"Which waives the attorney-client privilege, of course."
"Of course." Terri turned her head on the pillow. "Mind concentrating on my neck? I've got a headache going from there all the way through my temples to my eyes."
Chris's thumbs began pressing into the base of her skull. "Thanks," she murmured. "Maybe James's excuse in the Calvin Coolman case—about not disclosing client confidences—was bullshit. But maybe it wasn't. The risk in our case is that James will testify that Rennell confessed to murder—or that James learned something from Rennell, or maybe even Payton, which points to guilt. That not only would eviscerate any claim of innocence but suggests Rennell is at least smart enough to lie in a consistent way. Lousy atmospherics for claiming he's retarded."
She heard Chris laugh softly. "No wonder you've got a headache. Does James have any friends we can locate?"
"Not really. Johnny says his associates from back then seem to have dropped away—mostly sleazebags, anyhow. But there is an ex-wife, and ex-wives can be useful."
"You might start there. We need to feel out his frame of mind before we go stirring up old memories. And for all you know, he's descended from coke to crack."
"Maybe. But Johnny says he's working in a law library."
"Nice to know that James could find one." Chris's thumbs increased their pressure. "How's that?"
"Fine. Eyes still hurt though."
"I'll get you a damp cloth to put over them before you go to sleep. Unless there's some other service I can perform."
Terri smiled into the pillow. "Does it require my involvement?"
"It might—depends, I suppose. So what other of your problems can I resolve?"
"DNA." Terri closed her eyes, feeling the slow release of pain flowing through her neck. "Retesting the semen may be a long shot. But there's other evidence, too—like the hair caught in Thuy Sen's barrette."
"Sure. But if the hair's not Rennell's, it doesn't prove him innocent. And what if it is Rennell's?"
Terri's temples still throbbed: the last vestiges of the headache, she guessed, would stubbornly survive Chris's ministrations. "At least we'll know," she answered. "What if the Attorney General already does?"
TEN
RENNELL BEGAN TO SMILE AS SOON AS HE GLIMPSED TERRI.
She waited inside the plastic cubicle as the guards brought him from death row. Tentative at first, his smile broadened into a rare show of teeth as the guards locked him inside with her. Then he reached into his pocket and placed an object on the table with an expression that, despite the smile, struck Terri as imploring.
"I been wantin' to show you this," he told her.
She could not imagine what it was besides an artifact constructed of paper clips, dental floss, the handle of a toothbrush, a small piece of metal, and two plastic straws with copper wire extending from the straws. To obscure her mystification, Terri said, "It looks really complicated."
Rennell gazed down at the object as though it bore a talismanic power. "You got that right," he said with a tincture of bravado. "Took me a long, long time. I'm mechanical, for sure. Bet you can't guess what it is."
Terri continued her examination of what—however unfathomable its purpose—was quite intricate in design. Smiling, she shook her head.
"It heats water." The forefinger of his large hand lovingly traced the two parallel copper wires. "I put these in the socket thing, and the metal part in the water. Then it gets hot."
Looking up, Terri felt herself grinning. "Amazing."
Rennell's expression changed once more, his probing look at Terri combining pride with uncertainty. "Pretty smart, huh."
"Yeah," she answered softly. "Pretty smart."
His smile vanished. "When those tests the doctor talking about?"
Suddenly she could feel his worry as strongly as heat passing through his copper wires—a fear she shared, though she could never let him know this. "Pretty soon now," she answered, gazing down at his invention. "I can't wait for you to show this to Dr. Lane."
* * *
They talked for another hour. Their conversation drifted with Rennell's shifting attention, sometimes foundering—Terri now suspected—on the shoals of fears too deep for Rennell to acknowledge, a stifling admixture of retardation and repression. But Terri knew that such fear could lead to a more palpable form of numbing—the need to dull consciousness until one's surroundings, and one's actions, seemed part of a dream state occupied by some other, more indifferent Rennell Price.
"I guess sometimes you smoked crack," Terri ventured. "To feel better."
Rennell's eyelids lowered. "Long time ago," he said in a dull, distant voice. "With Payton."
Terri restrained herself from asking about Thuy Sen. "When you smoked crack, Rennell, did you ever drink alcohol, too?"
Rennell's face darkened, and he could not look at her—if this was difficult, Terri thought with some despair, how might they ever talk about his parents? Then, to her surprise, he mumbled, "I drank beer 'fore I even know about no crack."
The softness of his voice did not conceal a tremor. With equal quiet, Terri asked, "When did you start drinking beer?"
For a long time, Rennell was silent, and then the lid of one half-closed eye fluttered. "Daddy," he mumbled. "It was my daddy."
After this, he barely spoke at all. He would not, or could not, tell Terri what he meant.
* * *
Chatting amiably, Carlo Paget and his father sat drinking beer and half-watching the Giants play their last day game of the summer on a sunstruck afternoon at Pacific Bell Park. Closing his eyes, Carlo tilted his head back toward the sun. "Baseball in San Francisco shouldn't be played on a day like this," he said lazily. "Weather's way too nice."
Chris smiled at this. Carlo and he had watched baseball together for almost two decades, and the memories of Giants games were part of the warp and woof of their shared history, even—or perhaps especially—their mutual determination to endure the misery of night games once played at Candlestick Park, enveloped by the chill dampness of the bay. A phrase passed from one to the other—perhaps as simple as "remember the night"—would evoke for Kit's benefit, and their own amusement, the memory of the Dodgers' right-hander who disappeared in an impenetrable fog enveloping the pitcher's mound, from which his pitches emerged like bullets fired from ambush. Other images were, quite literally, warmer: the day game when the Pirates catcher Tony Pena decided to toss a baseball to the eight-year-old Carlo instead of to a gaggle of rude and clamoring adults; the sudden arrival of Barry Bonds, which the fifteen-year-old Carlo had insisted—in the face of his father's skepticism—would change San Francisco Giants baseball as they knew it; the other bone-chilling night when Bonds had changed the quality of Christopher Paget's life by hitting an eleventh-inning home run to put his teammates, and Carlo's shivering father, out of their collective misery.
Carlo had been fifteen then. Now he was twenty-five, and his father had acquired a brace of tickets in anticipation of Carlo's return to the city. And so, for these few hours, he had resolved to bail Carlo out of their office and, he hoped, out of his increasingly grim preoccupation with the impending execution of Rennell Price. But the game through eight innings was scoreless and, for the most part, lacking in incident, save for a couple of double plays and a base-running blunder by the Giants which had left Carlo muttering darkly about brainlock. Then he gazed into the bottom of his empty cup of beer and began relating Terri's account of this morning's interview with Rennell, and the way his stepmother's questions had suddenly hit a wall.
"It could be that he's just inarticulate," Chris observed. "Or maybe it's something too awful to articulate. As terrible as it is, we're left hoping to find out the latter—and that it'll matter."
"Shouldn't it?"
"Atkins gives us a shot," Chris answered in an undertone too soft for others to hear. Leaning back, he cast an eye upon the sunlit field and restive fans around them. "But lately I find myself looking at Kit and wondering how I would feel about anyone who did to him what Rennell Price is supposed to have done to Thuy Sen. And what kind of man would Kit become if he suffered as a child like Rennell may have? Considering either question makes me sick. Though not as sick as wondering about what Terri must feel about this case, but can never let herself say."