Authors: Allison Leotta
“I miss her, too,” Anna said. “And you.”
“Do you want to come home, spend a few nights, and pack whatever you need to tide you over for the next few weeks? It seems like you’re going to be in Michigan for a while.”
Home. That sounded so good. She wanted Jack to hold her. She wanted to open her own arms, have Olivia fly into them, and bury her head in the sweet smell of the little girl’s hair.
She asked, “Has anything changed with your . . . situation?”
“Mm.” Jack cleared his throat and paused. “Not really. You were wiser than me. I did need time to sort things out. I’m sorting.”
She imagined the “sorting” and felt a little sick. She pictured him kissing another woman. She imagined him looking into the other woman’s eyes as he laid her back in his bed. Anna’s chest tightened painfully.
She said, “I better stay here in Michigan. If I e-mail you a list of things, would you mind sending them to Jody’s house?”
“Of course. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.”
“Thanks. Well. Good luck with everything.”
“You too.”
“Bye, Jack.” She hung up before an accidental “I love you” slipped out. She sat back and closed her eyes.
“You okay?” Cooper asked a few minutes later.
She opened her eyes, stood up, and straightened her spine. “I got the DOJ approval. That’s the important thing.”
Out on the courthouse steps, three local reporters came up to her. One guy held a video camera.
“Did she do it?” asked a journalist.
Anna stopped walking and looked at the camera.
“My sister is completely innocent. She is a gentle soul, a good person, and one of the kindest women I’ve ever known. She wouldn’t hurt a fly. I don’t know how the police could have come to the conclusion that she would hurt Coach Fowler, but with all due respect to them, that is completely wrong. I know there is a tendency to assume the worst when someone is charged with a crime like this, but I would ask the people of Holly Grove to reserve judgment.”
“Was she romantically involved with the coach?”
“Where was she on the night of his death?”
“Is it true that she works at GM? So she has expert knowledge of cars?”
Anna wasn’t getting into specifics now. If she only said a few sentences, that would be the sound bite the TV stations would play tonight. She could control the message by saying only what she wanted heard. She ignored the rest of the questions and walked down the steps. But she knew that she’d have to answer all of them soon.
26
T
hat night, Anna waited in the parking lot outside the central cell block for Jody to be released. Cooper waited with her, and she was grateful. Several prisoners had come out over the last few hours, but there was no sign of Jody. The warm summer air smelled of asphalt and broken people. She and Cooper sat on a bench facing the tall chain-link fence, watching the sun set behind the monolithic brick building. Cooper put an arm around her shoulders. She tensed, then relaxed and rested her head against his shoulder. She was grateful to find anything solid in Holly Grove.
The sky was dark when the chain-link gates finally slid apart and the facility’s large metal door creaked open. Jody looked worn and pale as she walked out the gate.
Anna stood and wrapped her sister in a hug. Jody laid her head on Anna’s shoulder and cried. Anna’s own chest tightened. She was the only thing standing between her sister and thousands of nights behind a fence like this one. They said good-bye to Cooper and drove home in the darkness.
“Did you get hurt in lockup?” Anna asked.
“No,” Jody said. “But I desperately need a shower. Can the ankle bracelet get wet?”
Anna didn’t know. The question didn’t come up on the prosecution side of things. “It must be able to get wet,” she concluded. “You’re supposed to have it on all the time. If it breaks, it’s not your fault.”
“I’m not so much worried about it breaking as it electrocuting me.”
When they got to Jody’s house, Anna watched her sister’s first
few moments of showering, to make sure she didn’t get fried. The bracelet’s red light blinked continually and Jody didn’t get shocked. Anna left a towel on the cabinet and gave her sister some privacy.
Afterward, Jody wanted to go right to bed, but Anna forced her to eat some soup first. “You have to take care of yourself,” she said. And that baby, she thought.
After the soup, Jody stood. “I can’t wait to sleep in my own bed.”
Anna wanted to ask her a hundred questions, but she knew they could wait. “Good night, Jody.”
