“What about time of death?” Nick asked.
“It’s a little early to say definitely”-it was a disclaimer Nick always expected and usually received-“but rigor mortis has not set in yet, and from the coagulation of the blood in the ankles I’d say offhand that everything shut down about ten o’clock.”
Coroners, Nick thought. They have such an interesting way of describing death.
“Thanks, Dan. I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot of each other in the next few days and weeks.”
“Yeah,” Dan groaned. “You know, Nick, I was scheduled to be off tonight. Just my luck to get one of these high-profile cases where everybody is breathing down your neck.”
“I’m with you,” Nick replied. “Who the fuck was this guy anyway?”
“Some super-rich oil guy.”
“Jesus. Let’s see if we can put this to bed as quickly as possible.”
“Sure thing, Nick. Okay if I take the body? I want to get it out of here before the reporters start sticking their heads down his shorts looking for a scoop.”
Nick laughed. It wasn’t far from the truth. “He’s all yours.”
“Thanks, Nick.”
As Nick watched Dan Jenkins assemble his people and equipment to transport the body to the morgue, the assistant chief, Ralph Hitchens, sidled up next to him.
“Looks like a robbery gone bad,” he said, trying to sound like he knew what he was talking about. In twenty years in homicide, Nick had never seen Ralph Hitchens at a murder scene before.
Nick stifled the urge to say, No, Sherlock, it looks like a murder. Instead, he just nodded in agreement as he watched Dan Jenkins’s young assistant load the body onto a stretcher. He didn’t like to miss any of the details, especially in a high-profile case like this.
“Any thoughts so far, Detective?” Hitchens asked.
Nick couldn’t bring himself to ignore the question. The assistant chief was nothing more than a glorified pencil pusher: they had entered the academy together and graduated at the same time, but while Nick went directly to the street, old Ralphie boy became some captain’s clerk. Nobody who knew Ralph Hitchens back then would ever have picked him as a leader of men. They might have picked him as the guy most likely to piss his pants in a gun battle, but that was about it. He rose in rank the way most of them did, sticking their nose up enough asses until they were rewarded for the endeavor. Politics, Nick thought with that exact picture in his mind. No wonder it stinks!
“Well, it’s definitely a homicide, Chief. Bullet wound to the head,” Nick deadpanned. Over to his left, Nick noticed that Tony Severino, recently returned from his crowd-management duties, was fighting to keep from laughing out loud.
Ralph Hitchens’s jaw tensed. He clearly was not amused by the remark.
“I want this case wrapped up quickly, Walsh. You’ve got an eyewitness.”
Is this shithead for real? Nick fumed to himself. Yeah, Chief, there’s an eyewitness who saw someone next to the body. That narrows it down to eight million people, you schmuck! He decided to pull the prick’s chain a little longer. What the hell, I’m vested.
“I’ll get right on it, Chief. An unidentified male shouldn’t be too hard to find.”
As he said the words, Nick realized all he needed was a description to solve the case. Whoever did this crime was probably in the system somewhere.
Thanks, Chief! he said to himself. I wouldn’t have thought of that right away if I hadn’t been busting your balls.
3
Florida, 1998
Clang! The gates of the maximum-security state prison in Starke, Florida, slammed shut behind Jack Tobin as he entered. It wasn’t an unfamiliar sound. This had been his work for the last two years-representing people on death row. There were aspects of the endeavor that he loved and aspects that he hated. One of the things he hated most was entering the prison, with its dank odors and its chaotic sounds bouncing off the bare walls and steel bars and ricocheting up and down the corridors. The racket reminded him of the Central Park Zoo when he was a kid, when it was the sounds of animals that rang in his ears and the smells of their excrement that filled his nostrils. Zoos had changed since then. Apparently, some experts decided that animals thrived in a more open, natural environment. Maybe someday a lightbulb will go off somewhere and they’ll realize that a better environment might work for human beings as well, Jack thought as he walked down the corridor and into the visiting room accompanied by a uniformed guard.
He was visiting an inmate named Henry Wilson. Jack did not know the complete details of the case. He knew that Wilson, who was black, had a rap sheet about six miles long, that he had been a criminal and a drug addict his entire adult life, and that he’d been convicted seventeen years ago of murdering a drug dealer named Clarence Waterman.
Jack had been a very successful civil trial lawyer in Miami for twenty years. He had started his own firm, and when it grew to one hundred lawyers and he could no longer stand it, he had negotiated a twenty-million-dollar buyout of his interest. He had planned on retiring to the little town of Bass Creek near Lake Okeechobee and becoming a part-time country lawyer and a full-time fisherman. Other matters intervened, however. First, the governor offered him the position of state’s attorney for that county. Even though he didn’t want the job, he couldn’t say no. And then he learned that his best friend from his childhood years in New York, Mike Kelly, had died, and that Mike’s son, Rudy, was on death row in Florida. Thus began a quest to save Rudy from the electric chair. It was through the process of representing Rudy that Jack realized he had a calling and that his particular calling was to represent death-row inmates.
The visiting room was as stark and uninviting as the rest of the facility, with nothing in it but a steel table and steel chairs bolted to the ground. Jack took his seat and waited for the sound of Henry Wilson coming down the hall. It was always the same. You heard them long before you saw them: chains clanging, feet shuffling. Still, Jack was shocked when Henry Wilson walked in the room. He was an imposing figure, standing at least six feet, five inches tall with a wide, thick, muscular frame. His brown eyes were dark and inset, and the corners of his lips turned downward in a perpetual scowl. He looked like he could break his shackles, overpower the guards, and walk through the walls to freedom anytime he wanted.
Jack also noticed that there were three guards with Henry Wilson instead of the usual two and they were watching Wilson’s every move. Jack took his cue from them.
Henry shuffled in and stood in front of the bolted chair on the opposite side of the table. “Hello, Mr. Wilson, I’m Jack Tobin,” he said rising from his seat. He did not offer his hand because he noticed that Henry’s cuffs were shackled to a waist belt. “I’m a lawyer.”
Henry Wilson looked across at the man standing on the opposite side of the table. He appeared to be in his late forties, early fifties, and he had a tough, weathered look about him-kind of like an old marine. At six-two, Jack was not quite as tall as Henry; his thinning gray hair was short and he looked fit, even muscular. Henry Wilson said nothing in reply to Jack’s introduction. He simply gave the lawyer a bored look.
They both sat down, Henry filling his chair and then some. Jack could feel his disdain.
“I’m with Exoneration. It’s a death penalty advocacy group located here in the state of Florida,” Jack continued. The mention of Exoneration seemed to strike a chord with Henry. He finally spoke.