I EXPECTED the place to be dirtier. The white tiled floor was swept clean, the chairs in the waiting room were the same connected seats from Dr. Wagner’s waiting room, but the copies of the Times and Vogue and Men’s Health were newer, less vandalized. The walls were the mint green of doctor’s offices; it was as though, in this little spot, they were trying to make you forget this was a prison.
They had two kinds of visiting areas, an open room with tables or a phone booth. You were allowed to choose. There was a longer line for the phones, but I chose that option anyway, not wanting even the possibility of him touching me. I didn’t want to feel his breath on my face, didn’t want to smell him, to have him reach for me. Even the thought made my skin crawl.
So I waited in the deceptively clean waiting room with women with screaming babies waiting to see daddy, with anxious parents visiting their children, with girlfriends who looked too damn young fixing their hair and makeup in the reflection of their iPhone screens. And me, waiting to speak to the man who had taken everything from me.
“Nguyen?”
They’d said my name correctly. I was somehow unsurprised. The surrealness of the place and the situation made anything possible, even the correct pronunciation that sometimes even my mother’s family couldn’t get quite right even with years of practice.
I followed an armed guard through door after buzzing door. Each time the door buzzed and slammed, buzzed and slammed, I felt more and more trapped. I flinched when we finally entered the room, a long rectangle with ten booths. I was directed into the third one, where I sat on a metal stool that groaned as I adjusted my weight on it.
I was too short for the booth. The counter hit me at chest level, and the phone was far above my head. The cord was long; it would reach, but I felt silly knowing I’d have to stretch to pick it up. I felt small. I felt weak. I wanted to feel in charge, powerful, in control. I was on the outside and he was in a cage.
The door on his side of the glass buzzed. I could feel it more than hear it. Other people were speaking into the phones with their loved ones. Dustin came into view, and my breath caught. He seemed surprised to see me as well.
He sat shakily down on his own stool. He was taller than I remembered, but willowy, thin as a branch. He picked up the phone, and I waited a moment. I was in control. He gestured toward my phone, and I stretched up to reach it and then put the black plastic receiver to my ear.
“I thought there’d been some mistake when they told me you were my visitor,” he said, and I felt slighted. He’d taken my opportunity to open, stolen the moment. He laughed and I shivered. “I didn’t think you would ever want to see me again.”
“I don’t,” I answered quickly, knowing that if I didn’t steer the conversation, he’d be in control. He’d manipulate his way into my head and see all the cracks he’d made, all the damage. “I don’t want to see you. But I need to know why you did it.”
Dustin paused to brush a limp curl of brown hair off his forehead. It was lank and unkempt.
“I’m still maintaining my innocence,” he said dutifully, parroting his lawyer, no doubt. “We’re calling for a mistrial, or an appeal, or something.” He shrugged in the classic “can’t help you, sorry” kind of way. I wasn’t buying it.
“I’m not a lawyer. You don’t have your lawyer present. Nothing you say to me can be used in court.” I wasn’t sure about this, but it seemed likely. “It would be hearsay, inadmissible.” I’d been watching too much Judge Judy.
Dustin didn’t reply. He slowly hit the receiver against his temple, once, twice, three times, dislodging the lock of hair he’d slicked back.
“Dustin, this is me. It’s just me.” I hated appealing to him. Everything about him made my skin crawl. I would rather bathe in raw sewage than have him in the same room as me again. He was sitting a foot away, separated by plexiglass. “I need to know what really happened.”
“No you don’t.” He continued to hit the phone against his temple. Once, twice, three times again. “You don’t want the truth. You want a neat little package, a fantasy wrapped up in a bow.” Once, twice, three times.
The slope of his forehead, the jut of his jaw, the button nose, and the blue eyes—there was so much of Kate there; they were so similar when you knew what to look for. Dustin Adams. Murderer. His heart-shaped face and blue eyes didn’t fit the description.
“No,” I said. “I want the truth.” And I did. I so desperately needed to know the truth. So many lies in the courtroom had muddled everything, had muddled what really happened in my head. Had I really seen him turn his face toward me when he shot Jacob Hastings? Had his feet really stopped just in front of the stall while I held my breath?
“Do you really, though?” he sneered, and I did not flinch. I did not give him the satisfaction.
“I do. How did you know where we were?” A question that had been plaguing me, never addressed.
