She put the paperwork in her bag, and shook his hand.
“Not every day we get a private investigator working on a death row case,” he said, and she saw that he was intrigued, and maybe making sure the shoe company wouldn’t end up in the paper.
“Just a formality,” she said, as she did on every case. “My work is confidential and privileged. What I find, I turn over to the attorney. But I don’t talk to the press. I don’t like the press.”
“Why not?”
She said nothing, but she was thinking about terms likeinner cityandat riskthat the media used to describe and stigmatize Black people, or how reporters shrugged off police misconduct but depicted defenselawyers as slimeballs out to free every convicted killer. Every word, every sleight of hand, was weighted against men like Mitchell.
“I just don’t,” she said, and seeing the confusion in his eyes, she felt herself retreat inside. This man found her attractive: He wanted to know more about her. But there was a canyon of experience between them, and Ruby knew better than to even try to cross it. She had gotten tired of trying to explain the system to others. It never worked.
She turned to leave, and he watched her go.
She stopped for coffee, and sat on a bench beside a pond, eating a bagel and tossing the crumbs to the ducks. It was nice to be outside. She pulled a ream of papers—the evidence listings—out of her bag and read the typed-out lists in the mild Oregon sun.
Pants.
Socks.
A wallet, splashed with blood.
The clothing had been part of exhibit A during the trial, placed in a cardboard box that had later disappeared. She was very interested in that fact.
Fingerprint cards.
Lab results from the Pickleweed police.
The photo of the bloody handprint on the car door.
All of it gone, as lost to the world as Mitchell’s mother, and all the other women on Ruby’s map.
A fat mallard waddled up to her, pecking hopefully at her feet.
“Sorry, Charlie,” she said. “I’m all out.”
Exhibit B was a set of car keys. These had been identified as belonging to Mitchell Brown. They had been found on the gas station counter, sprayed with blood. There was blood all over the gas station, even splashedacross the foggy-cold windows of the beer cooler. Ruby had no trouble believing that the blood was a match for Betty Dubois, even if those tests, along with the keys and the rest of exhibit B, had also disappeared. After ten years, she didn’t doubt that the woman was dead.
She thought of those trial exhibit boxes. White cardboard, with lids. They would have been carried from the Pickleweed courtroom into a locking room in the district attorney’s offices. After the conviction, they should have been transported to police archives. In the case of murder—especially a death penalty conviction—the state was required to keep the evidence until the death of the convicted person.
But losing it? There was no penalty for that.
The duck at her feet kept pecking.
The district attorney had said it was a mystery, what happened to those boxes. In a way, it didn’t matter. There was no way to retest the evidence now. There was no way to see if someone had been lying.
The last page of the list was, as usual, all the evidence that had been ruled out as important. There had been a driver’s manual in Mitchell’s glove box, in a truck that was later turned into a cube, and a map, which might have saved his life that night if he had been sober enough to check it. Dirty socks on the truck floor. A car wrench from the toolbox, ruled out as a murder weapon.
A VHS tape.
That caught her attention. She turned the page. There was nothing more.
She called Terrence Fulks as she left the park, the ducks swarming the bench behind her. He picked up immediately.
“I got that report,” he said. “Poor guy. I didn’t know that his mom went missing.”
“Me either,” she said. “Probably doesn’t mean anything to the case. But I was reading the evidence listings, and toward the end there’s one that says ‘VHS tape.’ Do you know what that is?”
“I do. I asked the district attorney about it. It was video from the bar that night. They didn’t use it during the trial because it was established that Mitchell was there. The defense had no argument with that fact. It’s what happened later that we dispute.”
