Innocent

by Scott Turow

Genres: Legal Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

Twenty years ago, Tommy Molto charged his colleague Rusty Sabich with the murder of a former lover; when a shocking turn of events transformed Prosecutor Rusty from the accuser into the accused. Rusty was cleared, but the seismic trial left both men reeling. Molto’s name was dragged through the mud and while Rusty regained his career, he lost much more . . .

Now, Rusty – sixty years old and a chief judge – wakes to a new nightmare. His wife Barbara has died in suspicious circumstances and once again, he is the prime suspect. Reunited with his charismatic lawyer Sandy Stern, Rusty will do anything to convince his beloved son Nat of his innocence. But what is he hiding?

In an explosive trial which will expose lies, jealousy, revenge, corruption and the darker side of human nature, Rusty Sabich and Tommy Molto will battle it out to finally discover the real meaning of truth, and of justice.

Release date: April 16, 2010

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 544

Sample

A man is sitting on a bed. He is my father.


The body of a woman is beneath the covers. She was my mother.

This is not really where the story starts. Or how it ends. But it is the moment my mind returns to, the way I always see them.

According to what my father will soon tell me, he has been there, in that room, for nearly twenty-three hours, except for
bathroom breaks. Yesterday, he awoke, as he does most weekdays, at half past six and could see the mortal change as soon as
he glanced back at my mother, just as his feet had found his slippers. He rocked her shoulder, touched her lips. He pumped
the heel of his palm against her sternum a few times, but her skin was cool as clay. Her limbs were already moving in a piece,
like a mannequin’s.


He will tell me he sat then, in a chair across from her. He never cried. He thought, he will say. He does not know how long,
except that the sun had moved all the way across the room, when he finally stood again and began to tidy obsessively.


He will say he put the three or four books she was always reading back on the shelf. He hung up the clothes she had a habit
of piling on the chaise in front of her dressing mirror, then made the bed around her, pulling the sheets tight, folding the
spread down evenly, before laying her hands out like a doll’s on the satin binding of the blanket. He threw out two of the
flowers that had wilted in the vase on her night table and straightened the papers and magazines on her desk.


He will tell me he called no one, not even the paramedics because he was certain she was dead, and sent only a one-line e-mail
to his assistant to say he would not be at work. He did not answer the phone, although it rang several times. Almost an entire
day will have passed before he realizes he must contact me.


But how can she be dead? I will ask. She was fine two nights ago when we were together. After a freighted second, I will tell
my father, She didn’t kill herself.


No, he will agree at once.

She wasn’t in that kind of mood.

It was her heart, he will say then. It had to be her heart. And her blood pressure. Your grandfather died the same way.

Are you going to call the police?

The police, he will say after a time. Why would I call the police?

Well, Christ, Dad. You’re a judge. Isn’t that what you do when someone dies suddenly? I was crying by now. I didn’t know when
I had started.


I was going to phone the funeral home, he will tell me, but I realized you might want to see her before I did that.

Well, shit, well, yes, I want to see her.

As it happens, the funeral home will tell us to call our family doctor, and he in turn will summon the coroner, who will send
the police. It will become a long morning, and then a longer afternoon, with dozens of people moving in and out of the house.
The coroner will not arrive for nearly six hours. He will be alone with my mom’s body for only a minute before asking my dad’s
permission to make an index of all the medications she took. An hour later, I will pass my parents’ bathroom and see a cop
standing slack-jawed before the open medicine cabinet, a pen and pad in hand.


Jesus, he will declare.

Bipolar disorder, I will tell him when he finally notices me. She had to take a lot of pills. In time, he will simply sweep
the shelves clean and go off with a garbage bag containing all the bottles.


In the meanwhile, every so often another police officer will arrive and ask my father about what happened. He tells the story
again and again, always the same way.


What was there to think about all that time? one cop will say.

My dad can have a hard way with his blue eyes, something he probably learned from his own father, a man he despised.

Officer, are you married?

I am, Judge.

Then you know what there was to think about. Life, he will answer. Marriage. Her.