Anna watched her walk down the hall. She was too keyed up herself to sleep, which was fine. Now that her sister had been charged, she would be able to get a lot of the information the police had. As a suspect, Jody wasn’t entitled to anything. As a defendant, she was.
Anna made some tea and turned on Jody’s computer. She wrote a letter to the prosecutor, requesting every item to which she was entitled under Michigan’s discovery rules, and more. All the police paperwork on the case, the criminal history of the defendant and victim, DNA testing results, expert reports, witness statements, grand jury transcripts, the video of Rob interrogating Jody. She requested the opportunity to look at all the items the police had taken from Jody’s house during the search warrant. She asked for a recording of any 911 calls made from the coach’s houses over the last ten years. She asked for the name of every police officer on the case, and for their disciplinary records. She named Rob Gargaron in particular.
When she tried to print the letter, Jody’s printer jammed. Anna’s attempts to fix it only made it groan and release a burnt-rubber scent. The machine looked to be ten years old and was covered in dust. Jody manufactured cars for a living. Her garage was full of wrenches and drills, but she didn’t use much ink. Anna worked with words. She didn’t own a drill but couldn’t go a week without a printer.
Anna went to Meijer, which was open twenty-four hours, and
wandered through the deserted aisles, picking out a new printer, ink cartridges, reams of paper, and legal pads. If she was going to represent Jody, she needed to be able to run her own little legal shop out of Jody’s spare bedroom. She also grabbed an extralarge bag of Starbucks Italian Roast.
Back at the house, she set up the guest bedroom until it resembled an office. When there was nothing else she could do—at around two
A.M.
—she finally changed into pajamas and lay down on the air mattress. She lay awake for a long time.
She awoke the next morning to the roar of a vacuum cleaner. She moaned, shuffled out of her bedroom, and found Jody, bright eyed and dressed, vacuuming the hallway.
“Why?” Anna asked groggily. “Couldn’t you have waited a few more hours?”
“It’s disgusting from all the police in here. They left crap all over. I want to erase every trace of those thugs invading my home.”
Anna closed her eyes and nodded. “Did you make coffee?”
“In the kitchen.”
The house smelled of artificial lemon and Pine-Sol. The living room carpet was scored with neat rows from a fresh vacuuming. A rag and a bottle of Fantastik sat on top of a counter. Jody was scrubbing the police off the house, while wearing an ankle bracelet. The actual dirt might be gone, but they had a long way to go to clear the mud from her name.
Later that morning, as Anna cleaned out the coffeepot, Jody sat at the shining kitchen table, called her ob-gyn, and made an appointment. When she hung up, she turned to Anna.
“I’m not sure what I’m gonna do with this baby,” Jody said. “But I want to explore my options. I’ve heard good things about open adoption.”
Anna nodded. “Can I come with you to your doctor’s appointment?”
“That would be great, Annie.”
“Do you want to contact the father and let him know?”
“I told you. There is no father.”
Jody pursed her lips and left the kitchen. Anna swallowed a wave of anger. She’d been willing to quit her job to protect Jody—and Jody wouldn’t even tell her who the father of her child was. Anna set the carafe down on the counter so hard it cracked. The web of fissures in the glass reminded her of the Corvette’s windshield.
• • •
Over the next few days, they settled into a routine. Jody’s wrist healed enough that she went back to work at the GM plant. Anna started working on appellate briefs that the U.S. Attorney’s Office sent. Her work was all research and writing: recapping the trials and arguing why the convictions should stand. While Jody was at the plant, the house was totally silent. Anna could go all day without using her voice.
Her first three appellate cases involved three sex-offense convictions: a priest who assaulted his altar boys, an ice-cream man who molested local kids, and an uncle who raped his niece. When Anna was in college, she and her friends had worried about a stranger jumping out of the bushes to rape them. Now that she was a prosecutor, she knew that predators were far more likely to be someone the victim knew and trusted. They used that trust to gain access. These days, Anna worried less about someone breaking in through a window, and more about who she allowed through her front door.
