Before I Sleep Read online

  Carl Dunleavy, the afternoon host, was on his way out, heading for his second job in his own business as an auto detailer.

  It was a sad fact that radio didn't provide job security. Most everyone here had some kind of backup job, or worked for more than one station. Carey considered herself lucky in that her ratings and the syndication of her show on a hundred other stations gave her a nice income. But all of it could dry up as fast as she could say “ratings.”

  She paused to talk to Carl. He was a tall, lean man with a runner's build and a Renaissance man's knowledge. She hadn't yet found a subject he couldn't discuss intelligently, and, like a good talk host, he had an opinion on every one of them.

  She liked him probably more than anyone else at the station. Carl was happy with what he was doing, and happy to be doing it. He never stabbed anyone else in the back, and was always quick to lend a helping hand. And unlike some other people here, he had been quick to help her in a lot of ways during her first days on the job.

  But he, like everyone else, wanted to know the same thing.

  “Are you going to do the Otis death warrant?”

  Carey shrugged. “I haven't made up my mind.”

  “You ought to. If you don't, someone else will, and the death penalty is always one hell of a topic. Ratings, Carey. Ratings. The only reason everyone else is waiting to see if you do it is because you have the inside scoop on the trial. Nobody wants to shoot off his mouth only to have you come on the air and say it isn't so.” He flashed a charming smile. “For once you've got the upper hand. Enjoy it.”

  She had to smile back. Somehow she had wakened today with a feeling of calm. She hoped it would last.

  “And,” he said, “you missed the meeting.”

  “Oh, shit.” She'd forgotten all about it.

  “Bill isn't real happy with you.” He was referring to the station manager. “So he set you up to do the mall opening next Saturday. Lucky you, you get to hand out bumper stickers and prizes from two until six.”

  Carey groaned. This was her least favorite kind of public appearance. She didn't mind giving speeches. She even enjoyed riding in the float for Guavaween. She loved going to schools to talk to classes about her work. But she loathed sitting in malls and handing out prizes.

  Carl laughed. “That's what you get for not being there to defend yourself. Where were you, anyway?”

  “Sleeping off a really bad night.”

  His expression suddenly became serious. “Otis?”

  “You could say that.”

  “I was thinking about that. I can't imagine what it must be like to know you helped put the guy there. Not that I think anything is wrong with it, but I can sure see how it might bother you.”

  At last, she thought, somebody who actually understood she might have negative feelings about this. “Thank you for understanding, Carl.”

  He nodded and started to pass by. “The thing is,” he said, pausing, “you didn't really put him there. He put himself there. Do the crime, do the time.”

  And then he was gone, having totally missed the real point. But what could she expect? He, like all the rest of the world, figured the conviction settled it.

  She passed by the broadcast studio and glanced in to see Kel Murchison busy talking to some caller. He was also looking up every few seconds toward his producer in the next booth, obviously getting ready to cut away to commercial. When he looked in her direction, she waved, but kept walking.

  As she came around the dogleg in the hallway, she could hear what he was saying coming out of the speaker high on the wall.

  “But people on minimum wage jobs don't get cost-of-living increases,” he said to the caller. “So why should social security recipients?”

  “People making minimum wage can look for better jobs,” the caller responded. “I can't.”

  Carey tuned it out, and made her way to the news anchor's office, where she could scan the AP wire for interesting tidbits to use on her show. Ed was across the way in a recording booth, talking into a microphone. She waved to him through the window as she ducked into his office, then called up the index on the computer.

  Ten minutes later she'd printed out a half dozen bulletins that she thought would make great conversation starters on her show: a federal appeals court decision, a Florida Supreme Court decision, a local lawsuit against a cellular phone company, and a couple of other items.

  Ed had apparently finished recording his newscast, because he came into the office behind her. “Are you going to talk about Otis?” he asked. “It's been on every newscast I did today, and it headlined in the papers this morning. The phones will light up like Christmas.”

  The phones, she thought. Always the phones. All that mattered was that people were listening and calling.

  “Yeah,” she said, making up her mind. “I'll do it.” If it was all over the news, callers were going to want to talk about it anyway. She might as well deal with it.

  But the decision made her stomach feel like lead.

  She stopped to talk to Bill Hayes about the meeting she'd missed and avoided complaining about the mall assignment. He'd enjoy it too much if she let him know how much she disliked it, and she refused to give him the satisfaction. He gave her hell about missing the meeting, and she just nodded her way through it, knowing his rant was meaningless as long as she didn't argue with him. With Bill, all you had to do was let him have his say, and he'd forget about it.

  “You going to do the Otis thing?” he asked finally.

  “Gossip sure gets around,” she remarked.

  He shrugged. “Kel remembered that you worked on it when you were a prosecutor.”

  And of course Kel couldn't keep that to himself. She began to wonder if he'd brought it up deliberately in order to pressure her into doing a show about it. But why? She couldn't think of a good reason—unless he wanted her to do the topic first, so he could tear it all to shreds on his show.

  “I'm doing it,” she told Bill.

