I say, “Brilliant, just brilliant. Two men who’ve never met, one eighteen years old, the other thirty-five, join up for about half an hour to murder two little girls, then go their separate ways, never to see each other again and both determined to keep their mouths shut forever. You wanna argue that on appeal?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Huver says, scratching his chin as if his high-powered brain is clicking right along and sifting through new theories of the crime.
Kaufman, whose mouth is still open in disbelief, says, “You can’t be serious, Dan.”
Dan says, “I want to proceed. I think Gardy Baker was involved in this crime. I can get a conviction.” It’s pathetic to watch him plunge onward when he knows he’s wrong.
“Let me guess,” I say. “You believe in your case.”
“Damned right I do. I want to go forward. I can get a conviction.”
“Of course you can, and getting a conviction is far more important than justice,” I say, remarkably under control. “Get your conviction. We’ll slog through the appellate courts for the next ten years while Gardy wastes away on death row and the real killer walks the streets, then one day a federal judge somewhere will see the light and we’ll have another high-profile exoneration. You, the prosecutor, and you, the judge, will look like idiots because of what’s happening right now.”
“I want to go forward,” Huver says like a defective recording.
I keep going: “I think I’ll go to the press, show them the DNA test results. They’ll splash it around and you’ll look like a couple of clowns still trying the case. Meanwhile, Jack Peeley will disappear.”
“How’d you get his DNA?” Judge Kaufman asks me.
“He got in a bar fight last Saturday at the Blue & White, got his face busted, and the guy who did it works for me. I personally scraped Peeley’s blood off my guy’s fist and sent it to the lab, along with a sample of the hair I collected earlier.”
“That’s tampering with the evidence,” Huver says, predictably.
“Oh, sue me, or throw me in jail again. This little party’s over, Dan, give it up!”
Kaufman says, “I want to see the test results.”
“I’ll have them by tomorrow. The lab’s in San Diego.”
“We’re in recess until then.”
At some point during the day, the judge and the prosecutor meet secretly. I’m not invited. The rules of procedure prohibit such clandestine meetings, but they happen. These guys need an exit strategy, and fast. By now they know I’m half-crazy and I will indeed run to the press with my test results. At this desperate hour, they are still more concerned with politics than with the truth. All they care about is saving face.
Partner and I return to the City, where I spend the day working on other cases. I convince the lab to e-mail the test results to Judge Kaufman, and by noon he knows the truth. At 6:00 p.m. I get the phone call. Jack Peeley has just been arrested.
We meet the following morning in Kaufman’s chambers, not in open court, where we belong. A dismissal in open court would be far too embarrassing for the system, so the judge and the prosecutor have conspired to do it behind closed doors, and as quickly as possible. I sit at a table with Gardy by my side and listen as Dan Huver limps through a tepid motion to dismiss the charges. I strongly suspect that Huver wants to proceed with his beloved case, the one he believes in so strongly, but Kaufman said no; said this little party is over; said let’s cut our losses and get this radical bastard and his brain-damaged client out of here.
When the paperwork is signed, Gardy is a free man. He’s spent the last year in a tough jail—I should know. But a year in jail for an innocent man is pure luck in our system. There are thousands locked away for decades, but that’s another soapbox.
Gardy is bewildered, not sure where to go or what to do. As they lead us out of Kaufman’s chambers, I hand him two $20 bills and tell him good luck. They’ll sneak him back to the jail to collect his assets, and from there his mother will take him somewhere safe. I’ll never see him again.
He doesn’t say thanks because he doesn’t know what to say. I don’t want to embrace him because he didn’t shower last night, but we manage a quick hug in a narrow hallway while two deputies watch us. “It’s over, Gardy,” I keep saying, but he doesn’t believe me.
Word has leaked and there’s a mob waiting outside. The town of Milo will never believe anyone but Gardy killed the Fentress girls, regardless of the evidence. This is what happens when the cops act on one of their smart hunches and march off in the wrong direction, controlling the rumors and taking the press along with them. The prosecutor joins the parade early on, and before long it becomes an organized and semi-legitimate lynching.
I slip through a side door to where Partner is waiting. We make our escape, without an escort of any sort, and as we speed away from the courthouse two tomatoes and an egg splash onto our windshield. I can’t help but laugh. Once again, I’m leaving town in style.
