But instead of meeting the governor’s eyes as their hands gripped, Alex looked past the big man at the frail, familiar-looking woman beyond. She looked about sixty, but Alex sensed that she was somewhat younger, as if tragedy or illness had added years to her appearance.
Alex was mystified by her presence here right now. It wasn’t merely the fact that this was supposed to be a private meeting between himself and the governor that left him so surprised to see her. It was the fact that he knew only too well who she was.
This sad-eyed lady was the mother of the very girl that his client had been found guilty of murdering.
Inside the blue Lincoln, the small man was sitting tensely. He knew that waiting was an inherently tense activity. Inactivity breeds a kind of stress that the most vigorous of purposeful action can never match. But there was nothing he could do about it. Waiting was part of the job.
The car was parked and the engine was off. But the key remained in the ignition, as if inactivity might give way to dynamism at any moment.
He touched the Bluetooth earpiece in his right ear, nervously. There was nothing particularly conspicuous about him. No one would pay attention to a twenty-seven-year-old, blue-eyed, brown-haired man in a dark blue suit nursing a Styrofoam cup of coffee from the Midway Café a few yards ahead. Strictly speaking, he wasn’t wearing a suit: his jacket was off, his blue tie loosened and the collar button of the white shirt opened.
From his attire and demeanor, he could almost have been an off-duty G-man. But his modest height and slight build detracted from that, giving him an innocuous aura. If he had been a Washington spook, he would have been a pen-pushing bean-counter, not a field agent. There was no way anyone could have felt threatened or intimidated by him, even though his close-cropped hair hinted—misleadingly—at a military background.
Poised well above the horizon, the sun’s warm glow was filtered by a thin veil of cloud. To the man in the car it had all the appearance of a giant wound in the sky, with blood still oozing through the bandage—not a new wound, more like an old one that refuses to heal.
He lifted his coffee cup out of the holder and took a single sip. Then he put the cup back down and looked round. Golden Gate Avenue looked normal, neither calm nor exceptionally busy. There was no sense of anything important going on twenty yards from where he sat.
He stared at the lacquered, grainy wood of the dashboard, admiring its elegance. It was a trivial thought—but it helped to stave off the boredom…for a couple of minutes at least.
The day was warm—not hot, just warm—hence his decision to take the jacket off. He tended to sweat in any sort of cumbersome clothing.
Finally the Bluetooth earpiece crackled to life.
‘You know Mrs Olsen, I presume.’
‘We’ve seen each other briefly,’ Alex’s embarrassed voice came through the earpiece. ‘But we’ve never actually been introduced.’
Alex walked over awkwardly to the chair where Mrs Olsen was sitting. He held his hand out toward her, not expecting her to rise. She took it limply and he made sure that his own handshake was suitably gentle.
But when he opened his mouth, a polite ‘How do you do?’ was all the lawyer could muster.
What did you say in a situation like this? Do you belatedly express condolences for her bereavement? Apologize for the fact that you’re representing the man convicted of murdering her daughter? Or keep your own counsel and remain silent?
For a few seconds he hovered, unsure of what to do next. The normal procedure was for the lawyer for the condemned man to meet the governor either alone or, more usually, with one of the governor’s staff present. But the sight of Mrs Olsen in this room had thrown his entire game plan out the window.
‘Well sit down, sit down,’ said the governor amiably, pointing to a chair.
Alex shuffled awkwardly toward the vacant chair. He sat down and looked straight at the governor—anything to avoid meeting Mrs Olsen’s unforgiving eyes. Dusenbury spoke again.
‘I’ve been following the Burrow case closely. I was most impressed by your work.’
‘Most of the work was already done. I only came in on it six weeks ago.’
Dusenbury, Alex remembered, was a lawyer by training, and by all accounts a wily old bastard.
‘Well all I can say is that you’ve been pretty busy in those six weeks,’ said Dusenbury. ‘If the press reports are anything to go by.’
‘Mr Governor—’
‘Chuck,’ the governor interrupted. ‘Everybody calls me Chuck.’
‘Sir…’ He couldn’t bring himself to address this man as Chuck. ‘I know this is going to sound rather rude, but I was expecting this to be a meeting in which I could plead the case for clemency for my client. This isn’t usually the way it’s done.’
Alex gave Mrs Olsen a quick glance to make sure that she hadn’t taken offense at his remark. Her eyes remained neutral, but there was the merest hint of a nervous smile, as if she were reaching out to him in a way that he couldn’t understand.
‘I know, son, I know,’ the governor responded. ‘But this is an unusual case, ain’t it?’
Alex couldn’t argue with that.
‘I’ll put it to you real simple,’ said the governor. ‘The reason Mrs Olsen is here is because she’s asked me to offer your client clemency.’
There are things I have done in my life that I’m not proud of. There were things I shouldn’t have done. I was a product of my upbringing. I wasn’t always taught right from wrong. And I was taught to hate people for things they had no control over or for things that I thought were bad because that’s the way I was brought up.
But whatever wrongs I am guilty of, murder is not one of them. I may have been a bully in my youth, but I was never a murderer. Dorothy Olsen suffered at the hands of many people, myself included. But I did not kill her.
Clayton Burrow stopped writing and put the pen down, his hand aching. He opened and closed the hand several times to alleviate the cramp. But it was nothing compared to the pain inside: pain…fear…guilt? He didn’t really know. He just had this constant urge to cry. He wouldn’t do so of course—at least not now. Crying was unmanly and, with a prison guard stationed outside his cell twenty-four hours a day, he wasn’t going to let the bastards see him broken. But at night, when the lights were dimmed (they never switched them off altogether on death row) he would bury his face in his pillow and give in to the weakness that he managed to hide from others in the light of day.
He looked down at the letter and scanned the words. At the time of writing, it had felt like the right thing to say and the right time to say it. But re-reading his words now, all he could think was how pathetic it all sounded. This was to be his final letter, to be read out before his execution. Or was it? Maybe it was to be his final plea for clemency to the state governor. Maybe it was to be his letter to Mrs Olsen if his request for clemency was granted. He wasn’t really sure.
Was it meant to be a letter of appeasement or a letter of defiance…an apology or a denial? What did he want to write? He didn’t even know that.