It was one A.M. in Arizona, four A.M. in Florida. Everybody I knew was sleeping, and that sounded wonderful. Back at my hotel before sunrise I fell onto the bed still clothed, intending to fall asleep at will like a good soldier. By five A.M. I admitted failure and eyed the sleeping pill on my bedside table next to the bottle of wine. That would be really stupid to take a sleeping pill right now, I thought. Then I popped the pill, and with the bottle silently toasted the action character I most admired before taking a slug. More power to ya, Reacher.
It was noon by the time I could fight my way back from oblivion. To get rid of a chemical hangover, I took a long shower and put on fresh clothes. That had only a minimal effect, so I called Todd first to ask how Dad was because I couldn’t take any surprises just then. Todd said he didn’t know what was going on.
“Todd. I just got back from Creighton’s execution. Laura Coleman was a mess.” I didn’t mention that I was a little messed up, too.
“Brigid. I can’t take sick people anymore. I can take them alive or dead, but not in between. You want to be there for Dad, more power to you.”
FaceTiming with Carlo was a little better. He seemed to understand my delay in contacting him better than I did. If he had been worried, he didn’t put it on me. I couldn’t remember when we’d spoken last or what message I’d left on the home phone, so I covered it all. “Creighton’s dead. Laura’s emotionally wasted. Dad’s in ICU because his condition worsened. I’m so tired my bones hurt. And I’ve spent most of the last five days either in a hospital room or the inside of a car. And have I mentioned I’m tired of driving?”
He didn’t offer any platitudes or comfort, just observed, “I can see you’re holding on tight, O’Hari.”
“Sorry to whine. I can take it,” I said.
“I know you can. For once I wish you would stop taking it. You look like you could use a good cry. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you cry.”
“I cried about a year ago when I thought I was going to lose you. You weren’t there to see it, but I got good and drunk, and I had a great case of the whisky remorses.”
“Did it feel good?”
“No, it sucked. I’d rather just tamp all this down. From now on I plan to do that until I’m around ninety and then implode.”
I made him laugh. One good thing in the day.
I tried reaching Laura on and off. She wasn’t answering her phone. Then I spent the rest of the day at the hospital, making up for all the times I hadn’t been there for my parents. Not just this go-round, but all the times. Mom was right when she said I’d left a long time ago. I’m talking years. Just because your parents aren’t the Cleavers doesn’t mean you don’t feel guilty. Dad was still not out of danger, but he didn’t seem to be getting worse. In a way, that described Mom, too. There was the same listless hospital patter, how are you feeling Dad did they say whether he’s responding to the antibiotics did you eat are they walking him does he get respiratory therapy in ICU did you sleep last night Mom have any lunch can I get you something (please say yes and give me a reason to get out of this room!) anything good on TV? But then as I watched Dad I thought about, no matter how fragile his hold on life, how much better it was than seeing Marcus Creighton’s corpse. Second good thing in the day.
Then there was nothing else to talk about. It made me sad to guess that there never had been. Remembering how awful it was to sit there with them, nobody speaking, as if we were watching over the corpse laid out at home, I had brought the photo albums with me that I’d taken from their apartment and left in the car.
As with most families, most of the pictures were of me because I was the eldest, and the frequency of photos lessened with each child, until for Todd there were damn few. I asked Mom some questions about the pictures, about the ones I couldn’t remember. Then I got to the end of the second book and saw the photographs of Christmas. So many of them were Christmas, that silver tree with the plastic disc rotating in front of a light that changed the color of the tree. You could say we weren’t classy, but we weren’t the only family who had that silver tree.
I remembered that Christmas. Dad got us all our own fishing rods and tackle boxes, filled with hooks and sinkers. Even little Todd, aged six, got one. We were pretty excited.
I turned the page of the album and that was it. A couple of dozen blank pages. No more photographs after I turned ten. I’d never thought about that before. I started to ask Mom, but she had dozed off. She looked like she was too exhausted for the doze to do any good.
Then I dozed off, too. When I woke I felt like the effects of the early-morning sleeping pill had finally lifted. I woke Mom up and, feeling more tender about the living for some reason I couldn’t fathom, insisted on driving her home. I even put her to bed.
It wasn’t late, and my body clock was now royally screwed. I left Mom a detailed note about how her car was at the hospital, and she should rest until I returned the next day. Then I left to pick up a bottle of vodka and a pizza. I kicked at Laura’s door while I balanced the bottle, the pizza, and the box of Marcus Creighton’s effects.
When she finally answered my kicks I took a look at her face. “You should have a good cry,” I said.
