On day 2,029 a transport team came for me at dawn. I’d spent one year, one month, and nineteen days in the county jail, and another five years, six months, and twenty-two days on death row. I was not yet convinced I wouldn’t be back. I said, What should I bring? McKenzie said, Are you kidding me, za-heater? Bring everything. It’s moving day. I put my diary and a clean white cotton jumpsuit in a box. I planned to hang it up wherever I decided to live, so I could see the letters DR, stenciled in black on the back, every day for the rest of my life. The hot plate and radio were for Mao. I asked Sargent what of my stuff he wanted. He said, All I want, Inocente, is to watch your skinny ass walk out a here. I could see he was smiling. I told him to please take the chess set because Águila had given it to me, and he said, Will do, brother. All my other possessions I left behind.
McKenzie said, Hands. In three hours I would be ordered released from custody, but they do have their procedures at the TDC. I squatted and offered my wrists. As soon as my door slid open, the row erupted. It was a sound of victory, and because victories are so rare in our world, the sound was thunderous. Through the din I heard Sargent say, Take care of yourself, Inocente. His fist was pressed against the plastic slit in the door. If you read a newspaper story about him and what he did, you’ll probably think he’s just a cold-blooded monster. There’s nothing like knowing a killer to create complexity. To me he was the best friend I’d ever known, not counting my parents and wife, and the only friend who had literally saved my life. I said, I’ll be back to visit. Count on it.
And with two COs standing on either side of me and a third trailing behind with my things, I walked out the same door through which I had entered more than five years before. I turned around and looked at the squat concrete block, then across the field where the horses grazed and tracking dogs bayed from their kennels. McKenzie said, Ready to go?, and I said, Yes, sir.
The back door of the van opened. Three guards were sitting inside. As the transport team was guiding me to the rear bench, McKenzie said, This ain’t something that happens too often around here. Good luck to you, za-heater. I said, Seems like something that shouldn’t ever happen at all. The guard walking behind me said, True that. McKenzie shook his head.
He did not offer to shake my hand. The guard who had my things placed them on the floorboard and did. I looked at his nameplate as he pumped my arm up and down and said, I appreciate that Officer Mullins. He said, Godspeed, sir. In less than two hours, I arrived at the courthouse in Houston.
When prisoners like me talk about not being able to touch another human being, we are not talking just about sex, or even mainly about sex. We are talking about the things you don’t notice: how the busboy uses his shoulder as he maneuvers past you to make sure you don’t stumble into his path, or how the sous chef places her hand in the small of your back as she passes behind you with a sauté pan of brown butter to make sure you don’t get scalded. We’re talking about guiding a woman by the elbow through a crowd or having a buddy on the adjacent barstool drape his arm over your shoulder and pull you toward him so he can whisper a secret in your ear. We’re talking about what’s invisible until it’s gone.
And so I felt my freedom begin when Olvido, Luther, and Laura, who were there to meet me at the courthouse’s rear door, began hugging the breath out of me before both my feet had hit the ground. I tried to say thank you but I sobbed instead. Luther handed me a pair of jeans, a black T-shirt, running shoes, and socks. He said, Might be a bit baggy.
Thus it happened that, as the sun was rising over Buffalo Bayou, I stood on the concrete slab at the inmates’ entrance to the Harris County courthouse, peeled off my prison garb, and changed into civilian clothes for the first time since the last day of my trial. Seven satellite trucks lined the street, reporting news of my exoneration as it occurred. All the major networks were there and even some from Europe. Olvido took in the scene for a moment, then held my face in her hands. She said, Rafael, I goddamn hate representing people who are innocent.
That morning I was inmate number 0002647, a resident of the Polunsky Unit of the TDC, otherwise known as Texas’s death row. That afternoon, I was a free man.
Sitting at the head of a huge limestone table in a room packed with fifty reporters from across the country, one from Mexico, one from Canada, and five from Western Europe, I had my first press conference. Most of the questions were inane. How does it feel to be out? Great. What are you looking forward to most? Walking around without handcuffs. What would you like to say to your lawyers? Thank you. How about to the people who are responsible for this tragedy? I dodged that question by thanking the new district attorney, but the reporter, a thin man who spoke with a French accent, followed up and asked the smartest question I got that day, and the only one I could not answer. He said, What do you think should happen to the officials who are at fault? That turned out to be a question I could not get out of my mind.
Later I had my first celebratory beer. Olvido, Luther, Laura, and I sat outdoors at a bar on Main, and I savored a jalapeño cream ale from a brewery down the road. A black guy pushing a grocery cart and missing half his teeth stopped in front of us and pointed at me. He said, I know you. You’re President Bush’s kin, ain’t that right? Can you spare a penny or a dime? I patted my hip, but I had no wallet and no cash just yet. Luther handed me a five. I asked, Do you take paper money? and his eyes sparkled. I said, Good luck, chief. He smiled and said, Kin of the president. Right in front a my eyes. Check this out, people, kin a number forty-three. And pushed his cart across the street to a new set of tables.
Olvido asked what I wanted for dinner.
