It was smaller than I'd have guessed. It lay on Kovach's blotter in a clear plastic bag with a strip of red tape across the top, between a cracker wrapper and a cold coffee.
White knit. A snowflake across the back in gray yarn gone yellow at the points. Left hand. Birdie lost a left mitten every winter of her life, never the right, and my mother bought them in threes at the church bazaar to cover it.
I put my hand out. "Don't," Kovach said, and I took it back.
"Sunday, about a quarter past two," she said. She had her coat on, in her own office, with a bagel she wasn't eating. "She took it to the DA's investigator. In a shoebox. He walked it over to my evidence room last night, because it's my case number on the bag, and that's the only reason I've got it."
"Who did?"
"The DA's witness. Ms. Pasko." She said it like she was reading off a label. "The one from the diner. Don't ask me where she lives, hon. I get the shoebox and two typed paragraphs, and they're not giving me the rest."
I said the name back to her. It was a name off a page. Kovach turned her monitor so I could see the screen, and she read it to me anyway.
"'I was cleaning out the back room at Peach Street in the spring of two thousand eighteen, when Mister Skarupa's family closed the place. I opened the employee lockers. Garrett Rudnicki's old one had a mitten in the bottom, behind a milk crate. I knew what it was. I put it in a shoebox and I took it home. I was afraid. I did not know who to give it to. Then I saw his face on the news.'"
"A shoebox," I said. "For eight years."
"That's what she says."
"Why wait that long?"
"People sit on things. Fear's most of what I see, hon. Fear and Sunday dinner." She turned the bag a quarter turn on the blotter with one finger, so the snowflake faced me.
"The mitten's a trophy." It was a word off TV. It came out of me by itself.
"That's what the DA will call it. I'm telling you what's on the paper. I'm not telling you what I think."
"What do you think?"
"I think I haven't finished my bagel." She put it down. She pulled a file toward her across the desk, an old one, with a tab gone soft from handling, and she opened it to a page with a fold in it. "Two thousand fourteen. The Monday after the lineup, February tenth, they tossed his locker at the diner. I've got the inventory. Apron. Crocs, men's, size eleven. One library book, overdue."
"No mitten."
"No mitten."
"So they missed it." I thought about it, two cops in a back room with a radiator, going through a locker like a kid's gym bag, and it wasn't hard at all to picture. "They didn't look. It was behind a milk crate and they didn't look."
"Could be," Kovach said.
She wrote a word on the folder.
"Here's the part you're going to like less. He made one call from booking. Nine fifty-two. His cousin Dale, in Corry. A patrolman up there had the number off our log, and he knows the family, and he did a courtesy drive-by at midnight. It had been snowing two hours. There was no truck in Dale's drive. No tracks in or out."
"Dale's truck wasn't home."
"Wasn't home at midnight. That's what I've got. That's all I've got, and I've got Corry asking."
"So he's got a friend."
"So I've got a truck not in a driveway." She rubbed her eyes. "They inventoried the Grand Prix, too. Standard. The photographs of your lot. The index card. A receipt off the floor from the Sheetz on Route Twenty, Friday night, ten to eleven. Gas, and one two-gallon can. There's a red can in the trunk, empty."
"That Sheetz is right down the road from the barn."
"I know where it is." She turned a page. "And the envelope from the glove box, with your name typed on it, dated before the letter."
"The recantation."
"They've all read it by now. They'd like it to be what it looks like."
"What does it look like?"
"A man who had a confession typed up for you before he ever wrote you a hello." She looked at me over her coffee. "That's the intimidation charge, Nell. That's it with a bow on. And you're in his passenger seat at the city line. I'd stay at the rink the next few days. I'd stay out of cars." She picked the bagel back up and bit it at last. "Go run your ice."
\ \ \*
At ten o'clock I should have been on State Street, signing. I'd texted Ruth Ann Sorensen first thing that morning, Not today. I'm sorry. She wrote back one word, Understood, and later another text, Four o'clock. County prison, attorney entrance. Bring identification.