  “Good. Good. It'll be hot.”

  She took some time to sit down with her laptop computer and try to organize her thoughts for a monologue to start the show with. It wasn't easy. Her mind had found its current calm by avoiding any real thought about Otis. Every time she tried to focus on the topic so she could decide what she wanted to say, her mind shied away like a frightened deer. Coming to grips with this wasn't going to be easy.

  An hour later, the laptop screen was still blank. Finally she went to get a cup of coffee, then sat down in the snack room at a table and started doodling absently on one of the legal pads she carried everywhere with her for recording ideas and things she learned.

  It was strange, she found herself thinking, how she couldn't forget it and couldn't think about it all at the same time. It was hovering there at the edges of all her thoughts like a cloud of doom hanging over her head, but she couldn't really look it at, as if it were sliding away, always staying on the periphery. And she was never going to learn to live with this if she couldn't get a handle on it.

  She glanced down at her pad and felt a shiver of shock run through her at what she had written.

  Twenty-one Days, Twenty-one Years.

  And suddenly she knew what she was going to say in her monologue.

  “Good morning,” she said into the microphone. “This is Carey Justice, and you're listening to the Talk of the Coast, 990 WCST.”

  Her stomach was growing heavier by the minute, and her mouth was drying out. She didn't want to do this. She licked her lips and forced herself to go on.

  “I don't want to do this show,” she said, ignoring the startled look from her producer who was in the next booth, watching through a window. “I'd rather go back in time and see if I could undo some of the things that happened. I wish I could make it all better. But I can't do that. None of us can. All I can do is pick over the bones and hope I—we—learn something from it.

  “This is a story about twenty-one years and twenty-one days, the twenty-one years of J
ohn Otis's life before the crime that got him the death penalty, and the twenty-one days he has left to live.”

  The phones were already starting to light up. She ignored them and forced herself to continue.

  “I don't know how many of you remember the first time John Otis was tried for murder. He was a twelve-year-old boy then. For the first twelve years of his life, he was subjected to some of the most appalling abuse that can be heaped on anyone, adult or child. I wasn't much more than a kid myself then, but I remember the stories that were in the press, and I remember finding it almost impossible to believe that any child could survive such horrible treatment.

  “Maybe you don't think it's relevant to what's going on now, but I do. If John William Otis really did kill his foster parents, then maybe we need to recognize that we helped make this child what he became.

  “What do you think happens to the mind and soul of a child who is sodomized by his father from the age of two? What do you think happens when he's chained in a dark closet like a dog for weeks on end with almost nothing to eat, and just barely enough water to survive? What do you think happens when he's beaten bloody and drenched with water and chained naked outside on the coldest nights of the year? What do you think happens to him when nobody steps in to help him because they're all afraid of his father?

  “And what do you think happens when he sees his little brother being abused in the same way?

  “Thirteen years ago, a jury took pity on this boy, and said that he killed his father in self-defense. What do you think about that?

  “Five years ago John Otis was convicted of killing his foster parents on the slimmest of circumstantial evidence. I was a prosecutor on the case, and I'm not convinced he did it. Not one witness saw him do it. There was no physical evidence linking him to the crime. No confession. Nothing at all. Nothing at all except a neighbor who heard him arguing with his foster father, and the fact that the wounds were similar to what happened to his real father, nine years before.

  “That was it. That was all we had to sell. And we sold the hell out of it. Yes, there was another prosecutor on the case. I was just riding second chair, doing the detail work, questioning a few witnesses. But I don't want to hide behind that little fact. I was part of the team that sold a jury on the idea that an overheard argument and a similarity to past events equals proof of premeditated murder, beyond and to the exclusion of every reasonable doubt.

  “But you were there, too. Oh, you probably weren't in the courtroom. Not that day. But you'd been clamoring for the death penalty, more executions more often, justice swift and sure. We heard you, in the prosecutor's office. And that jury heard you. So we're all in this together. This is what we've done.

  “John William Otis has twenty-one days left to live. Twenty-one days. Because you and I decided to kill him.

  “Our number in Hillsborough…”

  She rattled off the phone numbers for each county, and the cellular line, and the WATS line, even though she could see that those who'd taken the time to listen to her monologue would be getting busy signals for a while. Then she set her hook.

  “In twenty-one days, we're going to get together and kill someone. What do you think about that?”

  She cut away to her first commercial break, with calls already backing up. She looked through the window at Marge, and saw her producer engaged in the frantic tasks that were her job during the breaks, loading the commercial, news, and weather carts for the next round while the first group played.

  Well, she thought, with a surprising depth of bitterness, she'd done her job. She'd started her show with a monologue that was bound to keep people listening through the commercials. And that was the whole point of talk radio, to get those listeners so involved that they didn't want to miss a word, so they'd listen to all the ads.

  Marge was giving her the countdown through the window now, using her fingers. Ten seconds. Five.

  Looking at the screen where the callers were listed, Carey saw she had her pick, and even recognized some of them as regulars. She decided to go with someone she thought had never called before. Reaching out as the commercial ended, she punched a green button.

