Framed: Ten Years Stolen

Chapter 7

Judge Marla Kessler has sat on the Kane County bench for nineteen years, and she reads everything twice. She turned the state's charging document over, adjusted her gold-rimmed glasses, and laid both palms flat on the wood.

The arraignment was set for nine. By eight-thirty the courtroom benches held the local newspaper reporter, two television cameras stationed out in the corridor, and about half the sign-carriers from the motel parking lot. I sat at the defense table in my one good coat, keeping my hands resting on the yellow legal pad.

Grace Nolan did not waste time with introductory remarks. She set her briefcase down, took out the state crime laboratory report, and stepped to the lectern.

"Your Honor, the State's entire case rests on a gym bag found in my client's motel closet," Grace said. "The State has no witness placing Mr. Reed at the Route 47 site, no vehicle, and no tools of entry. What the State does have, from its own forensic laboratory, is this report. Technicians lifted eleven usable prints from the merchandise inside that bag: the drills, the battery packs, the tablet, and the zipper pulls. Not one print matches Caleb Reed. Every identified print belongs to one man: Curtis Vale."

The prosecutor was a young assistant from Hale's office, sent over for the morning. He stood up in a hurry, tugging his cuffs. "Objection. Relevance."

"Curtis Vale," Grace continued, turning her shoulder slightly toward him, "has two prior burglary convictions in this county. For the past six years he has been a paid confidential informant for the Kane County Sheriff's Office, reporting directly to Sheriff Briggs. The informant file is a public payroll record. We subpoenaed it yesterday. It took the county four hours to find a legal excuse not to produce it, and they failed."

The young assistant shifted from foot to foot. He opened a manila folder, closed it, and cleared his throat.

While the young man shuffled his papers, I took Grace's pencil. On the top sheet of the pad, I wrote a line I had turned over all night in the holding cell: Krol's body-cam log. Check the time gap before he opened the closet. I slid the pad toward her elbow.

Grace looked down, read the note, and nodded once.

Judge Kessler took off her glasses and placed them beside the docket sheet. "Mr. Prosecutor. Your office charged a man the State of Illinois has formally exonerated, not two months after that exoneration made the national news, with possessing property covered in the fingerprints of the sheriff's own paid informant. I am going to give you one opportunity to explain to this court why I should not dismiss this matter from the bench and refer the whole file to the Bureau of Investigation before noon."

The young assistant swallowed. He looked at the empty chairs behind him, then down at his table. "The State moves to dismiss, Your Honor. Without prejudice."

"With," Judge Kessler said, "the court's considerable prejudice."

The gavel struck the block.

"Mr. Reed, you are free to go. Again." She looked down at me from the bench. "This court apologizes that it is becoming a habit. The referral to the State Bureau of Investigation regarding the Kane County Sheriff's Office will issue from my chambers this afternoon."

Grace raised her voice before the clerk called the room. "One matter for the record, Your Honor. Deputy Krol wore a body camera during the search, as county policy has required for three years. The footage for the six minutes between entering Mr. Reed's room and finding that duffel bag does not exist. The sheriff's department reported an equipment malfunction. The maintenance log shows the device worked without error for eleven minutes before entering the room and for forty minutes after."

She handed the log to the bailiff. Judge Kessler signed the transfer sheet without looking up. "Next case."

Briggs did not come to court. Briggs, I was told, was in meetings.

Outside on the courthouse steps, the sign-carriers had thinned down to three or four men standing near the handrail. None of them looked at me. One old man I did not know stepped back as I reached the bottom step, took off his work cap, and held it against his stomach. He said nothing. He simply stood there in the November cold with his head bare while I walked down to the curb.

That evening, Grace drove me to Unit 14 in her Subaru. The facility floodlights hummed above the chain-link fence on Route 59. I unlocked the padlock, rolled the orange door up, and pulled the rotted tarp off the machinist's tool chest.

I knelt on the cold concrete in my good coat and opened the iron lid for the third time since my release. First alone, the day I walked out of prison. Then with Grace, when I gave her the receipt from the coffee tin. Now I lifted the steel tray that had held the top layer and set it on the floor.

Layer two was underneath.

I picked up the brass key. It was small, heavy-toothed, with square cuts along the blade that belonged to a solid tumbler in an old public building. Joe Miller had pressed it into my palm a week before the fire, while we sat in the cab of his truck behind the shop with the engine idling. If anything ever happens to me, this stays with you, he had told me then. Don't ask me what it opens, Caleb. A man who knows what a key opens goes looking for the lock at the wrong time.

I had never asked. I sealed it in this chest during my months out on bond.

Beneath the key lay a sheet of lined notebook paper, folded in thirds. I opened the folds. The writing was mine, rounder and faster than I write now, copied off my public defender's discovery list in the months I was out on bond. It gave the property-room catalog entry for the interrogation master tapes: division, year, shelf sequence.

The sequence ended in 0731.

I held the paper under the flashlight beam and tapped the four digits with my thumb.

"Frank Delgado," I said.

Grace leaned down from the doorway, her coat pulled tight against the draft. "What about Frank?"

"In Stateville," I said. "Frank showed me his palm. Four numbers inked into his skin: zero, seven, three, one. He said Eddie Marsh made him memorize them in the yard. Eddie logged my interrogation master tapes into the courthouse property room ten years ago. Two years later he logged them out, once, on a signature he was told not to read, and he never saw them come back."

Grace came into the unit and looked at the paper in my hand. "The clerk who died."

"The clerk who hanged himself the night before his release date," I said. "With a new suit in his cell and his papers packed. Eddie carried the tail of this number in his head for years, waiting for someone who might use it. They killed Eddie Marsh to bury it. But Frank remembered the four digits, and I wrote the full string before they locked me up."

Grace looked from the paper to the heavy brass key in my fingers. "What does the key open?"

"I don't know," I told her. "Eleven years, and I never knew. I only knew it had to survive."

I closed my fingers around the metal. "There's a lock somewhere in this county with my name's number on it, Grace. And the men who planted that duffel just taught the whole state to watch me look for it."