Unintended Consequences (8 page)

“Got to be pretty slow work for you. I don’t know many innocent prisoners.”

Tommy laughed. “I’m with you there. But this one’s got a needle waiting for him in five weeks. We just want to make sure he deserves it.”

“Didn’t a jury already decide that?”

“C’mon, detective. You know sometimes they slip up. Most of the time it’s letting a bad guy off. Once in a while it’s the other way around. Nothing’s perfect.”

“What do you need from me?”

“You investigated a missing-child case back in ’90. Name of Conklin, Stacy Conklin. Do you remember that?”

Tommy could hear a sigh at the other end of the line, then silence. He took another swig of Coors and waited. When the voice at the other end next spoke, it was more subdued.

“You know how some cases just stick with you? You work them and work them, and no matter how hard you look, you just get nowhere? That’s Stacy Conklin. It’s buried in the department as an unsolved case, but it’s not buried in my head. I wish it was. I got just two years left till retirement, and I sure don’t want to spend my days wondering about what happened to her.”

“Were there any leads? Any witnesses still around?”

“No. She disappeared from her bed in the middle of the night. The parents were asleep, and when they woke up, she was gone. No fingerprints, no sign of forced entry, but it was summer and the bedroom windows were open. We got a list of people who’d been around their house, but nothing panned out.”

“And the parents themselves—they checked out?”

“Well, they were pretty hysterical when it happened. Anyone seeing them could tell it had hit them hard. They weren’t putting on a show, if you know what I mean. When that body turned up right next door, in Indiana, we took the parents in for an ID. Seeing that burned body of a little girl near killed them. The mother couldn’t even look at her. I stood right next to them. Thankfully, it wasn’t their daughter.”

“How could they be sure, with the body so badly burned?”

“Different size, different weight. And some hair was still left. It wasn’t the same shade as their daughter’s.”

There was no reason to think the Hammond police force hadn’t done its job right, especially considering Detective Cannon’s zeal for closure on the case before he retired. Tommy decided to press further anyway. “Was any forensic testing done to confirm she wasn’t their daughter?”

“Like DNA?”

“Yeah, like DNA. Anyone compare the victim’s DNA to the Conklins’?”

“You gotta to remember, this was back in ’90. DNA testing wasn’t routine then.”

Tommy didn’t want to risk alienating Cannon. He’d need his help if this were a thread worth pursuing. “Okay, I keep forgetting that.”

“Why are you asking about Stacy, anyway? Do you have some information about her?”

“Nope. Just checking all loose ends for a guy on death row. By the way, do you know where the parents are living now?”

“Sure. Same house they were in when Stacy was taken. I tell you, I wouldn’t have stayed there. I still keep in touch with them. Nice couple. They never got over their daughter, though. Never had any more kids.”

Tommy thanked the detective for his help. Nothing for nothing, he thought to himself as he hung up.

C
HAPTER

8

A
loud knock at the door awakened her. “Housekeeping,” Dani heard someone say. She’d done it again—forgotten to put up the “Do Not Disturb” sign. The clock on the nightstand read 8:15. She tumbled out of bed, opened the door to the hallway and asked the woman on the other side to come back later.

She’d needed to be awakened anyway. Melanie and Tommy were meeting her in the lobby at nine for the hotel’s continental breakfast. She quickly showered, got dressed, and headed downstairs. They were already waiting for her at a small table. She grabbed a muffin and a cup of coffee and joined them.

“Hear from the warden yet?” Melanie asked.

“Yeah, I just spoke to him. Calhoun’s still in the infirmary but getting better. We’ll probably get to see him tomorrow.”

“I reached Detective Cannon last night,” Tommy said.

“And?” Dani and Melanie said in unison.

Tommy filled them in on his conversation with Cannon.

“Is there any way we can get a DNA sample from the Conklins?” Melanie asked.

“Hold your horses,” Tommy said. “Just because they have a daughter who disappeared around the same time as Angelina doesn’t mean the child buried in that grave is theirs.”

“But all the other children who disappeared then are accounted for.”