“Here’s how it’s going to be,” Laura said, not opening the door all the way. “You can come in if you say are you okay, and then I say I’m fine. I’m not up for jokes,” she said. “If you say a single snarky thing I’ll shoot you.”
“Aw, Coleman,” I answered. “Am I that bad?”
She stood her ground. The things I was carrying felt heavier. “No jokes,” I said. I felt an urge to hold up two fingers in a Girl Scout pledge gesture, but even that felt too close to a joke.
Laura opened the door and let me in. I put the vodka and pizza on the kitchen counter and placed the box on her desk. I noticed that the photograph album Creighton had given her during our visit was there and open to a picture of the family on a boat, all the kids in those clumsy orange life preservers, with grins showing baby-tooth gaps that could likely be matched to the jaws they found.
Laura folded up at one end of the couch, picking holes in a crocheted yarn pillow that looked like her mother might have made it. Her computer was on, running what seemed like a continuous loop of the news reports of Creighton’s execution, the finding of the bodies, the history of the case, and on and on and on. Her thousand-yard stare was fixed on something beyond the computer screen.
“Drink?” I asked.
She came back long enough to shake her head.
“Pizza?” I pressed. “It’s got anchovies.”
Nothing.
In the airplane safety talk, they always tell you to put on your own oxygen mask before helping the person next to you. So I walked into the little kitchen and went through the cupboards to find what could almost double as a cocktail glass. I wasn’t particular. I’ve used bud vases more than once. I opened the freezer door and took some ice from the automatic ice cube maker with my left hand. Opened the vodka and poured a decent shot. Stirred the ice around in the glass with my index finger. I wiped my finger on a towel lying on the counter and wandered back into her living room area. I could feel the sadness in the room so strongly I didn’t want to sit down and let it get on me.
“So how’s your father doing?” Laura asked, her fingers still picking at the yarn pillow.
Even without crying, she looked like she was starting to develop those little running cracks like in a cartoon character who gets hit by a dropping anvil just before she falls to pieces. I wanted to say I told you so. I wanted to remind her that when I first arrived I told her she was rushing it, that it takes more than a year to get over the kind of trauma she had experienced in Tucson before jumping into a case where an innocent man’s life hung in the balance and her heart was at stake.
But I didn’t say any of those things.
I said, “I think the first time it hit me like this wasn’t when I was in mortal danger. My first time was more like the Marcus Creighton business. I was taken to watch a man being executed in the electric chair at Raiford. I didn’t feel about him the way you felt about Creighton, but there’s something about just sitting there, doing nothing, while a man dies. You want to react but you don’t. Everything in your brain says stop it, but you hold in check all those muscles that want to react. You just tamp it all down, and you don’t realize the effort that goes into it. The tamping stays with you your whole life. It doesn’t start from square one the next time; it all has a way of stacking up, one on top of the other, so it doesn’t get any better, only worse. You try to protect yourself from this. You keep working out, and when that doesn’t work anymore, you try yoga. You go to movies. You drink. You find what will protect the human being in your core, and you do that. Because if you leave yourself vulnerable, it will kill you.”
“The rock, huh?”
“A granite callus on your soul. I don’t recommend living this life.”
I took a sip and put my glass on the coffee table. I knew things were bad then because she didn’t get me a coaster.
“What do you mean, how I felt?” she asked.
“Felt?”
“About Marcus. What do you mean, how I felt?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe that business about being too emotionally involved with a case.”
“That’s not what you meant. You meant I was in love with him. Didn’t you?”
I could feel her ire rising. I said, “I thought we were going to keep this easy.” Maybe I was still a little disoriented from lack of sleep, feeling cranky. “You wanna pick a fight? Is that how you want to handle this? Who would think I’d forget that option?”
“Didn’t you?”
If that was how she wanted to go … “Remember that married prosecutor you were having an affair with in Tucson? You’ve got a pattern, Coleman, of falling for men you can’t have. I don’t know why that is, but you need to come to terms with it.”
Laura got up from the couch and, with her fists clenched, looking ready to take the argument to the next level, began to pace the room. “What do you want me to do right now, Brigid? Do you want me to fall to my knees and shriek Why God why?” She laughed at the melodrama of it. “Would that work for you?”
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of. We’ve all been there, when love rears its ugly head. Just admit you were in love with Marcus Creighton. And consider. Even if you never told him, maybe he knew. Maybe he played you. Maybe he was so desperate he let you think whatever you wanted.”
“You’re still trying to prove to me he was guilty?” She stopped pacing. “You can be incredibly cruel, you know that?”
