THE LATE NEWS WAS ON BY THE TIME BRENNAN GOT TO Jane’s apartment. Hunter was on the couch scrolling through his phone, cheap beer in hand.
“Is she awake?” Brennan asked.
“Took her meds and nodded off an hour ago.”
“Thanks for staying with her.” Brennan sloughed her purse and her workbag off her shoulder and onto one of the wingback chairs facing the couch before flopping into the other one. She still wore her coat despite the heat in the apartment.
“Long day?” Hunter asked as Brennan rubbed her temples.
“Yeah. Not over. Probably have another hour of work to do when I get home.”
“You should have just gone home.”
“I wanted to look in on Mom.”
“You can take a night off.”
“Because you’re finally here?”
“Don’t start. Better late than never, right?”
I’ ll see you again, she remembered her father saying before never returning. Brennan said, “Sometimes late is as good as never.”
Hunter’s mouth creased—an expression he’d picked up from their mother when she wanted them to know she was pissed but was also going to demonstrate restraint. Brennan wanted to throw something at him. Instead, she pulled out a file folder stuffed with paper from her workbag.
“I had to give you these,” she said.
“What is this?”
“I printed out all of the stories I could find on the investigation and trial. Most of it is the News and Post, but a couple of pieces in there from the Times.”
He flipped through the stack of paper. “You had this lying around?”
“No. I pulled it off of Lexis today.”
“Did you read them?”
“Today? Yes.”
“You ever read them before?”
“No. Not really. You?”
“I looked up some articles when I first started in the newsroom. Didn’t read all of them.”
Hunter began to flip through the articles. Brennan got up, took off her coat, and grabbed a beer from the fridge.
“I shouldn’t drink this. It’s just going to make me more tired,” she said. She brought the bottle to her mouth and drank half in one draw. “When you get to it, you may recognize the name of the prosecutor. Timothy McCarthy.”
“Who?”
“He’s running for district attorney.”
Hunter looked up from his reading. “Other than that bit of trivia, did you get anything else from these?”
Brennan shrugged. “The trial ones are informative. They’re mostly reporting evidence and testimony. But they didn’t cover every day of the trial, at least not that I saw. And the details mainly focus on the sensational stuff.”
“It’s the stuff readers are interested in. We can’t print the entire trial transcript.”
“I’m just saying we can’t rely on it as a complete record.”
“I wasn’t expecting to do that. I know the limits of reporting, the same as you know the limits of what gets presented at trial. We’re all doing our best to get at the truth.”
“The reporting on the investigation is infuriating. The press convicted him early.”
“Because he was the guy.”
“I thought we were approaching this like good investigators? That means open minds.”
Hunter raised his hands in surrender. “Fair enough.”
“If you’re not going to take this seriously, then why are we doing it?”
“Back off. I am taking it seriously. It doesn’t mean I can’t have opinions.”
Brennan shook her head but let it go. “In the end, these stories are mostly useless.”
“Then why did you bring them?”
“To identify the players. People we should interview.” Brennan held up a sheet of paper. “I made a list.”
“So, give it to me.”
“Make your own list. Then we can compare.”
Hunter didn’t like it, but he nodded. “I’m working an angle on the files.”
“The trial files?”
“The police files.”
Hunter went back to the stack of stories. Brennan finished her beer, watching him read like he was a stranger on the train. She knew more about her assistant at the firm than she knew about her brother at this point. She tried to feel badly about it but found it was like doing a seventh shot—she didn’t feel any different.
She stood, put her coat on, and heaved her bags onto her shoulders.
“Meet here tomorrow?” she asked.
“Yeah.” Hunter didn’t look up.
“I’ll text you when I think I’ll be done with work.”
As she walked to the door, Hunter said, “You’re still really fucking bossy, you know.”
She gave him the finger as she left.
#
Brennan had arranged the stories in chronological order, then by paper. Daily News then New York Post then The New York Times. Hunter didn’t think she’d have her assistant do it; Brennan must have done it herself. So she was still a big fucking nerd.
None of the stories contained the photographs that ran with them, just the captions describing the photo. “Police leading John Lo from his building.”
