We had an appointment set up for visiting hours a couple of days after his psychological and medical assessments. There wasn’t a reason he’d need to call me before then. The assessments weren’t even scheduled until tomorrow.
Please God, let him not have been shanked in the shower and they’re calling to tell me he’s dead.
Or, worse, that he’d killed one of his fellow inmates. My chances of proving him innocent of Gordon’s murder would be zero if he killed another person, regardless of the reasons.
I tapped the display screen. “This is Nicole. You’re on speaker with co-counsel.”
“I need to talk to you today.” Clement’s voice crackled in and out, like the landline he was on was too old to be reliable anymore.
I opened my mouth to ask if he could tell me whatever he needed to over the phone.
“In person,” Clement said before I could. “In private.”
I dropped Anderson back off at his car and headed on. On the drive, I called the prison and made sure they’d allow me to see Clement. I wasn’t sure what the visiting hours were today, but I claimed I had to talk to him about an important element of his case that couldn’t wait.
I could only assume that was the truth. I’d pushed for a bit more information, but Clement had refused to talk about it until I arrived.
The guard brought me back into the same room I’d met Clement in before.
Clement’s skin was a healthy bronze tone, which was the opposite of what it should have been considering he’d been inside since his arrest except for the limited yard time prisoners received. His eyelids weren’t drooping anymore, either, giving him a more alert look.
My body couldn’t seem to get enough oxygen from the breaths I was taking. It was all wrong. He shouldn’t have looked healthier than I’d ever seen him. Not even hope was that powerful.
I slid slowly into the chair across the table from him and waited, once again, for the guard to leave us alone. The door’s clang as it shut seemed extra loud today. And my fear was for an entirely different reason.
The slightly out of breath feeling in my chest turned into an I’ve-been-running-up-a-steep-flight-of-stairs feeling. “You’re looking much better,” I said.
Clement rubbed a hand over his beard—slow like he was trying to coax out the words he needed to say. “I’ve been sleeping.”
“How long?”
“Since I got here.”
Oh crap, was the only words my mind could grapple on to. “I’m guessing your condition wasn’t one that could spontaneously correct itself.”
“Not according to my doctor. He told me to get my affairs in order.”
Not just crap. Double crap. A whole truckload of crap-ness. If we couldn’t prove Clement had fatal insomnia, then any defense based on him not understanding his actions was gone. We were claiming the insomnia caused hallucinations. If he didn’t have fatal insomnia, he was lying about the hallucinations and sleep deprivation.
And there was a distinct possibility that I’d been played.
16
The cacophony of my own thoughts was so loud I wished my brain came with a mute button.
Clement shook his head. “I don’t understa—”
I held up a finger. “I need you to sit quietly for a second. Please.”
I examined his face. He met my gaze and didn’t flinch away, even though it must have been uncomfortable to have me staring at him. The furrows in his forehead stayed identical to the way they’d been when I walked in, as if he’d been worrying about this long before I got there and was already concerned enough that my reaction wouldn’t make it either better or worse.
Beyond all that, though, was the authenticity I’d thought I’d detected the first time we met, when I was talking to a man who loved his wife and his job and the history of Michigan. A man who was arrested because he was found over the body covered in blood, but who the police still hadn’t been able to produce a motive for.
Had he tricked me?
It would have required extreme planning. He’d have had to know I was a lawyer before I told him because he’d shown signs of long-standing sleep deprivation from the moment I met him.
I ticked down one finger. If I got to three reasons in favor of his honesty, I’d give him the benefit of the doubt.
His timing was also terrible. If he’d been pretending, he should have kept pretending until after the psychological and medical assessments. There was no logical reason to pretend this long only to stop now. If he’d been faking, he’d been able to deceive trained professionals and should have been able to trick the ones I’d hired to assess him as well. I dropped another finger to the tabletop. That was two reasons.
Assuming he’d been telling me the truth about being diagnosed. “Will your doctor testify that you were diagnosed with fatal insomnia?”
“I can’t see why not. It should also be in writing in my medical records, and he sent those to multiple specialists.”
Okay, so then Clement would have had to be a talented actor, good enough to win an Oscar, to fool medical professionals. And he couldn’t have faked the stress signs his body would have been showing. “I’ll want you to sign a release so I can look at those records.”
“Anything you need.”
He didn’t blink or hesitate. He was confident his records would show he’d indeed been suffering from fatal insomnia. That wouldn’t be enough for the court if we couldn’t prove he still was suffering now—the assumption would be that he’d tricked the original doctors but hadn’t been able to trick the forensic specialists.
But it was enough for me.
I tapped my third finger into the desk, then tapped the three fingers together. Believing him left me in a real pickle, as my grandmother would have said.
“You said you started sleeping again after you came here.”
