Framed: Ten Years Stolen

Chapter 6

They came at five in the morning: three deputies and a warrant, knocking on the door of the weekly room by the interstate.

I opened up with my hands visible and my voice even, and while armed men went through my drawers I made coffee. It is a small thing, making coffee in your own kitchen during a search, but it is mine. I poured a cup and stood where they could see me and drank it, while a deputy went through my clothes a hanger at a time and another took the back off the toilet.

They found it in the closet, behind my one good coat.

It was a Kane County High School gym bag, navy, the Cougars logo gone gray with age. I had never seen it before. Inside, wrapped in a motel towel: two cordless drills, a contractor's laser level, a tablet, and a set of copper fittings. The warrant said they were the proceeds of a burglary at a construction site on Route 47, four nights prior.

Deputy Krol — young, pink-eared, reading my rights off a laminated card he had clearly never needed before — got to the end of the card and looked relieved. I asked if I could finish dressing. They allowed it. I tied my shoes slowly, and nobody hurried me.

"I didn't steal these," I said. "And whoever carried that bag into my room was careful about the door and careless about everything else."

"You can tell it to the judge," Krol said. He said it almost kindly.

Word travels in Kane County at the speed of a scanner app. By six there were maybe thirty people on the motel lot and across the road by the gas station, with signs. The manager watched from his doorway in a bathrobe, hands in pockets, working out what my fame would do to his rates. I read the signs through the cruiser window. SEND HIM BACK. THIEF IN, THIEF OUT. And one more, held by Mary Miller, who had last greeted me with a gallon of water at the prison gate: MY BROTHER IS STILL DEAD.

That one I did not begrudge her. Her brother is still dead. Out of every sign in that lot, hers was the only true one.

Krol drove. At the light on Route 47 a woman in the next lane recognized me off the television and lifted her phone. I gave her a nod. Manners are free.

At the county building they gave me the real furniture this time — a holding cell, steel bench, steel toilet, a camera with a red eye in the corner. The cell smelled of bleach laid over something older. My arraignment was set for the following morning. I sat on the bench, put my back against the wall, and started working the problem, because the morning was long and the problem was all I had brought with me.

Grace arrived at nine with her briefcase, and the deputy let her into the attorney's alcove. She stood close to the bars and spoke low, the way she speaks when walls might be listening.

"Possession cases live and die on knowledge, Mr. Reed. They have to prove you knew the bag was there, and they can't. But — " she had the arrest report open on her briefcase " — Krol's report says the closet was locked."

"The closet doesn't lock, Grace."

She stopped writing. Grace never stops writing.

"Somebody wrote a lie into an official report inside the first hour," she said.

"Good. Now here's the part that wins." I had worked it out overnight on the steel bench, and I laid it out for her the short way. "Whoever planted that bag wore gloves for my door, my closet and the bag itself. But the last step of the job is arranging the goods, and that's where men get lazy. Have the lab lift prints off the tools inside the bag. The drill handles. The battery packs. The zipper pulls. Not the bag — the cargo."

She was watching me without blinking.

"A man who plants evidence thinks like a delivery driver, not a burglar," I said. "He protects the route, not the cargo. And Briggs has a short bench. The man he sends for a job like this is a man he has used before, and men who have been used before have records."

"And records have fingerprints on file." She closed the briefcase. "The motion will be filed within the hour."

She gathered herself to go, then stopped and looked at me through the bars a moment longer than the work required. "You should be frightened, Mr. Reed. Frightened is the normal response. You sit in a cell making jokes and filing motions through me."

"I did my frightened years already. All ten of them, back to back." Down the corridor, Krol was pretending to study a clipboard, with the air of a man counting exits. "Him, though. Krol should be nervous. His sheriff sent him into a free man's room with a warrant for a planted bag, on camera, and when this turns, Briggs will be standing nowhere near him."

She left to file. I ate the bologna sandwich they slid through the slot. I napped sitting up, back to the wall, an old habit the state gave me for free. Mostly I waited, which is the other thing ten years trains into you, and I did it better than anyone in that building.

At four that afternoon Grace came back down the corridor faster than lawyers walk, a lab printout folded in her fist.

"Every print on those drills belongs to one man," she said through the bars. "And you are going to love whose payroll he's on."