Hunter closed his eyes and tried to imagine the photo. He had never seen it, but all perp walk photos were essentially the same: some grainy black-and-white shot of a suspect, walking out of a building, hands behind their back, a cop on each arm. The difference was that in this case it was the building he grew up in, and the perp was his father. But Hunter couldn’t picture his father’s face. Did he try to shield it from the camera? Pull his shirt up or his jacket over his head? Or did he walk from the door full of bravado and indignation? Did one or the other indicate guilt or innocence? The uncertainty reminded Hunter how little he knew his father—how much he had been cheated and spared.
Hunter couldn’t remember what subject it had been, only his classmates’ stares as his mother walked into the room and beckoned him over. She didn’t even look at the teacher, whom she had interrupted giving some instruction to the class. It was a shocking incongruity—his mother in the classroom in the middle of the day. The vibrating, urgent tension radiating from her and into the herd of children, a primal force; all the children were suddenly ready to bolt and scatter. His sister held the door ajar in her school jumper—unwilling to enter the classroom yet refusing to let their mother out of her sight. Hunter stood numbly and went to his mother. She held their hands, and they walked from the building into a waiting car. He remembered being worried that he had left his backpack behind.
In the car, he finally asked his mother—who had yet to speak a word—what had happened.
“You’ll need to ask your father.”
Close to their building, their mother pulled raincoats from her bag.
“Put these on. When we stop in front of the building, pull the hoods over your heads. Cover your faces, like you’re playing peekaboo. Can you do that?”
They dashed from curb to door—the raincoat’s hood magnifying the rustle of fabric against his hair, the heavy breathing, the smell of sweat and breath in his hands, cupped over his face, slivers of light through his fingers. This armor of flesh and nylon strangely muffled the click of cameras and shouted questions of reporters. His mother’s hand grasped his arm nearly underneath his armpit, her rings digging into his back unrelentingly. The doorman shouted for the reporters to “back—the—fuck—up!” The hallway came in sudden coolness and dim light, but Hunter kept his hands on his face until, in the elevator, his mother knelt down and peeled them—wet with tears—away. The flush in her cheeks fluoresced through a sheen of her own tears. She kissed his head and said, “You’re home now.”
None of that was in the news stories he was reading now. They mentioned his dad’s “wife and two children,” and sometimes even noted that they were a girl and a boy of certain ages. But they were objects in the stories, unnamed living victims juxtaposed against Jessica, as in: “Mr.Lo, married with two young children, is rumored to have had an affair with Ms. DeSalvo.”
Hunter had no idea what Jessica looked like. The captions read simply “Jessica DeSalvo”—probably some headshot or wedding picture—or “Ms. DeSalvo with husband, Mark, in Central Park.” He was sure that he had seen her photo in some paper when he was a kid but couldn’t remember. Now she was only text on a page.
The early reporting suffered, as it nearly always did, from speculation, incomplete information, and the agenda of the leaker. Underneath, though, like a geological feature, was a common landscape. Jessica was murdered in an apartment in the blurry border between the Upper East Side and East Harlem. Her friend, Cathy, lived in the apartment. Cathy found her body when she returned from a movie. The News reported Jessica’s husband, Mark, worked late before going home. In the first stories, immediately following the murder, police sources speculated about a home invasion. Death appeared to be from stabbing; the murder weapon was not found. A day later, after the initial rush, the Post and the News ran victim profiles. Her résumé—varsity tennis player at her Greenwich high school, college at Penn, law school at Columbia. The anguish of her parents radiated from their quotes, even all these years later. From her mother: “Please find the monster that killed my baby girl!” Cathy told a reporter about how life was never going to be the same without her. The reporters noted that her husband was too grief-stricken to comment.
On the fourth day after the murder, the stories turned. A police source revealed that Jessica had been having an affair. Cathy let Jessica use the apartment so that she could see her lover but did not know who he was. In the Post, an unnamed detective said, “Maybe Jessica shouldn’t have put herself in that position.” The Times broke the story that her lover was a partner at the law firm where she worked. Interesting, Hunter thought. Who was their source? The News and the Post clearly had good police sources, but the Times hadn’t stayed with the story. The law firm angle, however, not only brought them back—they broke the news. Hunter bit his lip and continued reading.