The police will make him go through his account three or four more times—how he sat there and why. His response will never
vary. He will answer every question in his usual contained manner, the stolid man of law who looks out on life as an endless
sea.


He will tell them how he moved each item.

He will tell them where he spent each hour.

But he will not tell anybody about the girl.

From the elevated walnut bench a dozen feet above the lawyers’ podium, I bang the gavel and call the last case of the morning
for oral argument.


“People versus John Harnason,” I say, “fifteen minutes each side.”


The stately appellate courtroom, with its oxblood pillars rising two stories to a ceiling decorated with rococo gildings,
is largely empty of spectators, save for Molly Singh, the Tribune’s courthouse reporter, and several young deputy PAs, drawn by a difficult case and the fact that their boss, the acting prosecuting
attorney, Tommy Molto, will be making a rare appearance up here to argue in behalf of the State. A ravaged-looking warhorse,
Molto sits with two of his deputies at one of the lustrous walnut tables in front of the bench. On the other side, the defendant,
John Harnason, convicted of the fatal poisoning of his roommate and lover, waits to hear his fate debated, while his lawyer,
Mel Tooley, advances toward the podium. Along the far wall, several law clerks are seated, including Anna Vostic, my senior
clerk, who will leave the job on Friday. At my nodding direction, Anna will ignite the tiny lights atop counsel’s podium,
green, yellow, and red, to indicate the same things they do in traffic.


“May it please the Court,” says Mel, the time-ingrained salutation of lawyers to appellate judges. At least seventy pounds
overweight these days, Mel still insists on wearing bold pin-striped suits as snug
as sausage casings—enough to instill vertigo—and the same lousy rug, which looks as though he skinned a poodle. He begins
with an oily grin, as if he and I, and the two judges who flank me on the three-judge panel that will decide the appeal, Marvina
Hamlin and George Mason, are all the best of friends. I have never cared for Mel, a bigger snake than usual in the nest of
serpents that is the criminal defense bar.


“First,” says Mel, “I can’t start without briefly wishing Chief Judge Sabich a happy birthday on this personal milestone.”

I am sixty years old today, an occasion I have approached with gloom. Mel undoubtedly gleaned this tidibit from the gossip
column on page two of today’s Trib, a daily drumbeat of innuendo and leaks. It concludes routinely with birthday greetings to a variety of celebrities and local
notables, which this morning included me: “Rusty Sabich, Chief Judge of the State Court of Appeals for the Third Appellate District and candidate for the state Supreme
Court, 60.” Seeing it in boldface was like taking a bullet.


“I hoped no one had noticed, Mr. Tooley,” I say. Everyone in the courtroom laughs. As I discovered long ago, being a judge
somehow makes your every joke, even the lamest, side splitting. I beckon Tooley to proceed.


The work of the appellate court in its simplest terms is to make sure that the person appealing got a fair trial. Our docket
reflects justice in the American style, divided evenly between the rich, who are usually contesting expensive civil cases,
and the poor, who make up most of the criminal appellants and face significant prison terms. Because the state supreme court
reviews very few matters, nine times out of ten the court of appeals holds the final word on a case.


The issue today is well-defined: Did the State offer enough evidence to justify the jury’s murder verdict against Harnason?
Appellate courts rarely reverse on this ground; the rule is that the jury’s decision stands unless it is literally irrational.
But this was a very close case. Ricardo Millan, Harnason’s roommate and business partner in a travel-packaging enterprise,
died at the age of thirty-nine of a mysterious progressive illness that the coroner took for an undiagnosed intestinal infection
or parasite. There things might have ended were it not for the doggedness of Ricardo’s mother, who made several trips here
from Puerto Rico. She used all her savings to hire a private detective and a toxicologist at the U who persuaded the police
to exhume Ricardo’s body. Hair specimens showed lethal levels of arsenic.


