The Holdout, page 21
“The jury?”
“You.”
Maya didn’t understand what he was trying to say.
“Gibson leaned in and whispered in my ear, ‘All we need is one. And I think Maya Seale is our one.’ ”
Maya tried to imagine what the expression on her face had been. She tried to remember if she’d shifted in her chair; if she’d gasped, as so many of the others had. She didn’t know. She realized that she’d been so focused on Lou in that moment that it had never occurred to her that Bobby’s lawyer could have been just as focused on her.
“I don’t…” Maya stammered. It never occurred to her that even before the deliberations, she was already affecting the trial’s outcome.
“You know how to play Hearts?” Bobby said. “Actually, I still have no idea how to play Hearts. Gibson does. Did. She said we were going to ‘shoot the moon.’ I guess it’s a risky move that either works very, very well—or you lose in a second?” He snapped his fingers. “I figured that given the stakes…fuck it.”
It seemed that Bobby Nock’s lawyer had a better eye for people like Maya than Maya did. It didn’t feel good, to be so thoroughly known by someone who’d only seen her face across a courtroom. It was no comfort to learn that she was an identifiable type: the idealist. The crusader.
The rube.
“Why are you telling me this?” she said.
“Because if I agree to help you, it won’t be because I owe you shit. You didn’t stick your neck out for me—you did exactly what you were supposed to do. What you were picked to do. Believe it or not, there are people in my life for whom I’m honest-to-God grateful. But you are not one of them.”
Maya did not need a pat on the back from him. What she needed was information. “So if you won’t help me out of gratitude, why will you?”
“Because I didn’t kill Jessica.”
It took Maya a moment to understand that this wasn’t merely a statement. It was a pact.
“I didn’t kill Rick,” she offered in return. And without another word, they reached an agreement.
“What happened when Rick found you?” she asked. “Why did you run, after?”
Then he did something she hadn’t seen him do in all of the hundreds of hours that they’d spent together, silently, in a courtroom.
He laughed. The sound was higher than his speaking voice, like a child’s. His laugh sounded like it came from a part of his lungs that didn’t get much use. “Let’s take a walk.”
* * *
—
THE FIRST THING Bobby did was to show her evidence supporting his alibi for the night of Rick’s death. As they strolled across the encampment, he told her that he’d been right here in East Jesus. One of the photographers in the camp had been taking photos all week. Rick took Maya by the photographer’s tent and showed her the digitally time-stamped photos. Bobby’s face was visible in the shots.
Provided the time stamps were accurate, the only way that Bobby could have killed Rick was if he’d been able to make the five- to seven-hour drive to L.A., commit a murder, and then make the five- to seven-hour drive back in the span of seventy minutes.
* * *
—
BOBBY’S OWN TENT was near the tower of dolls’ heads. The tent was just big enough for a sleeping bag, a box of water, a flashlight, and a few decorative touches.
“I’d offer you a seat,” he said, gesturing to the lack of the chairs. “But…”
Hung on the tent’s wall, beside the sleeping bag, Maya saw a crayon drawing of an alligator. The alligator was bright red, with orange teeth. Its incongruity with the surroundings couldn’t help but catch her eye. For a second she thought Bobby might have taken up crayon art, but then realized that it must be the work of a child. He had two younger brothers, she remembered. Did either of them have kids? It was as if Bobby had preserved only this one remnant of what could have been a normal familial life.
She had seen Bobby’s family in the courtroom. His parents attended every day, sitting on the opposite side from Elaine Silver. They’d been more visibly distraught than Elaine, or maybe they just hadn’t been hiding their grief. Maya had tried to fathom the depth of their suffering. Lou and Elaine Silver’s daughter had vanished from them in an instant. Jerry and Alana Nock’s son was slowly taken away from them before their eyes, day by day, over months. Maya didn’t know which was worse.
“Rick Leonard didn’t have anything on me,” he said, finally answering her question. “He showed up at my trailer in Miracle one day, all ready to interrogate me. To finally get me to confess, or something. I told him to go away.”
Maya had trouble believing this. “So then why did you run?”
“Because he was going to keep coming. Him and everyone else. He said with the ten-year anniversary coming up, there were going to be specials. More press. I wasn’t hard to find. It was all going to start all over again. So…I just couldn’t take it. Not again. One of the guys in Miracle told me about this place.” Bobby shook his head. “Pause a moment to think about how shitty my life has become: I’m taking real estate recommendations from pedophiles.”
Maya searched his face: Could this really be the truth?
Rick hadn’t even told Bobby what he’d found?
“You could have gone home.”
“Home?”
“Your parents. Your brothers.”
“I think they’ve been through enough.”
“It seems like you’ve been through more than enough yourself.”
“Have I?” Bobby kicked the toe of his boot into the hard dirt. “I can think of someone who went through a lot worse.” He looked up. “Jessica.”
And then, as if it was the most normal thing in the world to do, Maya asked Bobby a question that she’d wondered about—hypothesized about, strategized about—for ten years.
“Bobby,” she said, “who do you think killed Jessica?”
