1 - 11-2
1900 Words
“Specializing in Gustavo Ochoa,” Harper said. “Sounds like you’ve grown attached to him.”
“I’ve known Gus for seven years. He’s gentle and honest. I can’t imagine him killing anyone. The more I learn about his case, the more convinced I am that he didn’t murder that woman.”
She paused for another sip of beer.
“When I applied for post-conviction relief,” she continued, “my co-counsel and I blew several big holes in the prosecution case. Hearing was before Judge Bennett. Same judge I had today. He wrote in his opinion that Gus might not be guilty. But he refused to grant him a third trial.”
“’Course not,” Harper said. “Judge has to run for re-election every four years. He’s not going to tell twenty-four registered voters who served on the first two juries that they wasted their time. Much better for him if the appellate division takes the heat.”
“That’s where we’re headed. The State Supremes agreed to hear the appeal. I got a court order transferring the most important exhibits to Olympia, so they’d be available to the justices. And that’s when the county clerk tells me he can’t locate a glass slide. Supposedly, it contained a fiber removed from the victim’s body. When I recovered the exhibit, I could tell it was a hair.”
“My, my,” Harper mused. “Misplaced and mislabeled evidence. How careless.”
“Careless my ass.”
Lifting her pint, she drained it and felt the alcohol loosening her up.
Eyeing Harper, she recalled her conversation with Channing. Best not to get too loose with him. Especially when he wasn’t giving her anything helpful.
Before she could use her empty glass as an excuse to end the evening, he was on his feet. He headed for the bar with both their glasses. When he set the refilled pints on the table, she reached for hers.
“Thanks.”
He grinned. “Long story. Thirsty work.”
He was right. Her mouth had gone dry from all the talking. Lifting her glass, she swallowed deeply. “Short version is the forensic scientist who prepared the slide testified in both trials that he’d passed it on to the local cops. They claimed they never got it. Three months ago, the forensic guy discovered it in another file in his office.”
She emphasized “discovered” as if the word had quotes around it.
“And that made you suspicious.”
“The hair was blond. Of course it hadn’t come from a brown man. I arranged for an expert to analyze it. Test showed it hadn’t come from the victim, either. Damn, a foreign pubic hair on her body.”
Harper’s eyebrows rose. “You’re saying the hair wasn’t introduced into evidence at the original trial?”
“Not by the prosecution and not by the defense. Completely unacceptable. I figured the state appellate lawyer handling the case would agree to re-try the case. She didn’t.”
“She?” Harper’s brow wrinkled. “You mean Marianne Freemantle?”
“You know her?”
“Seen her in court.”
“Makes two of us.”
She stopped herself from saying more. Harper didn’t need to hear how much she hated the woman. “So I went back to Judge Bennett. Who said—”
Harper interrupted. “‘One pubic hair is not enough.’ And I agree. It isn’t. You haven’t shown it came from a viable suspect.”
She opened her mouth to protest.
Harper held up both hands, palms out, to stop her.
“You clearly believe the neighbor killed the old woman. You tie that hair and those fingerprints to him, you’ll get a new trial and you’ll get your client off.”
“Great idea.” She puffed air between her lips to add a derisive sound.
“Except for him being dead and buried.”
“So exhume him,” he retorted. “Get his DNA. Take his prints.”
Damn, Harper was twisted.
She hadn’t considered digging up the dead to free Gus.
“I’m glad I called you,” she told Harper. “Your suggestion isn’t what I expected to hear. But it’s a good one. I’ll think it over.”
“Not what I expected to say, either, since that remark by the judge today is the most I’ve heard about Gustavo Ochoa’s case.”
Harper leaned back and pushed his empty mug to one side.
“The only client of yours I’m familiar with is Jared Nelson,” he said.
He’d named Quinn’s life imprisonment appeal client.
She struggled to wrench her mind away from Gus.
“You thought I wanted your views on Jared?”
“The most cold-blooded criminal I’ve ever encountered,” Harper said.
Her brain refused to absorb the switch.
“I’m not Jared’s lead attorney.” She shifted in her seat and added, “I’m not that familiar with his case.”
Undeterred, Harper continued. “His wife testified that he attacked and raped her. Yet he calmly repeats that he wasn’t home. How can Jared Nelson expect anyone to believe his own wife didn’t recognize him?”
He looked at her expectantly.
As if she’d reveal Quinn’s strategy for the case. Or more accurately, his lack of one. She made a show of checking her watch. Seven-thirty. “Sorry, I have to cut this conversation short.”
Standing, she added, “Thanks again for the advice and the beer. And Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas.”
Harper stood, too.
She bumped into him twice as they struggled into their coats. Beer made her clumsy. Might also make her talk too much.
Playing it safe, she declined Harper’s offer to drive her home.
They parted at the exit and he grinned at her.
“You have a Happy New Year, Little Buckaroo.”
She couldn’t help giggling.
“You, too, Farm Boy.”
Buoyed by the beer, the new idea for Gus, and the plain silliness of imagining riding in the Pendleton Roundup, she walked briskly home alone along frozen sidewalks. Collecting her briefcase from the Buick, she climbed the exterior staircase to the covered walkway fronting her apartment.
Her front door opened directly into a single box-shaped room, flanked along the right-hand wall by a tiny kitchen, walk-in closet, and bathroom. Small, but hers.
