42.
The two officers of the Pickleweed police—Aaron Evans and Patrick Dufur—reacted the way they had been trained to. They kept
their guns pointed at the suspect until they had him in their car, cuffed so tight his fingertips turned blue. Mitchell was
groggy and nauseous. He struggled to remember how he had gotten there.
The morning sun was bright, and he blinked, looking around, bewildered. He was outside a gas station in a place he had never
been before.
He could see from the back of the police car into the gas station.
There was blood all over the floor.
His eyes widened, and his heart thumped in his chest. The police had left him in the locked car to go inside, and the kid
who had called them was standing frozen by his bike, just looking.
Mitchell could see gobbets of blood on the cooler doors. It looked like a slaughterhouse in there. An interior prayer started
in him, and it went, Dear God, don’t let this be true and This cannot be true. This is not happening. I am sleeping. I will wake up. I will wake up back in my apartment in Union City.
I will wake up by the Chinook River.
One of the officers came back outside, staring at him as he made a call on his walkie-talkie. It was the coldest stare Mitchell
had ever seen, and being a Black man, he had gotten some cold looks. This one went beyond cold. It took him a moment to see
it for what it really was, and he didn’t think it had anything to do with race. It had to do with murder.
It was hate. Icy cold, white-hot hate.
Later that day, they took Mitchell to the police station.
There, in a back room made of concrete with no windows, the officers took turns beating him.
They knew he was guilty—it was obvious. His keys had been found on the counter, and in the front seat of his truck, next to where he had been sleeping, there was a blood-splashed wallet.
In the concrete room, Mitchell could barely breathe. The blood had settled in his lungs. His eyes were black with it. His
lips were so swollen that it hurt to swallow. His neck was scratched from being choked. Over and over again, the officers
asked him, Where is she? And one even cried with rage while beating him, saying, I know you done it.
Later, he would not remember confessing. All he remembered was the terror. He knew, in that moment, he would never leave the
land of small concrete rooms. He had been jettisoned from a world where he had never belonged, and now there was no going
back.
At the gas station, the officers scraped samples of the blood off the floor, and put them in vials. They asked a local farmer
with bloodhounds to search the woods, using a scrap of clothing from Betty’s farmhouse closet.
Mitchell’s truck was taken into impound and the bloody handprint photographed. After a few days, he was stripped out of the
clothes he had worn while being beaten, and these, heavy with blood, were put into an evidence bag and, along with the vials
of blood, taken to the tiny crime lab in the back of the station, where they were examined by the solitary technician. He
knew his job. They all knew their job.
Mitchell was clearly guilty, and if they had to add a paperweight or two to keep the papers from flying off the desk, they
would, because they didn’t want to take the chance that a killer might walk free. None of them felt bad about it because they
were making sure a guilty man got his just deserts.
No one on the jury stopped to ask why the wallet was on the seat next to Mitchell and not in his pocket. Or why the police didn’t look for other tire tracks, or dust the counter for prints. Or if there was video from the bar, and if there was, why it wasn’t shown.
Actually, one person did ask those questions. District Attorney Jerrod Tinsley asked himself, as the trial ended with a gavel
drop and a death sentence. What had seemed so cut-and-dried in a trial, he knew, could fall apart like flowers left in a vase
for too long.
So he called the impound lot. Time to crush that truck. The video, he couldn’t do much about. It was already in the vaults,
and he didn’t want to risk his career by stealing it. They did things by the book there, and he didn’t want his name, or any
other, showing up on a clipboard later if the defense started poking around. No one was going to care about an irrelevant
tape, anyhow. The exhibit boxes were another story. He knew that any proper appeal attorney would want to retest the bloody
clothing and examine the lab results. They might notice that the tests were suspicious, and realize that what was said on
the stand might not be true.
He called a man with a dog in the fight. Frank Castle.
Frank dressed in his old uniform, and then the boxes were gone.
Ten years later, the district attorney was haunted by what had happened. Not because he felt guilty, but because at the press
conference after the execution he would be announcing what Ruby had learned at the library: He was running for governor against
the incumbent. His advisors—including those wealthy shareholders in the prison system—had told him that the governor was weakening,
especially on the issue of crime. It was a prime opportunity for Tinsley to move into the position. The prison system was
more profitable than oil, and he wanted to be in prime position when the gusher was tapped.
But first he needed Mitchell Brown to die.
The execution of a high-profile murderer was guaranteed media coverage.
Tinsley would appear on televisions across the state, talking about the need for a governor who was tough on crime—just like him.
It was the opening sally against an opponent already on the ropes.
This execution would launch Tinsley’s campaign.
In a different story, the bone will tell you, the district attorney would have felt conflicted by the obvious tension between
truth and justice. But he didn’t. He felt perfectly okay about what he had done, because in his mind, he had framed a guilty
man.