“This is news?”
Laura’s eyes darted around the living room until they came to rest on the medicine ball placed neatly next to the elliptical trainer. She picked up the ball and, in a rage I’d never known from her, threw it at my head. With my feint that would have made Mom proud, she missed, and left a crater in the drywall an inch deep. We both stared at the crater as bits of gypsum drifted to the carpet.
“How about that?” she asked with a quaking voice.
“Not bad for a beginner,” I said, trying not to let my voice shake with its own anger at nearly having taken a fifteen-pound projectile in my face.
Her fury unspent, she picked up my glass from the coffee table and threw that at the same wall where the medicine ball hit. Shards of glass splattered with the remaining vodka.
As for myself, watching the violence, I felt a perverse mix of compassion for her pain and satisfaction that I was right. It was like a parent telling a child she was sure to break her favorite doll if she continued to play with it that way, and then seeing it come to pass. And it reminded me a little of home. “Welcome to my world,” I said, standing my ground for her sake.
But disgusted at the outburst, both with me and with herself, she went into her bedroom, presumably for some tissue to blow her nose loudly enough for me to hear from the living room.
In her absence I went to her desk, where I had put the box of Marcus Creighton’s personal effects. In the top drawer of her desk was a box cutter. I knew Laura would have a box cutter specifically for opening boxes. I used it. We might as well hurt all the way tonight, for I doubted I would have another chance to get behind the person Coleman showed the world. Right on top was that letter, the one Wally said he hadn’t seen. Odd.
I held it up when Laura returned to the room, but she ignored me and went into the kitchen. I followed her and got another glass out of the cupboard for myself, poured a little more vodka. For her part, Laura reached over the fridge to that little cupboard that no one uses. Pushed to the side, just close enough for her fingers to wiggle it forward, was a bottle of port. She used a towel to wipe off the cake of dust that had formed on the sealed cap and neck. She removed the cap and left it off, though I don’t think she had its breathing in mind.
In another cupboard, the one with glasses, she again reached high up and took a red wine glass, the kind with a monstrous bowl, from a set of four on the top shelf. She had to dust that off as well, and then poured half the bottle into the glass. The thought of drinking that much port made even me a little sick to my stomach. She reached into the freezer, threw a few ice cubes into the glass, and swished it.
“You should eat a little something with that,” I said.
She opened the pizza box, took out a slice, and finished it in half a dozen bites. With her mouth still full she said, “Happy now?” At least that’s what I think she said.
Pizza only works so fast. By the time we returned to her desk the port was half gone, and the effects of that on a brain that had no alcohol resistance, plus not having eaten anything for at least a day, could already be seen. She could have made a Guinness record for time to inebriation. Laura swiveled her chair out from her desk and sat down while I remained standing, the envelope in my outstretched hand. “Might as well get it over with in one fell swoop,” I said.
Laura took it listlessly and opened it, assuming as I did that it was the letter Marcus had written to her the night before his execution. So she looked understandably puzzled when she saw the letter was typed, and then she looked terribly hurt, and then angry. “It’s from Alison Samuels,” she said. She scanned it. “It looks like this was her first contact with Marcus, introducing herself.”
She read it aloud.
Dear Mr. Creighton,
My name is Alison Samuels. I work for an organization called the Haven. Because of my affiliation with that organization, though I wasn’t working for them at the time of your conviction for the murder of your wife and children, the case was so sensational that it was still being talked about when I joined them three years ago. I had the opportunity to view photographs of your children that were used to search for them. Others gave up the search, but there was something about your case that would not allow me to give up. I am obsessive by nature, and do not easily give up on any of the children I seek.
I never forgot the faces of your children. While I’m sure you’ve spent all these years regretting your actions, carried out under who knows what circumstances at that time, I feel you must have arrived at the conclusion that you deserve your penalty. Whether you actually killed the children, or whether you abandoned them to someone, their souls still died, even if their bodies are alive today.
As for the purpose of my writing: In the course of my job I’ve come into the possession of a photograph that may be one of your children. It is a photograph of a boy I found recently while doing internet searches on child pornography websites. The child appears to be fifteen years old in the photograph which would have been taken seven years after his disappearance in 1999. I obtained the photograph on record of your son and aged it to fifteen. The photograph I have appears to be your son.
I would like to show you this photograph and get your opinion. With your execution pending I would suppose you willing to speak with me and perhaps shed some light on what happened to the children. Perhaps this information would help me to trace the location of the boy in the photograph.
Her voice cracked here, and I took the letter out of her hand and continued.
