THE MEMBERS OF THE PRESIDENT’S CABINET WERE NOT TYPICALLYallowed to enjoy holiday weekends. Even if they managed to escape to a beach or lake house, their phones seldom stopped buzzing. The world, it seemed, didn’t stop to remember American history. So it was that Bev Mangrove, the acting assistant attorney general, had the unenviable task of intruding on her boss’s weekend. She’d taken an early-morning flight into Raleigh-Durham and was now snaking through mountain roads on her way to Summit Lake, North Carolina, where Cooper Schott had planned to spend the week in isolation, away from the politics of Washington, D.C., and isolated from the president and his staff and the problems of the country. Bev Mangrove was not happy to be intruding on Cooper and his wife, but the situation could not wait.
U.S. Attorney General Cooper Schott had a millennial name, despite being north of sixty. He’d spent his entire life correcting people who had called himMr. Cooper.Now most of his friends had grandkids named Cooper. His parents were apparently ahead of the curve.
Bev pulled through the quaint downtown area of Summit Lake and found the turnoff for the long, serpentine driveway that led to the house on the hill, where her boss spent four weeks each year. The front door of the large Colonial opened as she pulled up, and Cooper Schott stood in the doorway, wearing jeans and a starched white shirt with French cuffs held tight by dazzling cuff links. Bev seldom saw him wearing anything but a suit, and she couldn’t immediately tell if he looked more or less comfortable today.
“You made it!” Cooper Schott said as Bev opened her car door.
“It’s beautiful up here,” she said, climbing from the rental car and walking up the front steps. “I can see why you come here so often.”
“Not often enough. Come on in,” Cooper said, shaking her hand. “We’ll head out back.”
Bev followed her boss through the immaculate house, which was flooded with sunlight that spilled through the floor-to-ceiling windows and numerous French doors that lined the west side of the house, most of which were open to allow the lake breeze to stir through the home. Cooper walked onto a sprawling stone patio out back, the view from which captured the lake and the mountains in the distance. Bev sat opposite him at the patio table, protected from the sun by a large umbrella. A sweating pitcher of sweet tea stood on a serving dish, and Cooper poured two glasses. The man, Bev knew, had sworn off liquor years ago.
“So,” Cooper said, “tell me what’s on your mind.”
“Grace Sebold.”
Cooper took a sip of sweet tea and stared out at the lake. “The name rings a bell.”
She knew it did more than that—the Sebold case had been on the Justice Department’s radar for some time—but she was intruding on his vacation, so she played along.
“She was the U.S. med student who, in 2007, was convicted of killing her boyfriend while they were on spring break in St. Lucia.”
“Yes,” Cooper said, taking another sip. “I remember now.”
Bev reached into her leather bag and removed several files. They were government files she had pulled from the State Department the day before.
“Are you aware of the documentary that is currently featuring her story?”
“I haven’t watched anything but a Sooners game in many years.”
“In that case, allow me to catch you up. Sidney Ryan is a producer and filmmaker. Her previous three documentaries were about small-time felons convicted of crimes, it turns out, they did not commit. Ryan’s shtick is that she cherry-picks cases that are sent her way and finds the ones she believes are the most egregious examples of injustice. So far, she’s batting a thousand. Two were in New York, one in Illinois. All three documentaries ended with the convictions overturned. She’s becoming the most feared nonattorney for D.A.’s around the country, because she simply makes the prosecution look silly and, at times, dishonest in the way they reached a conviction.”
“How does this case affect us?” Cooper asked. “The U.S. government, and the Justice Department specifically, had nothing to do with the conviction of the Sebold girl.”
“No, we had nothing to do with the conviction. But I sent Janet Station, from the Southern District of New York, to feel out Sidney Ryan and get an idea of where she plans to go with this documentary. If you look at what she’s uncovered so far, and what she plans to produce in the coming weeks, it all points to the possibility that Grace Sebold is innocent. And if not innocent, it certainly appears thatrules were bent to make sure she was found guiltier than she was.”
“Bent by whom?”
“The St. Lucian government.”
Cooper put his sweet tea down and pulled the files toward him. Bev spoke as he read.
“The documentary is wildly popular. Millions of people are watching it now, and millions more will be watching by the end. It’s become a pop-culture phenomenon. And I understand that popular culture does not dictate our decisions, but our problem lies not in the fact that it is so popular, but in that the arc of the story will suggest that Sebold was wrongly convicted of a crime she did not commit and that a U.S. citizen has spent ten years imprisoned in a foreign country because of this conviction.”
“And,” Cooper said, “the U.S. government sat back and did nothing.”
“Correct,” Bev said.
“This will need to be investigated.”
“I’m on it.”
“The FBI will have to get involved.”
“I’ve already made calls to the FBI, State Department, and to our U.S. ambassador to Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean.”
Cooper lifted his chin slightly. “Who is?”
