“Damn straight,” Ginny said. “I’m not carrying them out.”
“I hadn’t planned on dragging a rotting corpse down the trail, either. But some legal experts think we have to tell the police the location of the bodies and others don’t think a lawyer who just sees the corpse has any obligation to reveal the location to the cops.”
“What about attorney-client confidentiality?” Ginny asked.
“That just extends to what the client says to you and not to physical evidence. We can’t be forced to tell the authorities how we knew where to find the bodies or the pinkies but we may not be able to keep them a secret.”
“It won’t take a genius to figure out that you got the information from Clarence.”
“True. All they’ll have to do is check the visitors’ list at the prison to find out who I visited or look up the records to see the list of my criminal cases-all one of them. But there won’t be a big battle over this. Little wants me to give the pinkies to the police so he can prove he’s innocent of the Erickson murder and he doesn’t seem to care if they nail him for Farmer.”
Ginny shook her head. “Your client sure has a twisted set of principles.”
“That could be one of the great understatements of all time.”
Ginny stood up and stretched. Her T-shirt rode up her flat belly. Brad looked away, embarrassed, and concentrated on picking up his trash.
“According to Little’s instructions, the bodies should be two miles in,” Ginny said.
“I can’t wait,” Brad answered with a shudder.
As it turned out, he could have waited-forever. That’s what Brad told himself as soon as he’d used a napkin Ginny handed him to wipe his mouth after throwing up in a bush a few steps from Peggy Farmer’s corpse.
“Sorry,” he mumbled.
“Don’t mention it,” Ginny said as she placed the soiled napkin in the bag they’d brought for their trash before handing Brad a bottle of water so he could wash out his mouth. “I did the same thing the first time they brought a really bad accident victim into Emergency while I was training to be a nurse. This guy’s stomach was ripped open and his intestines-”
“Please,” Brad begged weakly as he bent over, eyes squeezed shut, and fought to keep from tossing his cookies again.
“Oops, sorry,” Ginny said sheepishly.
Little had told Brad that he’d buried Peggy Farmer and her boyfriend a few yards into the forest from a fallen tree. The tree was supposed to be an eighth of a mile off the trail that led past the waterfall. Ginny used an odometer to pace off the distance, and they found the thick capsized trunk exactly where Little had said it would be. So were the bodies, although there was a lot less of them than there had been when they were buried years before.
Scavengers had uncovered the shallow grave, and there was very little flesh left on the skeletal remains. Even so, the sight of a real dead body disoriented Brad even more than seeing Laurie Erickson’s autopsy photos. Ginny helped him sit with his back against a tree in a position where he couldn’t see the corpses. While he recovered his equilibrium, Ginny returned to the fallen tree and started digging under the trunk where Little said he’d buried his collection of severed fingers.
“I’ve got them,” she told Brad. “There’s no reason to look if you think it will upset you. I can just put the jar in my backpack.”
“No, I should look at them,” Brad said as he pushed himself to his feet. “I’ll have to at some point, and you’ve already seen me make a fool of myself.”
Brad took a deep breath and forced himself to walk over to the Mason jar Ginny had placed on top of the tree trunk. Brad was surprised that he didn’t have the same visceral reaction to seeing the fingers he’d had when they’d unearthed the bodies. Maybe between seeing Laurie Erickson’s autopsy photos and the dead bodies he’d exhausted his capacity for horror. Brad studied the fingers. They forced him to see his client with a clarity he’d been unable to achieve before. Clarence Little wasn’t weird or clever. Clarence Little was pure evil. Brad’s duty to do everything in his power to clear Little of Laurie Erickson’s murder made Brad feel worse than he had when he’d discovered Peggy Farmer’s body.
Chapter Nineteen
“Sit, sit,” Susan Tuchman said when her secretary showed Brad Miller into her office, first thing Monday morning. “How’s your project coming?”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Brad answered nervously. “There have been a few developments.”
“Good. Tell me about them.”
“I went to Salem like you suggested, to the penitentiary.”
“I bet that was quite an experience.”
“Yes, it was very…interesting. Anyway, I talked to Mr. Little about his case. He says he’s innocent.”
Tuchman smiled knowingly. “I had dinner with the attorney general the last time I was in Washington. He told me he felt terrible because every person he sent to prison when he was a district attorney in Arkansas claimed he was innocent. He said he wished he could have convicted at least one guilty person.”
Tuchman laughed. Brad smiled dutifully.
“Little may actually be innocent,” he said.
Tuchman stopped smiling. “Why do you say that?”
Her tone was not friendly, and Brad guessed that she was sensing that his pro bono assignment might take more time than it was supposed to, which meant it would cut down on Brad’s billable hours.
“Uh, well, I did read the transcript of his trial and there was only circumstantial evidence connecting him to the crime.”
“Most murderers are convicted with circumstantial evidence, since any eyewitness is usually dead.”
“Still, looking at the case objectively, the key evidence against Mr. Little concerned other murders, which-by the way-he doesn’t deny committing. If the modus operandi of those cases didn’t match the MO in Laurie Erickson’s case the judge would probably have dismissed the case when the defense lawyer moved for a judgment of acquittal.”
“But it did match.”
“Well, yes.”
“So there you are.”
“Someone could have killed Laurie Erickson and copied Little’s MO.”
Tuchman sighed. She looked disappointed. Brad was glad Tuchman didn’t know about Ginny’s part in his investigation.
“You’re young, Brad, and I’m glad to see you’re still idealistic, but you’ve also got to be realistic. There are copycat killers in the movies and in legal thrillers. In real life one sick bastard does all the dirty work by himself.
“You’re also losing focus. This whole discussion is irrelevant to your assignment. You’re handling a case in which the only issue is whether Little’s trial attorney was incompetent. The guilt or innocence of Clarence Little is not your concern.”
“That’s a good point, except I’ve found evidence that could prove our client’s claim of actual innocence.”
“Evidence?”
“Yes. Mr. Little told me his alibi for the night Laurie Erickson was murdered. He claims that he was murdering another victim named Peggy Farmer in the Deschutes National Forest. He said it was impossible for him to have kidnapped Laurie Erickson from the governor’s mansion because he was too far away from Salem when Erickson was kidnapped. I checked. He’s right. If he killed Farmer he couldn’t have killed Erickson and vice versa.”
“I’m confused here, Brad. He confessed to another murder in the forest?”
“Yes. The police don’t know about it. That was his alibi, but he didn’t tell his trial attorney because he didn’t trust him.”
“How do we even know there was such a murder?”
“Uh, well I know because I dug up the corpse.”
“You what!!!”
“Actually, there was more than one. Mr. Little killed Farmer’s boyfriend, too. He told me where to find the bodies and his collection of pinkies, which was buried under a fallen tree near the corpses.”