A Twist of the Knife Read online

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  For Del, Paulette, and Julie

  Revenge, revenge,

  See the furies arise.

  —John Dryden

  Prologue

  January 25, 1980, midnight

  The first execution I attended wasn’t by lethal injection but by Old Sparky. That’s what they affectionately call the electric chair at Raiford Penitentiary in the northeast part of Florida. It was in 1980, a few years after the death penalty was reinstated across the country. They had come up with the lethal injection cocktail by that time, but you were allowed to choose your method of dying.

  I had nothing to do with catching the guy who was to be executed. The man who brought me there was a mentor who was dubbed Wooly Bully by the rest of my class at Quantico. With his full white beard, he was what Santa Claus would be like if Santa Claus was a son of a bitch. He said this should be part of my criminal justice education, that I should witness what you might think of as the final result of what I did for a living. Rookie though I was, it wasn’t lost on me that I was the only agent brought here, and one of the first women hired by the FBI. That was when they made jokes like On the way to a bust, the male agents check their guns, and the female agents check their lipstick.

  Call it hazing. Call it sexist. You can call it a field trip for all I care.

  “The witnesses are now entering the witness room,” I heard a voice say, and it continued throughout the entire event, like a macabre master of ceremonies.

  We entered and sat in wooden pews, facing a room with glass partitions. Beyond the glass was a sturdy wooden chair, straps dangling from the arms, and straps hooked to the front legs. A metal cap was suspended like a halo over all. Two journalists were there as well. Another man sat by himself one pew ahead of us and to the right.

  My mentor pointed to the man and whispered, “That guy? He’s the father. The guy about to die killed his two kids.” I could feel him looking at me from the corner of his eye. He leaned back and crossed his arms over his belly like he was about to enjoy telling a child he wouldn’t get the football he wanted.

  He had already explained to me how three executioners would be standing in a room off the execution chamber, each tasked to press a button that would deliver two thousand volts of current for three seconds, one thousand volts for seven seconds, and two hundred and fifty volts for fifteen seconds. The mechanism was set to deliver the current randomly from only one of the buttons. None of the three men assigned to deliver the current would know which button actually did it.

  The warden’s assistant stood by the window; I could see his face peering in and his lips moving as he reported everything he saw. His job was to stay on the phone with the commissioner, to report what was happening and to be alerted should there be a last-second stay of execution. There was always that dramatic anticipation of the final moment when the call would come in to stop the procedure.

  Not this time.

  The commentary, delivered in a sober yet matter-of-fact tone, defused the drama of the scene as much as it could. As if the actors wanted to convince the audience that the play was not real.

  “The date is January 25, 1980. The time is now 12:13 A.M.”

  Why midnight, I wondered. What the hell difference does it make?

  “The condemned man has been escorted from the holding cell into the execution chamber. He appears to be passive, and after some hesitation has seated himself in the chair. The guards have secured the straps around his arms and legs. Do you have any final words?”

  The man in the chair had a round face and puffy eyes. He looked out through the window at us and said, “I’m sorry, Frank. I take it back.” As if Frank would say Okay, then, never mind. He tried to say more but only succeeded in making an absurd sound like the mewling of a cat, and he gave up.

  The man sitting to our right and one pew ahead of us, who I figured was Frank, stared without comment.

  The master of ceremonies went on. “These are the final words. Would you like to pray?”

  The man’s lips moved over and over in the same phrase, the words barely audible, the words hardly a prayer. “Going to hell. Going to hell. Going to hell. Going to hell.” He might have continued like this forever if the executioners hadn’t decided to move the agenda along.

  “The assistants are now placing wet sponges on his head and his legs. This seems to have agitated the prisoner. One assistant wipes his forehead, either from perspiration or an excess of water running into his eyes. They are now securing a cloth over the man’s head. Now they are placing a metal cap over his head and strapping it in place. The prisoner is trembling violently. The assistants have exited the room.

  “The time is now 12:19 A.M. Permission requested to proceed with execution.

  “Permission to proceed granted.

  “Phase one. The body has gone rigid, seeming to rise above the surface of the chair for the seconds of voltage administered. There was a popping sound, which we thought was one of the bands breaking, but appears to be caused by the suddenly charged water. His hands are grasping the arms of the chair.

  “Phase two. The body has already relaxed. I think we have a successful process this time.

  “Phase three. No other condition to report. Current ceased.

  “We are now into lapse time. He doesn’t appear to be breathing.

  “Four minutes.”

  Certainly the man’s body was still and slumped, held in place by the cuffs on his arms and the metal cap strapped to his head.

  “Three minutes.”

  None of us in the witness room moved. I think I remember breathing, but I couldn’t vouch for anyone else.

  “Two minutes.

  “One minute.