I ran the ice. I did the boards and the lights and I filled Big Sue and went out, and I ran her like an old woman crossing the street, one lap and then another, and the lines came out straight. Benny stood at the ice door with a cup of coffee in both hands, and when I came in, he said, "You didn't hit anything," and looked at me like it was a bad sign.
Lorraine caught me at the rental desk before lunch with her reading glasses on their chain. The district attorney's office had called the front desk about the trespass citation from the twenty-ninth, she said, and about Saturday, and she'd given them the incident book because she had to. "That's what a form is for, Nell." She looked at my face and took the glasses off. "I'm saying I gave it to them and I'm sorry."
Owen came off the bus and put his folder on the corner table. Cody's practice was cancelled. Lorraine had put a sign up, in marker, that said SQUIRTS CANCELLED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE, and nobody had asked why. Dolores was at the counter with the warmer lit. She didn't look at me and I didn't look at her, and when Owen held up his page, she held it to the light and said, "Two holes. Half," and tore the pretzel and gave him half.
My phone went in the sharpening room. I shut the door.
"The lab did a preliminary on Hartzell," Kovach said. She was chewing again. "The swab he gave on Friday. They rushed it. Cannot be excluded, is how they put it. All the markers match. The written report's two weeks."
"So it's Cody."
"It's Cody's DNA under her nails. I'd say he's the guy. The lab won't yet. But you've got to hear the rest, because it doesn't help you. The one unexplained thing in this whole case was whose scratch that was. Now somebody's got a name, and the name's got thirty people and a camera roll, and he's off the board. DA reads that as a clean case." A cracker wrapper crinkled. "They set the retrial this morning. Bail's denied. He's in the county until it's done."
"Okay," I said. "I'm going over to the county at four. Sorensen's bringing me in as a witness they're interviewing."
"I didn't hear that." She chewed. "Whatever she calls it, hon, I didn't hear it."
\ \ \*
The attorney booth at the Erie County Prison has a counter and two plastic chairs on one side of a pane of glass and a counter and one chair on the other, and a steel-corded phone on each side. It smells like floor cleaner and radiators. Sorensen signed me in as "a witness the defense is interviewing," in a hand like a ruler, and told the officer at the desk that she would be in the hall.
"I can see you through the window," she told me. "I can't hear you. That's the rule in this building, and I'm relying on it." She was in a gray suit with her reading glasses pushed up in her hair. She had a warm voice for a woman with a face like a closed door. "I wrote that affidavit, Eleanor. Seven pages. I wrote it so a person could sign it and have it be true. No longer certain. So I'll ask you what I'd ask any witness. What are you certain of?"
"That it was him."
"Then I won't tell you to sign it. A take-back you don't believe is perjury, signed. I'd rather lose clean." She took her glasses down and put them on, and her eyes got larger and tireder behind them. "Eat something afterward."
They brought him in on the other side. It was a county jumpsuit, orange, with the sleeves too long, and he'd been shaved by somebody else, and a stripe along the jaw had come out raw. He sat down very carefully in the one chair, as if it had been left for him. He'd lost something in two days, and I couldn't have told you what, some squareness in the shoulders. He folded his free hand on the counter, one finger over another. He picked up the phone, and I picked up mine.
"Thank you for coming," Garrett said. "Are you eating? Ruth Ann says you should eat."
"May I begin with the paper?" he went on, when I didn't answer.
"No."
"It is seven pages. It says you are no longer certain you saw the man in the shelter. It does not say you saw someone else. It says no longer certain."
"I know what it says. It was in your glove box."
"Sign it, Nell." His voice came through the phone flat and clear and small. "If you sign, the retrial ends, and the warrant goes with it, and the mitten is a mitten in a shoebox. They have nothing to take to a judge but a woman who used to be sure."
"I'm not going to lie. I was right."
"Being right put me in here twelve years."
I opened my mouth. There was a spot on the glass at the level of his chin where somebody had left a fingerprint, a long oval, and I looked at that.
"Did you take her mitten?" I said.
"No."
