46

The next day, after a special FBI request to the judge, Blake and I boarded one of the bureau’s Gulfstream jets to travel to Chicago. A car was waiting. At midday, we arrived at the blocks of apartment buildings where Magnolia lived. I went up alone.

She stood in front of her door on the third floor. Her gap-toothed smile only shamed me more for what I was about to ask. Magnolia ushered me into the back of the apartment, to a kitchen with tiles that must have been installed in the sixties. She boiled water on an old stove and poured it into a Chinese pot with bags of chamomile inside.

I gave her drawings that Garth and Frieda had made. They weren’t just to persuade her to help me. I really wanted her to have them. She reciprocated with two framed needlepoint pictures. For Garth, a brown-and-white eagle. Frieda’s picture was a purple, orange, and black butterfly with the word Mariposa inscribed under it. I stared at Magnolia, then at the gifts. I couldn’t bring myself to make the ask.

She poured the tea into flowered, mismatched mugs. Closing her eyes, she drew in the mist and said, “You want me to go see him, don’t you?”

I studied my lap. “The FBI thinks he’ll tell you things he won’t tell me.”

“And what do you think?”

My children were threatened. I had no choice. “We’ll be in a private room. He’ll be chained to the chair. There won’t be any danger.”

Her arms pushed into her sides. Her eyes turned to glass. “We’ll have to talk about Mother and Jonas, won’t we?”

That was the point. His sister and his childhood terror were the shocks that would open him up.

The late-morning sun through the back window lit up her eyes. She gave me a sad, hopeless smile. “Just before I ran away, he told me about a dream. He and Jonas took an axe to Mother.”

Her head sank into her hands and her long blonde and gray skeins hung to the old kitchen table. In the apartment above us, footsteps stamped over the floor. A child cried in the overgrown yard below the apartment building.

“I can’t do this,” she said.

I knew she was right. Once inside that prison room, she’d come face-to-face with her brother as a stooped and broken old man. She’d think once again that if only she’d stayed with him or brought him with her, she could have prevented what he’d become. And that would just be the start. When the press learned about Magnolia, hundreds of the Preying Hands’ fans would hunt her down and knock at her door. They’d take pictures through her windows and follow her through the streets.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She still cupped her face with her long, outstretched fingers.

“My children will love the needlepoints,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

As I left Magnolia’s apartment, the sun shone through the white curtains covering the living room window. I closed the door quietly and wondered what I would do. Half the Chicago FBI would be listening to me inside Harvey Dean Kogan’s cell. And I had no plan.