Framed: Ten Years Stolen

Chapter 16

By Thursday morning of the second week of December, the red vinyl seal from the spillway had dried inside a clear evidence bag, its stamped 0731 sharp against the plastic.

Grace went to the courthouse at nine. She walked into Judge Marla Kessler's courtroom with a motion for an evidence preservation order and a demand for the original sign-out slip from the day the master tapes had been removed eight days after my release. Kessler read the motion twice, set her gold-rimmed glasses down beside the file folder, and signed the order from the bench. She gave the State's Attorney's office forty-eight hours to produce the slip.

While Grace worked the courthouse, I drove my F-150 east to the Bureau's field office in Aurora. I did not send a courier. I carried the sealed bag holding the four-inch strip of red vinyl and the shoebox containing Danny Cole's three microcassettes up the stairs myself.

Agent Laura Kline met me at the intake counter. She looked at the stamped numbers on the red seal through the plastic, then lined the three dated cassettes up on the blotter. She filled out the property receipt in small, square print, sliding the carbon copy across the counter for my signature.

"Chain of custody starts here," Kline said. "Once you sign this line, Mr. Reed, these don't come back to your shop until a trial is over."

"They've been in my shop long enough," I said, and signed my name.

On the way back I had a print shop make an eight-by-ten color photograph of the red seal lying next to a steel ruler. I slid the print into a manila folder and put it on the passenger seat.

That evening, the Fox Valley Builders Association hosted a candidates' forum in the exhibition hall at the county fairgrounds. Tickets were forty dollars at the door, open to the public. I paid cash, wore my one good dark coat, and walked in under the high aluminum trusses.

The front rows were filled with the men who poured concrete and subdivided farmland across Kane County, Victor Hale's donors sitting shoulder to shoulder in wool overcoats. Before I took a seat near the center aisle, I clipped my phone to a small bracket on the breast pocket of my coat and opened the livestream. Within three minutes, the counter in the corner of the screen climbed past forty thousand viewers.

Victor Hale sat at the center of the stage beneath his campaign banner. Since I walked out of Stateville I had seen him only on billboards and on television. Now he was thirty feet away, fifty-eight years old, his silver hair neat under the truss lights.

When the moderator opened the floor microphone for audience questions, I stood up before anyone in the front rows could move. I walked down the concrete aisle with the manila folder in my left hand and stopped behind the standing microphone.

"Mr. Hale. Caleb Reed. Your office signed my interrogation tapes out of the vault eight days after I walked out of Stateville. Nobody signed them back in. Where are they?"

Along the front row, half a dozen heads turned. On stage, Hale did not look toward his staff along the wall. He stood up from his chair, buttoned his suit jacket, and walked to the wooden lectern. He rested both hands on its edges and looked down at me, his voice slow and gentle, pitched as if he were explaining a hard truth to a relative.

"Mr. Reed. I remember you. I remember your mother in the hallway. Evidence in a closed matter is handled by clerks, not candidates."

I opened the manila folder and held the eight-by-ten photograph up above the microphone stand, facing the stage and the press cameras along the side wall.

"This came out of the county reservoir on Tuesday. It's your office's seal. Number 0731. Your clerks handled it into thirty feet of water."

Hale did not look at the photograph. He turned his shoulders toward the three hundred people seated in the metal folding chairs, opening his hands slightly at the edges of the lectern.

"This man bought the scene of the crime and dug up its floor. If anyone in this room is handling evidence, it's him."

A ripple of low laughter ran through the first three rows of developers.

I lowered the photograph and put it back inside the folder. I did not argue with the lectern. Instead, I turned my back on the stage so that I was facing the rows of donors, the neighbors behind them, and the local reporters holding their recorders near the aisle. I spoke loudly enough to carry without the microphone.

"Mr. Hale visited the jury at the Route 38 motel the night before closing arguments in my trial. One of those jurors is in a burn unit with her right hand wrapped. Her name is Margaret Ellis. She taught some of you. Ask her who came to the lounge."

I walked back up the aisle to my row and sat down, placing my hands flat on my knees where everyone around me could see them.

Nobody in the front rows laughed. Behind the lectern, Hale stood with his hands still resting on the wood for a beat before returning to his chair. At the side table, the moderator cleared his throat, turned a page on his legal pad, and read the next question about highway zoning.

I stayed in my seat until the closing remarks ended at nine o'clock, then clicked off the stream and walked out into the gravel parking lot.

The lot was emptying fast. My F-150 sat under the far sodium lamp by the chain-link fence, away from the crush of sedans.

As I reached the rear bumper of my truck, a black town car idled past the end of the row and stopped. The rear door opened, and Victor Hale stepped out onto the gravel with his dark wool coat buttoned to the throat and his felt hat held in his hand. His driver stayed behind the wheel with the windows up.

There were no television cameras at the back of the lot. The nearest departing car was fifty yards away, turning toward Route 47.

Hale walked past the bed of my truck, coming within arm's reach, and stopped for two seconds on the frozen gravel. He looked straight at me, his expression calm, his voice dropping so low it barely carried over the idle of the town car's engine.

"Your public defender brought me a photocopy once, Mr. Reed. It was nothing then. It is nothing now."

He did not wait for an answer. He walked the three steps to the open door of the town car, got in, and pulled the door shut behind him.

I stood by the tailgate and watched the red taillights turn onto the highway. In the hall, in front of three hundred people and three cameras, he had remembered only my mother in a corridor and left the files to clerks. Out here in the dark, with no microphones and no witnesses, he knew which piece of paper my public defender had carried into his office ten years ago. That was his rule: he only told the truth in places nobody could subpoena.

The next morning at eight-thirty, I was wiping down the front counter of the shop when Grace's ten-year-old Subaru pulled into the lot. They had not waited out the forty-eight hours.

Grace walked in carrying a single laminated sheet inside a document sleeve. She did not take off her coat. She laid the paper flat on the scarred wood between us.

It was the property room sign-out slip, dated eight days after the gates at Stateville opened for me. In the description box, a clerk had typed: Received: 2 master cassettes, item 0731.

At the bottom, on the line reserved for the receiving officer, was a heavy, slanted signature in black ink: M. Doyle, Chief Investigator.

The man who had walked into the courthouse basement to sign out an evidence box he already knew was empty was currently running Victor Hale's campaign from the old bank down the street.