THE LAST WITNESS
The Victim’s Name
Thomas Greer had been dead for six hours before Sara Cole learned his name. She had six seconds before she learned why it mattered.
Detective Webb || Thomas Greer || Investigation || Revelation
Detective Marcus Webb arrived at Sara’s office at the Cook County District Attorney’s office on West Washington at 8:47 a.m. on Wednesday morning, which was eleven hours after the attack in the alley, which was three hours after Sara had driven to the hospital to learn that the man she had found in the alley was still alive, barely, in a surgical ICU with two cracked vertebrae and a subdural hematoma that the attending neurosurgeon described as “significant” with the specific brevity of someone who had learned that patients’ families found anything longer than one word at a time almost impossible to process. The man was in a medically induced coma. He had not regained consciousness. He might not. The surgeon had not been optimistic in the way that good surgeons were not optimistic when optimism wasn’t warranted. Sara had stood in the hospital corridor outside the ICU with her hands pressed flat against her belly — which was becoming a gesture, she noticed, a physical management of the anxiety she was not allowing herself to express otherwise — and she had looked through the glass at the man in the bed and she had thought: I still don’t know who you are.
Marcus Webb knocked on her open office door with the specific knock of someone who already knew she was expecting him — not tentative, not aggressive, just present, the knock of a person who was here on business and expected to be received. He was forty-five years old, which she would learn later; he looked, at first assessment, like fifty — a big man, broad across the shoulders, with the particular weathered quality of someone who had been having difficult conversations in difficult places for a long time and had not found this rejuvenating. He had a good face, in the sense that it was an honest face, the kind that telegraphed its emotional state whether the owner wanted it to or not, and what his face was telegraphing this morning was something between professional concern and a more personal discomfort that he was managing with moderate success. He was in a dark suit that had seen better years and a tie that was one of maybe four ties he owned, Sara would eventually decide, all of them some variation on the same blue-grey palette. He held a manila folder in one hand and his credentials in the other. He introduced himself: Detective Marcus Webb, Area Central Violent Crimes. He shook her hand. He sat in the chair across her desk with the ease of someone accustomed to sitting across from lawyers without being intimidated by the furniture arrangement.
“The man in the alley last night,” he said, without preamble, which she appreciated. “His name is Thomas Greer. He’s forty-three years old. He works — worked — as an investigative journalist. Freelance, mostly, but some staff positions over the years. Tribune, Sun-Times, some national outlets.” He opened the folder. He slid a photograph across the desk toward her. “Is this the man you saw?” Sara looked at the photograph. The man in it was a headshot, the kind journalists kept for bylines — professional, direct, a face that was trying to project credibility and mostly succeeding. Dark hair with grey at the temples. A face she did not recognize. “Yes,” she said. “That’s the victim.” Webb watched her say it. She noticed him watching. “You’re sure you don’t know him?” he said. “I’m sure,” she said. He nodded slowly, with the expression of someone receiving an answer they had expected and weren’t sure what to do with. He reached into the folder again. He slid a second piece of paper across the desk. It was a printout — call records, the format she recognized immediately from casework, the clean columns of time stamps and numbers. He said: “This is Thomas Greer’s phone from the last twenty-four hours before the attack.” He pointed at three entries, highlighted in yellow. “These three calls are to you.”
