Percy's car is a shiny pick-up his parents bought for him when he was sixteen, before he even got his license. Indy remembers being worried that he was going to crash it to smithereens before he could even properly learn to drive it, so it's a relief to her now that it's still in good condition. The green paint has faded over time, the milky color of oxidized copper, but he keeps it clean, and it runs without a problem.
Gatz lost shotgun, so Indy sits in the front, tuning the radio as the mint air freshener dangles from the rearview mirror, the road in front of them long and straight and lined by grassy fields.
"You're lucky today was a slow day," Indy murmurs. The radio lands on a faintly staticky R&B station, and she lets it play. "Still, you owe me the pay I would've gotten if I stayed."
Percy rolls his eyes. "How's that fair? You agreed to this. Gatz and I could've gone alone."
"We asked Sylvia, too, but she's got rehearsals," Gatz says before Indy can ask. Stretching their feet long across the truck's cream backseat, they certainly seem content without Sylvia there. "Tell us again how exactly you worked this all out, Percy?"
"Yes," Indy insists. "Do tell."
Percy's grip on the steering wheel tightens slightly, then loosens again. "I was able to get my dad involved. I said it was important for class that I talk to this guy, and that was all it took, really. He made some phone calls and here we are."
Indy pauses, watching Percy's face, wondering if the conversation was truly as easy as he's making it seem. When it comes to the Mitchells, the seams between parent and son and brother and brother aren't so gaping that they're visible to those standing far away. Though Indy has a vantage point closer than most, it still isn't close enough. Even here she can just barely see the frays.
And she has the persistent feeling that's exactly how the Mitchells prefer it.
Gatz leans forward, knocking their fists against the console. "That's Senator Mitchell for you."
Percy winces. "I don't like taking advantage of my name like that. But I justâ"
"You gave us somewhere to start," Indy says. "Thanks, Percy."
He's quiet for a second, the sound of the tires whirring against the asphalt filling the space his voice leaves behind.
He flashes Indy a brief smile. "Sure."
Percy's name also gets them through the high-security, high-tech gates of the state penitentiary, the top of the mile-high fence looped with barbed wire. The three of them have their bags checked and their bodies scanned, before a warden marches them down a hall that reminds Indy eerily of a horror movie: walls and floor and ceiling all the same bland shade of beige, a light at the end of the hall flickering intermittently.
Keys jingle together as the ward stops them all at a heavy iron door and takes her key ring from her pocket. "Thirty minutes," she says without feeling, the door squealing as she pulls it open, veins in her arm straining. "Recordings are fine. No gifts, pictures, or physical contact allowed."
Indy nods her understanding. She steps inside, and Gatz and Percy follow.
Another ward stands against the wall, gun and baton in full display upon his tool belt. Sitting in a chair before him, looking tired and vaguely disinterested, is Lamar Pine.
Though he was barely in his twenties when Elizabeth Dobbs was murdered, it's been years now, and his face shows it. Wrinkles and frown lines have worn deep into his skin, coiled hair and beard straggly and peppered with gray. His eyes are downturned, so deep a brown they look black, a mole dotting his cheek and the tip of his nose.
His face scarcely changes as they enter; he gives only a minute twitch of his eyebrow.
Only when Indy tosses an expectant look at Gatz and Percy does she realize both of them are doing the same to her.
If she weren't so tense, she'd roll her eyes.
Awkwardly, Indy steps forward, the clack of her boots echoing off the linoleum. "Mr. Pine?" she starts. She frets over her words, her mind momentarily short-circuiting as she tries to decide which degree of formality is appropriate. "I'm sorry to bother you. My name is Indy Helaire, and I've come with my friends Percy Mitchell and Tayvon Gatleyâ"
"Everyone just calls me Gatz."
"Gatz," Indy allows, shooting them a pointed look, which they just shrug off. She turns back to Pine. "We're students at Proudley College."
For the first time, Pine's expression shifts, his eyes just slightly widening with surprise. Whether this surprise is the pleasant sort, Indy can't be sure. "Proudley. Is that so?" Pine muses. His voice is throaty, a low rasp at the end of his words. "What's this for? A little research project, something like that?"
It's Gatz's turn to shoot a look at Indy, its silent message something along the lines of He just read you like a book.
Yes. Indy knows that.
She supposes it's pointless to waste any time beating around the bush. She takes the seat facing Pine, pulling the notebook and pen she brought from her bag. "That's the assignment, yes. To look into cold cases and how the media covered them," Indy begins, "but that's not the only reason we're here."
Pine's brows twitch, but he says nothing, just regarding her with those tired, world-weary eyes. The metal cuffs jingle on his hands as he fidgets with his fingers, his knuckles knobby and worn.
Indy tosses a glance at the warden, worried there's some rule against this topic of conversation that they didn't warn her about, because they didn't think anyone would be foolish enough to try. "Your case was decided on meager evidence, wasn't it?"
