The Pardon

and headline that would appear in the next day’s tabloids: “Jack Swyteck-Bleeding Liberal.” Shit, does it get any worse than this?

It was after dark by the time he got home. He noticed immediately that there was no red Pontiac in the driveway, which meant his girlfriend, Cindy Paige, wouldn’t be there to listen to the day’s events. His girlfriend. He wondered if he was kidding himself about that. Things hadn’t been the best between them lately. The story she’d handed him about staying with her friend Gina for a few days “to help her with some problems she’s been having” was starting to sound like just an excuse to get out from under all the baggage he’d been carrying these past few months. Hell, he couldn’t blame her. When he wasn’t up to his eyeballs in work, he was having these dialogues with himself, questioning where his life was going. And most of the time he left Cindy on the outside looking in.

“Hey, boy,” said Jack as his hairy best friend attacked him on the porch, planting his bear-like paws on his master’s chest and greeting him nose to cold nose. His name was Thursday, for the day Jack, Cindy, and her five- year-old niece picked him up from the pound and saved him from being put to sleep-the most deserving prisoner he’d ever kept from dying. He was definitely part Lab, but mostly a product of the canine melting pot. His expressive, chocolate-brown eyes made him an excellent communicator-and at the moment, the eyes were screaming, “I’m hungry.”

“Looks like you have a case of the munchies,” Jack said, gently pushing him away as he entered the house. He went to the kitchen and filled the dog’s bowl with Puppy Chow, then dug the pizza-bones appetizer out of the refrigerator. Cindy never ate the crust or the pepperoni. She saved them for Thursday.

He set the bowl on the floor and watched the dog dig in.

Fortunately, the blood-or whatever it was-washed off easily in the shower. As he toweled himself dry, Jack could hear Thursday pushing his empty bowl across the kitchen floor with his nose. Jack smiled and pulled on his boxer shorts. Then he went to the bedroom and sat on the edge of the king-size bed. His eyes scanned the room, finally coming to rest on a framed photograph of Cindy that stood on the nightstand. In it she was standing on a rock along some mountain trail they’d hiked together in Utah. She had a big, happy smile on her face, and the summer wind was tossing her honey-blond hair. It was his favorite picture of her, because it captured so many of the qualities that made her special. At first glance, anyone would be struck by her beautiful face and great body. But for Jack, it was Cindy’s eyes and her smile that told the whole story.

On impulse, he reached for the phone. He frowned when Gina Terisi’s machine picked up: “I’m sorry I can’t come to the phone right now. .” said the recorded message.

“Cindy, call me,” he said. “Miss you,” he added, and put the receiver down. He fell back on the bed, closed his eyes, and began to relax for the first time in more than a day. But he was disturbed as he realized that Gina would get the message first and convince Cindy he was pining away for her. Well, he was, wasn’t he?

Idly, he flipped on the TV and began channel-surfing, searching for any station that didn’t have something to say about the acquittal of Eddy Goss. He fixed on MTV. Two mangy-looking rockers were banging on their guitars while getting their faces licked by a Cindy Crawford look-alike.

He switched off the set, nestled his head in the pillow, and lay in the darkness. But he couldn’t sleep. He looked straight ahead, over the tops of his toes, staring at the television on the dresser. There was nothing he wanted to watch. But as the day’s ugly events played out in his mind, there was one thing he suddenly had to watch.

He rolled out of bed, grabbed his briefcase, and popped it open, quickly finding what he was looking for even in the darkness. He switched on the television and VCR, shoved in the cassette, and sat on the edge of the bed, waiting. There was a screen full of snow, a few rolling blips, and then. .