I said, What I really want is to eat dinner after it’s dark. You all decide where.
We took the train east to a cavernous restaurant with thirty-foot ceilings and a hundred kinds of tequila I was too scared to try, but the owner sent over a tray with a sample of five. Strangers who had seen the news made eye contact and nodded. Several came over to shake my hand. As we were finishing our coffee, the waiter told us someone had picked up the tab.
Luther handed me a duffel bag holding toiletries and clean clothes, and the four of us drove to a nearby apartment leased by a nonprofit organization devoted to helping former prisoners reenter society. It was a one-room efficiency in a marginal part of town with a two-burner stove and a sofa that opened into a bed. It was mine for a month. The refrigerator and pantry were stocked, and there was an envelope on the table with five hundred dollars in cash.
Olvido had said, You do not have to stay here. I have an extra room. You are welcome to it for as long as you like.
But I was ready to be alone and unwatched, ready to use the toilet with the door open wide and nobody around, ready to watch TV in the middle of the night, ready to shower for however long I wanted at any time I chose. I was already planning to walk down the street to a convenience store at three A.M. and come home and make a bag of popcorn in the microwave. I said, Thank you so much, Olvido, but this will do fine for now. They hugged me and said they’d talk to me in the morning.
I set my duffel on the table and stood in the center of the room. I stretched my arms to either side because they wouldn’t reach the walls. I opened the window despite the cold, again because I could. Horns blared and voices drifted up. Across the street a neon sign advertising beer with two missing letters flashed off and on. Three guys wearing micro shorts and leather jackets—I think they were guys—went roller-skating down the middle of the street and swerved around a bus parked at the curb. It was nearly midnight, and I wasn’t the least bit tired.
The thin walls may as well have been screens. In the apartment next door, a young couple from Eastern Europe whispering in what I think was Polish tried without success to console their infant son. The woman sang, and I think the man played a mandolin. I grabbed two beers from the six-pack in the refrigerator, plopped down on the sofa, and turned on the cable news with the sound on mute while listening to the child cry all night. At four A.M. I walked over to the window and watched the stoplight change from yellow to red. A single car approached from my right. As it drew near I could see the driver was smoking. He was wearing a uniform, perhaps a security guard going home from work. He stopped at the light and turned his head up toward the window from where I watched. He noticed me there, nodded once, then idled on the empty street until the light turned green, white smoke curling up from his tailpipe. When the sky lightened at the false dawn and the traffic began to grow thick, I went to the bathroom and washed my face, then lay back down and fell deeply asleep.
A volunteer from the reentry group knocked on my door at ten holding two steaming cups of coffee and a paper city map. I thanked her for the apartment, the supplies, and the clothes, and reminded her I lived nearby not very long ago. She said, Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know. She was embarrassed. I told her not to worry and to lighten the mood said, Do people still use paper maps? That might have made things worse. I said, Okay, no more jokes from me, and she smiled. She drove me to a government office where I got a new driver’s license, then to a branch bank where I opened a savings account with a thousand-dollar money order donated by the volunteers. I didn’t need the funds, of course, but I thought it might be bad manners to say so. So I said, Thank you very much. I will pay you back as soon as I can. She patted my forearm kindly. A month later I sent the charity an anonymous cashier’s check for ten thousand dollars.
The night before, at dinner, Olvido had handed me an envelope. I opened it in the morning after the volunteer dropped me off. Inside were letters written by nine of the twelve people who had sentenced me to death. You might wonder what happened to the other three. I wonder that too. I brewed a cup of actual espresso and sat down to read. What would you say to someone whom you had grievously misjudged and caused to lose six years of his life? I admired these men and women for even trying to answer that impossible question. Tieresse used to tell me she judged people’s sincerity by their effort, not their execution. The anguish and sorrow were evident in every letter I read. I knew these people had not acted in malice, and their antipathy toward the person they thought had murdered someone so good even struck me as a positive thing. Eventually I’d write back to every one of them with absolution. There were people I knew I would never forgive, but the twelve men and women who once believed I killed my wife were not among them.
I folded the letters and placed them back inside the envelope. I watched a small cockroach scurry across the kitchenette’s linoleum floor. I clutched the envelope to my chest. The letters made me feel more alone, not less so.
A few years before I met Tieresse, I was watching the local news one night. Reporters were covering the story of a young man who had been convicted of rape and sentenced to prison for thirty years before new DNA testing established his innocence five years into his term. A crowd gathered outside the jail, awaiting his release. He emerged onto the street carrying all his possessions in a cardboard box. He was wearing a warm-up suit, horn-rimmed glasses, and an ear-to-ear smile. For a moment he took in the size of the crowd, then walked straight into the embrace of his mother, sister, and girlfriend, and disappeared. A reporter had interviewed the mom, who said she never had any doubt about her son’s innocence. The only thing she didn’t know was how long it would take her to prove it so he could come back home where he belongs. She placed her hands together and tilted back her head and said, Glory be to God, all glory belongs to the Lord Jesus Christ, and she was so certain and serene I smiled despite myself.
