No court had considered this claim worthy of belief or even, in the last five of these proceedings, a hearing. As far as the State was concerned, its sole remaining task should be to dispatch three psychiatrists to advise the Governor's office, within twenty days of the appointed date of execution, whether her client was sane enough to die: one of the niceties of capital punishment, Terri thought sardonically, was the State's insistence that the condemned fully appreciate that lethal injection would, in fact, be lethal.
She nodded to the guard.
He rapped sharply on the Plexiglas. With a twitch of his shoulders, as though startled, the black man inside the cage turned to face them.
His eyes were expressionless; for him, Terri thought, the highlight of her visit—a view of the bay—was already over. With a resignation born of fifteen years of meeting lawyers in these booths, he backed toward the door and, hands held behind his back, thrust them through an open slot.
The guard clapped on his handcuffs, closing them with a metallic click. Then Rennell Price, shackled, stepped away from the door.
The guard opened it, admitting Terri.
The door shut, and Rennell stood over her. As he backed to the slot again, waiting for the guard to uncuff his outthrust hands, Terri had an involuntary spurt of fear, the reflex of a small woman confined with a hulking stranger who had, in the estimate of twelve jurors, done a terrible thing to someone much smaller than she.
She held out her hand. 'I'm Terri Paget,' she told him. 'Your new lawyer.'
His expression was somewhere between sullen and indifferent—she might as well have pronounced herself an emissary from Pluto. But after a moment, he looked up at her and said in a monotone, 'My name Rennell.'
She searched his eyes for hope or, at least, some instinct to trust. She saw none.
'Why don't we sit,' Terri said. 'Get acquainted a little.'
With a fractional shrug, her client turned, slid out the orange plastic chair on the far side of a laminated wood table, and sat, staring past Terri. Settling across from him, Terri saw the inmates in the next two cages huddled with their lawyers, lips moving without sound.
Rennell's face, Terri decided, was more than inexpressive—it had no lines, as if no emotion had ever crossed it. She reminded herself that he had been only eighteen when convicted, now was barely thirty-three, and that the fifteen years in between had been, were this man lucky, mostly solitary, and unrelentingly the same. But not even Terri's presence—a novelty, at least—caused the line of his full mouth to soften, or his wide brown eyes to acknowledge her.
Terri tried to wait him out. Yet the broad plane of his face remained so impassive that he seemed not so much to look through her as to deny her presence. It was hard to know the reasons. But one of the hallmarks of an adult abused as a child, Terri reflected, was an emotional numbing to the point of dissociation—a willful process of going blank, of withdrawing mentally from this earth. Jurors often thought such men indifferent to the crimes their prosecutors described so vividly; in the case of this crime, that could hardly have helped Rennell Price.
'I've taken over your case,' Terri explained. 'Your lawyers at Kenyon and Walker thought you deserved a fresh pair of eyes.'
This drew no reaction. Mentally, Terri cursed her predecessors for their absence, the ultimate act of cowardice and desertion—leaving her to build a relationship with a sullen stranger, the better to save his life, or prepare him to die. Then, to her surprise, he asked, 'You know Payton?'
'Your brother? No, I don't.' Terri tried to animate her voice with curiosity. 'How's he doing?'
'Fixing to die. They're going to kill him. Before me.'
Oddly, Terri thought, this last detail about Payton seemed to carry more dread than his own fate. 'How do you know?' she inquired.
He slumped forward on the table, not answering. 'I can't be there,' he said dully. 'Warden told me that.'
Struck by the answer, Terri chose to ignore its unresponsiveness. 'What else did she tell you?'
'That I can pick five people. When my time come.'
Five witnesses, Terri thought, granted the condemned by the grace of the State of California. But from what Terri knew, it would be hard to find five people, outside the victim's family, who gave enough of a damn to watch. Rennell Price's death, if it came, would be a very private affair.
'You don't have to worry about that yet.' Pausing, Terri looked hard into his eyes. 'We'll have a lot of help—my husband, Chris, who's a terrific lawyer, and a team of investigators to look into your case. You'll meet them all soon. We'll be doing everything we can to save your life.'
For almost half that life, he had heard this—Terri could see that much in his face. And each time, she already suspected, whoever said it had been lying.
Slowly, his eyelids dropped.
'I didn't do that little girl,' he said. 'Payton didn't do her.'
The denial sounded rote, yet etched with fatigue. 'How do you know about Payton?' Terri asked.
'He told me.'
What to make of that, she wondered. As either a reason to believe his brother or a statement of truth, it was implausible to the point of pitiful, and she could not divine if this man knew it. 'Who do you think 'did' her, Rennell?'
He gave a silent shrug of the shoulders, suggesting an absence of knowledge or, perhaps, a massive indifference.
'The day she died,' Terri persisted, 'can you remember where you were?'
'I don't remember nothing.'
