Presumed Guilty

Book 0: Presumed Innocent

by Scott Turow

Genres: Legal Thrillers

Synopsis

The latest legal thriller from the #1 New York Times bestselling author who created the genre, Scott Turow.

Release date: January 14, 2025

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 464

Sample

September 13, 2023

Aaron has disappeared. It has happened before and, despite my recent hopes, it will probably happen again. Everybody realizes that. Except his mother.

“Do you think he’s okay?” asks Bea, pronounced like the letter B. Thirteen months ago, as a gift of sorts for my seventy-fifth birthday, Bea agreed to marry me, although she’s been reluctant since then to set a date.

Late last night, while we were sleeping, a hellacious storm blew in from the north. The concussive power of the thunder doubled as it ricocheted off Mirror Lake, on whose shore we live. After a boom like an artillery round rattled our windows, I felt Bea rise—and a few minutes later tumble back into bed with a cheerless weight that let me know that Aaron was not home. Up for the morning, she’s just checked again, hope against hope, with the same result.

“Of course,” I answer about Aaron, doing my best to look convincing. “You know him. He’s probably by himself out in the woods.”

“But how did he get there?” Now that she asks, this is a troubling question. Since Aaron’s felony conviction a year and a half ago, after he was arrested with enough cocaine and meth to mean real trouble, his driver’s license has been suspended. More important, the terms of the strict probation he agreed to in order to get out of the Skageon County jail after four months there require him to live in our house and stay in close touch with us. Aaron, we both know, could teach classes at the university level in how to get in your own way. And yet, this is the first time since he moved in that he has ‘gone dark,’ as he likes to put it, turning off his phone and voicemail, relieving himself of what he often finds the most onerous responsibility of civilization, the obligation to communicate.

I ask Bea whether her ex has heard from their son, and she says she hasn’t tried Lloyd yet. She did speak to her own father, but Joe, who is close to Aaron, claimed to have no idea concerning his grandson’s whereabouts.

“Do you believe him?” I ask, and Bea’s face is mobile for an instant with her customary skepticism of her father.

“Probably,” she says. For a second, we ponder one another in silence, until she asks, “We don’t have to call the judge yet, do we?”

‘We,’ as she knows, is euphemistic. The sentencing judge, Morton Sams, thought that I, as a former judge myself, and someone who still needs his license to practice law, would understand my duty to the court if Aaron steps out of line.

“Not yet,” I tell her. “It’s one night. It could be anything. Maybe whoever’s car he was in broke down. He’ll turn up soon.”

Before now, I would have said that Aaron has done well. He attends meetings faithfully, avoids the drug-addled crew who resembled the undead that he was living with before his arrest, and even found a job he loved. He was working for Galore, a party planner in the swanky summer enclave of Como Stop nearby, doing all manner of commercial art, everything from banners to designing invitations. But with the annual retreat of the seasonal residents, he was unexpectedly laid off last week. The support groups Bea attends emphasize how precarious sobriety is for someone like Aaron who is new to it. Now the unspoken probability that he has relapsed, and the dark complications that would invite, including the risk of a significant prison sentence, has turned his mother’s fabulous amber eyes into lakes of misery.

At these moments I am impressed by the occasional cruelty of motherhood with its consuming anxieties that seem to have no expiration date. Bea often admits that until she and Lloyd adopted Aaron at birth, she regarded herself as laid-back. Instead, her worries multiplied at once, as people she would never have suspected drew back at the sight of an infant in her arms who was, by some uncertain proportion, Black.

Until now, the new year that functionally commences in the US after Labor Day had fallen into a satisfying rhythm, after a languorous summer. I had returned my attention to the legal work I’ve done for the last decade, as a mediator and arbitrator—basically a privately paid judge—and Bea had survived the avalanche of administrative crises that befall a grade school principal at the start of every year. Ecclesiastes was not correct when he proclaimed that there is nothing new under the sun, but one of the comforts of this age is that there is less.

