Injustice (12 page)

“Something like that,” Tina said. “Doing some research.”

“I try not to think about it anymore,” Cunningham said. “It was pretty disturbing.”

“Barn,” I said, “let's you and me go look at the reservoir while Mommy has a meeting.” I took him outside; we didn't need him exposed to talk about decomposed corpses. Tina and Arthur Cunningham didn't talk long. They were out within fifteen minutes. We got into our car and followed Cunningham to the site where he'd found the body.

“Do you really need to see the place?” I asked Tina.

“No,” she said. “But I'd rather this guy thinks I'm a reporter or something. I've been vague with him. If he knows I'm a lawyer, he might call the state prosecutor and say that a defense attorney has been poking around. They might be tempted to hide something. Nobody wants to have their screwups uncovered.”

“I think your job is making you paranoid,” I said. “How was the conversation? Did you learn anything?”

She glanced over the seat back at Barnaby. “Later,” she said.

Cunningham led us down old logging roads through the woods to an open area that had once been a hay field but was being taken over by weeds and willow saplings. At the edges of the clearing were alders that already had a few tinges of autumn yellow. I could see a stone wall through the trees. ZZ and the guy's yellow Lab jumped out and started sniffing each other's butts and running in growly circles. The Lab brushed against Barnaby, knocking him down, but Barn bounced back up laughing. I put him on my shoulders and started trotting after the dogs so Tina could talk to Cunningham.

Again, they didn't talk long. Tina called me back to the car. We thanked the guy and drove away.

“Cunningham told me about a paddleboat and canoe rental ten miles up the shore,” Tina said.

“Barn, you want to go try a paddleboat?”

“Yeah yeah yeah.”

So we drove up the shore to a place with a yard full of boats. “Just in time,” a woman said, “we close for the season tomorrow.”

She put us in a blue plastic paddleboat. Barn sat on my lap in
his huge life jacket, and we pedaled out toward the other side of the reservoir, which was remote and undeveloped. I'd once been present at a crime scene over there when the troopers dug up the body of a young informant who'd been executed. That was a long time ago, though. Now I thought it would be fun to explore the reservoir sometime in a canoe. Maybe even bring a tent. Tina and I occasionally talked about going canoe camping. I took Tina's hand and held on to it as we pedaled our way across the water to the other side. Then back.

On the way home, we took a detour to the south through Lukus County to visit a crafts shop that Tina had heard about.

Lukus County, along with its county seat, Lukusville, is notorious in our state. Originally located fifty miles to the north, Lukusville was settled by northern European immigrants. They farmed the fertile floodplain of the Slippery River Valley. But then the river was dammed for the reservoir, and all that good farmland became lake bottom. Thousands of residents moved south onto the unfarmable wetlands the state offered them in compensation. Poverty ensued and brought with it all the predictable social problems.

State and federal officials had turned a blind eye for most of the century. Even as recently as twenty years ago, Lukus County led the state in alcohol and drug abuse, domestic assault, high school dropouts, fetal alcohol syndrome, suicide, incest, and STDs. The increasingly resentful, poorly educated, and unhealthy residents of Lukus County were suspicious of any intrusions by police, social workers, public health officials, and anyone else connected to the government. It was our own little piece of Appalachia. I knew lawyers who'd done public interest law in Lukus County back then. They had stories of the region that would curl your toes.

Things were improving, though, and Lukus County was coming into the modern age. Locals used to have to drive almost two hours to the city if they needed a hospital; school kids got bused an hour each way to high school. But now they had a top-notch medical
clinic and a modern new high school. There were jobs programs. There was an extension branch of the university.

The new craft shop near the reservoir was one of Lukus County's attempts to create some regional pride. It was a tiny place off the highway. I was sure it couldn't stay open if it weren't subsidized. The crafts were old-world stuff: beaded hangings, ceramic bells, hand-knit mittens and sweaters, painted eggs, glass wind chimes, nesting dolls. Tina picked out some Christmas-tree ornaments.

An elderly woman sat behind the counter knitting with arthritic hands.

“You have some lovely things,” Tina said.

“Yes, well, it's a community endeavor,” the woman said. “Anybody in Lukus County can sell here.”

That explained the variability of quality.

We heard a crash. Tina and I ran back around the corner and found a large stained-glass lampshade ruined on the floor, and Barn standing there, deciding whether to deflect any recriminations with a tsunami of tears. Tina snapped him up into her arms, and I started pushing the wreckage into a pile with my shoe. The woman brought a dustpan, brush, and wastebasket. “There, there,” she said to Barn. “These things happen.”

“We'll pay for it,” Tina and I said in unison.

When everything was cleaned up, the woman went in the back and got a home-baked chocolate chip cookie for Barn.

