“You’re from the FBI?” she said, fingering the beads of her long necklace, her glance looking past Sydney to Carillo.
“Yes, ma’am.” Sydney showed the nurse her ID. “I’m here about your nephew, Johnnie Wheeler.”
“What for?” she asked, with a tinge of wariness.
“I have questions about his homicide conviction.”
She said nothing for several seconds, merely looked Sydney in the eye as though trying to read her. Then, “And what is it you want from me?”
“I was hoping you might be able to put me in touch with any friends of his, relatives, anyone who might, unknowingly even, have a lead as to what really happened.”
“What really happened?” Jazmine said, her voice strained. “Johnnie was stupid enough to cooperate with the detectives who came out and said they were only there to find out what really happened. A good show. Said they were going to help him, and they did, right into the back of their car. He was railroaded.”
“What do you mean railroaded?”
“By the cops. A scapegoat. Black man in a white town. He didn’t do it. There is no justice,” she said, stepping back into the hallway. “That’s more than I should’ve told you, and all I’m saying. Anything else, talk to Johnnie’s attorney.”
Sydney started to follow her down the hall. “Can you at least look at a photo?” she called out as a couple of the resident addicts moved in.
One of them, a tall black man, came within a foot of Sydney, saying, “You heard the lady. Go.”
Jazmine Wheeler stopped midflight, spun on her heel, and stalked toward the man, pinning her gaze on him. “Get your ass back in line, Trey, or you’ll be drying it out in detox, faster’n you can say where’s my methadone? Hear me?”
He put up his hands, edged back. “I’m cool. Just want to make sure you was okay, Miss Jazz, you hear me?”
“I hear you. Now get.” She waited until he was back in line before she faced Sydney. “Give me one good reason why I should look at this damned photo of yours.”
“Because I’m the daughter of the man your nephew says he didn’t kill. And if he didn’t do it, I want to know who did, before they stick that needle in his arm two days from now.”
Several seconds passed as Jazmine searched Sydney’s eyes, perhaps trying to judge her sincerity, and then she said, “My office is the third door on the left. We can talk in there.”
She led Sydney down the hall into a small room, cluttered and filled with hanging plants. A yellow school bus photo frame was filled with twelve pictures of a young boy, showing his progression from kindergarten until graduation from high school. Sydney thought she saw a bit of Johnnie Wheeler in the boy, and wondered if it might be his son, the baby he’d talked about having when he was arrested. They were the only photos in the room. A large padlocked file cabinet filled one corner of the office, its side covered with magnets from various destinations around the U.S. The remainder of the space was taken up by a metal desk, buried beneath stacks of medical folders.
Jazmine moved behind the desk, but didn’t sit. “I have a lot of patients I have to get through. And when they don’t get their methadone, things can get ugly very fast, so make this quick.”
Sydney opened her folder and set the photo on her desk. “Do you know any of these men?”
Jazmine gave a dismissive glance toward the picture, then did a double take. “What does Frank have to do with this?”
“You know him?”
“Frank White. Johnnie’s father.”
“You’ve seen this photo before?”
“No. But that’s definitely him. And he died well before Johnnie was ever arrested.”
“Do you know what he did for a living?”
Jazmine hesitated. “There’s what he said he did, and then there’s what I really think he did. He said he was a contract civilian employee doing electrical work for the army. Seemed his services were in demand. All over the world.”
“And you didn’t believe him? That he was a contract electrician?”
She gave a cynical laugh. “I know the government tosses money around like there’s no tomorrow, except when it comes to helping out places like this clinic, but how many times do they need to send out emergency electricians to change lightbulbs in places like Pakistan, Chile, or Honduras?” She started stacking folders, rote action to occupy her hands. “You name a political hotspot in the world twentytwo years ago, or some country that bordered one, and my sister’s ex-boyfriend was sent there. Usually taking off on a flight that left in the middle of the night. I told her something else was going on, but she didn’t believe me, nor did she care. In fact, what I remembered her saying was that since she never married the guy, he could take all the trips he wanted to wherever he wanted, as long as the child support checks came in.”
Sydney thought about her father, and his sudden trips to far-off locales to take his alleged photographs for recruitment posters and pamphlets. “Exactly when did he die?”
“Two years before my nephew was arrested for murder.” Right around the same time as her own father’s accident, she thought, just as Jazmine added, “Faulty wiring, was what I was told. Sparked some explosion.”
Explosion…? So many pieces fell into place with that simple statement. The time her father had come home from one of his photography trips with an injury that caused him to lose two fingers. Someone “accidentally” setting off “real” charges instead of the fake ones they were supposed to use for photography. Her father forced into retirement, and their subsequent move from Red Springs, North Carolina, to California. It made her wonder how she’d ever believed her father’s story about his accident and his retiring. What had he told her at the time…? Because he couldn’t hold a camera steady anymore.
It was never about holding a camera; she knew that now.
It was about holding a gun.
“Is there something I should know about this?” Jazmine asked, watching Sydney carefully.
Sydney slid the photo closer to her. “Are you sure you don’t know the rest of these men? Have you ever seen any of them before?”
Jazmine picked up the photo this time, looked at it for quite a while, but then shook her head. “The one here, with the curly blond hair,” she said, indicating Robert Orozco. “Maybe once when Frank came out to visit Johnnie for Christmas. Well, stopped by on his way out of the country, was more like it. But I couldn’t say for sure, because the other guy waited in the car.”
“Do you ever remember the detectives questioning you about Johnnie’s statement, that my father had befriended him?”
“Of course. Johnnie came to me that night because of his burned hands. He’d gone there to get some money to get to this job that your father had arranged for him. Johnnie told me that someone killed him, then set the fire, all while he was hiding in the back.”
“Did he say how it was he got burned?”
“Yes.” And yet she hesitated, as though trying to decide what to tell Sydney. Finally, “He said he went to help your father. When Johnnie realized he was dead, he fled out the window.” She took a frustrated breath, glanced off to the side, before continuing. “ I’m the one who convinced him to call, tell them just what he told me.. .”
“And Johnnie never questioned how it was that Kevin found him?”
“What was there to question? He’d just had a new baby, was trying to kick the drugs, and when your father told Johnnie that someone at some church had submitted his name, who was he to discount his good fortune that at last things were going his way? The cops said he made it up, an excuse for being in the restaurant that night to steal the money. But why? What could it possibly matter now how your father found him?”
Sydney pointed to her father. “That man standing behind Frank White. That was my father. Kevin Fitzpatrick.”
This time it was Jazmine’s turn to stare, and Sydney could tell the moment she started to understand just what was going on, the dawning of realization. “Your father?”