“I can get you in. I need to fax a letter up to the prison that says you are an investigator working for me and that you are entitled access to Brian. I then give you a to-whom-it-may-concern letter that you carry with you, and that identifies you as working for me. If you work for an attorney, you don’t need a state license. You carry the letter with you and show it at the gate. It will get you in.”

“Technically, I don’t work for you. My paper has rules about reporters misrepresenting themselves.”

Schifino reached into his pocket and pulled out his cash. He handed a dollar across the desk to me. I reached across the murder scene photos to take it.

“There,” he said. “I just paid you a dollar. You work for me.”

That didn’t really cut it but I wasn’t too worried about it, considering my employment situation.

“I guess that will work,” I said. “How far is Ely?”

“Depending on your driving, it’s three to four hours north of here. It’s in the middle of nowhere and they call the road going up there the loneliest road in America. I don’t know if it’s because it leads to the prison or if it’s the landscape you cross, but it’s not called that without good reason. They have an airport. You could take a sand jumper up there.”

I assumed that a sand jumper was the same as a puddle jumper, a small prop plane. I shook my head. I had written too many stories about little planes going down. I didn’t fly in them unless I absolutely had to.

“I’ll drive. Write the letters. And I’m going to need copies of everything in your files.”

“I’ll work on the letters and get Agnes to start making copies. I’ll need copies of what you have for the habeas petition. We can say that’s what my dollar bought.”

I nodded and thought, Yeah, put officious Agnes to work for me. I would like that.

“Let me ask you something,” I said.

“Shoot.”

“Before I came in here and showed you all of this, did you think Brian Oglevy was guilty?”

Schifino cocked his head back as he thought it over.

“Not for publication?”

I shrugged. It wasn’t what I wanted but it was what I’d take.

“If that’s the only way you’ll answer.”

“Okay, for publication I can tell you that I knew Brian was innocent from day one. There was just no way he could’ve committed this horrible crime.”

“And not for publication?”

“I thought he was guilty as sin. It was the only way I could live with losing the case.”

After stopping at a 7-Eleven and buying a throwaway phone with a hundred minutes of call time on it, I headed north through the desert on Highway 93 toward Ely State Prison.