'What's he gonna do,' Eddie said coolly. 'He's in jail, and there be only two people hold the key. Me, and you.'
Tasha writhed in pain. 'Let me go.'
Eddie loosened his grasp but did not release her. 'You got a choice, Tasha. Do what I want, and you'll get your boyfriend back. No one ever know but us.'
Tasha could not speak. The intimacy in the way he spoke her name sickened her. 'Don't need to say a thing,' Eddie continued quietly. 'All you need to do is let me in, and listen.'
When Tasha did not answer, he pushed her inside, closing the door behind them.
'You want him back,' he said. 'I can see it. So I'm gonna spell out just what you need to do to make that happen.'
He told her.
Undressing, Tasha willed her soul outside her body.
Eddie unzipped his pants. 'On your knees,' he said. 'Do me like I know you did for him.'
* * *
As Terri listened, sickened, Tasha bowed her head. 'Eddie lied to me,' she said. 'I never could tell Payton. All I could do was lie when Payton asked me to. 'Cause I loved him.'
To Terri, her voice was that of the younger Tasha, bereft and without defenses. Filled with her own fear and anger directed at Eddie Fleet, Terri struggled to discern the meaning of what she had just learned.
'Oral sex,' Terri said at last. 'That's all he wanted.'
Tasha nodded.
As with Thuy Sen, Terri thought, and Lacy Sims. But though she could not yet parse the uses of Tasha's story, she felt the undercurrent of her own misgivings.
'I'm sorry,' Terri told her.
Tasha shook her head. 'You haven't heard it all. There's only one thing I know for sure—Eddie Fleet's as evil as any man I ever met.'
* * *
The night after Payton and Rennell were sentenced to death, Eddie returned to her apartment.
This time she peered through the peephole and saw him. Tears of grief and rage ran down her face.
'I know you're here,' he said through the door, voice deep but soft with laughter. 'Figure you be needin' a man now, and wantin' what I have to give you.'
Tasha leaned against the door, teeth gritted. 'You lied to me.'
She heard Eddie laugh aloud. 'You knew I was. And I know you miss it from me, baby. You be comin' round.'
A week later, Tasha Bramwell left the Bayview, never to return.
* * *
'I didn't want to go back there,' Tasha said. 'I still don't.' She paused, voice quieter. 'I hate the person I was. But I outran the evil of that place, the evil of that man. I don't want to go back there, dragging my family with me.'
Terri placed her hand on Tasha's wrist. 'If you do,' she promised, 'it will be to save a life.'
* * *
It was two in the morning before she sat with Chris, the signed declaration from Betty and Lacy Sims spread across their breakfast table, and told him what she had learned from Tasha Harding.
'Forced oral copulation,' Chris said. 'Jealousy toward Payton of Iago-like proportions. There's a pattern. But you know what the problems are.'
'Yes. Tasha's already committed perjury. She knows nothing about Fleet being a pedophile, or anything that bears directly on Thuy Sen's death. In fact, Fleet told her—truthfully—that Payton was involved.'
Chris nodded. 'And said nothing about his own role, or Rennell's. I can hear Pell now: assuming that Tasha's to be believed at all, what Fleet told her confirmed his story. He'll say the whole thing's just sexual one-upmanship between a couple of crack dealers, evidence of nothing but our own desperation.'
Drained, Terri finished her coffee. 'I feel sorry for her. But our only obligation is to Rennell. Should we use this?'
'Not yet. Let's hope we find something else.'
The next morning, based on the declarations from Lacy and Betty Sims, the Pagets began preparing a third habeas petition for the California Supreme Court.
EIGHTEEN
TEN DAYS BEFORE RENNELL'S SCHEDULED EXECUTION, IN A TWOLINE opinion which again explained nothing, the California Supreme Court denied his third habeas corpus petition, and the Pagets asked the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals for permission to file the petition before Judge Gardner Bond.
The Attorney General responded swiftly: the declarations of Betty and Lacy Sims concerning Eddie Fleet were irrelevant to the murder of Thuy Sen and, therefore, inadmissible at trial. Anxious, the Pagets awaited the decision of Judges Sanders, Montgomery, and Nhu, and with considerably less hope, Governor Darrow's disposition of