“Only the children whose disappearances were reported. That doesn’t give the full picture. Say a set of parents murdered their kid during that time frame. They obviously wouldn’t have reported it to the authorities and so she wouldn’t be in the FBI database. Even if the dead child isn’t Angelina—and that’s a big if—it could be anyone.”

“Still,” Dani said, “it would be helpful if we could figure out how to get a DNA sample from the Conklins. Even if it’s just to rule them out.”

“Don’t forget the victim,” Tommy said. “Who knows whether there’s anything in the evidence kit that we could get a DNA sample from. Or if they even still have the evidence kit. Without the child’s DNA, we’ve got nothing to match it with.”

“Isn’t it standard to hold on to that evidence?” Melanie asked.

“Maybe not in 1990.”

“We’re getting ahead of ourselves, guys,” Dani said. “We know from George’s lawyer’s file that no DNA testing was done on the victim or the Calhouns. That may be because they had a confession from Sallie or because DNA just wasn’t part of their arsenal back then. But if there’s an evidence kit that contains something with the child’s DNA, we need to find out fast. We could run it against George’s DNA and see if it’s a match. Tommy, can you call the police station in LaGrange, see what they still have?”

“I’ll get on that.”

Dani took a bite of her muffin and washed it down with a swig of coffee. “And also, Tommy, do you think the detective in Hammond would introduce you to the Conklins?”

“My guess is he would. If there’s any possibility the child in the woods was Stacy and not Angelina, he’d want to know.”

“Okay. Work with him on that.”

“What are you thinking? That the Conklins may have been responsible for their daughter’s death?”

“Frankly, it doesn’t matter to us if they are or aren’t. If we can show that the child isn’t Angelina Calhoun, then we get a new trial for George, if not outright dismissal. But if it is Stacy, her parents’ insistence that the victim wasn’t their daughter certainly raises suspicion.”

Melanie shook her head. “If I were looking at a burned corpse, I’d want to believe it wasn’t my child. I’d want to protect myself from imagining the pain my daughter experienced.”

Dani looked around the breakfast room. Groups of families were sitting at tables, some chatting quietly, others visibly irritated by their children’s whining demands.
How would it feel if that whining child were taken from you, never to be seen again? God, the agonizing recriminations you’d put yourself through: Was it my carelessness? Could I have done more to protect my child?
She could understand a parent viewing a body in the sterile room of the medical examiner and proclaiming, “No! That can’t be my child! I won’t permit it to be my child!” Melanie was right; self-protection created a very strong armor.

“Tommy, I think you should drive over to Hammond and have a chat with the detective.”

“Consider it done.”

With the day clear for her, Dani decided to visit Bob Wilson. She drove toward LaGrange in another rental car, this time a subcompact, the least expensive. Tommy took the original rental to Hammond, Illinois, in the opposite direction.

She hated driving in strange cities with no satellite radio, only unfamiliar stations. She hated country music, which inevitably was the only music she could find on the dial outside New York. But she also hated driving without music; the silence unnerved her.

Meeting the attorney who had handled the trial of a death-row inmate usually made for an uncomfortable situation. Most were defensive. Some started out cooperatively, but when the investigating attorney dug in deeper, they retreated into familiar justifications for the jury verdict. The worst was the one Dani had gotten from Wilson: His client was guilty.

She pulled up to Wilson’s address and found just what she’d expected: a storefront on a back street, with a peeling sign out front and worn furniture inside. Small-town defense attorneys usually weren’t well paid for their efforts. After introducing herself, his secretary pointed her toward an office down the hall. “Go on back, dear. He’s expecting you. Just knock on the door.”

Dani entered and they exchanged pleasantries. Wilson appeared to be in his late fifties or early sixties. He had on a light-gray suit, although his jacket was draped over a hanger on the back of his office door. Despite the deep crease lines in his face, he carried the reminder of someone who’d been attractive in his youth. His office was no different from the reception area, perhaps even more shopworn. A large walnut desk was littered with files, and a nearby wastebasket overflowed. Other than a diploma from Indiana University School of Law, the white walls were bare. Dani got down to business. “Bob, is there anything about this case I should be aware of that’s not in the files?”

