“What’s your plan? What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“Why is it so difficult for anyone to believe that I just might like my job at the morgue?”
“I didn’t mean to assume. Do you like your job?”
“I do,” she said. “But my plan was always to go back to school…med school…and become a family doctor.”
“What stopped you?” he asked before taking another swallow of coffee.
“I had just turned eighteen when my parents divorced. I was angry with both of them at the time. Then my dad disappeared and I didn’t want to live with mom, so I struck off on my own. But keeping a roof over my head and food in the fridge wasn’t cheap. I managed to put myself through two years of med school, but it was costly, so I decided to drop out of school for a while. That’s when I snagged a job at the morgue. The years passed and before long, it no longer seemed feasible to go back to school and saddle myself with debt.”
“So now what?”
She shrugged. “Working at the morgue isn’t bad, but I guess I would prefer to help people while they’re alive and keep them out of the morgue.” She paused before she added, “These past few days have opened my eyes, made me see that I never should have given up my dream. I believe I have you to thank for that.”
“How so?”
“Look at you…accused of murder and yet you haven’t given up. You’re determined to do everything you can to fight for your freedom.”
“It sounds like you really might believe I’m innocent.”
“Would I be here if I didn’t?”
The corner of his mouth turned upward. Angela Chack was full of surprises.
“Okay,” she said, “we better get busy. What’s the lawyer’s name again?”
“Michael Gabaldon.”
It was quiet while she did her research. He’d been doing some research himself over the years. But he only had so many hours a week on the computer and he hadn’t wanted anyone to know what he was up to. There was only so much planning he could do within the confines of the prison walls without giving himself away.
“It sounds as if you worked with your lawyer for years,” she said as she typed. “What made you think, after all those years, that he had something to do with your incarceration?”
“I was a cocky twenty-seven year old when I went to prison. The last time I saw Mike, I had already spent three years behind bars. I was no longer the same na?ve young man. Prison life tends to make a person grow up fast. I learned some non-verbal survival methods in prison, including how to decode the human face.”
She raised a questioning brow.
“If I wanted to survive in that place, I needed to stay alert, and learn to read involuntary facial expressions: anger, surprise, contempt, and so on.”
“And you saw something in the lawyer’s face that you hadn’t seen before?”
“Exactly.”
“Can you read my face?”
“Easy.”
“Okay…so?”
“You’re feeling pretty good about yourself.”
“And what makes you say that?”
He placed the tip of his finger on her face, near her nose, and gently traced it to her mouth. “You have a tiny line that runs from the edge of your nose to your outer lip. You’re happy. Not a fake happy either because your muscles are engaged.”
Now that she was conscious of him watching her, she made a face, trying to mask whatever it was she was feeling.
He laughed.
Smiling, she went back to focusing on the task at hand. “Like taking candy from a baby,” she said a few minutes later. “Internet searches these days make it so that anyone can be an investigator.”
He tried to read the screen. A glare prevented him from doing so. “What did you find?”
She took the pad of paper, wrote down Mike Gabaldon’s address, then slid the paper his way. “He lives in Davis, California.”
As Jason pondered all the things he wanted to ask the man, Angela sipped her coffee and continued searching his case. “Who is Stephanie Carr?”
“She was a receptionist at the time of the murder. She’d only been working at the office for about a month.”
“It says here that she was a key witness.”
“That’s true. She pointed at me in the courtroom and said I was the killer. She also testified that she’d seen Dirk and me inside his office the night he was killed.”
“I thought you said the office building was empty.”
“I thought it was, but I didn’t see any reason for her to lie. I figured she must have been in the parking lot when Dirk and I returned to the office, but I never saw her. My lawyer knew this, assured me he’d done everything he could to try to disprove the girl, but it ended up being her word against mine.”
“What about the police? Surely they must have done some investigating.”
“In the end,” Jason said, “nobody could disprove Stephanie Carr’s testimony.”
“So she lied. But why? Maybe she was working with your lawyer.”