Owen was crying now. Sobbing between words. Jessica didn’t attempt to console him. She didn’t want to do anything that would stop his confession.
“I was so angry . . . It felt like every bad thing that had ever happened to me—getting sick, you and Dad getting divorced, everything—just built up in me all at once. I started yelling at him, cursing at him, actually. He kept saying I didn’t understand, but I kept screaming at him that I did understand. That I had seen this all happen before, and I wasn’t going to let him do this to you. To us. Not again.
“I was going to leave. I actually started running for the door. He followed me out into the living room and grabbed me.”
“Was that when you hit him?” she asked, knowing there could be only one answer coming.
“I don’t even remember it. I must have, but . . .”
Owen shut his eyes and stopped for a long moment.
“The next thing I remember was that blood was pouring out of him. I pulled him away from the table, like that would help, and . . .”
Owen stopped. Jessica didn’t say anything in case there was more he wanted to say.
The sobbing consumed him now. Fighting every motherly instinct she possessed, she prodded him for more. “Then what did you do?”
“I knew he was dead. I just knew. I swear, if I thought I could have saved him, I would have called 911. But there was nothing I could have done, so I ran out of there. I went to the park. I don’t know why. Just somewhere to be by myself. I sat there for . . . I’m not sure how long. I remember it was cold out, but I didn’t feel cold. No one else was in the park. When it started getting dark, I went to Dad’s.”
He looked like he wanted to be held. Her seventeen-year-old son, who had rebuffed virtually all physical intimacy from her for the past few years, wanted to hug his mommy. And in yet another of life’s great ironies, it was the last thing Jessica wanted in that moment.
“Owen, you could not be more wrong,” she finally said. “About everything you just said. James was not having an affair. The woman you saw, the woman who called James that morning, Allison? She was an FBI agent. She was investigating James, not sleeping with him. The sheets smelled the way they did because I was with James the day before. Remember? After we had the doctor’s appointment? You went to lunch with Dad, but I didn’t go because I said I was meeting James.”
Owen’s eyes were as big as saucers. Jessica had spent a lifetime trying to protect her son. Now she watched as the magnitude of his mistake began to take hold.
“James died for nothing,” she said evenly. “He was the love of my life, and he died for no reason at all.”
29
Gabriel was sitting in Captain Tomlinson’s office with Asra. They were joined by ADA Joe Salvesen, who had called the meeting. The purpose was to tell them that he wasn’t going to indict Owen Fiske.
After Salvesen had walked them through all the difficulties in the case, Gabriel said, “It doesn’t matter that the DNA isn’t a match. We know the blood at the scene came from the boy.”
“I know you do,” Salvesen said. “And if we took this case to trial, we could put on a medical expert to explain how the boy’s DNA changed because of the treatment. But juries hear ‘match’ or ‘no match.’ And once they hear ‘no match,’ the reasons don’t matter. He’s not a match to the DNA at the crime scene. That’s the reality.”
“But he’s the only one who possibly could be,” Asra said. “We know that it came from a blood relative of Howard Fiske. And we know it’s not Wayne Fiske. That leaves only Owen. And we know the reason why the DNA doesn’t match. That’s virtually the same as a match.”
“Let’s not drink our own Kool-Aid here,” Salvesen said. “At each step, the defense is going to have a field day. All the DNA evidence stands or falls on the fact that Howard Fiske is a blood relative to the person who left blood at the crime scene. But that may not even be right.”
Gabriel was a bit surprised at how much better prepared Salvesen was for this meeting than he had been for court. But it made sense that the ADA would spend his time getting out of work rather than creating it for himself. It would probably be another decade before Salvesen pulled a murder case against someone with a privately retained lawyer who would fight him at every turn, so he was working hard to secure a future of nine-to-five workdays going up against public defenders that would likely carry him to retirement.
“That’s what the website told us,” Asra said.
“Oh, the infallible website,” Salvesen said. “Can you imagine what it’s going to be like to have a representative of a genealogy website on the stand explaining their process? You think they’re going to say they never make mistakes? Acknowledging even one mistake is reasonable doubt, right there.”
“C’mon, Joe,” Gabriel said. “Do you really think they’ll claim they made a mistake that just happened to give a false positive of some guy in Oregon who just happens to