Poisoning is murder for the underhanded. No knife, no gun. No Nietzschean moment when you confront the victim and feel the
elemental thrill of exerting your will. It involves fraud far more than violence. And it’s hard not to believe that what sunk
Harnason before the jury is simply that he looks the part. He appears vaguely familiar, but that must be from seeing his picture
in the paper, because I would recall somebody so self-consciously odd. He is wearing a garish copper-colored suit. On the
hand with which he is furiously scribbling notes, his nails are so long that they have begun to curl under like some Chinese
emperor’s, and an abundance of unmanageable orangey knots covers his scalp. In fact, there is too much reddish hair all over
his head. His overgrown eyebrows make him resemble a beaver, and a gingery mustache droops over his mouth. I have always been
baffled by folks like this. Is he demanding attention or does he simply think the rest of us are boring?


Aside from his looks, the actual evidence that Harnason murdered Ricardo is spotty. Neighbors reported a recent episode in
which a drunken Harnason brandished a kitchen knife on the street, screaming at Ricardo about his visits with a younger man.
The State also emphasized that Harnason went to court to prevent exhuming Ricardo’s body, where he maintained that Ricky’s
mother was a kook who’d stick Harnason with the bill for another burial. Probably the only piece of substantial proof is that
the detectives found microscopic traces of arsenic oxide ant poison in the shed behind the house that Harnason inherited from
his mother. The product had not been manufactured for at least a decade, leading the defense to maintain that the infinitesimal
granules were merely a degraded leftover from the mother’s time, whereas the real perpetrator could have purchased a more
reliably lethal form of arsenic oxide from several vendors on the Internet. Despite the familiarity of arsenic as a classic
poison, such deaths are a rarity these days, and thus arsenic is not covered in routine toxicological screenings performed
in connection with autopsies, which is why the coroner initially missed the cause of death.


All in all, the evidence is so evenly balanced that as chief judge, I decided to order Harnason freed on bail pending his
appeal. That does not happen often after a defendant is convicted, but it seemed unfair for Harnason to start doing time in
this razor-thin case before we passed on the matter.


My order accounts, in turn, for the appearance today by Tommy Molto, the acting PA. Molto is a skillful appellate advocate,
but as head of his office, he rarely has the time to argue appeals these days. He is handling this case because the prosecutors
clearly read the bail ruling as an indication Harnason’s murder conviction might be reversed. Molto’s presence is meant to
emphasize how strongly his office stands by its evidence. I give Tommy his wish, as it were, and question him closely once
he takes his turn at the podium.


“Mr. Molto,” I say, “correct me, but as I read the record, there is no proof at all how Mr. Harnason would know that arsenic
would not be detected by a routine toxicological screening, and thus that he could pass off Mr. Millan’s death as one by natural
causes. That isn’t public information, is it, about what’s covered on an autopsy tox screen?”


“It’s not a state secret, Your Honor, but no, it’s not publicized, no.”

“And secret or not, there was no proof that Harnason would know, was there?”

“That is correct, Chief Judge,” says Molto.

One of Tommy’s strengths up here is that he is unfailingly polite and direct, but he cannot keep a familiar shadow of brooding
discontent from darkening his face in response to my interrogation. The two of us have a complicated history. Molto was the
junior prosecutor in the event twenty-one years ago that still divides my life as neatly as a stripe down the center of a
road, when I was tried and then exonerated of the murder of another deputy prosecuting attorney.


“And in fact, Mr. Molto, there wasn’t even clear evidence how Mr. Harnason could have poisoned Mr. Millan, was there? Didn’t
several of their friends testify that Mr. Millan cooked all the meals?”


“Yes, but Mr. Harnason usually poured the drinks.”

“But the defense chemist said arsenic oxide is too bitter to be concealed even in something like a martini or a glass of wine,
didn’t he? The prosecution didn’t really refute that testimony, did you?”


“There was no rebuttal on that point, that is true, Your Honor. But these men shared most of their meals. That certainly gave
Harnason plenty of opportunity to commit the crime the jury convicted him of.”


