Part 5
She made the call from the lot outside the laboratory, to Lindahl, who had most of a motion written already. Then the attorney general’s office. Then the court. The judgment was nine days old and the window had not closed, Lindahl said, and he said it twice, as though she might not have got there herself.
Owen had none of it until the deputies came down the tier. By then he stood up and put his wrists out without asking what for. In the small room Lindahl pulled a chair back from the table and then did not sit in it.
“Something’s been found,” he said. “Your dog found it.”
“Is he alive?”
“He’s alive. He opened up a paw. There’s a vet in Harlow keeping him.” Lindahl waited until Owen’s eyes came the whole way up to his face. “Owen. There’s more, and you need to hear it.”
Then he took him through it: what had come out of the ground, what was on it, the two men, and a window of hours the state could not hold. The cuffs stayed flat in front of him the whole time. Two things he made Lindahl give back a second time, and both times Lindahl slowed and left space.
Two days after the tier, in the visiting room, Lindahl told him Renner had recused himself. The judge’s written account and the clerk’s envelope would be preserved with the other recovery records; a visiting judge, Ellen Shaw, would hear the motion. Owen wanted to know, in plain words, whether the change could cost them anything on the evidence. Lindahl said it would not, and Owen made him say it again.
“He did what he was supposed to do,” Owen said.
“He did,” Lindahl answered. “And stepping off the case is part of that.”
On the twelfth morning after the sentencing, before anything else was taken up, Judge Ellen Shaw admitted Renner’s written account and the clerk’s contemporaneous envelope without objection. Renner’s account set out the whole of it: the animal in the parking lot, what he had said to Sutter and what Sutter had said back, the drive out behind the vehicles, and the fact that he had stopped at the end of the lane and had not laid a hand on anything.
Shaw stated that she had taken no part in the recovery and would decide the motion only on the record before her. Part of the hearing was closed for the other two families and an open investigation, grounds read out in court, and the Boyds waited in the corridor for the ruling.
Sutter testified to the recovery and to the ground his people had never covered. The card had never been out of the ground until it was photographed in it, and the pictures and the log carried it to the evidence room without a gap; the case had spent a night in a dog’s mouth, and nobody pretended otherwise or asked it to prove anything. No link in either chain depended on Renner’s observations. The findings went in with their limits attached.
Then Whitcomb stood. “The State cannot stand behind this conviction,” she said. “We should not have got it and we are not keeping it.” Lindahl moved to vacate and for release, and she said the state joined and would dismiss. Owen heard Lindahl’s pen roll off the table edge and hit the floor, and for some seconds after that there was nothing else in the room he could attend to.
The conviction went, and the sentence of death with it, and Shaw ordered him released.
There was a scratch in the varnish of the counsel table, four inches long, running at the water pitcher. Owen had learned it by heart in March while a foreman read a verdict, and could not get his mind to accept the same chair in the same room producing the opposite result. Lindahl left his arm alone until the judge had finished speaking.
“That’s it,” Lindahl said. “You’re out.”
The key came around the end of the table in a deputy’s hand. The right cuff had bound in the ratchet, and Owen rolled the wrist over to give him the angle, the way he had rolled it for eleven months without anybody having to ask. When the steel came off he went on standing with his hands held together until Lindahl reached across and took them apart.
Down the hall, in an office, the deputy who had lost him at the service gate had the dog. The bandage on the right forepaw was white and new. Dutch came as far as the courtroom doorway and stopped, taking in rows of people he did not know, then found Owen and came over the floor in a crooked, skidding rush that took a chair with it.
The dog was still coming when Owen went down to meet him. Dutch came in under his chin, got a tongue along his jaw, then put both forefeet on a thigh and tried to get the rest up after them, and Owen folded down over him and let the room behind him hear it. Both arms had gone the whole way around him. Nothing in the fur caught on anything at all.
At the end of a row, Dale Boyd stood with one hand on a bench back. Owen lifted his head eventually, and the man turned his face to the side. Janine was crying. None of it made Callie any less dead, and out in the county there were two more households nobody had gone to yet.
By the next morning there was nothing on the county’s books against him at all.
Two days later, deputies took Kern and Dowd at a closed body shop on the Vance road. Kern went for the back door, hit an oil slick, and went down hard enough to be taken to the emergency room first. Dowd came out of the office with his hands up and shaking, and behind him there was a duffel with cash in it, clothes, and two boxes of ammunition.
The follow-up by then had turned up a second burn site a quarter mile east of the shack, plus fibers and tire impressions worth comparing. A warrant put deputies into Dowd’s own bay, and Callie’s bracelet was behind a false panel in the bottom of a rolling tool chest: thin silver, the one she took off at a sink, on the list her mother gave investigators eleven months before. Owen’s pistol never came out of the locker it had been in since April. It did not have to.
Two vans were still at the end of Owen’s lane, and he could not sleep in rooms where strangers had been through every drawer and written a number in marker on everything he owned. So Lindahl brought the news to the motel on the highway, where nobody wondered why a man on his own wanted a second key. Had Callie’s parents been told about the bracelet, Owen wanted to know. They had. He nodded and asked him to pull the curtain across on his way out.
Somebody knocked on the third day after the dismissal…
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