Innocent Read online

  ALSO BY SCOTT TUROW

  Limitations

  Ordinary Heroes

  Ultimate Punishment

  Reversible Errors

  Personal Injuries

  The Laws of Our Fathers

  Pleading Guilty

  The Burden of Proof

  Presumed Innocent

  One L

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright (c) 2010 by Scott Turow

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Grand Central Publishing

  Hachette Book Group

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  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  www.twitter.com/grandcentralpub

  First eBook Edition: May 2010

  Grand Central Publishing is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The Grand Central Publishing name and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  ISBN: 978-0-446-56821-0

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT

  PROLOGUE: Nat, September 30, 2008

  PART ONE: I.

  CHAPTER 1: Rusty, March 19, 2007, Eighteen Months Earlier

  CHAPTER 2: Tommy Molto, September 30, 2008

  CHAPTER 3: Rusty, March 19, 2007

  CHAPTER 4: Tommy Molto, October 3, 2008

  CHAPTER 5: Rusty, March 19, 2007

  CHAPTER 6: Tommy, October 13, 2008

  CHAPTER 7: Rusty, March-April 2007

  CHAPTER 8: Tommy, October 17, 2008

  CHAPTER 9: Rusty, May 2007

  CHAPTER 10: Tommy, October 23, 2008

  II.

  CHAPTER 11: Rusty, September 2, 2008

  CHAPTER 12: Tommy, October 27, 2008

  CHAPTER 13: Anna, September 2, 2008

  CHAPTER 14: Tommy, October 29, 2008

  CHAPTER 15: Anna, September 2, 2008

  CHAPTER 16: Rusty, September 2, 2008

  CHAPTER 17: Nat, September 2, 2008

  CHAPTER 18: Tommy, October 31, 2008

  CHAPTER 19: Anna, September 24-25, 2008

  CHAPTER 20: Tommy, October 31, 2008

  CHAPTER 21: Nat, September 28, 2008

  CHAPTER 22: Tommy, November 4, 2008

  PART TWO: III.

  CHAPTER 23: Nat, June 22, 2009

  CHAPTER 24: Tommy, June 22, 2009

  CHAPTER 25: Nat, June 22, 2009

  CHAPTER 26: Nat, June 22, 2009

  CHAPTER 27: Tommy, June 22, 2009

  CHAPTER 28: Nat, June 22, 2009

  CHAPTER 29: Nat, June 22, 2009

  CHAPTER 30: Tommy, June 23, 2009

  CHAPTER 31: Nat, June 23, 2009

  CHAPTER 32: Nat, June 23, 2009

  CHAPTER 33: Tommy, June 23, 2009

  CHAPTER 34: Nat, June 24, 2009

  CHAPTER 35: Tommy, June 24, 2009

  CHAPTER 36: Nat, June 24, 2009

  CHAPTER 37: Tommy, June 25, 2009

  CHAPTER 38: Nat, June 25, 2009

  CHAPTER 39: Tommy, June 25, 2009

  CHAPTER 40: Nat, June 26, 2009

  IV.

  CHAPTER 41: Tommy, August 3, 2009

  CHAPTER 42: Rusty, August 4, 2009

  CHAPTER 43: Tommy, August 4-5, 2009

  CHAPTER 44: Anna, August 5-6, 2009

  CHAPTER 45: Rusty, August 25, 2009

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For Nina

  PROLOGUE

  Nat, September 30, 2008

  A man is sitting on a bed. He is my father.

  The body of a woman is beneath the covers. She was my mother.

  This is not really where the story starts. Or how it ends. But it is the moment my mind returns to, the way I always see them.

  According to what my father will soon tell me, he has been there, in that room, for nearly twenty-three hours, except for bathroom breaks. Yesterday, he awoke, as he does most weekdays, at half past six and could see the mortal change as soon as he glanced back at my mother, just as his feet had found his slippers. He rocked her shoulder, touched her lips. He pumped the heel of his palm against her sternum a few times, but her skin was cool as clay. Her limbs were already moving in a piece, like a mannequin's.