When I walked off of death row, the only people there to greet me were the guards, and when I emerged from the Houston courtroom a free man, there was nobody there at all. Reporters had to keep their cameras fixed on me. My parents and wife were dead. My friends were still in prison. Most of La Ventana’s staff had testified for me at my trial, but they had been my friends, not my family, and unlike family, friends do move on. My restaurant and upstairs apartment were shuttered, and in another month I would sell them. I was glad to be out, but every remnant of my prior life was gone. What awaited me was emptiness.
I spent my first full day of freedom walking. Olvido had given me a cell phone, but except for a call from her to check up on me around noon, it didn’t ring. I arranged with my offshore bank to have funds transferred to a new domestic account. I spent an hour reading the local paper in a hipster coffeehouse, surprised to see a quarter-page-size photo of myself taken outside the courthouse the day before. Six other patrons didn’t seem to have any idea who I was, but the young man who brewed my drink bumped my fist when he came by my table to ask if I needed anything else. I left too large a tip and walked north toward Buffalo Bayou, pausing to buy a hamburger at a food truck along the way. By the time I got back to my apartment at close to five, my legs were so sore I struggled up the stairs. I drank a glass of wine while I drew a bath, and I fell asleep in the tub. There’s a neighborhood pizza place that also delivers beer. I ordered a large pie with jalapeños and a six-pack of lager when I woke up at nine and watched basketball while I ate. Then my cell phone rang.
After the first DNA report came back, I received a letter from Reinhardt. It was the first time I had heard from him since arriving on death row. The letter held both a sincere apology and an unsparing flagellation of his decision to cut off contact with me. I read it out loud to Sargent. He said, Damn, Inocente, some motherfucker beat my old lady to death I’d kill him too. Dude’s stand-up, but he’s got to chill. I said, Yeah, I know what you mean. I wrote Reinhardt back saying I missed having him in my life.
I did not recognize the area code, but I answered anyway. Reinhardt said, I hope it is not too late to call. I didn’t know how to reach you. I finally got your number from your lawyer. His voice was unsteady. I said, I am glad you did.
Reinhardt said, There are a lot of things I need to say to you, but the first task is to get you your money back so you can move on with your life.
He must not have known I already had more sitting in Caribbean banks than I could possibly spend. I said, Actually, Reinhardt, that’s very kind, but I do not need it, and I don’t really want it.
He said, You can make that decision later, if you want to. Right now, I am arranging to transfer to you what my mother wanted you to have.
We spoke for nearly an hour, both of us crying at times, and made plans to see each other the following week. Before we hung up he said, My mother was the happiest I ever saw her beginning the day she met you and lasting until the end of her life. It should have been obvious to me you could never have harmed her. I recalled what Sargent had said. I said, Reinhardt, if our two positions had been reversed, we’d be having the mirror image of this same conversation.
The neighbors’ baby was quiet that night, and I slept until the sun woke me the following day. I’d spent six years waiting for something good to happen, but believing I might jinx it if I made any plans. I no longer had an excuse. I took a cab to La Ventana to have one last look. Splotches of mold peeked out from cracks in the walls. The dial on the electric meter was still. The mirror that ran the length of the bar was tarnished and cracked, but the tables and chairs were mostly still in place, and I stared at the spot where I had first shaken Tieresse’s hand. A homeless woman walked past and asked if I could spare some change.
I walked down the street to a boutique hotel and checked in for a week. I ordered a steak and a bottle of bourbon from room service and ate in bed while I watched a classic movie on a huge TV. That night, slightly drunk, I made a plan. I decided to say adios to Texas.
But it took a while before I could leave. Four TV networks wanted me on their morning shows. They flew me to New York in first class and put me up in a three-room suite overlooking Central Park. I sat down for interviews with NPR and the BBC, and my story was on the front page of The New York Times. Between shows I went to a matinee at a theater near Times Square. It was dark and loud, and I kept turning around to see what was happening behind me. I left before it ended. From a vendor on the street, I bought a candy bar and four newspapers and carried them uptown to the park. I sat on a bench across from a man who looked homeless and watched him throw crumbs to overweight birds. Although the temperature was in the sixties, he was wearing a threadbare overcoat, a polyester scarf, and an oven mitt on his left hand. I handed him my unopened chocolate before I left. He looked at me, confused, glancing over my shoulder toward the pond. I think he said thank you in a language I didn’t understand.
The day before I flew back to Texas, I had the beginning of an idea. At the time it was less an idea than an intuition, the way you can feel the extraction team coming around the corner before you see them. I was walking in Koreatown, looking for a place to eat lunch. At a bodega with wicker baskets holding carnations, roses, apples, and pears I bought a Nokia phone with one thousand minutes of talk time and two hundred texts. I paid for it with cash. I left it in its plastic wrapping and packed it in my suitcase for the flight back home.
