Don't Believe It

by Charlie Donlea

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals

Synopsis

The Girl of Sugar Beach is the most watched documentary in television history — a riveting, true-life mystery that unfolds over 12 weeks and centers on a fascinating question: Did Grace Sebold murder her boyfriend, Julian, while on a Spring Break vacation, or is she a victim of circumstance and poor police work? Grace has spent the last ten years in a St. Lucian prison, and reaches out to filmmaker Sidney Ryan in a last, desperate attempt to prove her innocence. As Sidney begins researching, she uncovers startling evidence, additional suspects, and timeline issues that were all overlooked during the original investigation. Before the series even finishes filming, public outcry leads officials to reopen the case. But as the show surges towards its final episodes, Sidney receives a letter saying that she got it badly, terribly wrong. Sidney has just convinced the world that Grace is innocent. Now she wonders if she has helped to free a ruthless killer. Delving into Grace's past, she peels away layer after layer of deception. But as Sidney edges closer to the real heart of the story, she must decide if finding the truth is worth risking her newfound fame, her career...even her life.

Release date: March 26, 2019

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

SIDNEY RYAN FINISHED TAPPING ON HER COMPUTER, SAVED HER FILE, and folded the laptop closed. She reached under the seat and slipped it into her carry-on. The popping in her ears told her they had started their descent. She pulled a thick folder from her bag, opened it, and removed the maiden letter that had started her journey.

Sidney folded the letter and looked out the window. The plane was on a gentle glide and ready to set down in the ocean when a runway reached out and grabbed the Airbus A330 to pull it safely onto dry land. A five-minute taxi settled the plane on the tarmac just outside the terminal doors. Everyone onboard opened overhead compartments and gathered bags. Sidney walked through the plane’s exit door and stepped onto the landing of the staircase, where the humid Caribbean air quickly worked her skin to a glistening shine. She took the stairs to the tarmac and felt the heat of the pavement rise in invisible flames around her. The camera crew sorted their equipment as she headed into the terminal. Through customs thirty minutes later, she bounced in the backseat of the taxi van as the driver navigated the rolling mountains of St. Lucia and the twisting roads that cut through their slopes.

Hills lush with rain forest filled the windows of the taxi for most of the sixty-minute ride. Eventually the driver shifted to a lower gear and the van strained to climb a steep bank. As they crested the precipice on the outskirts of the Jalousie Plantation, the ocean came into view across the valley. In the middle of the afternoon, the water carried an emerald brilliance, and from such an elevated vantage point looked almost cartoonish as it smoldered bright cobalt in the area near shore, melting to a deeper navy farther out to sea.

The driver began the descent into the valley toward Sugar Beach Resort. Contrasting the journey to this point, which had been defined by a series of steep inclines barely conquered by the taxi van’s straining engine, the ride down into the valley came with the constant squeak of brakes and slow turns around hairpins. The deeper they ventured into the basin, the higher the twin volcanic plugs of Gros Piton and Petit Piton rose on either side of them. The prehistoric nature of the precipitous mountains gave Sidney the sense of heading into Jurassic Park.

Finally the van made the last turn and tall iron gates parted as they approached the entrance to the resort. The humidity again mugged her when the door slid open and Sidney climbed from the van.

“Ms. Ryan,” a staff member said, extending a basket of ice-cold hand towels. “Welcome to Sugar Beach.”

Sidney draped the towel across the back of her neck.

“The staff will manage your bags,” the woman said in a pleasant Caribbean accent. “Your firm has already arranged check-in, so your room is waiting.”

Sidney nodded and followed the woman onto a path lined by Lansan trees, the shade of which offered a reprieve from the heat. The staffer pointed out landmarks as they walked.

“The spa is that way,” she said, pointing. “It’s world renowned and highly recommended. Built directly into the rain forest.”

Sidney smiled and nodded, surveying the tree-house–like structures built within the forest and the wooden staircases that twirled down to the ground.

The woman pointed in the other direction. “This path will take you to the beach.”

Overhanging branches of palm trees cocooned the long cobblestone walkway. Their heavy fronds rustled in the ocean breeze toward the far end of the path, where a spot of bright sunshine and surf was just visible from where Sidney stood.

They made one more turn. “And here is your cottage.”

The woman keyed the door and allowed Sidney to enter the posh room, the furniture of which was white and immaculate. Dark cherrywood floors shone brightly with afternoon sunlight that spilled through the windows and French doors.

“The bar is stocked with anything you might like—water, juice, and soda. Spirits as well. Your bags should arrive shortly.”

“Thank you,” Sidney said. She glanced at the placard outside the door: 306.

“Yes,” the woman said, recognizing the question in Sidney’s eyes. “This was the room she stayed in.”

Sidney nodded.

“Please call if you need anything,” the woman said.

“Thank you.”

