Before I Sleep Read online

  She glanced his way, giving him a wry smile. “Around the courthouse, do you know what the conventional wisdom is about Batt-LEO? They say it means the cop used excessive force and is trying to cover it up.”

  He grimaced. “I won't say it never happens.”

  “Oh, it happens all right. And I had a case of it. The defendant was covered with bruises that competent medical authority said could only have happened if he'd been hit by a heavy, blunt instrument or dropped from a height of six feet. The cops said they never touched him, that all they did was wrestle him to the ground. They said the bruises were already there, and that the defendant complained about them when he got out of the car, even though a half dozen witnesses testified he'd been just fine a couple of hours before. After the beating the guy couldn't even walk. It was so bad they took him to the emergency room.

  “What's more, the defendant's companion backed up his story that the cop just started whaling on him. Nor were the cops trying to arrest the guy. He'd merely been a passenger in a vehicle stopped for speeding. So why would this guy get in a fight with the cops?”

  “It happens.”

  “Maybe. But it also turns out the cop and the defendant have a long, unpleasant social history.”

  He nodded. “Not so good.”

  “That's what I thought. Anyway, the cop was adamant the guy was drunk and hit him, but insisted he never hit back. The cop's partner was so vague on what happened that it was downright suspicious. So I refused to prosecute the case.”

  “And then?”

  “They turned it over to someone else and the guy got four years for hitting the cop. So I quit. I couldn't stomach it anymore. Cops lie and juries believe them. I've seen it time and again.”

  “It happens,” he said. “I won't deny it. Cops are just people, and some are more ethical than others.”

  “Yeah.” She shook her head. “The problem is, they're supposed to be better. They're supposed to be upholding the law.”

  “I won't argue with that.” He stirred a piece of French toast around in a puddle of syrup, then put his fork down. “I can see why you got disillusioned.”

  She shrugged a shoulder and pushed her own plate aside. Her appetite had died somewhere during her discourse on the Otis case. “My fault. I was too damn idealistic when I got out of law school. I should have known that human nature would get in the way. So how's your dad? Did he get into treatment?”

  “By eleven o'clock this morning. He actually seemed glad to go.”

  “Maybe he was. Living with your disapproval isn't easy.”

  He winced, and the look he gave her was pained.” I suppose you know all about that.”

  “I suppose I do.”

  He sighed and shoved his plate away. “I guess I deserve that.”

  She shrugged again.

  “So you see me as a self-righteous son of a bitch?”

  “I wouldn't say self-righteous. But you are always right.”

  “Same difference.”

  She shook her head and lifted her coffee mug, cradling it in both hands.

  “Look, I was wrong, the way I reacted to your doubts about Otis. I'm not saying the guy wasn't guilty as sin. I'm just saying that I was wrong how I responded to you. I assumed you were making all those arguments at work, for one thing. And I assumed the reason you were making them to me was that you wanted me to bolster your belief that the guy was guilty. I thought I was being supportive.”

  She looked at him in disbelief.

  He held up a hand, as if to say, I know it sounds stupid.

  All of a sudden she gave him a sad smile. “I wonder how many other times one of us was guilty of bad assumptions.”

  “Damned if I know.”

  Carey continued to look at him, feeling a terrible ache for what might have been. Too late. So many things in life came too late. “I'm sorry, but I didn't get through to the IRS today.”

  “Doesn't matter. Whenever is probably soon enough. The old man is so deep in shit right now, he needs a snorkel.”

  “Why are you so angry with him, Seamus? Just because of his drinking?”

  “Isn't that enough?”

  She cocked her head. “I wouldn't have thought so. I'd have expected you to feel pity for him, not this kind of anger.”

  He looked down, visibly hesitating. Then he said, “Well, he was driving the car when my daughter was killed.”

  Carey felt a current of shock run down her spine. It was as if the world suddenly went still and cold. “I thought—I thought there was a drunk driver. I thought your wife was driving when they were hit.”

  He shook his head. “Danny was driving. He was visiting for the weekend, and she asked him to drive because Seana was having convulsions from a high fever. Mary didn't want to be driving because she couldn't watch the baby in case she stopped breathing.”

  She nodded. “It makes sense.” She waited for him to say what he always said: I should have been there. But Seamus had been on a stakeout, and matters had apparently happened so rapidly that Mary hadn't even tried to get ahold of him. He blamed himself for that, and had never stopped blaming himself for it. His constant, heavy burden of guilt had been one of the things to come between them.

  But he didn't say he should have been there. Not this time. Instead he continued. “Danny had had a couple of beers earlier. He always had a couple after he finished work. The blood test showed he wasn't legally drunk at the time of the accident but …” He looked away.

  “But maybe he could have reacted faster,” she supplied for him. She could understand how that might plague him.

  “Mary didn't put Seana in her car seat,” Seamus continued. “I guess she was in too much of a hurry to go, and didn't want to pull it out of her car. I don't know.”

