Truth and Consequences Page 5

  Elke cleared her throat. “Listen, we have to feel as though there’s demonstrable evidence that the convicted person is innocent, and in the case of your son—”

  “You think he did it,” said Gloria, and there was a catch in her voice.

  Damn it, she was going to start crying.

  Elke cringed.

  Frankie cringed.

  “The evidence against him—”

  “There’s no evidence,” said Gloria.

  “There’s DNA,” said Elke.

  “Yes, but they were together all the time,” said Gloria. “And they were in a relationship, even though they were very young. It’s not as if I entirely approve, but it’s what teenagers do, you know? Yes, he had sex with her, but that doesn’t mean anything.”

  Elke pressed her lips together.

  Frankie cleared her throat. “We’ve talked to Holly Ross.”

  “Who’s that talking?” said Gloria.

  “I’m Frankie Hart,” said Frankie. “I work with Ms. Lawrence.”

  “Well, Frankie Hart, that Holly girl is lying. I never liked her. She always seemed a little off to me. Not like Allison, who was as sweet as could be.”

  “Be that as it may,” said Elke, “there is still the fact that your son seems to have had a disturbing fascination with violence towards women.”

  It was quiet.

  “You’re talking about the drawings,” Gloria said finally.

  “I am,” said Elke.

  “They don’t prove anything,” Gloria murmured. “They’re just drawings.”

  “Not in and of themselves, but taken together with all the rest of the evidence—”

  “I don’t like the drawings either, but you can’t condemn him for that,” said Gloria. “Listen, it’s not against the law to draw naked pictures.”

  “No, it’s not,” said Elke. “But these pictures are incredibly…” She searched for the proper word.

  “I know that.” Now Gloria really was crying. “I don’t know why he would draw anything like that. I really don’t know. But I will tell you something, Ms. Lawrence, I know my son, and he would never have hurt anyone. And least of all Allison. He adored that girl. He was head over heels. Please, please don’t give up on the case yet. Just do a little more looking.”

  Elke sighed. “I don’t think I need to do more looking.”

  “Please?” Gloria’s voice cracked. “I’m begging you.”

  Elke looked up at the ceiling, squeezing her eyes closed. Then she looked back at the phone.

  Frankie shook her head at her. Don’t give in, she thought at Elke.

  “A little longer,” said Elke. “But not much, all right? I can’t afford to waste time if I don’t believe in Curtis’s innocence.”

  “Thank you,” said Gloria. “You will believe in his innocence. I swear you will. Keep looking.”

  There was a little more talking. Gloria gushed thank yous several more times. Then they said their goodbyes and hung up.

  Elke rubbed her temples, groaning under her breath.

  Frankie didn’t say anything.

  Elke looked up at her. “Listen, maybe she’s right. Maybe there’s an explanation—”

  “There’s not,” Frankie snapped. “You’re looking for something because of this woman, but her son is a monster.”

  Elke glared at her. “Watch your tone, Hart.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Frankie, “but how can you be so soft with that woman? You should be made of stronger stuff than that. When you were a prosecutor—”

  “All right, that’s enough.” Elke’s voice was ice. She stood up from her desk and glared at Frankie.

  Frankie lifted her chin. “All I’m saying is that I respect you, and—”

  “It doesn’t sound like you do,” said Elke.

  Frankie snorted.

  Elke smiled tightly. “I know you and I have not always seen eye-to-eye on everything, but I do want to remind you that I am your direct superior, and it is my decision—”

  “Your decisions right now are not good.” Frankie threw up her hands. And then she stalked out of the office without being dismissed.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “I don’t even know,” said Frankie, rummaging through the refrigerator. “She couldn’t hire me, but maybe she can fire me. She hates me. I swear she hates me. You should have seen the way she looked at me.”

  “Hey, sweetie, calm down,” said Rufus from behind her. “What are you looking for?”

