Next of Kin Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  The Janet Moodie series from L.F. Robertson and Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also Available from Titan Books

  NEXT

  OF

  KIN

  The Janet Moodie series from L.F. Robertson and Titan Books

  Two Lost Boys

  Madman Walking

  Next of Kin

  NEXT

  OF

  KIN

  L.F. ROBERTSON

  TITAN BOOKS

  NEXT OF KIN

  Print edition ISBN: 9781785659126

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781785659133

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: June 2019

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2019 by L.F. Robertson. All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  To Morgan

  1

  Harrison, California, isn’t a place known for murders, the way, say, Stockton is, or Bakersfield. It’s a typical Central Valley town, a generous sprawl of low buildings laid down over the last century and a half on the vast ancient seabed that forms the middle of the state. It has its old downtown, with fortress-like former banks now housing antique malls, boutiques in 1920s storefronts, and an old-fashioned movie theater, complete with a neon-lit tower, marquee and ticket booth, that now shows indie films. Off the beaten track these days, Old Town is a place where residents take visiting relatives to shop for California wine, olive oil, souvenirs, and Depression-era kitchen gadgets, and eat osso bucco and cannelloni at the old-school Italian restaurant or drink craft beer at the edgy new brewpub in a building that used to be a speakeasy. The neighborhoods around it are a mix of shabby apartment complexes and older run-down cottages, many of them rentals occupied by families who make their living as farmworkers or store clerks.

  The present commercial center of town is Sequoia Avenue, a wide boulevard edged with office buildings, real estate offices, law firms, and strip malls, flanked by subdivisions of placid suburban houses on generous, tree-shaded lots. Unlike some similar towns which have withered as railroad traffic diminished and highways bypassed them, Harrison got lucky: it’s the county seat of Hartwell County, and a major highway runs along its edge.

  Hartwell County came into existence in the great drought of the 1860s that broke up the vast Mexican land grants and opened the valley to Basque sheep herders and Swiss-Italian dairy farmers. During the Civil War the area held a pocket of Confederate sympathizers in a state that went with the Union; Harrison is named for a town in Arkansas. In the 1930s, in the middle of the Great Depression, Hartwell County attracted Dust Bowl migrants from Arkansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma, searching for any work they could get on the ranches, truck farms, and fruit orchards that support its prosperity. The Ku Klux Klan marched there as late as the 1980s, and the white people in Hartwell County (there are very few African-Americans) still retain something of the South in their speech, religion, and politics.

  A few minutes outside town are the miles of well-kept orchards—peaches, walnuts, pistachios, pomegranates, oranges, lemons, grapes—set in a grid of numbered two-lane roads, and here and there a stretch of pasture behind an old wood and wire fence or a house and outbuildings down a long private drive. The rows of trees and tracts of open land along the roads are interrupted now and then by ragtag farm towns of small stucco houses with front yards of dirt and dry weeds, paint peeling from wood trim, air conditioners in their windows or old swamp coolers on their roofs, and pickup trucks parked in their driveways. The towns’ main streets are a row of liquor stores, thrift shops, bodegas, churches, and shops that repair things: cars, farm equipment, wells and septic tanks, household appliances.

  Sunny Ferrante grew up in one of those dusty little towns, a dot on the map twelve miles outside Harrison, called Sparksville. She may be the most famous of its alumnae; almost certainly, she’s the only one to have landed on death row. A long time ago, she had been my client, and now she was again.

  2

  Carey Bergmann collared me during a continuing education seminar about criminal appeals, as I waited in line outside the restroom. “Janet!” she said, startling me from my reverie about the new changes in the felony murder rule.

  I looked up. “Carey?” Not that I needed to ask; she hadn’t changed much since I’d last seen her. I tried to remember how long it had been—seven years? Ten?

  “I’d like to talk to you,” she said. “When you have a moment.”

  I saw her a couple of minutes later, as I left the line of coffee urns with a fresh cup to get me, I hoped, through the rest of the morning. She was talking with Joe Hamilton, one of the day’s speakers, but she excused herself and hurried over to meet me.

  “I’m so glad to see you here today,” she said, as we found our way to a couple of empty chairs. “I was going to call you.” As we walked, I had a chance to look at her more closely. She really hadn’t changed much—a little thinner, maybe, and more tanned in the face. She is taller than I am, perhaps five foot six, and she still moved with an athletic grace and physical confidence that has always eluded me.

  “It’s been a while,” she said, when we’d both sat down. “I don’t think I’ve seen you since Terry’s memorial. That was really a shock. We all thought the world of him; he was an inspiration for me. How are you doing?”

  “Not bad,” I said, with a shrug. Terry, my husband, had committed suicide seven years ago. It wasn’t something I generally cared to talk about. “I live a dull life.”