  “The medical examiner has now entered the room and is checking for signs of life. The medical examiner reports the condemned has expired on this date at 12:33 A.M. The warden has reported this execution to the commissioner, and we have been told job well done. The warden answered that it was a team effort and we were ready for the next one.”

  “So. What do you think, Jane Wayne?” my mentor asked.

  I didn’t mind that nickname as much as I minded Dickless Tracy. I rubbed the corner of my mouth where a nerve jumped. One person, somewhere, laughed.

  We stayed for the autopsy, which was not my first, but the first I had witnessed from death by electrocution. It seems absurd to autopsy a man you’ve watched die, but it’s part of the formal record keeping to which humans are so tied, perhaps in an attempt to protest that we are human after all.

  I had been told there would be “some burn marks” at the site where the current entered. That was correct. The back of his right leg looked and smelled like pork after ten minutes under a broiler, and the top of his scalp was burned down to his skull. When the top of the skull was lifted, cranial hemorrhaging was noted in the record. Urine was taken to determine whether the man had been given drugs before execution, but
none were found.

  Manner of death: homicide by electrocution.

  Homicide is what they put on the death certificate. That means one person killing another under any circumstances, although in this case sanctioned under the law.

  Cause of death: cardiac failure.

  It’s a hard way to go, and not an easy thing to watch. Do you have any idea what it feels like to sit very still in what looks like a church pew and do nothing while a stranger dies violently fifteen feet away? To carefully control all your muscles that are getting messages fired from your brain to stop death? To tamp down that urge to do something. To save.

  Many people in criminal justice are opposed to the death penalty because they know better than anyone else the flaws of judgment, science, or law that can lead to a wrongful conviction. As for me, people joke sometimes about how vicious I am, how I support the death penalty to the extent that if I could I would make traffic offenses capital crimes. Well, I confess there were two times in my life, years later, when I relished watching someone die, one by my own hand. And for some I’d be pleased to pull the switch myself. But as a routine event, execution is more like putting down a sick animal. There’s no pleasure in it, no thrills, only a kind of disgust that makes you cleave to a precise script from which you can detach yourself. You make yourself an actor in a theatrical drama someone else has written.

  Yes, but can you take it, Brigid Quinn? Sure, I can take it. I tamped it down real good.

  That’s what an execution is like. It’s what I witnessed thirty-five years ago, what I remember of every sight, and sound, and smell, like it was yesterday. I didn’t want to know that man’s complete story. I wasn’t even sure he was competent. Having known some creatures that simply need to be put down, I’m not against the death penalty by any means. But anyone out there who ever suggests I get a morbid thrill from it, fuck you.

  One

  35 years later …

  It is a well-established fact that stranger homicide is rare. Most murderers kill people close to them. This is a story about a man on death row for killing his whole family, and about the women who loved or hated him. This is a story about the lengths we go to seek justice as we see it. It’s also about prisons, some made of stone. And along those lines, it’s about the family legends we tell, to each other and ourselves, that imprison us. Heroes and villains, they all got family.

  This story begins with my father. My mother had called me from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to tell me that his bronchitis had turned into pneumonia, and an ambulance had just taken him from their assisted living facility to the hospital. I had to go. I had my ticket and I was packed.

  But this story also begins with Special Agent Laura Coleman.

  Here is what I saw in a room at Tucson Medical Center the day after she nearly died saving my life:

  I saw the backs of three people who formed a cordon around her bed as if they could protect her from the world, the kind of family that hugged and kissed and were overly generous with their emotion. They were dressed in dark clothes. I had met the father and the mother, who was in some stage of Alzheimer’s, several days before. The brother had just arrived. They turned and thanked me ten times and left for the cafeteria so Coleman and I could talk.

  When her family peeled away from the bed I saw Laura Coleman, surrounded by things almost as pale as her face, the hospital gown, the sheet, the screen next to the bed. She was hooked up to an IV. She was thinner after going without water for more than twenty-four hours, not long but too long in a desert climate. Her bones cast shadows. A bit of antiseptic wash seeped through a gauze bandage covering the ear that had been stapled. I saw that her knees were supported on a cushioned platform to keep her ankles elevated after they repaired her sliced Achilles tendons. Her cap of curly hair formed individual coils from sweat and oil.

  I felt guilty that I was upright, and only a little bruised. I looked down and noticed beneath my fingernail, despite the thorough cleansing, a speck of something that was likely not my own blood.

  When I looked back at her I saw her eyes: at first gauzy from the sedative, but then they saw me.

  Not me. The doctors, the family, they had distracted her momentarily, but I could see that my face plunged her back to where we had been the night before. She pressed her head back into her pillow as if she had been struck lightly.

  I had been there with her, and even I had trouble dealing with it. This had been her first time of death, and what she had experienced, what she had witnessed, would have done in most agents, male or female. You don’t just shake it off no matter who you are, and anyone who says you do lives in a comic book world.