  Frankie began to pull things out of the refrigerator. A carton of milk. A bottle of orange juice. Several cans of soda. “I really don’t know what’s going on with her. She’s usually tough as nails, so the fact that this Gloria woman is manipulating her, well, maybe she’s going through some kind of trauma and she’s in no condition to work. Or maybe she has, I don’t know, a brain tumor or something, and it’s affecting her ability to think clearly.”

  “Frankie.” Rufus put a hand on her shoulder. “Calm down.”

  Frankie felt hot tears start to form in her eyes. She had been holding them in ever since blowing up at Elke. “Don’t we have any beer?”

  He smiled. “Sit down.” He pointed to the table.

  Her whole body sagged. “Rufus, this isn’t funny.”

  He pointed.

  She went to the table and sat down.

  Rufus took a bottle of Dos Equis out of a shelf on the refrigerator door. He opened the beer and then handed her the bottle. “There you go.”

  “Thanks,” she said, dashing at the tears that were spilling onto her cheeks.

  Rufus put the milk and juice and soda back into the refrigerator and closed the door. He came over to the table and sat down next to her. “I don’t think she’s going to fire you.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “You’re too good for her to fire you. She needs you.”

  Frankie sniffed. “She doesn’t think I’m good. She hates me.”

  “She doesn’t hate you.”

  “You don’t even know her.”

  “Frankie, I don’t think this is what you’re really worried about.”

  “What else would I be worried about?”

  “You’re afraid that you’re going to let a guilty man out of jail.”

  Frankie took a long draught of her beer, feeling his words settle over her. He was right. She was terrified of that. “Oh, hell.”

  “You were always afraid that you’d defend someone guilty and help them get off from a serious charge and avoid their punishment. This is just a variation on the same theme.”

  She set down the bottle of beer. “What if he is guilty and we find some way to get him out? What if he does it again? If he kills again, then it’ll be partly my fault, because I got him out.”

  “You won’t let that happen,” said Rufus.

  “What if I can’t stop it? She agreed with me that he was guilty, and we’re still on the damned case!”

  He put his arm around her. “You’re looking at this the wrong way.”

  She sighed. “How could I be doing that?”

  “Lawrence almost dropped the case today. You’re making progress. She didn’t quite get there today, but she will. You just have to keep trying. Dig up all the evidence and make sure she understands that Fisher is guilty. And then she will drop the case. You’ll see.”

  Frankie picked up her beer again. “You think so?”

  “I know so.”

  * * *

  Elke slapped one of the drawings down in front of Curtis Fisher. It was a particularly horrid one, featuring a naked woman who was staring into space with wide open, empty eyes.

  Curtis took a moment to register what was in front of him, and then he reddened. “Fuck.” He shoved the picture away.

  Interesting.

  Elke had figured that he would be enticed by the picture, that he would want to keep it. Of course, maybe he was pretending not to be intrigued by it because he wanted her to think he was innocent.

  Curtis turn
ed the piece of paper over so that he couldn’t see it. “How did you find that?”

  “It’s part of the evidence file for your case,” said Elke. She sat down opposite him in the interview room at the prison. “That’s not the only one there. I have a lot of them.”

  A flash of something like disgust crossed Curtis’s face. He rubbed his forehead. “I’m sorry you saw those.”

  “You are? Because you think it means I’ll be less likely to believe in your innocence?”

  “Because they’re awful, and I wish I’d never drawn them.”

  “Why do you wish that?”

  He dragged a hand over his face. “I… I guess when I did it, I didn’t understand about what it would really be like.”

  “And then you raped and murdered your girlfriend and you did understand?”

  “No, it’s not…” He shook his head. “Uh… look, they were for a comic.”

  “What?”

  He nodded. “I was reading these comics—graphic novels—at the time, and they were kind of edgy, and so I started doing some of my own stuff. I was doing this dark superhero story, kind of a riff on Batman and the Joker. Anyway, this is what the supervillain did to women, and the superhero kept finding the bodies and he was trying—”

  “I don’t believe that. You drew these as some kind of disturbed sexual fantasy—”

  “Yeah, I guess,” he snapped.

