staff attorney with the Help Innocent Prisoners Project in New York City. I’m calling about George Calhoun. I’ve received a letter from him.”
“Yes?”
“I’ll be overnighting him a retainer letter, and once it comes back, I’d like to meet with you first. I’m just calling to give you a heads-up, since his scheduled date of execution is only six weeks away. We’ll need to move quickly on this.”
“Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad he did. It’s just that he’s seemed resigned to what’s coming. Most of the others on death row fight as hard as they can to get out. They go through lawyers like chicken feed. But George stuck with the same lawyer from the beginning. It always seemed like he didn’t care what happened.”
That surprised Dani. Innocent prisoners, especially those on death row, were usually persistent in their fight for freedom. “Do you think he’s guilty?”
“Can’t say I don’t, can’t say I do. The jury spoke and they said he was.”
“I’m confused. If that’s how you feel, why are you glad George wrote us?”
“As far as I can tell, George has always insisted he’s innocent. The way I look at it, if a man keeps saying he didn’t do the crime, he should have every chance possible to prove it. That’s why I’m glad he contacted you.”
“That’s refreshing coming from a warden.”
Dani heard a soft chuckle on the other end of the line. “I suppose it is. But I sleep better at night knowing something wasn’t missed.”
Dani got off the phone relieved that she wouldn’t get the runaround from the warden. HIPP had worked with enough prisoners in enough prisons for her to know that with one word from the top man, the job could become easier or tortuous. Given the short time they had, an obstructionist warden would make the task truly impossible.
She turned to her computer and logged in to Lexis/Nexis, the online research tool for lawyers. She typed in The People of Indiana v. George Calhoun and began reading the earliest appeals court decision, handed down six months after his conviction.
In May 1990, the charred remains of a child were found half-buried in the woods near a gas station a few miles off an isolated stretch of Route 80 between Orland and Howe, Indiana. Through study of the skeleton, the county’s forensic anthropologist determined that the child had been a three- or four-year-old Caucasian female. Her fingers and feet had been burned too badly to check databases for matches. Walter Jankiewicz, the gas station owner, recalled seeing a run-down American car, maybe a Chevy, at least six or seven years old, black or dark blue, pull off the road one day several weeks earlier after the sun had set but before darkness had fully settled. He watched as a medium-built man emerged from the car and struggled with the large package in his arms as he headed into the forest. Twenty minutes later, a truck pulled into the gas station, and after the station owner finished filling the tank, the car parked along the road was gone.
Inevitably, a dead Caucasian girl burned beyond recognition created fodder for the media. But after weeks of constant attention, with talking heads speculating ad nauseum about the identity of the victim and the circumstances of her death, the news coverage finally petered out. Two years later, America’s Most Wanted ran a program around the story and, as always, ended the show with a call for help from viewers. A week later they had received dozens of calls. One of them led to George Calhoun.
“Hey, gorgeous. I hear you want me.”
Dani looked up from the computer and saw a grinning Tommy Noorland standing in her doorway. She used to bristle when a male colleague referred to her looks. She thought it a backhanded way of being sexist—you know, a woman mattered only if she was attractive. And if she was, there was no reason to see past that. She’d wanted to matter because she was smart and worked hard, not because she happened to be pretty. As she got older, she’d mellowed. Now she could appreciate that men like Tommy were natural flirts and that his banter was not demeaning. She knew he respected the hell out of her, so she just smiled and answered, “In your dreams, Tommy.”
“Ah, baby, you don’t know what you’re missing,” he said and gave her a wink.
This was Tommy’s standard repartee, not just with Dani but with every female in