Richard Patterson - Conviction

"Fool," Athalie Price muttered with contempt. "And he thought that boy was stupid 'cause I was. That made him the stupidest of us all."

When Laura asked if she meant Rennell's father, Athalie leaned back, head against the wall, and started laughing to herself, a hiss of rage escaping from her lips. She refused to speak another word.

* * *

"All I came away with," Finney said now, "is this wasn't the Cleaver family. That much I already knew."

"What about Thuy Sen's family?" Terri asked. "Ever talk to them?"

"No." Finney's face registered palpable surprise. "What could they tell me that wouldn't add to their misery? Even before having my own daughter, I wouldn't have wanted to remind them all over again of how theirs died. Not unless it did some good."

Carlo glanced at Terri and saw nothing in her eyes about Elena. But, uncharacteristically, she seemed to have no follow-up question. "What about DNA?" he asked Finney.

"We tried every test there was. But Thuy Sen had been floating for two days before they found her. The semen samples from her mouth and throat were too degraded to show whose sperm it was." Pausing, Finney drew a breath. "To tell the truth, part of me was relieved. I was too afraid of knowing."

Terri stared at her. "Knowing what?" she quietly asked. "That Rennell was guilty, or that he might not be? Only the latter scares me."

Still watching Terri, Carlo wondered if this were true.

TWO

SILENT, FINNEY CONSIDERED TERRI. "TO BE HONEST," SHE SAID sharply, "I never felt at risk of finding out Rennell was innocent. God knows I tried."

Terri was unsurprised, except by Finney's candor. "What did Rennell say happened?" she asked.

" 'I didn't do that little girl.' Over and over, for fifteen years. But he didn't give us any reason to believe that."

"Didn't?" Terri countered in even tones. "Or couldn't? Suppose he is retarded—that wouldn't make him gifted at constructing an alternative. Or suppose he wasn't there at all. He wouldn't know what happened."

"True," Finney answered. "But Thuy Sen was inside their living room. We know that from the forensics, from Flora Lewis, and from Fleet."

"Then let's start with Lewis. Did you talk to her yourself?"

Finney nodded. "Shortly before she died in her parents' home—as she made clear to us she'd always planned on, no matter what had happened to the neighborhood. She was as certain with us of what she'd seen that day as she was with Charles Monk."

"Maybe so," Terri responded. "But as Monk well knows, a white woman like Lewis—elderly, isolated, and frightened—might not distinguish one black man from another. She might even have wanted one of the men she saw, or said she saw, to be Rennell."

"Who else would Flora Lewis have seen?"

"A black man," Terri answered dryly. "That much we can count on. Did you consult any experts on the reliability of cross-racial IDs?"

"No." Finney's voice rose. "You do understand that, when we started, the State of California allowed only twelve thousand dollars in investigative fees, and that the federal court's allowance for expenses on habeas corpus was largely left to the discretion of the judge. It's not just that Kenyon and Walker didn't bill for our time for fourteen years—we pretty much carried the cost of Rennell Price's petition, however slim the prospect of success."

From Finney's perspective, Terri acknowledged, that was fair—the fees allowed the Pagets were well below their normal rates. "I appreciate the problem," she offered in a mollifying tone. "But we've only got forty-nine days and a very hard road. I need to know how many avenues are left to keep the state from killing Rennell Price. Did you talk to Eddie Fleet?"

"I tried, the last time maybe seven years ago." Something, perhaps a memory, seemed to make Finney glance briefly at her daughter. "The nearest I got to him was Betty Sims's front door."

* * *

The Bayview, Finney acknowledged to herself, made her apprehensive—there was a sense of danger, as frightening for its randomness as for its malignity. Laura Finney suffered from the lawyer's belief in cause and effect; the idea of dying for no reason—except perhaps that she was white, or a woman, or in the wrong place when some drug dealer fired a gun—made her feel powerless and afraid, as vulnerable as if she were standing naked on a street corner. Knocking on a stranger's door in the featureless squalor of the Double Rock project, she felt pinpricks on the back of her neck.

After the second knock, a woman in a bathrobe slowly opened the door. She was perhaps in her mid-thirties, but her eyes, wide and wary, seemed older, as if no surprise in her life had ever been a good one. A girl of seven or eight leaned against her, gripping the belt of her robe as though it were a lifeline.

"I'm looking for Betty Sims," Finney told her. "Can you help me?"

The woman paused before curtly answering. "I'm Betty."As she did, Finney saw that her lower lip was swollen, marred by the remnants of a scab which suggested that the lip had been cut by her own tooth.

Finney extended her hand. "I'm Laura Finney," she said. "I represent Rennell Price."

Sims stared at her hand as though the gesture were Martian. When she took it, her grasp was tentative and fleeting. "Rennell's on death row," Finney continued. "You probably know that."

Sims hesitated. "What you want with me?"

The query was delivered in a muted undertone, echoing the fright Finney felt just from being there. "According to the police files," she explained, "you were a friend of Eddie Fleet's. I wanted to talk with you about him, maybe to Mr. Fleet himself."

What happened next was, to Finney, deeply disturbing: Betty Sims stiffened, looking back over her shoulder, as the girl at her side cast a silent, pleading look upward—first at Sims, then at Laura Finney. In a near whisper, Sims said, "We got nothin' to say."

Finney steeled herself to persist. "Is Eddie here?"

The girl's lips parted, as though to speak. Then Sims jerked her back and, with stricken eyes, closed the door in Finney's face.

* * *

Listening, Terri felt a frisson, the shadow of her own childhood passing through her mind. Softly, she asked Finney, "What did you make of it?"

Finney's expression was a curious mix of rueful and resigned. "That Fleet was there—or some guy—and whoever it was beat her. But I never set eyes on Eddie Fleet." Finney's gaze expanded to take in Carlo, sitting beside Terri with a notebook in his hand. "Whatever Fleet's peculiarities, we never found a reason to challenge Mauriani's case—Lewis, Fleet, and the forensics. The absence of DNA evidence was the clincher."

Though she had several disturbing thoughts of her own, Terri did not question this. "About the little girl with Sims," she asked. "Do you know who she was?"

"Her niece, the neighbors said—actually her cousin's daughter by some guy named Demetrius, who was serving life for murder. His name stuck in my mind."

Cordelia and Demetrius, Terri remembered from Monk's narrative, almost like Shakespeare. It was not hard to imagine the chain of events, beginning with Monk's and Larry Minnehan's appearance in her living room, that had delivered this child to Betty Sims and whatever fate they both might suffer. But she kept this melancholy reflection to herself and turned to another subject. "What about James's failure to seek a change of venue? How did that pan out?"

"We interviewed whatever jurors we could find. They said what you'd expect—that they decided on the evidence, not on pretrial publicity. More than plausible given the trial transcript." Finney paused to gather her thoughts. "In the end, we fell back on mitigation—the absence of any prior record of violence by Rennell, or of his involvement in any sex crimes. Plus the patent misery of his childhood."