She wondered if she should mention to the network suits that the inmates at Baldwin were fans ofThe Girl of Sugar Beach.She could use the ratings.
“I know you’re real busy,” he said. “But did you get the chance to look into the DNA?”
Sidney shook her head. “Not yet.”
She gave her father credit. His original letter had requested to see her with no ulterior motive besides a reunion after more than twenty years. She had reluctantly visited, expecting him to ask if she could manage to free him the way she had freed so many others. It was a common plea in the letters she received from inmates. That she had, actually, only gotten three convictions overturned was immaterial to most felons she spoke with. The fact that she’d freed a single man was enough to draw the attention of convicts around the country. So, when Sidney visited Baldwin for the first time, she expected a similar reception. She didn’t get it. Her father simply stared at her for most of the visit. He laughed a lot, too, shaking his head at the sight of his ten-year-old daughter who had blossomed into a beautiful woman with long brown hair, highlighted by faint streaks of auburn. Hazel eyes brightened with radial traces of ice blue. He couldn’t, in fact, stop shaking his head during that first visit. It was two years, and nine visits later, before he breached the subject of his innocence.
“There are new techniques now,” he had said. “That weren’t available back when I was convicted. DNA analysis is much more specific and advanced these days. If I get you a sample of my DNA, then you could use it to show that it doesn’t match any collected at the crime scene.”
Sidney had changed the subject then, veering the conversation back to her mother. It was a common topic between them, and had been enough to distract him from pursuing things further. Then the letter arrived containing her father’s fingernail clippings. Until Sidney had opened that small square of tissue that spilled ten perfect crescent moon fingernails onto her desk, she had been able to explain away her inaction. But since the potential source of DNA had arrived, it gnawed at her and prevented her from dismissing her father’s pleas.
“Nail clippings are a viable source for DNA,” her father said now. “I looked it up. And I put the tissue paper on my tongue, so a good lab should be able to draw a saliva sample as well.”
The tissue and nail clippings sat in Sidney’s desk drawer at home. They had spent the night next to her kitchen trash can, but Sidney had never gotten up the nerve to toss them in. Instead, she stowed the tissue and clippings in her desk and tried not to think about them.
She looked at her father through the glass now. “I haven’t had them tested yet.”
He shrugged. To most, Sidney figured, this would be discouraging. But she had found over the years that inmates, deprived of just about every luxury in life, possessed a great deal of patience. They never expected anything to happen quickly, and took news of delays in much the same fashion as finding the bathroom stall occupied. They simply took a breath and waited.
Too young at the time of the crime to understand fully what had happened, she had briefly researched her father’s conviction in college. Accused of killing a man in the victim’s home, he was sentenced to first-degree murder and was slated to spend his life in prison.
The single bullet fired came from a .22 automatic found at the scene. Neil Ryan’s prints were recovered from the gun. It was a claim he vehemently denied, since, according to his attorney, he’d never held a gun in his life. Fingerprint experts grappled during trial about whether the prints were a definitive match to Neil Ryan’s. Complicating matters was that another, overlying set of prints had also been pulled from the gun. The prosecution argued that the anonymous prints came from a young officer who had mistakenly, and against protocol, picked up the weapon when he arrived on the scene. But testing of the smeared prints could not definitively be matched to the officer. It was still claimed as a certain match by the prosecution’s expert witness, refuted by the defense’s own fingerprint guru, but not convincingly enough to keep Sidney’s father out of jail.
When the fingerprint debate was over, the prosecution presented the blow, which would turn out to be of the knockout variety, that Neil Ryan was having an affair with the dead man’s wife. Fingerprint arguments were quickly forgotten, and the idea of premeditation became a hot topic.
The jury settled on first-degree murder, agreeing with the prosecution’s argument that Neil Ryan had gone to his lover’s home with the intent to kill her husband, who had discovered the affair. Twenty-five years later, Sidney’s father still sat in a prison cell without the possibility of parole. That he refused to admit to the crime, and showed no remorse for it, was a catching point for every parole board that reviewed his case. No board members had ever given a second thought to a man without remorse, or considered stamping Neil Ryan’s case with anything other thanDenied.
“You’ve been an exemplary prisoner,” Sidney finally said, regaining eye contact through the glass partition. “If you would just take responsibility, you’d likely come up for parole.”
“I didn’t kill that man,” he said. “Why on earth would I admit it?”
“Because it could get you out of here.”
“It could also seal my fate. You know how many guys in here cop to things they didn’t do because they think it’ll get them outta here? Plenty. You know what happens to most of them? They still get denied. And then they can never take back what they told that board.”
“Fine,” Sidney said. “Don’t admit to the crime, but show them some remorse for your involvement. If you hadn’t been . . .” She almost saidcheating on Mom,but it seemed so insignificant this many years later that she was embarrassed it still bothered her. “Sleeping with his wife, the idea of premeditation wouldn’t have come up.”
“I’m a lot of things. A terrible husband is one of them. But cheating on your spouse is not a crime, and it certainly doesn’t prove I killed anyone. I’m not slicing my own throat in front of a parole board just to win their favor.” Her father stared at her through the glass partition. “So, can you help me?”
What her father was asking was for Sidney to somehow pull that. 22 out of a box buried somewhere in an Atlanta Federal Building’s evidence room and prove that her father’s DNA was not on the handle, or anywhere on the weapon, or at the crime scene. This, he was convinced, would be enough to get him a new trial. He’d done his homework, and the plan held some merit. Sidney had made some casual inquires in the last several months, but finding someone who still remembered the case from twenty-plus years ago was nearly impossible. And attempting to get anyone to pay attention to her request to pull evidence from so long ago had so far been fruitless.
“I’m working on it,” she finally said.
Her father took a deep breath. “I guess that’s all I can ask.”
“Anyway,” Sidney said, her way of letting on that she was ready to leave, “I just stopped on my way back to New York.”
“Okay. We’ll talk soon,” he said.
Her father nodded and hung up the phone. He raised his hand and the guard was by his side a moment later, leading him back to his cell. Sidney sat for a while longer, staring through the glass at the empty chair a stranger had just vacated. Her imagination replaced him with her father from years ago. The man on whose shoulders she had loved to ride. Sidney was sure she owed the stranger nothing, but wondered if the other man deserved something.
* * *
In her car, colliding thoughts of her father and Grace Sebold ran through her mind. Since Dr. Cutty’s revelations, Sidney had tried for the last day to find the arc of her story, imagining the best way to present the impossibility of the boat oar being the weapon used to cause Julian Crist’s skull fracture and that, instead, some other instrument wrapped in nylon had been used to strike Julian Crist. It was an explosive argument that could have real consequences. It was backed by science, not some retroactive opinion offered by someone with thin credentials and labeled an expert, as Sidney had seen many other documentarians try to pull off. This development was legitimate, disproving a critical aspect used in Grace Sebold’s conviction. It needed to be handled correctly.
Grace Sebold’s problem, however, and what Sidney had wrestled with for the past twenty-four hours, was the same problem her father faced as he sat in jail. The unexplainable needed to be explained. If the documentary was going to suggest that another object was actually used to strike Julian, then the inconvenient facts of Julian’s bloodin her cottage, as well as on the blade of the oar, and Grace’s fingerprints on the shaft, needed to be explained.
There were not many ways to rationalize those findings. There may not be any. But if one existed, Sidney knew where it rested, and she knew whom it needed to come from. Baldwin’s chain-link fence slowly parted. Sidney turned the rental away from the prison and headed back to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
