The door opened and a downcast Lorenz walked in. I could see Gail out in the hallway. He closed the door.
"It was four, wasn't it?" I asked him.
Lorenz was big and burly, a sort of sitcom-father stereotype with a more gritty, Northeastern twist. I sensed immediately that I had disappointed him. He didn't need to say anything. I had chosen the wrong one. It was number four.
"You were in a hurry to get out of there," he said.
"It was four."
"I can't tell you anything," he said. "Uebelhoer wants an affidavit. She wants you to detail the lineup for her. Tell us exactly why you chose five."
"Where is she?" I was suddenly frantic. I felt myself collapsing inward. I had failed them all and this was the wrap-up. Uebelhoer would go on to other cases, better victims; she had no time to waste with a failure like me.
"The suspect has agreed to provide samples of his pubic hair," Lorenz said, and couldn't help but grin. "Counsel has elected to be present in the men's room for extraction."
"Why would he do that?" I asked.
"Because he has reason to believe that the hair found on your person the night of the incident may not match his."
"But it will," I said. "He has to know that."
"His lawyer weighed the odds and decided to do it. It looks good if they volunteer. We need to take a statement. You sit tight."
He went to find paper and to attend to things I couldn't know. The uniform left me alone in the room. "You'll be safe in here," he said.
During that time I put two and two together: I had identified the wrong man. Directly afterward, Paquette had agreed to voluntary extraction of a pubic hair from his client. Uebelhoer had told me the defense was building a case based on misidentification. A panicked white girl saw a black man on the street. He spoke familiarly to her and in her mind she connected this to her rape. She was accusing the wrong man. The lineup went directly to this.
I sat down at the conference table. I brought it all together in my mind. Thought of what had just happened to me. I had been so afraid, I had chosen the man who scared me most, the one who had been looking at me. I felt I had just caught on-too late-to a trick.
Lorenz was going to be back any minute. I needed to rebuild my case.
When Lorenz returned, he smiled while telling me that Madison's pubic hair had to be plucked, not cut. He was trying to be jolly in front of me.
He took an affidavit. It noted that I had entered the room at 11:05 and left at 11:11.1 quickly gave my reasons for ruling out the men in positions one, two, and three. I compared four and five and noted they looked similar, with four's features being a bit "flatter and broader" than the suspect's. I said that four had been looking down the whole time and that I chose five because he was looking right at me. I added that I had felt rushed and defense counsel's refusal to allow a member of Rape Crisis in the lineup room had further intimidated me. I said that I never got a good look at four's eyes and said again that I chose five because he was looking at me.
The room was quiet for a moment, save the noise of Lorenz's hunt-and-peck typing.
"Alice," he said, "it is now my duty to inform you that you failed to pick out the suspect." He did not tell me which one was the suspect. He couldn't. But I knew.
He noted that he had informed me of my failure, and I stated, for the record, that in my opinion the men in positions four and five were almost identical.
Uebelhoer came into the room. There were other people with her. Police and Tricia now. Uebelhoer was angry, but she smiled nonetheless.
"Well, we got the hair out of the bastard," she said.
"Officer Lorenz told me I chose the wrong one," I said.
"She thinks it was four," Lorenz said.
The two of them looked at each other for a moment. Gail turned to me.
"Of course you chose the wrong one," she said. "He and his attorney worked to make sure you'd never have a chance."
"Gail," Lorenz warned.
"She has a right to know. She knows anyway," she said, looking at him. He thought I needed protection; she knew I craved the truth.
"The reason why it took so long, Alice, is because Madison had his friend come down and stand next to him. We had to send a car to the prison to get him here. They wouldn't go ahead until he showed."
"I don't understand," I said. "He's allowed to have his friend stand next to him?"
"It's the defendant's right," she said. "And it makes good sense on a certain level. If the others in the lineup don't appear to the suspect to look enough like him, he can choose someone to stand beside him."
"Can we say that?" I was beginning to see a window of explanation here. I might still have a chance.
"No," she said, "it goes against the defendant's rights. They really worked a number on you. He uses that friend, or that friend uses him, in every lineup they do. They're dead ringers."
I listened to everything she said. Uebelhoer had seen it all, but still was passionate enough to get mad.
"So the eyes?"
"His friend gives you a look that's scary. He can tell when you're standing in front of the mirror and he psyches you out. Meanwhile, the suspect looks down like he doesn't even know where or why he's there. Like he got lost on the way to the circus."
"And we can't use that in court?"
"No. I stated a formal objection before the lineup, so it would be included in the record, but that's just a formality. It's not admissible unless he lets prior knowledge slip."
The unfairness of this seemed unconscionable to me.
"Rights are weighted on the side of the defendant," Gail said. I hungered for more facts. In those moments, where I could easily have slipped away, facts were my life. "That's why the law uses words like 'reasonable doubt.' It's his attorney's job to provide that doubt. The lineup was a risk. We knew something like this could happen, but there was no photo in the mug books and he waived the prelim. We had no choice. We can't refuse a lineup."
"What about the hair?"
"If we're lucky, it will match all seventeen points available on a hair. But even hairs taken from the same head can vary on these points. Paquette decided the gamble was worth it. He's probably going with the story that you lost your virginity voluntarily that night and were sorry about it, that eventually you would have blamed any black man that ran into you on the street. He'll do his best to make you look bad. But we're not going to let that happen."
"What's next?"
"The grand jury," she said.
I was miserable. At two, the next big leg of this journey would begin and I had to be ready for it. I'm sure I spent that time trying to clear my mind of my failure that morning, trying not to let the picture of me that Madison's attorney was building invade my mind. I did not call my mother. I had no good news, though I did have Uebelhoer. I focused on the fact that she had been present for the pubic extraction.
At two I was brought into a waiting area outside the grand jury room. Gail was inside. We had not had time, as she had wished, to talk beforehand. She had been busy working on questions through lunch and although I was scheduled for two, there were other witnesses appearing before me. Tricia, with my assurances, had left following the lineup.
While I waited, I tried to think about an Italian test I had to take the next day. I got out a worksheet of sample sentences from my knapsack and stared at them. I had made some small talk about this course to the officer who'd picked me up that morning. I wished I'd had Tes s with me. I had a deep fear of alienating her and Toby by being a drain on them because of the rape, so I tried to be as assiduous in their classrooms as I was with anything concerning my case.