Steve Martini - Compelling Evidence

COMPELLING

EVIDENCE

Paul Madriani Book 01

Steve Martini

CHAPTER 1.

FROM somewhere behind the scenes the lights in the chamber are turned on. Dreyers nudges me. "Looks like the $64,000 Challenge," he says. This is low, directed to me, but others hear it A little comic relief There's a titter of laughter from behind us, up on the risers. Johnston and the other guard don't laugh. Dreyers whispers, lower now, under his breath, to me only. "Pretty soon they'll pop the question." I look at him. "For $64,000how long can you hold your breath?" He gives me a little sideways wink. I can hear some giggling on the other side of Dreyers. Another cop, one of his buddies. Bad taste, I think. But as I study the scene, he's right. Now this room with its cupolalike top, lit on the inside like some MacY's store window, does not resemble anything so much as one of the glittering, cheesy booths from a sixties TV quiz show. A lone guard enters the room through a door on the other side of the chamber. Muffled cries, intonations of a desperate low moan are clearly audible as the door is closed. Now each calculated procedure is a step closer to death for the man waiting on the other side of that door. In quick, measuredI movements the guard lowers two sets of green venetian blinds covering windows on the other side of the chamber. These will mask the execution team as they open the valves and throw the lever to release the lethal gas. Then I see them, the size of two softballs.

Granules of sodium cyanide, like fine baking powder'a pound each, have been tied 2 and molded into a round form. They are held in two pieces Of cheesecloth and fastened to a device over the vat under each chair.

These deadly chemical balls hang tenuously by wire from two curved metal arms. When the lever is thrown these arms will drop, the cyanide falling into the pots of sulfuric acid and water. For safety the two vats are now empty. Sally Ryan's father is here, a decade older, grayer, the lines of his face more deeply etched than I remember. He stands apart from the rest of us, as if he's on a different mission, some ancient and sacred vendetta bred of human instinct. The memory of a defiled and murdered child is long. I asked Ryan about the parents of the other girl, Linda i Maldinado. "Divorced," he said, as if this explained their absence. What he meant was, destroyedravaged by a grieving they could not conclude while this thing remained open, incomplete. It's the first I've seen of either family since the trial, when Ryan and the more aggressive Mrs. Maldinado hovered with me in hallways, demanding assurance that justice wouldn't be stillborn. Ryan eyes me now with a cynicism that is palpable, an abiding bitterness that the journey has taken this long. My own presence here is as a favor to Sam Jennings, the DA, now out of office with whom I prosecuted Danley. Jennings is sick, too ill to make this appointment, perhaps too close to jmw@ himself to stare it squarely in the eye. Gale Haight is here. I nodded to him as we boarded the van. He didn't return the gesture. A normally affable man two years:, my senior in law school, Haight cannot bring himself to even a, grudging greeting on this day. He carries a heavy burden, ITWV

defended Danley at uial. There are a few cops here, represented because the law says, they must be. The others, ten men and two women, I suspect

N4 political favorites of the governor or the director of corrections, official guests for this grim task. 1 stand next to Jim Dreyers, now retired from the sheriff's department. Dreyers had tracked Brian Danley to a girftff=% apartment after the killings. Backed up by the SWAT team, he'o1 made the arrest and led Danley, with hands cuffed behind MT back, to a squad car. The suspect spat at cameras all the way there;" a large green lugi caught in midflight centered the frame of the shots. It made the cover of Newsweek, a special crime @"Orts MR Since the conviction, Danley's been handled by skilled A@ta' late attorneys, people who've delayed this date six times in @iwiql@ s. Whenever cameras are made available now, Danley is the are of polite reserve. A bleedingheart piece in the bar assoon's house organ a year ago pictured him the circumspect e of justice denied. He is, if the story is to be believed, pitiable victim of fetalalcohol syndrome. An army of shrinks ow assembled to attest to this malady. It's the latest in an ess series of social ills raised to excuse his crime, or at a imum to avoid its punishment. These news articles are well ed for maximum effect. They don't play in the magazines "for iring minds." Instead Danley's lawyers shoot for a more lofty ership, fed into publications an appellate judge might read in dle hour. he chamber door, something from a vintage submarine, is i facing the other side. hree people were already in the room when we arrived, an r woman and two clergymen. One of them comforts the an, an arm around her shoulder. She, I assume, is family. onfronting him daily through four months of trial seven years I wonder whether Danley will show the same sand now. n, he'd been hard. Unremitting. e was his own lawyer's worst nightmare. Through weeks of endless versions of a smug expression occupied his f@ce. He ed through halfaday of horrorstestimony by the medical iner that caused one juror to lose her breakfast. Against advice of his own attorney he took the stand, denying all iation with the crime, this in utter contradiction to a sea hysical evidence that included his own fingerprints at the e. Danley was at some loss to explain how they'd become rimposed in the blood of his two victims. after conviction, in the penalty phase, to an astonished jury h was only a little less dazed than his own lawyer, Danley itted that he'd done it. His version of throwing himself on the y of the jury, it seems, was a public survey of the crimes in 1wrenching detail. remember the vivid photos of Sally Ryan and the Maldinado after they had been raped and sodomized. These shots were inated by the grotesque rust hues of congealed bloodtheir ats sliced with the precision of a scalpel. Danley used the rsharp hooked blade of a linoleum knife. "A tool of the

"I he

called it. This particular knife hadn't seen linoleum ears. He kept it for special occasions. It was once used to e a deep letter

"A," to the

bone, in his wife's right cheek. Danley, ii1er a little too much to drink, found himself fantasizing about jiptdtal infidelities on the part of his commonlaw wife, i woman IM hadn't seen in a year. Some barbabbling luminary it seems, had given him a mo@e lurid than literal review of 77u Scarlet Ruer. I steel myself with the thought that Brian Danle3 is a 6)i*iqn1re the world is well rid of. I OMMMY watch. It's now one minute past the appointed hour There ;iianoises on the other side of the chamber. The agonizec wailing W a man, his words, except for one, unintelligible. Th( repetition of a single syllable grows louder: "Noooo ..."

Two irionefaced guards enter from the other side. Behind them feebly, Brian Trevor Danley is unrecognizable to me Forty eqnds lighter than at any time during the trial, he is i ghost. '17,swagger and bravado are gone. His knees are bent feet orp Ming. He's carried under each arm by two guards, bull who *)old snap him like a twig should he resist.

Danley's hand are is@.iop.Wed in front. His eyes are wild, haunted, searching as i to dc'vmrevery image left to them in the seconds that remain. H( searches 1he faces beyond the glass without apparent recognitior as his .4McKinged feet are dragged over the threshold into th( chamber. As he's turned and pushed down into the chair, he see her.

His ;Ayes light up. 111MM3. Bampa." He's liotploring the woman with the two clergymen. Her arnu are oimmled, as if she could reach out and grab him. I stito M;, Dreyers and motion with my head toward the woman

"His

iknt. Bampa's the name he gave her as a kid." Dreyer., shrugs I"