Now You See Her - Michael Ledwidge [60]
“Which is exactly what he said happened when she came in to volunteer that morning before she went missing. He claimed after he went off shift that day, he was with another woman, his fiancée, the whole day at the Miami Seaquarium. But when police questioned his alibi, the fiancée completely denied it.”
“Crap,” I said.
“On a pointy stick,” he said. “That’s why my white-shoe firm handed the case to me when his first lawyer was disbarred for bilking his real estate clients. See, like you, I was once moronic enough to believe in Harris, too. Enough at least to take it to trial.”
“What happened in court?”
“It came down to the jury not buying that a poor black prison guard could possibly have consensual sex with an angelic white college student who volunteered there. Foster’s mother sat in the front row, and she cringed and cried whenever the notion of her daughter and Harris being together came up. The jury wasn’t too hot on the idea either. Slam dunk. Capital murder.”
Charlie yawned and licked some custard off his finger.
“I left my firm a year later. Couldn’t stop thinking about it, I guess. So there you have it. In a nutshell. Trying to dig Harris out of his hole cost me pretty much everything. How you figure you’re going to get it done in a week?”
“I don’t know,” I said standing, “but I’m going to do something that maybe you haven’t thought of this year.”
“Yeah, what’s that?” Charlie said, sitting up.
“I’m going to fucking try,” I said.
Chapter 75
IT WAS FOUR IN THE AFTERNOON by the time my chartered plane brought me up to Raiford, where Harris was being held on death row.
Raiford, in North Florida near Jacksonville, was about as far from Key West as you can get without leaving the state. Charlie had suggested to Harris that a local attorney might be more practical, but Harris had refused to get someone else.
It was Charlie or no one, Harris had said. Which made me wonder about Harris’s judgment.
I passed a small group of young protesters sitting on cars parked in the brown grass across from the maximum security prison. A waiflike teen in a vintage flowered dress waved a sign at me that said, DOWN WITH THE DEATH PENALTY. FREE JUSTIN HARRIS!
“Doing my best,” I mumbled as I approached the razor-wire fence of the prison parking lot.
With its king palms, hedged grounds, and whitewashed mission architecture, the entrance of Raiford looked more like a nineteenth-century resort than a prison.
But I nearly forgot that impression forever the moment I stepped inside and took in the stark concrete-and-steel interior decoration. I was buzzed in and felt as much as heard the clack as a door bolt shot home behind my back. It was the first time I’d ever been inside a prison. Movies didn’t do justice to the demoralizing horror.
From somewhere and everywhere came indeterminate shouts, overly loud televisions, flushing toilets, steel on steel.
I thought about that night on the beach so long ago. About Ramón Peña. About the fate I’d dodged.
Or had I? I wondered. Every time I thought I’d gotten away from it, it seemed to pop up again, like a will-o’-the-wisp in reverse.
After being admitted and having my bag searched, I was escorted by a mute, broad-backed Hispanic guard down a bleak cement hallway. I had to wait twenty minutes before Justin Harris hobbled into the death row visitor area in wrist-to-leg shackles. The guard with him actually cuffed him, like a wild beast, to a raised iron ring in the floor beside the table.
And the guard didn’t go far. He stood watching us intently from the other side of a large wired-glass window.
I looked at Justin Harris for the first time. He was heavier than his Fox News picture. He was a big man, gone to fat, his massive shoulders and arms and chest crumpled toward the floor as if something at his center had caved in. He sat there breathing raspily as he stared at me blankly. I noticed a raised, bluish bump on his cropped head.
“Where’s Charlie?” he finally said. “I thought they said my lawyer was here.”
“I’m Nina Bloom. I work