only been a couple of days, but I already have the confidence that I can turn something over to him knowing it will be done. It's a nice feeling.
Laurie reports on her progress, which is less favorable. I expected this; when a murder was committed this long ago there's little likelihood of turning up much new. More disturbing is her inability to find Willie's lawyer, Robert Hinton. His elusiveness is puzzling. Lawyers generally don't like to disappear; it causes them to have trouble attracting new clients.
Laurie is going to redouble her efforts to find Hinton, as well as arrange to interview the eyewitness whose testimony helped to bury Willie in the first trial. She's also recruited a DNA expert for us to possibly use to rebut the state's evidence, or to help us prevent it getting in. Like the change of venue and just about everything else involved with the case, it's pretty much a lost cause, but I agree to see him at three o'clock this afternoon.
We're wrapping things up when the phone rings. Edna, despite having been told not to interrupt us, does so anyway.
“I think you'll want to take this,” she says.
“Who is it?”
“It's your wife. It sounds like an emergency.”
I pick up the phone and conduct a ten-second conversation during which Nicole tells me what has happened. I hang up and start walking toward the door.
“Is everything okay?” Laurie asks.
I tell her. “Nicole found a threatening message on the downstairs answering machine.”
“What did it say?”
I shake my head. “I don't know yet. But whatever it says, that's not the worst part.”
“What's the worst part?”
“We don't have a downstairs answering machine.”
I make it home in record time. Nicole was borderline hysterical when I spoke to her, and she's not likely to have calmed down before I get there. She's also not likely to calm down after I get there.
I pull up to the house, and I see that she is peeking out from behind the drapes, watching for me. She opens the door and leads me to the answering machine, which is hooked up in the den. It is not a machine I have ever seen before.
So as not to smudge any fingerprints, and so I could appear to know what I'm doing, I use the point of a pen to press play. The voice is computer-generated, effectively concealing the speaker.
“Think of your embarrassment in court as just the beginning … a small sign of our power. We are bigger than you, Carpenter … much bigger. We can do what we want … when we want. So drop your crusade, before it is too late. The past is past.”
Nicole looks at me, as if I can say something that will take away her fear. Something like, “Oh, is that all? Don't worry. I had told a friend he could break into the house and drop off a threatening answering machine.”
She sees I have nothing comforting to offer, so she says, with great drama, “Andy, they were in here. While we were sleeping. They were in our house.”
My mind flashes to Michael Corleone, speaking to Pentan-geli after gunmen shot up his house. “In my bedroom, where my wife sleeps! Where my children come to play with their toys!”
I decide not to mention the Godfather reference to Nicole. Instead I ask, “Did you check the doors and windows?”
“No, I didn't,” she says before she explodes. “I'm not a policeman, Andy. I don't want this to happen in my house!”
“Of course you don't, Nicole, and neither do I. But …”
She's now more under control, but with an intensity in her voice that I don't think I have ever heard. It strikes me that I've never seen Nicole afraid. She did not grow up in a world where she ever had reason to be afraid.
“I do not want the awful people that you deal with in my life. Not the murderers, not the prostitutes, nor the other animals. I don't want it and I don't deserve it.”
“We don't know who did this. Or why.”
She shakes her head; as if I'm not getting it. “That doesn't matter. What matters is that it does not happen again.”
I start looking around, but I can't imagine that I'm going to find a clue. Tara sniffs around with me, though if she were going to be active in the case I would have preferred that she had barked during the break-in. My mind starts trying to put it all together: the debacle in the courthouse, the