Sidney closed the cottage door and allowed the air-conditioned interior to cool her body and unstick her shirt from her skin. She looked around the room, moving her gaze from the shining wooden floors to the lush bathroom accommodations, to the sun-drenched patio, and finally to the plush four-poster bed, with its brilliant white comforter. She ran her hand over the thick blanket before sitting on the edge.

Ten years earlier, Grace Sebold had slept in this very room the night Julian Crist was killed.

THE TROPICAL GARDENS WERE PLUSH AND GREEN AS SIDNEY AND HER crew walked along the resort’s serpentine paths that wound toward the beach. Once past the pool, her tennis shoes sank into the sand of Sugar Beach. Around her, the twin peaks sprouted into the sky. On her right and to the north, Petit Piton; on her left and to the south, Gros Piton. Laid between the summits was a two-hundred-yard stretch of sugar-white sand that glistened under the hot sun. Closer toward the water, the sand was darker, where the surf washed over it and bathed it into wet caramel.

“Ms. Ryan?” a young Caribbean man asked as he approached.

“Sidney.” She reached out and shook his hand.

“Darnell. I’ll be guiding you and your crew today. Are you ready?”

Sidney nodded. She looked back to her camera guys and pointed to the Pitons. “Get these,” she said to her crew. “A few stills from the base to the peak, with a clouded sky above. Maybe time-lapse it to get a tropical storm moving through. Might be a good promo, beautiful scenery one minute and a ferocious storm the next. Aerials would work well, if we can budget it.” She looked back to Darnell. “Is the hike difficult?”

“To the summit?” He smiled. His teeth were broad and white. “Yeh, man. To the Soufriere Bluff? Easy.”

“Easy?” Sidney asked.

“No problem.” Darnell pointed to Sidney’s bicep, then flexed his own and let out a jovial laugh. “Trust me. No problem.”

Thirty minutes later, they had completed the necessary paperwork and signed the waivers required to partake in a guided hike up Gros Piton. The trip to the summit was an all-day excursion taking more than four hours. To the bluff where Julian Crist was killed required thirty minutes of walking along a narrow path flanked by heavy foliage, with occasional views of Pitons Bay to the north and the Jalousie Plantation to the east.

Sidney and her crew were halfway to the bluff when they came to a staircase made from boulders and flanked by a makeshift bamboo railing. The structure had been reinforced over the years with additional balustrades and a few odd rocks. The man-made arrangement tackled a steep gorge that would otherwise be too challenging to traverse.

“Darnell,” Sidney said as they approached the Stone Age staircase. “Has this portion of the hike changed over the years?”

“No. Same now as it’s always been.”

“So, ten years ago, this was the same staircase?”

“Yeh, man. Same is same.”

Sidney directed her crew. “Get this from bottom to top, and then top to bottom. Capture a first-person account of climbing up the staircase, no one else in the frame. And time me on the way up. Take a few more runs and get an average of how long it takes to walk it, jog it, and sprint it.”

Sidney followed Darnell up the boulders, the first vigorous portion of the day’s hike. With temperatures in the low nineties and 100 percent humidity, her tank top was soaked by the time she was halfway up the staircase.

A healthy thirty-six-year-old woman in good physical shape, Sidney considered that she was ten years older now than Grace had been when she supposedly made this journey. Sidney needed the aid of the bamboo railing to make it to the top. The steep incline toward the peak required her to grab the bamboo with both hands, one on each side, to hoist herself to the top. Once there, she surveyed the landing and then headed back down. At the foot of the stairs, she grabbed a tripod from one of the crewmembers and extended it to its full length, placed it over her shoulder, and repeated her climb up the boulders with only one hand available to grab the bamboo.

When Sidney was satisfied with her test runs, she found Darnell sitting in the shade of a Lansan. “How much farther?”

“Not much,” Darnell said, pushing himself away from the tree’s trunk. “A few switchbacks.”

She followed Darnell along the narrow dirt path until they made one last turn. Then the foliage cleared and a bluff came into view—smooth beige granite that mirrored the afternoon sun. Sidney walked over to it, already visualizing how she could present this majestic and tragic scene.

“Is this it?” she asked as she walked carefully onto the bluff.

“Yeh, man.” Darnell was more daring, walking fearlessly to the edge. “He went over right here. All the way down to the water.” He pointed over the ledge, then smacked his palms together.

Sidney stopped a few feet from the edge, bent at the waist, and took a hesitant glance over the threshold. Her stomach rose into her throat. It was a long way down. She looked behind her. The camera crew was just now arriving after capturing the staircase from the angles she requested. Sidney walked over to Leslie Martin, her producing partner, turned back to look at the clearing and the bluff and the pristine view of Pitons Bay sparkling with afternoon sun. She put her arms out wide.