The sixth day, they ran stories about the search of the apartment. His father’s name, in print: “Police searched the home of John Lo, a Chinese American partner at Taylor Wood & West, the Wall Street firm.” The next line: “Sources close to Ms. DeSalvo claim she was having an affair with a partner at the firm.” No source to connect the two facts, yet allowing the obvious inference to be drawn. Hunter tried to remember the day of the search, but it was unremarkable. The next day, a classmate (Was his name Jeremy? That kid sucked.) said to him, “Your daddy was in the paper today. And I know why.” Hunter wasn’t able to learn why his father made the news. He didn’t ask his parents. He just hoped that it would go away. It never did. But over time, the whole thing faded, a patina over which he lived his life, thicker here in New York, thinner elsewhere.
More stories. The police leaked a note from Jessica found in his father’s desk that confirmed the affair. No mention of an alibi. Over the next five days, shorter articles as new facts and angles dried up. Hunter presumed that the cops were doing the boring part of the investigation—eliminating other suspects, trying to find the murder weapon, tying off loose ends. Two days before the arrest was reported—the day before the arrest—a columnist for the Post castigated the cops for slow-walking the investigation. The columnist reinterviewed Jessica’s mother. “I don’t know what they’re waiting for,” she said. “Jessica was a good girl. I’m sure that monster forced her into the situation so she could keep her job. They’re letting my daughter’s killer walk the streets, a menace, and for what? Nice girls like Jessica already have so much to worry about in Manhattan. They shouldn’t have to worry about that peril.”
After the arrest, the papers breathlessly published stories with previously reported facts. The Post ran the “Devil” headline. Her husband finally gave a statement: “No matter what differences Jessica and I had, I loved Jessica. I miss her.” Harris made his first appearances with the same quote running in the three papers: “Whatever my client’s relationship with Ms. DeSalvo, there is no evidence connecting him to the crime. The police have rushed to judgment. My client looks forward to the truth coming out at trial.” The DA’s office opposed bail on the theory that “Mr. Lo could flee to China.” None of the stories mentioned that he was born in the United States and had never been to China. The judge granted bail pending trial despite that argument. The bond required was significant, but his father posted it and surrendered his passport. The columnists excoriated the judge the next day for letting his father not only walk the streets, but presumably return to the home he shared with his wife and two children.
Hunter tried to remember what those days had been like for him, what he experienced in school, what it had been like in the house, but all he had were memories of having memories of those things. He finally understood what his mother had been raving about the other night. He managed to recall standing in Brennan’s room years later, his freshman year of high school. Brennan had eventually moved into their father’s old office. They’d just arrived home wearing their different schools’ uniforms.
He had come to her room to see if he could borrow her dictionary, but before he could, she said, “It’s not any better, is it?”
“What?” he asked.
“I thought when I got to a different school, it would be behind me. I don’t know if it’s because Viv and Kelly came to Dalton, too, or because girls are just mean, but people know. About Dad.”
His sister hadn’t spoken to him about their father in years. Hunter didn’t ever bring their dad up with her—her pain was a warehouse fire, no place for a child and best left to burn itself out. For Hunter, he carried the memories of their father like a shaken soda can, something to put away for someone else to deal with. Mostly, they took their cues from their mother, who focused relentlessly on the present and never mentioned him, until the topic of their father was like a stain that couldn’t be cleaned. Eventually, they just ignored its constant presence.
“What happened?” he asked.
“It doesn’t matter. They’re wrong. He didn’t hurt that lady.” Hunter remembered feeling like he was standing on a dock while water surged past him—a strange, still vertigo. He had assumed in their communal silence about their father that she had grown out of her childish belief in his innocence, that her realization that he’d been guilty was the root of her pain.
“But he did,” Hunter said casually, certain Brennan knew how he felt.
Brennan’s hand went to her chest in a fist, a wounded gesture she picked up from their mother. But whereas their mother did it for show, Brennan’s movement was strikingly vulnerable, raw, injured, and alone. Forever after, even in war zones reporting among dying men, the desperate and grievously stricken casualties crawling for aid or comfort brought to mind his sister in that moment. But at least those soldiers had others they could count on.
“I thought we were on the same side,” Brennan said. Her skin was flushed and suddenly sweaty, as though she were embarrassed. Hunter expected blood to seep from underneath her clenched fist.
He remembered wanting to say something like I am on your side, but what came out of his mouth instead was, “You’re a fucking idiot if you think he didn’t do it.”
