"What about organic brain damage?" Tammy asked. "Mama drank all during pregnancy, and then put beer in his bottle."
Lane turned to her; in this meeting, Carlo began to notice, his voice and manner were more deliberate, the judicious aura of an expert crafting an opinion on which a life might depend. "Let's start with fetal alcohol syndrome. That's one of the common causes of retardation. And it can affect a couple of capacities: intellectual functioning, where Rennell has real problems, and impulse control." Lane paused to adjust his glasses. "Problems with impulse control could make Rennell more likely to force a nine-year-old girl into giving him oral sex. He could go from idea to execution in a matter of seconds."
Carlo thought of Flora Lewis's testimony that it was Rennell, not Payton, who had pulled Thuy Sen inside. "Does Rennell seem like that to you—impulsive?"
"Not particularly," Lane answered. "He strikes me as depressed—the headaches, the fear of sleeping, phobias about rain and darkness, feelings of worthlessness. Not to mention that very troubling scar on his wrist. He's more like a person who had the joy beat out of him."
"Still," Moore observed, "once you throw in smoking crack, even a slug can have an impulsive moment." Glancing at Tammy, he added, "We've still got no evidence that he ever had sex with anyone, right?"
"Not so much as a hand job."
"That's helpful," Lane told Terri. "But it's a problem that Rennell looks normal, except maybe for impaired coordination . . ."
"That could be fetal alcohol."
"Sure. But a judge may see just another sullen murderer, with what the A.G.'s folks will portray as superior lineage: Vernon Price may have been crazy but not dumb. Even Mom's IQ—at least from the hospital records—checks in at seventy-eight . . ."
"So all I've got to do," Tammy said dryly, "is find his supposed real dad, the nameless slow but sweet one, and blood-test him for paternity."
Lane smiled. "That would help, yeah."
A moment passed in silence, the others sifting their thoughts and drinking coffee. "Another problem," Moore said to Terri, "is this pubic hair of Payton's."
"That's Payton's problem," Terri answered. "There's still no physical evidence directly linking Rennell to a sex act with Thuy Sen."
Moore stroked his grizzled beard. "But if I'm the A.G., my version goes like this: Payton told Rennell to pull Thuy Sen off the street, then hold her head while she goes down on Payton. Even if Rennell's got no sexual interest in a nine-year-old, his brother does. The semen belongs to Payton. But Rennell's still guilty of felony murder—"
"But not fit to be executed," Carlo objected. "Isn't a mitigating factor against the death penalty that Rennell acted under the domination and control of Payton? He's retarded, for Godsakes—Payton ran him his whole life."
"That," Terri answered, "would be the argument." She sat back, her gaze taking in her team. "I still wish we knew what really happened. Whatever it is, I'd work with it."
Moore frowned. "I'm not so sure, Terri. This may be one case where ignorance is as close to bliss as we'll ever get—"
The telephone rang.
Terri stood, her expression of annoyance quickly switching to curiosity. "I told Julie to hold my calls, unless it's the President or the Easter bunny."
"Maybe," Moore suggested helpfully, "it's Rennell's real father, calling in from Yale. Where he's chairman of the Physics Department."
With a wan smile, Terri walked over to the far end of the conference room and picked up the phone. "Teresa Paget."
Carlo watched her expression change to one of taut attention, so complete that she barely seemed to breathe. "When?" she asked and then, a moment later, said simply, "I'll be there."
As the others watched, she slowly put down the phone, taking a moment to acknowledge their presence.
"You'll never guess," she told them. "That was Payton's lawyer. Before he dies, Payton wants to see me."
FIFTEEN
FROM THE MOMENT THAT TERRI STEPPED INTO THE PLASTIC CUBICLE where he waited with his lawyer, Payton Price surprised her.
The first jolt was his appearance. She still thought of him as the twenty-two-year-old crack dealer in the mug shot, with a smooth, hard handsomeness and the cold, indifferent stare meant to signal his lethality. But fifteen years had passed. The man sitting across from her had a premature touch of gray in his close-cropped hair and creases of age in a thin face lit by eyes bright with intelligence, its harsh angles leavened by a full mouth, turned up slightly at one end to signal amusement at their circumstances. The other thing that struck Terri was Payton's stillness. Compared with his lawyer, Paul Rubin—a lean, bespectacled, thirtyish public defender twitching with repressed energy—Payton seemed an oasis of calm, facing his last ten days of life with the fatalism of someone who has moved beyond hope.
"So," Payton said to Terri, "you're Rennell's lawyer. Talks about you all the time."
The curiosity in Payton's tone was matched by his expression. But for their surroundings, he could have been meeting his kid brother's first girlfriend, brought home for a family dinner. "We've spent a lot of time together," Terri answered.
"So he tells me. You're the first one he ever gave a damn about, or thinks gave a damn about him." A brief smile showed a flash of gold-capped teeth. "Keeps runnin' on about how beautiful you are. Course he's been in here a good while now, and he never had much luck with women."
The last remark, too wryly delivered to be slighting, was darkened by its tacit reference—which Terri thought intended—to the murder of Thuy Sen, reinforcing her queasy near-certainty that this man was guilty of a loathsome crime into which, perhaps, he had led Rennell. As he sat beside his client, Rubin's eyes darted between Payton and Terri. It was all too apparent the lawyer did not want her here.
She decided to start slowly. "Fifteen years," she said. "How have you two gotten by?"
"Day at a time—one push-up or sit-up at a time, five hundred of each, each and every day." His mouth twisted in a brief, bitter smile. "Helps to have a purpose. One of mine was to keep Rennell and me from gettin' buttfucked. This life could have been hard on him."
The sardonic acknowledgment of his responsibility for Rennell suggested, to Terri, more self-awareness than she had expected. "Still," she said, "you spend a lot of the day alone."
He gave a measured shrug, a slight movement of the head. "You learn to organize your time, make prison serve you as best you can. I read a lot of history—African mostly. Try to write a little poetry." His tone took on the pride of the self-educated. "Keep up with the world, like what's happenin' in the Middle East. Don't think a pack of white folks in Washington ever gonna be able to fix that. I mean, we invented fucking Osama-been-missin', and this guy Saddam, and then when they don't turn out like they're supposed to, we have to kill 'em. Think we'd of learned by now."
The pithiness of this assessment made Terri laugh with surprise. Then her amusement was overshadowed by the sad realization that fifteen years on death row had produced a more thoughtful man than selling crack in the Bayview ever could have—assuming the unlikely, that Payton Price would have lived that long. But the end result would be the same, his premature death.
He seemed to read her thoughts. "Well," he said evenly, "you didn't come to hear my views on ge-o-politics. You're hopin' to keep Rennell from joinin' me in Paradise."
Terri nodded. "I thought one of you was enough."
For the first time, Payton averted his eyes, gazing down at the table. "Rennell says you been askin' about when we was kids. Think any of that shit matters?"