Hard news - Jeffery Deaver [26]
“In here, miss.”
The guard led her into a small room. She guessed it was reserved for private meetings between lawyers and their prisoners. The guard disappeared. Rune sat at a gray table. She studied the battered bars on the window and decided that this particular metal seemed stronger than anything she’d ever seen.
She was looking out the greasy glass when Randy Boggs entered the room.
He was thinner than she’d expected. He looked best straight on; when he turned his head to glance at a guard his head became birdish—like a woodpecker’s. His hair was longer than in the tape she’d studied and the Dairy Queen twist was gone. It still glistened from the oil or cream he used to keep it in place. His ears were long and narrow and he had tufts of blond, wiry hair growing out of them. She observed dark eyes, darkened further by an overhang of bone, and thick eyebrows that reached toward each other. His skin wasn’t good; in his face were patches of wrinkles like cities in satellite photos. But this appeared to be a temporary unhealthiness—the kind that good food and sun and sleep can erase.
Boggs looked at the guard and said, “Could you leave us?”
The man answered, “No.”
Rune said to the guard, “I don’t mind.”
“No.”
“Sure,” Boggs said, as cheerful as if he’d been picked for first baseman in a softball game. He sat down and said, “What for d’you want to see me, miss?”
As she told him about receiving his letter and about the story she grew agitated. It wasn’t the surroundings; it was Boggs himself. The intensity of his calmness. Which didn’t really make sense but she thought about it and decided that was what she sensed: He was so peaceful that she felt her own pulse rising, her breath coming quickly— as if her body were behaving this natural way because his couldn’t.
Still, she ignored her own feelings and got to work. Rune had interviewed people before. She’d put the camera in front of them, washed them in the hot light from Redhead lamps and then asked them a hundred questions. She’d gotten tongue-tied some and maybe asked the wrong questions but her talent was in getting people to open up.
Boggs, though, took a lot of work. Even though he’d written the letter to the station he was uneasy around reporters. “Don’t think I’m not grateful.” He spoke in a soft voice; a slight southern accent licked at his words. “But I’m … Well, I don’t mean this personal, directed at you, miss, but you’re the people convicted me.”
“How?”
“Well, miss, you know the expression ‘media circus’? I’d never heard that before but when I read about my trial afterwards I found out what they mean. I wasn’t the only person who felt that way. Somebody who got interviewed in Time said that’s what my trial was. I wrote a letter to Mr. Megler and to the judge saying that I thought it was a media circus. Neither of them wrote back.”
“What was a circus about it?”
He smiled and looked off, as if he was arranging his thoughts. “The way I see it, there was so many of you reporters all over the place, writing things about me, that the jury got it into their head that I was guilty.”
“But don’t they …” There was a word she was looking for. “You know, don’t they keep the jury in hotel rooms, away from papers and TV?”
“Sequester,” Boggs said. “You think that works? I was on Live at Five the day I was arrested and probably every other day up till the trial. You think there was one person in the area that didn’t know about me? I doubt it very much.”
Rune had told him she worked for Current Events but there was no visible reaction; either he didn’t watch the program or he didn’t know that it was on the Network, the employer of the man he’d supposedly killed. Or maybe he just wasn’t impressed. He glanced at the Betacam sitting on the table beside Rune. “Had a film crew in the other day. Were shooting some kind of cop movie.