Chapter 6 - Twenty-Four Hours
Elena collapsed.
Not dramatically.
Her knees simply stopped working.
Officer Bell caught her before she hit the floor.
"It's stayed," Mitchell said. "Elena, do you hear me?"
She stared at him.
"For how long?"
"Forty-eight hours."
Relief disappeared from her face almost immediately.
"Only forty-eight?"
"That's what the court granted."
Elena laughed once.
A broken, exhausted sound.
"So I get two more days to prove I deserve to keep breathing."
Mitchell didn't know what to say.
By midnight, the case had exploded nationally.
Reporters crowded outside the prison.
Satellite trucks lined the road.
Adrian Kell held another press conference.
He called the recording "an eleventh-hour fraud."
He called Sergeant Givens "a troubled employee."
He called Chloe's statement "the unreliable memory of a traumatized child."
That last sentence made Elena stand up in her cell.
"Don't use her."
The television couldn't hear her.
"Don't you dare use my child."
Meanwhile, Leah sat in Givens's widow's kitchen.
Carol Givens was sixty-one and looked terrified.
She placed a yellow envelope on the table.
"Paul told me to burn this."
Leah frowned.
"Why didn't you?"
"Because he was scared."
Carol touched the envelope.
"I had never seen my husband scared until the Cole case."
Inside was the original internal complaint.
Givens wrote that he discovered audio evidence while processing a device recovered from Nathan's home.
Detective Rusk ordered him to erase it.
Givens secretly preserved a copy.
Then he placed that copy on a phone he found hidden beneath a loose floorboard in Nathan's study.
Leah looked up.
"Wait."
"The blue phone?"
Carol nodded.
"Paul said Nathan must have had two hiding places. He put the recording on the phone and put the phone somewhere police wouldn't find it."
"Behind Chloe's wall."
Carol's eyes filled.
"He never told me where."
The complaint also mentioned another witness.
A neighbor.
Dennis Pike.
The prosecution's star witness.
Pike testified that he saw Elena running from the house covered in blood.
His testimony helped seal her conviction.
But Givens wrote one additional sentence:
PIKE'S ORIGINAL STATEMENT DID NOT IDENTIFY ELENA COLE.
Leah read it three times.
"Where's the original statement?"
Carol shook her head.
"Paul said it disappeared."
Owen called from his car.
"I found Pike."
Leah stood.
"Where?"
"Trailer park outside Waco."
"Is he alive?"
"Looks like it."
"Don't approach him alone."
Too late.
Owen was already walking toward the trailer.
Dennis Pike opened the door before Owen knocked.
He was fifty-eight now.
Thin.
Bearded.
And holding a shotgun.
"You need to leave."
Owen slowly raised both hands.
"My name is Owen Beck."
"I know who you are."
That stopped him.
"How?"
Pike's face went gray.
"Because Calvin Rusk called me an hour ago."
Owen felt a chill.
"What did he say?"
Pike glanced toward the road.
"He said people were digging into Elena Cole's case."
"And?"
Pike's hands began shaking around the shotgun.
"He told me if I talked..."
A vehicle appeared at the far end of the road.
Pike saw it.
His face collapsed.
"Oh God."
"What?"
"That's him."
A black SUV accelerated toward the trailer.
May you like
Pike dropped the shotgun.
"Run."
