Injustice (45 page)

Tina stood up and talked about Peggy's perseverance and devotion to Daryl. To keep things going, I stood up and praised Tina for her dedication to the case. I talked about how she'd worked so hard, often late into the night, to “right this terrible wrong.” Then I said that now, though I was only meeting Daryl for the first time, I could see how her efforts were well spent and how certain I was that Daryl would put this all behind him and make up for lost time in living a good and happy and productive life. People clapped politely.

Calvin Dunbar is awaiting trial on three first-degree-murder charges. His gun, which was picked up at the scene in Flora's kitchen, was identified as the weapon that killed Jimmy Mailing and Lydia. The NTSB is still hoping to locate the wreckage of Bud Billman's plane, and possibly adding two more murders—Billman's and his grandson's—to the tally.

Over in the civil division of the U.S. Attorney's Office, several eagle-eyed lawyers are trying to find a way to get the five million back from the Seychelles. I have a personal interest in this because Tina, as executor of Lydia's estate (and sole beneficiary), has brought a wrongful-death action against Calvin Dunbar. Tina says if she ever gets any money, she'll probably put most of it back into the Innocence Project.

Rachel Sabin and I get together for lunch sometimes. She is respectful of my ongoing attempts to reconcile with Tina. She tells me Philbin is doing well: Since Henry was found guilty in state court and also charged in federal court, nobody even remembers Monica's Hail Mary attempt to blame Philbin for the whole thing. Detective Philbin has emerged unblemished.

As for Lizzy, things aren't all sunny. After coming so close to being another of Calvin's victims, she got scared again and canceled her travel plans. Flora and I (along with Chip and Tina) are being attentive. We try including her in whatever we're doing. I think she'll be okay if we can keep her out of harm's way for a change. She just needs to huddle a bit longer under the parental umbrella. She was always so smart and independent that she got ahead of herself. Mature and sophisticated though she is, she's not quite done being a little girl. She is conflicted, though. She loved being my investigator/researcher, even though it almost got us all killed. She wants more projects.

Barnaby, too, is showing the effects of all this family trauma. He has bitten a few kids at preschool and has had a couple of tantrums that seemed to have no discernible trigger. We have him seeing a therapist who says he is responding to the stress the rest of us have exhibited. Secondhand PTSD, she calls it. It is absolutely essential, she says, to keep things as calm and predictable as possible. Tina and I have both reduced our work schedules to four days a week. She takes Friday off, I take Monday. So Barn is in day care only three days a week.

Chip and Flora are fine. Flora is resilient and shows no ill effects from her brush with Calvin Dunbar.

The Subsurface corruption probe is winding down. Not much has happened. A few legislators paid fines and are spending several months in jail. The public has lost interest. After the revelations about Calvin Dunbar, everything else is anticlimactic.

As for me, I'm mostly okay. But sometimes I wake up in the night in my bed at Friendly City, and my mind plays back to me when Sabin ran up the driveway and into Flora's house covered in her own blood. I try to tweak this in my mind. I try assigning myself some role in that demented scene, because the awful truth is that Sabin concocted the scheme, drew the knife across her own scalp, and hurled herself into harm's way, while I stayed safely back at the car. This gnaws at me. I want to have been the protector; the savior.

There's one more postscript to the sorry saga of Lydia's murder. It came yesterday in a call from Chip. “I've got more news,” he said.

“What news?”

“I talked to one of the agents from San Francisco,” Chip said. “City police just found an abandoned rental car in the parking lot at one end of the Golden Gate. Apparently, that's a common thing, somebody renting a car and ditching it in the parking lot before taking the plunge. Turns out the car was rented to Tony Smeltzer.”

This made me unexpectedly sad. Not sad for Smeltzer, so much, he was bad news. Just sad at the futility of everything.
Halfway across and all the way down
, Smeltzer had said to me in the Fog City Tap that night. Poor guy. In my mind, the futility of his worthless life blends into all the other waste and sorrow. Now that he's gone and apparently was never a threat to us anyway, I'm able to feel some pity for him.

“Did they find his body?” I asked Chip.

“Nope,” Chip says. “I guess the great whites got a free meal.”

This makes me uneasy, but I push the feeling aside.