She’d raced off to Hammond County this morning, leaving the sleeper sofa unfolded. The homemade quilt with the not-quite-right sunbonnet-girl pattern welcomed her back.
She’d repainted the walls three times since moving in. They shone glossy white, a pristine backdrop for her “prison art,” drawings sent by grateful clients who had no other gifts to give her.
Gus’s colored-pencil sketch of a family picnic held pride of place. On it, bright sun shone in an azure sky. Small figures spread across a grassy meadow, clustering under willows, wading in the stream. He’d filled the paper with tiny, intricate details. At the center, he’d placed himself, his family, and her.
She was flanked by his sturdy white-haired mother Luisa and his graying older half-sister Yvonne. His lawyer—his carrot-topped Nora—burned like a flame in that hopeful future landscape.
Her first case, Gus had been part of her life for seven years. He was more than a client—he mattered. And he was innocent. She was certain of that.
She’d do everything in her power to set him free.
Emptying her pockets as she undressed for bed, she remembered to turn her cell back on and found she’d missed one call.
She recognized the number. It belonged to the phone used by inmates at Oregon’s correctional facility for women.
The automated message in her voice mail intoned the name of her caller in two different voices: “Winifred. Yates.”
Uneasy, she drummed her fingers on the bedside table. She’d made her pre-Christmas visit to Winnie last weekend. What had come up in the past seven days that was too urgent to crawl past the censors in email or a letter?
2 Marianne FreemantleMarianne Freemantle frowned at her email. It was Saturday morning and she was at home in her upstairs den. “Call me,” read the message from Zane Carter, who worked for Oregon’s attorney general.
All their previous communication had been via email. What had he chosen not to put in writing? She pulled out her cell and tapped in the number he’d provided.
When Zane answered, she heard the clink of a spoon against china along with his muffled and high-pitched, “Hello.”
The man’s girlish voice did not go with his macho first name. And why was a busy attorney eating cereal at ten-thirty in the morning?
She identified herself and asked, “Am I interrupting your breakfast?”
“All finished.” He swallowed whatever was clogging his mouth. “Thanks for getting back to me so quick.”
“What’s up?”
Carter’s response was stiff. “We won’t name your person of interest during this phone conversation, okay?”
Had he developed second thoughts about the task he’d agreed to do for her?
“I made a legitimate request,” she reminded him. “An inquiry concerning a resident of my state who’d been incarcerated in yours.”
“Might have told me how she’s earning her living these days. I did a records check. Confirmed your person spent twenty-five months at the former Oregon correctional institution for women near Salem. I dug a little deeper and learned she shared her cell with only one inmate while incarcerated. Winifred Yates, a thirty-five year old white woman serving three consecutive sentences totaling nineteen-plus years for felonies committed in 1997.”
The time inside implied serious crime. Yates had hurt somebody. She might be willing to hurt her former cellmate.
She scribbled notes while she did the math.
“So Wicked Winnie was twenty-one when they put my person in her cell. She remember her fondly?”
Carter’s laugh was sour. “Too fondly for your purposes. According to Winifred, your person is a candidate for sainthood. Not only did she turn her life around after release and become a lawyer. She helps the downtrodden, including her old cellmate. Who’s very attractive, by the way. Beautiful black hair and lots of charm. She was real cute, flirting with me.”
With him? She’d expected Carter to send an investigator.
“You saw the woman in person?”
“Didn’t want to involve anyone else at this stage. I had an appointment with another inmate at the same facility. Found time to fit in Winifred. My schedule’s a little lighter these days. Appeal process has gotten leisurely.”
By “these days,” Carter meant since Oregon’s governor banned executions in the state. She believed the ban to be a huge mistake and feared her own governor would soon copy Oregon’s.
“Glad you can get something positive from that,” she said.
“Not entirely negative, at least,” Carter said. “Anyway, Winifred and your person must’ve been quite the jailhouse couple.”
Intrigued, she jotted “lesbian?” on her pad. “You mean they were playing house?”
“No suggestion by Winifred that they were more than friends. But both of them being in their twenties. Winifred being such a looker. Your person making herself so helpful to everyone. The combination had to be attention getting.”
Marianne drew a line through “lesbian?” and moved on. “What do you mean, my person is helping the cellmate?”
“Your person is trying to get Winifred out of jail.”
“Of course,” she said. “No doubt she was wrongly convicted. No one doing time ever committed the crime.”
“Winifred did,” Carter retorted. “She confessed to the Springfield home invasion. Copped to one count of first degree robbery, one of second, and one of second degree kidnapping.”
Marianne let her surprise color her voice. “And that plea bargain put her inside for two decades?”
Carter grunted. “She may not have gotten the best advice. Each count means a separate mandatory sentence. The end result is she’s doing twice as much time as women convicted of manslaughter.”
He was making an editorial comment.
She countered. “Society is better off keeping violent criminals in jail. And I understand that the Oregon law is like Washington’s mandatory minimum sentences. The inmate gets no time off for good behavior and has no possibility of parole.”
“Right,” Carter confirmed. “Basic philosophy is lock’em up and throw away the key.”
“So what can my person do to get the cellmate released earlier?” she asked.
“Remember, Winnie has three separate sentences, served consecutively. She’s completed the first and second and part of the third.”
- Writer