Again, perhaps you did not kill your children, or at least not your son. Perhaps some horror at what you were doing made you stop at him. Perhaps you paid someone to do the deed for you, and they profited from this child instead of murdering him. His name, you’ll recall, was Devon. Please think of him. It is a sad circumstance to imagine him being given up and degraded in the way this photograph suggests, for at least seven years, and maybe even now.
I think he was a sweet boy at eight, according to the photograph I have. At fifteen he is handsome, though thin and stooped. I can see the despair only in his dead eyes. Was his life cut short by bondage or by death? If he is still alive he would be twenty-four now, but he is still your child. How can this boy tear my heart apart, but leave yours intact?
You’ll find my card enclosed with this letter should you agree to meet me and look at the photographs. I would bring them with me.
Sincerely,
Alison Samuels
The Haven
I picked up the envelope from where Laura had dropped it on the desk and found three photographs inside. Marcus must have agreed to meet her that first time, and she left the photos with him. The first was one of Devon as a child, taken standing next to what might have been his first two-wheeler. He had that dopey fakey grin that kids give you when you say smile.
The second photograph showed the boy in the first, only aged to somewhere in his teens.
The third photograph in the envelope was a closer-up shot of a boy. This one seemed to have come from an Internet site. That third photograph I won’t describe. There’s no purpose in it. I’ll only say that it could very well have been the same boy, except that he wasn’t smiling anymore.
Laura had slipped down into her chair, head on the back, legs stuck out under the coffee table so her body was in a straight line at a forty-five-degree angle, eyes staring up at the ceiling, blinking. I put the photos on the desk, lining them up in order, youngest, then aged with bicycle, then the one from the porn site. This business seemed to go on and on. Big mistake, giving her that letter.
“She was mistaken, Coleman. We know the boy is dead now. It’s all done.”
“Maybe it wasn’t a mistake.” The words came out slowly, carefully chosen, as if she was thinking them for the first time and hardly believing them. “Maybe Samuels knew that kid wasn’t Devon. It was as if she wanted to twist the knife, as if she took out all of her hate for men who hurt children on him.”
“Oh, come on, Coleman. You can’t just make up stories and call them true,” I said.
“Or maybe I know.” She crossed her arms tightly the way I remembered crossing mine at a time when it felt like all of my bones were trying to jump out of my body. “Ever think of that, Brigid? Maybe I know Alison Samuels better than anyone.”
I let her keep drinking her port while I paged through the rest of the photograph album once more. It told a story like any other book. Except that this story was only happy, no sadness, no conflict. It was Christmas trees and birthday wrapping paper and playing with plastic toys in the tub and learning how to ride a bike and swim with flippers in the pool and fishing, just like the Quinn family album. And like any other book, it simply stopped in time like a freeze-frame of life.
Then Laura started voicing her thoughts again, without looking at me. “Did you ever want to kill someone, Brigid? Did you ever get so fucking furious at injustice that the thought of taking a shotgun and blam exploding someone’s face is the only thing that keeps you from actually doing it? I don’t mean that you’re so horrified by your thoughts that you turn away from them. It’s more like the violence comforts your mind, you know what I mean? Imagining it all. When you feel this impotent rage, imagining it feels almost as good as doing it. It feels good.”
I couldn’t decide what was healthier for her, depression or rage. Laura closed her eyes and looked a little dreamy as if she was watching a scene play on the inside of her eyelids. If it was for her own benefit, her thoughts might be heinous. But this way she could call it justice. Sometimes when you’re angry at the whole world, you pick out one piece of it for your reckoning.
* * *
Laura opened her eyes and sat up. Using her hands as much as her sight she searched around the desk, then got up to do the same on the kitchen counter, and the coffee table that had nothing on it.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
“Keys. Car,” she said.
Laura always kept her keys in her purse. This was how I knew she was pretty drunk. I wondered if she would go into the desk drawer where I knew she kept her weapons, but she did not. I picked up the box cutter and discreetly moved it under a couch cushion. I was about to grab her purse, which lay in precisely the same spot it always did, on a small table in her front hall. But she remembered and got to it before I could. I wondered what was in the purse besides her keys.
“Where are you going? Let me drive,” I said, but she was already out the front door and into the parking lot of the apartment building before I could grab my own tote, thrust less neatly on the dining room table.
By the time I grabbed it and followed her, Laura had gotten into her own car and was pulling out of her parking space.
I don’t know where she intended to go, but halfway out of the parking lot she passed out in the car and rolled to a stop against the curb. I managed to wake her up long enough to extract her from the driver’s seat, and got her to a patch of grass.