And so it ends. The pathetic Tony Smeltzer has apparently written his own story, while the two monsters, Calvin Dunbar and Henry Tatlock, have been put away. The legacy of their crimes is hard to comprehend. So many lives are permanently changed by these murderers, and my family has borne the brunt.

L
izzy calls me at work: “Dad, can we meet for lunch?”

“Definitely.”

“Rain Tree at one-thirty,” she says.

She looks great. Professional and confident. She has her briefcase with her, but I have no idea what she's packing in it. We get a table and order clams. The springtime sunlight makes the river and the dam and the dining room look fresh and full of promise. That's how Lizzy looks, too.

“About the sentencing hearing,” she says.

Henry's sentencing, she means. It's coming up in a few weeks. The only real question is whether he'll live out his natural life as a wretched animal in a cage, or if the state will stick a needle in his arm and end the whole thing. Gregory Nations is asking for the death penalty because Henry refuses to give up any information about where he buried his other victims.

“Do you have a position?” Lizzy asks.

“No.”

“You could have a lot of influence,” she says.

Now I'm worried. I know this girl. She opposes the death penalty, and I know she wants to bring me over to her side. But I've already decided not to think about it anymore, and definitely not to get involved. I don't have the stomach for it.

She's right about my influence. Other than Judge Ballard, I probably have more influence over what happens to Henry than anybody. I'm a federal prosecutor, his former supervisor at work, and his former friend. I was nearly his brother-in-law. I'm family, and I
am married to the lawyer who brought the Kyle Runion case back to light, which is what exposed Henry in the first place. Judge Ballard will make the ultimate decision, but he'll want input (and cover). If I take a strong stand at the sentencing hearing, my perspective could sway the decision.

“What are you proposing, Liz?”

“Lydia loved him,” Lizzy says.

“Well, that doesn't justify—”

“Nobody's talking about justifications. I'm just wondering what made him how he is.”

“Everyone wonders that, but . . .”

“We know he got burned in a fire and was abandoned at the hospital.”

“We do?”

“Yeah. He told me. They dropped him at the hospital and never came back. That's got to mess with the head of a two-year-old. Right?

“He was two?”

“My God, Dad.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I asked him about his scars once. Didn't you?”

“I, um, didn't want to pry. But none of that justifies Kyle Runion,” I say. It's a stupid comment, because that isn't what she's talking about. She's talking about whether cruel blows dealt him at an early age triggered his psychopathic behavior, and if so, whether that's enough reason for me to advocate life instead of death.

A couple of months ago, I'd have said absolutely not. I wasn't interested in compassion, and I'd have happily plunged the lethal syringe myself. But that was back in the thick of things. Maybe I'm more objective now that Henry is put away and can't hurt us again. I don't feel as vulnerable.

But compassion?

My job isn't about compassion. It's about consequence and responsibility and protecting the public. Lizzy is the one with compassion: If a perp ever had so much as a hangnail, she's all about how rough his life has been. She's a pushover.

“What are you suggesting, Liz?”

“I thought I'd do some research. Maybe write something up for you to read to the judge.”

“Anybody can submit material,” I said.

“Really? I can submit it myself?”

“Sure.”

“Will you help me?”

Not in a million years,
I think.

“Sure,” I say.

I
don't know where to find Aaron Pursley, but I have an idea where to start looking. Pursley is the crooked, unlicensed investigator Henry hired in hopes of locating his biological family (or so he claimed). If that's true, maybe Aaron Pursley can point Lizzy and me in the right direction.

I didn't tell Lizzy I'm going to Rivertown, because she'd have wanted to come. I'm done bringing her along on my forays into the jungles of human corruption.

I know of a bar over in Rivertown: the Elfin Grot. It's small and below street level, and on weekends it fills with the sounds of working-class drinkers trying hard to replace with beer everything that pours out of them as sweat and piss and revelry. I like the place. But now, midweek, it's a different crowd. They don't hang out; they pass through. The place is like a hub or a roundhouse for the comings and goings of people whose business, like the bar itself, is dark and subsurface. The place is long and narrow. Most of it is taken up with barstools and standing room, but there are a few tables in the very back. Business gets conducted at those tables.

I show up around five in the evening. I recognize the bartender from when I was here several years ago: a woman in her sixties, cadaverous, bluish hair. Maybe she owns the place.