I have resided up here in what is called the Skageon Region for fourteen years. We are a bit more than one hundred miles north-northwest of Kindle County, where I had always lived before: Son. Student. Husband. Father. Prosecutor. Judge. A dutiful and generally successful existence. But that life collapsed under the impact of a series of numbing calamities that began with the death of my wife and culminated in a prison term for me, which ended unexpectedly when the prosecutor suddenly conceded I was innocent.

After my release, I planned to hide out up here for a year or so. I had no wish to explain myself to anyone and figured I’d wait long enough that people would forget to ask. Instead, I realized that aside from my son and granddaughters, whom I see once or twice a month, there was nothing in Kindle calling me back. The prospect of a new start in a very different place, where remaining solitary seemed more natural than antisocial, was appealing. Here I could recover at my own pace.

The Skageon Region contains a sort of variety pack of American life. At the western end is the magnificent Como Lake, whose clear waters run seven miles long and three across and more than two hundred feet deep. On its shore, every summer since the late nineteenth century, the rich at leisure have gathered, baronial families who would arrive by train from as far away as New York City to spend a few idyllic months in the vast mansions that hulked along the lake. The nearby place, where the railroad came to a halt, was called Como Stop, a name that stuck as the town developed. Today Como Stop has roughly ten thousand full-time residents, and maintains a distinctly upscale vibe, with coffee shops and brew pubs and the kind of stylish stores selling brightly colored ladies’ wear and home décor items familiar to well-to-do suburbs. Sixty miles east, in Carroll County, the old worn-out city of Kweagon, which was once the home to a US Motors plant, holds block after block of empty storefronts and dilapidated housing for the struggling communities of color.

Between the extremes of those two towns is where Bea and I and fifty thousand other people dwell. Outside Como Stop, shopping centers and townhouse developments have sprung up, principally serving those who toil in the many large warehouses and distribution centers along the interstate. Moving east, the rich land in the Skageon River Valley is given over to family farms, where dairy cows swish their tails, and corn, soybeans and alfalfa, as well as several kinds of fruits and vegetables, rise and fall. Here and there the large fields are broken up by the few remaining swaths of primary growth forest. On our side of the county, the footprints of the glaciers pushed the land into rocky formations with ponds and small lakes forming in the low spots.

It was the dream of a second home in that area, a place where we could swim and boat with our son, that first brought me and Barbara, my deceased wife, up here almost forty years ago. These days, fertilizer runoff leaves many of the local bodies of water eutrophic and rimmed in green algae, but we discovered Mirror Lake, sourced by subterranean creeks that percolate up through cleansing layers of limestone. The business of being a prosecutor, as I was then, gives you a proctologist’s view of humanity. I wanted a haven for my family, away from the turmoil of the city and the anxieties of my job. For once, Barbara and I agreed, and we bought a small cabin at the rear of the property I now live on. (There’s a story there, too, but I’ll take them one at a time.) From May to late September, whenever I had a break between trials, we’d come up on the weekend, living in our bathing suits and striking up comfortable friendships with our neighbors.

I enjoyed the sense of reprieve and over time looked forward especially to Sunday mornings, when Nat and Barbara usually slept in, and I could ride my bike the three miles to Mirror, the little town nearby, where I was able to find a copy of the Kindle County Tribune at a local gas station. A billionaire commodities trader had purchased the Trib, determined to turn it into a national paper. The Sunday edition now had the heft of a phone book, and provided a whole day’s reading with its expansive coverage of news and culture.

After my exile up here, I continued that habit but eventually found that periodically the station was sold out. Eventually, Ravi, the proprietor, told me that despite his protests, his distributor was delivering only a single copy of the Sunday Tribune. I started getting up earlier and earlier to snag it.

One Sunday, I walked in a little before seven a.m., and there was a shorter woman in front of the cashier. Her back was to me, her springy black hair banded in a ponytail, but I could see that she had ‘my’ copy of the paper in her hand, while she awaited change from Dema at the register. When the woman turned, I was deeply struck—yes, she was very attractive, at least by my lights, with those yellowish eyes that stood out like beacons in her darker complexion. But it was what passed through her face instantly that took hold of me, a bolt of intelligence, self-confidence and humor. Of course, she could tell at once from my crestfallen look why I was there.

She hesitated only a second and then asked, ‘What’s your favorite section?’ I was startled, but said, if I had to pick, it would be the front pages, featuring world and national news.

