Richard Patterson - Conviction

"Sweetheart," she cried out, and held Elena close.

The little girl's heart pounded against Terri's chest. "It's okay," Terri urged. "I'm here."

Terri could feel her own heart race. Elena's trembling arms held Terri like a vise. "It was just your nightmare," Terri said in a soothing voice. "Only the nightmare."

Elena could not seem to speak. Softly, Terri stroked the little girl's hair again, and then Elena began to cry.

Terri kissed her face. "What was it, Elena?"

The little girl kept on crying, softly, raggedly, pausing to breathe. After a time, her keening became half spasm, half hiccup, the residue of fear.

All at once, Elena was still.

Gently, Terri pulled away a little, cupping one hand at the side of Elena's face. Fearful, the child looked back at her.

"Tell me what it was," Terri said softly, "and maybe you won't feel alone."

The little girl watched her face, afraid to look away. Her mouth opened once, closed, and then opened again.

"Yes, sweetheart?"

Swallowing, Elena said softly, "Daddy was here."

"In your dream?"

Elena nodded. "I saw him."

Terri wondered what to say. "It was a dream, Elena. Daddy's dead now. He died in an accident."

Slowly, Elena shook her head, and then tears began again, ragged and shuddering.

"What happened?" Terri asked.

Elena clutched her mother's nightdress with both hands, voice suddenly higher. "I was scared, Mommy."

"Why?"

Elena's lips trembled. Half-choking, she whispered, "He was going to hurt the little girl."

Terri swallowed. In a calm voice, she asked, "How?"

Elena looked away. Her voice was small and shamed. "He was going to take her panties off."

"Who?"

Elena seemed to choke. And then she whispered, "Daddy."

Terri swallowed. "What else was Daddy going to do?"

"Touch her." The little girl's face twisted. "It was just their secret."

Terri stared at her. "Why is it a secret?"

"Daddy feels lonely. Sometimes he needs a girl." Elena looked into her mother's face. "To put his pee-pee in her mouth and feel better. Because you left him for Chris, and Daddy's all alone now."

Terri's sudden rage was almost blinding. "Did he do anything else to you?"

"That's all, Mommy." Elena's eyes shut, as if at what she saw on her mother's face. "But he let me light the candles for him. To make it special."

Terri pulled her close.

She did not know how long she held Elena. Terri asked her nothing more; through her grief and shock and impotent anger, she knew that she should not push her daughter. It was some time before Terri realized that she, too, was crying—silently, so that Elena could not hear her.

Perhaps, the reasoning part of Terri had felt with pitiless shame, she had always known this. Perhaps she had simply chosen not to believe it, with the same preconditioned numbness that had protected her since the day she discovered, as a child smaller than Elena, that to know her own father was to know a fear she could not endure. So that she, Ramon Peralta's daughter, was able blindly to live with a man who could do this to her own daughter.

"Elena Rosa," Terri had murmured at last. "How I wish you could have told me . . ."

But Elena had not, and now, six years later, the dream still overtook her, the price of sleep.

SEVEN

"ANY GOOD FAMILY STORY," TAMMY MATTOX BEGAN, "STARTS WITH Mom."

The others—Terri, Carlo, and Anthony Lane—were gathered around a conference table in the Pagets' law office, consuming coffee and bagels. "What about this mom?" Terri asked.

"Right out of Tennessee Williams. Near as I can make out, Mama was retarded, likely bipolar, an alcohol abuser, a battered wife, and—quite possibly—abusive to her children." Mattox took a quick swallow of coffee. "Pretty damned clear that someone was."

"How so?"

"I'll get to that. As far as 'who,' Dad's a genuine prospect—crazy as a bedbug, and quick to anger. Just because Mom's crazy, too, doesn't mean sticking a knife in him wasn't a rational decision." She glanced at Lane. "Before she killed him, Vernon Price spent a stint in a state mental hospital—long enough to be diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. Grandma was probably the one safe haven these boys had ever known."

With an involuntary chill, Terri thought of the one safe haven in her childhood, her mother, so at the mercy of the sudden outbreaks of her father's drunkenness and brutality that Terri could only watch. How much worse if Rennell's only hope of safety was to wish both parents dead.

"For Rennell," Mattox continued, "not even his first trimester as a fetus was safe. Mom was hospitalized for alcohol poisoning after 'falling'—she'd drunk so much she damn near died. When she was sober enough to talk, she told the ER doc she'd tried to end her pregnancy by jumping off Grandma's porch."

Lane began taking notes. "What about prenatal care?"

"That was it—no other record of doctors' visits. To call Rennell 'unwanted' doesn't begin to cover it."

Lane nodded. "Neither does 'fetal alcohol syndrome' cover all his problems, I expect. But that may be part of Rennell's deficiencies."

"How does fetal alcohol syndrome," Carlo asked, "fit into our habeas petition?"

Tammy leaned forward, elbows resting on the table. "It's part of the history we tell the court—beginning with Rennell's beginning. But fetal alcohol syndrome would have burdened him to the day Thuy Sen died—"

"Among the potential outcomes," Lane interjected, "are defects in cerebral development which manifest physically: widened forehead, cleft palate, harelip. None of that shows up in Rennell. But there's also what you described—impaired coordination, the awkward movements of a Frankenstein monster . . ."

"Sounds right," Carlo affirmed. "But what's it got to do with Thuy Sen's death?"

"Nothing, in itself—it's just evidence of brain damage. But fetal alcohol also impairs the brain's executive function, the capacity to deliberate before you act. Cut that out and Rennell becomes a creature of excitation and impulse—"

"As in using a child for sex," Mattox said flatly. "But outside of what he's charged with, I'm not finding much evidence of impulsive behavior, and none at all of violence. The childhood I'm beginning to construct is more like Ferdinand the Bull's—all that was scary about Rennell was what he looked like, not who he really was."

"And who was that?" Terri asked after a moment.

"A big, clumsy kid, slow to react—same as now. Neighbors remember him staying close to Payton." She spoke to Lane again. "If I'm right about life before Grandma, Payton was the only sane person in the family. And Payton was just a kid himself, coping with a familial horror story."

"If there was abuse," Lane interposed, "then Rennell may have become deeply fearful of anything unpredictable—especially random violence. That could have made Payton a human life raft, all Rennell had to hang on to."

"That fits with Rennell the crack dealer," Tammy said. "All people recall is him being Payton's gofer, running errands. Which makes it criminal that Yancey James presented them as one and the same, a couple of thugs."

"What about school?" Terri asked.

"I found Rennell's third-grade teacher." Briefly, Tammy flipped a spiral notepad, reviewing notes that, to Terri, looked indecipherable. "Sharon Brooks. 'Slow but sort of sweet' is how she described him—impairment of fine motor skills, difficulty in drawing and writing. So school was painful for him." Tammy glanced up at Terri. "But the reason Brooks remembers him," she finished, "is that he never wanted to leave when school was over."

For an instant, Terri thought of Thuy Sen, perhaps an hour from death, fatefully lingering after school for help with math. "Did Brooks say why?"