Life is lived in the grays.
That is a problem for most people. It is so much easier to see the world in black and white. Someone is all good or all bad. I try sometimes to glance online, at Twitter or social media—at the outrage real, imagined, and faux. Extremism and outrage are simple, relentless, attention-seeking. Rationality and prudence are difficult, exhausting, mundane.
Occam’s razor works in reverse when it comes to answers: If the answer is easy, it is wrong.
I warn you now. You’ll disagree with some of the choices I make. Don’t fret about it. I don’t know whether I made the right ones either. If I was certain, per my personal axiom, I would probably be wrong.
* * *
When I arrive back at the Dakota, PT is waiting for me. I bring him up to my apartment. I pour us both cognac in snifters.
“Arlo Sugarman is dead,” I tell him.
PT is my friend. I don’t really believe in mentors, but if I did, PT would be one. He has been good to me. He has been fair.
“You’re sure?” he asks.
“I had my people call the crematorium that works with St. Timothy’s to look into their records for on and around June 15, 2011. They also looked into death certificates for the Greater St. Louis area for that date.”
PT sits back in the leather wing chair. “Damn.”
I wait.
He shakes his head. “I wanted him, Win. I wanted to bring him to justice.”
“I know.”
PT raises the cognac. “To Patrick O’Malley.”
“To Patrick,” I say.
We clink glasses. PT collapses back into the chair.
“I really wanted to right that wrong,” he says.
With the glass near my lips, I add, “If you did anything wrong.”
PT makes a face. “What does that mean?”
“You were the junior agent,” I say.
“So?”
“So those were his calls, weren’t they?”
PT carefully puts down his glass on the coaster. He watches me. “What calls?”
“To not wait for backup,” I say. “To go in through the back door on his own.”
“What are you trying to say, Win?”
“You blame yourself. You’ve blamed yourself for almost fifty years.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
I shrug. “Who called that tip in?” I ask him.
“It was anonymous.”
“Who told you that?” I ask. “Never mind, it’s not important. You both drove to the house, but when you got there, Special Agent O’Malley made the decision not to wait for backup.”
PT looks at me over his snifter. “He thought time was of the essence.”
“Still,” I say, “he broke protocol.”
“Well, technically, yes.”
“He kicked in the back door on his own. Who fired the first shot, PT?”
“What difference does it make?”
“You didn’t mention it to me. Who fired first?”
“We don’t know for sure.”
“But Special Agent O’Malley did discharge his weapon, correct?”
PT stares at me hard for a few long seconds. Then he tilts his head back on the leather and closes his eyes. I wait for him to say more. He doesn’t. He just sits with his head tilted back and his eyes closed. PT looks old and tired. I stay silent. I’ve said enough. Perhaps Special Agent Patrick O’Malley was just overzealous. Perhaps he wanted to catch Arlo Sugarman and make himself the hero, even if it meant shattering standard FBI procedure. Or perhaps O’Malley, a father financially stretched with six kids, had heard that Nero Staunch had put a bounty on the Jane Street Six, and really, they were killers anyway and so what if one of them got shot trying to escape?
I don’t know the answer.
I don’t want to push it.
Life is lived in the grays.
“Win?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t say another word, okay?”
I don’t. I just sit there with my drink and my friend and let the night close in around us.
* * *
The next morning, I drive out to Bernardsville, New Jersey, and I visit Mrs. Parker and Mr. Rowan again.
This for me is the grayest of the gray.
They made me promise to tell them what I learned about their children.
So do I? Do I tell these two elderly parents that their children are dead—or do I let them go on believing that maybe Billy and Edie survived and have children and possibly grandchildren? What good will knowing the truth at their age do for them? Should I let them live with their harmless fantasy? Will the truth cause too much stress at their age? Do I have the right to make that call?
I warned you that you may disagree with some of the calls I make.
Here is one.
Mrs. Parker and Mr. Rowan have waited nearly fifty years to learn the truth. I know the truth. I promised that I would tell them the truth.
And so I do.
I don’t go into gruesome detail, and mercifully they don’t ask.
When I finish, Mrs. Parker takes my hand in hers.
“Thank you.”
I nod. We sit there. They cry for a bit. Then I make my excuses and leave.
They’d wanted to know who killed their children.
Here again I am making a call you may not like.
I tell them it was Vanessa Hogan.
As I leave the assisted living village, I take out my phone and hit the send button on my email. I am emailing an audio file to PT. Of course, I realized that Vanessa Hogan might ask for my phone in order to confess—and of course, I carry a spare.
I cut out the opening—my words about my own unlawful acts—but the FBI will have her full confession on tape. Vanessa Hogan crossed the line in my view. You hear me say this, and you think me a hypocrite. You counter about my “night tours” and my beating of Teddy “Big T” Lyons in the beginning of this tale. Teddy did me no harm. On the other hand, Vanessa Hogan’s victims—Billy Rowan and Edie Parker—were responsible for the death of Vanessa Hogan’s only son.
I understand that. None of these are easy calls.
We live in the grays.
But Billy Rowan and Edie Parker were young with no record. They didn’t throw the explosives. They were remorseful and willing to surrender. They would not have continued to kill and harm people. Should Vanessa Hogan pay for what she did?
I’ll leave that to the courts.
Am I threading too thin a needle again?
Well, we aren’t done yet.
