“Yes. I told Joe to go get himself a drink while I spoke to them. Then I found Rosa and Maribel and brought them into my study. They sat holding hands while I explained their choice. When I was finished, they spoke in Spanish for a couple of minutes. I think Rosa asked Maribel if she wanted to go through a trial. Maribel asked in English if I thought Joe Cantor could win a trial, given all the circumstances. I said there was a good chance, but Wes Conley had a top-flight lawyer, and there were no guarantees. In the end, they decided that putting Conley away for nine years was enough. It would ensure that he wouldn’t hurt any other women for a long time, and maybe he’d learn a lesson while he was inside. I told them he’d probably get some firsthand knowledge of what Maribel had been through, and I saw some satisfaction in Rosa’s eyes. Then we all hugged each other, Rosa blessed me, and they left.
“When I gave Joe the news, the relief in his eyes was palpable. He did not want to take that case to trial. He left almost immediately, to close the deal before Evan White had time to persuade Old Man Conley to change his mind.”
“Was that really the end of it?” Jack asks.
“Not quite. It took another hour for all the guests to clear out. Our close friends and relatives were still hanging around. There was also a woman I didn’t recognize, about thirty, and black. I had the feeling she was waiting for a chance to speak to me, so I went over to her.
“She introduced herself as Detective Eve Washington, the woman I’d called on the day Vargas contacted me. She’d worked the Avila case from the beginning. I thanked her for coming, but she told me she was there because she’d heard things were in play on the Avila case, and that most of the office lawyers were coming to the service. She’d seen Joe go into my study with me, and then the Avilas. When I told her the result of our talks, she didn’t look surprised. Then she asked what Cantor had told me about getting Conley’s plea deal vacated.
“‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I figured he must have called in a year’s worth of favors downtown. A lot of people owe him.’
“Detective Washington shook her head. ‘Uh-uh,’ she said. ‘He’s getting it vacated on material breach of the agreement by the defendant.’
“This stunned me. ‘How could he manage that?’ I asked her. ‘What did Conley do?’
“Eve Washington smiled. ‘Remember you asked me to go back over the case and see whether we might have missed anything?’
“A chill raced up my back, and—”
“They found the picture!” Jack cries.
I shake my head.
“The camera, then.”
“No.”
“Then what did they miss? Had the crime lab screwed up something else?”
I smile in remembrance of Eve Washington’s satisfaction. “Detective Washington never believed Conley’s five friends with their alibi about the airport. So she got a warrant and traced all their parents’ credit cards for the day of the crime. They already had the records on the boys, but she figured, why not? Sure enough, one had bought gas at a station near Hobby Airport about ten minutes prior to the time of the rape. Washington and her partner drove out to that station and took a look at their security tapes. The station had been having a spate of drive-offs out there, so they had a great camera setup. There was beautiful footage of those five boys buying gas for a jacked-up dually pickup truck. They were all outside the vehicle, horsing around, drinking beer and acting fools.”
“What about Conley?” Jack asks.
“No sign of him. He wasn’t in the vehicle, either. And their story was that they had all ridden to the airport together, after leaving Conley’s truck at a friend’s house.”
“How could the police be sure Conley wasn’t inside the truck?”
“Once Washington had that footage, she took another run at his friends. The second one folded in five minutes. He was on probation for a drug charge. He didn’t know anything about the missing camera, but he admitted Conley had never been with them that night, and that he’d asked them to cover for him after the fact. Part of the initial plea agreement was that Conley swore to the judge that he’d been at Hobby with his friends during the rape. Washington had proved that was impossible, and that he’d lied. That gave Cantor grounds to get the plea vacated.”
Jack gives a cynical smile and shakes his head. “And Cantor never said a word to you about that.”
“As Eve Washington told me at the funeral, ‘He’s a politician.’ Joe wanted me to think he’d called in major favors to help me out. Or moved heaven and earth to do the right thing. Take your pick.
“I told Washington it didn’t matter, that the Avila family was okay with the new plea, and we’d got the best result we could. I thanked her for her work and told her I was in her debt. She already knew that, but she looked grateful for the praise. You don’t get much of it in her job. ‘You, too,’ she said. ‘That was a stand-up thing, you getting into the case like that. Especially with all this other weight on you.’
“I almost ended the conversation there. But then I asked her how bad the crime lab really was. I told her from what I’d seen, it was pretty fucked up.
