Mercy

09:38 PDT (#ulink_2a0a7182-bfde-5f33-a60d-fa4824a95f76)

Inside the blue Lincoln, the small man was sitting tensely. He knew that waiting was an inherently tense activity. Inactivity breeds a kind of stress that the most vigorous of purposeful action can never match. But there was nothing he could do about it. Waiting was part of the job.

The car was parked and the engine was off. But the key remained in the ignition, as if inactivity might give way to dynamism at any moment.

He touched the Bluetooth earpiece in his right ear, nervously. There was nothing particularly conspicuous about him. No one would pay attention to a twenty-seven-year-old, blue-eyed, brown-haired man in a dark blue suit nursing a Styrofoam cup of coffee from the Midway Café a few yards ahead. Strictly speaking, he wasn’t wearing a suit: his jacket was off, his blue tie loosened and the collar button of the white shirt opened.

From his attire and demeanor, he could almost have been an off-duty G-man. But his modest height and slight build detracted from that, giving him an innocuous aura. If he had been a Washington spook, he would have been a pen-pushing bean-counter, not a field agent. There was no way anyone could have felt threatened or intimidated by him, even though his close-cropped hair hinted—misleadingly—at a military background.

Poised well above the horizon, the sun’s warm glow was filtered by a thin veil of cloud. To the man in the car it had all the appearance of a giant wound in the sky, with blood still oozing through the bandage—not a new wound, more like an old one that refuses to heal.

He lifted his coffee cup out of the holder and took a single sip. Then he put the cup back down and looked round. Golden Gate Avenue looked normal, neither calm nor exceptionally busy. There was no sense of anything important going on twenty yards from where he sat.

He stared at the lacquered, grainy wood of the dashboard, admiring its elegance. It was a trivial thought—but it helped to stave off the boredom…for a couple of minutes at least.

The day was warm—not hot, just warm—hence his decision to take the jacket off. He tended to sweat in any sort of cumbersome clothing.

Finally the Bluetooth earpiece crackled to life.

‘You know Mrs Olsen, I presume.’

‘We’ve seen each other briefly,’ Alex’s embarrassed voice came through the earpiece. ‘But we’ve never actually been introduced.’

09:40 PDT (#ulink_342cc40f-2d60-591d-8b1a-64115a1b44ac)

Alex walked over awkwardly to the chair where Mrs Olsen was sitting. He held his hand out toward her, not expecting her to rise. She took it limply and he made sure that his own handshake was suitably gentle.

But when he opened his mouth, a polite ‘How do you do?’ was all the lawyer could muster.

What did you say in a situation like this? Do you belatedly express condolences for her bereavement? Apologize for the fact that you’re representing the man convicted of murdering her daughter? Or keep your own counsel and remain silent?

For a few seconds he hovered, unsure of what to do next. The normal procedure was for the lawyer for the condemned man to meet the governor either alone or, more usually, with one of the governor’s staff present. But the sight of Mrs Olsen in this room had thrown his entire game plan out the window.

‘Well sit down, sit down,’ said the governor amiably, pointing to a chair.

Alex shuffled awkwardly toward the vacant chair. He sat down and looked straight at the governor—anything to avoid meeting Mrs Olsen’s unforgiving eyes. Dusenbury spoke again.

‘I’ve been following the Burrow case closely. I was most impressed by your work.’

‘Most of the work was already done. I only came in on it six weeks ago.’

Dusenbury, Alex remembered, was a lawyer by training, and by all accounts a wily old bastard.

‘Well all I can say is that you’ve been pretty busy in those six weeks,’ said Dusenbury. ‘If the press reports are anything to go by.’

‘Mr Governor—’

‘Chuck,’ the governor interrupted. ‘Everybody calls me Chuck.’

‘Sir…’ He couldn’t bring himself to address this man as Chuck. ‘I know this is going to sound rather rude, but I was expecting this to be a meeting in which I could plead the case for clemency for my client. This isn’t usually the way it’s done.’

Alex gave Mrs Olsen a quick glance to make sure that she hadn’t taken offense at his remark. Her eyes remained neutral, but there was the merest hint of a nervous smile, as if she were reaching out to him in a way that he couldn’t understand.

‘I know, son, I know,’ the governor responded. ‘But this is an unusual case, ain’t it?’

Alex couldn’t argue with that.

‘I’ll put it to you real simple,’ said the governor. ‘The reason Mrs Olsen is here is because she’s asked me to offer your client clemency.’

