It's surprisingly easy to make a criminal case go away. I prepared a
one-sentence motion and order stating that the case was dismissed in
the interests of justice in light of exculpatory evidence produced by
the defense at trial. Lesh signed and filed it, and I faxed copies to
Lisa Lopez and the jail. Derringer would be out in a couple of
hours.
By the time I finished, I was pretty sure that Kendra would be home
from school.
After a couple of minutes of small talk, I told her I wanted to come
out to talk about the case. The tone of my voice must have given her
an idea of what was coming. 'Go ahead and tell me,' she said. 'God or
Edison or whoever invented the phone for a reason, you know.'
This wasn't going well. When I insisted on driving out, I got a
'whatever' in response. I signed myself out on the DVD board, grabbed
the file, and made it to Rockwood in record time. When I knocked on
the door, I heard what I recognized as Puddle of Mudd blasting from
Kendra's CD player. In my neighborhood, that kind of volume would
trigger a call to police. In Rockwood, it was background music.
She apparently didn't have any plans on answering the door for me. I
banged on it and pressed the bell for a full two minutes before walking
around the back of the house to knock on her bedroom window. 'I know
you're in there, Kendra. I'm not leaving until you open the door.' I
rapped the bottom of my fist against her window with the beat of her
music for a couple of songs until she finally turned it off.
A few seconds later, I heard her holler from the front door in a
singsong voice, 'I don't know how you expect to get into the house if
you're not here when I open the door.' I sprinted around the house
like a famished cat responding to a can opener, before Kendra could
change her mind. When she didn't say anything about making me wait, I
pretended like she hadn't.
'You really didn't have to drive all the way out here, you know,' she
said, sitting on her bed and going through her CDs, probably searching
for the one most likely to give me a headache.
'I know,' I said, even though it wasn't true. 'But I wanted to see
you. You hungry?'
'You trying to give me an eating disorder or something?
French fries and a milkshake don't make everything OK, Sam.'
Since when? 'Fine,' I said. 'I want to talk to you about the case,
though.'
I started by showing her the Oregonian articles about the Long Hauler.
Andrea didn't subscribe to the paper, and I suspected Kendra had never
seen the articles themselves. 'What are these?' she asked.
'Please, just read them, and then we'll talk.'
She took them from me and spread them out in front of her on the bed,
but I could tell she wasn't really reading them.
'Do you mind if I get a glass of water from the kitchen? I'm kind of
thirsty,' I said, backing out of the room. I got another 'whatever' in
response, but it gave me a way to leave her alone in her room with the
articles for a few minutes. When I returned, she was clutching a
pillow on her lap and staring at the photographs on the front page.
'I could've sworn it was him,' she said.
'You're not sure anymore?' I asked.
She held the paper up to her face, staring at the photograph of
Derringer. 'I still think it looks like him, but it can't be him, can
it?'
I should've given Kendra more credit. I had been clinging to our
theory of the case because I was too stubborn to admit we were
mistaken. Here she was, five minutes after reading the article,
accepting the unavoidable conclusion. We had the wrong man.
'No, Kendra, I don't see any way it can be him. I know that the
newspaper only says the Long Hauler letter had details about your case,
but it actually had a lot of information that no one could have had
without being one of the men who did this to you.'
'So does everyone think I'm a liar now?' she said.
'No one thinks you lied about anything.' Looking at her, knowing she
was doubting my faith in her, made me want to cry. 'We know you told
the truth about what happened to you, but you might have made a mistake
about who did it. You shouldn't feel bad. You had just been through a
horribly traumatic experience. Plus, there was a lot of other evidence
pointing to Derringer. Even if you hadn't identified him, we would
have wound up focusing on him anyway after his fingerprint came up on
your purse.'
'My mother did not steal that purse,' she said.
'I know that. It looks like it came from Meier & Frank. The problem
is that Derringer worked there too.'