Sara looked at the numbers. She had already looked at her own phone records that morning, twice, and she knew what she would see on his end, but seeing it in the format of official case documentation — clean, printed, evidential — was different from seeing it on her phone in a bathroom at midnight. It had a different weight. She let the weight settle. “I know,” she said. Webb looked at her. “You know.” “I checked my outgoing calls last night when I got home,” she said. “I don’t remember making those calls. I have no memory of them. I was going to mention it to you.” He was quiet for a moment. The specific quiet of someone processing an answer that was either exactly right or exactly wrong, that required more information before it could be categorized. “You don’t remember making them,” he said. “No,” she said. “Is that something that happens to you?” he said, carefully. “Forgetting phone calls?” “No,” she said. “It is not something that happens to me. I have an excellent memory. I know it’s — I know it’s not what you’d expect me to say.” “It’s not,” he said. “I’ll be honest with you, Ms. Cole. There are a few different ways to look at this situation. I’d like to hear what you think is the right way before I tell you which one I’m considering.” She looked at him. She understood what he was doing. “You’re wondering if I’m a suspect,” she said. “I’m wondering what the honest picture is,” he said. “Which sometimes includes a suspect and sometimes doesn’t.” “Thomas Greer is alive,” she said. “Barely.” “He may not survive,” Webb said. “If he doesn’t, this becomes a homicide investigation. And you are currently the only witness.” “I’m also the person whose number is in his phone,” she said. “Yes,” said Webb. He looked at her steadily. He had grey eyes, she noticed. Very direct. The kind of eyes that were designed to make people feel that concealment was expensive. She was not concealing anything. But she was aware that the gap in her memory — three phone calls she had no recollection of making — was a gap that could be filled in ways she might not like. “I want to cooperate fully,” she said. “I want to know who Thomas Greer is and why he called me and why I called him back and what I don’t remember. I want all of those things as much as you do.” “Do you?” said Webb. “Yes,” she said. She meant it completely. She would continue to mean it even as the things she discovered became things she would have preferred not to know.
After Webb left — he took the folder, he took her formal written statement, he left his card and said he’d be in touch, he did all of this with the professional efficiency of someone conducting what was still being called a routine investigation — Sara sat at her desk with her door closed and she opened her computer and she searched for Thomas Greer. Journalist. Freelance. She expected to find a professional profile, clips from newspapers, the digital trail of a career. She found those things. She also found, on page three of the search results, a name she recognized. It was in a 2011 article in the Tribune — a short piece, barely two hundred words, the kind of story that noted an outcome rather than examined it. The headline read: Greer Investigation Led to Wrongful Conviction Claim, Court Says Otherwise. She read it. She read it again. In 2011, Thomas Greer had been investigating a claim that a man named Raymond Doss, convicted of murder in 2009, had been wrongly convicted. Greer had alleged that evidence had been suppressed, that the prosecution’s key witness had been coerced, that the conviction was built on a foundation that wouldn’t survive scrutiny. The court had disagreed. Raymond Doss’s appeal had been denied. Thomas Greer’s investigation had gone nowhere. The article was four paragraphs long and it said very little and it said it without passion, the specific neutral language of a newspaper that had moved on. Sara read the name of the lead prosecutor in the 2009 case. She read it twice. The name was Sara Cole. She was twenty-four years old in 2009. She was still in law school. She had not been a prosecutor. She had not been anywhere near this case. The lead prosecutor’s name was her name. This was impossible. And then, with the specific cold clarity of an intelligence that did not allow itself to pretend: Unless it wasn’t impossible. Unless there is something in the gap between what I remember and what happened. She closed the article. She pressed her hands flat on the desk and breathed in the careful, counted way that Dr. Ross had taught her for moments of acute anxiety. She counted to ten. She thought: There is a mistake here. There is an explanation. Find it before someone else finds it for you. She picked up her phone. She called the number that Webb had given her. He answered on the second ring. “Detective Webb,” she said, “I need to see you again today. There’s something I found that you need to know about.” He said: “I know. I was about to call you about the same thing.” The silence that followed was not long. But it was the kind of silence in which two people simultaneously understood that they were in the middle of something much larger than either of them had thought they were in when the morning started.
She did not tell James about any of it. Not that morning, not that evening when he came home from the firm with his usual cheerful energy, his briefcase and his good suit and the easy warmth that she had loved about him for six years and that felt, tonight, slightly off in a way she could not articulate. He asked about her day. She said it was fine, a long meeting, a case she was prepping. He made dinner — he was a better cook than her and they both knew it — and they ate at the kitchen table and talked about the baby, about the name they still hadn’t agreed on, about the nursery furniture that was supposed to arrive on Friday. She watched him across the table the way she watched everything, with the systematic attention she couldn’t turn off, and she told herself that the slight wrongness she was perceiving was the pregnancy, the anxiety, the residue of an alley in the rain. She told herself this with conviction, because she had no evidence of anything else, and Sara Cole did not go beyond what the evidence supported. That was a rule. She held the rule like a lifeline. She held it even as something underneath it, something that wasn’t evidence but was older than evidence, was already asking questions she didn’t yet have the courage to ask out loud.