  “I hope not,” she said. “Jim Christie says you’re living way out in the woods in, like, Mendocino, and you and he have a habeas corpus case together.”

  “You know Jim?” The community of death penalty lawyers was really a small world, I thought.

  “Yeah. I tried a case with him once, and we run into each other in court sometimes. Is he keeping you busy?”

  “Not right now,” I said, with what I hoped was a noncommittal shrug.

  She gave a short laugh. “He’s a regular Tom Sawyer. He has a gift for getting other people to do his work.”

  I nodded. “But we’re almost finished. The petition in that case was filed—oh, God, two years ago—and
we’re waiting for the court to act. So I’m in a bit of a lull, I guess, doing appeals and not much else.”

  “Oh, good. You remember Sunny Ferrante?”

  “Wow, Sunny. That was a long time ago.”

  “2002. She was sentenced in 2004.”

  “Right.” It was a cold case—capital appeals move at a glacial pace through the legal system—and a twisted, sordid one: on a spring day in 2002, Sunny’s husband, Greg Ferrante, a local real-estate developer, had been found dead next to the swimming pool behind his house, a single bullet in the back of his head. Suspicion fell immediately on Sunny, especially since the local rumor mill had it that Greg had been about to leave her for a younger woman. But she had a solid alibi for the time of the crime. With no evidence and no other suspects, the case sat unsolved for several months, until a local petty malefactor in jail on a charge of his own told a guard that Sunny’s daughter’s boyfriend, a kid named Todd Betts, had confessed the murder to him, saying he’d been hired by Sunny to kill her husband. As bad luck would have it, Sunny had loaned Todd several thousand dollars to repair his truck, a month after the murder. And a month or so after that Todd had died of a drug overdose. The evidence against Sunny was thin, but enough to move an outraged jury to convict her of Greg’s murder and give her the death penalty.

  The state defender’s office, where I was working, had taken her appeal, and it had been assigned to me. I’d been working on the opening brief when Terry killed himself. That had been just over seven years ago, now, in February. Somehow, I’d managed to finish writing the brief; in fact I’d thrown myself into it because absorbing myself in work seemed the only way I could temporarily push away the engulfing waves of shock, misery, and grief. But at the end of that year, I was too battered by hurt at Terry’s inexplicable suicide and the fallout from it, particularly the murmured insinuations of blame from our colleagues in the criminal defense community, where Terry had been a respected trial lawyer. So I left the state defender, Sunny’s case and all, and swore off death penalty work.

  I’d retreated—there was no better word for it, except perhaps “fled”—to a little settlement called Corbin’s Landing on the coast north of the mouth of the Russian River, where I bought a dilapidated vacation cabin on an acre of cleared land within earshot of the Pacific. I learned to graft fruit trees and build deer fences and started an orchard and a garden. I supported myself, a dog, and two cats by taking court-appointed criminal appeals, writing the briefs in a bedroom repurposed as my office. It wasn’t a bad life, and over time it helped me recover some balance.

  But death penalty defense, once undertaken, is something between a calling and an addiction. It gets a grip on your conscience that is hard, if not impossible, to disengage. So eventually it pulled me back, first to the case of a convicted serial killer, then to that of a man who’d been convicted of murder despite the fact that the real killer had confessed and exonerated him. And now, it seemed, to Sunny.

  “Is Sunny okay?” I asked. “Has something happened?”

  “She’s fine, as far as I know. I’ve just been approved for appointment as counsel for her habeas corpus case,” Carey said, “and the court has agreed to appoint you as co-counsel if Sunny will waive any conflict of interest from your having been her appeal lawyer.”

  “Wow, thanks. I feel honored. I like Sunny; I really was sorry to give up her appeal.” I meant it, too, but even as the words emerged from my mouth, my rational mind told me I should know better than to get involved in another habeas corpus.

  In California, every defendant sentenced to death gets counsel for their appeal and for a separate habeas corpus proceeding. The good news about habeas corpus is that, as the lawyer, you get to investigate the case all over again and present new evidence if you find it, something you can’t do with the appeal. The bad news is that the courts don’t generally give you enough money or time to do it all, to spend endless hours scouring courthouses, schools, hospitals, and social service agencies for records, traveling to a succession of dusty towns and state prisons, and talking to a lot of strangers, in the hope of finding something that might convince a court to give your client another trial. I’d been second chair on two habeas cases in the past couple of years, and I didn’t have much appetite for jumping into another one. On the other hand, the client would be Sunny. I knew her and liked her, and I’d always had doubts about the case against her.

  “Well, it makes sense,” Carey went on. “You know Sunny and her case already. Plus I liked the work you did for Jesus Ortega; you were really helpful when I took the habeas. And Terry always said such glowing things about you.”

