Chapter 10 #3
“I’ve given it a lot of thought. A rape is validated by physical evidence.
She prevented hers, so there’s no DNA evidence, and no bodily damage to her.
The prosecution will argue she could have made up that part of it.
The man she stabbed was a member of a family that’s respected and loved.
He was always wild as a young man, and was picked up by the police a number of times.
But I’ve been told that, as of the night he died, he had a clean record.
I suspect that there were infractions that somehow never made it to the record and some juvenile offenses that have been sealed.
He made a deathbed statement that she had offered sex for money, and as they were about to begin, she stabbed him to take his wallet. ”
“Where does that leave her?”
“I think she won’t get the death penalty, but I think she may get stuck in the system for years, maybe forever, charged with offenses that seem minor but can add decades to a sentence—not just manslaughter, but robbery with a deadly weapon, even prostitution, since deathbed statements are given a lot of weight and are often treated as proven.
And since she was arrested at home after the encounter, the fact that she had no money on her probably won’t help in court. ”
“Where does that leave her?”
“I don’t know, really. You came to see if your committee can help.
What I believe is the best we can do is to negotiate a plea for a lesser charge.
She’s so young. If she accepted a twenty-year manslaughter sentence, she could get out at thirty-six.
For violent crimes you can be considered for parole after eighty-five percent of your sentence, so she might be out after seventeen years and only be thirty-three. ”
“Pretty bleak.”
“It is. Or she could roll the dice and hope to get off. But I think the best we can hope for is a hung jury, based on a principled holdout or two. But the DA could keep filing the charge as many times as it took, and the judges here would probably allow it.”
“Well, thank you, Ms. Fawcett. I may check in with you again as the process goes on.”
“Thank you for coming, and for your concern.”
The two stood, and both went out into the waiting room, Monica Fawcett to look at the next name on the sign-in list, and Jane to leave the building and become Nora Gibbs again.
Jane started back across the business section of the town toward the lot where she’d left her rental car, walking slowly and scanning to find a place where she might be able to overhear answers to some more of the questions on her mind.
She had learned a bit about the legal threats Clare was likely to face in this jurisdiction, and now she wanted to get a broader impression of the way the people who were likely to be on a jury felt about the case.
She began to scan the streets around her for a manicure shop or a hairdresser, or another restaurant that was likely to cater to a lunch crowd.
She noticed two sights. The first one was a police officer walking to the office she had just left.
She tried to imagine why a uniformed officer would be entering the public defenders’ office alone.
She wondered if the cop might be giving an official statement about a crime.
But wouldn’t he have been on the same appointment schedule she had signed?
It was the fresh, quiet part of the morning, when the day was still getting started.
There had been few sounds of car engines and no lawn machinery yet, and most of the stores still had Closed signs on their doors.
There hadn’t seemed to be anything out of the ordinary to attract police to that office.
Yes, there had. A tall, thin woman with black hair, a stranger, had gone in, stayed for a while, and then left.
As the cop reached for the doorknob with his right hand, his left hand pushed his sunglasses up on his forehead, and she was sure he was Davy, the brother of Gerry Fenton.
The only thing that was visible in the outer office had been the sign-in book.
Jane thought about it. So what if he found out that Ms. Bull from a national Indian organization had come to talk to Monica Fawcett?
It meant nothing and led nowhere. If there was a problem, she would see something more ominous.
The second sight was another police officer, three hundred feet ahead of her in the parking lot where she had parked this morning.
She judged from the angle of his head what he must be looking at.
It was her rental car. As he approached the car, he took the handheld radio off his belt and raised it to his face to speak into it.
The sight of the first cop had not seemed threatening.
Two cops, both interested in her, was something else.
Jane knew that she had to move quickly. The next step was going to be to ask her some questions.
That was not something she could allow. She turned left at the first intersection and headed toward the place where she had exited Highway 59 and entered town.
As she walked, she took off her raincoat, folded it into her bag, put her hat in with it, shook out her hair, and ran her brush through it.
When she reached Highway 59, she stationed herself a few feet before the northbound entrance, stuck out her hand with her thumb up, and began to hitchhike.
Jane was of the opinion that she was not as eye-catching as she had been at twenty-two, but she was still likely to get someone to stop for her.
After about a dozen cars passed her without stopping, she moved back from the entrance about fifty feet to give the drivers time to notice her, evaluate what they saw, and pull over to stop safely before they committed themselves to the entrance ramp.