Later in the day, I came back from fishing to find that section of the paper stuffed into my mailbox. The fact that she recognized me was not all that surprising. Since my life had once made headlines, I was fairly notorious around Skageon, and my address was in the phone book.

The next weekend I left her a note at the gas station that thanked her for her generosity, but informed her I was henceforth conceding the paper to her, having now taught myself how to access the digital edition (which apparently was the billionaire’s new strategy to turn a profit). After my release from prison, I had started a largely clandestine relationship with the widow, Lorna Murphy, who lived in the large lakeside house that fronted my cabin, but we had both moved on by then. I was dating occasionally, and considered whether it was wise to add another flirty line or two, asking my competitor, for instance, about her favorite section—but I decided against it. A woman with that kind of natural spark was almost certainly married or attached, and even if that weren’t the case, I was, from the looks of it, about thirty years older than she was. More to the point, I decided, was the fact that she had delivered the front section to my mailbox without a note or card, a clear signal that she was not inviting further contact.

Now and then, when I was filling up at Ravi’s, or visiting Mirror’s one sparse grocery store, she’d cross my mind, but there were no further sightings. I accepted the judgment of fate, realizing that, as so often happens, she would likely turn out to be not half as interesting as she’d appeared in that initial moment.

Mansy Potter—Mansfield Potter IV—is the best friend I have in these parts. We met when we were both appellate court judges, and once I ran into big trouble, he was a stalwart, who denounced the charges against me, purely on faith. We have lunch together every Wednesday, usually at Trixie’s, a stylish café with excellent food, on the eastern edge of Como Stop.

For the half-hour drive, I shortcut down a series of two-lane roads. Time, in the country, passes differently. In Kindle County, for decades I commuted by bus or ferry and began my workday at once, concentrating on the briefs and motions I carried in my briefcase. Now, although I often drive considerable distances, I’m more at leisure. Sometimes there are phone calls with my son, Nat, sometimes a podcast, or an audiobook, or conference calls regarding an arbitration. But more often I enjoy the meditative zone I find myself in on a straight road with little traffic, where I can relish the liberty of existing in open space, absorbing the simple poetry of the country landscape. The land rolls gently and the farm fields, rising against the horizon, look like a quilt. The soybeans are going from green to gold, the feed corn is still standing, its withering leaves looking like arms lowered in disappointment, and the early harvest of other crops has left either yellow stubble or, where the earth has already been turned, the rich black of the loam that somehow looks almost good enough to eat. Sometimes on a high point, a substantial farmhouse will command the distance, often a trilevel McMansion, in contrast to the five-room clapboard bungalows the locals bought from the Sears catalog a century ago.

My visits with Lorna aside, I was keeping to myself when I moved up here. I first accepted Mansy’s invitation for lunch as an act of loyalty. I assumed—correctly—that he needed company in the wake of the death of Kathleen, after fifty-three years of marriage. As time went on, however, it was Mansy who became the person with a mission, determined to lure me back into the practice of law.

When I arrived in Skageon, I viewed the law the way the lapsed regard their forsaken faith. But with Mansy’s prodding, I became intrigued with the idea of accepting court appointments as the lawyer for criminal defendants too poor to pay an attorney. I thought I’d bring a unique perspective, as someone who’d been the accused, and a piece of me enjoyed the ironic prospect of achieving a kind of repertory role in the criminal justice system. Prosecutor. Judge. Defendant. And now defense lawyer. Except for the clerk who calls out ‘Hear ye’ to start each session, I would have played every speaking part in the courtroom.

Mansy, who still exerts considerable political power in Skageon County, was quick to help, but I liked the work less than I had anticipated. My clients were all guilty, which I had expected, but their plights did nothing to lift my spirits. They had stumbled through life, each of them. Their crimes were one more thing at which they’d failed in the course of an existence in which hindrance and struggle were constant themes.

‘I have another idea for you,’ Mansy said several months later when I sheepishly reported my disappointment. Since leaving the state supreme court, he’d been working as an arbitrator and mediator, through a big outfit down in Kindle County. He had more work than he wanted and thought he could direct the overflow to me. Thanks to the start Mansy gave me, I’m now able to handpick my cases.