“No,” he answered quickly. “It’s all there.”

“So, no one attempted to identify the child in the woods, other than by Sallie’s confession?”

“Well, they couldn’t do a run for finger- or footprints. The body was too badly burned.”

“And no DNA?”

“Keep in mind defense attorneys didn’t usually do DNA testing back then. And what’d be the point? Sallie said it was her daughter.”

“But George insisted it wasn’t.”

Wilson leaned back in his chair and looked her over. “Sweetie, you big-city, ivy-towered lawyers think money grows on trees,” he said with a smirk. “It costs big bucks for DNA testing, especially back then. When you do criminal-defense work, you get a sixth sense. You know when a client is hustling you and you know when they’re laying it all out. George was no innocent—I knew that right away. No point in throwing money away chasing dead ends. Sallie said that was their daughter, and no matter what any testing showed, the jury damn sure would believe her.”

Dani felt her anger rise. She wanted to throttle Wilson’s neck and shout,
You were representing a man facing death. How dare you decide to give up on him? How dare you take his case if you weren’t going to do everything within your power to find the truth? How dare you practice criminal law, you worthless excuse for an attorney?
Instead, she asked calmly, “Did you believe Sallie told the truth?”

“Well, I admit, she was harder to read. She couldn’t manage a sentence without bawling. But I had no reason to disbelieve her.”

“How about her mental processes? Did you try to have a psych evaluation done on her?”

“I keep telling you, these things cost money. I didn’t receive a whole lot of money for representing him, and he didn’t qualify for pauper status, so the court wasn’t giving away money for all these tests you think should have been done.”

“Tell me, then, if you were so convinced of George’s guilt, why didn’t you encourage him to take a plea?”

Wilson got up from his chair and looked out the window. After a moment, he turned back to Dani. The belligerence was gone from his voice when he answered. “I’d have got down on my knees and begged him to take a plea if that would’ve done any good. The D.A. offered life, no parole; took death off the table. But George wouldn’t hear of it. He sounded like a broken record, saying he didn’t kill that girl. Seemed to me that he had a death wish, the way he insisted on going to trial.”

Dani hesitated to come across as too condemnatory of Wilson—he had too much knowledge of the case for her to dismiss his value. But she had hard questions about his handling of the case. “I was surprised you put George on the stand, especially since you thought he was guilty. Did you think he was going to offer the jurors an explanation for his missing daughter?”

Wilson shook his head. “I knew he’d be a disaster. Didn’t matter how many times I told him he was putting the noose around his own neck if he took the stand. He just kept insisting he had to tell the jury he wasn’t a murderer. Finally I gave in. I figured he was going down anyway. Might as well let him have his say.”

Dani wondered what it felt like to represent a man facing death when you believed he was guilty. She practiced in a rarefied world—HIPP represented a last-ditch hope for condemned men and women. If HIPP lawyers didn’t believe in their clients’ innocence, they walked away. Dani had never faced arguing on behalf of someone whose innocence she doubted. Defense attorneys were a different breed. Some were true idealists who viewed themselves as crusaders upholding the sacred tenet that everyone had a right to counsel; others started out as prosecutors and used the skills they learned to open a practice defending accused criminals. And a few—a very few, she hoped—just wanted to get through the day earning a buck. Wilson struck her as one of those.

“Isn’t it surprising for a guilty man to risk trial when his life is on the line?”

“Not in my experience. Some of these criminals are so deluded, they convince themselves they didn’t do the crime, even when they’re caught red-handed.”

Dani flashed back to a three-year-old Jonah, standing on a chair, his hand holding a cookie he’d just retrieved from the kitchen cabinet. “Jonah no take cookie,” he’d said when confronted by his mother, a look of total innocence on his face. Dani appreciated that Wilson’s assessment of some criminals was true. She switched to another line of questions. “You didn’t cross-examine Sallie for very long. How come?”

“I could see the jurors were believing her. A lot more than they were going to believe George. No sense in giving her more time to get their sympathy.”

“But still, you could have tried to impeach her. The state didn’t have any forensic evidence tying George to the victim, only Sallie’s testimony.”