Reclaim: A Recovered Innocence Novel Read Free Page B

“I see your point. Is there any way for her to recant her confession?”
    “The Freedom Project has relationships with a couple of experts on false confessions. I’ve already sent out a copy of the police video to them. I’m hoping they can give us some insight. Here’s the video.” I give her a DVD copy. “In it you’ll see how tired Carla looks. Her clothes are disheveled. There’s a bruise near her right eye. Who knows what all they did to her, what they said.”
    “What do you need from us?” This is the first time Nolan’s spoken.
    His voice is deeper, rougher than I expected. I look at him—really look at him—for the first time. As the lead investigator on the case, he’s someone I’m going to be spending a lot of time with. I should’ve been paying better attention. On the surface he’s a placid lake. There’s a quietness to him that makes me wonder if he’s as deep as he seems or as dumb as a box of rocks. Either way I envy his calm. Drawn up tight and strung out so thin, I sometimes vibrate inside like a plucked string. There is no stillness in me. I’m like a bee flitting from flower to flower, never landing for very long.
    His seemingly tranquil nature intrigues me. I press him for more, leaning closer to ask, “What do you mean?”
    “It seems like you’ve got everything sorted out with the experts. I’m just wondering what you need a private investigation agency for?”
    Cora doesn’t say a word as she turns her attention from Nolan back to me.
    “A couple of things,” I say. “I’ve been able to locate one witness, an eight-year-old boy, who can testify that when he and Diego were little, Diego liked to wrap the elastic cord of the bedsheet that strangled him around his throat and pretend he was Spider-Man. I want to see if we can find Inez Torres, the neighbor who often babysat Diego. Filipe, that’s the eight-year-old, said that she chastised Diego for putting the cord around his neck more than once. They can corroborate Carla’s version of events.
    “I also need you to find Carla’s defense attorney, John Martin. He disappeared shortly after her conviction. I’d really like to see his notes and paperwork on the case if they still exist.”
    “What do you mean
disappeared
?” Cora asks.
    “As in vanished off the face of the earth. His family filed a missing persons report a little more than a month after the trial.”
    “Do you suspect foul play?”
    “I don’t know what to make of it. The timing of it…I want to know if he really disappeared or if he relocated and didn’t tell anyone. And if he
did
relocate, why?”
    “Maybe he went into witness protection.” Nolan meant it as a joke, but his quip is a possibility I hadn’t considered. But then why would a defense attorney go into protective custody?
    Cora turns to Nolan. “That’s a thread we’ll definitely have to follow. There’s no way the federal marshals would tell us if he was in witness protection, but we can try to see if there was something in his background or in one of his cases that might cause that to happen.”
    “A court-appointed defense attorney isn’t likely to have the kind of cases that would warrant protective custody,” I say. “Even if he did, there’s attorney–client privilege. He couldn’t testify using any information he received during his defense of a client.”
    “He probably ran off with a mistress or something.” Nolan shrugs. “Or he’s dead.”
    I’m not sure I like his flippant attitude. “If he was dead there would be a death certificate.”
    “Not if he was murdered.”
    I can’t say the thought hadn’t crossed my mind, but the question is,
Why
? “Why would someone murder a low-level public defender? There’s nothing in his background that might lead to that.”
    “Not even his personal background? Maybe he had an affair with a married woman with a vindictive husband. Maybe he had a gambling debt he couldn’t repay. Maybe he fleeced a client and they