Barnaby fell asleep on the way home.

“Okay, so tell,” I said. “What did you learn from Mr. Cunningham?”

“Quite a bit,” Tina said. “I learned that the boy's body was clothed and wrapped in a sheet when the dog found it. Shallow grave. Some animals had disturbed it. Dirt had been dug away, and Cunningham could see perfectly well that it was a body.”

“Strange,” I said. “Had he—the body—had he been, you know, sexually . . . ?”

“Yes.”

“But still the perp clothed him and wrapped him up in a sheet before burying him?”

Tina nodded. “They say it means remorse. The perp felt guilty.”

“Who'd they convict?”

“The guy's name is Devaney. Daryl Devaney.”

“Yes. I remember that now. What makes you think he's innocent?”

“I don't. I don't have an opinion yet. But the guy's sister has been trying to get our attention for years, so I finally looked at the record.”

“What's the evidence against him?”

“He lived in Orchard City, close to where the kid disappeared. Neighbors said they'd seen a red truck casing the neighborhood. Devaney's sister had a truck that fit the description. Daryl didn't have a license, but he used to drive the truck around on their farm. Daryl lived with his sister. And Daryl is odd. He has borderline intelligence and apparently was inappropriate sometimes.”

“Inappropriate how?”

“Modesty, grooming, hygiene. So the police questioned him a couple of times but couldn't get anywhere. A year later, when Cunningham's dog found the body, the police immediately took Devaney in for questioning again. This time he confessed.”

“So what's the problem?”

“Lots of problems: They questioned him for fifteen hours before he confessed. And his sister claimed that, given his limitations, there was no way he could have driven those two hundred miles from Orchard City up here to Lukus County to bury the body, then gotten home again without her knowing he was gone. And who knows if he even understood that he could stop the questioning and ask for a lawyer.”

“Did his trial lawyer try to get the confession thrown out?”

“No. The state offered a deal. If he'd plead guilty, they wouldn't go for the death penalty.”

“Ouch. So you're arguing against a confession
and
a guilty plea?”

“Right. That's the thing. The guy is persuadable.”

“Was there physical evidence?”

“I don't think so. I have the impression the cops didn't look too hard once they had the kid's remains. When the body turned up, they swooped in, questioned Daryl all night long, got the confession, arrested him, pled him, sentenced him.”

“What about corpus delicti?” I asked. Corpus delicti is the legal principle that someone can't be convicted solely on their own confession. The confession needs corroboration of some kind.

“Right,” Tina said. “Apparently, Daryl knew details that hadn't been released to the press. Stuff about where and how he was buried.”

“Then that resolves it, right? He must be guilty.”

“For Christ's sake, Nick, think like a lawyer,” Tina said. She was genuinely irritated. “They questioned him for fifteen hours.
Fifteen hours!
And he's cognitively impaired. How easy would it be for the cops to feed him those details, get him all confused about what he knew and what he didn't? So when they finally convince him that he must have done it, he works all this new information into the narrative. Problem solved.”

I
t was evening. I put Barnaby to bed and read him
Henry Hikes to Fitchburg
, his favorite—or maybe it's my favorite. I took ZZ to Rokeby Park for our run, then home and up to the office, where Tina was drafting her petition to have the state turn over all physical evidence it had collected in the Kyle Runion case.

“How's it coming?” I asked.

“Not bad.”

“Do you think you'll . . .”

“Please,” she said, “I just want to . . .” And she dove back into it.

I took out my file on the Subsurface probe. “Want some ice cream?” I whispered.

Tina shook her head. I went down and got a bowl for myself; back at my desk, trying not to clink my spoon against the bowl too loudly, I ate ice cream and read transcripts of the previous grand jury witnesses.

Morning. I went into the personnel records and pulled Henry Tatlock's file. Anyone applying to work in the U.S. Attorney's Office has to survive a background check. I recalled Henry mentioning some trouble when he was in his teens, but I never knew all the details. There was nothing about it in the official record. I called him at home to ask about it.

“The record was expunged,” he said.

“Did you have a lawyer?”

“Yes. Public defender.”

“What was his name?”

“It was twenty years ago, Nick. What's this about?”

“I'm going to stick my neck out for you, Henry. I don't want surprises.”

“Okay. I guess. What happened was—”

“Wait,” I said. “I just want to read the file and transcript, get the unbiased perspective. And I don't want to have to go through the court to have it officially released—I'd hate to draw anybody's attention to it. So just track down your lawyer, see if he or she still has a file, and give your authorization to let me look. Okay?”

“It was a nightmare, Nick. I'd hate to dredge it up again.”

“Eyes only. Promise.”