The Quiet Game

"I think because it was far from Mississippi but still the South. She got an unlisted number, cut herself off from her old friends. By the time my father's trial got going, I didn't care anymore."

"You didn't ask her why her father was going after yours?"

This memory is one of my worst. "I flew up to Charlottesville a week before the trial, to try to get her to make Leo drop the case. My dad had already had a heart attack from the stress. She said she thought it was just a normal case, and that her father wouldn't listen to her opinion anyway. She was back in her high school queen mode, winning hearts and minds at UVA. It was like talking to a stranger." I take a burning sip of Scotch. "I wanted to kill her."

"Yes, but you loved her. You're still in love with her."

"No."

Caitlin smiles, not without empathy. "You are. You always will be."

"That's a depressing thought."

"No. Just recognize it and move on. Livy's not the person you think she is. Nobody could be. And you'd better be careful. She just separated from her husband, and you're still grieving over your wife. She could really mess you up."

"I'm no babe in the woods, Caitlin."

Her smile is timeless. All men are babes in the woods, it says. "You're trying to destroy her father now. How do you think she'll react to that?"

"I don't know. She has a love-hate relationship with him. It's like something out of Aeschylus. She knows he's done terrible things, but in some ways she's just like him."

"You should try very hard to keep that in mind."

"Why?"

She takes a pair of headphones from her lap, plugs them into the seat jack, and starts flipping through her channel guide. "How long has it been since you've seen her?"

"She came to my wife's funeral. We only spoke for a moment, though."

"Before that."

"A long time. Maybe seventeen years."

"You pull the lid off something that might get her father charged with capital murder, and suddenly she shows up like magic?"

"What are you saying? That her father called her to Natchez to… to influence me somehow? Because of your newspaper story?"

Caitlin shrugs. "I don't want to upset you, but that's what I'm saying."

She gives me a sad smile and puts on the headphones.

CHAPTER 20

I thought I was the last person to arrive in the witness room at Huntsville Prison until FBI Director John Portman walked in, flanked by two field agents who shadowed him like centurions guarding an emperor. Up to that point the preparations for the execution had proceeded with the tense banality that characterizes them all.

I had arrived to find the room nearly full. My old boss, Joe Cantor, motioned me to the empty chair beside Mrs. Givens, the closest relative of the victims. The curtain was drawn over the window of the extermination chamber, but I knew Arthur Lee Hanratty was already strapped to the gurney behind it, while a technician searched for veins good enough to take large-bore IV lines.

I hadn't seen Mrs. Givens for eight years, but the smell of cigarettes on her clothes brought back everything, a nervous woman who chain-smoked through every pretrial meeting and rushed for the courthouse door at every recess. She had a Bible in her lap tonight, open to Job. When I touched her hand, she clenched my wrist and asked if I'd seen many executions before, and if they were difficult to watch. In a quiet voice, I explained the procedure: sodium thiopental to shut down Hanratty's brain; Pavulon to paralyze him and stop his breathing; potassium chloride to stop his heart.

"You mean they put him to sleep before they give the bad chemicals?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Will he be able to say anything?"

"I'm afraid so. He'll be allowed to make a final statement for the record."

She patted the leather-bound book in her lap. "I'm not going to listen. I'm going to read the Good Book then."

"That sounds like a good idea." Killers often asked forgiveness at the end, but that wasn't Hanratty's style.

That was the moment that the door at the back of the room opened. Some reporters in front of me turned around, and recognition and amazement lit their faces. I turned and froze, confronted by the most unlikely vision I thought I would see at midnight in Texas.

John Portman looks like a walking advertisement for Brooks Brothers: thin and strong but a bit stiff, handsome with a longish face framed by hair gone gracefully gray. He was fifty-five when he and I crossed swords over Arthur Lee Hanratty, but he looked forty. He scarcely looks older now. I've always sensed a Dorian Gray aura about him, as though he were committing secret sins that never registered on his countenance.

I can't imagine what he's doing here. There's no upside for him. None that I can see, anyway. Maybe it's as simple as revenge. His experience with Hanratty almost derailed his juggernaut career, and Portman definitely knows how to carry a grudge. Watching Hanratty die might give him a great deal of satisfaction.