Briefly, Payton shut his eyes. When he spoke it was to Kim. "I'm sorry—not 'cause I'm gonna die, but for what I done to all of you. If watching me die makes any difference to you, then maybe there's some good in this. But they got no reason to kill Rennell." His voice quavered. "Rennell's innocent. It was Eddie Fleet that choked her. I know, 'cause I was part of it." His gaze moved from Thuy Sen's sister to her mother, and finally to her father. "Killin' my brother," he finished softly, "be one more murder. No good can come to you from that."
Meng Sen stiffened, a posture of anger and rejection. Kim raised Thuy Sen's photograph between Payton and her own face.
Payton's eyes dulled. Slowly, he faced Terri. "Tell my brother I didn't feel no pain." His voice was tired and husky, a near-whisper. "Tell him I'm sorry for leavin', and for what I done to put him here."
Turning to one of the guards, he nodded toward the table.
In silence, they moved him there. Payton sat, then lay on his side, rolling himself onto the table. The guards strapped him in, face upward. He no longer looked around him.
Slowly, the warden nodded.
A prison technician entered the chamber. He approached Payton, face as devoid of expression as was the warden's, and connected two IVs into the tubes already inserted in the flesh of his left forearm. Terri forced herself to watch.
"You may carry out the death warrant," the warden intoned.
Through the plastic tubes, Terri knew, would flow fifty cc's of potassium chloride. As the doctor stood beside him, Payton closed his eyes.
Minutes seemed to pass. Neither Payton nor those who watched him made a sound. Please, Terri thought, let it be done.
Abruptly, Payton's mouth opened, expelling a deep, guttural exhalation which preceded a final gasp for air. His body convulsed, as though from an electric shock, followed by shudders. Terri felt Rennell's drawing crumple in her fist.
At last the shuddering subsided. As Terri turned to her, Kim Sen, tears streaming from her eyes, held out Thuy Sen's photograph as if Payton still could see.
PART THREE
THE CIRCUIT
ONE
ON THE DAY AFTER THE EXECUTION OF PAYTON PRICE, CAROLINE Clark Masters, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, and her onetime mentor, Judge Blair Montgomery of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, decided to follow their leisurely and discursive lunch at the Old Angler's Inn outside Washington with a walk along the shallow river which ran beside it.
It was a crisp day in early November, suitable for a stroll along the well-worn path which meandered amidst the rocks and gravel, and the echo of water rushing blended with the bright orange woods around them to make Caroline feel, for a blessed afternoon, far removed from the cloistered intensity of the ideologically riven Court over which—however uneasily—she presided. But her slow pace reflected less a desire to escape than her knowledge that Blair Montgomery, while still spare and bright-eyed, was frailer and more halting than the last time she had seen him.
At fifty-three, Caroline was a fitness fanatic, and her height and leanness accented the attributes which made other hikers notice her at once: an erect posture, a casual grace of movement, and striking features—a long, aquiline nose; wide-set brown eyes; a high forehead; and still-glossy black hair, which began with a widow's peak. She looked and sounded like what she was, the daughter of a patrician New England family, save for a touch of the exotic—emphatic gestures, olive skin, a somewhat sardonic smile—which suggested her mother, a French Jewish beauty whose parents had died in the Holocaust.
Beside her, Blair Montgomery was shorter and smaller, a white-haired miniature of his younger self. The casual observer would not have seen him as did the judicial conservatives: a liberal bomb thrower whose passion for civil liberties, reproductive choice, and the separation of church and state was as unrelenting as his loathing of the death penalty, and whose closeness to the new Chief Justice was yet more proof—if any was needed—that her appointment by President Kerry Kilcannon was a triumph for secular humanism over the forces of faith and judicial restraint. It was a suspicion shared, to Caroline's regret, by several members of her own Court. This was deepened by their hostility to the intermediate court on which both Caroline and Montgomery once had served, the Ninth Circuit, which heard appeals from federal district courts in nine western states, most notably California: twenty-eight active judges, a combustible mixture of conservatives, moderates, and liberals, combined in random three-judge panels to issue rulings which—depending on the panel—were considered by conservatives to enshrine a lawless disregard for precedent and common sense.
"The work of the Supreme Court," Caroline's conservative predecessor, Roger Bannon, had once remarked, "is to interpret what the law is, and explain to the Ninth Circuit what the law is not." Fortunately for Caroline, this aphorism had found much wider currency than her own prior remark to Judge Montgomery that the transition from her contentious Senate confirmation hearing to the cloistered quiet of the Supreme Court had been like "going from a circus to a monastery—except that some of the monks are vicious."
"Is your working environment any better these days?" Montgomery asked now.
Caroline paused to afford him a rest, hands shoved in the pockets of her slacks, surveying the swift rush of water over rocks as she contemplated her answer. "Superficially," she said. "This last term didn't have quite as many contentious cases—except from your circuit, of course." She turned to him. "I see you had an execution yesterday."
"Yes. But there was nothing for our Court to do—this man Price told his lawyers to take him off life support. What he left us is more problematic: a last-minute confession claiming that the next one scheduled to die, his brother, is innocent. The evidence is ambiguous."
"Spare me ambiguity," Caroline said dryly. "In the death penalty, even the cut-and-dried can turn into a morass. At least in our Court."
Montgomery began walking again, eyes on the path before them. "A morass?" His tone became bitter. "More like an abattoir. In his nearly twenty-five years as Chief Justice, Roger Bannon never once voted to overturn a death sentence. But what truly distinguished him was a driving lack of curiosity as to whether any of these defendants were, in fact, innocent."
Caroline smiled. "Oh, Roger Bannon may have been 'curious,' in the abstract," she answered. "He just didn't think guilt or innocence was any of his business. Or yours."
Montgomery gave her a keen look. "After the first decade or two of executions, I ceased to believe that Bannon cared about anything I recognize as justice. No defense counsel was too incompetent, no racial disparity too glaring, no condemned too young or too retarded, no judge or jury too biased. As for the small matter of innocence, Bannon labored mightily to erect a Byzantine morass of arbitrary legal barriers between federal judges and deciding what, to me, is the most basic question we should address: whether we kill some people for no reason but their misfortune and our own ineradicable imperfections."
What she was hearing, Caroline knew, was a lifetime of frustration and moral passion, based on a single, diamond-hard belief: that the death penalty was tainted by human failings too profound to cure, and that imposing it was an act of arrogance which diminished our humanity. For Blair Montgomery, no Ted Bundy or Timothy McVeigh would ever compensate for the execution of the innocent.
"Blair," she said gently, "you've earned the right to feel as you do. But the death penalty is the law, and I promised Congress to uphold it. All I can do is try to make it fairer."