Right.
He'd read somewhere that she'd optioned her life story to some Hollywood outfit, and he thought that was just perfect. She was a charlatan and a liar and had parlayed a couple of weeks with his famous client into a cottage industry among the politically correct. He had nothing but contempt for her and what she stood for.
But now the accordion folder was on the milk crate in the other room while he sat at his kitchen table pretending to go over Emil Balian's testimony about Mark's car as he chewed on his pizza and drank his second and third beers of the evening.
He kept the radio on low – Christmas carols. He didn't want to hear any random country music. None of Emil Balian's story made any more sense than it had the fifth and sixth times he'd reviewed it. The nosy neighbor didn't know what car he'd seen on the night of the murder.
The second period of the Warriors game was like the second period of all basketball games. Farrell was coming to the opinion that they should change the rules of pro basketball – give each team a hundred points and shorten the game to two minutes. You'd wind up with the same scores and save everybody a lot of wear and tear.
In the end, he swore to himself, flicked off the tube, then the radio, opened another beer, and sat on his futon with the folder in his lap, still hesitating.
What did Sam mean, this was for him, not the trial?
There were a lot of pages. The first was from a high-school yearbook -Diane Taylor with a beaming smile, the mortar-board graduation photo, under it the list of organizations she'd belonged to and awards she'd won -Rally Committee, Debate Society, Chess Club, Varsity Cheerleader, Biology Club, Swim Team, Bank of America Science Award, Lifetime Member California Scholarship Federation, National Merit Semi-finalist.
Wes flipped to the next pages. More yearbook, the individual photos that showed her as she'd been back then – vivacious, pretty, popular.
But so what? The newspapers were filled with file photos of mass murderers who'd looked like this and done this much in high school. You just couldn't tell. Wes had no trouble recalling his own high-school yearbook photo – with his Beatle haircut, he'd been voted 'Best Hair'. Now he was forty-seven percent bald by actual count. And that alone, he thought, pretty much said it all about the relevance of high-school pictures.
But he kept going, turning the pages within the folder, sipping his beer. A change in focus now – from photographs to Xeroxes of report cards and transcripts. Senior year – all A's. First semester at Stanford. A's. Second and third semester. A's. Fourth semester. A B, 2 C 's and an incomplete.
So something happened during the spring semester of her sophomore year. Wes had seen this, too, a million times. This was – he double-checked the date on the transcript – 1968. Drugs happened, was what. Martin Luther King got killed. Bobby Kennedy. The Chicago Democratic convention and Humphrey and then Richard Nixon. America fell apart. Wes wouldn't be surprised if 1968 set a record for grades going to hell – somebody ought to do a study, get a government grant. But what did it mean?
It meant nothing. It was yet another example of a person – Sam in this case – seeing what she was already disposed to see. He finished his beer and went to get another one. He should go to sleep.
But something tugged him back to the futon, to the folder. He owed Sam something, didn't he?
No, he didn't. She was wrong here and he was right. She had caused him all the pain, not the other way around. She was still hurting him.
The next stapled group of pages, forty-two of them, contained Xeroxes of diary entries in a confident female hand – two to a page, the first eighty-three days of the year, ending March 23rd.
He read it all. Diane was a chatty and charming diarist. She was still swimming competitively. She was taking German, Chemistry, Biology and Western Civ, and she was worried that they were too easy, that she wouldn't be prepared when she got to Med School. She had two close female friends – Maxine and Sharon – and on March 14th, she'd met Mark Dooher, the first male mentioned in a romantic context within the pages.
No drugs, no sex. No innuendos of either.
On March 17th, she went to an afternoon college baseball game with Mark Dooher. Burgers. A kiss good night.
The last line on March 22nd. Mark and I m.o. a little. First boyfriend this year. Whew! Thought it was my breath.
The last line on March 23rd. Tomorrow date with Mark. Can't wait.
Wes turned the last page of this section and frowned. The next stapled section seemed to be more Xeroxes of diary pages, again two to a page, beginning March 24th, but these pages had no writing. He flipped through, page by page.
Nothing for seventeen days, where before March 23rd, Diane had never skipped more than a day. Then, on April 10th, the handwriting had changed – subtly, but recognizable even to Wes. It was more cramped somehow, less confident.
Didn 't get out of bed. Too scared. Seeing everything different now, what people are capable of now. Since Mark. From that? I'm afraid I'll see him and then what. I've got to tell somebody. But he said he 'd kill me. I want to go home, but I can't leave school without saying why, but I can't think. I can't talk to anybody. God, my mom… how can I tell them?
And then another sheaf of blank pages until June 5th, when, presumably, school got out.
Wes was asking himself why hadn't he seen this before? Why hadn't Sam given it to Amanda Jenkins? If she'd done that, Wes would have read it in the discovery documents. But it hadn't been there.
But what did it mean anyway?
Legally, it was worthless. Purportedly, this was nothing but copies of pages, maybe from a diary, of twenty-some years before. The entire package could have been reconstructed, or originally created, in the past month. In no way was it evidence.
But, as Sam had said, it wasn't meant to be evidence. The pages weren't for the trial, they were for Wes.
CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT
On Monday morning at 9:35, Wes Farrell stood before the witness box in Department 26 and said good morning to Dr Harris. The two men had had a long talk on Sunday afternoon, discussing what they would say this morning. Harris had always liked Mark Dooher – had liked Sheila, too. The police had more or less set him up to make Mark look bad, and he was more than willing to try to work some damage control.
'Doctor,' Farrell began. 'On Friday, you testified that you lost a vial of blood from your office on May thirty-first. Have you ever located that vial of blood?'
'No.'
'In other words, it's lost.'
'That's right.'
'How did you discover it was lost?'
'It didn't come back from the lab when it was supposed to.'
'Oh!' Farrell was intrigued.'This blood then, was it supposed to go to a lab from your office?'
'Yes. We send our blood work out to the Pacheco Clinic where they've got a lab facility.'
'Is the Pacheco Clinic far from your office?'
'No. A mile, maybe a little more.'
'All right, then. Now, Doctor, how do they keep track of the blood they work on in this lab?'
'We have a requisition slip that we attach to the vials with tape. Then they fill in a report form for results.'
'Let's back up a minute, shall we? You attach your requisition slip to these vials with tape?'
'Yes.'
'What kind of tape?'
'Regular Scotch tape.'
'Scotch tape on glass vials. Hmm. Is that sticky enough, Doctor? Does the tape ever come off?'