Luckily, I had a friend.
When I was lost and close to suicide after Sarah left, Tony Olsen picked me up and never let me feel that I was a burden, or that he was doing me any favors. When I was drinking myself into oblivion, it was Tony who brought me to his home, made sure I stayed away from drink, and gave me a job handling security for his firm. The crazy thing is he’d also been a friend of Rosemary’s… you’d think after what I had done he’d want me dead.
I gave up drinking but the ghosts remained, and for years, both drunk and sober, I’ve fantasized about getting all the suspects together, all those I’d mistakenly ruled out, getting at the facts and exacting justice, for Rosemary, for her kids, for my own life.
It took me a long time, but I managed to convince Tony to help me. I needed closure, and it could only come from a second bite of that poisoned apple. It’s why now, all these years later, I need to get the principals together in one place. I need to confront the people who might have done it.
But Tony was right-we couldn’t just ask them to come together to give me another crack at solving the case.
We talked a lot about it, how we could get them all together, but the answer was there all the time-the memorial that Rosemary had requested in her last will and testament, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of her death. The innocent would pay their respects. The guilty would attend to avoid rousing suspicion. And why worry? Rosemary had been found guilty and executed. No DA in his right mind was going to reopen the case. They would all come, I was sure of it, some of them wearing innocence like a mask.
I’ve been an agnostic all my life. I’ve never believed in anything. I can’t imagine the phoenix rising from the ashes. From what I’ve seen, ashes always remain ashes, and sooner or later everything rots and decays. But with this idea of bringing them together, of finally uncovering the guilty party, I was going to resurrect myself.
You’re probably thinking I’m just a policeman obsessed with a case he couldn’t crack. But you’re wrong. It’s more than that. I have to know the truth: the truth about Rosemary and the truth about who really killed Christopher Thomas. You see, I have to find out who destroyed my life, who slept well the night Rosemary Thomas knew she’d never again see the bright morning through her cold prison bars.
Prologue Jonathan Santlofer
August 23, 2000
Valley State Prison for Women
Chowchilla, California
I am already a ghost.
Rosemary Thomas stared at her long fingers painted with stripes, the cell’s bars casting shadows. She raised her hand and studied it as if it were a newly discovered specimen, noting the pale blue veins under translucent flesh.
Yes, she thought, I am disappearing. She traced fingertips across her cheeks like a blind woman touching a stranger’s face, could barely feel them, barely take in the reality of her situation: I have less than an hour to live.
“How did this happen?” she whispered to no one, yet it was real and she knew it, knew that her husband, Christopher, had been murdered, knew that he had absurdly been sealed into an eighteenth-century torture device on loan to her department of the museum, knew that all of the evidence somehow pointed to her.
WIFE’S FINGERPRINTS ON IRON MAIDEN
Just one of the many headlines in the many newspapers that detailed the crime, her crime, or so the district attorney had proved.
Rosemary pictured him, an aging peacock in a three-piece suit, how he’d lobbied loudly and publicly for equality-No deals for the rich! his motto throughout the trial-and with his reelection only weeks away not something he was going to trade for the life of one rich woman. He’d gone for blood on day one, asking a surprised judge and jury for the death penalty and “nothing less.”
Her case had become a cause célèbre, pro-life versus pro-death forces having a field day. Funny, thought Rosemary, that it had taken a murder to finally get her some attention.
Had it not been an election year with the DA, the judge, and the governor up for reelection, her lawyer insisted she would have gotten a reduced sentence.
But it was an election year. And she was going to die.
When had it happened, when had she finally given up hope? When her brother’s words condemned her, or when the cop, Jon Nunn, whom she’d trusted, had given his damning testimony?
She thought of the burly cop on the stand, hair a mess, three days’ growth of beard, the dark circles under his eyes. And how, when he’d finished testifying, he’d glanced over at her with eyes so sad that she’d nodded in spite of her anger, as if to say she understood he was doing his job, even as she realized that the prosecution now had all they needed, and the absolute certainty of her fate washed over her.
Rosemary sighed, took in the bare walls of the special security cell where she’d been moved after she’d lost her last appeal. She had lived with two weeks of hourly checks, the “death watch” as it was known, a guard taking notes as if there were something to report: the inmate moved from bed to chair; the inmate did not eat her dinner; the inmate wrote in her diary; the inmate is crying.
Yes, she had cried. But not anymore. She was past tears. That’s what she’d told the psychiatrist and the chaplain and the caseworker, all of them well-meaning but useless. What could they do for her?
She was sane.
She’d been born a Christian but was now an agnostic.
She was charitable.
She’d actually said that to the caseworker, and the absurdity of the statement had made them both laugh.
Was it the last time she would ever laugh?
Rosemary paced across the tiny cell, back and forth, hand tapping her side, adrenaline coursing through her veins. She hadn’t slept but wasn’t tired, the evidence against her replaying on automatic-the blouse, the button, her strands of hair, the fight, the fingerprints-but none of it mattered now. She was going to die.
Today, her last twenty-four hours, she’d felt almost resigned to her fate. That was how she’d described her state of mind to her friend and only visitor, Belle McGuire.
Loyal, dependable Belle. She had given Belle something to safeguard until the children were older. But would it even matter in ten years time? It would to Ben and Leila; it always would to them. Rosemary squeezed her eyes shut at the thought of her children. She’d refused the nanny who offered to bring them to say good-bye. How do you say good-bye forever to your children? How do you explain this to them?
She sagged onto her cot, played with a loose thread at the cuff of her orange jumpsuit, wrapped it so tightly around her finger the tip turned white, until the picture of another finger-Christopher’s finger-flashed in her mind along with other crime scene photos of her dead husband’s decomposed body.
Rosemary pushed herself up from the cot, six steps to the bars, pressed her cheek against cold steel, squinted to read the clock at the far end of the hall. But why? To tell her that the minutes of what was left of her life were ticking away?
She turned away and stared at the tray on the edge of her bed, stains blooming through the napkin. Her last meal-a cheeseburger and fries-ordered when the sad, smiling guard said she could have anything she wanted.
Anything? A new trial? Freedom? Her life?
She’d returned the woman’s sad smile. “I don’t care,” she’d said. And when the cheeseburger had arrived oozing blood, with fat french fries lapping up the liquid like leeches, she’d covered it with a napkin, the thought of eating impossible.