  He will tell me he sat then, in a chair across from her. He never cried. He thought, he will say. He does not know how long, except that the sun had moved all the way across the room, when he finally stood again and began to tidy obsessively.

  He will say he put the three or four books she was always reading back on the shelf. He hung up the clothes she had a habit of piling on the chaise in front of her dressing mirror, then made the bed around her, pulling the sheets tight, folding the spread down evenly, before laying her hands out like a doll's on the satin binding of the blanket. He threw out two of the flowers that had wilted in the vase on her night table and straightened the papers and magazines on her desk.

  He will tell me he called no one, not even the paramedics because he was certain she was dead, and sent only a one-line e-mail to his assistant to say he would not be at work. He did not answer the phone, although it rang several times. Almost an entire day will have passed before he realizes he must contact me.

  But how can she be dead? I will ask. She was fine two nights ago when we were together. After a freighted second, I will tell my father, She didn't kill herself.

  No, he will agree at once.

  She wasn't in that kind of mood.

  It was her heart, he will say then. It had to be her heart. And her blood pressure. Your grandfather died the same way.

  Are you going to call the police?

  The police, he will say after a time. Why would I call the police?

  Well, Christ, Dad. You're a judge. Isn't that what you do when someone dies suddenly? I was crying by now. I didn't know when I had started.

  I was going to phone the funeral home, he will tell me, but I realized you might want to see her before I did that.

  Well, shit, well, yes, I want to see her.

  As it happens, the funeral home will tell us to call our family doctor, and he in turn will summon the coroner, who will send the police. It will become a long morning, and then a longer afternoon, with dozens of people moving in and out of the house. The coroner will not arrive for nearly six hours. He will be alone with my mom's body for only a minute before asking my dad's permission to make an index of all the medications she took. An hour later, I will pass my parents' bathroom and see a cop standing slack-jawed before the open medicine cabinet, a pen and pad in hand.

  Jesus, he will declare.

  Bipolar disorder, I will tell him when he finally notices me. She had to take a lot of pills. In time, he will simply sweep the shelves clean and go off with a garbage bag containing all the bottles.

  In the meanwhile, every so often another police officer will arrive and ask my father about what happened. He tells the story again and again, always the same way.

  What was there to think about all that time? one cop will say.

  My dad can have a hard way with his blue eyes, something he probably learned from his own father, a man he despised.

  Officer, are you married?

  I am, Judge.

  Then you know what there was to think about. Life, he will answer. Marriage. Her.

  The police will make him go through his account three or four more times--how he sat there and why. His response will never
vary. He will answer every question in his usual contained manner, the stolid man of law who looks out on life as an endless sea.

  He will tell them how he moved each item.

  He will tell them where he spent each hour.

  But he will not tell anybody about the girl.

  PART ONE

  I.

  CHAPTER 1

  Rusty, March 19, 2007, Eighteen Months Earlier

  From the elevated walnut bench a dozen feet above the lawyers' podium, I bang the gavel and call the last case of the morning for oral argument.

  "People versus John Harnason," I say, "fifteen minutes each side."

  The stately appellate courtroom, with its oxblood pillars rising two stories to a ceiling decorated with rococo gildings, is largely empty of spectators, save for Molly Singh, the Tribune's courthouse reporter, and several young deputy PAs, drawn by a difficult case and the fact that their boss, the acting prosecuting attorney, Tommy Molto, will be making a rare appearance up here to argue in behalf of the State. A ravaged-looking warhorse, Molto sits with two of his deputies at one of the lustrous walnut tables in front of the bench. On the other side, the defendant, John Harnason, convicted of the fatal poisoning of his roommate and lover, waits to hear his fate debated, while his lawyer, Mel Tooley, advances toward the podium. Along the far wall, several law clerks are seated, including Anna Vostic, my senior clerk, who will leave the job on Friday. At my nodding direction, Anna will ignite the tiny lights atop counsel's podium, green, yellow, and red, to indicate the same things they do in traffic.

