Switchback. Ch3

The Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, Lucasville

One day later

The wind wasn’t particularly strong; more of a stiff breeze, but it was enough to play havoc with Alexandra Lord’s flame-red hair as she power-walked out the facility’s gate. Her left hand she used to tame the hair whilst her right was clenched into a fist to conceal the tiny brooch-like device she held. She reached her cameraman and dropped it into his upturned palm.

          ‘Tell me you got that, Otis,’ she said.

          ‘Oh, I got it all right. This little gem picked up everything that psycho had to say in there. Get it? Little gem? Brooch?’ His smile belonged on a Colgate billboard.

          ‘Was it clear?’ she said, herself rather low on merriment.

          ‘As a bell,’ he said, and handed her the CNN microphone. 'So how was it, being so close to someone as sick as that guy?'

          ‘Can we just get this over with? I need to get home.’

          ‘Why, you gotta hot date?’

          ‘No, I gotta cold shiver,’ she said, in reference to the forty-five minute interview she just had with a condemned man. ‘And I’ve got my kid sister coming over tonight, so I’d like to be there when she arrives.’

          ‘I wouldn’t worry too much about Sam, Alex, and she’s hardly a kid anymore.’

          ‘Her name’s Samantha and she’s seventeen, which makes her a kid in my eyes. And if I ever need your advice, Otis, I’ll ask for it. Okay?’

          ‘Okay,’ he said, both palms up. ‘I was−’

          ‘Well don’t. Just get behind your camera and stick to what you know best.’

Alex wasn’t pleased with her uncharacteristic outburst toward Otis, after all he was right; Samantha’s not a kid anymore. But she can’t help her feelings, can’t help being protective of her baby sister, well, half-sister, though Otis wouldn’t know anything about that, or the reason why.  

          Otis stuck to what he knew best and peered down the camera’s eye-piece. ‘Okay, in five … four … three.’ Two fingers, one finger.

          ‘This morning at eleven-fifty, here at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, and after spending fifteen years on death row at Ohio’s State Penitentiary, thirty-eight-year-old Karl Michael Evans, who was convicted of murdering five young girls whilst living at his parents’ house in Leyton Falls, paid the ultimate price today for his horrific crimes.

          ‘I, along with eighteen other guests, including Evans’ lawyers and several of his victims’ relatives, had been invited by the prison Governor, James T. Whiteman, to witness the execution of Evans by lethal injection.’

She paused, looked distracted, her gaze distant. Otis looked up from his eyepiece and made an agitated winding motion with an open hand that insisted she, “Keep-it-going”.

          She breathed in, continued.

          ‘Those of you who may recall the case will no doubt remember the press releases that said how, at the start of the three-month trial, Evans protested his innocence by claiming, and some might say outlandishly, that he was not the murderer, Karl Evans, but was in fact David Foley, a fifty-six year-old real estate agent from Arkansas. A man, whom, as his company’s records proved during the trial, did indeed visit the Evans house on the understanding of placing the property on the market. And who, on that day eighteen years ago, disappeared without trace, and has neither been seen nor heard of since.

          ‘At the trial Mister Evans also claimed, whilst still insisting he was the missing David Foley, that when he arrived at the house he was attacked by Karl Evans and rendered unconscious. Coming to, only to find he’d been somehow transformed into the murderer. Then, bound and gagged, he was left outside Leyton Falls police station with all the incriminating evidence the police would need to secure a conviction, including directions to the whereabouts of his victims’ remains which had been buried in a number of shallow graves out in Elijah forest, just three miles from the house he murdered them in.’

          Alex looked to the breeze in a bid to rid her face of the blasted stray bang, her left arm unfurling toward the prison.

          ‘And that was how the scene played out behind these walls within the last hour, as Evans, once more protesting his innocence, claimed to me in an interview that he arranged through the prison Governor, that he was the missing man, David Foley.’

          Alex again became distracted; she wanted to give her own view, her own beliefs about the man she just watched being executed, but decided against it. She wanted to investigate his claims, and if she wanted to do that, she needed her job to do it.

          ‘This is Alexandra Lord for CNN, reporting from outside the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville.’

          ‘Annnd … were done.’ Otis said. ‘Wow, thought you’d dried-up on me for a minute there. Twice.’

           ‘No, just lost my train, that’s all.’

          ‘Well Murray wants this patching through right away, said he needs it for the one o’clock. But I’ll erase the stalls first.’

          ‘Thanks, Otis. What did you do with the interview recording?’

          ‘I copied it to your IPod. Do you want to keep the original?’

          She shook her head. ‘No, erase that, too.’

          Otis crouched and began to wrap up the equipment. ‘You know, if Murray finds out you’re holding out on him−’

          ‘There’s no need for Murray to find out anything. What do you think I was doing in my motel room the whole of last night whilst you were chatting-up the barmaids across the road?’

          ‘Please don’t say you were writing out the interview.’

