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Taking a photo out of the folder she’d been carrying, she taped it up on to the window. Sure enough, there was my ex-wife, eleven, maybe twelve years old, posing for a picture with her mother at the fair.
“Where did you get this?” I whispered. “How did you get this?”
“It wasn’t the most legal of means, but when I went to see my father, he told me that Savannah had brought her daughter for the same reason he did, as an alibi and a cover up for their affair. I no longer have the pictures of that day, but I figured she had to have kept something.”
“So you hacked her computer?” Tristan asked her.
He sounded relieved that he could finally see how this case could come together.
“I didn’t do anything, but like I said, not the most legal means,” she replied, pointing to it. “The prosecution’s whole case was built on the fact that my—that Ben Walton, was some kind of love-sick stalker. They painted a picture of a woman who was scared and was being held captive by a monster. But does she look that way to you? No one ever spoke to Odile Van Allen. People wanted someone to be convicted, and Ben Walton was the easiest choice.”
Tristan leaned in behind me and whispered, “She sounds like she’s pleading her case now.”
“She is.”
Everything she’d done and put herself through was for this.
“Why didn’t your mother take this case then?” Raymond asked, “Or at the very least, she could have gotten someone to help with it if she didn’t want her name to it.”
I looked to her, waiting. If she wanted to do this she was going to have to pull out every damn skeleton out of her closet.
“Because she was spiteful. When I spoke to Ben Walton, he says she had the evidence to prove that he was innocent, but when she realized it wasn’t just an affair, that he’d planned to leave her for Savannah, she became jilted and destroyed the evidence.”
“But she told you?” Atticus added pushing her.
“She told me that she wanted him to spend the rest of his life in jail,” Thea said dryly. “She passed off the case to a public defendant she knew, and that was the last contact she ever had with him.”
She turned to me, and I nodded as I stood up. “As most of you know, keeping a man out of prison is relatively easy. Getting a man out is a whole other ball game. And on top of that, this is a death row case. Prepare yourselves to be hit with every roadblock humanly possible. There is no way we can simply exonerate him, but that isn’t what we’re going after right now. What we need right now, is to get a retrial, and the only way to win this case is through social media and public pressure. We are throwing all of the case information out there.”
“But won’t that just make it easy for the prosecution to combat everything?” Thea asked me.
“It’s the only way,” Tristan answered. “If we try going legal route, we will be stuck for months, if not years, behind the legal tape.”
Years sounded about right… they would out spend us, and bury us under a mountain of paperwork and technicalities.
“Besides, all the pieces of this are starting to come together… there is more proof out there, we just need to find it. But for now, we will make so much noise that they will have to take notice. You all are in a social media generation, it’s your job start blogs, give interviews, tweet to every last celebrity who is against the death penalty, make the people take notice. We might even be granted a miracle and someone who still has photos of that fair may come forward with something we can use. We will be working out of the office, but also be prepared to go to Connecticut when the time comes—”
“Mr. Black,” Betty interrupted me with panic in her voice, “your ex-wife, she’s here.”
“Weren’t you married to Odile Van Allen?” Raymond asked with a frown.
A series of gasps echoed through the room.
“I’ll be right there,” I told Betty ignoring him. “Get to work people.”
“Godspeed,” Tristan said on my way out.
Yeah, I was going to need the grace of God to make it away from her clutches in one piece. My mother had nothing on the rage that she was going to throw at me. This morning I truly felt bad… I knew how much this tore her apart. We were younger, but she knew. She knew her mother was having an affair and she had said nothing.
No, she had to have said something, and no one listened.
Walking into my office she, with her long dark hair and hazel eyes, turned to me shaking.
“You fucking bastard!” she screamed, charging at me. “Do you hate me this much? I cheated on you, so now you are going to hurt me like this?! This is low, so low, it’s disgusting, even for you! Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this?!”
Grabbing her fists, I held her steady. “He didn’t do it. But you know that don’t you? You were there. They were together. You know that.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. You—I don’t even know who you are now!” she yelled, ripping herself away from me.