  She drew back.

  “I mean, yeah.” He squared his shoulders. “It’s complicated, but, yeah, in a way. I don’t think that people should hurt women in real life, and I don’t want to hurt women in real life, but there was a kind of perverse power in those kind of images and drawing them, it… I’m not going to say I didn’t like it. But it was all very abstract and this fantasy world, and they weren’t real, you know? They were just body parts, just things for the superhero to see and get angrier and angrier about.”

  “Just because these aren’t real women doesn’t mean it’s not disturbing.”

  He didn’t answer. He rubbed his forehead and wouldn’t look at her.

  Elke tried to think of her next question.

  Suddenly, Curtis was talking again. “There was one girl in the comic, the girl that the superhero saved…”

  “Yes?” She didn’t know why he was bringing that up.

  “I think about this stuff sometimes, because when you’re in jail, you have a lot of time to think. And I think that I liked that fantasy, because I wanted to be a hero, and I wanted to save women from danger. Be the hero. All guys want that, right? But if I drew the other pictures, it was like I got to have it both ways. Like I could condemn the violence, but I still experienced the thrill of being, like, in control of a fantasy woman.”

  Elke wasn’t sure what to make of that. “It’s more than control.”

  “Right, yeah. I guess. I drew them. I killed them. I was like the drawings’ god or something.”

  Elke raised her eyebrows.

  “Fuck, why am I saying this to you? I’m making it worse.” He buried his head in his hands. “You think I’m some kind of psycho.”

  Elke didn’t say anything.

  He raised his gaze to hers. “I’m not.”

  She sat back in her chair.

  “I’m really not. I was a dumb kid, and I didn’t understand what death was.” His voice had gone gravelly. “I knew about death, but I’d never felt it. But then Allison…” His nostrils flared. “That’s what I didn’t understand, right? It was that death is this ripple. It started with her, and when I think of how… agonizing her last moments were, and that I was no kind of hero at all.”

  Elke drew in a breath, feeling sorry for him, wanting to reassure him that it hadn’t been his fault. Was he the killer?

  Curtis was still talking. “I was off running lines and she was fighting for her life. She died in horrible pain, you know? Like the worst way to die. And that pain exploded outwards and everyone who ever cared about her felt some part of it. Ripples and ripples of it emanating out, affecting everyone. One moment, and so many people were hurt. If I had known that death did that, I would never have…” He tapped the back of the picture. “Never.”

  “But before her death, you were, what? Sexually excited by death?”

  “No,” he said. “Maybe. But not real death. Just this idea of death. A fake idea. When you’re, like, turned on sometimes, you don’t think clearly. You want to push things further and further, make it more intense, you know? Being that turned on normalizes things that it shouldn’t.”

  Elke was still quiet.

  He laughed a little. “What am I saying? Someone like you wouldn’t understand.”

  The thing was, Elke sort of did understand, but she wasn’t going to admit something like that to Curtis, not when there was a chance he was a psycho, who was doing all of this to get his jollies making her uncomfortable. But she knew that there were things that seemed sexy in the moment sometimes that only seemed, well, gross later. Sex itself was kind of like that. It was all sweat and fluids in the end, after all.

  But she had never—never once—found blood or violence sexy.

  Okay, there was this vampire show on HBO she used to watch and sometimes they were biting each other’s necks while they were—

  But that wasn’t the same thing. That was a fantasy.

  Of course, if he was telling the truth about the comic book, then it was a fantasy for him too.

  Still.

  One thing was for sure. Curtis was an intelligent, thoughtful guy. That made her like him, but it also meant that he might be intelligent enough to manipulate her. She was more confused now than ever.

  “I guess you’re not going to be investigating my case anymore,” Curtis spoke up quietly.