He smiled grimly. “It’s been so long since anybody’s asked me that.”
He looked over at the child’s alligator drawing on the wall. Like something in it was melting something inside him.
“Her dad used to hit her,” Bobby said.
Maya could feel the breath catching in her throat. “What are you talking about?”
“She showed me the bruises. He hit Elaine too, she said. It had been going on forever. Anything could set him off. If Jessica left the lights on at night. Or turned the wrong lights off. Or was late for dinner. Anything. I think I was the first person Jessica told. She was terrified of him. Shit, I’ve never even met the guy and I’m terrified of him. You grow up in a house like that—he is the gaseous exploding star, and everyone else, her included, is a barren rock planet. That was her metaphor, actually. I remember her saying it, right after she showed me the cigarette burns on…”
He stopped. As if he wanted to protect Maya from knowing the worst.
“She said her mom got it as bad as she did. But Elaine fucking Silver wasn’t going to do anything about it. She was in deep, taking that shit for decades.”
Maya’s mind was spinning. She’d often wondered whether Lou was hiding anything. When something happened to a teenage girl, everyone’s thoughts went to the father. Statistically it made sense. But in all this time there hadn’t been so much as a word about any abuse.
She tried to picture frail, sunken Lou Silver committing such horrible acts of violence. He didn’t seem capable of it. But then, how many abusers looked the part?
“Why didn’t you say this at the trial?”
“I had no evidence other than my word. And if I took the stand and swore that Lou Silver physically abused his daughter…well, what was it you were just saying?”
Maya understood. He’d have opened up the door to his previous conviction. Testifying about the abuse Jessica suffered might have been accurate, but it would have been bad legal strategy.
Sometimes the truth was an especially poor defense.
“You know what the worst part is?” Bobby continued. “That’s how it all started, between us. Jessica needed to tell someone what was going on at home. She was scared, she was confused, she didn’t trust anybody….But for some reason she trusted me.” He squeezed his hand tightly, like he was trying to break his own bones. “And look what I did.”
“That’s when you started spending time together…alone?”
Bobby nodded. “Here was this poor girl living through hell and you know what I thought? I thought I could help.”
He shook his head ruefully. “You ever think about all the fucked-up shit we end up doing because we tell ourselves that we’re helping?”
Maya wished she thought about this less. “Yeah.”
“I told myself I was helping when I took her for coffee after school. I was so sure I was helping when I told her to go to the counselors, talk to the principal, hell, talk to the cops….But she kept saying no. She made me promise I wouldn’t tell a soul. She said, ‘Who is anyone going to believe, you or my dad? What could anyone do?’ I don’t know if she was wrong. You think somebody like Lou Silver gets arrested? You think somebody like Lou Silver goes to jail? No way. Worst thing that could’ve happened to him is that Elaine would finally bolt with Jessica. Which I also advised. ‘Tell your mom that if you both stay there,’ I said, ‘one of you is going to get killed. Take your mom, get in a car—hire a private plane, you can afford it—and go.’ But she wouldn’t leave without her mom. And her mom wouldn’t leave. Her mom said it would be okay. Her mom said she was handling it, Lou would stop. No one would get killed….”
He let that last word reverberate through the gloom.
“So what did I do? I promised not to tell. To keep her talking. I tried to get her to go to the counselors. We kept meeting. I was new to L.A. I didn’t know a lot of people. I was lonely. Coffees happened more and more. I mean, what else was I doing after school? She talked about what she wanted from her life—a little town somewhere. Quiet, away from the city. A farm, maybe. She was going to have kids and they’d have a nice dad, a good dad, the opposite dad from the one she’d had. And it wasn’t all heavy. Did you know she was funny? People see her photo on TV, or they hear all these facts about her life—they don’t know that she was actually just really funny. She hated the water. Strangest thing about her—terrified of getting eaten by sharks or something. I guess she used to be on the swim team but then she stopped, on account of the cuts and bruises—she couldn’t put on a bathing suit—but she lied and told her parents she was still swimming. I’d see her on the weekends and before I’d drop her off at home she’d dunk her hair in the sink so it was wet. She’d tell her dad she was at the beach all day. Why the beach? I never knew.
“Then we were texting. It was playful, joking around. I knew I shouldn’t be texting with a student, but I got off on the attention. How pathetic is that? I needed the attention of an abused fifteen-year-old to feel good about myself. Maybe she was the first person who looked up to me. And I said, ‘No one is getting hurt here. I haven’t done anything wrong.’ So I kept spending time with her. The dirty texts, the dirty photos—they were a joke. She took my phone one day. She sent all those sexual messages back and forth between our phones. When I finally figured out she had mine, and I found her after school and she showed me what she’d done—she was laughing so hard. ‘You’re so fucked if anyone sees these.’ She thought it was hysterical. What a practical joke. I deleted the whole chain from my phone, but I guess she left them on hers. And then, later, once the cops got hold of them…”
Maya remembered a detail from the trial: All the really explicit texts between Bobby and Jessica had been sent on the same day. His explanation was oddly plausible. Even if he was only offering it now.
