“Sarah could do that, but I don’t think she did.”

“Tell me a little about her personality.”

“Sarah’s very tough, driven, and she likes a challenge. She skydives, she climbs mountains.”

“She’s a risk taker?”

“Yeah, but she’s not crazy. She got me up Mount Hood the first year we worked together, and she took all of the safety precautions.”

“Did she take risks on the street?”

“No. I would have asked for another partner if I thought she was a cowboy. But she liked the action. I can handle it OK, but I wouldn’t be sorry if I never ran into another bad situation. I think she preferred tense situations.”

“So she was a good cop?” Dana asked.

Moffit took another long drink of coffee. “Yeah, overall. She cut corners on occasion, but I always felt comfortable riding with her.”

“Did she ever do anything illegal?”

“You’re asking me if she was dirty?” Moffit sounded offended.

“I’m just asking.”

“No, she was straight. I never saw her do anything crooked.”

“Did Sarah ever talk about John Finley?”

Moffit nodded. “When he first moved to Portland.”

“What did she say?”

“She told me about meeting him after she climbed that mountain in South America and how he showed up.”

“Mary tried to get evidence that would prove John Finley was a government agent. Did she ever say anything about that?”

“Not to me.”

“I think I’ve exhausted my questions. Do you want to tell me anything else?”

“Only that I don’t think she did it. Everything I know points toward spooks. Finley sounds like he was into mysteries we average folks don’t deal with.”

Chapter Forty-five

The Willamette Valley Correctional Facility for Women had been selected by the Oregon Department of Corrections to house female death-row prisoners. Sarah Woodruff had the dubious honor of being the institution’s first and only death-row resident. A chain-link fence topped by barbed wire surrounded the low-slung, pastel yellow buildings. A service road circled the prison, and the land on the other side of the road had been ground down and stripped away. Anyone escaping would be visible to the guards until they made it to the evergreens that grew half a mile beyond the fence. In the distance were low green hills and a vast blue sky.

Dana was expected. After she signed in and passed through the metal detector, a guard led her down the prison corridors to the noncontact visiting room, where she waited for the institution’s most famous inmate. Fifteen minutes later, a thick metal door opened on the other side of the bulletproof glass, and Sarah Woodruff shuffled in dressed in a baggy jumpsuit and wearing manacles. Her complexion was pasty, a result of the starchy institutional food and lack of sunlight, but the former policewoman held her head high despite her depressing situation. Dana was pleased to see that the prisoner had maintained her dignity.

Woodruff eyed Dana warily while the guard took off her chains. When the guard left, she sat in an orange molded plastic chair and picked up the receiver that was affixed to the wall.

“Thank you for seeing me,” Dana said into an identical receiver.

“You’re a reporter, right?”

Dana nodded.

“And you’re here to do a story about my case?”

“Yes. We think we can stir up support for your cause by letting our readers know how the government kept you from getting a fair trial.”

“You might make some money off the papers you sell, too,” Sarah said.

“There’s that, too. Even reporters have to eat.”

“I hope exploiting me helps fatten you up, Miss Cutler.”

Dana found it interesting that Sarah had made no effort to mask her cynicism, even though Mary Garrett must have told her that Dana was there to help. It was a good sign that Woodruff was not trying to manipulate her. She looked straight through the glass and locked her eyes on Woodruff’s.

“Selling papers does put food on my plate. That doesn’t mean I don’t think you were fucked over. I’m in this for the money and because I think you got a raw deal.”

“Mary said you were a detective with the D.C. police. What did you work?”

“Vice and Narcotics. Now I’m an investigative reporter. You use a lot of the same skills. The big difference is that I can’t use a rubber hose to get people to talk to me.”

Sarah didn’t smile at the joke. “I wanted to be a detective,” she said. “That dream ended the minute I was arrested.”

Dana leaned forward. “We want to help you get your life back on track, and the first step is a new trial. There are so many unanswered questions in your case. Especially those involving the intelligence agencies. Hopefully, Ms. Garrett will get answers to them if the Supreme Court sends your case back on the national-security issue.”

“That’s where I was really screwed,” Woodruff said, her anger barely contained. “The government shut us down. They raised that state-secrets bullshit, and I never had a chance.”

“Why do you think the government worked so hard to keep the truth from coming out.”

Sarah laughed bitterly. “That’s easy. Can you imagine the uproar if the public found out its government was dealing drugs? Someone somewhere is scared to death of what would happen if the truth about the China Sea came out. I’m certain that John was killed by the CIA because he could prove hashish was smuggled in on the China Sea.”

“Before I ask you about the facts of your case, I’d like to talk a little about your childhood and how you ended up on the police force.”

“Why do you need to know that?”

“I’m writing an article that I’m hoping will help you get a new trial, so I’ve got to make our readers see you as a real person.”

“I’d rather not talk about my past. Can’t you get all that from Mary? She had me write an autobiography for the sentencing phase of my trial.”

“I need to hear it from you-how you see your life, not how an expert witness dissected it. All our readers know about you now is that you’re a convicted killer.”

“Nothing I tell you is going to endear me to them. My early life wasn’t pretty. I was lucky to escape from it in one piece.”

“There was testimony about abuse during the sentencing hearing.”

“Yeah, well, those were some of my earliest memories of dear old Dad, may he rot in hell.”

“How long did it go on?”

“Until he died, which fortunately was when I was nine. He was a trucker. There was a big pileup on an icy road in Montana. I hear he burned to death. I hope it’s true.”

Woodruff paused and caught her breath. Dana waited before asking about Sarah’s mother.

“Living with that bastard took its toll. He beat her when he was home. She was a dishrag. She never protected me, even when I told her what was going on. She screamed at me, accused me of lying. She was drunk most of the time, and she’d drink enough to pass out when he was home so she could claim she didn’t know what was happening. I got out of there as soon as I could.”

Dana consulted her notes. “You ran away several times.”

“They’d bring me back, and I’d plot my next exit. When I turned sixteen, I took off for good. I’d heard Oregon was a good place to go, and that’s how I ended up here. I lied about my age. That was easy. I always looked older than I was. Got a job waitressing and soon found out that waiting tables was not what I wanted to do all my life. So I got a GED, worked my way through community college, scholarship to Portland State, and on to the police academy.”

“Do you ever talk to your mom?” Dana asked.

“She died. I found out about that by chance. After I left, I never called, and to the best of my knowledge, she never tried to contact me.”

“What made you choose law enforcement as a career?”

“It gave me a chance to arrest scumbags like my father,” Sarah answered without hesitation.