Page 117 of Return of the Spider

I said, “And he’s heard nothing from the outside world?”

“Been in solitary for breaking the rules,” Celt said. “Twenty-three hours a day in his cell. One hour of exercise in the yard, which is where he’ll be coming from.”

Celt led us to an interior room with booths that faced bulletproof glass.

I said, “Given the circumstances, can we meet with him without the glass?”

The warden hesitated, then nodded and took us to a second room with a long table and benches made of concrete. Eyebolts jutted up out of the other side of the table and the floor.

The warden left through another door. A few minutes later, it opened.

A slight, older man in an orange jumpsuit with sweaty gray hair, glasses, and a furious expression shuffled in. An armed guard followed. A short chain linked the handcuffs he wore to a leather belt around his waist. A longer chain linked the cuffs around his ankles.

He sat, rage on his face, glasses fogged from coming out of the heat and into the air-conditioning. He said nothing as the guard connected his restraints to the eyebolts in the floor and on the other side of the table.

When the guard left, the inmate said angrily, “Can’t see you for nothing. But I told the guard and the warden, I don’t want to talk to no lawyer, much less three. Got no use for goddamned lawyers and I’m missing my fresh-air time.”

“Mr. Beech,” Ryan Davis said. “You probably don’t remember me, but I was your attorney when you were held in the state police barracks in Coatesville.”

“Here,” I said, “let me clean your glasses before we go on. Is that okay?”

“Go ahead,” Harold Beech said, sounding even more infuriated.

I took the glasses, wiped them clean, and put them back on his face.

Beech blinked, looked at Davis. “You’re right. I don’t remember you.”

“How about us?” Sampson asked.

The inmate stared at each of us in turn and then nodded, stony. “Cross and Sampson. You put me here.”

“We did,” I said. “And now we’re going to get you out.”

CHAPTER

99

Shaking his head slowly,Harold Beech glared at me, Sampson, and Davis, then snarled, “Don’t you be effing with me now, giving me hope like that. I been effed on hope and every appeal for decades. I just can’t—”

“It’s different this time, Mr. Beech,” Davis, the attorney, said.

Sampson said, “We’ve uncovered new and incontrovertible evidence that we believe exonerates you from the accessory-to-murder convictions in the deaths of Conrad Talbot, Selena DeMille, Alice Ways, Brenda Miles, and Bunny Maddox.”

“It’s going to take a little while for the old DNA samples to be matched to the bodies found recently in the Pine Barrens,” Davis cautioned. “And I have to file motions based on the new evidence to get us a court hearing. But we are all confident that you will soon be a free man, Mr. Beech.”

The anger began to leave the inmate’s face, and tears welled in his eyes. “Is this real, man? Am I dreaming?”

“It’s real, sir,” I said. “No dream.”

“I was framed. Isn’t that right?”

“You were framed,” Sampson said. “Clearly.”

“You were caught in the web of a diabolical spider named Gary Soneji,” I said. “We all were.”

After we gave him all the nuts and bolts—who Soneji was and who he became and how he had slowly and meticulously planted the evidence that had sent him to prison for life—Beech swallowed hard and stared at us, the anger returning.

“Eamon,” he said.