he’s in a difficult situation and any information that your father might be in a position to pass on to me would help.’
‘What kind of information were you looking for?’ she asked.
I mentioned the Selina Day case, and the agreement that had been struck with R. Dean Bailey. I asked for any background to the agreement that her father might be able to give, along with any further details that he felt might be pertinent. I was stumbling in the dark, to be honest, but at this point any light that he could shed on the case would be better than none.
If the names I had given Anita meant anything to her, she didn’t say. She agreed to take my numbers, both fax and phone, and my e-mail address. I also gave her Aimee Price’s details, and said that I was employed by her on Haight’s behalf, and was therefore bound by rules of client confidentiality. She said that her father was sleeping, but as soon as he woke she would mention my call to him. I thanked her, hung up, then called Aimee Price to let her know that I had established some form of contact with Bowens. After that, with nothing more to be done for now, I made myself a simple meal of penne with pesto and ate it while watching the news on the portable TV in my kitchen. Anna Kore’s disappearance was the second story after a big crash north of Augusta, but it was clear to me that the networks were already losing interest. After all, there were only so many ways to say that no progress had been made. Anna Kore would make it back to the top of the news only if she was found, alive or dead.
When the news had concluded, I took a Willy Vlautin novel into my office and lay back on my battered old couch to read, but that picture of Selina Day kept intruding on my concentration. Eventually I think I must have dozed for a time as I was going over the details of Randall Haight’s story in my mind. Reality blurred in the way that it does when one drops unexpectedly into sleep, and I thought I saw Haight outside my window peering in at me. His skin was very pale, and there were wrinkles on his scalp and cheeks that I had not noticed before, as though his skull had begun to shrink. He raised his right hand and plunged it into his flesh, and his face came away. What was exposed was bloody and waxen, but still recognizably him. He repeated the action over and over, alternating hands and discarding the remains at his feet like a spider shedding its external skin in order to grow, until only a blank visage remained where once his features had been, the eye sockets empty and yet, somehow, still weeping.
A pinging sound from my computer brought me back to consciousness. There was an e-mail in my in-box from Anita Bowens, consisting of a short message and an attachment. The message read:
My father hopes that Randall, as he now thinks of him (and, as he hopes, Randall now thinks of himself) is doing well, that he has grasped the chance to leave his past behind while still regretting his actions, and sends him his kindest regards. Nevertheless, he requests that there should be no further contact with him from either Randall or yourself regarding this matter. Anything of relevance to your inquiries can be found in the accompanying documents.
Yours,
Anita Bowens
P.S. I know a little of the history behind this case, for my father has referred in the past to the ‘imperfect agreement’ reached with the prosecutor, Mr. Bailey. The documents included here should indicate the reasons for my father’s dissatisfaction. For now, it’s enough to recognize that he wanted the boys to be tried as juveniles, not as adults. Both the attorney general and the district attorney disagreed, as did Mr. Bailey, and prosecutorial discretion won out. Rather than abandon the boys entirely to the dubious mercies of the system, the price of my father’s acquiescence was a new start for them once their sentences were served. I suspect that my father still believes he sold his principles too cheaply.
A.B.
I opened the attachment. It consisted of a scanned copy of Maurice Bowens’s letter to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania indicating his decision to cease practicing in the state in protest at its continued insistence on trying children as adults and allowing them to be sentenced to life without parole; and an article published in a law journal expanding on the theme.
According to the article, which contained more recent footnotes updating some of its points and statistics, Pennsylvania was one of twenty-two states, along with the District of Columbia, that allowed children as young as seven to be tried as adults, and one of forty-two that allowed children to be sentenced to life without parole for a first criminal conviction. Pennsylvania alone accounted for more than twenty percent of the children in the United States who faced the prospect of dying behind bars if convicted. Bowens’s piece argued that, by ‘enthusiastically’ sentencing thirteen- and fourteen-year-old children, and younger, to die in prison, both for homicide and non- homicide offenses, the state was guilty of ‘cruel and unusual’ punishment and was therefore in violation of the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, of international law, and, theoretically, of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which, as Bowens pointed out, the United States had signally failed to ratify, making it and Somalia the only countries to refuse to do so. He said that such a law took no account of the vulnerability of children, of the developmental and legal distinctions between children and adults, and of children’s capacity for growth, change, and redemption.
‘By allowing the incarceration of children without hope of parole, we have shown ourselves to be unworthy of the trust and responsibility placed in us as lawmakers,’ Bowens concluded. ‘We have confused punishment with retribution, and sacrificed justice to injustice. But, worst of all, we have allowed cruelty and expediency to govern us, permitting our humanity to fall away. No country that treats the most vulnerable of its young people in this way deserves to call itself civilized. We have failed in our duty as lawmakers, as parents, as protectors of children, and as human beings.’
I forwarded the email to Aimee, then printed out the letter and the article and added them to the file on the case. I hadn’t known about the Convention on the Rights of the Child, but being in bed with Somalia didn’t strike me as anything about which to be proud. It wasn’t hard to figure out why the Somalis hadn’t signed – any country that swells the ranks of its armies with child soldiers wasn’t in much of a position to sign anything other than a receipt for more guns – but last time I looked, the United States military wasn’t so depleted that it was forced to recruit in grade schools. Still, it was clear that somebody somewhere in the US government had come up with an argument against signing an agreement to protect children. Whoever it was, I’m sure that his kids were proud of him, and the Somalis sent him a card at Christmas.
So Bowens had left Pennsylvania, worked his way up the ranks of the North Dakota judiciary, and eventually had found himself judging a case that tested his principles once again. But instead of resigning again in the face of prosecutorial intransigence he had struck a deal guaranteeing the boys a fresh start, even if it meant compromising his principles, because better a small victory than no victory at all. If his daughter was to be believed, the nature of that compromise had tormented him ever since.
I looked again at Bowens’s letter. I regretted that I hadn’t been able to talk to him in person, and that any further communication between us now appeared to be unwelcome. Given the opportunity, I would have asked him about the third person involved in that killing decades ago, the final apex of the triangle connecting three lives: Lonny Midas. Haight had presented Midas as the instigator of what had occurred, but, as I’d pointed out to Aimee, that might simply have been the complexion that Haight chose to place on events. Again, I was reminded of how he had reverted at times to an unnerving juvenility during his description of the killing and its aftermath. It was the response of a cornered child, facing punishment for doing something bad, to blame someone else for the worst of it. I wanted to learn more about Lonny Midas, but unless I could find him and ask him face-to-face about the death of Selina Day it seemed that I would have to rely on the testimony of Randall Haight alone. But Haight was self- serving at best in his depiction of his role, and at worst a potential liar.
I had begun doodling while I thought, and stopped when I saw that I had drawn a crude outline of a girl’s head, framed by beribboned pigtails. Liar: I kept coming back to that word. Why was I so convinced that Haight’s account of the murder was not simply revisionist but contained moments of active concealment? After all, what could be worth hiding? He had admitted his involvement in a terrible crime. The fact that he claimed it was Lonny Midas who had smothered Selina was important only in that it represented the culmination of a sequence of events to which he had been a party, and for which he and Midas were both equally culpable. Perhaps he had fought against Midas at the end, but would he have tried to pull him off when Midas began raping Selina? Would he have joined in himself? What was the point at which he realized that it had all gone too far – if, in fact, he ever gained that realization?
I knew then that my problem with Randall Haight was that not only did I not believe his story in its entirety; I didn’t like him. I couldn’t say for sure if that was because of what he had done, and the death of my own child, in