“Kate texted Mom to let her know where she was going,” Dustin said, and I felt a wave of nausea. “And to ask if Mom could bring her some pajamas. Mom was asleep on the couch. I was upstairs freaking out because I kept coming up short.” He tapped his temple again, once, twice. Not a third time. He wrapped the cord around his fingers.
Coming up short…? “You were… what? Weighing your drugs?” I asked. He nodded.
“I’d been a little short here and there for weeks, never quite making quota. My bosses accused me of skimming, but I only ever took my cut.” He shifted on his seat, agitated. “But it was Kate. She was the one who’d been skimming. A little bit here and there for months. It added up.”
I closed my eyes and tried to steady my breathing. I hadn’t known she’d kept using. It had only been that once for me, one isolated incident on my bathroom floor, where I’d kissed her for the first time. She hadn’t told me she’d kept using; maybe she’d been using before that night too, when she’d come to share.
“Do you really want to hear this?”
“Yes,” I said, opening my eyes. “I need to know.” My voice was very small.
“When Kate texted, I went into her room to grab her pajamas. I was going to drive them over because Mom was asleep. I was pretty high already, but I’d driven on more.”
He tapped his temple again, three times. I wanted to reach through the plexiglass and yank the receiver out of his hands.
“How did you know that she was taking it?”
“She had bloody Kleenex in her garbage, from the nosebleeds. It was pretty obvious. I went through her purse and found a baggie with a little left in it. I was so angry. She’d cost me a lot of money. She’d gotten my ass kicked for skimming.”
I wanted to hit him. I bit down hard on the inside of my cheek instead. “Where did you get the gun?”
“My neighbor’s shed. I knew he kept it there. He used to take me hunting sometimes. He bought it for cheap because it was altered, sawed off. It wasn’t accurate at all and we never killed anything.”
I flinched, couldn’t help it. “You did, though.” I met Dustin’s eyes through the plexiglass.
“I wanted to scare her.” Suddenly I saw a flicker of regret, the first I’d seen, pass through his eyes. He looked scared himself. “I didn’t go expecting to use it. I did an extra line in the parking lot to psych myself up. I wanted her to pay for stealing from me.”
“So you killed her.”
“I didn’t mean to. I really didn’t. I don’t even remember pulling the trigger. I had just walked in the door and she was there, in the first booth. And then she was on the floor, and the other two started screaming.”
Tap, tap, tap went the receiver against Dustin’s temple.
“I just wanted them to shut up. Someone was going to hear them.” Tap, tap, tap. I felt another wave of nausea, a shudder of disgust that ran through my entire system. “It was like Grand Theft Auto. It didn’t feel like it was really happening.”
“And Jake? What did he do?”
“I was standing over—over Jessa.” He stumbled over her name. “And I looked up and saw him, behind the counter. I thought he was going to call the police. So I reacted.”
There was something off about Dustin’s description of what happened. I couldn’t pinpoint it. “That’s not what happened,” I said. “You’re still lying.” Everyone was lying about everything. The truth didn’t matter to anyone. It was all just stories.
“I’m not. I didn’t mean to shoot Kate, but once I had, what choice did I have? I didn’t want to go to prison!”
“You’re lying. You wanted her dead! You were jealous of her!” Rage boiled under my skin, white-hot in my veins. My temples throbbed. “You wanted to get rid of her!”
Dustin seemed at a loss by my anger. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out of it except “No.”
Someone touched my shoulder. It was a guard. “Ma’am, we’re going to have to ask you to leave now.”
The rage disappeared as quickly as it had come. “Okay.” I wasn’t going to get what I wanted here, that much was clear. “Good-bye Dustin.” I hoped that “Rot in hell, you bastard” was implied by my tone.
Dustin was still talking, but I hung up the receiver, and he went silent behind the plexiglass. His mouth was still moving as he gestured to my receiver.
I followed the guard out of the jail, through buzzing doors that slammed behind me. Each one closed Dustin farther and farther off from the world; with each bang and buzz, he grew more distant from me. He was locked away where he could not hurt anyone else, though I doubted he ever would anyway.
Not that he was incapable. No, he was capable. He was a psychopath. There was no other explanation how, after one accidental shot, he could kill three more people—and talk about it like it was a video game. Maybe that first shot had been an accident, and maybe it hadn’t. It really didn’t matter either way.
I was done with him. With all of it.