Around the courthouse these days, people speak regularly of how different Tommy seems, married for the first time late in
life and ensconced by luck in a job he plainly longed for. Tommy’s recent good fortune has done little to rescue him from
his lifetime standing among the physically unblessed. His face looks timeworn, verging on elderly. The little bit of hair
left on his head has gone entirely white, and there are pouches of flesh beneath his eyes like used teabags. Yet there is
no denying a subtle improvement. Tommy has lost weight and bought suits that no longer look as if he’d slept in them, and
he often sports an expression of peace and, even, cheerfulness. But not now. Not with me. When it comes to me, despite the
years, Tommy still regards me as an enduring enemy, and judging by his look as he heads back to his seat, he takes my doubts
today as further proof.


As soon as the argument is over, the other two judges and I adjourn without our clerks to a conference room adjoining the
courtroom, where we will discuss the morning’s cases and decide their outcome, including which of the three of us will write
each opinion for the court. This is an elegant chamber that looks like the dining room in a men’s club, right down to the
crystal chandelier. A vast Chippendale table holds enough high-backed leather chairs to seat all eighteen judges of the court
on the rare occasion that we sit together—en banc, as it is known—to decide a case.


“Affirm,” says Marvina Hamlin, as if there is no point for discussion, once we get to Harnason. Marvina is your average tough black lady with plenty of reason to be that way. She was ghetto raised, had a son at sixteen,
and still worked her way through school, starting as a legal secretary and ending up as a lawyer—and a good one, too. She
tried two cases in front of me when I was a trial judge years ago. On the other hand, after sitting with Marvina for a decade,
I know she will not change her mind. She has not heard another human being say anything worth considering since her mother
told her at a very early age that she had to watch out for herself. “Who else could have done it?” demands Marvina.


“Does your assistant bring you coffee, Marvina?” I ask.

“I fetch for myself, thank you,” she answers.

“You know what I mean. What proof was there that it wasn’t someone at work?”

“The prosecutors don’t have to chase rabbits down every hole,” she answers. “And neither do we.”

She’s right about that, but fortified by this exchange, I tell my colleagues I’m going to vote to reverse. Thus we each turn
to George Mason, who will functionally decide the case. A mannerly Virginian, George still retains soft traces of his native
accent and is blessed with the white coif central casting would order for a judge. George is my best friend on the court and
will succeed me as chief judge if, as widely anticipated, I win both the primary and the general election next year and move
up to the state supreme court.


“I think it’s just inside the boundary,” he says.

“George!” I protest. George Mason and I have been at each other’s throats as lawyers since he showed up thirty years ago as
the newly minted state defender assigned to the courtroom where I was the lead prosecutor. Early experience is formative in
the law like everything else, and George sides with defendants more often than I do. But not today.


“I admit it would have been an NG if it was tried as a bench in front of me,” he says, “but we’re on appeal and I don’t get
to substitute my judgment for the jury’s.”


This little tweak is aimed at me. I would never say it aloud, but I sense that Molto’s appearance, and the importance the
PA places on the case, has moved the needle just enough with both of my colleagues. Yet the point is I’ve lost. That too is
part of the job, accepting the law’s ambiguities. I ask Marvina to draft the opinion for the court. Still a little hot, she
exits, leaving George and me to ourselves.


“Tough case,” he says. It’s an axiom of this life that, like a husband and wife who do not go to bed angry, judges of a court
of review leave their disagreements in the impressions conference. I shrug in response, but he can tell I remain unsettled.
“Why don’t you draft a dissent?” he suggests, meaning my own opinion, explaining why I think the other two got it wrong. “I
promise I’ll look at the matter fresh when it’s on paper.”


I rarely dissent, since it’s one of my primary responsibilities as chief judge to promote harmony on the court, but I decide
to take him up on his offer, and I head down to my chambers to begin the process with my law clerks. As chief, I occupy a
suite the size of a small house. Off a large anteroom occupied by my assistant and my courtroom staff are two compact offices
for my law clerks and, on the other side, my own vast work space, thirty-by-thirty and a story and a half high, with wainscoting
of ancient varnished oak that lends my inside chambers the dark air of a castle.