“I need a full shot of this view. A first-person perspective, coming around the bend and witnessing the bluff and the clearing and the bay. We’ll need to get a shot at sunset as well, with the sun in the backdrop and long shadows creeping toward the camera. That’s about the time he was killed.”

“I can see the promo,” Leslie said. “Gorgeous, but eerie.”

Sidney nodded. “Get a blanket up here, too. With a bottle of champagne and two glasses. Low shot, okay? Ground level, with the glasses in the foreground and the setting sun behind them.”

“You’re a genius. I love it,” Leslie said.

“It was a long time ago,” Darnell interrupted. “When that boy went over the edge. What is the interest so many years later?”

“Research.”

“For a book?”

“No, a film.”

Darnell’s bright smile appeared again. “A movie?”

“Documentary.”

Sidney walked back onto the bluff as her camera crew prepared to film the area where Julian Crist was killed. She enjoyed a moment of solitude as she looked out over the ocean, and then down to Sugar Beach, where vacationers strolled hand in hand, their footsteps melting in the sand.

“Okay, St. Lucia. Tell me your story.”

“WHAT’S THE INTEREST, MS. RYAN?” INSPECTOR CLAUDE PIERRE asked.

A tall, thin man with hair so short his scalp was visible, Pierre had run the investigation division of the St. Lucian police force for the past two decades. A native St. Lucian, born and raised, he was a product of the island and the school system, and was an example of how hard work and determination could bring you to the top of your occupation. It was the same here on a small island as in any large city in the United States. Sidney had done her research on Inspector Pierre, and knew him to be a terribly proud man of his homeland and his role within it.

“I’m filming a documentary about Julian Crist, and looking for anyone who had knowledge about the case. Anyone who might be able to offer details.”

“What is the nature of the documentary?”

“To tell the truth about what happened to Julian Crist. It will air in the States. I’m in St. Lucia on a fact-finding mission to gather details about the case and take some footage. My studio floated me a slim budget to get my crew down here to see if there’s enough to run with.”

“Enough what, Ms. Ryan? The Julian Crist case was closed many years ago. The truth has already been told.”

“Enough intrigue,” Sidney said.

Inspector Pierre smiled. “I’m not sure I’d call a young man’s tragic death ‘intriguing.’ I’ll presume you’re looking for disturbing more than anything else.”

Sidney was looking for much more than a disturbing story. She was looking for holes in the case. For things that might have been missed by Inspector Pierre and his associates. She was looking for clues that would confirm the story she’d read in the hundreds of letters Grace Sebold had sent her over the past two years in which the woman clung to her innocence and offered many examples of how the case had been mishandled. So, was she looking for disturbing? Sidney would never argue that unsettling stories didn’t sell, but what she was really after was anything she could take back to her bosses at the network that might convince them a grave injustice had taken place.

Sidney was tasked with putting together the pilot episode of her proposed documentary about Grace Sebold. The network would then decide if they’d give the project a summer run after they viewed the first few cuts. The documentary—assuming she could get it off the ground—would be Sidney’s fourth. Her first two films had been online-only events streamed through a subscription service, and her third was an add-on to the prime-time news program Events, Sidney’s first foray into television. She had done all the work—filming, writing, producing the hour-long special—only to play a secondary role to Luke Barrington, the face of the network’s prime-time lineup, who insisted on narrating the special edition and ultimately received most of the credit for the documentary’s success. Still, the network liked Sidney’s work, and contracted her for another film. Her pitch was a biopic that broadly covered Grace Sebold’s life, including the girl’s love story with Julian Crist, her conviction for his murder, and the ten years she’s spent in a St. Lucian prison, claiming innocence of the grisly crime. But to get such a project green-lit, Sidney needed proof that Grace Sebold’s case had been mishandled. Proof that the St. Lucian government had pinned on her a crime she did not commit. That they’d made assumptions and mistakes ten years ago that had cost an innocent woman her freedom.

Sidney would share none of this with the man who was responsible for putting Grace Sebold behind bars. In order to keep her true motives hidden from Claude Pierre, she would focus her questions today on Julian Crist.

“Disturbing or otherwise, Inspector Pierre, I’m looking for facts,” Sidney finally said. “It’s been ten years since this boy was killed. Sadly, America has forgotten about him.”

This statement was mostly true. America had forgotten about Julian Crist, but not about his death. American popular culture remembered only that a young medical student had been killed in St. Lucia, and that his girlfriend was convicted of his murder. Julian Crist was a footnote in Grace Sebold’s story. She had stolen the headlines over the last decade. Her appeals and cries of injustice had been loud. America knew her as the girl stuck in a foreign land, accused of a murder she claimed not to commit.