Brennan threw the dictionary from her desk with enough force that it cut the upper part of his forehead where the corner of the book hit him. He couldn’t remember if she had screamed at him, too. But she slammed the door—he recalled the specific squeak from the hinges. After, he sat on his bed, feverish with anger, watching blood drip from his brow to the wood floor of his room. That night, after his mother got home from work, she brought a warm rag into his room and wiped the blood from his hairline and off his face, like he was four instead of fourteen.
“Do you want to talk about the fight you had with your sister?” she asked.
“What’s there to talk about?”
“Do you think that maybe you could have handled the situation differently?”
“She’s wrong.”
“Does that matter? She’s your sister.”
“And she’s wrong. The truth matters. She can’t really believe that he didn’t do it. Everybody knows he did it.”
“Your sister believes that he didn’t.”
“Then she’s an idiot. Or a liar. Like him.”
His mother looked at his closed door, like maybe his sister was out there, listening in. Or perhaps there was something in his eyes that she couldn’t face at that moment.
“Your father did a terrible thing, Hunter. None of us can change that. But I told you before, it’s not your sister’s fault that she’s his daughter and loves him. It’s okay for children to love their parents, even if they’re not perfect.”
Hunter didn’t say anything, stunned that his mother agreed with him, full of the vicious elation of the righteous.
As a man, reflecting back, Hunter remembered the rush of certainty mainly for its present absence. He had heard what he wanted to hear in his mother’s carefully chosen words. He looked over at her bedroom door. What had she meant when she said his dad did a “terrible thing”? That he killed a woman? Or that he had an affair? Or both? Or neither?
Hunter looked back at the stack of papers in his hand, keenly aware that his eyes were dry and bleary. His cell phone buzzed on the table.
“Hey, Vega,” Hunter said. “Please tell me you’re up late because you found those files already.”
“Yeah, about that.” Vega’s voice was barely audible against a background of street noise. “Two things. You ever hear of Bobby Bauman?”
“No.”
“He was the lead on this case. Dude’s a legend in homicide. Retired as chief of detectives about a decade ago. Gotta kid on the force, too. I don’t know him, but he’s got lots of connections.”
“Uh huh,” Hunter said. “What was the second thing?”
“Do you know who the prosecutor on the case was?”
“I just learned that.”
“You gotta tell me that this isn’t some kind of campaign thing. Nothing like that.”
Hunter stood so he could pace as he spoke. “No. Not at all. Has nothing to do with that guy.”
“You’ve been gone for a while. McCarthy has juice. Guys here love him, you know? He’s always had our backs.”
“I’m not going to hang you out there, man. You know me. We go way back. I won’t screw you over.”
Vega laughed. “I can cover my own ass, man. I’m trying to help you. People are invested in this guy winning. They find you’re doing a story around this or whatever, it may be trouble for you.”
“How would they find out?”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Between Bauman and his kid and McCarthy, I pull this file, someone may hear about it. You sure you want to dig in this dirt?”
Vega had never waved him off a story before, which made Hunter hesitate for a moment before he said, “Yeah. It’s fine. I’ll be fine.”
“Okay, then. I’ll see what I can do.”
After Vega disconnected the call, Hunter dialed Brennan.
“Is she okay?” she answered.
“Mom? Yeah. She’s sleeping.”
“I was heading to bed. But thanks for the scare. What’s up?”
He told her about the call with Vega.
“That it?” she asked.
“One thing I learned overseas is not to underestimate dangerous situations.”
“We’ll be careful,” she said. “What about the stories? What are your thoughts there?”
He didn’t like how quickly she slid over his warning, but he decided to move on. “What do we really know about Dad? And what do we know about Jessica? Maybe we start with someone from his firm? Who knew him. Maybe knew them both?”
“My list started with Cathy,” she said. “With Dad, we knew him.”
“Are we going to have to start arguing about this already?”
“Don’t be difficult,” Brennan said. “We can work it from both sides. There’s a guy. He was friends with Mom and Dad. I’ve crossed paths with him a few times over the years. Can’t remember his name right now. I’ll get it tomorrow. Whoever we can line up first. Then the other.”
“Good idea,” he said. “See? Maybe we’ll do this without fighting the whole time.”