Aaron was saying, “What Dace doesn’t know is this guy Cates is a registered sex offender and he has his eye on the teenaged girl in a bikini, sunning herself the yard next door. She’s abducted that night, and two days later they find her body stuffed in a sewer pipe half a mile away. She’s been raped and strangled with the cord from the rope-and-pulley system on the very pruning saw Dace was using that day.”

I lowered my spoon. “Are you sure about this? I never even met the man, but I find that hard to believe.”

“Sheriff’s department didn’t have a problem with it. Cates was identified from a palm print left at the scene and he’s the one who implicated Dace. Eventually, Cates ended up on death row in San Quentin, but Dace insisted all along that he was innocent. His wife got on the stand and testified he was home the night the girl was kidnaped. Jury figured she was lying through her teeth. Vote on the guilty verdict was unanimous and the judge sentenced him to life in prison. He spent the next twelve years writing letters to anyone and everyone.”

“I’ve had letters from inmates and they always sound like crackpots. Long, garbled tales about political conspiracies and corruption in the legal system.”

Aaron leaned forward. “Here’s the kicker. Two years ago, Cates finds out he’s terminal. He’s diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, three months to live at the outside, and he decides he doesn’t want to die with a bad conscience. He finally tells the authorities Dace wasn’t the guy, that it was someone else.”

“Amazing.”

“That’s what I said. You’d think Cates’s recanting would be sufficient, but no deal. Prosecutor thinks it’s bullshit. Dace’s original defense attorney is retired and suffering early stage dementia so he’s no help. The judge doesn’t want to hear about it and there’s no one willing to go to bat for him. Twenty-five letters later an attorney finally agreed to look into Dace’s claims. He went back and reviewed all the old police files and the evidence in storage, including a bloody shirt Dace had always sworn wasn’t his. The attorney got a judge to sign an order submitting the semen sample and the bloody shirt for DNA testing that wasn’t available back then. Sure enough, results ruled him out.”

“What about the real guy?”

“He’d been killed in a prison riot two months before. Dace was freed but his life was in pieces, as you might imagine.”

“Humpty Dumpty.”