"Don't say it like a lawyer."
"No," he said. "I did not take it. I did not know there was a mitten to take. I walked out of that diner at twelve-fifteen with my apron in my locker, and I never went back for it." He wet his lip. "Dee called me in, and now Dee has a mitten. That is a lot of remembering."
"And you." I leaned in. The phone cord went tight. "Gas and a can from the Sheetz on Friday night, and the can's empty. A phone call at nine fifty-two. Your cousin in Corry. A barn burned down with a car in it at twelve-thirty, and you were in a cell, and a trooper looked me in the eye and said, then he's got a friend. What did you say to him?"
"Not today."
"Not today," I said.
"I will not put his name in this room. He has been kind to me. He has done nothing." His eyes were pale and steady and very tired. "Ask me anything else."
I didn't. He waited. A door banged somewhere behind him and a man's voice said a number.
"Where is Owen tonight?" he said.
"He's at the rink. With Benny."
"Good."
"Don't," I said. "Don't you ask me where my son is."
"All right."
"I think you'd say anything," I said.
"Yes." He said it quietly. "I have said anything. For twelve years I said I was asleep."
Then he did a thing I wasn't ready for. He put his hand flat on the glass, at about the height of my face, with the fingers spread. Not pressing. The way you put a hand on a door to see if the room behind it is warm.
My hand went up. It went against the pane across from his, a cold smooth sheet and his heat coming through it faint as a window in the sun. And then it wasn't there. It was in my lap, in my other hand, and I was holding it, like I'd touched the burner.
He took his hand off the glass.
I hung up. I put the phone back in its cradle, carefully, so it wouldn't bang. I didn't look back at him on my way out. Sorensen was in the hall with her glasses in her hand.
"Anything you want me to know?" she said.
"He wants me to sign."
"I'm not surprised, and I'm not asking." She walked me down the corridor with her heels going, past the vending machine and the man at the desk, all the way to the doors. "I know what I heard, which is nothing. That's what I'll know tomorrow."
\ \ \*
Owen was at the corner table with a pizza box lid for a desk, and Benny beside him with a thermos, reading the manual for the machine out loud in a murmur, "and then you check the hydraulic line," and Owen saying, "How do you check it?" and Benny saying, "Depends." The lobby was lit and nearly empty.
Dolores was counting change at the register with the drawer out.
She does it every night. She tips the coins out onto the counter and sorts them into little hills, and rolls them in paper, forty quarters to a roll, and tamps the end of each one against the glass with a tiny flat sound. I stood at the end of the counter with my coat on. I had a sentence I'd carried all the way from the prison. I'd had it all the way down Peach, and I couldn't find the front of it.
"Dolores."
"Ten. Twenty. Thirty."
"They found her mitten. Birdie's. Somebody kept it in a shoebox."
"Thirty-five. Forty." She tamped the roll. She reached for the next pile.
"Eight years," I said. "In a shoebox."
She didn't answer. She counted quarters in a murmur, two at a time, the way you'd say a rosary if you were somebody who said them, and her hands were very quick, and she did not look up. I stood there until the roll was done and the next one was started. I don't know what I wanted from her. Somebody to say it to who wasn't a cop.
Owen laughed at something Benny said. It went through the walls.
My phone went in my pocket, a number I didn't know, an Erie exchange. I took it out into the vestibule between the two sets of doors, where it's cold and the glass is old and there's a rack of flyers about swimming lessons.
"Is this Eleanor Dorsey? I'm so sorry to call you on a Monday night. This is Joanne. My father is Walt Brzezinski." The voice was apologetic, quick and practical, a voice used to explaining things at nursing stations. "I got your number from Ruth Ann Sorensen's office, I hope that's all right. I told them I'd be very brief."
"It's all right."
"He saw the barn fire on the news. Channel Twelve, the early one, with the picture of the black frame and the one trooper. He hasn't stopped since. He keeps asking for the girl. It has to be at night, he doesn't sleep, they let me sit with him." She took a breath. "He says to tell you he did a fender."