Chương 6
A car stopped in front of him.
Harold leaned across the truck and opened the passenger door.
Leo stayed on the curb.
“How’d you find me?”
“I didn’t. I was going to Evelyn’s.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“No. But it’s true.”
“Where’s Cole?”
“He let me leave.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“He said he wanted you to reach Evelyn.”
Leo stood. “Why?”
“He wouldn’t say.”
“That man is having a very convenient moral awakening.”
Harold rested his forearms on the steering wheel. “I don’t think morality has anything to do with it.”
Leo picked up the tool bag.
“You could have given him the binders.”
“I could have.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Your father trusted me.”
Leo stared at him.
Harold looked away first.
“That still means something to me,” the old man said.
Evelyn Rusk worked from a second-floor office above a bail bond agency. The stairwell smelled of cigarette smoke even though a NO SMOKING sign hung at every landing.
Her receptionist had left for the day. Evelyn was standing in the doorway with her coat over one arm when Leo and Harold reached the top of the stairs.
She recognized Leo immediately.
Age had made her face thinner. Her dark hair, once cut bluntly at her jaw, was threaded with gray and gathered at the back of her neck. She wore reading glasses on a chain and held a paper cup of coffee.
For several seconds, nobody spoke.
Then she said, “You’re out.”
Leo almost laughed.
“So I’ve been told.”
Evelyn looked at Harold, then at the tool bag.
Her coat slipped from her arm.
“Where did you get that?”
“Locker 214.”
She stepped back into the office and locked the door after them.
The room had the same mismatched furniture Leo remembered: metal filing cabinets, two visitor chairs with cracked vinyl, a desk permanently buried beneath legal pads. A dying plant leaned toward the window.
Evelyn placed her coffee on a shelf.
“Is Thomas with you?”
Leo watched her face carefully.
“You knew he was alive.”
She sat down.
“Leo—”
“How long?”
“I was not certain.”
“How long?”
“Eight months.”
He placed both hands on the back of a chair.
Evelyn’s voice lowered. “I received a package. No return address. It contained copies of documents from your case and a note asking me to review them.”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“And some of them indicated misconduct. Some were incomplete. Some could not be authenticated. Your father claimed he had more.”
“Did you tell anybody?”
“I contacted the state innocence unit without naming Thomas. They asked for original records or a cooperating witness. I had neither.”
“You had me.”
“You had pleaded guilty.”
“Because you told me to.”
Evelyn removed her glasses.
“I advised you to accept an offer that cut your likely sentence in half.”
“Based on evidence you now think was planted.”
“Based on what was available to me then.”
“You didn’t ask why the gun entered evidence before they found it?”
“I did not have that log.”
Leo pulled it from the binder and threw it onto her desk.
The paper slid across a legal pad and struck her coffee.
The cup tipped.
Coffee ran over the desk, dripping onto the floor.
Evelyn grabbed tissues. Harold found a wastebasket and held it beneath the edge.
For several absurd seconds, all three of them worked to stop coffee from soaking files.
Leo stood there breathing hard, ashamed of the cup and angrier because he was ashamed.
Evelyn dropped the wet tissues into the wastebasket.
“My client was twenty-four,” she said. “He admitted driving two armed men to a warehouse. One witness identified his car. His fingerprints were on a crowbar found inside. The prosecutor had a recorded call in which Darren Pike told Leo to keep his mouth shut. One codefendant was dead and the other missing. The offer was twelve years with eligibility for early release. I advised him to take it.”
“You’re talking about me like I’m not standing here.”
“I’m telling you what I knew.”
“You knew I said I never went inside.”
“Yes.”
“You believed me?”
Evelyn hesitated.
Leo nodded slowly. “There it is.”
“I believed you might be telling the truth.”
“Might.”
“I had forty-two open felony cases.”
“That’s not my fault.”
“No. It is not.”
Her acceptance stopped him.
Evelyn pressed both palms flat against the desk.
“I failed to investigate the evidence log. I failed to push hard enough on the informant relationship. I believed the prosecutor when he said Darren Pike had no formal agreement with Detective Vey. I should not have believed him without records. Those are facts. Another fact is that you drove the car.”
“I know what I did.”
“Do you?”
Leo stepped around the chair.
Harold moved between them, not dramatically, simply placing his thin body where Leo would have to notice it.
Evelyn continued.
“I’m not saying that to punish you. I’m saying it because any effort to clear your conviction will fail if you present yourself as innocent of everything. You were manipulated. That is not the same as being blameless.”
Leo reached into the lunchbox and removed his mother’s ring.
He set it on Evelyn’s desk beside the wet papers.
“Tell me where my father is.”
Evelyn looked at the ring.
“I don’t know.”
“Cole says he knows where he was twelve days ago.”
At the name, Evelyn went still.
“You spoke to Adrian Cole?”
“He spoke to me.”
“Did you give him anything?”
“No.”
“Did he follow you here?”
“I don’t know.”
Evelyn crossed to the window and pulled the blinds aside by half an inch.
A black SUV was parked across from the courthouse.
She let the blind fall.
Harold lowered himself into a chair.
“He wanted Leo to reach you,” he said.
“That does not mean he is helping.”
“What does he want?” Leo asked.
May you like
Evelyn opened the blue spiral notebook.
Thomas had filled it with dates, names, license plates, and short observations. Several pages contained columns of payments. Others documented meetings between Grant Hale, Detective Ross Vey, and Marcus Vale.