  “Really?” I said, and I felt a surprising small rush of tenderness. Terry’s death had left me feeling not only broken, but angry and betrayed by his suicide and by the fact that he had never confided to me the pain that led him to it. Enough time had passed, it seemed, that I could feel touched by hearing how he had felt about me. That was progress, I guess.

  The morning break was over, and Joe Hamilton was well into his lecture as we opened the door to the small auditorium. “I’ll call you,” Carey whispered, as we separated. We both stooped, instinctively, and I stifled a giggle as I thought of the picture we made, two middle-aged women, one tall and slender and the other short and, well, sturdy, creeping like guilty schoolkids to our seats.

  * * *

  I heard from Carey two weeks later. “It’s all good,” she said. “Sunny’s appellate lawyer—you remember Toni Jackson?— visited her, and Sunny signed the conflict of interest waiver, so you can represent her. Evelyn Turner called; the court appointed us this morning. So the one-year clock is ticking as of now.”

  “How did you get Evelyn to give you Sunny’s habeas appointment? Her appeal hasn’t even been decided yet, and I thought Evelyn was trying to get lawyers for the oldest cases first.”

  Evelyn Turner was the state Supreme Court staff attorney in charge of assigning attorneys to capital appeals and habeas corpus cases. She was a tough negotiator, and once she had decided which defendants were getting lawyers that month from the roster of eligible attorneys, it was almost impossible to change her mind. It was also well known to everyone on the panel that there were a lot more defendants than there were qualified attorneys willing to take habeas corpus cases. Evelyn was working through a growing backlog of prisoners, some of whom had been waiting twenty years or more since their convictions for a habeas lawyer to be appointed for them. By my rough calculation, Sunny was still far from the head of that line.

  “She’s desperate,” Carey said. “Almost no one is taking habeas cases anymore. The court doesn’t pay enough, and you only have a year from appointment to file them. So she’s a little more flexible. I read something about Sunny’s case a while ago, and I told Evelyn I was interested in it, but she wasn’t going to give it to me unless I took an old case at the same time.”

  “She’s still tough.”

  “Yeah. But I was too busy then to take two more cases at once, and by the time things had freed up, this new law had passed, with the one-year filing deadline, and the pool of lawyers just dried up. Poor Evelyn hasn’t got many cards to play. So she let me take Sunny’s case if I promised to take another one after filing Sunny’s petition.”

  I was impressed with Carey’s powers of persuasion. “What made you want Sunny’s case in particular?”

  “Couple of things. First, looking at the appeal briefs, the case against her is shaky. Seems to me there’s a real possibility she’s telling the truth when she says she didn’t do it. And there’s this social prejudice against women killing their husbands—much more than when men kill their wives— and that may be part of why the system was so punitive with her. Since Betty Mateski, I kind of follow cases where women get convicted of killing their husbands or boyfriends.”

  Betty Mateski’s case had been something of a cause célèbre. She had shot her husband as he slept, after some twenty years of unremitting abuse during which he had regularly beaten he
r and threatened to kill her if she left him. She had been charged with first-degree premeditated murder by lying in wait, essentially meaning that she had deliberately waited to kill him until she could catch him unawares. The prosecution sought a sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole. Carey, who was then a young public defender, had been assigned to represent her; and she had argued that Betty wasn’t guilty of murder because she had killed her husband in self-defense.

  At her trial, Betty testified about the years of abuse and terror Raymond Mateski had inflicted on her. His beatings had sent her to the hospital more than once; she had lied about how she had been injured, and the doctors and nurses treating her had largely taken her at her word. One or two surmised what had really happened and urged her to press charges, but she had shaken her head and gone back to Ray. She explained at her trial that she was so beaten down and afraid of him that in the years when her children had been living at home, she’d believed his threat that he would get custody of them if she left him.

  All three of her children had testified to the violence Ray had done to Betty and to them, until one by one they had run away. After the children were gone, Betty finally tried to leave him. She left the house when he was at work and walked five miles to an old friend’s house, but Ray tracked her down and showed up carrying a gun, threatening to kill Betty’s friend and her husband. To spare them the horror of being menaced anymore by Ray, Betty had gone home.

  On the night she killed him, he had gotten drunk on cheap whiskey and had accused her of infidelity with her friend’s husband, and of plotting with her friend and her sister to leave him. He had refused to let her leave the house, punched her, pistol-whipped her, and repeatedly told her she would be dead before morning and that if she tried to escape he would hunt her down and kill her, her sister, and anyone who tried to help her. He had beaten her up and threatened her before, she admitted in her trial testimony. “But this time it felt different. There was something in his eyes and the way he was talking. I believed that this time he meant to do it. I thought I was going to die.” Eventually, he fell into a drunken sleep, and she took a sawed-off shotgun he kept behind the door to their bedroom and emptied both barrels, one after the other, into his chest. When she felt sure he was dead she took his truck keys from his pants pocket and drove to her friend’s house, where she called the police to turn herself in.