We were hanging up when he added, “Just so you know, Eycks contracted our firm for a week’s work, which means that if you need me after next Wednesday, you’ll have to talk to him.”
Today was Friday. I wondered if I could possibly sort out this tangled business in five days. I felt panicky when I hung up. Not the best frame of mind for good detective work.
I did half an hour of stretches, trying to persuade my weary legs and arms that a good workout was the equivalent of ten hours’ sleep. And that caffeine would make up any remaining deficit.
It didn’t really work, but I resolutely settled myself at the dining room table with my laptop, looking at the list of inmates that the Department of Corrections had placed at Ruhetal. Most people in the forensic wing are there for a short time only; if they are psychotic, they are medicated until they are mentally stable enough to plead. I was assuming that anyone Leydon had wanted to talk to in the locked wing was there after a successful insanity or incompetency plea. And I was hoping I could find someone whose incarceration was linked to arson.
I’d pleaded incompetence or insanity only a few times in my stint as a public defender, even though a huge proportion of offenders are mentally ill, or addicted to drugs—the two often go together—or can’t understand the crimes they’d allegedly committed. Anyone working in public-aid law has seen more than their share of perpetrators with competency issues, and if the system had worked well, I would have mounted that defense more often.
Unfortunately, incompetent inmates become stateless and defenseless. Letting your client be deemed unfit for trial is like condemning him to a horrible purgatory. If your client never stands trial, he’s never sentenced. Doctors, not a court, decide whether he ever becomes fit enough to stand. If he’s never tried, it’s a tribunal, not a judge, that decides whether he can be released. And most of those judged mentally incompetent come from families without the education or resources to lobby for a tribunal hearing.
I opened the results file. No one was at Ruhetal because of arson-related crimes, but the DOC database gives information only at the highest level. There were plenty of murders, attempted murders, aggravated assaults, assaults with attempted murder—any of those could have been caused by arson.
I went slowly through the Ruhetal list but didn’t find anyone I’d represented. Perhaps I could pick someone at random and see if they or their families would appoint me as a lawyer. The state says that a lawyer in good standing can call any inmate and offer to represent them, and the hospital has to let you in.
There were three inmates who’d been at Ruhetal so long that they predated the automation of case reports—the case-file system didn’t include the crime they’d been arrested for. One of the names sounded vaguely familiar—Tommy Glover. Google gave back twelve million results when I asked it.
The court records didn’t tell me what Glover had done, just that he’d been sent to Ruhetal twenty-seven years ago. I went into Lexis to do a news search but didn’t turn up anything. There was no way to get access to arrest reports—even if the arresting force had kept them after all these years, they’re not available to the public eye in any shape or form.
I’d been hunched over my laptop for more than two hours and my neck and shoulders were too sore to continue. I took the dogs to the lake, where the three of us swam a half mile between the buoys. When I got home, I needed a nap more than ever. Sleep is just a craving, I told myself. Distract yourself and the craving will diminish.
I drove to my office as a distraction so I could go through my complete case file on the vampire killing. I found the reference by accident, after sifting through all notes and documents I’d collected during the past two weeks.
In desperation, I pulled out the clippings I’d removed from Leydon’s Hermès bag the day she fell at Rockefeller. Most were about the Fukushima reactor or on nutrition, but she’d also kept a story on the death of Netta Glover in a hit-and-run accident.
Two days before Wuchnik’s murder, Netta Glover had been walking from her suburban bus stop to her home in Tampier Lake Township when she was struck by a car and killed. It was nine at night and no one had seen the incident, but a man walking his dog had come upon her, probably within minutes of the accident. He’d called 911 but by the time an ambulance arrived she was already dead. So far, no one had come forward to ID the car that had hit her.