  “This is Carey Justice, and you're listening to 990 WCST. Delia from Tarpon Springs, you're on the air.”

  “I don't know why you're talking like the death penalty is wrong, Carey,” said the querulous voice of an older woman. “It's an eye for an eye.”

  “That's the Old Testament, Delia. I take it you don't believe in the New Testament?”

  “Well, of course I do! I'm a good Christian woman. But what that man did—”

  “Leaving aside the question of whether he really did it— and I'm not sure he did—I seem to remember the New Testament says we ought to turn the other cheek.”

  “But what this man did—”

  “What this man did, if he actually did it, was a horrible, heinous crime.”

  “Yes it was!” Delia said fervently.

  “But what good does it do to kill him?”

  Delia was silent, apparently unsure how to answer.

  “Delia?” Carey repeated, making sure her voice wasn't confrontational. “What good do you see being served by killing him?”

  “He's a monster, and he has no right to live!”

  “Well,” Carey said, pitching her voice to be sympathetic, “I guess that's what the jury thought when he killed his real father. That the old man was a monster and didn't deserve to live.”

  “That's right. And he was.”

  “But what about now, Delia? You're a good Christian woman. What if I tell you that John William Otis has been saved? That he's not the person he was when he was twenty-one.”

  “Well…” Delia trailed off uncertainly. “Has he?”

  “I don't know. I'm just speculating here, but I tell you what, Delia. I'm going to find out. But for now, just suppose hehas been saved. Do you still think he should die?”

  “Well… yes. Yes I do! We have to make the streets safe for God-fearing people.”

  “I agree with you. Nobody should be at risk from a criminal. But couldn't we make the streets safe just as easily by keeping John William Otis in prison for the rest of his natural life?”

  “I… I suppose. Yes, we could, if he really stayed in prison for life.”

  “We can do that, Delia. We have really good maximum-security prisons these days. And if you pay any attention to what the legislature is doing in Tallahassee, you know we're spending lots of money on prisons. We can keep him in jail for the rest of his life.” “I guess so.”

  “So what's the point in killing him?”

  Delia fell silent, and Carey cut her off, going to the next caller.

  She had spent more time on Delia than she ordinarily would have on such a pallid, uncertain caller, but she had done so purposely to set up the question. What she wanted, what she needed, were passionate kooks and people with really well-thought-out opinions who could argue interestingly. Anybody who thought that talk radio was the public's forum didn't understand that it was entertainment before all else.

  To her relief, she saw that one of her favorite lunatics was on hold, a man she could always count on for wild and inflammatory speeches on any subject. He was definitely out in the ozone.

  “George from Bradenton, you're on the air.”

  “What, are you crazy?” George demanded without preamble. “What the guy did was a horrible crime, and it doesn't matter whether we can keep him in prison forever. He deserves to die, just like those people he killed! We can't be letting murderers get away with this! And all this talk about how the electric chair is cruel and unusual punishment—I'll tell you what's cruel and unusual! What he did to those people is worse than anything Old Sparky will do to him!”

  “You think so, George?”

  “I know so! What's the matter with you? Did you lose your stomach for it?”

  “This isn't about me, George. This is about a man who's going to die.”

  “Yeah, right. I
heard what you said about all of us killing him. He's killing himself because of what he did. And I'm not going to feel a damn bit guilty about it.”

  “Good for you, George,” she said acidly. The guy was trying to bait her into a personal argument, and she wouldn't allow it. Within the limits of talk radio, she tried never to let discussions become personal pissing contests.

  George was on a roll, though, and hardly heard her response. “And what's ah this crap about protecting society anyway? This isn't about protecting society! This is about retribution. This is about punishment. Nobody can give those people back their lives, but we can sure as hell take his to get even for it!”

  She started leading him on. “We oughtta make that sumbitch pay, huh, George?”

  “Damn right, counselor.”

  “Make it painful, too.”

  “Yep.”

  “As bad as it was for them.”

  “You got it.”

  “And you'd be willing to pull the switch?”

  She knew she'd taken a risk; he might back away, and she was due for a break in less than a minute. She wanted to do a “hot break,” cutting into the commercials directly from the conversation, with no warning. She couldn't afford for George to get reasonable now. But she'd judged her quarry well.

  “Damn right I would,” he said, his voice rising. “And I wouldn't just throw the switch, either. I'd tease him with it. A little jolt here, another there. Let him know exactly what's coming. Let him sweat and hurt. Just the way he did to them.”

  She punched off his line at the end of the sentence and stepped in as if he'd finished.

  “That's what we call justice,” she said, and stabbed the white button that started the commercial break.

  The rest of the hour went just as well, most of the callers disagreeing with George, whether or not they disagreed with the death penalty. And she had no doubt that George would call back, because he was now the topic of conversation, and he loved nothing better. Good old George, a host's dream.

  At the top of the hour, she left the booth for a ten-minute break while news, weather, and commercials played. She headed straight for Bill Hayes's office and was relieved to find him still there.