Unintended Consequences (9 page)

“You forget the gas station attendant.”

“His testimony was questionable at best. And you did a good job showing that to the jury.”

Wilson chuckled. “Look, don’t waste your time trying to butter me up. It’s no secret you’ll argue ineffective counsel. My feelings won’t be hurt. I doubt it’ll get George a new trial, but you go ahead and try.”

Whether HIPP would even take the case was still to be decided. Even if Dani believed George’s claim of innocence, she would have to evaluate her chance of succeeding. Wilson was right—getting a new trial this close to a scheduled execution would be tough.

They talked some more, going over details of the trial and the appeals. Dani thanked Wilson for his help and gathered her notes to leave. On her way out the door, she turned back to him. “And you’re certain neither George nor Sallie ever explained what happened to their daughter, to Angelina?”

Wilson closed his eyes and rubbed them with balled-up fists. When he opened his eyes, they looked tired, worn out by years of eking out a living representing society’s outcasts. “Not once before trial. Not even during the appeals. Only later, much later, about five or six years ago—I think maybe when I worked on his last grab to the Supreme Court—George wrote me. Made up some cockeyed story about his daughter being sick and then rambled on about no one helping her. It was bunk—a desperate grab at reversing his fate. I threw the letter away.”

The shock on Dani’s face must have been apparent. “You didn’t follow up on his letter?”

“What for? Some prisoner probably helped him come up with the story. You wouldn’t believe how creative they get in there. Liars, all of them. There was no point in wasting my time anymore.”

“But what if it was true?”

“Then he would have told me when it mattered.”

Wilson may not have been a bad attorney. He was certainly not a stupid attorney. Dani didn’t really know him, but she guessed he wasn’t even a lazy attorney. Plenty of all three types were defending clients in courts all over the United States. Wilson’s problem was not being paid enough by a client he believed was guilty—a toxic combination for a defendant facing the death penalty.

C
HAPTER

9

T
ommy kept the speedometer at just under fifteen miles over the speed limit. He knew from experience it was the safety zone, the gap between the speed posted as the maximum and the point at which he might be ticketed if he had the bad luck to pass a traffic cop. He arrived at the Hammond police station in just under two hours, and Hank Cannon was waiting for him.

“I don’t know that there’s much more I can tell you,” Cannon said. “I pretty much covered it on the phone yesterday.”

“Well, I don’t expect to come away with anything more by coming here. But our interview with Calhoun has been pushed back a day, and I never had the patience to sit on my ass, so I figured if nothing else, I’ll get to meet Jimmy’s friend.”

A big smile broke out on Cannon’s face as he swung his arm over Tommy’s shoulder. “Yeah, I bet we could share some pretty wild stories about Jimmy. C’mon into my office.”

Tommy followed Cannon down the hallway. The once-stark white paint on the walls was now a dingy gray and peeling at the corners. The industrial carpet underfoot was well worn.

The mixture of voices, ringing telephones, and keyboard typing created a familiar hum, and a wave of nostalgia for his FBI days washed over Tommy.

Cannon brought him into a large open space filled with desks and a row of three rooms at the far end. “This here’s my office,” Cannon said as he pointed to one of the twenty or so desks in the room. “Take a load off your feet.” Cannon dropped himself into the chair behind his desk and waited for Tommy to get comfortable in the plastic chair beside it.

“So, what’s this visit really about? I could jaw all day about Jimmy, and I’m sure we’d yuk it up, but I don’t believe you drove out here just for the heck of it.”

“Nah, you’re right. I just got to thinking maybe you wouldn’t mind taking me to meet Stacy’s parents.”

Cannon stared silently at Tommy for a moment. “You thinking I got too close to them and overlooked some key evidence?”

“No, nothing like that. It’s just, sometimes a fresh pair of eyes can’t hurt. I don’t expect it’s their daughter they found in Indiana back in ’90. But if it was, wouldn’t they want to know?”

“And just how do you think meeting the Conklins will help you find out whether it was Stacy buried in those woods?”