          ‘Yep, Murray gets his interview, albeit mostly fake, and I get two weeks off to follow up on what was said in there.’

          ‘What? You’re not serious; tell me you don’t actually believe what Evans just told you?’

          ‘Not one, single, solitary word.’

          ‘Good, ‘because that guy’s a total−’

          ‘But I do believe what David Foley just told me.’

          Otis stood again, his face serious. ‘Are you insane? That guy was a psycho, a fruitcake, and all that bullshit you got just now was exactly that … bullshit.’

          ‘He knew things, personal things. You heard what he said on that recording. And don’t try to tell me there wasn’t sincerity in his voice.’

          Otis scoffed. ‘Sincerity? You really want to talk about sincerity? You just called his claims outlandish, and now you’re saying you believe him, where’s your sincerity?’

          ‘Indifference, Otis, ever heard of that? It means having no particular interest or sympathy, to remain unconcerned and not take sides. It’s something that comes with the job we do, you know that. And, as you so obviously missed it, I used the phrase, “Some might say outlandishly” which makes me indifferent. Not only that, if anyone suspected I took his side or sympathised with him…’ she trailed off.

          Otis nodded. ‘Yeah, you’d be labelled a crank and justifiably so in my opinion. But this isn’t about taking sides or sympathy, Alex. That man was going to die no matter what he said, and no matter who he said it to. Of course he’d sound sincere, even Jesus Christ’d have a hard time disbelieving the guy.’

          ‘So if that was you in there, if you were in his shoes just then, would your dying wish be the same as his? Would your dying wish be to spend the final hour of your life trying to convince someone who couldn’t do shit for you that you were trapped in another person’s body?’

          ‘I don’t know, perhaps I would if I was as crazy as he was.’

          ‘But he knew every little detail about Foley’s life, and I mean every little detail.’

          Otis tossed aside some cables he’d rolled up. ‘That doesn’t mean shit, Alex. So what, Evans did his homework. It wouldn’t be the first time a psycho knew all about his victim. He probably spent weeks, maybe even months following the guy, watching what he did, how he did it, where he went, who he knew.’

          ‘That’s not the case here. Last year, when I first interviewed him, he gave me a list of things to find out, things that only he could verify. Things Karl Evans couldn’t possibly have known anything about. Things his dead college friend’s parents’ told me. Things an ex-girlfriend, who’s been living in France for the past twenty six years, told me. Everything I questioned him about he answered, off-the-bat and without thinking, including a date and two sets of initials his wife told me that Foley had carved into a tree in Baltimore twenty one years ago. And that was information Foley didn’t mention, but I found that tree outside his mother’s old house and those initials were there, his and the woman he married two years later. David Foley laughed when I mentioned it to him, an absent laugh, like what I’d said had triggered some fond memory, a fond memory that Evans couldn’t possibly have known anything about.’

          ‘So you actually believe that man was Foley trapped inside Evans’ body?’

          ‘Yes, I do. And another strange thing about all this is that Karl Evans had an eye defect, it’s in his medical records.’

          ‘You got access to his medical records?’

          ‘Yes, and don’t ask how I got access, I’m not proud of myself for that. But his records showed he had a coloboma in his left iris, meaning part of it was missing. In Evans’ case a portion at the bottom of his iris remained black, which made his pupil resemble a key-hole. It’s irreparable, yet the man I just watched being executed in there didn’t have a coloboma. You heard what he said on that recording when I asked about it, “The eyes don’t change, Miss Lord.” That’s what he said. “They stay with the person who is inside, they just don’t change.”’

          Otis shook his head and turned away to climb in the back of the van where he sat to start his editing before patching the report through to Angus Murray at the CNN headquarters in Atlanta. He spoke without looking away from the console. ‘Okay, let’s say, “hypothetically speaking” that whoever it was in there and whatever he told you was true. What are you going to do about it?’

          ‘Find him.’

          ‘Find who?’

          ‘If David Foley is the man lying in that prison morgue, and I have no doubt that he is, then Evans is still out there in hiding and in Foley’s body, and I’m going to find him.’

          Otis swivelled in the chair. ‘Well, I’m glad we were speaking hypothetically. So, what are you really going to do?’

          Alex looked at him, a tilt to her head, a hand raised to shade her steel-grey eyes from the sun. ‘I’m serious, Otis.’

          ‘You’re actually going to try to find this guy; someone who’s been missing for the past eighteen years, and probably doesn’t even exist anymore?’

          ‘He does exist, and he’s out there, and I will find him.’

          ‘For what … so you can bring him to justice?’

          ‘No, I want to know about the switch. I want to know how it works.’

          ‘Why?’

          In that one heartbeat she almost told him, almost let slip the truth behind her motive for going to Leyton falls to find Karl Evans.

          ‘Because however he does it,’ she said. ‘It has to be the biggest story since man first stood erect, and I want to be the one to break it.’