Rennell's eyes shut tighter. "Yes, ma'am."
Terri paused. Softly, she asked, "Is Payton a respectful man?"
For a long moment Rennell would not answer. "Payton never did nothin'," he insisted.
This seemed to be ingrained—the point Rennell would uphold, whatever the accusation. But it was Terri and Carlo's job, perhaps contrary to Rennell's most basic instinct, to separate him from Payton on pain of death. Still quietly, Terri inquired, "Did Payton say that Tasha Bramwell would help you? Or maybe Jamal Harrison?"
At last Rennell opened his eyes. "Payton didn't say nothin'," he said. "Took care of me, is all."
SIX
THE BAYVIEW DISTRICT IN LATE AFTERNOON ENVELOPED TERRI in the deceptive lassitude of danger awaiting night to bloom: cleaning women returning home to lock their doors; aimless youths playing pickup basketball or loitering on the streets; a squad car with a shattered side window cruising down Third Street past a clump of girls sharing a cigarette no doubt laced with crack; a burglar alarm jangling that no one seemed to notice. The bus in front of her belched exhaust.
Turning, Terri drove up a narrow street past what had been Flora Lewis's house, a peeling remnant with missing shutters. But she did not stop until she reached the neatly tended stucco home to which Thuy Sen had never returned.
* * *
The door was protected by a wrought-iron security gate, for Terri a disturbing echo of death row, made more unsettling by her hope that the Sens' desire for Rennell Price's death might have lessened through the years. She rang the bell.
After a moment she heard someone stirring inside, the rattling of a chain. The door cracked ajar. A small Asian woman regarded Terri through the bars with eyes more scared and stricken than the appearance of a female stranger would account for.
"Are you Chou Sen?" Terri asked.
The woman froze. When it came, her nod was barely perceptible, as though this admission stripped her of defenses. Her eyes drilled Terri's like a bird's, both penetrant and deflective.
"I'm Teresa Paget." With deep reluctance, she finished, "I represent Rennell Price."
The woman's face was so taut that the only sign of comprehension was a brief flutter of eyelids. "What you want?"
The words seemed barely to escape her throat. Briefly, Terri bowed her head in a gesture of respect. "I was hoping we could talk."
"About what?"
"The case." Terri paused. "Rennell's scheduled to be executed in forty-one days, Payton in twenty-five."
Crossing her arms, Chou Sen clasped both shoulders tightly. "They just tell us that. Years since they tell us anything. Now you."
Terri was unsurprised: over time, as memories faded and personnel changed, the District Attorney's solicitude for survivors too often lapsed into forgetfulness, no less unkind for its inadvertence. "I'm sorry to come here," Terri said. "But there'll be publicity, hearings where we try to stop the execution. I expect that people from the Attorney General's Office will ask you to attend."
The tight mask of Chou Sen's face began to crumble. "Fifteen years," she said.
Her voice was etched with incredulity. "I know," Terri answered. "I'm sorry for that, too."
"You don't know sorry." Each word held sibilant precision. "Sorry is a picture of a child who never gets older. Sorry is a father looking at his living daughter with questions she can never answer."
Terri felt the tremor of a long-ago psychic explosion, still reverberating, which this woman would feel in her bones until she died. Cautiously, she asked, "How is your daughter Kim doing now?"
Chou Sen stood straighter. "Leave Kim be," she hissed at Terri. Tears in her eyes, she softly shut the door.
* * *
Alone, Terri stood on the desolate spit of land where—in Eddie Fleet's telling—Thuy Sen had begun her journey to Candlestick Point.
The druidical piles of sand were gone. But enough remained—the stunted shrubs, the tallow factory with its stench of burning animal remnants. The neglected pier was now a few worn posts sticking from the water like rotted teeth, and the old, wrecked barge was a ghost of Terri's imaginings. Across the steady current of the channel, loading cranes cast fading shadows on black water.
Walking to the dirty sand along the channel, Terri tried to envision a large black man bearing the frail body of a child, waist-deep in the current. But she could not summon Rennell's face. Perhaps that was because of the darkness she imagined—she could not fault Fleet's description of the place itself, as chilling as the water which had borne Thuy Sen away. As chilling as Terri's own memories.
* * *
In the dark of her bedroom, Terri awoke.
Shirtless, Chris slept beside her, his face still softened from their lovemaking. But though long hours of work separated Terri from her meeting with Chou Sen and her visit to the water's edge, Terri could not stop thinking of Elena.
With a mother's intuition—or perhaps the incessant worry, she acknowledged, of a woman who believed, despite Chris's generous heart, that she alone truly loved this damaged child—Terri went to her teenage daughter's room.
The door was cracked open, the inside dark. Uncertain of her purpose, Terri opened the door, pausing at the threshold of Elena's room to hear the whisper of her breathing.
Her daughter spoke from darkness. "Why are you defending him?"
Terri felt gooseflesh on her skin. Words of answer sticking in her throat, she crossed the carpet to sit at the edge of her daughter's bed, then reached for Elena's hand.
Elena snatched it away. Jerking upright, she snapped on her bedside lamp and scrutinized her mother, steadily and fiercely, as Terri blinked at circles of yellow from the sudden flood of light.
"What do you know about him?" Terri asked.
"I went to your library," Elena answered without apology. "There were papers on your desk."
Terri felt her stomach clench. "And?"
"I read about the dead girl, and what he did to her." Elena's voice filled with fury. "How can you do this? How can you not care?"
Terri felt a moment of disbelief, the wish to turn back time, followed by a hopeless sense that no words could be adequate. "I do care," she tried. "More than you can ever know. But Rennell Price doesn't have anyone else."
"He could have," Elena snapped back. "Don't be such a fucking martyr. Like you're the only lawyer in America, and nothing's more important than you and him."
The words made Terri flinch. She gazed at her daughter, trying to remember the bright-eyed child with the riot of curls and elfin face, unsullied by the knowledge of violation, of solitude and secrecy and boundaries betrayed, resurrected, again and again, in weekly visits to a child therapist. Now Elena's face and body seemed an external map of her confusion—new breasts and a woman's roundness emerging from a gangling frame, a lineless face at war with burning eyes. She would not be a classic beauty, Terri guessed, but hers would become a face hard to forget.
"There are other lawyers," Terri answered as calmly as she could. "But I'm good at what I do."
"That's because you don't do anything else."
This indictment, so unfair in its starkness, resonated with a years-old accusation. How can I not have known? Terri asked herself yet again. That Richie and she had been separated when he started on his daughter—perhaps his twisted means of revenge for Christopher Paget—would never soothe her pain.
But that guilt was hers to bear. Softly, she said, "I know I work hard, Lainie. It takes too much time from us."
This acknowledgment, with its absence of excuses, seemed to still Elena's wrath. "But why for him?" her daughter asked, an undertone of plaintiveness beneath the vehemence.
"Because I don't think the State should kill people, no matter what they've done, or what we think they've done." Pausing, Terri sifted the arguments Elena might accept. "There's too big a risk of innocence. And some of my clients have suffered in ways it's hard for a lot of people to understand, and harder to get over." But not, I hope, too hard for you.