Free The Guilty One by Sophie Littlefield Page B

maintained.
    At six fifteen on Tuesday, the only people left in the office were a small team working together in the conference room. Ron waved to them as he left, his stomach already tightening with the prospect of going home. He stopped on the way for a bag of shockingly expensive peaches and a bunch of delphiniums. These gifts for his wife were a regular habit, and well compensated, but today they were also a defense, a bribe.
    When he walked in the door, Deb took the packages from him with barely a comment, clearly distracted. “You said you were going to be late,” she said, and he remembered that when they talked before lunch, he’d mentioned he might get a beer with Frank—but Frank had to be at his kid’s band concert.
    â€œSorry,” he said, bending for a kiss on the cheek which she did not return.
    â€œIt’s just that Kami’s here.”
    Now he heard the soft cough from the living room, registered that the car in front of the house didn’t belong to a stranger. “Oh,” he said carefully.
    â€œWe were almost done—”
    â€œYou know what, I need to make a call anyway. I’ll do it upstairs.”
    He went up without waiting for her to answer. There was no call; they both knew that. Ron’s relationship with Kami had started well enough, in the early days when he’d still been able to make himself imagine a version of events where it was all just a terrible misunderstanding, where Karl had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, confused with the other, the real killer. Back then, he’d drunk down her zeal, her practiced rhetoric, as greedily as Deb. Now, though, he couldn’t look at her without wondering what sort of woman would do this sort of poorly paid, hopeless work on purpose.
    The Youth Innocence Project was connected with Cal State Dylon Beach, and nearly all of the youth they were trying to exonerate were black, poor, and had been questionably represented by state-appointed defenders. Moreover, their staff consisted mostly of law faculty and interns. Kami was the exception: a program coordinator, a glorified office manager who had taken a personal interest in Karl and offered her help outside the official scope of the program but with their hazy, tacit approval. Or so she had claimed, and so Deb had chosen to believe.
    Soon after Karl’s arrest, Ron had begun to understand the hopelessness of the cause. Despite Karl’s insistence (and on this he had never wavered; Ron had to give him credit for that) that there had been another man there that night, a stranger, someone that a neighbor named Gloria Kirsch (seventy-eight years old, hard of hearing, self-reported insomniac) had reportedly seen peering into windows around the neighborhood and had even called the police about the prior week, the evidence against Karl had been too damning. He and Calla had left the party together, after multiple people reported seeing them argue and Karl pushing or shoving Calla. Two of Calla’s best friends swore that she had said she was “afraid of” Karl in the days leading up to her death, and one said that when she broke up with him, he’d threatened her. And most damning of all, Karl’s car—the eight-year-old Explorer that Deb and Ron had bought when he passed his driver’s test—had traces of mud in the wheel wells that matched the makeup of the soil at Byron Ranch.
    The more impassioned Deb’s insistence on Karl’s innocence, the more convinced Ron became that he was guilty. The divide seemed a natural if tragic one;it was a mother’s job to defend her offspring, just as it was a father’s job to provide expectations and consequences. In this, Deb could be said to have succeeded where Ron failed, and it was perhaps this knowledge that led him to support his wife without agreeing with her.
    But even so, he couldn’t tolerate Kami, with her shapeless hand-dyed clothes and her head wraps