36

Ryan Jaworski was totally in the dark. He had no idea when, or even whether, the judge was going to reveal that he was the mysterious “confidential informant” who’d told the feds that Sid Cranmer had more porn in his house. Sid’s woman lawyer was pushing for disclosure, arguing to Norcross that she had a right to call what she referred to as the “lying CI” as a witness at Sid’s trial. The black cop, Patterson, had stopped taking Ryan’s calls, probably blaming him for the blown search and the howling load of crap the newspapers had poured onto the government afterward. If Ryan’s name came out, Libby would go crazy. Nine chances out of ten, she’d tell Patterson that Ryan had seen the flyer while they were at Sid’s house, and Patterson would realize he had lied about that.

In half an hour on the Internet, Ryan learned that lying to an FBI agent was a serious crime. He couldn’t believe how—without really doing anything wrong—he’d ended up in such an unfair, fucking horrible mess.

As the days passed, the situation ate away at him. With “The Dog That Didn’t Bark, and the Porn That Wasn’t There” in and out of the front pages, the news that the “CI” was an Amherst undergrad would be banner news locally. Jackie might hear about it way out on Long Island, not to mention Jackie’s mom—who hated him already—and eventually his dad back in Chicago, which made Ryan sick to his stomach. His entire life was wobbling toward the toilet. No one could blame him if he couldn’t just stand by, doing nothing.

The linchpin was Lib. She was the only one who could connect him to the flyer. As Professor Mattoon said, if he could keep Lib’s lip buttoned, they could ride this out. Mattoon was texting him every other day now, asking whether he’d “had his little chat” with Libby. But just having a chat with her wasn’t going to do it; she’d talk rings around him. Wasn’t there a case in New York where some girl died during “rough sex”? And hadn’t the guy gotten off? Ryan wasn’t going to go that far, obviously—though it would be easy to slip up during one of their games, especially if they were shit-faced. His judo experience made him an expert on choke holds, which he and Libby sometimes played around with to jack things up. The holidays were coming up soon, which would give him a timely escape and the space to think. When the new semester began, his birthday wouldn’t be far off. The celebration was bound to be wild. Accidents happened all the time.