When I arrive at Trixie’s, I am surprised to see Mansy standing beside a two-top, in the midst of what looks to be an intense conversation with his second son, Harrison, who is called Hardy everywhere but on his official letterhead. Like his father a generation before him, Hardy is the Skageon County Prosecuting Attorney. My first guess, given the look of gravity between the two men, is that Hardy has encountered a substantial obstacle in his campaign for reelection next year, a problem which requires his father’s seasoned advice. Almost a head taller than his dad, with dark hair and eyes in a family of blonds, Hardy is holding his lunch check, so I take it that he bumped into his dad after dining with other companions.

Standing by the glass case that holds the cash register, I look around the restaurant aimlessly, rather than seeming to spy on the Potters’ conversation. Trixie’s has the peppy feel of a chain, new construction with exposed rafters and skylights, but the food is strictly home cooked. Every week now the crowd is thinner. The weather remains mild, but most of the folks with houses in Como Stop have kids and grandkids back in school and have resumed their usual routines in Kindle County or Milwaukee.

Mansy finally notices me. He waves me forward while Hardy heads out, brushing past me with a somewhat reluctant smile that suggests he remains deeply preoccupied or is even less pleased than usual to see me.

“Sorry,” Mansy says, taking his seat and motioning me toward mine. “Family issues.”

Like his son, Mansy, even at the age of eighty-three, remains a handsome fellow. I have often tried to figure out why the WASP elite in this country look so good. To some extent, I think, it must reflect their long hold on power, meaning they set—or were taken to embody—aesthetic standards in their own image—tall, blond, blue-eyed, athletic. And of course, for generations they married their own kind, so that the towheaded children seem to come forth like they were issued from a stamping plant. Whatever the reason, Mansy is a Rockwell figure, with a full mane of white hair parted to the side and going just a trifle yellow near his scalp. Below his thick white eyebrows, a somewhat prominent nose dominates his well-proportioned features. His cool-blue eyes still hold the light of a fierce intelligence.

“No intention of prying,” I say, “but is Charmaine all right?” Hardy’s wife has MS and uses a wheelchair these days at times.

“Fine,” Mansy answers. “The MS is stable, but Charmaine doesn’t need a lot of stress, and my screw-loose granddaughter is providing plenty, as usual.”

I decide ‘What now?’ is a trifle impolite. Mansy’s manners are flawless and I’m always trying to emulate his genteel manner. When he speaks, his voice modulates like a radio announcer’s and he exhibits artful tact, a sort of perfect pitch for knowing what can be well expressed and what can’t, what people will hear and take to heart, rather than ignore.

“Mae has disappeared,” he says. “She said something about camping, but slipped out of the house and is on radio silence. Won’t pick up her phone or answer messages.”

I’m sure my face betrays me, and Mansy’s expression darkens.

“Aaron too?” he asks. When I answer yes, he takes a second to ponder and then says what we’re both thinking: “Too coincidental.”

Neither family will receive this as good news. Bea regards Mae as the principal cause of Aaron’s troubles. It’s certainly true that on his last arrest, the one that landed him in jail for four months, he was holding drugs Mae had purchased. It infuriated Bea that Mae wasn’t even questioned, but the sheriff’s deputies here, like cops in many other places, extend some professional courtesy to the elected prosecutor and his family. Besides, as Aaron pointed out to his mother, he was the one who was driving loaded.

Aaron and Mae have been an item since junior high, with fiery breakups and quick reunions becoming frequent toward the end of high school. After he was released from jail, I thought Aaron had sworn not to see her.

“We hadn’t even heard they were back together,” I tell Mansy. Aaron, especially since he’s gotten sober, is generally honest. He prefers not to answer, rather than lie. But with him, Mae is a tender subject.

Mae is both brilliant and uncommonly beautiful, even by the standards of her fine-looking family. A white blonde, tall and slender, she has the angelic features of the kind of young women who were on shampoo bottles in my youth. She actually tried for a while to make it as a model in Manhattan after she dropped out of college. Long before this summer’s cinematic extravaganza, her hair and figure inspired comparisons to that iconic doll.