When I push open the door to the large room, I find a crowd of forty or so people who immediately shrill out, “Surprise!”
I am surprised all right, but principally by how morbid I find the recollection of my birthday. Nonetheless, I pretend to
be delighted as I circle the room, greeting persons whose long-standing presence in my life makes them, in my current mood,
as bleakly poignant as the messages on tombstones.


Both my son, Nat, now twenty-eight, too lean but hauntingly handsome amid his torrents of jet hair, and Barbara, my wife of
thirty-six years, are here, and so are all but two of the other seventeen judges on the court. George Mason has arrived now
and manages a hug, a gesture of the times with which neither of us is fully comfortable, as he hands me a box on behalf of
all my colleagues.


Also present are a few key administrators on the court staff and several friends who remain practicing lawyers. My former
attorney, Sandy Stern, round and robust but bothered by a summer cough, is here with his daughter and law partner, Marta,
and so is the man who more than twenty-five years ago made me his chief deputy, former prosecuting attorney Raymond Horgan.
Ray evolved from friend to enemy and back again in the space of a single year, when he testified against me at my trial and
then, after my acquittal, put in motion the process that made me acting PA. Raymond again is playing a large role in my life
as the chair of my supreme court campaign. He strategizes and shakes the money tree at the big firms, leaving the operational
details to two she-wolves, thirty-one and thirty-three, whose commitment to my election seems about as deep as a hit man’s.


Most of the guests are or were trial lawyers, an amiable group by nature, and there is great bonhomie and laughter. Nat will
graduate from law school in June and, after the bar, begin a clerkship on the state supreme court, where I, too, was once
a law clerk. Nat remains himself, uncomfortable in conversation, and Barbara and I, by long habit, drift near from time to
time to protect him. My own two law clerks, who do a similar job to the one Nat will be taking, assisting me in researching
and writing my opinions for this court, have assumed less distinguished duty today as waiters. Because Barbara is perpetually
ill at ease in the world beyond our house, especially in larger social gatherings, Anna Vostic, my senior clerk, serves more
or less as hostess, pouring a dribble of champagne into the bottom of the plastic glasses that are soon raised for a lusty
singing of “Happy Birthday.” Everyone cheers when it turns out I still am full of enough hot air to extinguish the forest
fire of candles on the four-tier carrot cake Anna baked.


The invitation said no presents, but there are a couple of gags—George found a card that reads, “Congratulations, man, you’re
60 and you know what that means.” Inside: “No more khakis!” Below, George has inscribed by hand, “P.S. Now you know why judges
wear robes.” In the box he handed over, there is a new death-black gown with braided golden drum major epaulets fixed at the
shoulder. The mock finery for the chief inspires broad guffaws when I display it to the assembled guests.


After another ten minutes of mingling, the group begins to disperse.

“News,” Ray Horgan says in a voice delicate enough for a pixie as he edges past on his way out. A grin creases his wide pink
face, but partisan talk about my candidacy is forbidden on public property, and as chief judge, I am ever mindful of the burden
of being an example. Instead, I agree to come by his office in half an hour.


After everyone else is gone, Nat and Barbara and I and the members of my staff gather up the paper plates and glasses. I thank
them all.


“Anna was wonderful,” says Barbara, then adds, in one of those bursts of candor my odd duck of a wife will never understand
is not required, “This whole party was her idea.” Barbara is especially fond of my senior law clerk and often expresses dismay
that Anna is just a little too old for Nat, who has recently parted with his long-term girlfriend. I join the compliments
for Anna’s baking, which is locally famous in the court of appeals. Emboldened by the presence of my family, which can only
mark her gesture as innocuous, Anna advances to embrace me while I pat her back in comradely fashion.


“Happy birthday, Judge,” she declares. “You rock!” With that, she’s gone, while I do my best to banish the startling sensation
of Anna full against me from my mind, or at least my expression.


I firm up dinner plans with my wife and son. Barbara predictably prefers to eat at home rather than at a restaurant. They
depart while the odors of cake and champagne linger sadly in the newly silent room. Sixty years along, I am, as ever, alone
to deal with myself.


