.”