“Think they’re eloping?” Mansy asks out of nowhere.

“Jesus. Eloping?” I had immediately assumed that the two of them were in a tent, enjoying an ecstatic orgy of sex and drugs. “Does Mae talk about that?”

“No, it just came into my head,” Mansy says, although I suspect he is being discreet. “It’s the kind of crazy impulsive thing they both would do. Certainly her.”

“That marriage wouldn’t last a month,” I declare. “And I sure wouldn’t send china as a wedding gift. It would all end up shattered against the walls.”

I’m not completely positive how Mansy would react to a Black grandson-in-law. I suspect he’d need a second to hitch up his britches and then accept it in stride. Charmaine and Hardy would be another matter. They would never ascribe their reservations to skin color, but the racehorse breeding of the Potter family has been impeccable, and I imagine they tried to inculcate the idea of ‘marrying well’ since Mae was at a young age. In Skageon County, the Potters are accepted as one of the few dynastic families, and have long played the role of benevolent aristocrats. The original family fortune was made in the nineteenth century by digging sphagnum moss, and was expanded into forestry, real estate and banking. The children have gone off to elite educations in the East or Midwest and then returned here, where they attend church with everybody else and do their business honorably.

“Would it be an imposition, Mansy, if I asked you not to say anything about Aaron to Hardy just yet?” Hardy’s attitude toward Aaron is similar to Bea’s feelings for Mae, but the power of his elected position makes him far more threatening. Whenever Aaron has had his scuffles with the law, Hardy has claimed to have removed himself from deciding his daughter’s boyfriend’s fate. But Hardy is in many ways his father’s polar opposite, and seems to make up for his lesser abilities by adhering to lower scruples. It would not be unlike him to offer some kind of winking direction to his chief deputy, who now would be the one to decide whether to move to revoke Aaron’s probation, if he’s violated its many strict terms. “I’d like to give him a day or two and see what kind of shape he’s in when he gets back here.”

Mansy lowers an eyebrow and asks, “You think he’s using again?”

“I hope not,” I say. The fact is that substances seem to have been a large part of Mae and Aaron’s relationship from the start. Even at thirteen, they were drinking Hardy’s vodka and watering the bottles, and occasionally stealing some of Charmaine’s pills.

“He’s been sober quite some time now, hasn’t he?” Mansy, who comments often about his unsuccessful effort to discipline himself with alcohol, regards sobriety as a substantial achievement, as do I.

“I thought he’s been doing fabulously,” I answer. “He’s got a sponsor in Kweagon, Reverend Spruce, he really admires.”

“Oh yeah. Donall Spruce. Never said a good thing about me, but he’s an honest man.” Mansy gives his head a shake at the thought of the Reverend. “Has Joe heard from Aaron?” he asks, referring to Bea’s father.

“Bea says he’s denied it to her, but she never really believes him. I think I better lay eyes on Joe,” I tell Mansy. “If push comes to shove, he’ll lie to me anyway, but it’s harder for him to do it face-to-face.”

With the worrying subject of Mae and Aaron pretty much exhausted, we find, after another couple of minutes, that we’ve fallen back into the usual meandering flow of our luncheon conversations. Since each of us held public office for years—Mansy was a state senator, then served three terms as the elected PA for Skageon County, before running for the bench—politics is an inevitable topic, especially since we get the opportunity to joust with one another. We don’t agree about some national issues, like how to address climate change or tax policy, but our discussions are tempered by the recognition that these are matters far beyond the control of either of us. Our views have no more impact than a fan shouting instructions to the batter at a baseball game.

We also share a lot of local information, which, truthfully, is not much more than gossip. These are small towns, where people’s lives tend to intersect in multiple ways. Frequently, the news is about who has moved away, especially the young people, who often go off for college and find themselves educated beyond the level of available local employment. Bea also often comes home from the teachers’ lounge with tales of sexual intrigues, but Mansy is too gentlemanly to get into extended discussion of those topics. And certain other subjects are generally banned as well, since we have adopted the same three rules Mansy says he follows with his golf buddies. One, no discussion of physical ailments. A few years older than I, Mansy has a slightly longer list of complaints, but the truth is that both of us have enough friends who’ve passed by the wayside that we count ourselves among the blessed. Two, no grousing about the women in our lives. Mansy now has two female friends he sees regularly. Naturally, I have some curiosity about how this arrangement works in practice, but Mansy is not the kind to welcome any inquiry into the details. Third, no more than five minutes on grandchildren, including bragging—a rule observed in the breach today with our extended talk of Mae.