Once I was back from New York, my newsworthiness faded to dusk. Other than talking to Reinhardt almost every day, my conversations were with waiters and cashiers. I had more space and more freedom, but no longer purpose or plan. I called Olvido, thanked her again, and told her not to worry if she couldn’t find me for a while. She asked how long a while. I said, I’ll let you know. I bought a small RV, food staples, clothes, and a bike. After an early cup of coffee the next morning, I checked out of the hotel, drove past La Ventana one last time, and headed east to Louisiana, the fastest way out of Texas. I crossed the Sabine, pulled into a rest stop, made a roast beef sandwich, and studied the map. I realized what I wanted to do first, what I needed to do first. I gripped the wheel, took a deep breath, and said out loud, I’m coming, my love. I drove north though Louisiana, into Arkansas and across Missouri, then I made a left turn and headed west.
It was after midnight when I crossed into Kansas. West of Kansas City, at a rest stop on Interstate 70, I pulled over for the night. I stretched my legs, had a sandwich, and drank a beer. Then I slept until nearly dawn.
The next morning, as the sky lightened behind me, I arrived at the property where we had planned to grow old. The pasture showed signs of six years of neglect, but the house itself was a pristine time capsule. When I had asked Reinhardt about it, he said he’d been too sentimental to list it for sale. I told him I was glad to hear that, it was where I felt I belonged. I lived in the RV for two days, working outside to clear brush and trails until the electricity, water, and gas were turned back on, then I parked the camper beside the hangar and moved back inside.
Reinhardt had had his mother cremated. I wish he hadn’t. Maybe this sounds morbid, but I wanted to hold her bones, to go to sleep one last time with them lying next to me in bed. I have a different relationship to death than I once did. I’d spent seven years knowing the last woman I intimately touched was someone not my wife. I wish I could have changed that.
He sent me a box holding her ashes. I pushed my hand deep down into it. It was damp and cool, like rocky sand. I took a fistful of ashes and placed them in a clear crystal vase that still stood on the granite kitchen island beneath a patina of dust. I added a rose from a dozen Tieresse had dried and displayed. I put another handful in a small box from which I had emptied wooden matches. I took the remainder and scattered them where our garden had grown. I said, Tomorrow, my love, I will plant, and I wiped the ash from my hands.
I crossed the overgrown field to the forest and meandered down to the river. A love seat we had made from an old chairlift and a tractor-tire swing still hung from a massive oak. I took off my boots and socks and sat at the river’s edge. The water was clear and cold. I saw a giant sturgeon and a school of rainbow trout. She never came to visit me in prison, not even once, but I felt her presence there. I smelled her too. I lay down and covered my eyes with my handkerchief. I pictured her the first time we had come here together, laughing, eating ribs with her hands, licking a dab of sauce from the corner of my lips. I heard her laugh again, and I smiled. I remembered our first night in Kansas, sitting outside, sharing a bottle of wine and staring up at the stars. I felt and I smelled and I tasted and I heard, and I smiled again, until I cried.
The next morning I cooked breakfast at dawn then walked to the hangar where we kept her plane. I drained and changed the oil and checked the fuel. I spent more than an hour inspecting the engine and frame. To start it up, I used an external power source because the battery needed a charge. The sky was cloudless, and visibility was unlimited. I checked the wind sock and took off to the west, and I flew for an hour.
To make my license current and knock off the rust, I enrolled in a three-day refresher course at a flying school in the southwest corner of the state, where nobody knew my name. I celebrated the three-week anniversary of my exoneration with a meat loaf sandwich and root beer float at a diner behind a gas station where they still filled your tank and checked your oil. The next morning, in the sky over Colby, heading east toward home, I discovered an important truth about myself. I’ve read interviews of exonerated men who spent years in prison before being released, and they always seem so serene and centered. They betray no hint of vengefulness or rage. They go on TV and say they harbor no malice toward anyone, and they mean it. They say, Mistakes are made, and they shrug. They say, Shit happens. They describe human tragedy with the passive voice. They say, There’s no point in being bitter, and they aren’t. They set up charitable foundations and go on the speaker circuit to urge reform of the criminal justice system. They write books and give the profits away. After years of being brutalized by a system that did not care about them at all, that denied their very dignity, they remain decent and good.
That day over Colby, this is what I realized: I am not one of them.
Years before, on that day early in our relationship when I first told Tieresse about my family and she told me about hers, I recounted the night my father caused the man who had leered at my mother in the marketplace to disappear. She seemed impressed by his primal act of retribution, not embarrassed on my behalf. I was surprised, and I told her so. Since reading Aeschylus in college I’d believed the urge to get even was a base impulse educated people could overcome. I said to Tieresse, Not to be too cliché-ish, but don’t you think there’s some truth in the pacifist mantra that an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind? Tieresse answered, Yes, of course I do, Rafa, but not all acts of retribution trigger cycles of violence. Sometimes you can close the loop and get rid of the bad guy without injuring a good guy in the process. Maybe those instances are few and far between, but they do exist. I think your father found one of them.