Pine lets out a long exhale, shaking his head. "Now, miss, I'm sure you've got a good head on your shoulders, but there ain't no point inâ"
"The hammer found at the scene was the most damning piece of evidence. It matched the tools carried by HVAC repairmen from your company, and you yourself admitted it was yours when it was presented to you," Indy says, reading from the notes she's already taken so far, tracing over the words with her nail. "Yet the murder occurred in 1978. That's eight years before the first use of DNA evidence in a criminal case. If they tested the hammer now, that could possibly put the case in a new light, wouldn't it?"
By now, Pine has his face in his hand. "My fingerprints were found on the handle. That was enough for the investigators, and for the jury."
Indy grits her teeth, but she won't stop there. "Motive, then. You didn't know Dobbs at all before her murder, and none of her items were found missing from the house, so it's not like it was a botched robbery. What reason would you have to kill her?"
"Still not evidence, miss. You're assuming things."
Indy clicks her pen. "Did you kill her, Mr. Pine?"
"Indy!" Percy snaps.
Indy's face warms; the question came out of her mouth before she could think about it, and though the bitter taste of regret begins to form on her tongue, it's not like she can take it back now.
"I don't believe you did it, Mr. Pine," she says. "For more reasons than one. I can prove it to the people who matter; I can free you, if you let me try. It's never too late, isn't it? As long as you're alive."
Slowly, Pine lifts his face from his hand, and in it, Indy suddenly sees not just his suffering, but the suffering of thousands of others like him. The weight of a crime they didn't commit bearing down on their shoulders, dreams and futures snatched from their hands without question. Pinned by a system that prosecuted them simply for having the audacity to exist, or to exist too loudly.
It's a lot bigger than some school project.
These are people's lives.
That detective couldn't have been more right.
"We understand you're tired, sir," Percy starts, and Indy glances at him in surprise. "I can't imagine how exhausting all of these appeals must have been, for you and for your family. But we have something that can really change it this time."
"Something?" Pine scoffs. "That's awfully vague, don't you think?"
Indy sighs. "Just give us a chance. Give yourself another chance. Isn't there something you want to live for? Someone you want to see on the other side of all this?"
Pine closes his eyes, tilts his head back, in deep thoughtâso much so that it's as if Indy and the rest of them are no longer in the room at all.
He moves his lips, though no words come out. Indy realizes a moment later that he's praying.
He exhales and looks at them, his eyes watery but his face dry. "I suppose I don't got much left to lose."
A smile wants to squirm across Indy's face, but she stifles it. This is no time for celebration. She can't celebrate until she's really fixed it, until she's really reunited Pine with his loved ones on the other side of the penitentiary's bleak stone walls.
By then, Indy and the others only have twenty minutes left, and she refuses to waste even a second of it. She asks him first about himself, how he was born and raised in Erskine, by a mother whose physical disability kept her from holding a job, and a father who worked in a grocery store. He had a brother and a sister, though he'd his brother in a freak accident fairly early, and as custom of the times it then fell upon him to carry on the family name.
College wasn't an option, but when he saw an ad for a position at a heating and air conditioning company, training included, he saw his chance.
"There was no glitz or glory to it," says Pine, "but that wasn't what I needed. I just needed a reliable way to make money for me and my folks, and it was that, for a while."
A while being until the Dobbs service call, the night that changed everything.
"I know it's a sensitive topic for you, sir," Gatz offers when the time comes, "but can you tell us what you remember? Anything could help."
Pine's eyes flit towards the ceiling, then lower again, brows knitted in an intense frown. "I don't remember nothing strange. The refrigerant was too low; that's what had made the air conditioning freeze up and stop working. I refilled it for her, and I left."
"Did you notice anything weird on your way out?" Percy asks, and Pine looks up at him, skeptical. "Anyone or anything suspicious?"
Pine pauses, deeply pondering. "A car."
"A car?" the three of them repeat.
"Yes. Now that I think about it, there was another car, a black sedan, pulling into Miss Dobbs's driveway as I left. No idea who it was, though."
Indy scribbles it down, frightful, excited, doubting, and all at once. "Was there anyone else who could have seen this car, or who would've known who it belonged to?"
"Miss Dobbs's neighbors, I imagine, if any of them was home," Pine replies. "Though who knows where any of them could be off to nowadays."
Someone might know, Indy thinks. It's a question of if I can get them to tell me.
Indy wants to ask more, but the door opens, their signal that their time for today is up.
Indy stands, chair creaking as she gets out of it. "Thank you, Mr. Pine," she says. "I'll do everything I can. I swear."
And she could be imagining it, but some of the exhaustion has disappeared from his eyes, replaced instead by the tender beginnings of hope. The barest spark, soon to birth a flame.
He almost looks like he believes her.