Free All Day and a Night by Alafair Burke

when she was dying and asking for me
    - Her funeral
    - My sister getting married
    - My neice and nephew (twins) being born, learning to talk, starting school. They do not even know they have an uncle because they would not understand
    -Everything else I might of done as a young man to make myself better and stay out of jail and be a regular person
    I know I made mistakes. I was no angel, and I admit (and told Buck Majors) I hired prostitutes sometimes. But I did not kill anybody. Please believe me. Look at the words of the confessions. There is no way. My original attorney, Mr. McConnell, was a good man, but he was more worried about saving me from the needle than proving my innocence. I didn’t know then that I’d be better off dead than pullng LWOP for crimes I did not do. There’s a reason they call it “all day and a night .”
    I look forward to your response .
    Sincerely ,
    Anthony Amaro
    Amaro had included a hodgepodge of attachments with his letter, random pages of miscellaneous documents he had collected over the years. Carrie’s first task this morning had been to file a motion to vacate Amaro’s conviction. They knew they didn’t have sufficient evidence yet to exonerate Amaro, but accompanying the motion was a request for a subpoena duces tecum to the Utica and New York City police departments for all documents associated with Anthony Amaro’s case.
    She had also reached out to Harry McConnell, Amaro’s original defense attorney on the Deborah Garner case, and learned that he was retired from practice. She left a message for the daughter who now ran the office, hoping she might be able to fill in some of the blanks. Now Carrie was creating a more specific list of requests to file with the police. While Linda’s many years as a courtroom defense lawyer made her great in front of a jury, big-firm practice had made Carrie very, very good at looking at pieces of paper and figuring out which other pieces of paper were likely missing.
    She was pulled into the present by three quick raps at the door, followed by the appearance of Thomas’s cheerful face. “You sure you have everything you need in here?”
    In here was a squat better suited as a janitorial closet than a lawyer’s office. Thomas’s eyes darted around Carrie’s makeshift workspace in curiosity.
    Yesterday, she had thought of Thomas as simply the receptionist, but now Carrie realized that, until today, he had been the only full-time worker at the Law Offices of Linda Moreland, LLC, other than Linda herself. From what Carrie could tell, Thomas was Linda’s secretary, scheduler, and personal barista. When Linda had introduced them yesterday, Thomas beamed as Linda recounted a story of him producing a backup tube of her go-to shade of lipstick when she couldn’t locate hers before a recent CNN interview.
    Linda Moreland had been a true one-lawyer shop, but now she had so much work she needed a second lawyer—enter Carrie. When she offered Carrie the position yesterday, she had also offered to let her delay the start-time until she secured “proper working space.” Carrie had been the one to decide she wanted to start right away, and now Thomas had added Take care of Carrie as she worked out of a storage closet to his list of responsibilities.
    “Thank you so much, Thomas. Really, I’m fine.”
    “She’s got me calling the building manager to nudge him about the space down the hall she’s expanding into. Obviously it’s more urgent now that you’re here.”
    At Russ Waterston, lawyers billed their time in six-minute increments, so there wasn’t a lot of in-office small talk. “Well, thanks for doing that. But I don’t mind this.”
    He didn’t close the door, though. “I never thought she’d hire a full-time lawyer. She has a bunch of investigators she likes to work with. And she’s used contract attorneys when she’s busy; and she likes to employ interns. I think it reminds her of teaching. But I guess something happened with