In three sentences, she undermined my entire understanding of why vengeance is bad. I didn’t have to feel shame. It was okay for me to be proud of what Papá had done. Yet until that day flying home, the concept of just deserts remained mostly an abstraction. In prison I’d been too busy surviving to think about who was responsible for hurting me, or what punishment they deserved. Now, with nothing to do but fill the hours of my day, and the question the French reporter had asked lingering in my mind, the urge to get even took root, and it began in utter stealth. My subconscious was formulating details of the plan before my conscious mind realized a plan was there.
Powerful people had violated a moral code. They compounded my sorrow with pain. They deserved to pay. I believe Tieresse would have said that, too, was one of those times demanding retribution. I believe she would have approved.
So a few days later, I flew to Enid, Oklahoma, and drove a rental car to a convenience store at the edge of town. The intuition I had in New York had begun to take on a clearer shape. I bought a Motorola phone with five hundred minutes of talk and one hundred prepaid texts. I paid for it with cash. The same week, at a garage sale in Emporia, I found a brand-new Dell laptop computer still in the box. At a big-box store in Topeka I paid cash for an Apple iPad mini. In the men’s room of a truck stop on Highway 75 I bought a three-pack of tickler condoms for a dollar.
I put the phones in special foil packets the police use to prevent data from being remotely erased, and I placed the packets, along with the computer, the tablet, and a portable GPS, in a faux leather backpack. For the next seven months I stored the backpack in the luggage compartment of Tieresse’s plane.
The first thing I needed to do was establish a routine. You could count on one hand, without a need for the thumb, the dividends from my time on death row. But there was undeniably one: Routine came easy to me.
The Main Street Diner, ten miles down the road, had been in business for seventy-five years, serving breakfast and lunch, from five in the morning until two thirty in the afternoon, every day of the year but Christmas, Easter, and New Year’s Day. I started to go in three mornings a week, arriving between eight and nine. Unless it was raining the farmers were usually gone, but a few men in business suits would still be finishing up their eggs and bacon or asking for one more cup of coffee to go. It’s a platitude, but it’s true that news travels fast in a small town, and by my fourth visit, everyone I saw knew who I was. All three early shift waitresses, both busboys, and two of the cooks knew my name. I sat at the same counter stool every day and had coffee and cereal, and every now and again a homemade cinnamon roll or a cup of fruit.
I’d read the local paper someone had always left behind and use the free Wi-Fi to visit national news sites to learn what was happening in the rest of the world. A few former employees, including my sous and pastry chefs, had reached out to me, and I’d also connected with the families of some of the men I had met inside, so I would check my e-mail and social media too. After an hour or sometimes more, I would say thank you, leave money for the check and a tip at my place, and walk across the street to buy groceries and whatever else I needed for the day. Two or three times a month I would stop into the local hardware store. The owner and manager knew I almost always had a do-it-yourself home improvement project in progress. I was a fixture around town. People would have said I kept to myself, that I was friendly but quiet, that I seemed sad or diminished but not angry or bitter. The people who said those things would have been mostly right.
Thursday mornings I would leave. I would get in Tieresse’s plane and fly somewhere for the weekend, always returning Sunday afternoon, unless the weather kept me away for a day or two longer. On Mondays the diner staff would ask me where I had gone, and if they didn’t, I would tell them anyway. I showed them photos of small towns and national parks taken from five thousand feet. Sometimes I stayed in two-star motels in one-light towns and ate at local restaurants. Other times I flew to small cities and stayed and ate at chains. My favorite trips were to the wilderness, where I would camp and cook on an open flame. I was leaving a trail the weakest tracker alive could follow. I flew to places in Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arkansas, Missouri, Louisiana, and Texas—lots of places in Texas. Renata, a new waitress at the diner, once asked me what I was running from, and I told her that wasn’t it at all. I was making up for lost time, seeing the whole country from the air and on the ground. She said, Making up lost time for what? and I saw Ramos, the busboy, whisper in her ear.
In the late afternoons, when the angle of the light made me melancholy, I would take a long walk around our property. In my jacket pocket I kept the box of Tieresse’s ashes and a bag of unshelled pecans to feed to critters. In the early spring I scattered wildflower seeds in the grass. Most days I would linger in the tree swing by the creek and listen to the birds sing. At dusk I would have a drink or two on the porch and eat my dinner watching TV. I never invited anyone over, and in this town, no one ever stopped by unannounced. I would get in bed before eleven and read. I would rise with the sun, eager to start the long day ahead.
Years before, after Tieresse had seen this place for the first time, made a few phone calls, and bought the property with hardly a pause, the two of us returned to Houston. She came by La Ventana one night as we were closing, carrying blueprints and a 3-D model of the house. She said, I just picked these up at the architect’s office. She unrolled the plans, spread them on a table, and said, It’s perfect, but are we sure the design will work on the land? I had answered, There’s only one way to find out. So the next morning, drawings in hand, we went back.
That was when we found it.
On the opposite side of the driveway from where we planned to put our house, hidden by a thicket of weeds, was a large manhole cover, nearly as large as a queen-size bed. It peeked out from the northern end of the mile-long concrete strip we planned to repurpose as a runway. After struggling without success to pry it open, I spied a small gearwheel covered by brush and brittle dandelions. Tieresse turned it, and the heavy steel door opened to the inside, revealing four hinges each a foot long. She said, What in the world is this?
