Behind a glass observation window Warden Gaines felt a chill run down his spine. Thirty years of instinct told him something important had just happened. He lifted the phone and called the state attorney’s office.
“Stop the execution process,” he said. “We have a situation.”
Security cameras had recorded the entire meeting and Gaines watched the footage again and again in his office. Victor’s reaction was too powerful to ignore and the girl’s whisper had clearly changed everything.
“What exactly did she say,” the warden asked the guard who had been inside the room.
“I could not hear the words,” the officer admitted. “But whatever she told him changed that man completely.”
Gaines stared at the screen showing Avery’s face and called the Attorney General directly.
“I am requesting a seventy two hour stay of execution because there may be new evidence,” he said.
The prosecutor on the other end sounded furious and asked if the warden had lost his mind since the warrant had already been signed and the procedure scheduled. Gaines answered calmly that he would not allow the execution to proceed until the meaning of that whisper was understood.
After a long pause the official finally agreed. “You have seventy two hours. If nothing comes from this, your career is finished.”
Two hundred kilometers away in a quiet suburb outside Denver, a retired defense attorney named Dorothy McBride sat alone at her small kitchen table watching the evening news. At sixty eight she had been forced into retirement after a serious heart attack three years earlier, and her days had become slow and quiet. When the broadcast showed Victor Bennett’s face and explained that his execution had been postponed because of a mysterious conversation with his daughter, Dorothy felt something tighten in her chest.
Decades earlier she had defended a man whose eyes looked exactly the same. That man had been innocent and had spent fifteen years in prison before the real criminal was found. Dorothy had never forgiven herself for failing him.
She picked up her phone and called her former assistant Frank Delgado.
“Frank, I need the entire file on the Bennett case,” she said. “Every document and every piece of evidence.”