Mitchell was clearly guilty, and if they had to add a paperweight or two to keep the papers from flying off the desk, they would, because they didn’t want to take the chance that a killer might walk free. None of them felt bad about it because they were making sure a guilty man got his just deserts.
No one on the jury stopped to ask why the wallet was on the seat next to Mitchell and not in his pocket. Or why the police didn’t look for other tire tracks, or dust the counter for prints. Or if there was video from the bar, and if there was, why it wasn’t shown.
Actually, one person did ask those questions. District Attorney Jerrod Tinsley asked himself, as the trial ended with a gavel drop and a death sentence. What had seemed so cut-and-dried in a trial, he knew, could fall apart like flowers left in a vase for too long.
So he called the impound lot. Time to crush that truck. The video, he couldn’t do much about. It was already in the vaults, and he didn’t want to risk his career by stealing it. They did things by the book there, and he didn’t want his name, or any other, showing up on a clipboard later if the defense started poking around. No one was going to care about an irrelevant tape, anyhow. The exhibit boxes were another story. He knew that any proper appeal attorney would want to retest the bloody clothing and examine the lab results. They might notice that the tests were suspicious, and realize that what was said on the stand might not be true.
He called a man with a dog in the fight. Frank Castle.
Frank dressed in his old uniform, and then the boxes were gone.
Ten years later, the district attorney was haunted by what had happened. Not because he felt guilty, but because at the press conference after the execution he would be announcing what Ruby had learned at the library: He was running for governor against the incumbent. His advisors—including those wealthy shareholders in the prison system—had told him that the governor was weakening, especially on the issue of crime. It was a prime opportunity for Tinsley to move into the position. The prison system was more profitable than oil, and he wanted to be in prime position when the gusher was tapped.
But first he needed Mitchell Brown to die. The execution of a high-profile murderer was guaranteed media coverage. Tinsley would appear on televisions across the state, talking about the need for a governor who was tough on crime—just like him. It was the opening sally against an opponent already on the ropes. This execution would launch Tinsley’s campaign.
In a different story, the bone will tell you, the district attorney would have felt conflicted by the obvious tension between truth and justice. But he didn’t. He felt perfectly okay about what he had done, because in his mind, he had framed a guilty man.
43.
As the sun came up, Ruby sat in her car outside the gas station where the crime had happened. She had known, on this day of execution, that sleep would not come.
Mitchell was slated for execution later that morning.
She pulled the map from her crowded bag, opening it in the pearly soft half-light. The trees looked thick with darkness. She smelled distant woodsmoke and low rivers, the exposed mud. The cicadas were dwindling but still insistent.
She traced the route Mitchell had drawn from Oregon to Georgia, then found the spot where she was sitting now. It was mostly farmland around here. Farmland and foothills, the misty morning rising.
Stretching her neck, she felt the bones creak. The take-out coffee cup at her side was empty. Someday, her friend Delaney had once joked, they’d go to take Ruby’s blood and it would be coffee.
It was a forensic scientist joke, Ruby figured.
The woods were quiet. To the north was the Pickleweed Motel. Willa would be rising now, preparing for her day. She would be placing tiny soaps alongside sinks, shaking out stale duvets. Turning pillows, looking for marks of life on the sheets.
Ruby stared at the map. She used her finger to draw her own path, from the bar to the gas station. It had been a clean shot. Mitchell had followed the road straight here.
Something about that bothered her.
Feeling teary, she put away the map. She had failed, she thought,and it was too late to rectify that. Not just to save her client’s life but to catch the real killer, too. Not only of Betty, she suspected, but of the other women who had gone missing.
Ruby knew she could tell herself she would return here and work those cases. Maybe she would. But she also knew that as soon as she was finished with this case, her phone would ring. There were too many missing women, too many men on death row, for her to work them all.
Mitchell would be dead by then. Ruby had posthumously exonerated several men who had been executed, or died while on death row. It gave her no satisfaction. If anything, it was the most painful aspect of her career. She felt their reproach.You were too late,those voices said.
She rummaged through her crowded bag, pausing at Mitchell’s job application. She remembered thinking how sometimes it was one detail that broke a case. Like that section he had filled out on his challenge. How he’d gotten to know everyone around Chinook.
Her hand found the copies of the ledgers, each one held together with a neat clip in the top left-hand corner. It was something else she had promised herself to do: find the relatives of these people. She could even go looking for her own long-lost relatives, find them somewhere in the fields of life.
She closed her eyes. They felt grainy and hot. It never got easier, to say goodbye to someone you had tried to save.
She thought of her last vision, and the matron in her chair, writing down a name. She would have noted each new person that arrived, and all that died. The few that were born at the poorhouse, like her mother. The effervescent, purehearted Desirée.
Ruby opened the first ledger at random, and began turning pages. There were a lot of Ralphs, many Elizabeths. Popular names at the time.A Georgette appeared, an Englebert. A Samuel. She was wasting time, she was sure.
She stopped. In the vision, the matron had been writing a name in thefrontof the ledger.
Trembling, she turned to the first page. Here the matron had written her own name, with her title. The staff had their own page, you see. Because they were not quite residents.
They were employees.
