The Kill (7 page)

He gave her a blank stare, only the tic in his neck telling her he was suspicious of her motives. “And?” he prompted.

“We have state-of-the-art equipment there, and I sort of know the assistant director of CODIS. He’ll rush it for me.”

“Oh?”

She felt like she was on the hot seat. “He’s my ex-husband.”

“Your ex-husband works in the lab?” He grinned. “Hell, I wouldn’t be able to get my ex-wife to do me any favors.”

His humor relaxed Olivia a bit. “Well, he’ll do it for me. We parted friends.”

“It’s not easy keeping a marriage going in our line of work,” Zack commented, almost to himself.

Guilt again tickled Olivia. It wasn’t her line of work, but she knew enough agents and cops to know relationships were difficult for them. Ironically, work was the one thing that had brought her and Greg together, and kept them friends.

“All right,” he said, standing abruptly. “If we can get answers faster by using your ex, I’m all for it. Let’s go down to the lab and you and Cohn can talk about all that technical stuff. You probably picked up a lot of knowledge just being married to one of those lab guys.”

He doesn’t know the half of it, Olivia thought.

Brian stomped down the three flights of stairs to the alley where his beat-up truck was parked. He was stuck until his attorney could get him some money from the damn government. You’d think they could have handed him a check on his way out the door—he was
innocent
, he’d told them he was innocent, and no one had believed him because that stupid fucking cop lied about the evidence. Planted evidence. Isn’t that what happened to O.J.? Cops planted evidence.

Of course Brian didn’t believe for one minute that O.J. didn’t do his wife, but hey, the cops fucked it up just like they screwed up everything and so they probably planted evidence on O.J. to make themselves look good, just like they’d planted evidence in his truck.

He jerked open the tinny door of the mini-pickup, wishing he had his big Dodge, but it had been seized
as evidence
. Shit, that wasn’t fair. It was probably a classic now. Worth some money.

Three tries as he pumped the clutch and gas to get the rust bucket to turn over. He’d wanted to see his mom and show her that he was fine, just fine, better than ever. He wanted to move home, eat real food, sleep in a real bed, and never again see another cockroach.

He’d called his mom from the prison last week, the night before he was released.

“Ma, it’s me. Brian.”

She didn’t say anything for nearly a minute, and Brian thought for sure he’d been disconnected, some lame-ass prank of the prison guards.

“Brian,” she finally said, her voice old and flat. Unhappy.

Anger and a funny sort of pain clogged his throat. He swallowed with difficulty, then said, “Ma, I’m getting out. I didn’t do it.”

Another long pause. “I don’t understand. Where are you?”

“I’m still in Folsom, but they’re letting me come home tomorrow. They have new evidence, and it says I didn’t kill anyone.”

“Home? You’re coming home?”

She sounded scared. Hadn’t she heard what he’d said? That he was innocent? That the stupid fucking cops had made a mistake?

“Yeah. I’m
inn-o-cent
,” he stressed. “I told you that before.”

It hurt that his mother hadn’t visited him. He squirmed. He really didn’t know what his mother thought, what she even looked like as an old woman, or how she was coming along with his dad being dead.

He was surprised at how much it bothered him.

“I—Brian, I don’t know what to say.”

“Say I can come home.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

His hand clutched the receiver so tight his knuckles whitened.
Stupid bitch! I told you I didn’t do it
!

A familiar guilt spread through him and he hated himself for thinking so poorly of his mother. Shit, this was no good. He had to show her.

“Ma, it’s okay.” He took a deep breath. “The court got me an apartment and is giving me a little money, and because I was wrongfully imprisoned they’re going to give me over a million dollars. So I’ll call you next week, give you some time.”

“Thank you. Brian, I never stopped praying for you. Not one day. I hope you’ll do something good with your life now that you’re being released from prison.”

“Yes, Ma.” He hung up, afraid he’d start yelling at her.
Something good with his life
? What’d she think he’d do, murder someone? He didn’t murder that little girl, never would kill a kid. And the guy on the yard, hell, that had been an accident. And the Vietcong had been the enemy. He hadn’t murdered anyone, like in cold blood. It wasn’t fair, it fucking wasn’t fair, that he’d been sent to prison for thirty-four years because the stupid cops screwed up their investigation.

