Hard news - Jeffery Deaver [2]
Boggs ignored the man’s crazy rambling and finally touched pen to paper. In the upper left-hand corner of the paper he wrote, “Harrison Men’s Correctional Facility.” He wrote the date. Then he wrote:
Dear to who it may concern:
You have to help me. Please.
After this careful beginning Randy Boggs paused, thought for a long moment and started to write once more.
chapter 2
RUNE WATCHED THE TAPE ONCE AND THEN A SECOND time. And then once more.
She sat in a deserted corner of the Network’s newsroom, a huge open space, twenty feet high, three thousand square feet, divided up by movable partitions, head-high and covered with gray cloth. The on-camera sets were bright and immaculate; the rest of the walls and floors were scuffed and chipped and streaked with old dirt. To get from one side of the studio to the other, you had to dance over a million wires and around monitors and cameras and computers and desks. A huge control booth, like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, looked out over the room. A dozen people stood in clusters around desks or monitors. Others carried sheets of paper and blue cardboard cups of coffee and videocassettes. Some sat at computers, typing or editing news stories.
Everyone wore casual clothing but no one behaved casually.
Rune was hunched over the Sony 3/4-inch tape player and small color TV that served as a monitor.
A tinny voice came out of the small speaker. “I told them back then just what I’m telling you now: I didn’t do it.”
The man on the screen was a gaunt thirty-something, with high cheekbones and sideburns. His hair was slicked back and crowned with a Kewpie-doll curl above his forehead. His face was very pale. When Rune had first cued up the tape and started it running, ten minutes before, she’d thought, This dude is a total nerd.
He wore a tight gray jumpsuit, which under other circumstances—say on West Broadway in SoHo—might have been chic. Except that the name of the designer on the label wasn’t Giorgio Armani or Calvin Klein but the New York State Department of Correctional Services.
Rune paused the tape and looked at the letter once again, read the man’s unsteady handwriting. Turned back to the TV screen and heard the interviewer ask him, “You’ll be up for parole, when?”
“Parole? Maybe a few years. But hell…” The thin man looked at the camera quickly, then away. “A man’s innocent, he shouldn’t be out on parole, he should just be out.”
Rune watched the rest of the tape, listened to him tell about how bad life in prison was, how nobody in the warden’s office or the court would listen to him, how incompetent his lawyer had been. She was surprised, though, that he didn’t sound bitter. He was more baffled—like somebody who can’t understand the justice behind a plane crash or car wreck. She liked that about him; if anybody had a right to be obnoxious or sarcastic it was an innocent man who was in prison. But he just talked calmly and wistfully, occasionally lifting a finger to touch a glistening sideburn. He seemed scared of the camera. Or modest or embarrassed.
She paused the tape and turned to the letter that had ended up on her desk that morning. She had no clue how she’d happened to receive it—other than her being your typical low-level-person-of-indeterminate-job-description at a major television network. Which meant she often got bizarre letters dumped on her desk—anything from Publishers Clearing House award notices to fan mail for Captain Kangaroo and Edward R. Murrow, written by wackos.
It was this letter that had motivated her to go into the archives and dig up these old interview tapes.
She read it again.
Dear to who it may concern:
You have to help me. Please.
It sounded so desperate, pathetic. But the tone wasn’t what affected her as much as the third paragraph of the letter. She read it again.
And what it was was that the Police which I have nothing against normally, didn’t talk to all the Witnesses, or ask the ones they DID talk to the questions they should of asked. If they had done that, then I feel, in my opinion, they would have found