She enjoyed crafting the appellate briefs, knowing her work would help keep these predators off the streets. She missed the buzz and collegiality of her office—but there was a certain relief to being far away. If she were in the office, she’d be dealing with the gossip and sympathy from her wedding being called off. She’d have to see Jack in the hallways. This felt like a different world, and Anna didn’t mind being in a different world for now. She wondered if Cooper felt that way, too.
In the evenings, after Jody came home, the sisters ate dinner,
talked, and watched old movies. As long as they didn’t talk about the case or Jody’s pregnancy, their time together felt a bit like a vacation. Anna tried to savor it. If Jody went to jail, it would be a long time before they got to hang out again.
The first time the doorbell rang in the middle of the afternoon, Anna’s heartbeat sped up; the last doorbell ended with her sister’s arrest. But now it was a FedEx package arriving for her signature. It was from the Holly Grove DA’s office. She signed and ripped it open while the delivery guy was still walking back to his truck.
As she read it, the fear crept back in. It was the autopsy report. She parsed through the technical language, extracting a few key points. As Rob had confided, the coroner concluded that Owen Fowler’s cause of death was not the car accident, but blunt force trauma to the head that occurred prior to the crash. Anna looked at the pictures and diagrams and saw why. The coach’s skull had two areas of fracture. One was his forehead, in the area you would expect would hit the windshield. But the other was the left side of his skull. And that area was more badly fractured. Anna looked at the attached pictures. It showed long, straight indentations in the side of the coach’s charred skull. A few of the indentations appeared to have been made by something with a square corner. The coroner estimated that Owen Fowler had been struck at least six times with something that was not part of the car.
The coroner was unable to tell what time the coach died. By the time the fire was put out, his body had been completely exsanguinated—his blood burned away. His flesh was mostly gone, leaving a charred black skeleton. However, his eyeballs had remained intact. Protected inside his skull, they survived the heat of the blaze. The coroner was able to extract some liquid from them and determine that there was the presence of both alcohol and metabolites for the drug gamma-hydroxybutyrate, also known as GHB.
Alcohol was expected, although the coroner couldn’t determine how much the coach had been drinking. Fluid in the eye didn’t provide a blood alcohol level like blood did. Nor could the coroner determine how much GHB the coach had in his system or when
he’d ingested it. Fluid in the eyeball held on to chemicals for longer than blood did, and for an uncertain time.
Anna was familiar with GHB. In her experience, she saw it used for two purposes. One was as a date-rape drug, which if taken in sufficient quantity, could make a person black out. The other was as a steroid substitute for athletes, who used it to build muscle. Both purposes were illegal—it was a controlled substance with no legal use. The coroner didn’t speculate on how or when the GHB got into the coach’s system.
Anna’s cell phone rang from her pocket. She looked up. She was still standing in her sister’s front vestibule; she had read the whole document right there. She answered her phone.
“Hello?”
“May I speak to Anna Curtis?”
“This is.”
“Hello, Ms. Curtis, this is Desiree Williams, from the Holly Grove DA’s Office.”
“Oh, hi. I just got your package. You can call me Anna.”
“Call me Desiree. I understand you’re a prosecutor in D.C.?”
“Yes.”
They talked about their backgrounds. Desiree had graduated from the University of Michigan Law School a few years before Anna had graduated from Harvard Law. They both had been debaters in college and knew a few of the same people.
“Small world,” Anna said. In slightly different circumstances, they would have been colleagues, friends. Now, this woman was trying to put her sister in jail. “I’m glad you called. The autopsy report noted the presence of GHB in the coach’s system. I wondered if the government has a theory on that?”
“Yes,” Desiree said. “It seems that he used the substance to build muscle. His wife says he was always diligent about staying in shape, and in recent years he started to try . . . alternative methods.”
“Thanks,” Anna said. The prosecutor had no obligation to tell her that.
“You’re welcome. But the reason I’m calling is to discuss your
discovery requests. I’ll obviously give you everything required under the rules. But some of these requests—I don’t see a basis for them. For example, the 911 calls from the coach’s house.”
“So there
are
some?”
“Nothing that involves your sister.”
“They involve his wife?”
“I’m not getting into that. I’ve listened to them and they’re not relevant.”