Kimberly Belle - The Last Breath

“Well, duh. That goes without saying.”

Lexi covers the receiver with a hand, muffling her voice when she tells a colleague she’s on the phone, but will be right there.

“You’ve got to go?” I ask.

“Sorry. We’ll catch up on all the rest tonight, okay?”

“Okay. And, Lex?” She pauses, but I hear papers shuffling around her desk, and even though I know I’ve probably already lost her, I say it anyway: “I’ve missed you.”

“Same here. See you at seven-thirty.” And then she’s gone.

I plunk the phone on the counter by my mug and head outside to retrieve my suitcase, still in the trunk of my rental. In the past hour, the temperature plummeted and the air turned metallic, thick with invisible frost and crystals. I cast a glance at the darkening sky. No clouds yet, but I know what that scent means. I inhale enough of it to give my lungs freezer burn. God, how I’ve missed the smell of promised snow.

Up at the street, a silver Escort slows, tires crunching in the dirt and gravel on the side of the road. Any other day, any other place, and I probably wouldn’t have paid the car a bit of attention. But I lived on Maple Street long enough to know strangers don’t typically happen down this way by accident. I keep it in my periphery as I make my way up the concrete drive.

The car pulls to a sudden stop with a piercing squeal of brakes, and I freeze, gaze glued to the passenger side window. It whirrs and lowers to reveal a dark-haired man about my age. He leans across the seat, ducking his head to get a clear view through the window.

And though he may be wearing a friendly smile, I’m not.

“Sorry to bother you.” His bangs flop over an eye, and he pushes them back with a palm. “But can you tell me where the closest gas station is?”

The breath I’d been holding makes a thick cloud before it dissipates into the air. I take two steps across the frozen grass to his car, keeping a careful distance, pointing him in the opposite direction. “You’ve got to go back toward town, but it’s not far. Only two miles or so.”

“Two miles?” He draws out the last word, stretching his mouth wide to fit the vowels. I get this a lot in the field, people trying to imitate my Tennessee drawl as if there’s something funny or quaint about an accent. But their teasing only comes across as condescension, or at the very best, surprise that I’m not as dumb as I sound.

Which is why I lay it on thick now. “Two miles, yeah. Take a left at the four-way stop, and then it’ll be on your right. You can’t miss it.”

“There wouldn’t happen to be a decent hotel near there, too, would there?”

I take in his longish hair and battered leather jacket. Scruffy chic or penny-pincher? I can’t tell. “There’s the Hale Springs Inn in town, but it’s pretty swanky. Take the highway either way, though, and you’ll find some more affordable places a little farther out.”

He gives me a smile of thanks, but I detect something more to it—there’s something more than just fuel and shelter he’s looking for. A chill that has nothing to do with the February air brushes my shoulders, and I think of my cell, lying useless inside on the kitchen counter. I glance behind me, eyeing the distance to the front door, my senses on high alert.

He points over my shoulder. “Nice place. You live here?”

“Only temporari—” I swallow the last syllable, realizing a second too late I shouldn’t have admitted to living in a semi-deserted house at the end of a semi-deserted street.

He stretches his neck to get a better look, and then his gaze returns to mine. He smiles again, and I back up a step. “You’re Gia Andrews, right?”

Something like relief that he’s not a rapist or armed robber washes over me, quickly replaced by fury. A journalist. A goddamn journalist. You’d think after all my interactions with them in the field, I would have recognized him as one immediately.

I turn and stalk to my car. “I don’t talk to journalists.”

“Fine by me, because I’m not a journalist.” I don’t slow, and he bolts out of the Escort, his voice booming over its hood. “I’m a writer. I’m writing a book about America’s most shocking wrongful convictions.”

His words are electric, shooting a paralyzing current from my crown to the tips of my toes and melding my sneakers to the icy pavement. Wrongful conviction? I pivot my head to meet his gaze. “Excuse me?”

He bites off a mitten and digs around in a coat pocket, then crosses the driveway and hands me a card. “I’m Jeffrey Levine, by the way.”

I blink at the paper between my fingers, thick white linen with raised letters and a crest embossed in blue. “It says here you’re a professor of law.”

He slides his bare hand back into his mitten and nods. “For Emory. I’m taking a semester sabbatical to work on my book. It’s called True Crimes, False Convictions: Criminal Injustice in America.” When I don’t respond, he shrugs. “Yeah, it’s a working title.”

“And you think my father’s case is one of them?”

His head bobs in a decisive nod, and those ridiculous bangs flop over one eye. “Let me put it this way—your father’s case is a textbook on what not to do. How to ignore leads. How to sweep conflict of interest under the rug. How to miscarry justice and send an innocent man to prison.”

“But there was a witness.” I pivot now to face him, purposefully playing devil’s advocate. It’s one thing to say my father’s conviction was wrongful, another thing entirely to believe it. There was too much evidence to the contrary.

“One who thought he saw him breaking and entering his own house two hours after the time of death, not standing over the body with a smoking gun.”

“Ella Mae was suffocated.”

He gives me a look. “It was a figure of speech. And between you and me and everybody else who’s going to read my book, I think Dean Sullivan’s testimony was coerced. Did you know the police held him for six and a half hours? That screams gross misconduct to me.”

Six and a half hours? Is that even allowed? But still. “The judge and jury believed him.”

“Of course they did. Mr. Sullivan was an upstanding, God-fearing citizen.” He points past me to the ramshackle ranch where the Sullivans once lived. “Just look at him now.”

I gape at the neighboring property, so neglected I’d assumed it was abandoned. Front steps, rickety and rotting, lead to a front porch littered with trash and a ripped brown leather sofa. The yard, a foul-looking patch of dirt and rock, has seen neither fertilizer nor lawn mower since sometime last century. Even Dean’s prized rosebushes have hardened into brown and scraggly branches jutting up from the frozen earth, a tangle of sticks and thorns.

“People actually still live there?” I say.

“Dean Sullivan lives there. Alone. His family won’t have anything to do with him. His only friend is Jack Daniel’s. His house, his yard, his entire life is a mess.”

A mess might just be the biggest understatement on the planet. Dean’s house makes some of the shanties in Dadaab look like palaces.

“What do you think he’s hiding from?” Jeffrey asks.

I don’t know what to say to that. I’d never considered the possibility Dean was still living there, much less hiding from something.

I think for a moment. If everything Jeffrey said is true, then why not tell me this right away, when he stopped to ask for directions? Or better yet, why not tell Uncle Cal? I was barely eighteen when Ella Mae was murdered, and I’ve had practically nothing to do with the case since.

“What do you want from me? You should be talking to my uncle Cal. He’s the one who handled everything.”

“I’d love to talk to him, but unfortunately, he wants nothing to do with me.” He gives me a wry smile. “It might have something to do with me telling him I’m devoting an entire chapter to his shoddy defense of your father.”