  “I don’t know if I want to,” said Elke. “You don’t have much going for you to prove your innocence.”

  “I guess I don’t.” Curtis sounded defeated.

  Elke stood up.

  “You know, it’s funny.” Curtis smiled ruefully. “When you’re innocent, and you’re trying to convince people that you are, you start to realize that everything you say makes you sound like a guilty person telling lies. The more you protest, the less anyone believes you. After a while, you don’t even want to bother anymore.”

  “Mr. Fisher, I think you’re a very smart guy, but I have to tell you—”

  “I didn’t kill Allison.” He looked up at her, his expression fierce. “No matter why I drew that stuff, it doesn’t matter. Drawing pictures doesn’t make you a murderer.”

  “It doesn’t make you look innocent either.”

  “What if it could be proved that it was someone else? If there was someone else who was more likely than me to have done it?”

  “You have any theories?”

  “Yeah, maybe. There was a teacher at our school, Mr. Sanders. He taught English. There were all these rumors that he was involved with some of the girls at the school. There were more than one of these girls, and they kind of flaunted it. Like, they didn’t have to take tests or do papers and they still got As. And the day that Allison, uh… that it happened, she was supposed to meet with him.”

  Elke raised her eyebrows. “So, you think Mr. Sanders killed Allison?”

  “Well, maybe she wouldn’t sleep with him, and that made him mad. Maybe he just… snapped.” Curtis shrugged.

  Elke sighed. “You remember the names of any of these girls?”

  * * *

  Frankie was late to work the next day, and she fully expected to be confronted by Elke when she arrived, maybe even fired. But Elke wasn’t in the office when she got there, and Frankie found out that she’d gone to the prison to talk to Fisher, so Frankie decided to relax a little bit.

  She made a list on her computer of ways she could prove without a shadow of a doubt that Fisher was guilty. But the list contained things like, confession, video of murder, and multiple eyewitness accounts. She wasn’t likely to actually get any of those things.

  There were don
uts in the conference room, and Frankie went out to get one. If Amos kept bringing them and she kept eating them, she was going to start putting on weight just from snacking at work. She needed to exercise some self-control.

  Tomorrow. She’d exercise self-control tomorrow. Today was all about chocolate sprinkles.

  Mouth full, she turned and saw Elke coming into the conference room.

  Damn it. Frankie chewed, wanting to run away and not being able to. Instead, she raised a tentative hand and waved. She swallowed. “Uh, good morning.”

  “Morning,” said Elke. She stopped and started looking through the donuts. “You sleep well?”

  Was she just going to act like they hadn’t argued the day before? “Sure.”

  “That’s good.” Elke picked up a glazed donut. “Listen, this case may end up like the Mukherjee case. We may have to look for other suspects, see if there’s evidence that anyone committed the crime.”

  “Fisher did it,” Frankie said without thinking. Then she wished she’d kept her mouth shut.

  Elke held up a finger. “What if he didn’t?”

  “He did,” said Frankie.

  Elke shook her head. “I’m not sure anymore.”

  “What did he say to you this morning? Did he convince you someone else drew those pictures?”

  “No, he admitted to it. Blamed it on being a horny teenager.”

  “Normal horny teenagers don’t—”

  “I know,” said Elke. “But maybe he’s not normal and still innocent.” She gestured with her donut. “Meeting at 10:30, all right?”

  * * *

  “Anyone look at the interview with Mr. Joel Sanders?” Elke was saying from the front of the conference room. “It’s in Fisher’s file.”

  “Sure,” said Frankie. “I think I read that. What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Well,” said Elke, “he’s a possible suspect.”

  “Wait.” Iain furrowed his brow. “We’re investigating suspects?”

  “Yes,” said Elke. “I think this may be like the Mukherjee case, where we’ve got to actually find out who committed the murder besides Fisher.”

  “Well, that’s great and all,” said Frankie, “assuming Fisher is actually innocent.”

  “Yeah,” said Iain. “His DNA—”