  I put my tote bag on the foot of her bed, moving slowly so as not to startle her, and gently so she wouldn’t feel it in her ankles.

  “You need to wash your hair,” I said, to show her it was me, Brigid Quinn, and that this was a day like any other. None of that generic are you okay we’re concerned about you bullshit. She would know that wasn’t me.

  Coleman started to pull her bedsheet to her chin and then must have thought how like a frightened child it made her look.

  “I understand,” I said. It doesn’t take some kind of hooey-hooey New Age thinking to know that the violence we shared had linked us. “You’ll get over it.”

  The terror left her eyes as she came back to the present and finally saw just me.

  Coleman cleared her throat and changed the subject with small talk. “Willis. My brother, Willis, lives in North Carolina,” she said. “I’m taking some leave and spending it with him in Hendersonville, in the mountains of North Carolina. It will be good.” She said those words, but she didn’t look enthused. “I worry about Dad having to deal with Mom by himself, though. It was one of the reasons I stayed out here.”

  “I can see you have good family. We should all have such good family.” And then, being inept at small talk, I asked, “Has that jerk-off come to visit?”

  The pain meds had her fogged somewhat, but she still followed me. “No. He wouldn’t.”

  “Of course he wouldn’t. I haven’t told you that I tried to get him to believe that you’d been kidnapped. But he was more worried about having our conversation overheard by his wife.”

  “Let’s l-let that go, Brigid,” she said, stuttering the way she had the first time when she accidentally called the prosecuting attorney by his first name, and saw that I could tell they were lovers. “Nag me when I can fight back. Right now I’m tired.”

  Best thing to do for trauma is force yourself to review it over and over again until even you get bored with it. I said, “I know an excellent person in Asheville. It’s a bit of a drive from Hendersonville, but he’s worth it. He got me through a rough time once, and no one in the Bureau will know.” I had already written down the name and phone number, and now reached into my tote bag where the piece of paper rested on top of all my other crap. I put the paper on her rolling bed table.

  “Don’t lose it. Oh, and I’ve already contacted him to let him know you’ll be calling, so if you don’t see him I’ll find out.”

  “You’re treating me like a rookie,” Laura said.

  Which she wasn’t, technically. Coleman had been working for some years investigating Medicare fraud, following the money. But she had switched to homicide just before we met. Whole new territory for her; hence her rookiness. With her encounter of violence still fresh, Coleman wasn’t yet aware that she stood now at a crossroads, either living the present or living the past. Just because a bad guy dies in the last act doesn’t mean he can’t still pull you after him into the grave. At the time I wasn’t aware of how this idea, that dying isn’t always the last thing that people do, would affect Coleman and me.

  “Any more advice?”

  I realized I had gone into my thoughts and was about to picture Laura Coleman doing herself harm. I’d seen it happen to others, but not her, I told myself. She was too resilient for that. I came back to the room to hear her repeating, “Any more advice?”
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  “I’ve rethought what I told you about staying with the FBI. There are times when you walk away. This is one of those times. You’ve done your service. You’ve done a lifetime of service. After you’ve healed, after you’ve really healed, do something else.” Despite my intention to stay tough, even in my own ears my voice sounded embarrassingly like a mother’s, a little whiny pleading note in there somewhere. And no surprise; if I had ever had the ill luck to bear a child, she probably would have been Laura Coleman.

  Her eyes and mouth went a little slitty despite the sedative, tightening the way they did when anyone got in her way. Laura never could control all those tells. Her look lifted me, because it reassured me that there she was, Laura was still in there. “Any other advice?” she repeated.

  I knew when to back off. “Don’t fall in love with the wrong man again. And always wait for backup.”

  She chuckled, just a small one, and probably for the first time in a while. My tendency to joke in the face of trouble wasn’t all bad.

  “That’s it?” she asked.

  “One more thing.” I stopped to figure out how to put this.

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t be me.”

  * * *

  I hadn’t spoken to Coleman in a while, and it had been a year since we’d worked that case together in Arizona. Last I heard she had moved from her brother’s place in North Carolina to Florida, where she had signed on with the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, working on cold case homicide investigations.

  On a day in June I called her from my home in the high desert north of Tucson to let her know my dad was in the hospital and I was going to be in Fort Lauderdale, and ask if she wanted to get together. Before I had a chance to do that, she told me she wasn’t with the PBCS cold case squad anymore. Hadn’t been there for seven months. Since we last spoke she’d gone to an Innocence Project fund-raiser and met a high-end criminal defense lawyer who wasn’t part of IP but did some pro bono work for felons’ appeals he thought had merit. He had hired her as an investigator. This was her third case. With that reluctance that showed how she took losing personally, she told me the first two had been unsuccessful. But she wasn’t totally bummed, because those guys were guilty. It was a whole different thing to defend someone who was innocent.