We called the realtor, who had no idea what it was or even that it was there. I grabbed a flashlight from my flight bag and we lowered ourselves in. Tieresse had said, I’ll be darned. I bought a piece of history for a pittance. We built the hangar for her plane right on top of her historical memento.
What we had found was a silo that formerly housed an Atlas F missile. Three decades earlier, a small structure on top had hidden the entrance, but the squat cinder-block building was long since gone. In the early 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, the US government had secretly built dozens of these silos, mostly in the Midwest. They held Atlas, Titan, and Minuteman missiles and were constructed to withstand a direct nuclear hit. Now that they were decommissioned and abandoned, the government declined to even acknowledge their existence. Ours did not appear on plans of the land, and nobody we asked could tell us when the weapon had been removed, but the silo’s plumbing, electrical wiring, and ventilation remained in perfect repair.
The silo had eight levels, with a narrow tight spiral staircase descending the upper six, and steel-rung ladders welded to the walls providing access to the bottom two. The seventh and eighth levels held storage tanks, hot and cold connection systems, pressurization units, and overflow collection. The sixth level was the least crowded. It held a redundant heat exchange, a doubly redundant exhaust fan, and a diesel fume detector. All the equipment was against the northern and western walls. Tieresse had said, If we didn’t want to keep this place private, we could turn this silo into a bed-and-breakfast. It would be the hardest reservation to get in all the Midwest. I had asked her whether she really wanted to do that. She smiled and kissed me and said, Not in a million years. This spot of earth is yours and mine.
Seven years and a few months later, it was exactly the same as we had left it. Wearing a headlamp, I walked up and down the eight stories, sketching each floor on a separate page of my drafting pad. My do-it-yourself home improvement project took shape. With sheet metal, cinder blocks, and stainless steel, I could turn the sixth level into exactly what I needed, something both secret and secure. It would become two adjacent cells. Together they’d be bounded by three solid concrete walls, with steel bars across the front. They would be divided into two separate spaces by a set of bars as well. They’d lack the built-ins I had on the row, and they wouldn’t have a window, either. But I’d make them larger, because my prisoners would be there all the time. I couldn’t risk taking them back and forth to a separate room for exercise or to bathe. I’d hang a shower curtain on each side of the interior wall so my prisoners could give each other privacy, or gain some for themselves, if they were so inclined.
Some of what I needed I bought from the hardware store in town. For the items that would have made the local owner wonder, I went to Kansas City or Overland Park. I bought the vertical bars from a company near Salina that sold fencing materials to construction crews. I bought sheet metal from a national chain in Topeka. I bought cinder blocks from a small home remodeling business in Tulsa. I paid for everything in cash. When a vendor acted suspicious of my stack of one-hundred-dollar bills, I told him I didn’t like the idea of the federal government being able to keep track of me by getting records from the credit card companies. He shook my hand warmly and said that made perfect sense.
After six weeks, I had stockpiled my supplies, but I needed a disguise. I hired a company to put in a lap pool and hot tub. I can barely swim, but by heating the pool, or pretending to, I could explain heavy power consumption. Next, an outfit from Kansas City custom built for me a one-thousand-square-foot greenhouse where I planned to grow heirloom tomatoes, butter lettuce, and six kinds of chili peppers. Most important, though, it too would draw electricity and water.
With the subterfuges in place, it was time for me to build. Using a walk-behind, wet-cutting saw, I cut four three-inch-by-three-inch holes in the concrete floor of the sixth level down, beginning the construction of what would become the two impregnable cells. The holes would drain water and waste through pipes of PVC to the storage tanks two stories below. I ran a horizontal rod dropped eighteen inches below the ceiling across both cells. The inmates would be able to hang their portable shower bags from that rod. Set on top of two of the drain holes were camping toilets purchased in Oklahoma City that I had modified to fit the space.
In the ceiling I installed recessed LED lights. They were linked to a timer that turned them on at seven each morning and off at eleven each night, the same time the television would run. The electrical circuits were also relayed to my computer network through a router mounted on level 3. All the bulbs were outside the cells, so I could change them without having to go inside. I did not know how physically capable my adversaries might be, and I did not have any interest in finding out. Below the TV, bolted to the wall next to the door, was a digital clock that would count down the hours and minutes remaining until their release. Next to it was a battery-powered calendar showing the day, date, and time.
Vertical steel bars, spaced three inches apart, spanned the front. Each partitioned space had a gate with the highest-grade dead bolts money can buy. I bought them at a hardware store in Houston. The door built into their shared wall of bars had no lock at all. If they wanted to have conjugal visits, they wouldn’t have to ask my permission. I bought cheap end tables for their cells at a flea market, and on top of each I placed a stack of books. In the drawers I left writing notebooks and a dozen pencils and pens. I bought two battery-powered camping lanterns, in case they wanted illumination after the lights shut off. Each cell had a straight-back chair, a rocker, and a stationary bike. One had a single cot, the other a sturdy bunk bed. The mattresses on both were warranted for twenty years.
