Now You See Her

“Do you think Fabiana will take the bait?” I said.

“Do I know?” Charlie said, closing his eyes. “Depends on how much she hates Justin, I guess. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, right? It’s looking like Justin must have scorned the living crap out of Miss Desmarais. Is it actually possible for a woman to hate a man to death?”

“You’d be surprised,” I said grimly. “How long do we wait?”

Charlie let out a tired breath. “Two, three hours at the most,” he said. “If she doesn’t show, then we won’t have any other choice. We’ll have to go with Plan B.”

“Which is?” I said.

“We still go up to meet with the clemency board in Tallahassee, but instead of Fabiana recanting her testimony, you’re going to have to tell the board your bizarre life story instead. It’s gonna suck, and it probably won’t even work, but it’s like you said. Other than that, we don’t have a damn thing.”

I pieced through that excruciating scenario. I’d had trouble enough telling my secrets to Charlie. How exactly was I going to give them up to the governor of Florida?

A long hour later, after my third game of solitaire, I was heading out onto the balcony to give Emma a call when there was a soft knock on the door.

“Lunch. Finally,” Charlie mumbled from where he lay dozing on the couch.

“No, please don’t get up. I got it, really,” I snapped as I crossed to the door.

My mood definitely lifted when I opened it.

It wasn’t room service.

I stepped back and let Fabiana in.

Chapter 94

“THANK YOU SO MUCH for coming, Fabiana,” I said. “I promise that when you testify that—”

“I haven’t changed my mind. I’m not testifying. I came to give you this,” she said, taking a sheet of newspaper out of her pocket.

I unfolded it. It was a yellowed page of classified ads from the Miami Herald. I held my breath after I spotted the date in the corner. It was from June 19, 1993. From reading and rereading the case and trial transcripts, I knew that was the day after Tara Foster had been abducted.

“What is this, Fabiana?” I said, quickly scanning the classifieds.

Fabiana took it out of my hand and turned it over. My eyes fell immediately to the photograph at the bottom. A group of people were sitting in some stands by a pool with a woman in a wet suit and some dolphins.

“Floridians beat yesterday’s heat at the Miami Seaquarium,” said the caption.

“Justin and I are in the picture,” Fabiana said. “Right there in the front row. You were right. I lied.”

I peered at the photograph more closely. It was true. You could just make out Justin and Fabiana sitting in the front row.

“Charlie!” I yelled, handing him the page. “You’re not going to believe this. Look!”

He took the newspaper page out of my hands, looked at the picture, looked at the date.

“Yes!” he said with a triumphant grin. “Finally, a break!”

“All you need to do is show this to the authorities, and my lie will be exposed,” Fabiana said. “Then they can set Justin free, yes?”

“Actually, well, no, Fabiana,” Charlie said. “It’s not that simple. This is extremely helpful, but you need to come to Tallahassee with us and bring this forward yourself. You’ll have to give your testimony as well.”

“I’m absolutely not willing to do that,” Fabiana said coldly.

“Why not?” Charlie said.

“Nina?” Fabiana said, looking at me. “Can I speak to you alone?”

I eyeballed Charlie to get going.

“Fine. I’ll be out in the hall, I guess.”

“Don’t judge me,” Fabiana said after Charlie left.

I shook my head. “Of course not, Fabiana.”

“Seventeen years ago, Justin made me pregnant. He told me that he couldn’t afford a baby and a wife, but that if I… got rid of the baby, he would eventually marry me. He even bought me a ring. So I agreed. I didn’t want to kill my baby, but in the end I decided I didn’t want to lose Justin more. It was three months later that I found out through a friend that he was cheating on me. Not with just one woman, but with several.”

Ouch, I thought. Justin really had scorned the living crap out of her.

“When the detective told me years later that Justin had admitted to having sex with Tara Foster in the prison, it brought back all that horror and hatred and pain. So I lied. I wanted to hurt Justin as much as he had hurt me. The last thing I want to do now, after all these years, is tell my dirty little story to the whole wide world. You can understand that, can’t you? I’ll probably be in some trouble myself for lying.”

“That’s true, Fabiana. But there’s no other way. You don’t have to get into specifics about why you lied. All you need to do is explain that you did lie and that Justin was with you the whole day.”

“Can’t you do it for me?” Fabiana said, closing her eyes.

“It doesn’t work that way, Fabiana. I know it’ll be painful to testify, but how do you think you’ll feel if you don’t come forward and Justin is executed? Seventeen years is a long time to hold on to your pain. It’s time to let yours go.”

Fabiana let out a breath. “You’ll be there?”

“Of course,” I said.

“OK,” she said. “I guess I don’t have a choice. I’ll do it.”

Chapter 95

JUST BEFORE DINNER, on the second-to-last day of his life, Justin Harris lay on his cot with a book open in his large hands. It was a cheesy old paperback about a brilliant and bulky detective named Nero Wolfe.

“News flash, fatso,” Justin mumbled as he tossed the book under his bunk. “In the real world, the killer gets away with it.”

He sat up immediately as boots squeaked and metal clicked out in front of his death-watch cell adjacent to the execution chamber.

“Harris, visitor,” the day captain, Johannson, said, opening the gate.

Visitor? he thought as Johannson cuffed him. Must be that irritating new lady lawyer, he guessed, smoothing his orange jumpsuit.

The white execution chamber Johannson brought him past could have been a large doctor’s examination room, except for the singular black velvet curtain covering one wall and the leather restraints on the gurney.

“Oh, yeah, by the way, Harris, since you were a guard, all of us got together and chipped in on a little gift,” Johannson said, showing him a box. “We thought maybe if you got bored, you’d like to see a movie tonight.”

Harris glanced down at the box. Dead Man Walking. “Nice of you guys,” he said, cheerily refusing to let these bastards or anyone else get to him. “Some of Sean Penn’s best work right there. Too bad I don’t have a DVD player, though.”

“You won’t need one where you’re going, lowlife,” the guard cooed in his ear.

“Yeah, you deserve it, you sick freak,” called out Jimmy Litz, one of his neighbors down the row. Litz had dropped a cinderblock off an overpass and then, pretending to help the victim, a twenty-three-year-old Jacksonville housewife, raped and killed her instead.