“Nobody cared enough to do something,” she slurred.
“You cared,” I said. “Come on, sit up.”
“Not enough. Not enough to make everyone else care.”
Then she passed out again. I’m pretty strong, but after twenty-four hours without sleep, lifting one hundred and thirty pounds of dead weight was beyond me. It was either bring her a pillow or get some help. By this time the lights were off around the complex, and I risked the supposition that Laura wasn’t chummy with her neighbors. So I called Todd.
He was asleep rather than screwing Madeline, thank goodness; otherwise he might have been crankier. As it was, he answered the phone with a sleepy, “What?”
“I’ve got Laura Coleman passed out in her front yard. Can you come help?”
“Throw some water on her.”
“I tried that,” I lied.
He agreed to come, and, leaving her safely on the lawn, I pulled her car back in to its parking space. Then I sat beside her. The sky was typically cloudy in June, and I couldn’t even imagine where the constellations would be that Carlo had taught me to see in the desert this time of year. The only thing I could spot for sure was Venus. But even a few miles in from the coast the offshore breeze cooled off the night, and there weren’t more than a few mosquitos to swat before Todd arrived.
Between the two of us we got Laura into her bed, took off her shoes, and drew a sheet over her. “Poor kid. She’s not used to drinking, and she hasn’t had water. She’s going to feel like hell in the morning.”
“Sometimes that’s not a bad thing,” Todd said. “It takes the edge off the real hurting.” He was wide-awake now and asked if there was anything to drink in the house. I poured him a vodka over ice in a blue plastic tumbler, which was the only other glass Laura had.
I picked up the bigger pieces from the glass Laura had thrown at the wall. Then I nosed around in Laura’s laundry room and found a whisk broom and dustpan. While Todd and I talked, I cleaned up the broken glass that had sprayed out from the wall where it hit.
“So, Todd,” I started, “this Madeline Stanley. What does she see in you?”
“Come on, Brigid, don’t give me trouble.”
“I’m not. Not really. You seem less angry to me than you used to be. And we all know you did your time.”
I whisked the smaller pieces of glass into the dustpan and tossed them in the garbage pail under the sink. Then I got a wad of paper towels and dampened them.
“I still love Marylin,” he said. “For me it wasn’t doing time.” That’s as cozy as Todd would get, and he changed the subject. He indicated the bedroom with his chin. “What’s the story with that woman?”
“She’s bent out of shape over Marcus Creighton being executed.”
“Why?”
“I dunno, why do Greenpeace activists risk their lives for a porpoise? The thing is, when I met Laura she was a passionate righter of wrongs, and she’s just being herself.” What I didn’t bother to tell Todd was how this passion was intensified if you happened to fall in love.
“Where was she going tonight?” he asked.
I concentrated on running the wet paper towels over the tile floor to make sure I captured any small shards that had missed the whisk broom. I knew to do this from experience in my youth.
“I’m not sure where she was going,” I said. “She was all about wanting to kill someone, and then she passed out.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know, Alison Samuels maybe. It was that kind of mood where anybody would do.”
The wall would have to wait for some Spackle to fill the crater made by the medicine ball. I didn’t know if Laura had any. We always had some on hand on a shelf in the garage, to patch up the holes that Dad made when he put his fist into a door.
Finished with the cleanup, I got a little drink for myself and settled back down on the couch. “You ever witness an execution, Todd?”
“No,” he said. “Not that many death penalty cases for me at all.”
I said, “I’m starting to rethink the death penalty thing.”
He took a sip of his drink and still didn’t comment.
“Come on, talk to me,” I said.
Todd gave an impatient grunt. “It’s understood that you’re ready to deal out death as soon as you strap on a gun. The ultimate penalty, that’s just paperwork.”
“You ever doubt a case?”
“I play my position,” Todd said.
“You’re hedging. I asked, do you have any doubts about any of the guys who are still in prison because of you?”
“The word they use is reasonable doubt, isn’t it? Not any doubt.”
“I know, I know. But the science is moving so fast. In half the cases where there’s DNA to test, the people are exonerated.”
“I told you, that’s not my position to play. I investigate, I arrest. It’s not my job to decide who lives and who dies.”
“But.”
“Stop pushing me.”
“But.”
Todd’s face hardened with the effort of not remembering something. I could tell because he finally said, “You want a but? Okay. But, there have been a few times I testified when I was damn glad I wasn’t the judge.” He thought some more. “Like God. I’m damn glad I’m not God.”