A second row of bars, sixteen inches in front of the first, had a single door with two padlocks and a twelve-inch towing chain. It created a buffer zone between them and me and, more important, between them and freedom. I doubted they could escape from their cells, but there was something else important I learned on the row: the value of redundancy. The outer door leading to the staircase was from a bank vault. I rented a truck in Junction City to transport it to my property, and I paid three day laborers I hired in Kansas City to help me put it in place. When the work was done I bought them beer and tacos before driving them home, and I hoped they would not remember a single thing about me or what they had done that day. The vault door had a modified lock I could open myself by punching in an eight-digit code. Considering there are a hundred million combinations, I was fairly confident my code was secure. I used a drill with an industrial diamond bit to bore a peephole into the door so I could look in on my prisoners before entering their space.
One story up, on the fifth floor, I cut two four-inch-square holes through which food and water would be dropped into each of their cells once a day by an automated arm I scavenged from an electric dog food dispenser. The inmates would dispose of their waste and small bits of trash by dropping it through the drain holes in the floor of their living spaces, where it would fall into the storage vessel two stories below and be consumed by bacteria ordinarily found in backyard septic tanks. On the floors of levels 3 and 2 I laid a foot of sound insulation, and glued a foot more to the walls. Throughout the silo, I spread tiny remote-controlled cameras the size of a nickel attached to fiber-optic cable dropped down from level 1. The clock contained a camera I could remotely control to send me both video and sound. Smoke and fire alarms as well as carbon monoxide detectors were programmed to send me a text alert in case of danger. I was aiming to be a jail keeper, not a murderer.
Working four days a week, from late morning until early evening, construction took me nearly nine months. When my labor was done, I carried a radio down to level 6, tuned in the loudest music I could find, closed the vault, and climbed the levels until I was outside. I couldn’t hear a thing. I pressed my ear against the manhole cover leading down and listened hard. I still heard nothing, except for a helicopter’s rotors beating in the distance. I walked outside the hangar and looked up to see if I could spot it. I remotely activated the audio feed and heard the Rolling Stones singing “Satisfaction.”
After coffee the next morning, I told the diner workers I was excited about my next trip. I was going to head out to northern Arizona. The pictures I’d show them the following Monday I had actually taken a week before. So instead of flying west, I spent the next five days underground, three days in one cell, two in the other, testing everything out. The lights came on as programmed. My eye mask and earplugs shut out the light and sound of the TV. The food and water dropped on schedule. My shower bag filled every other day. The water and waste drained smoothly. The air was clean and fresh. I tried with both a baseball bat and a tire iron to hammer my way out, and I didn’t make a dent. I couldn’t imagine what kind of implement they would need to escape other than a key or a phone, and I didn’t plan to let them get their hands on either one. The place was a fortress. I’d built a prison more secure than Alcatraz. If they could escape from this dungeon, they deserved to be free.
It was time to become familiar with the enemy. One I immediately had second thoughts about, but the other two I did not.
According to her official biography on the State of Texas Judiciary website, Sarah Moss had been on the Supreme Criminal Court for ten years. She attended St. Mary’s School of Law, served as an assistant district attorney in San Antonio for six years, and ran for the position on the court after an unsuccessful bid to oust the Bexar County district attorney. She was a cheerleader at TCU, where she met her future husband, Harvey, who is the pastor of a megachurch in South Austin. The two have no children.
I did a web search to learn more. I did not find much news of interest. The one exception was a story that broke when I was in my second year on death row. Moss’s husband was sued by a former church employee who claimed she had carried on an affair with the pastor for six years and was fired when she decided to break it off. She accused him of fathering her six-month-old girl. The case was settled out of court for undisclosed terms. I tried to track down the mistress. As best I could determine, she and her daughter were living with her parents in Honduras.
According to his official biography, Leonard Stream graduated from Texas Lutheran with a degree in marketing. He played on the professional golf circuit for two years before starting a series of business ventures. He later attended law school at Baylor. Upon graduation, he went to work in the energy sector. A year before Moss was elected, the governor tapped Stream to fill a vacancy on the court when its senior member died.
My web search of Judge Stream was more fruitful. He started his business career operating fast-food franchises. A childhood friend of the governor, he bought, with the governor’s financial backing, an established boot-manufacturing business, but the company declared bankruptcy after it was raided by immigration officials who determined that eighteen of the twenty-one employees were in the US illegally. Stream and his partner paid a fine for violating federal regulations but did not face criminal charges. Stream has an estranged son from his first marriage to a beauty contestant from Midland. Stream’s second wife, a Dallas socialite, accused him of physical and psychological abuse in a high-profile divorce shortly after he was appointed to the court, but in the following election, Stream easily won reelection over a Green Party candidate. He is now single, and rumors occasionally surface that he is secretly gay.