That news remains enough in mind that it requires no transition as we are winding up for me to return to it.

“And you’ll keep the stuff about Aaron between us for a day or two?” I ask again.

“Of course,” Mansy answers. “Speaking to Hardy wouldn’t be productive anyway. You could probably see he goes off like a Roman candle whenever Mae gets out of hand. And frankly, he needs to focus on his campaign. He’s gotten a late start as far as I’m concerned.”

Hardy has a primary opponent for the first time, a state senator named Madison van Ohne, who is running at him from the right.

Out in the parking lot, Mansy and I are smiling as we part, promising to be in touch if either of us gets further word about the missing pair. But I have no doubt we’re each leaving far more worried than we were when we arrived.

September 13–14

As I expected, the news I deliver when Bea returns from school—that Aaron is probably with Mae—induces a pained reflex. She leans forward with her slender hand gripping her forehead and shielding her eyes.

“Her mission in life is to bring him down, it really is,” she says. This is a clear exaggeration. Mae’s antic behavior most often strikes me as intended to harm herself more than anybody else. And it was Aaron who became an actual addict. But that does not prevent Bea from declaring, “Honestly, sometimes I just wish the earth would open and swallow that girl.”

After dinner, I can hear Bea on the phone with a couple of Aaron’s closest friends. She taught virtually every kid who grew up in the Mirror district while they were in grade school, and no matter how insolent they’ve become—and a lot of these kids still seem to need a solid smack—they answer her respectfully. But nobody knows much, with the exception of Cassity Benisch, Aaron’s bestie, who plays her cards close but, after a long pause, answers yes when Bea asks if Aaron is with Mae.

Bea passes another restless night. In the morning, I can see that the agony of being the parent of an addict, which she has not felt for close to a year and a half, has returned with its harrowing effect. The numbers say that most teen addicts eventually become productive adults. The problem is keeping them alive long enough; the year after rehab is the most tenuous. Aaron already failed once, after his first arrest while he was a college freshman, but having gotten this far now, he supposedly has a solid chance. Thus there is a special agony in finding that all the hopes raised by months of disciplined behavior may now be wasted, bringing us to the brink of disaster.

As she’s headed out to school, Bea stops by the garage door.

“Will you text Aaron, please, and warn him?” she asks. “Tell him you’re going to have to call the judge if we don’t hear from him.”

The point of this is lost on me, since none of her own messages have been delivered, all seemingly pending somewhere in the cloud.

“I’ll take that under advisement,” I say, trying to avoid an outright no. “But Mansy did make the point that we ought to talk to Joe. If anybody knows anything, your father does. If we haven’t heard from Aaron by tonight, we should probably go over to the VFW to have a word with him.”

“Me too?” Bea generally prefers to deal with her father only in Aaron’s company. When they are alone, she sometimes cannot contain her rage. Throughout her childhood, he was an abusive drunk who battered her mother and terrified his children.

“I just think if he knows where Aaron is, he’d have a harder time looking both of us in the eye and lying.”

Bea seems to accept my logic, but still issues a shudder before heading out the door.

I work until lunch, enjoying a half sandwich of gravlax we cured ourselves with a salmon I caught last week during the spawning run. I’ve just finished when the house phone rings. It’s the landline that comes free with our Internet.

“It’s Gert,” the woman says, a voice always enlarged by the rattle of phlegm from years of smoking. Gertrude Gevorgian is Aaron’s probation officer. “Where’s Aaron? I’ve been calling his cell for an hour.”

Now I’m in a spot. Addicts often take their families down with them, and so I know better than to lie for Aaron. But saying he’s AWOL will only create a crisis—for him, because that might jeopardize his probation, and also for me, since I’m supposed to be hi