Trace Of Innocence

“He hasn’t met a liquor he doesn’t like,” I muttered. Then I shrugged and sighed, but fell into step with Lewis and Joe. As we walked, I noticed that the massive man next to me was wearing loafers that had easily set him back a grand, and his pants had the crisp cut of an Italian designer. His leather jacket—which had to have been custom-made, given his ex-NFL build—looked butter soft.

“You went to law school after the NFL, right?” Lewis asked.

Joe nodded. “Blew my knee out, but they still had to honor the rest of my contract. I had invested wisely over the five years I played. Owned my place outright, owned my car. Didn’t buy into the flash—except maybe for my clothes.” He grinned, running his hands down the lapel of his jacket. “I drove a nice Mercedes sedan, not a souped-up sports car. I was set for life, as far as I was concerned. Invested in real estate, some solid stocks. My mama taught me very well. ‘Don’t be a flash in the pan, son,’ she used to say. I was restless in retirement. She’d always instilled in me a love of reading and education so I decided to go to law school. After a couple of years with a blue-chip firm, I started my own private practice. I represent a lot of my old NFL buddies. Making almost as much as when I was with the league. But I started the Foundation because I felt that there were too many young African-American men in prison and that DNA might help get some of the innocent ones out. Since then, we’ve freed men of all colors and backgrounds.”

I pulled my jacket tighter around me as a brisk wind whipped down between the tall apartment buildings. The sign for Coyote Canyon was lit in neon, with a giant green cactus sign jutting out over the door. The place used to be a hole-in-the-wall, before Hoboken became a trendy place to live back two decades or so ago. Yuppies started renting anything and everything they could find, hence Coyote Canyon became popular with the suit-and-tie crowd fresh off the commuter trains that hurtled beneath the river to Manhattan.

When we walked in, the hostess recognized Joe and pointed to a table where a woman sat waiting for us. We maneuvered around the women in Manhattan stylish clothes and the men with real Rolex watches on their wrists and sat down. Joe leaned over to give the woman a peck on the cheek first.

“Lewis LeBarge, Billie Quinn, this is Sister Catherine Christine. She goes by C.C.”

The woman stood and smiled and shook each of our hands. She was stunning—and not dressed in a nun’s habit. She wore a simple black turtleneck and black pants over black riding boots. She had a plain gold band on her left hand, and a simple gold cross around her neck with a diamond chip in the center of it. Her hair was long—and she had lots of it, in tight, strawberry-blond curls.

“Thank you so much for agreeing to meet with us,” she said, smiling.

I looked over at Lewis, who was clearly captivated by her. He drawled, “May I ask how a nun and a football player ended up as partners?” He smiled as we sat down.

C.C. looked at Joe, who nodded.

“Well,” she said in a soft, gentle voice. “I was in prison ministry…. I know it seems an odd choice, but I always felt like prisoners are the modern-day lepers. Forgotten, tossed away…And I met a young man by the name of Thomas Garson. He’d been railroaded into taking a plea bargain for murder two, but he was innocent.”

“How did you know?” Lewis asked.

“Intuition. Prayer. Divine guidance. And I’ve been doing this long enough to smell the guilt on a man.”

I tried to avoid laughing out loud. Lewis and I were creatures of science—and intuition and prayer weren’t high on our agenda. Lewis was an atheist. I hadn’t darkened a Catholic church in years. I understood what was under a microscope or in my test tube. I trusted traces of blood and sperm, or intricate patterns of crystallized drugs. Like most criminalists, I was a chemistry major in college, and I had my masters in molecular biology.

“Thomas was a fan of Joe’s. His family had moved to New Jersey from Louisiana when he was a boy, but like a lot of people, he still rooted for that hometown team. Me? I could move to Alaska and still root for the Giants.”

“A nun who follows football?” Lewis cocked an eyebrow.

She laughed and continued. “I promised to try to get him an autograph or a letter of encouragement. I’m sure Joe thought I was crazy, but I tracked him down. I hadn’t realized he had gone into law. I told him about Thomas, and one thing led to another and Joe took his case pro bono and won an appeal. Thomas is now the file clerk for Joe’s firm. Has a new baby daughter and a pretty young wife who’s a paralegal.”