“My name is Eddy Goss,” said the man on the screen, speaking stiffly into a police video camera. Goss’s normally flat and stringy hair was a tangled, greasy mess. He looked and undoubtedly smelled as if he’d been sleeping under a bridge all week, dressed in dirty Levi’s, unlaced tennis shoes, and a yellow-white undershirt, torn at the V and stained with underarm sweat. He sat smugly in the metal folding chair, exuding a punk’s confidence, his arms folded tightly. Four long and fresh red scratches ran along his neck. The date and time, 11:04 p.m., March 12-four and a half months ago-flashed in the corner of the screen.

“I live at four-oh-nine East Adams Street,” Goss continued, “apartment two-seventeen.”

The camera drew back to show the suspect, seated at the end of the long conference table, and an older man seated on the side, to Goss’s right. The man appeared to be in his late sixties, gray-haired, with a hawk nose that supported his black-rimmed glasses.

“Mr. Goss,” said the man, “I’m Detective Lonzo Stafford. With me, behind the camera, is Detective Jamahl Bradley. You understand, son, that you have the right to remain silent. You have the right-”

Jack hit the remote, fast-forwarding to the part he’d seen at least a hundred times before. Visible in the frame now was a different Goss, more animated, boasting like a proud father.

“. . I killed the little prick tease,” Goss said with a carefree shrug.

Jack stopped the tape, rewound, and listened again, as if flogging himself.

“. . I killed the little prick tease,” he heard one more time. Just the way thousands of other people had heard it-with expletive deleted-and were probably hearing it again tonight, on the television news. The tape rolled on, and Jack closed his eyes and listened as Goss described the deed in grisly detail. The car ride to the woods. The knife at the young girl’s throat. The tears that had stemmed his vulgar attempts at gentle caresses. The struggle that had ensued. And finally, pulling the nylon tight around the girl’s neck. .

Jack sighed, keeping his eyes closed. The tape continued, but there was only silence. Even the police interrogators, it seemed, had needed to catch their breath. Had they been allowed to hear it, a jury probably would have reacted the same way. But he’d prevented that. He’d kept the entire videotape out of evidence by arguing that Goss’s constitutional rights had been violated-that his confession had been involuntary. The police hadn’t beaten it out of him with a rubber hose. They hadn’t even threatened him. “They tricked him,” Jack had argued, relying on one questionable remark by a seasoned detective who so desperately wanted to nail Goss that he pushed it a little too far-though the detective had still played good odds, knowing from experience that only the most liberal judge would condemn his tactics.

“We don’t want to know if you did it,” Detective Stafford had assured Goss. “We just want you to show us where Kerry’s body is, so we can give her a decent Christian burial.” That was all the ammunition Jack had needed. “They induced a confession by playing on my client’s conscience!” he’d argued to the judge. “They appealed to his religious convictions. A Christian burial speech is patently illegal, Your Honor.”

No one was more surprised than Jack when the judge bought the argument. The confession was ruled inadmissible. The jury never saw the videotape. They acquitted a guilty man. And the miscarriage of justice was clear. Nice going, Swyteck.

He hit the eject button on his VCR and tossed the confession aside, disgusted at himself and what he did for a living. He grabbed another cassette from the case beside the television, pushed To Kill a Mockingbird into his VCR, and for the fifteenth time since joining the Freedom Institute, watched Gregory Peck defend the innocent.

Peck’s Atticus Finch had just launched into his peroration when a shrill ringing startled Jack from a state of half sleep.

He snatched up the telephone, hoping to hear Cindy’s voice. For a few moments, though, all he heard was silence. Finally, a surly voice came over the line. “Swyteck?” it asked.

Jack didn’t move. The voice seemed vaguely familiar, but it also seemed raspy and disguised. He waited. And finally came the brief, sobering message.

“A killer is on the loose tonight, Swyteck. A killer is on the loose.”

Jack gripped the receiver tighter. “Who’s there?”

Again, there was only silence.

“Who’s there? Who are you?” Jack waited, but heard only the sound of his own erratic breathing. Then, finally. .

“Sleep tight,” was the cool reply. The phone clicked, and then came the dial tone.

Chapter 5