The third vehicle was a green pickup. She saw the front end dipping as the driver applied the brakes.
Jane ran to the right side of the truck, heard the door lock click, and climbed in. The driver was a man with Indian features—hair, eyes, skin. He said, “Where would you like to go?”
Jane was acutely conscious of the cars flashing past and swerving onto the entrance ramp. “If you’re going as far as Joplin, that would be good.”
He saw a break in the traffic, pulled forward, and accelerated up the ramp. “I didn’t ask what would be good. Anyplace is better than standing beside the road. Where would you like to go?”
“The Springfield-Branson Airport.”
“That makes me feel better,” he said. “It’s an intentional destination, not just a place you’ll get stuck in, like you were stuck here.
I’ll take you to the airport. I’m going there to pick up my daughter anyway.
And her luggage.” He gestured toward the covered truck bed behind him. “It’ll only be a couple hours.”
“Thank you,” she said. She liked him, and had an urge to say who she was, but she couldn’t. “I’m Nora Gibbs, by the way.”
“Tyler Shelford.”
“Cherokee?”
“Wyandotte. You?”
“Shawnee,” she lied. “Thank you for giving me a ride. I’d like to pay for your gas. If we stop for it where we can get some food, I’d like to buy that too.”
“That’s nice of you. I’ll take it. You don’t travel this way much, do you?”
“No,” she said. “This is a special circumstance.”
“You know it’s dangerous, right?”
“Yep,” she said. “And I don’t do risky things unless it’s to avoid something that’s riskier.
There were two men who seemed to have more than a healthy curiosity about me, and I saw one of them going to check out my rental car when he didn’t know I was behind him.
I decided to get to the airport another way, and pay the rental company to pick it up. ”
“Sometimes it’s not an easy world,” he said.
When they reached Joplin they stopped for gas and bought hamburgers for lunch. Then they got onto Interstate 44 for the rest of the trip.
When they approached the Springfield-Branson Airport, Shelford got a text message and went to the curb outside the baggage area and waited.
Jane opened the door. “Thank you, Tyler. You’ve been a friend.
I hope that if you ever have a problem there’s someone as good as you to help you.
” She got out of the truck, hurried inside the terminal, and took the elevator up to the ticketing level.
Nora Gibbs flew to Chicago O’Hare, and bought a ticket on American Airlines for a flight ten days away for Los Angeles, Nora’s home city.
She took a cab to Midway Airport and used her Emily Whittaker ID to ask for the earliest flight on United to Buffalo.
There was a flight that was undersold, almost ready to board.
She got ticketed and ran for the gate. The flight took only a bit over an hour and a half.
At ten fifteen she was walking out to the parking lot of the Buffalo Niagara International Airport toward her car.
She knew there were many people who didn’t like being in a parking lot alone at night, but dark spaces anywhere could conceal an enemy, and Jane Whitefield knew how to use the advantages of the dark.
It was easy to keep her face half turned away from the overhead lights so the movement and shadows made her face a series of impressions that kept changing as anyone watching her saw parts of it and his imagination kept filling in the rest. She was used to staying alert, and her body kept itself ready to run or fight.
She used her key fob to turn on her car’s interior lights while she was still twenty feet away to be sure the car was empty, then turn them off.
She didn’t unlock the car until she was five feet from the door, and relocked it as soon as she was in.
She tossed her bag on the passenger seat and drove.
She had spent too much of her life traveling not to see her home airport with eyes and memory at once. This was still the place where she felt sad going away and happy to return. After one day, she felt as though she had been away from Carey and May for weeks.
She headed out to Genesee Street. No Seneca could hear the word Genesee without thinking “pleasant banks,” the Nundawaono name for the river at the center of Seneca country.
She opened the window an inch so she could still feel the warm air.
In minutes she was on the New York State Thruway, then the Youngmann Expressway, and then home to Amherst.
She turned the car into the long driveway and into the garage beside Carey’s car. She got out and he was already outside and walking toward her. He put his arms around her and they kissed.
“You okay?” he said.
“Yeah,” she said. “You?”
“Now I am.”
“Did May miss me too?”
“Come on, let’s go in and you can ask her.”
Jane walked to the big old stone house regretting that what she’d said was a lie. She was not okay. She hoped he had been telling the truth.