  "May it please the Court," says Mel, the time-ingrained salutation of lawyers to appellate judges. At least seventy pounds overweight these days, Mel still insists on wearing bold pin-striped suits as snug as sausage casings--enough to instill vertigo--and the same lousy rug, which looks as though he skinned a poodle. He begins with an oily grin, as if he and I, and the two judges who flank me on the three-judge panel that will decide the appeal, Marvina Hamlin and George Mason, are all the best of friends. I have never cared for Mel, a bigger snake than usual in the nest of serpents that is the criminal defense bar.

  "First," says Mel, "I can't start without briefly wishing Chief Judge Sabich a happy birthday on this personal milestone."

  I am sixty years old today, an occasion I have approached with gloom. Mel undoubtedly gleaned this tidibit from the gossip column on page two of today's Trib, a daily drumbeat of innuendo and leaks. It concludes routinely with birthday greetings to a variety of celebrities and local notables, which this morning included me: "Rusty Sabich, Chief Judge of the State Court of Appeals for the Third Appellate District and candidate for the state Supreme Court, 60." Seeing it in boldface was like taking a bullet.

  "I hoped no one had noticed, Mr. Tooley," I say. Everyone in the courtroom laughs. As I discovered long ago, being a judge somehow makes your every joke, even the lamest, side splitting. I beckon Tooley to proceed.

  The work of the appellate court in its simplest terms is to make sure that the person appealing got a fair trial. Our docket reflects justice in the American style, divided evenly between the rich, who are usually contesting expensive civil cases, and the poor, who make up most of the criminal appellants and face significant prison terms. Because the state supreme court reviews very few matters, nine times out of ten the court of appeals holds the final word on a case.

  The issue today is well-defined: Did the State offer enough evidence to justify the jury's murder verdict against Harnason? Appellate courts rarely reverse on this ground; the rule is that the jury's decision stands unless it is literally irrational. But this was a very close case. Ricardo Millan, Harnason's roommate and business partner in a travel-packaging enterprise, died at the age of thirty-nine of a mysterious progressive illness that the coroner took for an undiagnosed intestinal infection or parasite. There things might have ended were it not for the doggedness of Ricardo's mother, who made several trips here from Puerto Rico. She used all her savings to hire a private detective and a toxicologist at the U who persuaded the police to exhume Ricardo's body. Hair specimens showed lethal levels of arsenic.

  Poisoning is murder for the underhanded. No knife, no gun. No Nietzschean moment when you confront the victim and feel the elemental thrill of exerting your will. It involves fraud far more than violence. And it's hard not to believe that what sunk Harnason before the jury is simply that he looks the part. He appears vaguely familiar, but that must be from seeing his picture in the paper, because I would recall somebody so self-consciously odd. He is wearing a garish copper-colored suit. On the hand with which he is furiously scribbling notes, his nails are so long that they have begun to curl under like some Chinese emperor's, and an abundance of unmanageable orangey knots covers his scalp. In fact, there is too much reddish hair all over his head. His overgrown eyebrows make him resemble a beaver, and a gingery mustache droops over his mouth. I have always been baffled by folks like this. Is he demanding attention or does he simply think the rest of us are boring?

  Aside from his looks, the actual evidence that Harnason murdered Ricardo is spotty. Neighbors reported a recent episode in which a drunken Harnason brandished a kitchen knife on the street, screaming at Ricardo about his visits with a younger man. The State also emphasized that Harnason went to court to prevent exhuming Ricardo's body, where he maintained that Ricky's mother was a kook who'd stick Harnason with the bill for another burial. Probably the only piece of substantial proof is that the detectives found microscopic traces of arsenic oxide ant poison in the shed behind the house that Harnason inherited from his mother. The product had not been manufactured for at least a decade, leading the defense to maintain that the infinitesimal granules were merely a degraded leftover from the mother's time, whereas the real perpetrator could have purchased a more reliably lethal form of arsenic oxide from several vendors on the Internet. Despite the familiarity of arsenic as a classic poison, such deaths are a rarity these days, and thus arsenic is not covered in routine toxicological screenings performed in connection with autopsies, which is why the coroner initially missed the cause of death.

