Mercy. David Kessler

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      Alex shifted uncomfortably. He was flogging a dead horse. Time for another shift in his arguments.

      ‘Well what about her trust fund? Eighty-six thousand dollars that she just liquidated a few days before she vanished?’

      ‘The defense already tried that smokescreen at the trial. It was her money. She’d just turned eighteen and she wanted to get her hands on it.’

      ‘And what about all that jewelry she bought with it?’

      ‘What of it?’

      ‘Well why would she suddenly do something crazy like that?’

      ‘How the heck would I know? Maybe she wanted to make an impression at the prom!’

      ‘Then how come they never found the jewelry afterward?’

      ‘Maybe Burrow stole it! After he killed her!’

      ‘Then why didn’t they find any of it on him? Or in his house?’

      ‘Maybe he sold it. He had seventeen months between when she disappeared and when they arrested him.’

      ‘So where’s the money? He didn’t exactly lead a lavish lifestyle.’

      ‘How the heck should I know? Maybe he lost the jewels! The point is, they found incriminating evidence on him and he had no explanation for it. It was an open and shut case.’

      Alex Sedaka let the air out of his lungs. This was going nowhere.

      He had only recently learned these details. He had not in fact had anything to do with the original trial. Burrow had been represented by an overworked Public Defender. After the guilty verdict, Burrow’s cause had been taken up by a liberal-leaning law firm, which had tried to base its appeal mainly on allegations of incompetent representation by the defense counsel. When these efforts failed—and with the execution date looming ever nearer—they hinted to Burrow, in no uncertain terms, that he might like to consider hiring new counsel. They had no desire to be associated with a failed attempt to save a murderer from execution, hence their eleventh-hour retreat from the battlefield.

      The upshot of all this was that Alex had been called in six weeks ago to try and save Clayton Burrow from death by lethal injection.

      ‘He’ll see you now.’ A hard-edged female voice cut through Alex’s imaginings.

      Alex had been so wrapped up in his mental dress rehearsal of his pleadings, that he hadn’t even heard her enter the room. He looked up to see the same lean, prim and spinsterly woman who had politely told him to wait here a few minutes ago. He hoped to God that he hadn’t been talking out loud while alone in the room.

      She led him down the corridor, turning back to give him a disapproving stare through her horn-rimmed spectacles when he stopped for a moment before a perspex-fronted painting to pat down into place his gray-tinged, black hair. Alex sensed that she was the kind of woman who didn’t suffer fools gladly.

      When they arrived at the meeting room, the woman opened the door, holding it for him to enter. He looked at her expectantly, but she made it clear with her body language that she had no intention of entering the room herself. As he stepped into the plush, mahogany-panelled room, the governor—a smiling, hulking figure in a check shirt and extra large jeans, part fat, part muscle—rose from the conference table to greet him.

      It was at that moment that Alex was struck by an unexpected sight. On another chair on the far side of the conference table sat a lean, short, frail, middle-aged woman with gray hair.

      ‘Alex Sedaka,’ Chuck Dusenbury’s voice boomed out. It was a politician’s tone—that sort of ‘I’m a man of the people’ twang that Alex associated more with the Midwest or Rocky Mountains. Dusenbury followed through with a firm handshake. Alex was grateful that it wasn’t a bear-like hug.

      But instead of meeting the governor’s eyes as their hands gripped, Alex looked past the big man at the frail, familiar-looking woman beyond. She looked about sixty, but Alex sensed that she was somewhat younger, as if tragedy or illness had added years to her appearance.

      Alex was mystified by her presence here right now. It wasn’t merely the fact that this was supposed to be a private meeting between himself and the governor that left him so surprised to see her. It was the fact that he knew only too well who she was.

      This sad-eyed lady was the mother of the very girl that his client had been found guilty of murdering.

       09:38 PDT

      Inside the blue Lincoln, the small man was sitting tensely. He knew that waiting was an inherently tense activity. Inactivity breeds a kind of stress that the most vigorous of purposeful action can never match. But there was nothing he could do about it. Waiting was part of the job.

      The car was parked and the engine was off. But the key remained in the ignition, as if inactivity might give way to dynamism at any moment.

      He touched the Bluetooth earpiece in his right ear, nervously. There was nothing particularly conspicuous about him. No one would pay attention to a twenty-seven-year-old, blue-eyed, brown-haired man in a dark blue suit nursing a Styrofoam cup of coffee from the Midway Café a few yards ahead. Strictly speaking, he wasn’t wearing a suit: his jacket was off, his blue tie loosened and the collar button of the white shirt opened.

      From his attire and demeanor, he could almost have been an off-duty G-man. But his modest height and slight build detracted from that, giving him an innocuous aura. If he had been a Washington spook, he would have been a pen-pushing bean-counter, not a field agent. There was no way anyone could have felt threatened or intimidated by him, even though his close-cropped hair hinted—misleadingly—at a military background.

      Poised well above the horizon, the sun’s warm glow was filtered by a thin veil of cloud. To the man in the car it had all the appearance of a giant wound in the sky, with blood still oozing through the bandage—not a new wound, more like an old one that refuses to heal.

      He lifted his coffee cup out of the holder and took a single sip. Then he put the cup back down and looked round. Golden Gate Avenue looked normal, neither calm nor exceptionally busy. There was no sense of anything important going on twenty yards from where he sat.

      He stared at the lacquered, grainy wood of the dashboard, admiring its elegance. It was a trivial thought—but it helped to stave off the boredom…for a couple of minutes at least.

      The day was warm—not hot, just warm—hence his decision to take the jacket off. He tended to sweat in any sort of cumbersome clothing.

      Finally the Bluetooth earpiece crackled to life.

      ‘You know Mrs Olsen, I presume.’

      ‘We’ve seen each other briefly,’ Alex’s embarrassed voice came through the earpiece. ‘But we’ve never actually been introduced.’

       09:40 PDT

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