* * *
My jet awaits. We fly back out to St. Louis. When we land, I take the drive myself. The address is already in my phone navigation. I arrive at the farm and park on the road. I trek through the high grass. There are signs warning me about trespassing. I don’t much care. The farm has been in the Sinclair family for three generations. The Reverend was born in that farmhouse. But I am more interested in the caretaker.
I didn’t buy Reverend Calvin Sinclair’s reasons for not letting the world know who “R.L.” was once Arlo Sugarman died. He could say he had just learned his identity. There was no real danger in the truth anymore. The Reverend was also so ready for my arrival at his church, and thus I suspected that he had been warned, which, it turns out, he had been. Elena Randolph had called him within minutes of our confrontation.
With all that in mind, I did, as I told PT, have my people call not just the crematorium St. Timothy’s normally uses but all the local ones. I also had them check the county death records. In both cases, they found nothing matching anyone with the initials RL who died on June 15, 2011. In fact, there were no male deaths matching Arlo Sugarman’s description—age and height anyway—at all during that time.
When I walk up through the farm’s gate, I turn right. A man steps into view. He looks to be his age—sixty-six years old—with a shaved head. He is also the right height.
“Can I help you?” the man asks.
I can still hear the slightest hint of a Brooklyn accent.
Arlo Sugarman didn’t show up the night they tried to firebomb the Freedom Hall because he didn’t believe in that kind of destruction. He ended up caught up in something beyond his control and spent his life on the run. If I told PT the truth, would he have wanted to take Arlo in and bring him to trial? Or would he have seen it the way I do?
I don’t know. It isn’t PT’s call anyway. It’s mine.
“It isn’t over,” I tell him. “You need to run again.”
“Pardon?”
The back door of the farmhouse slams open. Calvin Sinclair hurries out. When he sees me, he starts to rush, obviously concerned by my intrusion, but the man with the Brooklyn accent puts up his palm to stop him.
“I figured out you’re still alive,” I say. “Someone else could too.”
The man looks as though he’s about to make denials or arguments, but instead he nods at me and says, “Thank you.”
My gaze moves to Calvin Sinclair, then back to Arlo Sugarman. I almost ask what they are going to do now. But I don’t. I have done my part. The rest is up to them. I turn and head back down the hill.
I still have one more stop to make.
* * *
As I pull off Hickory Place and up the long driveway, I see the old baronial mansion in the distance. I am back in New Jersey. Ema lives here with her movie star mother, Angelica Wyatt. I soon spot them both waiting for me by the front door.
I think by now you’ve guessed that I’ve told no one about Cousin Patricia. She gunned down a monster—a monster, per my own justification with Teddy “Big T” Lyons, who would have continued to maim and kill. There is no reason for Cousin Patricia, who ended up doing so much good, to pay any sort of price for that. I admit that I may be slightly biased because this decision also neatly fits into both my personal narrative and my own self-interest.
I don’t want my father and my family scandalized.
But regardless, I think this decision is just. You may disagree. Too bad.
When I park and get out of the car, Ema runs from the door to greet me. She doesn’t break stride as she wraps her arms around me, holding me tight, and I feel something in my chest crack open.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m groovy,” I say.
“Win?”
Ema buries her face in my chest. I let her.
“What?”
“Don’t ever use the word ‘groovy’ again, okay?”
“Okay.”
I look over her shoulder and see her mother watching us. Angelica is not happy to see me. I meet her eye and try to give her a reassuring smile, but that does little to placate her. She does not want me here. I understand.
Angelica spins away and heads inside.
Ema pulls back and looks at me. “You’ll tell me everything?”
“Everything,” I reply.
But I’m not sure that’s true.
As I look at my daughter’s face, I flash back to the night before.
I’m in bed with Username Helena. My phone rings. It’s Kabir.
“We have a big problem.”
“What is it?”
“We lost Trey Lyons.”
I snap up fast, startling Helena. “Details,” I say.
But you don’t need the details. You don’t need the details of how my men lost Trey Lyons’s SUV on Eisenhower Parkway. You don’t need the details of how I surmised that Trey Lyons had eyes on the Dakota, how those eyes must have spotted Ema, how they followed her back, how stupid I felt not to have realized that earlier. You don’t need the details on my call to Angelica at two a.m., how I told her to hide in the basement with Ema. You don’t need the details on how fast I rushed out here, how I parked on Hickory Place, how I ran up the drive wearing night goggles with a Desert Eagle .50 cal semiautomatic in my hand. You don’t need to know how I spotted Trey Lyons breaking in through a back window. You don’t need to know that I didn’t call out to him, didn’t tell him to put his hands up, didn’t give him a chance to surrender.
This one may seem to be another gray to you. But it is not.
This one was easy. This one was black and white.
He came for my daughter. My. Daughter.
“Come on,” Ema says. “Let’s go inside.”
I nod. It’s a warm, sun-kissed day. The sky is the kind of blue only something celestial could have painted. Ema leads the way. She is wearing a top with spaghetti straps, so I can see her upper back. As we get closer to the door, I spot what looks like a familiar tattoo peeking out from between her shoulder blades…
A Tisiphone abeona perhaps?
I almost stop, almost ask, but when my daughter turns and looks at me, all those grays suddenly vanish in the bright of her smile. For perhaps the first time in my life, I only see the white.
Am I being hackneyed? Perhaps.
But since when have I cared what you thought?