“Look, I’m trying to be straight with you. I’m kind of hoping the Conklins held on to something of Stacy’s. Maybe a comb or hairbrush. Maybe her favorite doll might have some of her stray hairs. Then we could compare it to any DNA left in the evidence kit over in LaGrange.”

“LaGrange?”

“Yeah, that’s the precinct that grabbed the case of the kid found in the woods, over by Orland.”

“So they have DNA from the kid?”

Tommy shifted his eyes downward. “I haven’t talked to them, but I’m figuring they’ve got to. I mean, don’t they always in a murder case?”

“Maybe you guys at the Bureau routinely kept DNA evidence back in ’90, but us local guys, it wasn’t necessarily on our radar. Don’t you think you should check with LaGrange before we go bothering the Conklins?”

Tommy gave Cannon his warmest smile. “You know, I’m here now. It’s a beautiful day outside. This’ll give us an excuse to get out of the office. Besides, maybe the Conklins will be encouraged to know someone else is trying to find out what happened to Stacy.”

Cannon eyed Tommy quizzically. “You sure you’re not trying to pin this rap on the Conklins? ’Cause if you are, I’ll tell you right now you’re off in left field. No way, no how.”

“Relax. I’m not thinking they did this. I’m not even saying our guy didn’t do it. All I know is, Calhoun insists the girl in the woods wasn’t his daughter. I haven’t even met him yet. When I do, maybe I’ll come away thinking he’s full of crap and he’s going to get exactly what he deserves. Frankly, that’s what I expect will happen. But in the meantime, I just want to be thorough. If there’s even a small chance that Calhoun is telling the truth and the girl in the woods wasn’t his daughter, she has to be somebody else. Maybe that somebody is Stacy Conklin. If I were her parents, I’d want the person responsible for putting her there to rot in hell for it. And the one thing I’m sure of is that George Calhoun didn’t murder Stacy Conklin.”

“The Conklins eyeballed that little girl’s body. It wasn’t Stacy.”

“From what I’ve read, the burns were pretty extensive. They could’ve been wrong. I mean, if it were my daughter, I’d want to believe it wasn’t her.”

Cannon shrugged. “I think this is a wild goose chase, but I don’t have anything pressing today. Let’s give it a go.”

Thirty minutes later, Tommy shook the hand of Mickey Conklin. The man’s grip was as strong as he looked. A bodybuilder, Tommy thought to himself as he eyed the muscles bulging against Mickey’s tight-fitted cotton sweater. Janine Conklin stood by his side, her arms crossed in front of her slim body.

“Thanks for seeing us,” Cannon said after introductions were made. “I promise we won’t take up much of your time. How’ve you folks been doing? It’s been a while since we last talked.”

Janine stood impassively at the front door, in contrast with Mickey, who rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. “We’re good, good. Right, Janine?” Mickey said, the words tumbling quickly from his mouth as he eyed Tommy.

“Would it be all right if we came in for a bit?” Cannon asked.

“Sure, of course; pardon my manners, Hank. It’s just that we weren’t expecting you,” Janine said and stepped aside for the two men to enter her home.

“Please, make yourself comfortable,” Janine continued as she motioned toward the couch. “Can I get you something to drink? There’s a fresh pot of coffee made.”

“Love some, Janine. Thanks. The usual way,” Cannon said.

Tommy shook his head. “None for me.”

As Janine left the living room, Tommy turned to Mickey. “Detective Cannon has told me about your daughter’s disappearance. My sympathies to you and your wife.”

Mickey nodded silently.

“Would you mind showing me the room she was taken from?”

“What business is it of yours?” Mickey asked.

“Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. I represent a man who’s about to get the needle for murdering his daughter. When the body was discovered, there’d been some thought it might have been Stacy, and you were brought in for a possible ID. You said it wasn’t her. I’m just doubling back to make sure that’s the case.”

Tommy saw Mickey’s back stiffen. “Don’t you think I’d know my own daughter?”

“I think that any father would want to believe it wasn’t his daughter who’d been murdered and set on fire,” Tommy said, his voice soft. “And I think the mind can trick us into seeing what we want to see.”

