'Not much there. Mom killed Dad, Grandmother's literally sick and tired, and his brother, Payton, hasn't opened his mouth for a decade and a half. All we got from any of them was the grandma saying that the Rennell who came to live with her was a sweet and gentle boy. I guess that's what she had to cling to.'
Terri's features suddenly lacked all expression—a sign, Carlo guessed, of how hard she was working to conceal her impatience with Laura Finney. 'What about the mother?' she asked.
'We tried,' Finney answered. 'But the woman's crazy. Talking to her was like listening to some street person jabber to herself.'
'No doubt,' Terri responded. 'But tell me about it, anyway.'
* * *
What Laura Finney remembered was eyes like burn holes.
She sat with Athalie Price in a mental institution so grim that it could have been nothing else. The woman's processed hair was hacked off, her face gaunt, her body as stringy as beef jerky. But it was the eyes—to Finney, they spat madness.
'Fool,' Athalie Price muttered with contempt. 'And he thought that boy was stupid 'cause I was. That made him the stupidest of us all.'
When Laura asked if she meant Rennell's father, Athalie leaned back, head against the wall, and started laughing to herself, a hiss of rage escaping from her lips. She refused to speak another word.
* * *
'All I came away with,' Finney said now, 'is this wasn't the Cleaver family. That much I already knew.'
'What about Thuy Sen's family?' Terri asked. 'Ever talk to them?'
'No.' Finney's face registered palpable surprise. 'What could they tell me that wouldn't add to their misery? Even before having my own daughter, I wouldn't have wanted to remind them all over again of how theirs died. Not unless it did some good.'
Carlo glanced at Terri and saw nothing in her eyes about Elena. But, uncharacteristically, she seemed to have no follow-up question. 'What about DNA?' he asked Finney.
'We tried every test there was. But Thuy Sen had been floating for two days before they found her. The semen samples from her mouth and throat were too degraded to show whose sperm it was.' Pausing, Finney drew a breath. 'To tell the truth, part of me was relieved. I was too afraid of knowing.'
Terri stared at her. 'Knowing what?' she quietly asked. 'That Rennell was guilty, or that he might not be? Only the latter scares me.'
Still watching Terri, Carlo wondered if this were true.
TWO
SILENT, FINNEY CONSIDERED TERRI. 'TO BE HONEST,' SHE SAID sharply, 'I never felt at risk of finding out Rennell was innocent. God knows I tried.'
Terri was unsurprised, except by Finney's candor. 'What did Rennell say happened?' she asked.
' 'I didn't do that little girl.' Over and over, for fifteen years. But he didn't give us any reason to believe that.'
'Didn't?' Terri countered in even tones. 'Or couldn't? Suppose he is retarded—that wouldn't make him gifted at constructing an alternative. Or suppose he wasn't there at all. He wouldn't know what happened.'
'True,' Finney answered. 'But Thuy Sen was inside their living room. We know that from the forensics, from Flora Lewis, and from Fleet.'
'Then let's start with Lewis. Did you talk to her yourself?'
Finney nodded. 'Shortly before she died in her parents' home—as she made clear to us she'd always planned on, no matter what had happened to the neighborhood. She was as certain with us of what she'd seen that day as she was with Charles Monk.'
'Maybe so,' Terri responded. 'But as Monk well knows, a white woman like Lewis—elderly, isolated, and frightened—might not distinguish one black man from another. She might even have wanted one of the men she saw, or said she saw, to be Rennell.'
'Who else would Flora Lewis have seen?'
'A black man,' Terri answered dryly. 'That much we can count on. Did you consult any experts on the reliability of cross-racial IDs?'
'No.' Finney's voice rose. 'You do understand that, when we started, the State of California allowed only twelve thousand dollars in investigative fees, and that the federal court's allowance for expenses on habeas corpus was largely left to the discretion of the judge. It's not just that Kenyon and Walker didn't bill for our time for fourteen years—we pretty much carried the cost of Rennell Price's petition, however slim the prospect of success.'
From Finney's perspective, Terri acknowledged, that was fair—the fees allowed the Pagets were well below their normal rates. 'I appreciate the problem,' she offered in a mollifying tone. 'But we've only got forty-nine days and a very hard road. I need to know how many avenues are left to keep the state from killing Rennell Price. Did you talk to Eddie Fleet?'
'I tried, the last time maybe seven years ago.' Something, perhaps a memory, seemed to make Finney glance briefly at her daughter. 'The nearest I got to him was Betty Sims's front door.'
* * *
The Bayview, Finney acknowledged to herself, made her apprehensive—there was a sense of danger, as frightening for its randomness as for its malignity. Laura Finney suffered from the lawyer's belief in cause and effect; the idea of dying for no reason—except perhaps that she was white, or a woman, or in the wrong place