Fucking
not fair
.

Brian wiped his brow, sweating, hot wind blowing through the open windows of his pitiful truck. It wasn’t just the weather. It was this odd feeling he’d had ever since he’d walked out of Folsom Prison a free man. He didn’t feel free. He didn’t feel like he was in his body. He was disoriented. He’d been watching television nonstop since he’d been out. He’d taken nearly half the piddling stipend the prison handed him—like $1500 and a free apartment was supposed to last for three months until his million bucks came—and bought a fine 36-inch tube. It wasn’t like he’d been living in a vacuum in prison—he’d watched the news and a few stupid shows and movies and whatnot, but he didn’t realize how much he’d missed.

His mother lived in Menlo Park, in an older, middle-class neighborhood on the San Francisco peninsula. It was only ten minutes from his shit-ass apartment on the bad side of the tracks in Redwood City, where he was the only white boy in his building. But until he got the money from the government, he couldn’t go anywhere.

Life sucked.

By the time he’d turned into his mom’s neighborhood, he was a basket case. First, he hadn’t realized how much the area had grown in the last thirty years. He almost had a heart attack on the freeway surrounded by a gazillion cars and big rigs. Shit, where did all these people live? The peninsula connecting San Francisco to San Jose wasn’t that big.

A lot of the houses in his mom’s neighborhood were big and opulent, well kept. Classy, he thought. Some were add-ons, little houses turned into big homes. This was not the middle-class neighborhood he’d left when he went to Vietnam. These people had money.

The trees were bigger—a lot taller. But the streets had a hint of familiarity, and there was the park where he’d played as a boy.

Tears stung his eyes and he pinched the bridge of his nose. How’d it all get so fucked? He used to walk on this exact road with the guys, Pete and Barry and Tom. Kicking rocks and jabbering. Whittling wood like his daddy had shown him. Where were the guys now? Pete had gone to Vietnam, like him, but Barry and Tom didn’t go, at least not that he knew. Barry had the brains; he’d gone off to some big college. Probably made good money and married and had kids and did all the stuff they hadn’t thought about as kids, but figured they’d get around to sooner or later.

Tom? Hell, he could have landed himself in prison for all Brian knew. He was always walking that line, like the time he ripped off Old Man Duncan’s soda shop on El Camino Real, or when he nabbed Debbie Palmer’s purse and found out she had birth control pills in her wallet. Debbie Palmer wasn’t a virgin? Tom had returned the purse without her knowing, minus five bucks, and hit on her. Got her in the back of his dad’s pickup one night after a ball game and they went at it like rabbits.

Brian stopped the truck in front of his mom’s house and it sputtered before it died. He stared at the neat little bungalow. The same, but different.

Same red-shingled one-story, but freshly painted. The porch still had a swing, but it wasn’t the one Brian remembered. This one was wooden with a red-and-white flowered cushion. Flowers lined the walk. Petunias, his mother’s favorite.

“They grow like weeds but they’re so colorful I can’t help but love them,” she’d told him many times when she planted at the first sign of spring.

What was she doing planting petunias now? She was eighty. She shouldn’t be on her knees in the dirt.

As with many of the homes in the neighborhood, the garage was set back from the house. Still, a new Honda rested in the driveway. He couldn’t remember a time his mother didn’t garage the car. He hoped she was well.

He missed her.

He got out of the truck and walked slowly up the brick path, straightening his new Dockers. Twenty-four bucks. He couldn’t believe a pair of stupid pants cost that much—and the shirt was half-price, but still fifteen dollars! But he wanted to look nice for his ma.

The door opened before he even knocked. It wasn’t his ma.

Uncle Glen? Looked just like him. Full head of light gray hair, watery blue eyes, and fat nose, much too big to be on the little guy’s skinny face.

Brian blinked. Couldn’t be Uncle Glen, his mom’s brother. He’d be ancient by now. And didn’t Ma write saying that he’d croaked years ago?

“Toby?” Brian blinked again, his mouth falling open. His cousin Toby looked so old. But he was six years younger than Brian, and . . .

. . . And
he
was old.
He
was fifty-four. In his fucking fifties.