“I know what I saw. I know it wasn’t Stacy.”

“What do you want from us?” Janine stood in the doorway, a cup of coffee in each hand. “Haven’t we been through enough?”

“I don’t want to cause you any suffering, Mrs. Conklin. I just thought maybe something remained in Stacy’s room that had a strand of her hair. That way we could know for sure that it wasn’t her.”

A gurgled sob came from Janine’s throat as she turned and retreated into the kitchen.

Mickey stood up. “Look, there’s nothing left in Stacy’s room. It’s our office now. We threw away anything of hers years ago. I think you’d better leave now.”

Tommy and Cannon stood and walked to the front door. “I know this is unpleasant. But if it is Stacy, wouldn’t you want her killer found? Wouldn’t you want him put away?”

“No,” Mickey said. “I just want our nightmare to be over.”

C
HAPTER

10

I
t had been three days since Dani flew to Indiana and she already missed home. How could Jonah possibly handle being away from his family for four weeks when she’d been away from him and Doug only a few days and yet even now felt the tugging of an addict going through withdrawal? She’d forgotten about the teenage urge for independence that she’d felt herself when she became a mother, the one left at home to worry about the dangers lurking in the shadows. As a child, she’d thought she was indestructible. No harm could befall her, no illness could overtake her, no risk was too great. How sad that everyone learned, as they grew up, that they were as vulnerable as the neighbor hit by a car or the grandparent who succumbed to a lingering illness or the friend’s parent who underwent chemotherapy for breast cancer and then died anyway. There were times when she longed for that dreamy ignorance, that certitude that she would live forever, that nothing could sabotage her happiness. No wonder she wished to protect Jonah from growing up too fast and learning that nothing was certain. A chance happening, be it illness, accident, a careless decision, or an extra chromosome, could change one’s life forever.

Despite her longing for home, Dani felt tingly with excitement—today they’d sit down with George Calhoun for the first time. She didn’t know what to expect. There was nothing ambiguous in Bob Wilson’s assessment of George. Yet something was missing, something unexplained that only George could answer. Whether he would provide the answer was still unknown.

She met Melanie and Tommy for breakfast in the hotel lobby. Again she poured herself a cup of coffee, picked out a plump blueberry muffin, and settled into the plastic chair at a table in the corner.

Dani finished describing her conversation with Bob Wilson and then turned to Tommy. “Did you speak to the police in LaGrange?”

“Yeah. I got one of the detectives originally on the case, back in ’90.”

“And?”

“And nothing. The evidence kit was pretty bare. There wasn’t anything in it that contained DNA.”

That surprised Dani. Despite the relative newness of DNA as an evidentiary tool at the time, she thought something would have been retained—a strand of hair, fingernail scrapings, a blood sample. “How’d it go with Cannon?”

“With my usual charm, I convinced Cannon to take me on a visit to the parents,” Tommy said. “I hoped they might have kept something of their daughter’s. You know, like maybe they still had her hairbrush. No luck. They cleaned everything out and turned her room into an office.”

“Did you get to talk to the parents?”

Tommy nodded and took a bite of his bagel. “The dad insisted it wasn’t Stacy. Maybe too insistent. Or maybe I’m just reading something from nothing.”

With anyone else, it would be easy to dismiss Tommy’s musing. But years of working undercover for the FBI had honed his already sharp instincts to razor-blade precision. If Tommy had questions about Mickey Conklin, Dani took it seriously. Whether they pursued that strand would depend on the outcome of their meeting with George.

As an appellate attorney, Dani had appeared in courthouses throughout the country but rarely ventured inside a maximum-security prison. Indiana State Prison, built during the Civil War to sequester prisoners of war, was considered one of the most dangerous prisons in the country. It had the appearance of a massive fortress, with imposing walls and multiple checkpoints. At the first checkpoint, Dani, Melanie, and Tommy were frisked and their bags hand-checked before they were allowed to move to the next gate. One gate closed behind them before the next opened, and they passed through five gates before they were led to a small interview room. After a short wait, a guard brought in George Calhoun, his hands shackled behind him.