For an instant, the judge seemed to pause at the duty before him, then intoned for Payton Price—now as impassive as his brother—and then for Rennell the awesome words Mauriani had come to think of as, quite literally, a sentence of death.
'Rennell Price, it is the judgment of this Court, and it is hereby ordered, adjudged, and decreed, that you shall be put to death in accordance with California law within the walls of the State Prison at San Quentin.
'The defendant Rennell Price is therefore remanded to the custody of the Sheriff of San Francisco County to be delivered to the administrator of that prison, within ten days from this date, for execution of the sentence of death for the murder of Thuy Sen . . .'
To Mauriani's astonishment, Rennell Price stood. For the only time, his deep voice sounded in the courtroom. 'I didn't do that little girl . . .'
* * *
Closing the transcript, Terri prepared to go home, try to get some sleep. There were fifty-four days until the date of execution.
PART TWO
THE INVESTIGATION
ONE
IT WAS THAT KIND OF SAN FRANCISCO MORNING WHEN DRIZZLE spattered through a mistlike fog which clung chill and close to the slick pavement. As Carlo drove, Terri sipped coffee from a porcelain mug, warming her cupped hands. The breath of the defroster cleared circles on the windshield of her cluttered Jeep.
Carlo turned down Pine Street toward Laurel Heights. 'So tell me about Laura Finney,' he said.
'Until a few weeks ago she was a senior counsel at Kenyon and Walker. She's the only lawyer who worked on Rennell's appeal from the start.' Pausing, Terri sipped her coffee. 'In theory, Kenyon and Walker's as different from Yancey James as you can get—six hundred lawyers from top-tier law schools, the elite of their profession, with resources to burn. More help than most would think Rennell deserved.'
'You don't sound impressed.'
'We'll see,' Terri answered with a shrug. 'What struck me about their filings was how neatly prepared they were. Perfect margins—not a typo I could find. The only thing missing was Rennell.'
* * *
Laura Finney snatched at a stray hair which had eluded the rubber band pulling her brown curls back in a bun.
Dressed in blue jeans, she was slender and pale, her eyes unsmiling behind wire-rim glasses. In the living room of her one-story stucco bungalow a toddler girl watched Sesame Street while an infant boy writhed in a playpen, vainly attempting to master the art of flipping on his stomach. The circles beneath her eyes made Finney look so tired that Carlo could imagine her on the treadmill of new motherhood.
'The second baby got to be too much,' she told them. 'I took maternity leave one month before the Supreme Court turned down Rennell's habeas corpus petition. By then I was the senior lawyer on the case—the only one who had been there since Rennell's direct appeal got assigned to us, when I was just out of law school.' Pausing, she added in a tone Carlo heard as bemusement. 'That was fourteen years ago.'
'Why so long?' he asked.
Finney shot a glance of wan amusement at Terri, sitting beside her stepson on the gray wool couch. 'Bureaucracy,' she told Carlo. 'Inertia. Despite all the right-wing politicians bleating about tricky lawyers abusing the system to put years between our death row clients and the needle, thus extending the agony of people like Thuy Sen's parents.
'Truth is, it's the process that's excruciating, and all we needed to invoke it was show up.' Leaning forward in her chair toward Carlo, she began ticking off its stages on her fingers. 'Let's review the stations of the cross. First three were the so-called direct appeal of Rennell's conviction to the California Supreme Court. The Court hears only about twenty or so direct appeals a year. And direct appeals include only issues which are presented by the record of the trial itself. That made our direct appeal pretty close to worthless when it came to whether 'Lawyer James' greased the wheels of death for his own client.'
'Why? You can see that much from the trial transcript.'
'All you can see,' Finney rejoined, 'is that James was a crummy lawyer with terrible judgment. The courtrooms of America are crawling with those. What you can't tell is whether he's what the Sixth Amendment right to counsel supposedly guarantees: a lawyer who investigates, with at least minimal competence, all the options for sparing his client death.'
'Or,' Terri interjected pointedly, 'whether his lawyer had a coke habit?'
The inquiry, cutting off Finney's clipped, ironic narrative, induced a look of doubt and surprise. 'Why do you think that?'
'Just surmise. You interview the grandmother?'
'I didn't.' The hint of doubt in Finney's manner became defensiveness. 'A junior associate did, I think. There was a lot to do, and so a lot of us worked this case.'
Carlo could read in Terri's skepticism her imaginings of some rookie lawyer, too lightly supervised, interviewing an elderly woman from the Bayview across the gap of race and age and culture—though Carlo himself had adduced from Eula Price the telling detail of James's runny nose. But then his life until age seven had given him a preternatural sense of people, and what was left unsaid.
'Who was the partner in charge?' Terri asked.
'Which year?' Finney's tone retrieved its irony. 'The direct appeal took seven years by itself, and the habeas corpus petition—the first time we could present facts outside the record—was decided seven years after that.