“A happy ending,” I said dryly. C.C. nodded. “But for every happy ending, there’s an innocent man languishing. More like ten innocent men. If they’re of color or they’re Hispanic or foreign-born, the number rises.”

A waitress came over and Joe ordered a pitcher of margaritas and a basket of chips with salsa.

“No offense, Sister,” I began. “But we just process the evidence. It’s not for us to determine if some guy is guilty or innocent.”

“Please call me C.C.” she said. I wanted to dislike her because she gave off an aura of such kindness my instinct was to think she was a fake, but I couldn’t make myself. She just seemed that nice.

The waitress returned with a pitcher, four glasses and a basket filled with freshly warmed tortilla chips.

“Look,” Joe said, leaning on the table with both elbows. “Walter Leighton used to advise us. But now that he’s a super celebrity, he’s forgotten us. We need you two to help us look at cases to see if there’s even the possibility that new evidence might reverse a conviction or win a new trial.”

“I always knew that Walter’s swelled head would get the best of him,” Lewis said.

Walter Leighton had written the forensic bible. When he consulted on a couple of really huge cases, his face time on Court TV, Dateline, Primetime Live and the Today Show increased until he was pretty much a household name and a celebrity. Then he had a ghostwriter pen two novels about a forensics investigative team and a police detective, sold about a million copies of each, and now he was famous and rich. Lewis hated the sight of Walter. I used to think it was professional jealousy. After I got to know Lewis better, I realized he saw the arrogance in Walter. It would be just like that guy to abandon the Justice Foundation. If Walter had walked away from C.C. and Joe, I knew just what Lewis was going to say before he even said it.

“We’ll be happy to offer our professional opinions where we can,” he said.

We. I’d gotten used to that, too. It was as if he thought of us as one person in that lab.

C.C. took out a folder from her briefcase. Her eyes were moist when she looked at us. “You have no idea how grateful we are.” She absentmindedly patted Joe’s forearm. “This work…it’s our lives.”

She slid the folder across the table.

Staring up at me from the mug shot was a man who made me blink slowly several times. He was beautiful. But beyond that, his eyes were soulful. Large and dark. He had a small scar on his left cheek, right near the corner of his eye, which brought my gaze to rest right at his pupils. His eyelashes were dark and made his eyes appear almost angelic. His hair was black and thick, with curl at the ends. He held up his processing number, and he looked stunned.

“What’s pretty boy’s story?” Lewis asked.

“David Falco is serving life for a rape-murder. The suicide king case,” C.C. replied.

“I don’t remember that one,” I said.

“About ten years ago. A woman murdered in her apartment. She was an acquaintance of his. She was splayed out, and the suicide king from a deck of playing cards—you know, the one with the knife through the head—was left by her side. A knife had been plunged into her temple.”

“Oh yeah.” I nodded. “Now I remember.” I had learned not to shudder anymore. Too many depraved cases.

“Evidence tying him to the murder?” I asked. For reasons I couldn’t explain, I had a knot in my belly, as if I wanted to believe that the man whose face was so innocent-looking had to be, in fact, innocent.

“Not much. He admitted he had been in her apartment, so his fingerprints were there, but no fingerprint on the knife or the playing card. He was seen leaving her apartment in the window of time when she was likely murdered—but so was another man who was never found or questioned. David said the three of them had been hanging out together.”

“So who was the other man?”

“He doesn’t know. Said it was a friend of hers. But he never got the guy’s name.”

“Sounds fishy,” Lewis said.

“I know,” said C.C., “but there was possibly semen on her panties—panties lost by the police. The case was botched from the word go. And I don’t know…he just doesn’t give off a dangerous vibe.”

“None of them do,” Lewis said, pouring himself another margarita.

“That’s not so. Even men who are innocent, after a time in prison, they start to smell of violence. They give off that feeling. But not him.”

“So where do we come in?” I asked, still fascinated by the picture.

“Well, the panties surfaced after the trial in a paper bag in another evidence file. They were well preserved and I figure we have one shot at testing what may or may not be semen. I mean, we think it is. And we just need a break on this one.”

I sipped my margarita and stared down at the picture. I wondered what the years in prison had done to that innocent-looking face.

Chapter 3

I drove a drunken Lewis home. He was a goner, and I don’t mean just drunk—though he was that, too.

“Isn’t she amazing?”

“Who?”