The world was melting. The next day, the sun reappeared, as if it had suddenly remembered it was springtime now and no longer winter. The tidal creek behind the house was swollen with runoff from the dripping ice, and the chickadees in the pines were singing a libidinal tune.
I didn’t tell Sarah where I was going. I let her leave for school in the belief that I planned to spend my day on the couch reading the Hemingway book Kathy had brought me from Key West. I knew that if I told her about my call to Ozzie Bell, she would assume I was meddling in the Ashley Kim investigation-which I was.
Dressing yourself with one hand is harder than you think. After trying for ten minutes to button a flannel shirt, I switched to a military-style sweater. I didn’t even bother attempting shoelaces, but tugged on my neoprene boots. Inspecting myself in the mirror, I thought I looked like a sickly duck hunter about to venture onto the frozen flats. I wondered if the prison guards would discern the opaque Vicodin glassiness in my eyes.
I wasn’t accustomed to driving with my left hand, having to reach across my body to shift gears, using my bad hand to hold the wheel steady. I’d arranged to meet Bell at a gas station up the road from the prison, where he would leave his vehicle. The two of us would ride in my Jeep, we’d agreed.
He stood waiting outside a blue Nissan about the size of a golf cart. He was dressed in exactly the same clothes he’d worn to the diner-black pants, black polo shirt, and black blazer lightly dusted with dandruff along the collar. His glasses were enormous, with heavy plastic frames, and his thick white hair was styled and swirled in a manner that made me think of a soft-serve ice-cream cone.
“Warden Bowditch! Or can I call you Mike?”
“Mike’s fine,” I said.
“Thanks for coming. Yowza, what happened to your hand?”
“I was in an all-terrain-vehicle accident.”
“What-like a go-cart? One of those things the kids ride?”
“Something like that.”
He coughed suddenly, a phlegmy sound that rattled wetly around his throat for a long while before he managed to gulp it down. “Cigarettes,” he explained at last. “What was it Norman Mailer said? ‘It’s easier to give up the love of your life than quit smoking.’ It took me forty years, but I finally did it. I knew Mailer back at the Voice. If there was a real newspaper editor in this backwater state, Erland Jefferts wouldn’t still be behind bars, I’ll tell you that much.”
I glanced at my watch for effect. “I’d like to get going, Mr. Bell.”
“Call me Ozzie. I appreciate your taking the time for this, Mike. But you won’t be sorry you did! If you don’t leave today convinced an innocent man is behind bars…” He trailed off, paused to collect his thoughts, and then began again. “You’re going to like Erland. You remind me of him a little. Not physically. But you’ve got the same inner strength. I’m a good judge of people. Every real journalist has a foolproof bullshit detector.”
When he climbed into my passenger seat and watched me reach across my body to shift gears, the peculiarity of the situation seemed to dawn on him. “Maybe we should take my Nissan. You shouldn’t be driving with a hand like that.”
“Thanks,” I said. “But I can manage.”
The Maine State Prison in Thomaston used to be a landmark on Route 1, a brick and razor-wire edifice that some called “Shawshank.” Then in the 1990s, the state built a massive complex on a wood-shrouded hilltop in the nearby town of Warren. Except for the distant spotlights, which gave the night sky an ocher glow, the new prison was largely hidden from the view of passing motorists. Out of sight, out of mind seemed to be the architectural and governmental intent.
“So you read the files, then?” Bell asked me as we turned up the hill toward the immense cream-colored structure. “You understand that the scientific evidence is indisputable. Kitteridge’s own report proves Erland could not have killed Nikki Donnatelli.”
I smiled at him. “You seem to have a low opinion of Dr. Kitteridge.”
“The guy’s a disgrace.”
“In your report you wrote that he threw away the fly larvae collected from Nikki’s eyes.”
“Threw it away! We don’t even know if they were Calliphoridae or Sarcophagidae.” Bell shook his hands in the air as if they were wet and he needed to dry them. “And he never measured the hypoxanthine in the ocular fluid. The least he could have done was to take the body and ambient temperature! All he did was a bullshit test for rigor mortis.”
I flicked a glance at him. “He testified rigor was passing off when he examined the body.”
“Which proves that Erland couldn’t have killed her, because he’d been in police custody for the previous thirty-six hours.”
“My understanding of rigor mortis is that there’s lots of variation depending on body size, temperature, and other factors.”
“Yes, yes. But Nikki was a small girl, and it was a hot day. Based upon the state’s own findings, there can be no question about the time of death.”
“I guess that’s what puzzles me,” I said.
“How so?”
“Well, you say that Dr. Kitteridge is incompetent, and you cite all these mistakes he made at the autopsy. But if he’s such a quack, why are you willing to take his word about the rigor mortis? How do you know he didn’t get that part wrong, too?”
He stared at me through those Coke bottles. “I don’t follow you, Mike.”
