Tim Green - False Convictions

“The jet’s already scheduled,” Graham said. “I’ve got my week planned out. I was going to spend a couple days in Dallas. I thought I’d check out the clinic and maybe have the chance to grab dinner or something. You’re not even making sense. Come on, here.”

Casey took a deep breath. “I spoke with Patricia Rivers today.”

“Today? Today, when? Like, between the press conference and now?”

“That’s the only time I’ve had,” she said.

“That’s ludicrous,” Graham said, his voice softening and taking on a singsong quality, as if he were talking to a child. “This case is closed. You did your job, now it’s time to go back. I’ve got dinner waiting for us. The crew. The jet’s all warmed up. Stop kidding around, Casey. It’s been a long day.”

“I’m not,” Casey said. “I think we may have made a mistake and if we did, I have to fix it.”

“Casey, Casey, come on,” Graham said. “There’s no mistake. You saw the DNA. This is crazy. Where are you?”

“And what if that DNA got switched?” she said.

Graham snorted. “Come on. Cut it out. You saw how serious those lab people were.”

“But how secure was the sample at the hospital?” Casey said. “Just stuck away someplace in some warehouse.”

Graham fell silent for a minute before he asked, “What did Rivers say to you?”

“She showed me three other crime scenes,” Casey said. “Remote places. Small towns where there weren’t any notes being compared. They all looked the same.”

“So, her son was a serial killer,” Graham said.

“She went outside the law to put Dwayne away, but maybe she did it because she knew he was guilty,” Casey said. “Her son wasn’t at those other places, but Dwayne might have been.”

“And you know this?”

It was Casey’s turn to go silent. Finally, she said, “I have to find out. If it’s true, then maybe we’ve done something very wrong.”

“Do you know how stupid, silly you’re going to look?” Graham said, his voice going suddenly hot. “You freed that man. You went on national TV and set him free. You don’t just go back on that. I’ve got this plane booked out for the next five days, so you need to get on it if you want get back home. You’re talking crazy here.”

“Then I am, and there’s always Delta. Good-bye.”

“Wait! Wait, wait, Casey,” Graham’s voice said, softening. “I’m sorry. It’s been a crazy day. I mean it, I’m sorry. Let’s talk. Let me come get you and we’ll talk. I didn’t mean that. I didn’t. You can go whenever you like. If my jet’s not around, I’ll charter one for you, and I’m writing that check for a million dollars for you tonight and you’ll have it. Sometimes my temper and I say stupid things I don’t mean.”

“Well,” Casey said, hesitating. Her phone beeped and she looked at the incoming call: Jake. “I’ve got a couple things to do. Let me call you later if I get free.”

“Like… what do you have to do?” Graham asked.

“I really have to go,” Casey said. “I’ll call you later.”

She clicked over and Jake told her it was clear.

GUESS WHO I WAS on the other line with,” Casey said, standing up, taking her drink, and heading out.

“Graham.”

“He wants to meet,” Casey said.

“And you told him no?”

“Told him I’d call him back later.”

“That’s fair,” Jake said. “If this goes nowhere, you can use my cell phone to make the call. I see you.”

Jake waved from the doorway. When Casey got to the law office, Jake looked up and down the sidewalk before showing her inside and closing and locking the door. The lobby was dark except for a small lamp behind the receptionist’s desk.

“Not like my lawyer’s office in Manhattan,” Jake said, punching the elevator button and stepping in. “They burn the candles until midnight there. It’s, what? Seven o’clock, and this place is empty.”

“Small town,” Casey said, following him.

On the third floor, they passed Marty’s office and went into the library, where Jake already had a computer booted up. Casey studied the screen.

“You found it?”

“LexisNexis,” Jake said. “No big deal. I didn’t get very far.”

Casey sat down and scrolled through the twenty-three-page decision in The Nature Conservancy v. Eastern Oil & Gas, an appellate court ruling that she quickly found had made its way to the court of appeals docket for the fall session.

“So Rivers would have been able to rule on this,” Casey said, thinking aloud as she continued to scroll through the lower court’s decision. “And she told us the court is evenly split between the left and the right. She’d be left of center and help to uphold this decision.”

“I went to the end, but I wasn’t sure what they were saying,” Jake said. “It’s a bunch of stuff about bats from Indiana, right?”

“The appellate court ruled in favor of the Nature Conservancy,” Casey said, still reading, “basically blocking Eastern from using fracture drilling in the Marcellus Shale Formation. It’s not bats from Indiana, it’s Indiana bats. They’re endangered and they winter in the same caves and mine shafts year after year. Because the fracture drilling is so destructive, and because the chemicals are used to pump the water into these underground fissures that go for miles, the court is saying that Eastern-and essentially anyone else drilling for gas-is prohibited from using that specific drilling technique.

“And, from what I see of the defendant’s argument,” Casey said, “they’re saying that if they can’t use fracture drilling, the gas rights across the entire formation in New York State are worthless.”

“That’s where the money comes in,” Jake said.

“Millions,” Casey said, nodding and reducing the LexisNexis search to bring up Google. “Probably hundreds of millions.”

“And that explains the ‘her’ Graham complained about them not taking care of,” Jake said. “I thought it was you, then I thought it was the ship, but it was Patricia Rivers. He asked them to take care of her.”

“Who’s them, and what do you mean by ‘take care of her’?” Casey asked.

“If it’s the them I think it is-and I think it’s his partners who are like the real-life Sopranos-” Jake said, “then he meant for them to kill her.”

“Isn’t that what the real-life Sopranos would have done?” Casey asked. “With all that money at stake?”

“They kill people when they have to,” Jake said soberly, “but they don’t take it lightly. I’d bet Graham put this business deal together the way he has so many others-remember I told you he financed his comeback with money from offshore partners-and they probably told him it was his deal, so he should take care of it himself. Maybe they’re sick of his crap, running around like a do-gooder when they’re bankrolling him with heroin profits. Maybe he’s had other deals go sour. Maybe they’re getting tired of him as a partner. Maybe he’s the one they’ll take care of if this thing doesn’t work out.”

Casey typed and clicked until she had a list of the biggest leaseholders across the formation in New York.

“See these? Range Resources? Chesapeake? Dominion? The top leaseholders in the formation? They’re the big boys. See the abbreviations? All listed on the New York Stock Exchange, but look at this,” Casey said, pointing, “number four, with 437,000 acres under lease, the only one in the top twenty that isn’t a big, publicly traded energy company.”

“Buffalo Oil and Gas?” Jake said.

“With no symbol for the exchange,” Casey said, typing the full name into Google.

“What did you get?” Jake said, hanging his head over her shoulder.