'All right,' Terri answered tiredly and then amended, 'Not quite all right—there're some problems with her girlfriends. Thirteen's hard, even if you're not her.'
'Want me to take her out for Mexican food?' Carlo asked. 'We haven't done that in a while. And I've got street cred—she doesn't have to take it on faith that I used to be a teenager.'
For a moment, Terri smiled, and her body, slumping slightly, seemed to relax. 'That would be great,' she told him. 'Even if you're ducking work. You can meet us later.'
'Who's 'us'?'
'Me. An experienced investigator, Johnny Moore. A Ph.D. in anthropology, Tammy Mattox—she's a mitigation specialist, and her job is putting together an entire social history of Rennell Price and his family. A psychiatric expert, Dr. Anthony Lane. All working around the clock until and unless, God forbid, the clock runs out.'
Rising from his Lego fort, Kit crawled into his father's lap, his bare legs dangling above the deck. 'I'm cold,' he said.
Kissing the crown of Kit's head, Chris took off his windbreaker and draped it over the boy's shoulders. 'We'll be going soon,' Chris promised.
Such moments, Carlo reflected, summoned his earliest memories of his father. Except that Kit, his brother, looked so like Teresa Peralta. 'Death cases are painful,' she told Carlo. 'I've learned to redefine my notions of success. So should you—because Rennell Price is very likely to die. It helps to believe two things. First, that your client is on death row because of what life dealt him, and he deserves to have that story told. The Attorney General's aim is to ensure that story is never told—to the judge, or to the public. Your job is to make sure he fails.'
'What's the second thing?'
'That your client deserves each day of life that you can give him. No matter what he's done, or who he seems to be.'
Carlo glanced toward Elena, still reading: noting her isolation, he wondered if she somehow knew about the nature of the case and, if so, how she felt about Rennell's lawyers—her own family. Which, once again, caused him to ponder how Terri would deal with Elena while representing Rennell Price, and with what Carlo knew to be Terri's ineradicable guilt. 'Doesn't seem like Rennell can help us much,' he said at length.
Terri shook her head. 'Neither Yancey James nor Laura Finney tried to build a relationship with him. They just took it as a given that Rennell was sullen and uncooperative, a kind of sociopath. It never seems to have occurred to them that maybe he was frightened, or confused, or just plain couldn't help them because he really doesn't know what's going on. And never did.'
'That's our biggest hope,' Chris opined. 'Proving that Rennell's retarded. It means that he could be manipulated and confused by the police, unable to assist his own defense, unable to knowingly waive James's conflict or comprehend the trial, and prone to look unfeeling to a jury when he didn't know what was happening all around him.'
Glancing at Elena, Terri stood, ready to leave—perhaps, Carlo guessed, to sublimate through action some thought too painful to express. 'More than that,' she told both men, 'it's the gateway to explaining his entire life, and our excuse for trying to jam in all the new evidence we can find.' Looking down at Carlo, she finished, 'If Rennell's still alive in forty-eight days, it'll be because we succeeded. So take Elena to dinner, and then we'll get to work.'
FOUR
AT EIGHT-THIRTY THAT NIGHT, THE HABEAS CORPUS TEAM GATHERED in a booth at Terri's favorite steak house, Alfred's—from past experience, she knew them to be carnivores.
Terri sat across from Carlo. To her left was Johnny Moore, bearded and grizzled, a sixtyish former FBI agent turned investigator. On her right sat Tammy Mattox, the mitigation specialist, a Buddha-faced Alabaman with an ample belly and raucous laugh, so tenacious in her gathering of evidence that she claimed—credibly—to know the layout of every trailer park in America. On the drive over, Terri had told Carlo a story that typified Tammy's zeal: learning that the family of a death row inmate held an annual reunion deep in the hills of Arkansas, Tammy had simply shown up with a fresh-cooked ham and a basket of biscuits. When, three hours later, somebody finally asked who she was, her answer didn't much matter; by then she was family herself.
'The thing about retarded folks,' Tammy told Carlo, 'is people expect them to be slack-jowled and bug-eyed. Otherwise they're a real disappointment.'
Sitting beside Carlo, Dr. Anthony Lane nodded his agreement. He was both a neuropsychiatrist—an expert in organic brain damage—and a specialist in retardation, and it would be his job to examine Rennell Price for impairments in mental functioning. Lane was a large black man with thick glasses, so big that Carlo would have thought of him as hulking but for the benignity of his gaze and the gentleness of his manner. 'The retarded,' he observed, 'are as complex as the rest of us, and as varied. Assuming that Rennell is impaired, we have to make sense of what he tells us, and what he did. Even if it seems to make no sense at all.'
Tammy sipped her mineral water. She did not drink the cabernet Terri had ordered for the table; years ago, when her drinking had become commensurate with the stress of her job, she had quit cold turkey. 'Retarded folks,' she told Carlo, 'develop all sorts of strategies to keep from looking dumb. Do you know about masking?'
'No.'
'Like anyone,' she explained, 'the retarded want to fit in. One way is to be agreeable, respond to cues the way they believe they should. A Rennell Price—if he is impaired—still wants to be part of the crowd, and may be smart enough to know he can't be. So he tries to cover up. Like he may have with Monk. But instead of seeing Rennell as sullen and resistant, as the cops did, consider the possibility that he was just trying to keep up, to give the answers Monk expected from him. That may be why his responses about Thuy Sen were so ambiguous.'
'Except for his bottom line,' Carlo said. ' 'I didn't do that little girl.' '
Lane touched his arm. 'I'll tell you a classic story, Carlo. In a pilot program, a number of retarded people were discharged from an institution and allowed to seek work. During job interviews, the great majority tried to conceal their hospitalization by claiming that they'd been in prison. They thought that sounded better.' As Carlo smiled, Lane added, 'Anyhow, I find it interesting that Rennell was so adamant about his innocence. No matter how hard Monk tried.'