“It just seems like you’re trying to have it both ways. You don’t want to believe anything Dr. Kitteridge says except when it validates your theory about the time of death.”
Bell pointed a big finger at a building. “Park over there,” he said, disregarding my argument.
The rules at the Maine State Prison require that all inmate visits be scheduled twenty-four hours ahead of time and that new visitors complete a detailed application form. But someone-I suspected Sheriff Baker, with his deep prison connections-had greased the skids for me. They let me in with just a glance at my driver’s license, warden’s badge, and a cursory pat-down. As for Bell, they led him away to a special room. As a perennial pest, he was probably subjected to cavity searches on a routine basis-how else to find the bug up his ass?
Before we were permitted into the visitation room, a stern-faced guard with the long torso of a weasel ran down the visitation rules with us. “There shall be no profane or loud language. Nothing may be passed between the visitor and prisoner. The hands of the prisoner and visitor must be visible at all times. The visitor and the prisoner may embrace or kiss briefly at the beginning and end of the visit. Prisoners and visitors may hold hands during the remainder of the visit. Visitors are not allowed to use the rest room in the visit area unless it is an emergency or undue hardship. Visitors are encouraged to use the rest room prior to their visit. Prisoners are not allowed toilet privileges during their visit under any conditions.”
I tried to picture the circumstances under which I might want to kiss Erland Jefferts, but my imagination failed me.
A tall guard with coffee-colored skin and hands the size of bird-eating tarantulas then escorted us into the visitation room. He greeted my companion with what appeared to be genuine affection. “How are you doing today, Mr. Bell?”
“I am well, Thomas. And you?”
“It’s good to see the sun.”
“You and I are fortunate to see the sun! The men in here are not so lucky.”
“Them’s the choices they made.”
“Not all of them, Thomas. Not Erland Jefferts.”
The towering guard laughed as he showed us to Visit Booth 2. “So you keep telling me, Mr. Bell.”
After he’d gone, Bell leaned close to me. “I call him ‘Doubting Thomas.’ He’s not a thug like some of the others. That skinny man outside-Tolman-he’s a thug. But Thomas is not too bright, either, and he’s very young. All the experienced guards, the ones with smarts, they know Erland is innocent.”
So Sheriff Baker had told me.
The protocol was for Bell and me to sit on the same side of a table-every item in the room was bolted to the floor-while the guards went to fetch Jefferts. The long wait gave Bell a chance to return to his dissertation on rigor mortis.
“I think you’re missing the important point about the time of death,” he said in his smoke-strained voice. “Maybe you didn’t have a chance to read the trial testimony in full, so I don’t blame you. Danica Marshall-I call her ‘the Black Widow’-is an expert prosecutor. She builds her cases very methodically, like spinning a web. I wasn’t present for Erland’s trial, but I’ve watched her in action since I joined the J-Team. I wanted to study her approach the way an entomologist studies a spider.”
“A spider is an arachnid,” I said.
Either he didn’t hear me or he didn’t find the correction worthy of acknowledgment.
“The Black Widow leaves nothing to chance. She studies every scrap of evidence and coaches each witness for the prosecution. She uses her looks, too, but that’s neither here nor there. I suspect she was raped as a young woman. That would explain her hatred of men.”
I kept my eyes on the door through which they would soon be bringing the prisoner. Bell and his relentless lectures had begun to annoy me.
He continued anyway: “In every murder trial, the prosecutor asks the medical examiner, ‘Based on your examination, at what time did death occur?’ And the ME specifies between which hours it might have taken place. The prosecutor wants to prove to the jury that the victim died at a certain hour, when the defendant had an opportunity to commit the crime. But the Black Widow didn’t do that! She asked Kitteridge if he had reached a conclusion about when death occurred, and he said, ‘Probably thirty hours or more.’ Why be so fuzzy? Because she knew Erland couldn’t have murdered Nikki, and she wanted to confuse the jurors.”
“What would be the point in her railroading an innocent man?”
“You are a game warden, so perhaps you feel a certain loyalty to the prosecution. But you are intelligent and open-minded. I know you attended Colby College. You see, I have studied you, too.” Was I supposed to feel flattered or stalked? “And you must admit that there are times when the cops fixate on a suspect too quickly. They know in their bones that so-and-so is guilty, but they don’t have the evidence to convict. What happens then? If they are professionals, they keep investigating until they find the evidence. Or they admit they are wrong and begin looking at other suspects. But not all detectives and prosecutors are so scrupulous. Some are lazy, like Winchenback and Marshall, who just decide that Erland Jefferts is guilty, and then do everything within their powers to convict him-even by withholding evidence and misleading the jury.”
It was at this stage of his diatribe that I’d begun to wonder whether coming to the prison had been such a smart move on my part. Then the doors slid open and the guard whom Bell called Doubting Thomas emerged. He was leading by the arm a handsome blond-haired man in a light blue work shirt and jeans.
“Erland!” Bell exclaimed, rising to his feet.