"Then I'll evaluate all that," Lane went on, "and meet with Rennell. That'll include testing for lesions on the brain, organic brain syndrome, head injuries, and, of course, IQ."
Carlo sat back, momentarily savoring the wine. It struck him that the warmth of their environment—red-flocked wallpaper, leather cushions, the familiar, dim-lit comfort—might represent the last relaxed moments he would enjoy in weeks. "I've read the Supreme Court opinion in Atkins," he told Lane. "It bars executing the retarded without ever defining what retardation is."
"That's up to us." Lane cut a bite of steak. "There are three standard criteria. First, significantly subaverage intellectual functioning—there's no hard and fast IQ, but seventy is generally considered the cutoff point."
"Seventy," Carlo repeated. "Isn't that awfully low?"
"In a word, yes," Mattox said sardonically. "But why make it easy."
"Second," Lane continued, "are significant limitations in what's called adaptive functioning, found in at least two of the areas we need to get along in life—such as communication, social skills, academic ability, use of community services, conformity to law, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. In the case of a black kid from the Bayview, we can expect to see shortfalls like these aggravated by a chaotic and maybe abusive family, lousy social services, poor health care, poverty, low employment, and the like."
"The third criteron," Mattox finished, "is that these problems have been visible before eighteen. Otherwise, think of all the death row inmates who'll start faking retardation. Like a high school production of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest."
Johnny Moore emitted a short laugh. "One thing you can be sure of," he told Carlo. "Give me a group of people charged with the same crime, and it's the retarded guy who's most likely to get the death penalty. Unlike our friend Eddie Fleet, he won't be smart enough to cut a deal, or navigate the system."
"I keep coming back to seventy," Carlo told Lane.
"So will the Attorney General. He'll want seventy to be the absolute ceiling. And he'll play into all the lay conceptions of the retarded—they slobber, they drool, they walk stooped, they talk funny, they've got Down syndrome." Lane glanced at Moore and Mattox. "Our job's harder. Not only do we have to show how Rennell got to be who he is—his entire life—but how he coped with the cops, the trial, and the justice system . . ."
"Let's get back to testing," Carlo said. "What kinds of tests?"
"Tests that measure performance—how well and quickly the brain functions. For example, if I blindfold you, then give you blocks with various shapes—squares, triangles, and circles—I'm betting you could put the right shapes in a board with the same shapes cut out. If you're retarded, believe it or not, that may not be so easy."
Carlo tried to imagine the brooding thug of Laura Finney's description wearing a blindfold and putting shapes in a board, like a kid at a kindergartner's birthday party. Shaking his head, he said, "What if Rennell doesn't want to do it?"
Lane shrugged. "If he's retarded, he won't. I guarantee you that much."
"To me," Tammy said, looking to Lane for agreement, "showing limitations in adaptive behavior is the most important. No one spends their entire life faking being slow in school, lousy with girls, and short of walking-around sense."
"That's why Tammy will construct a social history," Terri added. "From prenatal care to parenting, relatives, peer relationships, school performance, mental health, substance abuse, bizarre behavior, problems with juvenile authorities, and well before all that—the same work-up for every member of his family. Plus all the records we can find—for sheer credibility, paper trumps everything, particularly with judges who don't trust us . . ."
"All the stuff no one ever bothered with." Mattox jabbed the table for emphasis. "No one who represented Rennell Price knows who this man really is. Probably no one in his life does—excepting Payton, maybe. But six weeks from now, we will.
"A social history is like a novel—rich in characters and incident. But the tragic aspects tend to be numbingly the same: mental problems in the family, parental substance abuse, prenatal risk factors, nightmare childhood." She paused, her southern drawl deepening. "Honey, you just won't believe what we're gonna find out. It's so goddam baroque some judges hate us for making them confront it—they don't ever want to know. Like it's their mission to kill somebody, but confronting the life of the guy they're executing will offend their sensibilities.
"And this stuff is common—it's common. I remember one mama telling me our client wasn't bad like her other kids—she'd never had to stick his hand over the hot stove. Like I was a mom, too, so I'd get what she meant."
Carlo put down his fork. "Which brings us to the heart of things," Terri said softly.
"Yup," Mattox said. "Abuse."
"Hard to get at sometimes," Lane observed. "If it exists, trauma like that can be painful to open up. Families guard their secrets—fiercely so, the more dysfunctional they are. And no one else may know. Society does a rotten job with at-risk kids."
Terri sipped her wine. "Rennell Price is on death row because Monk, Mauriani, and twelve jurors all believed he was a party to a child sexual abuse. Was he abused? Conversely, is there any evidence that he was predisposed to be an abuser?
"There's no direct evidence of guilt. No witnesses; no physical evidence of sexual contact between Rennell and Thuy Sen. What we're left with is a damning but wholly circumstantial case. Which Rennell denies."
"He's got a real investment in denial," Lane observed. "But if you're right—that he's a wobbler, borderline retarded—he might not be a very good liar. To me that lends his denial a certain credence."
Listening, Carlo felt himself being drawn into a complex world—equal parts psychodrama, mystery, and horror story. It gave him a new appreciation of the mettle, and complexity, of his young stepmother's character, complicated still further by the deep ambivalence which this case surely must create. "There's a lot to consider," Terri was saying. "Start with Rennell's relationship to Payton. Could Payton lead him into an act he wouldn't do on his own?"
Lane fiddled with his salad. "At eighteen, Rennell would have been ragingly hormonal. And if he was retarded, he might have been more comfortable with children than with female peers. But he'd need a real antisocial component in his makeup for him to force a nine-year-old into oral copulation. Unless he was high on crack."
Cocking her head, Mattox looked across the table at Lane. "Isn't there a contraption called a pleathysmograph, or something—measures penile activity in response to visual cues, like naked women or little girls in tutus?"
"There is, actually. If you like that sort of thing."
"Too demeaning," Terri said firmly. "We're trying to build a relationship with this man, not turn him into a lab experiment from Krafft-Ebing." She drained her glass. "Still, I'd give a lot to know what really happened fifteen years ago."
Carlo gave her a quizzical smile. Would you? he wondered in silence.
But it was only as they left, and he and Terri stood in a dense fog waiting for the valet to bring their cars, that she asked, "How was dinner with Elena?"
"Good," Carlo answered, then added quietly, "I'm pretty sure she doesn't know, Terri. There's been nothing in the news, after all. Our client's sliding toward death without a ripple."
FIVE
IT WAS ON TERRI'S FOURTH VISIT TO RENNELL PRICE, WITH forty-one days before his execution, that she first took Carlo with her.
They crossed the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin County, the city behind them a mirage seen in glimpses through a low, swirling fog, the point of the Transamerica Pyramid piercing its highest wisps. On the far side of the bridge the parched, brown hills of Marin were like another country, bathed in the sun of a clear fall day. As they sped up Highway 101, Terri described Rennell's life.