  And suddenly, for the first time, Carey understood why Mary Rourke had hanged herself a few short weeks after the accident. The woman had blamed herself. The baby had probably died only because she hadn't been in the car seat when the drunk driver had hit them. The child had probably been flung violently around in the car, ripped right out of her mother's arms, most likely. Maybe even thrown through the windshield. Danny and Mary had walked away with minor injuries, but the baby had died. And then Mary had killed herself.

  She reached out suddenly, covering Seamus's hand with hers and squeezing, trying to convey her sympathy. For the first time she understood the full magnitude of the load he was carrying. It was far more complicated than Seamus's previous explanation that his child had died in a car accident caused by a drunk driver, and that his wife had hanged herself from grief. And all of it might have been avoided if Seamus had been home that night. No wonder he felt so guilty.

  And now she felt guilty, too. How different might things have been if she had just once asked him for details about what had happened to his family? But she hadn't dared ask, because she had feared treading in places where she wasn't welcome. Because she had feared raking up the cooling ashes of his grief. Because she had feared causing him more pain. Because she had known him to be reserved about things he felt deeply, and she had feared his reaction to her curiosity. God, what a fool and a coward she had been!

  So she had never really understood what he was suffering, and because she hadn't understood, she had come to resent it.

  “I'm so sorry,” she said, speaking the inadequate words because there was nothing else she could say.

  His face had taken on a tension she recognized. He was struggling with strong emotion. “It was bad enough about the baby,” he said, his voice thick. “Bad enough. But I didn't realize—I was so wrapped up in my own grief—if I had just known—” He shook his head. “I should have realized she was suicidal.”

  “Did she tell you she was? Did she say anything at all about it?”

  “I don't know. That's what's so goddamn awful about it, Carey! I don't know. I was in a fog, and I just don't know!” He stood up suddenly.

  “I'd better go. You'll be okay, won't your?”

 
Yes, of course …” She rose with him and followed him to the door, feeling a desperate need to do something to help him, but she didn't know what. “Seamus? Will you be all right?”

  He paused at the door and looked down at her. “I'll never be all right again. But I've survived these seven years, so I guess I'll just continue surviving.”

  He opened the door and stepped out. “I'll pick you up on Sunday morning to go to Starke, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  She watched him walk to his car, then closed the door, locking the night out. It was a symbolic gesture, and it didn't do a damn bit of good.

  CHAPTER 9

  16 Days

  There were times when John William Otis was convinced that he was the only sane person in the world. He'd felt that way throughout most of his childhood, a period he refused to remember because it only brought pain. He had lived in an insane world where he had been tortured and starved by the man who had given him life. He figured no amount of thinking was ever going to make him understand that irony, so he just left it alone.

  He also figured one of the sanest things he'd ever done in his life was kill his father. As he'd approached manhood, as his body had started to change, he'd seen the way his father was beginning to look at his baby brother.

  He'd worried about it, trying to figure out what he could do to protect Jamie, but after all the abuse he'd suffered, he hadn't grown strong or big, and there was no way he could have bested the man in a fight. So he'd thought and thought, and no answers had come to him. It had never occurred to him that he might turn to a teacher or a neighbor for help. At some point in his childhood, he'd begun to believe that all the adults in the world knew exactly what his father was doing to him and to Jamie, and that they approved. It had seemed the whole world was on his father's side.

  Of course, he knew better now, but by the time he had learned that he was wrong, it had been too late. He'd already killed the man, and he had never once regretted it because he had saved Jamie once and for all. Never again had he needed to throw himself between his father and brother to spare Jamie the blows of the fists and belt. Never again would he have to draw his father's wrath onto his own head to save his baby brother. For that he would gladly have gone to the chair.

  Nobody had been more surprised than young John Otis when he had been acquitted of murdering his father.

  For a while, during the years that he had lived with Harvey and Linda Kline, the rest of the world had seemed to become sane. For the very first time in his life, he had had someone to look after him, someone who really seemed to care about him.

  Then they had been killed, and the world had gone insane again. Not that he thought his conviction had been crazy. No, if the jury really believed he had done it, then the death penalty was the sanest choice they could have made.

  It didn't even strike him as insane that he'd been convicted of a crime he didn't commit. It was his own fault he'd been convicted, anyway. He could have placed the blame where it really belonged, but he refused to. He let them think what they would, and had no one to blame but himself.

  But the world was going crazy again, and he found himself watching it happen with a kind of detachment. His guards watched him constantly, afraid he might try to kill himself.

  The thought never entered his mind. He wasn't afraid of Old Sparky. He heard death by electrocution could be painful, and sometimes the chair didn't work right, but he wasn't really worried about it. He was a sane man, after all, and it seemed to him that being electrocuted had to be a lot quicker than hanging himself, or stabbing himself with that little stub of pencil they let him have, and quicker was better, any way you looked at it.

  Nor was he afraid of the pain. He'd stopped being afraid of pain in early childhood, when the whole world had been a haze of pain, both physical and emotional. Pain was something he could endure, and he figured there was no way that Old Sparky could be any worse than having your father burn you again and again with a hot iron.