09:43 PDT (#ulink_ddfb1b20-83ec-55d5-a896-2731f4a4cee5)

There are things I have done in my life that I’m not proud of. There were things I shouldn’t have done. I was a product of my upbringing. I wasn’t always taught right from wrong. And I was taught to hate people for things they had no control over or for things that I thought were bad because that’s the way I was brought up.

But whatever wrongs I am guilty of, murder is not one of them. I may have been a bully in my youth, but I was never a murderer. Dorothy Olsen suffered at the hands of many people, myself included. But I did not kill her.

Clayton Burrow stopped writing and put the pen down, his hand aching. He opened and closed the hand several times to alleviate the cramp. But it was nothing compared to the pain inside: pain…fear…guilt? He didn’t really know. He just had this constant urge to cry. He wouldn’t do so of course—at least not now. Crying was unmanly and, with a prison guard stationed outside his cell twenty-four hours a day, he wasn’t going to let the bastards see him broken. But at night, when the lights were dimmed (they never switched them off altogether on death row) he would bury his face in his pillow and give in to the weakness that he managed to hide from others in the light of day.

He looked down at the letter and scanned the words. At the time of writing, it had felt like the right thing to say and the right time to say it. But re-reading his words now, all he could think was how pathetic it all sounded. This was to be his final letter, to be read out before his execution. Or was it? Maybe it was to be his final plea for clemency to the state governor. Maybe it was to be his letter to Mrs Olsen if his request for clemency was granted. He wasn’t really sure.

Was it meant to be a letter of appeasement or a letter of defiance…an apology or a denial? What did he want to write? He didn’t even know that. All he knew was that he was feeling bitter and angry…and afraid…and…

Alone.

That was the worst part. In all his twenty-seven—nearly twenty-eight—years on this earth, he had always been one to surround himself with friends. Or perhaps ‘cronies’ was a better word. He liked to surround himself with people who cheered him on and told him he was an okay guy. Never a great athlete, he was nonetheless a good one, with a muscular build, defined rather than developed. He was also blessed with a smooth, ‘golden boy’ handsome face that belied his rather spiteful nature. And he had enough puerile wit and energetic sporting prowess to be popular with the girls and the guys alike. He was always on the right side in the high school clique, always with the majority in any lynch-mob situation, always in with the in-crowd rather than the geek or freak on the butt end of the bullying—be it verbal or physical.

He was very rarely alone. And that meant a lot to him. It meant more than he ever realized, because he was actually quite afraid of being alone. But he never knew this until he found himself in a situation in which he was unable to avoid it. Throughout his happy, time-wasting, fun-loving years at high school, he had never even had to think about it. Because he was never alone, he never knew how badly it would affect him when he was.

Looking back on it now, he probably had an inbuilt defense mechanism against solitude. Whenever he was alone he would rush to find human company. He was always the first to stride up to a friend or a group and stick his face into the conversation. He was always the one to approach the new kid in the class and size them up as friend or foe: friend to be used as a sounding board, foe to be bullied, or at least harassed.

Even in his own home he avoided solitude. He was an only child, but he always had friends over for sleepovers. More often than that, he slept over at friends’ places. He preferred that because he was embarrassed by his mother. He didn’t know who his father was—neither did his mother.

Now, he had to dwell in solitude for the first time in his life, he had to confront his fears. And this was a young man who had never known fear before.

But his fear of solitude—the fear that had always been there but that he had concealed from himself for so long—was now confronting him like an inner demon who would let him have no peace.

His mother didn’t visit. She had written him out of her life. And his old school friends—the ones whose lives he had brightened up with his antics—seemed to have no desire to share a moment’s company with their fallen idol.

But it wasn’t solitude as such that he feared. Solitude merely opened the door to his own personal Room 101—that secret, terrifying inner chamber where one’s worst fears become a reality. It forced him to engage in introspection. And it was introspection that he feared the most. Human company had merely been a way to stave off the need to look inside himself at the miserable squalor of his own soul. But stripped of that shield, introspection was all he had. Now at last, in the deafening silence of solitude and living under the shadow of death, he had to take a look at himself for what he really was.

And he didn’t like what he saw.

He saw a man who had wasted every opportunity that had presented itself. He saw a man who had been needlessly cruel toward the weak. He saw a man who had achieved popularity with the mob at the expense of the frail and the vulnerable.

But most of all he saw a man who had no chance to redeem himself.

He knew that Dorothy Olsen must also have had inner demons, probably far worse than his. But he had just trampled all over her. And for what? For some cheap puerile thrills that meant nothing to him now.

He wished he could have his life over again. He wished he could have those moments back so that he could make wiser—and kinder—decisions. But God grants no second chances…if there even was a God.