The Boy from the Woods(86)

It was handicap accessible.

The man in the wheelchair was black. His hair was cut short and gray, his skin leathery, his eyes jaundiced. Wilde guessed his age to be fifties, maybe sixties. It would be a cliché to say prison ages a man, but sometimes the cliché is apropos.

Saul Strauss stood and then he bent his tall frame down to hug the man. “Hey, Raymond.”

“Hey, Saul.”

“I want you to meet Wilde. Wilde, this is Raymond Stark.”

Wilde shook the man’s hand. Raymond Stark’s grip was firm. “So nice to meet you, Wilde.”

“You too,” Wilde said, because he had no idea what else to say.

Raymond Stark smiled up at him. The smile lit up his face. “They found you in the woods when I was being held at Red Onion,” Raymond said. “That’s a maximum-security facility in Virginia. I’d just gone in, and I still had hope, you know? Like they’d realize they got it wrong and I’d be free any second.”

This man, Wilde realized, had been in prison for more than three decades.

“I read every story about you back then. The whole idea…I mean, you had no connections, no family. No past, right?”

“Right.”

“I don’t know if that’s a blessing or a curse.”

Saul sat down and signaled for Wilde to do the same.

“Thanks for coming,” Raymond said to Wilde.

Wilde looked at Raymond, then at Strauss. “Do you want to tell me why I’m here?”

“In 1986, Raymond was arrested for the murder of a young man named Christopher Anson. Anson was stabbed to death in the Deanwood section of Washington, DC. The claim was that Anson had gone into the wrong neighborhood to buy drugs, though that part was mostly kept out of the press to protect the victim’s rep. Anyway, he was stabbed once, in the heart, and robbed. You would have been too young to remember it, but it was a big case. Anson was a rich, white college student. There were calls for the death penalty.”

Raymond put a hand on Wilde’s arm. Wilde turned and looked into the jaundiced eyes.

“I didn’t do it.”

“You can imagine what it was like—the media, the mayor, the pressure to solve the case. The cops supposedly got an anonymous tip that Anson had been buying drugs from a black kid in Deanwood, so they dragged in every black kid they could find, stonewalled, kept them awake, started up with the enhanced interrogations—again you know the deal.”

“I do,” Wilde said. “What I don’t know is why I’m here.”

Strauss pressed on. “Eventually, one kid said that Raymond sold drugs to rich white guys.”

“Marijuana,” Raymond said. “That part is true. I mostly just delivered.”

“A judge issued a search warrant, and a DC Metro detective named Shawn Kindler found a knife under Raymond’s mattress. Tests showed it was the murder weapon. You can imagine how fast it went downhill from there.”

“The knife wasn’t mine,” Raymond said. Again he met Wilde’s eye. “I didn’t do it.”

Wilde said, “Mr. Stark?”

“Call me Raymond.”

“Raymond, I’ve seen the biggest sociopaths look me in the eye like that and lie to my face.”

“Yeah, I know,” Raymond Stark said. “Me too. Every day of my life. I’m surrounded by them. But I don’t know what else to say, Wilde. I’ve spent thirty-four years in here for something I didn’t do. I’ve tried my best. I studied hard, got my high school equivalency, college degrees, even a JD. I wrote letters and briefs for other inmates and myself. But nothing happened. Nothing ever happens.”

Raymond folded his hands on the table and looked off. “Imagine being in a place like this every day, screaming out the truth every way you know how, but no one ever hears you. You want to hear something weird?”

Wilde waited.

“I have this recurring dream that I’m getting out,” Raymond said with a hint of a smile. “I dream someone finally believes me—and I get set free. And then I wake up in the same cell. Imagine that for a second. Imagine that moment when I first realize that it’s just a dream and I try to hold on, but it’s like grabbing smoke. My mother used to visit me twice a week. She did that for more than twenty years. Then they found a mass in her liver. Cancer. Ate her up. And I wonder every day, every hour, if the stress of seeing her son locked up for something he didn’t do weakened her immune system and killed her.”

“Raymond,” Strauss said, “tell Wilde how you ended up in that chair.”

Raymond slowly shook his head. “If it’s all the same, Saul, I’ll pass on that. A sad story like that won’t make you believe me, am I right?”

Wilde said nothing.

“So I’m not asking you for pity or to believe my face or my eyes,” Raymond said. “Instead I’m just going to ask you for a few more minutes. That’s all. No pleading about how innocent I am. No emotion. Just let Saul finish what he wants to say.”

Wilde was going to say that he didn’t have the time right now, that he was in the middle of an industrial-strength problem of his own, that even if he was convinced that Raymond Stark had been railroaded, it would make no difference. Wilde couldn’t do anything that Saul Strauss and his organization couldn’t do better.