“She shrugged. ‘That question’s way above my pay grade. We work with what we have, you know? I hear weird stuff out of there. Crazy things have happened. But that’s a problem for the brass, right?’
“‘Are they aware of the problems?’
“‘Got to be, by now. But . . . people see what they want to see, right?’ She gave me a curious look. ‘You gonna get into that next? Make some noise downtown?’
“I thought about it, then shook my head. ‘I pushed Joe hard on the lab,’ I told her. ‘And he promised to check it out. I’ve got my hands full with my daughter.’
“Washington gave me a sad smile, and then she left. I never saw her again.”
“Damn.” Jack is smiling strangely. “What about Vargas?”
I shake my head. “Felix quit or was let go not long after all that. He moved his family out of town, never called me once.”
“Huh. You know, it’s funny that it was a picture that nailed Conley in the end. It just wasn’t the picture.”
“Yeah.” I reach out and turn down the heat in the car. “You know what happened after that. The illusion of Annie being okay fell away pretty quickly. She developed severe separation anxiety. Therapists didn’t help. I had to start homeschooling her. And the house . . . Sarah had laid every tile, refinished ever floor, chosen every paint color. Her spirit invested the whole place, which you’d think would be comforting. Yet it felt like there was a hole that moved from room to room with us. Her absence was a palpable thing. I should have realized sooner that Annie needed to get out of there.
“I was experiencing my own disconnect. The book I’d been working on completely stalled, and the Avila case had tainted the city for me. I’d never loved Houston, but I had friends there. I’d done good work there. But my ultimatum to Joe had a strange ripple effect. I sensed a general feeling that I’d put people’s careers at risk. If I hadn’t been dealing with Annie’s problems, and my own grief, I might have made a battle of it. Tried to pull down the whole temple. But I didn’t have the strength for that. Investigations into the crime lab began soon enough. But fixing the problems proved harder than anyone could have imagined. They were so endemic to the system, to the city culture . . . the DNA section had to be closed altogether for a while. And they still haven’t straightened it all out.”
“Joe Cantor is leading that investigation?”
“No. Joe gracefully retired less than a year after I left Houston. Long before it all became a national scandal.”
“He knew enough to get out while the getting was good.”
“Maybe. I still believe he had more personal integrity than most DAs I’ve met in my life. And while quite a few convictions for lesser crimes have been reversed for flawed serology or DNA evidence in Harris County—most tried under Joe’s successors—there’s yet to be a capital case overturned. So Joe was right, in a way: the lab wasn’t as bad as Felix Vargas had feared. But the investigations are far from over, and I worry that reversals on capital cases may be coming. Think about that, Jack: a truly innocent man rotting in Huntsville Prison for murder. How do you ever make that right?”
“You can’t. Not with all the money in the world.”
“God forbid they ever go back and find we executed an innocent man.”
Jack whistles softly. “Amen.”
“A lot of good lawyers became cynical fast in that ADA job. I never did. But over time . . . what I saw changed how I felt about the death penalty in this country. Eleven years ago I shot a man because he was trying to kidnap my child. No picnic, by any means, but at least that was clean. A necessity.” I point out at the broad channel of the Mississippi. “A week ago I drowned a man twenty yards out in that river. He was trying to kill me. Not much gray area there, either. I sleep fine at night.” A rush of tangled memories flashes behind my eyes: a gasping mouth beneath eyes filled with hatred, and blood in the water. “But when you kill people with paper—with a stacked deck of cards—it starts getting easy. And when it’s easy, eventually you kill somebody who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Jack sighs deeply, then gives me a look that forgives everything without a word being spoken. “You think we’d better head back to the hospital?”
“Yeah. Maybe you can persuade Mom to give you a turn at the bedside now.”
“Tom’s going to make it,” Jack says, his eyes filled with faith. “I know it.”
I nod, but I’m far from feeling his certainty. “So you think I should just let it go, about Dad telling Mom he had something important to tell me before he died?”
Jack gives me his enigmatic look. “Let’s talk about it on the way back.”
AS I PULL through the massive wrought-iron gate of the cemetery and turn south, toward town, Jack says, “If you thought you were going to die in half an hour, would you be at peace with it? Or would you maybe need to make a call or two? Maybe ask for forgiveness, or grant it to somebody?”
“I hear you. I think it’s only the fact that this is Dad that’s rattled me. Of all the men I’ve ever known, he’s the one where you felt like what you saw was what you got. Somehow, his integrity has held up through every storm.”