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He nodded.
“You haven’t had any contact with them, have you?”
“Anne wrote to me a few times, but she stopped a few months after I was convicted.”
“Do you have those letters?”
He shook his head. “We don’t get to keep a lot of things.”
“All right,” I said, about to signal a guard standing on the other side of a door.
But Larry asked, “Would you go and see Brysen?”
“Who’s Brysen?”
“I told you about him in my letter. He’s the reason I want to get out. I want him to know this is happening.”
“Like I said, I’m not sure it is happening. I have to convince my boss.”
“Can you go see him anyway?”
“Sure.”
He rattled off Brysen’s phone number. He knew it by heart.
10
April 8, 1996
Monday late afternoon
It was getting late. It had been almost an hour since Larry had gone back to his cell. I’d gone nose-blind to the smell of the place and was now so hungry I was ready to eat the metal chair I was sitting on. Finally, the door popped open and Stu Whatley ambled in. He was a few inches under six-foot, balding on top, still muscular, with cold blue eyes. He sat down across from me, anger wafting off him like too much aftershave.
“Why is this taking so fucking long?”
I ignored that. “I’m Dom Reilly. We haven’t met. Lydia asked me to come and ask you a few questions.”
“What for? The DNA says I didn’t do it. Isn’t that enough?”
“Unfortunately, no. District attorneys are doing what they can to slow these cases down and sometimes stop them.”
He stared at me like he wanted to chew me up and spit me out. I continued, “I need to talk to you about your arrest and the identification process.”
“They arrested me. They broke down my door and treated me like I was the Kansas City Bomber.”
It took me a moment, but I figured out what he meant and corrected him. “Oklahoma City Bomber. Timothy McVeigh.”
“Yeah, him.”
“And they were there because you’d been arrested for felony rape before.”
“Arrested, yeah. But the bitch was lying. All I got charged with was assault.” He shrugged, and said, “I punched her. She deserved it.”
“You like to beat up women?”
“Why do people ask stupid questions like that?”
“It doesn’t seem so stupid.”