  What he was afraid of, really afraid of, was dying. Pain or no pain, he couldn't make it happen any sooner than it absolutely had to. Sometimes at night, when he lay sleepless on his cot, fear made his skin crawl as if a thousand bugs were running over him and he'd have to jump up and pace his shadowy cell. The daytime was easier, because there were a whole lot of things he could do to distract himself, but in the night there was nothing but the quailing of his mind and the companionship of death. Sometimes it was all he could do not to scream out that he didn't want to die.

  It didn't help that the preacher told him he'd go to heaven where everything would be beautiful because he wasn't sure of that. He'd killed a man. He'd killed his own father, and not even in the deepest moments of self-examination had he been able to find any honest regret over that.

  So he was an unrepentant sinner, and God was just another father who might torture him for eternity. Sometimes, in the dead of night, he even thought he could smell the approaching fire and brimstone.

  But they still thought he might try to kill himself sooner anyway, and they never let him out of their sight for long. He wondered why they couldn't see the absurdity of it. He was sentenced to die, so it really should make no difference whether it was by his own hand or by theirs, but they evidently thought it made a great big difference. After all, if he killed himself, he would escape his punishment. That was such a crazy way to look at it that he was apparently the only person in the world sane enough to see it.

  They wouldn't even let him see Carissa Stover alone. They were nice though. When he said he wanted to see her in his cell, they agreed, instead of insisting he go to one of the visiting rooms. He wondered if they understood his attachment to his cell. Probably not. They couldn't understand that it was the only home of his own he'd ever had. That it was as familiar and comfortable to him as their living rooms were to them. That he needed the security of his few possessions because he had nothing else in the world he could call his own.

  Nor did he especially care whether they understood. All that mattered was that, within the limits set on them by his being a prisoner, they were doing their best to make his last few days on earth as pleasant as possible.

  Except for the constant watching. He felt it starting to grate on his nerves, but he let go of the irritation. Life was definitely too short to let something so minor shadow his last hours.

  He figured he'd been born to die young. It was his fate. Why else had all his appeals failed so swiftly when there were men here on death row who'd been awaiting execution for much longer? Hell, one of them had been here ever since John Otis had been eight years old.

  Fate had carried him through the process faster than any of the rest of them, so he had decided it must be God's will, just retribution for his sin of patricide. But just or not, he ached for all the things he would never see, all the things he would never do, all the poems he would never write.

  He loved life, though there had been little in his life to love. And now it had all come down to this, that a visit from a woman who had helped put him on death row should seem welcome, as wonderful as a present on Christmas morning.

  He cleaned his cell, making sure it was spotless. It had been a long time since he'd had a visitor. Even his attorney had seemed to have forgotten he was still alive.

  But Carissa Stover hadn't forgotten. He remembered her in the courtroom during his trial, a young, trim woman in a no-nonsense navy blue suit, with soft brown hair and wide hazel eyes that had kept darting his way as if she were looking for something. He'd always wondered what it was she wanted. Maybe she had expected him to sprout horns or start vomiting pea soup? Maybe she'd been scared of him? He didn't think so.

  And today he was going to ask her. The other lawyers had never really looked at him. The jury had never really looked at him. At times during the trial, he'd honestly believed he was invisible, except to Carissa Stover.

  And depending on what she said today, he might even show her his poems. For now he tucked the book under his
mattress, out of sight. If she had come just to get something sensational for her radio show, he wasn't going to let her see it, that was for sure. It was too private, too personal. After he was dead he wouldn't be able to hide it any longer, but while he was alive it was for him to say who could come into that private place.

  Breakfast, eggs and grits, wouldn't settle in his stomach. He was nervous, he realized. It had been a long time since last he'd felt this nervous. Of course, this was the first time since the trial that he would come face-to-face with someone who had helped put him here.

  Given that, he thought she must believe him to be some kind of monster, because only a monster would kill the only two people in the whole world who had really loved him.

  So why was she coming to see him?

  Then, with patience he had learned the hard way, he settled down to wait.

  The guards were nice enough, Carey thought. They searched her thoroughly, but they let her take a microcassette recorder with her into John Otis's cell, after they checked it out. They'd probably search him from head to foot, and turn his cell inside out after she left, to make sure he hadn't managed to get something from her that he shouldn't have. She wondered if he'd gotten used to that indignity. If anyone could get used to it.

  Seamus had hardly said a word to her since he picked her up yesterday. His silence had added to her uneasiness, making her wonder if he disapproved of this visit, then making her wonder why she should care. His opinion didn't matter anymore.

  But he did that sometimes. She remembered all too well how he would go into these silent periods, brooding and saying nothing. It might have nothing at all to do with her, and everything to do with memories he had raked up on Friday night. They were certainly memories better left buried.

  She was wearing navy blue slacks and a cool cotton blouse, and she refrained from looking into other cells as she passed. And, unlike the movies, no one called out anything to her as she passed by in the company of a guard. No one said anything at all. This building, crowded with people who were the dregs of society, felt as empty as a tomb. It was as if the eyes of ghosts were on her.