His life was gone. Over. Stolen.

“Brian.” Toby made no move to open the security screen. When had Ma installed it?

“What are you doing here?” He didn’t mean to sound so defensive. He used to like his little cousin. But that was three decades ago, before shit happened.

“Aunt Vi called and said you’d been released. I came down to help.”

“Help with what?”

Toby shrugged.

“Let me in. I want to see my mom.”

“You’re not going to cause problems, Brian, are you?”

Brian fumed and wanted to slap that stern, holier-than-thou expression off Toby’s rotten face. “No,” he said, reining in his temper. “I wasn’t released. My conviction was overturned. I didn’t do it. I always said I didn’t do it; now there’s proof.”

Toby nodded. “Yes, that’s what Aunt Vi said you told her. She asked me to look into it.”

His own mother didn’t believe him. She didn’t believe that he’d been
exonerated
. She didn’t believe his word—she’d sent his lousy cousin to check up on him.

But more than the pain of his mother’s belief in his guilt was the anger that she’d been subjected to this travesty in the first place.

He didn’t kill that girl! His jaw trembled as he controlled his anger.

“So you know I told the truth.” It was almost impossible for him to speak. He wanted to pummel Toby’s stupid, gloating, idiotic face. Damn asshole, walking into
his
house and turning his own mother against him.

Toby gave a half-nod. “To an extent. But you still could have been involved.”

“Bullshit!”

Toby flinched and Brian heard a gasp from somewhere in the living room, behind his cousin. His ma. Shit. He ran a hand over his face, regaining his control.

“Your mother is eighty-one years old, Brian. Her heart isn’t too good. If I let you in, you have to promise not to upset her. Or I
will
have you arrested.”

Brian wanted to leave and never look back. All these years, in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, and now his own mother didn’t believe he had nothing to do with it.

But he missed her. He had to see her. She was all he had left.

He glanced down, torn but contrite. “All right.”

Toby opened the screen and Brian took a tentative step inside. As his eyes adjusted to the dim indoor lighting, he couldn’t help but notice everything had changed. While the house itself hadn’t, the furnishings were new, more modern. Leather. But the grandfather clock was still in the dining room. He couldn’t see it, but he heard its steady tick-tock, an intimately familiar sound that soothed him as he remembered listening to it as a small boy when he couldn’t sleep.

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock
. Slow and comforting.

Calmer, he searched out his mother.

She sat in a recliner, a walker perched next to her. She seemed so—small. Old. Shriveled. Three decades aged anyone, and Father Time took a middle-aged woman and made her elderly. Her hair, which she had dyed blonde for as long as he could remember, was now snow white. She was skinny and wrinkled. His mother despised wrinkles and used every lotion and potion under the sun to prevent them.

Guess they didn’t work.

But her eyes—blue and clear. She hadn’t lost her mind. As she turned those sharp eyes to him, he felt her disapproval, her sadness. He wanted to fall on his knees and beg her forgiveness.

Yet he had nothing to be forgiven for. He was innocent!

“Ma.” His voice didn’t sound right. He cleared his throat. “Ma, it’s good to see you.”

She nodded slowly, looked him up and down. Tears welled in her eyes and Brian’s throat constricted and his eyes blurred. Her arms came up.

“Brian.”

He stumbled toward her, fell to his knees and into her skeletal embrace. “Ma, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I never wanted to hurt you, I never did anything to hurt you.”

“I know, son.”

He sobbed into her lap, wanting to erase the years and make something of himself. Wishing he hadn’t volunteered for Vietnam, yet wishing he’d never left the military.

He had wanted to be her hero. Just like Daddy had been.

Now he was nothing.

Doug Cohn was no pushover, yet Zack watched Agent St. Martin quietly win him over. In less than ten minutes, they were speaking a language foreign to Zack, about DNA samples and test procedures and how they would transport the evidence found on Michelle Davidson’s body to the FBI lab in Virginia.

Then he heard Olivia mention her theory about the killer stealing trucks.

“I don’t have the motor vehicle records from the other jurisdictions,” Olivia said, “but I think the killer steals a truck the day of the abduction, and either returns the vehicle or dumps it somewhere.”