“Can you imagine,” he said, “if I had offered that story in my defense? Would anyone have believed me? Would you? It was better to act like I actually had sent those messages. But that was the whole problem with my defense: Our relationship was inappropriate. I admit that. It was just so much stranger than we could explain.
“Like the car stuff! That was the most ironic part, the stains from her nosebleeds, the hair in the front seat. Do you have any idea how much fucking time we spent in my car? Just driving around? It was so much more than the prosecutor even thought. L.A. is thirty percent roads. Did you know that? Jessica told me, said her dad talked about it all the time. So we’d drive. And text. I still don’t even know how those tiny drops of blood got in the trunk. I guess my lawyer was right and the evidence lab really did screw up. But we spent so much time in that car, I’m sure her DNA was everywhere. What happened between us was wrong. It was my fault. And then one day…she was gone.”
Maya was damned if she didn’t believe him. She always had, hadn’t she? He’d failed Jessica terribly. He knew it. But then, everyone else had too. Jessica’s parents, Jessica’s teachers, and even Maya, who, if Bobby’s story was true, was currently working with Jessica’s abuser.
“Did Lou Silver kill his daughter?” Maya whispered.
“That was the defense we would have put up. An ‘affirmative defense’? Maybe Lou found out about Jessica and me. Maybe she told Lou that she’d told me about him. They never found her body, right? Well, who has the resources to make a body disappear? Really disappear?”
There had never been any physical evidence—not a stitch—that implicated Lou. But then, that was Bobby’s argument, wasn’t it? To believe that Bobby killed Jessica, one would have to believe that he’d done a poor job of it, leaving blood in his own car. To believe that Lou killed Jessica, one would have to believe that he’d done such a good job of it that no one had even suspected him in ten long years.
Maya knew that she could believe Bobby’s story about the abuse without believing his accusation that Lou was the killer. It was the same line of thinking that she’d applied to Bobby—he’d done something terrible, but that did not necessarily make him a killer.
Going back and forth between Lou and Bobby, Maya felt trapped in some horrible, endless spiral. Lou and Bobby were the two most important men in Jessica’s life, and neither had protected her.
“You never said any of that, because…” This was the part that somehow made Maya even more sick to her stomach. “Because of me.”
He laughed with a bitterness that had fermented over the years. “You know what gets me sometimes? The justice system worked. I did something inappropriate with a teenager and I went to jail for it. People like you talked about what an injustice it all was, but when you think about it, really…what was the injustice?”
Maya looked at their surroundings. This strange place did not look like any kind of justice that she understood.
“You have to tell people this.”
Bobby looked at her like she was an idiot. “Who? Why?”
Maya felt confounded. This accusation was too explosive to keep to themselves. And yet…Bobby wasn’t wrong. There was a reason he hadn’t gone public. They could tell the police, but what would the police do? The only crime here was an old and unprovable one. They could talk to the press and attempt to shame Lou Silver publicly, but again, they had no evidence save the testimony of a man who most people believed had murdered Lou’s daughter.
Lou and Bobby could go on accusing each other of atrocities for the rest of their lives and it wouldn’t make any difference. Nothing would ever bring back what they’d lost.
“So what are you going to do?” she asked him. “Run forever?” What he’d done was wrong. But that didn’t mean he deserved to be persecuted endlessly for it. Not while there were people out there whose crimes, even against Jessica herself, had been even worse than his. “There are people who care about you.”
“Who?”
“I watched your family in the courtroom. I stared at your mom for hundreds of hours, trying to imagine how anyone could be as strong as she was to sit there every day. You can’t tell me she ever stopped believing in you, or that your father ever stopped trusting you. Don’t you think they miss you? Don’t you think they want you close?”
Bobby gave her a withering sigh. “You have no idea…You think you know me so well but you don’t. You have no idea who I am.”
She looked away, her eyes falling on the crayon alligator drawing. The long red body. The orange teeth bared and ready. The childlike attempt at terror seemed such a sad contrast to the drugged-out horror show of their surroundings.
She gestured to the drawing. “I know you like alligators.”
Bobby managed a laugh. He wasn’t going to discuss the drawing with her. Not with someone whom, even after ten years, he barely knew.
“I thought about writing to you,” he said instead. “After the trial.”
“To say what?”
“That I was sorry I’d ruined your life too.”
“What I did…it wasn’t for you.”
“ ‘You didn’t ruin my life’ would have been a nice thing to say just then.”
“I did it for a principle.”
He raised an eyebrow. “How’s that working out?”
There was no one, Maya thought, to whom she’d less like to defend the high priority of principle. The man hunched in a small tent in the middle of the desert was either the victim of a horrific injustice or the perpetrator of one.
Or both.
And yet somehow, he’d found a sense of calm about the justice of it all. Or maybe that wasn’t quite right. Maybe Bobby had just moved on from worrying about “justice” at all.
“I thought about writing to you too,” she said.
“To say what?”
Maya shrugged regretfully. “That’s why I never wrote.”
Bobby sighed as if he was lost in the grim memories of his former life. “Was everyone there? At the hotel?”
“Everyone?”