  All in all, the evidence is so evenly balanced that as chief judge, I decided to order Harnason freed on bail pending his appeal. That does not happen often after a defendant is convicted, but it seemed unfair for Harnason to start doing time in this razor-thin case before we passed on the matter.

  My order accounts, in turn, for the appearance today by Tommy Molto, the acting PA. Molto is a skillful appellate advocate, but as head of his office, he rarely has the time to argue appeals these days. He is handling this case because the prosecutors clearly read the bail ruling as an indication Harnason's murder conviction might be reversed. Molto's presence is meant to emphasize how strongly his office stands by its evidence. I give Tommy his wish, as it were, and question him closely once he takes his turn at the podium.

  "Mr. Molto," I say, "correct me, but as I read the record, there is no proof at all how Mr. Harnason would know that arsenic would not be detected by a routine toxicological screening, and thus that he could pass off Mr. Millan's death as one by natural causes. That isn't public information, is it, about what's covered on an autopsy tox screen?"

  "It's not a state secret, Your Honor, but no, it's not publicized, no."

  "And secret or not, there was no proof that Harnason would know, was there?"

  "That is correct, Chief Judge," says Molto.

  One of Tommy's strengths up here is that he is unfailingly polite and direct, but he cannot keep a familiar shadow of brooding discontent from darkening his face in response to my interrogation. The two of us have a complicated history. Molto was the junior prosecutor in the event twenty-one years ago that still divides my life as neatly as a stripe down the center of a road, when I was tried and then exonerated of the murder of another deputy prosecuting attorney.

  "And in fact, Mr. Molto, there wasn't even clear evidence how Mr. Harnason could have poisoned Mr. Millan, was there? Didn't several of the
ir friends testify that Mr. Millan cooked all the meals?"

  "Yes, but Mr. Harnason usually poured the drinks."

  "But the defense chemist said arsenic oxide is too bitter to be concealed even in something like a martini or a glass of wine, didn't he? The prosecution didn't really refute that testimony, did you?"

  "There was no rebuttal on that point, that is true, Your Honor. But these men shared most of their meals. That certainly gave Harnason plenty of opportunity to commit the crime the jury convicted him of."

  Around the courthouse these days, people speak regularly of how different Tommy seems, married for the first time late in life and ensconced by luck in a job he plainly longed for. Tommy's recent good fortune has done little to rescue him from his lifetime standing among the physically unblessed. His face looks timeworn, verging on elderly. The little bit of hair left on his head has gone entirely white, and there are pouches of flesh beneath his eyes like used teabags. Yet there is no denying a subtle improvement. Tommy has lost weight and bought suits that no longer look as if he'd slept in them, and he often sports an expression of peace and, even, cheerfulness. But not now. Not with me. When it comes to me, despite the years, Tommy still regards me as an enduring enemy, and judging by his look as he heads back to his seat, he takes my doubts today as further proof.

  As soon as the argument is over, the other two judges and I adjourn without our clerks to a conference room adjoining the courtroom, where we will discuss the morning's cases and decide their outcome, including which of the three of us will write each opinion for the court. This is an elegant chamber that looks like the dining room in a men's club, right down to the crystal chandelier. A vast Chippendale table holds enough high-backed leather chairs to seat all eighteen judges of the court on the rare occasion that we sit together--en banc, as it is known--to decide a case.

  "Affirm," says Marvina Hamlin, as if there is no point for discussion, once we get to Harnason. Marvina is your average tough black lady with plenty of reason to be that way. She was ghetto raised, had a son at sixteen, and still worked her way through school, starting as a legal secretary and ending up as a lawyer--and a good one, too. She tried two cases in front of me when I was a trial judge years ago. On the other hand, after sitting with Marvina for a decade, I know she will not change her mind. She has not heard another human being say anything worth considering since her mother told her at a very early age that she had to watch out for herself. "Who else could have done it?" demands Marvina.