I have never been what anybody would call a cheerful sort. I’m well aware that I’ve had more than my fair share of good fortune.
I love my son. I relish my work. I climbed back to the heights of respectability after tumbling into a valley of shame and
scandal. I have a middle-aged marriage that survived a crisis beyond easy imagining and is often peaceful, if never fully
connected. But I was raised in a troubled home by a timid and distracted mother and a father who felt no shame about being
a son of a bitch. I was not happy as a child, and thus it seemed very much the nature of things that I would never come of
age contented.


But even by the standards of somebody whose emotional temperature usually ranges from blah to blue, I’ve been in a bad way
awaiting today. The march to mortality occurs every second, but we all suffer certain signposts. Forty hit me like a ton of
bricks: the onset of middle age. And with sixty, I know full well that the curtain is rising on the final act. There is no
avoiding the signs: Statins to lower my cholesterol. Flomax to downsize my prostate. And four Advil with dinner every night,
because a day of sitting, an occupational hazard, does a number on my lower back.


The prospect of decline adds a special dread of the future and, particularly, my campaign for the supreme court, because when
I take the oath twenty months from now, I will have gone as far as ambition can propel me. And I know there will still be
a nagging whisper from my heart. It’s not enough, the voice will say. Not yet. All this done, all this accomplished. And yet,
at the heart of my heart, I will still not have the unnameable piece of happiness that has eluded me for sixty years.


Tomassino Molto III, acting prosecuting attorney for Kindle County, was behind the PA’s desk, big and heavy as a ’60s Cadillac,
wondering how different he was, when his chief deputy, Jim Brand, struck a single knuckle on the door frame.


“Deep thoughts?” asked Brand.

Tommy smiled, making the best efforts of a chronically blunt personality to be elusive. The question of how much he had changed
in the last two years arrived in Tommy’s brain like a drip from an eave once or twice every hour. People said he was dramatically
altered, joking all the time about where he hid the genie and the magic lamp. But Tommy was in his second stint as acting
prosecutor and he’d learned to recognize the flattery people always paid to power. How much could anybody change, after all?
he wondered. Was he really different? Or was he simply who he had always known he was at the core?


“State copper from Nearing just called in,” said Brand once he entered. “They found Barbara Sabich dead in her bed. The chief
judge’s wife?”


Tommy loved Jim Brand. He was a fine lawyer and loyal in a way few people were these days. But even so, Molto bridled at the
suggestion he had a peculiar interest in Rusty Sabich. He did, of course. Twenty-two years later, the name of the chief judge
of the court of appeals, who Tommy had unsuccessfully prosecuted for murdering a female colleague of theirs, still coursed
through him like current after the insertion of a plug. But what he did not care for was the insinuation he had carried a
long grudge against Sabich. A grudge was a badge of the dishonest, who could not face the truth, including a truth that was
unflattering to them. Tommy had long accepted the outcome of that case. A trial was a dogfight, and Rusty and his dog had
won.


“So?” asked Tommy. “Is the office sending flowers?”

Brand, tall and solid in a white shirt starched stiff as a priest’s collar, smiled, revealing good teeth. Tommy did not respond,
because he had actually meant it. This had happened to Tommy his entire life, when his own internal logic, so clear and unfaltering,
led to a remark that everybody else took for blatant comedy.


“No, it’s strange,” said Brand. “That’s why the lieutenant called it in. It’s like, ‘What’s up with this?’ The wife croaks
and the husband doesn’t even dial 911. Who appointed Rusty Sabich coroner?”


Tommy beckoned for more details. The judge, Brand said, had not told a soul, not even his son, for nearly twenty-four hours.
Instead, he had arranged the corpse like a mortician, as if they would be waking her right there. Sabich attributed his actions
to shock, to grief. He had wanted it all to be just so before he shared the news. Tommy supposed he could understand that.
Twenty-two months ago, at the age of fifty-seven, after a life in which poignant longing seemed as inevitable as breathing,
Tommy had fallen in love with Dominga Cortina, a shy but lovely administrator in the Clerk of Court’s office.