The conference room broke out in applause. Sidney and Leslie acknowledged the support from their colleagues, and made sure to recognize their crew for all their hard work. Sidney looked down the table at Luke Barrington, who wore a paper-thin smile and never put his hands together.
CHAPTER 35
Wednesday, July 5, 2017
JASON WALKED INTO THE ROOM AND STOPPED WHEN HE SAW THEempty bed. Then he noticed Gus in the bedside chair.
“You’re up early,” Jason said. “How’d you manage the chair?”
Gus grunted as he repositioned himself. “Nurse Ratched.”
Jason offered a confused look as he walked to the computer stand, opened Gus’s chart, and reviewed what he’d missed over the long weekend. “Thought you two weren’t talking.”
“We’re not. But we’re pretty good at grunting at each other. I couldn’t sleep and she got tired of me constantly ringing the nurses’ station, so she helped me move at about three o’clock this morning. And byhelped me,I mean she threw my ass in the chair while wearing gloves and trying not to catch cancer.”
“Glad you guys are working things out. But three hours is too long to sit, big boy. So back to bed.”
Gus shook his head. “I can’t do the bed right now.”
“Your other option is to stand for a while. Crutches or walker?”
“Walker,” Gus said without hesitation. He could see it caught Jason off guard. Gus had refused the goddamn walker every other time it had been offered, because it meant he needed to use his prosthetic.
Jason slowly nodded his head. “Be right back.”
A minute later, he returned with an ugly metal walker, the legs of which were capped with tennis balls to quiet the device from rattling against the linoleum floors of the rehab prison. It was a hideous-looking thing meant for the weak and the elderly. But the long holiday weekend had lit a fire. Since three in the morning, when he finished watching the fifth hour of the documentary about Grace Sebold, Gus had a desperate urge to get the hell out of this place. For the first time since retirement, when he handed over his badge and gun, he had something he needed to do. He had something to chase other than an afternoon whiskey buzz. Which, he had to admit, had been working just fine as a way to occupy his retirement until the pain started in his hip. The cancer diagnosis had promptly taken away his whiskey afternoons back then, and without too much of an introduction, it stole his leg a few weeks later.
The black abyss of depression had licked at his heels during those tough days of chemotherapy, when the poison nearly killed him, but had no effect on the tumor. More than once he’d considered allowing the despair to engulf him. Give in to the depression and the cancer and just let it all end. He had no kids, and his wife had passed more than twenty years ago, so no one would really miss him when he was gone. And when his options had been laid out in front of him, Gus decided that he had no desire to live the rest of his days with only one leg.
He still wasn’t sure what had changed his mind, and he spent the last month wondering why the hell he had gone through with the procedure that had made his life worse than when his right leg was withered with cancer. Now his leg andthe cancer were gone, and a strange phantom pain was present that shot down to toes that weren’t there. Apathy had overcome him in the days after surgery, so thick and heavy that it smothered all ambition to walk, to heal, to live. But damn if he hadn’t found inspiration in the most unusual place. A documentary.
His leg was gone, his badge retired, and his romance with whiskey would likely never be the same. But he had found over the weekend some unfinished business. It had never stopped gnawing at him, and if he were the self-reflective type, perhaps he would even admit that what he’d found over the Fourth of July weekend could explain the reason he had gone through with the surgery. Somewhere during the fifth hour of the Grace Sebold documentary, he decided that sitting in a goddamn hospital bed, feeling sorry for himself, was no way to chase down a woman who was guilty as sin.
CHAPTER 36
Thusday, July 6, 2017
ON THURSDAY MORNING, TWO DAYS AFTER THE FOURTH OF JULYholiday, a private jet landed in Castries, St. Lucia. Assistant U.S. Attorney General Bev Mangrove was the lowest-ranking member of the group that piled into the black SUV. Those that outranked her included her boss, Cooper Schott, whose vacation she had ruined a few days before, the director of the FBI, and the head of the State Department. A half-dozen staff members squeezed into a trailing vehicle. They rode mostly in silence, occasionally mentioning the beauty of the island and the lush tropics of the rain forest that surrounded them. But the lure of relaxation that the Caribbean typically offered was nowhere in the vehicle. There was serious work to be done.
Thirty minutes later, they pulled up to the Government House on the northern edge of Morne Fortuné, a hill that overlooks the southern Castries. The building was the personal residence of the governor-general, a location where official business was rarely conducted. An exception was made today. An assistant greeted them when they arrived and ledthem into the building. Waiting for the U.S. entourage and seated around the living room were the prime minister, the governor-general, and the Honorable Francis Bryan, judge of St. Lucia’s Supreme Court. Greetings and handshakes were exchanged, and everyone took their seats. Present in the hilltop home in the eastern Caribbean were the men and women who ran the Justice Department in their respective countries. They had a great deal to discuss, much to bargain, and wide authority from the few people more powerful than them to get this issue resolved.
CHAPTER 37
Monday, July 10, 2017
FOUR DAYS AFTER THE SUMMIT IN ST. LUCIA, SIDNEY SAT IN FRONT OFher computer and edited the clips Leslie had strung together for episode seven. The previous Friday, episode six showed again, in dramatic fashion, how Julian Crist’s skull may have been fractured from something other than a boat oar. Several theories about alternative murder weapons were produced, and they all contrasted sharply with the paddleboard oar that was used to convict Grace Sebold. The theories offered all hinged on the fact that microscopic amounts of organza fibers, a type of nylon, had been discovered in the skull fracture. The suggestion was that a household object might have been wrapped in a nylon bag or sock and used to strike Julian while he was high on the Soufriere Bluff.
The episode drew a startling 20 million viewers who took to the Internet to share their own theories as to what the object could be, and what revelation episode seven would lay bare regarding the blood and the cleanup. The documentary was the biggest television event of the summer. The Internet, Facebook, and Twitter were abuzz with shouts of Grace Sebold’s innocence.
Some part of Sidney felt bad for Julian Crist’s family, which believed for years that his murderer was behind bars. The documentary could provide no satisfying conclusion for the Crist family: Either Grace was innocent, and the tragedy of their son’s death had ruined yet another life, or she was as guilty now as she was ten years ago, and a commercial documentary was bringing doubt into what they believed was an open-and-shut case. Either way, Sidney knew it was an ugly time for the Crist family. The media was on a constant push to interview Julian’s parents and get their opinions.
The success of the documentary had elevated Sidney’s modest celebrity to movie star ranks. Everyone in America knew her name, and every family member or friend with a loved one in jail seemed to be sending her letters and packages begging for her help. Her desk was cluttered with manila envelopes stuffed with court documents and affidavits and witness lists. Proof, each letter claimed, of innocence.
Graham walked into her cluttered office. “The execs want to meet next week.”
Sidney continued to stare at her computer. “Why? Numbers are good. What could they possibly want to complain about?”
“Your numbers are exactly what they want to discuss. They want another documentary for next summer. Same format. They’re putting together an offer and want to discuss it with you next week.”
