Now You See Her - Michael Ledwidge [48]
After a while, I tried to console myself. Things could be worse. At least I hadn’t actually been assigned the Jump Killer case. I’d definitely dodged a bullet there.
What was I getting so upset over? I’d just have to concentrate on my own case, I decided. Keep my head down and my fingers crossed that Mary Ann wouldn’t recognize me. This whole thing would blow over like a freak storm.
I lifted Randall King’s heavy case file and dropped it on my desk.
I even opened it.
Then I stopped kidding myself.
I shoved the file aside and turned on my computer. I clicked open Internet Explorer and typed “Justin Harris” into the Google search box.
A fraction of a second later, I pushed the hair out of my shocked eyes.
Harris’s ten-year-old arrest really was a big media case. There were dozens of newspaper articles. There was even an ongoing segment on the Today show about Harris’s impending execution.
I didn’t really watch the news, but the Today show! How the hell had I missed it?
I didn’t want to know, was how, I realized. I hadn’t checked up on the Jump Killer in seventeen years. I never even once tried to find out what happened to Peter. I knew it was a childish notion, but I thought that if I stopped thinking about all of it, there would be some sort of karmic reciprocity, and everyone I had known would, in turn, stop thinking about me. Subconsciously, I’d made the decision that if I didn’t dwell on it, it would be like it never happened.
But it had happened, I thought as I stared sourly at the computer screen. And wouldn’t ever stop.
I opened a taped 2006 Fox News story about Harris on YouTube. I was hovering my finger over the mouse’s left-click button to play it when my secretary, Gloria “Go-To” Walsh, came in. I immediately minimized the article with a guilty click.
“I thought you had that ProGen prospectus meeting,” she said.
“Tom put me on a pro bono case,” I told her. “No more ProGen for me.”
“Yes!” Gloria said. “Maybe I’ll get home before seven this week. Anything interesting?”
No, more like life-threatening, I thought.
“Sort of, Gloria. I’m kind of in the middle of something. I’ll let you know, OK?”
I turned up the volume on my computer as she closed the door behind her. Shepard Smith was finishing up an intro about the Jump Killer murders. I took a breath, steeling myself to come face-to-face again with the man who tried to kill me that night.
When a picture of Justin Harris filled the screen, I hit the Pause button, puzzled.
Because the man on the screen wasn’t the Jump Killer who’d given me a ride all those years ago on the Overseas Highway.
Wearing an orange jumpsuit above the “Justin Harris” caption was a very sad-looking, very African American man.
Chapter 59
I SAT THERE very confused. Breathing slowly, trying to calm myself, I looked everywhere on my desk except the screen. I perused the snazzy gold embossing on a leather-bound copy of McKinney’s New York Civil Practice Law and Rules, smiled at the framed picture of Emma and me on our Vermont ski trip last January. For a little while, I even watched the minute hand of my gag lawyer’s desk clock that broke every hour down into ten six-minute increments, the same way we fun-loving corporate party animals billed our clients.
Then I looked back at the computer screen and winced.
Justin Harris was still there. Nothing had changed in the slightest. He was still black.
Which didn’t compute. Harris was definitely not the man who’d tried to kill me the night I hightailed it out of Key West. The terrifying, muscled wacko who’d put a gun up my nose was definitely Caucasian, or a mixture of Asian American and white.
Staring at the goateed black man, I came up with the most probable scenario. The one that the Mission Exonerate people kept on harping about: The Florida authorities had convicted and were about to execute an innocent man.
With a queasy feeling in my stomach, I clicked on the link for the most recent Miami Herald article. After I read its first paragraph,