A convict claiming innocence was nothing new. Many convicted felons ran the gamut of the appeals process. But only a select few found a voice. Those who follow news about the wrongfully convicted knew Grace Sebold well. Indeed, entire websites had been created to prove her innocence. Donations had been collected to help mount a fight in her defense. Grace had been fortunate enough to fall under the eye of the Innocence Project, a watchdog group that worked to overturn convictions of those they feel were wrongfully accused and unfairly sentenced. This group had taken Grace Sebold under their wings years ago and had staged more than one assault on the St. Lucian judiciary system, which the group claimed used illegal interrogation techniques and false testimony from expert witnesses to gain a conviction. The St. Lucian government was motivated, the group argued, by the desire to solve Julian Crist’s death quickly so that the island did not endure a drop in tourism. But despite spirited assaults, all previous attempts to free Grace had failed.

“Well,” the inspector said, “I have not forgotten about Mr. Crist, nor has St. Lucia. I am aware, however, of America’s true-crime documentary obsession. I’ve watched many of them myself. The police and the prosecution are not typically presented in a brilliant light, but rather cast as irresponsible in our search for justice.”

Despite his easy Caribbean vibe, Sidney sensed that Inspector Pierre was not only proud, but fierce in his convictions. He was responsible for putting Grace Sebold behind bars, and much scrutiny had fallen on his shoulders over the last decade. He’d managed so far to keep the weight from crushing him.

“Of course, you haven’t,” Sidney said. “That’s why I’ve come to speak with you. American citizens only know the story of Grace Sebold. They only know her claims.”

“That’s a travesty. But that is not how it is here. In St. Lucia, people know the boy who was killed. And people know the one who killed him has been brought to justice.”

“So help me, will you?” Sidney said. “Tell me about your investigation. About what you discovered and your path to find justice.”

Inspector Pierre thought on this a moment. “I’ve gotten a lot of pressure from the group in America that thinks this girl is innocent.”

“The Innocence Project. Yes, I know.”

“Will your documentary show the truth, or what they believe the truth to be? Because the truth about Ms. Sebold, I assure you, is overwhelming.”

“That’s what I’m after,” Sidney said. “The truth. Will you help me find it?”

A void of silence stretched between them. Sidney could see that Inspector Pierre not only wanted to talk, but after so many years needed to tell his story. He needed to defend his decisions and his actions. The thought of doing so in a documentary that could potentially reach a large audience outside of his tiny island was appealing.

Pierre nodded slowly. “I’ll help you.”

“YES,” INSPECTOR PIERRE SAID AFTER THEY HAD SETTLED AT THE conference table, cups of coffee in front of them.

For a country with an average daily temperature in the mid-eighties, coffee was an oddly popular drink in St. Lucia. Sidney had the interview recorded from multiple angles. The first was a shot over Sidney’s shoulder that captured the inspector’s responses straight on, with an occasional glance of the back of Sidney’s head. Other viewpoints came from a second cameraman, who moved from side to side, recording for a few minutes before moving to a new location, which occasionally framed Sidney’s face as she asked her questions, but which mostly concentrated on Claude Pierre.

“After Julian’s body was discovered, we were called onto the scene,” Pierre said. “The beach was cleared and taped off, and the medical examiner was brought in to handle the body. Our forensic team as well.”

Sidney had notes on her lap that the cameraman was careful to leave out of the shot. The goal, when Sidney was in the scene, was to give the appearance of a neutral journalist curiously asking questions about the case.

“What do you remember about Julian Crist’s body from that morning?”

“When I arrived, the body was floating in shallow waters off the beach. I remember the way he was inverted, even to this day. His feet came in first and his torso and head were still underwater, like the sea was trying to take him, but the beach wouldn’t allow it.”

“Do you remember anything specific about Julian’s body?”

“I remember most vividly the head trauma. It was nearly all I could notice when the medical examiner’s crew pulled him onto land.”

“It was determined Julian had died from a blow to the back of the head. Is that correct?”

“Ultimately, yes. But at the scene that morning, it was assumed he had fallen from Gros Piton.”

“And why was that assumption made?”

“He was a guest at the resort, and Gros Piton is a popular attraction. It was a reasonable assumption to begin with, assuming the tranquil and isolated nature of the resort.”

“And when did your assumptions change from an accident to homicide?”

“My first clue was a blood splatter that we discovered on the bluff.”

“The blood you found,” Sidney said, imagining the crime scene photos that would run over the audio of her interview, “made you suspect foul play?”

“Of course. If the original assumption was that Julian had fallen accidentally, then there was no way to explain the blood splatter.”

“With the discovery of blood, you figured someone had struck him.”

“That’s correct.”

Sidney paused for a moment before asking her next question.

“More than one hundred guests stayed at the resort on the night Julian Crist was killed. How did you so quickly settle on Grace Sebold as the one who killed him?”

SIDNEY LOOKED AT INSPECTOR PIERRE.

“So this argument,” she said, “between Grace and Julian. I understand that many resort guests witnessed it, since it occurred near the poo. . .