Playing Dead

He also took a pair of her panties. Bright pink, like her wall. Lacy. The underwear a teenage girl would wear to feel like a grown woman, but still in her favorite little-girl color.

A loud, metal grinding sound vibrated the house, and he tensed. Then came the sound of running water through pipes in the wall that separated Claire’s bedroom from her parents’.

Realizing the noise was simply an old plumbing system, he left Claire’s room and stood outside the master bedroom, looking through the open door. The adulteress was in the shower, evidenced by the sound of water hitting flesh. He quickly strode across the room, looked under pillows, under the bed, then in the nightstand drawers.

He grinned. He was right: There was a gun.

He returned to Claire’s room before her mother finished with her shower. He sat on her bed and waited. Waited for the perfect time to kill.

He imagined a life with Claire.

The assassin turned off the icy water. Fifteen years had passed and now he was an important part of Claire’s life. But if Tom O’Brien knew what Oliver Maddox knew, he, too, could put together the truth of that long-ago day. And if that happened, the assassin’s well-planned life would crumble around him.

Then he’d be forced to kill Claire. He refused to leave town without her, and he knew she wouldn’t go with him voluntarily.

EIGHT

Nelia was napping, her back to him, while Tom sat at the table near the covered window reading over the letter he’d written to his daughter. Nelia had wanted to deliver it for him, but Tom wouldn’t allow it. The more she risked exposure, the greater her chance of being tried as an accessory.

Wasn’t that what he was using Claire for? To have Claire become an accessory to help him find Oliver Maddox? To help him prove his innocence? Was it a double standard? He’d told Nelia that Claire’s training and resources made her the perfect person to dig for the truth. And on the one hand, that was true. But Tom also desperately wanted Claire to learn for herself that her father was innocent. She was a doubting Thomas, had to see it to believe. She’d always been like that, and he wanted her to figure out the truth so she’d believe him. He didn’t want to hurt Claire or get her in trouble. He hoped that if worse came to worst, the fact that he was her father and she was a distraught daughter would weigh in her favor if things got hairy.

Hopefully, it wouldn’t come to that. If she could just find Oliver Maddox, then she could step aside.

Tom rubbed his head. If Maddox had learned the truth about what happened, why hadn’t the kid turned it over to the police? Why had he missed his meeting with Tom the week before the quake? Someone must have scared him into hiding, or scared him into quitting the investigation. Maybe Tom was making a huge mistake bringing Claire into this mess.

His lower back burned and he absently rubbed it. He didn’t have a lot of time. His days were numbered either way. The only thing that mattered now was that he didn’t die a guilty man. Claire had to believe he was innocent. Then, maybe, he could die in peace.

Seeing Claire again had hurt. He hadn’t expected the physical pain in his heart, twisting his insides like a constrictor until it squeezed the breath from his lungs. The pain in her face, the distrust in her eyes. Claire was no longer the bright-eyed, too-smart-for-her-own-good, inquisitive daughter he’d been raising. As a child, she’d wanted to know how everything worked and why. She would marvel at something as basic as a toaster or as complex as the stars in the sky.

At least once a week on a clear night, Tom and Claire went out in the backyard and looked at the stars. Tom made a point of learning about astronomy because it pleased Claire that he knew about the universe, and it pleased him to make his girl happy. When they went on their summer camping trip-without Lydia, who didn’t like sleeping in a tent-they often stayed up well past midnight watching the sky and talking. About everything and nothing. Sometimes they were just quiet together.

Being a father had grounded Tom like nothing else in his life. His family was the most important thing to him. Lydia-he’d loved her, even after her infidelity. If that made him weak, he didn’t care. He’d have divorced her had he known about Taverton, not killed her. No matter how much anguish he endured because of Lydia’s choices, not for a second had he considered shooting her.

It was a few days before Christmas when Oliver Maddox had visited Tom at San Quentin for the first time. Tom had lost hope that he’d ever be able to clear his name. His last appeal had been rejected. He was scheduled for execution on July 1. Six and a half months and he would be dead. Being convicted of a crime he didn’t commit had enraged him for years, but his anger had dissipated. He would be executed an innocent man, but surprisingly he’d come to terms with dying.

What he couldn’t accept was that he would die a guilty man in the eyes of the only person he cared about.

The guard led Tom through the North Seg section of San Quentin. Tom glanced at the cage that held Scott Peterson. Peterson looked up, gave him a brightly dazed smile, then went back to the book he was reading. There was a guilty bastard, Tom thought. People equated Tom with scum like Peterson. A wife killer. But he didn’t care about public opinion. Tom only cared about the opinion of one person.

And, if he was honest with himself, he wanted to know who’d framed him. Who’d destroyed his life and why. Why, dammit?

He hadn’t been sentenced to Quentin. He’d spent the bulk of his fifteen years in a secure area of Folsom, where the warden segregated cops like him from the general prison population. It was lonely, and he still wasn’t completely safe. There were multiple attacks on him, and he didn’t know if they were because someone had found out he was a cop, or if he’d racked up more enemies.

When Tom’s last appeal was denied, the warden at Folsom asked if he would like to do a final good deed. He was asked to transfer to San Quentin to befriend a killer who police suspected of murdering more than the eight young girls he’d admitted to. Tom agreed.

Terrence Drager didn’t tell Tom squat about the unsolved cases in the months Tom was in the North Seg talking to him. But after he was executed, one of the guards handed Tom a letter. “From Terry. Wanted me to give it to you after he went to hell. You’ll be joining him there in a few months.”

The letter was a list of locations. Twenty-seven locations, each identified only by a month, year, and the color of the victim’s panties. Tom retched at the information.

Tom sent the information to the Folsom warden. He hadn’t heard whether any of it panned out, or about when he’d be transferred back to Folsom. His work here was done, and even though the North Seg was safer for him than other areas of San Quentin, he didn’t feel secure.

Tom learned later that Oliver Maddox had identified himself as an attorney working for Tom’s counsel, which was the reason why they were left alone in the interview room. Tom’s hands and feet were shackled, and a chain secured him to the floor. He’d never get over the feeling of being a caged animal. And still, bulletproof glass separated Tom from Maddox. They spoke through closed-circuit phones.

On the other side of the glass was a boy-well, he was probably in his mid-twenties, but he didn’t look more than eighteen. He had close-cropped hair except for a long tail in the back, and silver wire-rim glasses. “Oliver Maddox,” he said. “Thank you for agreeing to see me.”

“Your letter was interesting.”

Though the guard stood outside the door once Tom had been secured, Tom didn’t believe for a minute that the guards didn’t listen to the allegedly “privileged” conversations.

Oliver had sent Tom a letter asking for a meeting. Tom didn’t know the kid, but he identified himself as a new lawyer working for the Western Innocence Project. “I have reviewed all your case files and identified several oddities,” he had written. “I believe that you were wrongly convicted and would like to discuss a possible appeal.”