The Death Factory Read Online Free PDF Page B

aggravated rape, which is what the charge should have been. Conley’s prints were on the beer bottle, but he’d admitted bringing that with him, and Maribel had admitted bringing it inside the apartment herself. Another tenant of the complex, a Brazilian man, had seen a pickup truck like Conley’s parked near her apartment during the time of the attack, but when the cops went back to that guy, he decided he’d been wrong about the time.”
    “Conley’s old man got to him?”
    “Probably. But you can almost never prove that kind of thing. Did they buy him off or scare him off? It doesn’t matter. His testimony wasn’t going to help the state.”
    “Hey, look,” Jack says, pointing upriver.
    A long string of barges is rounding a bend in the distance, the deep rumble of the pushboat’s engines only a faint hum as yet.
    “How long until he reaches us?” Jack asks.
    I hear myself answer “He’ll be here before you know it,” but my mind is already operating on two planes. Speaking about the Avila case is like opening a door, or more like lifting a lid off a sealed well, dark and dank and filled with forgotten things. Jack apologizes for interrupting and asks me to continue my story. I do, speaking on autopilot, droning probably, but my voice is only incidental, for at bottom I am reliving this transformative event in my mind, the very thoughts I had during that time rising from the newly opened well, while my mouth relates some abbreviated version to my uncle, in the way that my hands and eyes often drive while my mind focuses on some deeper thought.
    In a Jack Webb monotone I say, “Maribel Avila would have made a compelling witness, but given all the facts, the ADA was reluctant to charge Conley with aggravated rape. The kid had no priors other than a DUI, and he had a top-flight criminal lawyer. Without DNA evidence proving Maribel’s story of the post-rape masturbation inside the apartment— by his client —that lawyer would have torn the state to shreds in front of a jury. But there was another side to the coin. The kid was scared. He didn’t know what evidence the cops had from inside the apartment, and his father didn’t want the family name dragged through the mud. The ADA on the case was a tough son of a bitch named Mitch Gaines. Former JAG Corps in the army. I never liked him, but Gaines could get the job done in court. So ultimately Conley’s lawyer agreed that the kid would plead guilty to a stalking charge. The sentence was two years, suspended, and he didn’t have to register as a sex offender.”
    “That doesn’t sound like a deal a tough son of a bitch would cut,” Jack says.
    “Yeah . . . well. Mitch was getting pretty senior by then, and he had his mind on bigger cases. As the lab tech put it, ‘Since you left, Mr. Cage, Mr. Gaines is the alpha dog over there. He’s got his eye on the headlines, and he’s got some big cases coming up.’ A Latina girl raped in Gulfton wasn’t exactly CNN headline material. Plus, Conley’s dad had some political stroke. Joe Cantor wouldn’t have cared about that, but Gaines might’ve.”
    Jack murmurs as he processes my summary, but it’s not enough to hold me in the present. The memory of Vargas’s visit, and my resulting confrontation with Joe Cantor, finally tips me over the edge of the well and pulls me down into the dark water of the past like lead weights strapped around my waist.
    “Why have you come to me, Felix?” I asked, watching him pace from the porch swing.
    He lit another cigarette and said, “I was out sick when they brought the carpet in. But when I got back to the office the next day, a colleague told me she didn’t think Dr. Kirmani had done a chemical test on the carpet sample. He just looked at it through the microscope and reported it clean.”
    “Is a chemical test required in that situation?”
    “I sure as hell would have done one.”
    “That’s not what I asked.”
    “Legally required? I don’t know. But by