'A couple of entries. Let me check.' The librarian hit some more characters and another set of words appeared on the screen. She read off the headlines: Tormer college student convicted in girl's murder, sentenced to death penalty; Appeal rejected in rural murder case; Florida Supreme Court to hear Death Row cases. That's all. Three stories. All from the Gulf Coast edition. Nothing ran in the main run, except the last, which is probably a roundup story.'
'Not much for a murder and death sentence,' Cowart said. 'You know, in the old days, it seemed we covered every murder trial
'No more.'
'Life meant more then.'
The librarian shrugged. 'Violent death used to be more sensational than it is now, and you're much too young to be talking about the old days. You probably mean the seventies…' She smiled and Cowart laughed with her. 'Anyway, death sentences are getting to be old hat in Florida these days. We've got…' She hesitated, pushing her head back and examining the ceiling for an instant.'… More than two hundred men on Death Row now. The governor signs a couple of death warrants every month. Doesn't mean they get it, but…' She looked at him and smiled. 'But Matt, you know all that. You wrote those editorials last year. About being a civilized nation. Right?' She nodded her head toward him.
'Right. I remember the main thrust was: We shouldn't sanction state murder. Three editorials, a total of maybe ninety column inches. In reply, we ran more than fifty letters that were, how shall I put it? Contrary to my position. We ran fifty, but we got maybe five quadrillion. The nicest ones merely suggested that I ought to be beheaded in a public square. The nasty ones were more inventive.'
The librarian smiled. 'Popularity is not our job, right? Would you like me to print these for you?'
'Please. But I'd rather be loved…'
She grinned at him and then turned to her computer. She played her fingers across the keyboard again and a high-speed printer in the corner of the room began whirring and shaking as it printed the news stories. 'There you go. On to something?'
'Maybe,' Cowart replied. He took the sheaf of paper out of the computer. 'Man says he didn't do it.'
The young woman laughed. 'Now that would be interesting. And unique.' She turned back to the computer screen and Cowart headed back to his office.
The events that had landed Robert Earl Ferguson on Death Row began to take on form and shape as Cowart read through the news stories. The library's offering had been minimal, but enough to create a portrait in his imagination. He learned that the victim in the case was an eleven-year-old girl, and that her body had been discovered concealed in scrub brush at the edge of a swamp.
It was easy for him to envision the murky green and brown foliage concealing the body. It would have had a sucking, oozing quality of sickness, an appropriate place to find death.
He read on. The victim was the child of a local city-council member, and she had last been seen walking home from school. Cowart saw a wide, single-story cinder-block building standing alone in a rural, dusty field. It would be painted a faded pink or institutional green, colors that could barely be brightened by children's excited voices greeting the end of the school day. That was when one of the teachers in the elementary grades had seen her getting into a green Ford with out-of-state plates. Why? What would make her get into a stranger's car? The thought made him shiver and feel an instant flush of fear for his own daughter. She wouldn't do that, he told himself abruptly. When the little girl failed to arrive home, an alarm had gone out. Cowart knew that the local television stations would have shown a picture on the evening news that night. It would have been of a ponytailed youngster, smiling, showing braces on her teeth. A family photo, taken in hope and promise, used obscenely to fill the airwaves with despair.
More than twenty-four hours later, deputies searching the area had uncovered her remains. The news story had been filled with euphemisms: 'brutal assault,' 'savage attack,' 'torn and ripped body,' which Cowart recognized as the shorthand of journalism; unwilling to describe in great detail the actual horror that the child had faced, the writer had resorted to a comfortable series of cliches.
It must have been a terrible death, he thought. People wanted to know what happened but not really, because if they did they would not sleep either.
He read on. As best he could tell, Ferguson had been the first and only suspect. Police had picked him up shortly after the victim's body had been discovered, because of the similarity with his car. He'd been questioned – there was nothing in any of the stories about being held incommunicado or beaten – and confessed. The confession, followed by a blood-type matchup and the vehicle identifiction, appeared to have been the only evidence against him, but Cowart was circumspect. Trials took on a certain momentum of their own, like great theater. A detail which seemed small or questionable when mentioned in a news story could become immense in a juror's eyes.
Ferguson had been correct about the judge's sentencing. The quote '… an animal that ought to be taken outside and shot' appeared prominently in the story. The judge had probably been up for reelection that year, he thought.
The other library entries had provided some additional information: primarily that Ferguson's initial appeal, based upon the insufficiency of evidence against him, had been rejected by the first district court of appeal. That was to be expected. It was still pending before the Florida Supreme Court. It was clear to Cowart that Ferguson had not yet really begun to gnaw away at the courts. He had numerous avenues of appeal and had yet to travel them.
Cowart sat back at his desk and tried to picture what had happened.
He saw a rural county in the backwoods of Florida. He knew this was a part of the state that had absolutely nothing in common with the popular images of Florida, nor the well-scrubbed, smiling faces of the middle class that flocked to Orlando and Disney World, nor the beered-up frat boys who headed to the beaches during their spring breaks, nor the tourists who drove their mobile homes to Cape Canaveral for space shots. Certainly, this Florida had nothing to do with the cosmopolitan, loose-fitting image of Miami, which styled itself as some sort of American Casablanca.
But in Pachoula, he thought, even in the eighties, when a little white girl is raped and murdered and the man that did it is black, a more primal America takes over. An America that people would prefer not to remember.
Is that what happened to Ferguson? It was certainly possible.
Cowart picked up the telephone to call the attorney handling Ferguson's appeal.
It took most of the remainder of the morning to get through to the lawyer. When Cowart finally did connect with the man, he was immediately struck by the lawyer's licorice-sweet southern accent.
'Mr. Cowart, this is Roy Black. What's got a Miami newspaper man interested in things up here in Escambia County?' He pronounced the word 'here' he-yah.
'Thanks for calling back, Mr. Black. I'm curious about one of your clients. A Robert Earl Ferguson.'
The lawyer laughed briefly. 'Well, I sorta figured it would be Mr. Ferguson's case that you were calling about when my gal here handed me your phone message. Whatcha wanna know?'
'First tell me about his case.'
'Well, State Supreme Court has the package right now. We contend that the evidence against Mr. Ferguson was hardly sufficient to convict him. And we're saying right out that the trial judge shoulda suppressed that confession of his'n. You oughta read it. Probably the most convenient document of its sort I ever saw. Just like the police wrote it up in the sheriff's department up here. And, without that confession, they got no case at all. If Robert Earl doesn't say what they want him to say, they don't even get two minutes in court. Not even in the worst redneck, racist court in the world.'
'What about the blood evidence?'
'Crime lab in Escambia County is pretty primitive, not like what y'all are used to down there in Miami. They only typed it down to its major group. Type O positive. That's what the semen they found in the deceased was, that's what Robert Earl is. Of course, the same is true of maybe a couple thousand men in that