To all outward appearances, Stream and Moss were nothing more than professional colleagues who voted the same way more than ninety-nine percent of the time. Both were regularly endorsed by police unions and prosecutors for their tough-on-crime decisions. In nearly one hundred cases that had come before them, including mine, neither Stream nor Moss had ever voted in favor of a death row inmate. What Moss had written about me—that I was a vile murderer who sacrificed one of God’s most beautiful creatures to my selfish and rapacious desires—she had also said, using the exact same language, of at least three black men whose female victims had been white.
Her hostility to science might have even exceeded her indifference to the Constitution. In one famous case that was broken by the Brazos County newspaper crime reporter and subsequently picked up by the national media, newly tested DNA evidence conclusively showed that a woman who had been raped and murdered could not have been raped by the man convicted of the crime. Moss voted against him anyway, speculating the man convicted of the crime might have worn a condom during the attack and laced the woman’s vagina with someone else’s semen to throw investigators off track. Stream joined her opinion, but a federal court intervened and granted the inmate relief. Neither Stream nor Moss had drawn an opponent in either the primary or general election for the past eight years.
But you can learn more on the ground than you can online. So I told the staff at the diner I’d be gone for two weeks, visiting national parks in Nevada and Utah. Instead, I checked the contents of the backpack in Tieresse’s plane, bought a car charger I could use for all the devices, and took off for the Texas Hill Country. I flew to a small airport south of San Antonio with no control tower, a potholed asphalt runway, and a rutty grass strip. Circling above the field at nine hundred feet to check out the wind sock, I thought the place looked deserted. According to an aviation website, the number of weekly arrivals and departures was zero, and there were no planes based at the field. I parked beside an empty hangar with a rusty padlock hanging from the open door. I planned to ride my bike to a used-car lot nearby and find something indistinguishable, but on the way there I spotted an old Ford pickup with a pop-up camper and a For Sale sign in the window parked on the side of a winding road. I pedaled up the unpaved driveway of a small ten-acre farm with two-foot-high alfalfa ready to be mowed. A potbellied man wearing denim overalls told me the truck had belonged to his elderly father who hadn’t driven it for years. The truck was untitled, but the inspection sticker and license plates were current, and I bought it for fifteen hundred dollars in cash. The farmer threw in a case of oil. I tossed my bike into the bed and drove back to the field where I had landed and dialed a number off a sign I was pretty sure was not a working line. I was mistaken. My call was answered by the manager of a twenty-thousand-acre cattle ranch that dated back to the days when Texas was a republic. Until two years ago, the manager told me, the airport where I’d landed had been used by crop dusters, but it was abandoned when the ranch constructed a larger field capable of accommodating private jets ten miles to the north. I told the manager this one worked fine for me. He said, You ain’t gonna be runnin’ no drugs or wetbacks outta the place, are ya? I said, No, sir, just looking for a bit of solitude to lick my wounds after a nasty divorce. He gave me a grunt of sympathy and a PO box where I could send the rent. I leased a hangar for a year for the price of a fancy meal and paid for it in advance. Even with the plane, the truck, the camper, and a few pieces of old furniture inside, it had room to spare. I took a spiral notebook out of the backpack and wrote at the top of page one: Things That Could Go Wrong. On the first line I wrote, Ranch manager? The manager hadn’t even asked my name, but it’s the risks you don’t notice that you most need to fear.
Keeping the speedometer needle five miles per hour below the limit, it took me less than an hour to drive to downtown Austin. I parked near the capitol and walked over to the courthouse. The entrance was set up like airport security. I took off my shoes and placed my phone in a tray. Nobody knew who I was. I sat down in the courtroom and watched the attorneys argue about whether the state’s system for funding schools discriminated against the poor, and marveled yet again at how lawyers and judges can debate a question every reasonable person knows is undebatable. I left in the middle of the next argument, which had to do with whether a man who shot a woman in the leg could be charged with murder when the woman died three years later from an infection a doctor attributed to the wound. At dusk I walked to a fancy hotel and had a beer and a hamburger at a rooftop bar. Nobody recognized me there, either.
I slept that night at my hangar, inside a sleeping bag resting in the bed of the truck, and I returned to Austin the next day at dawn. Over time I would learn the judges were creatures of habit, and their daily routines barely varied from what I observed on that initial scouting trip. Both drove themselves to the office. Stream alternated between a Porsche convertible and a Chevy SUV. Moss drove a BMW sedan. Their license plates identified them as judges. Most nights the local police left an empty cruiser parked at the curb outside each of their homes, and occasionally an officer would follow them to work in the morning.
Moss drove straight to the office and arrived at the court around nine thirty. Stream stopped every morning at a donut shop with a drive-through, but he always got out of his car and went inside. They left the courthouse for lunch around twelve thirty, but while Moss went to the same high-end restaurant every day and had a Caesar salad with grilled chicken and a single glass of wine, Stream usually picked up a meatball or salami sub and carried it back to his desk. They were never together, at least not that I saw, except in the world I was building. They left the office punctually at five. Stream would stop on his way home at a bar on Congress, stay for an hour or two, and pick up Chinese food, barbeque, or pizza on his way home. On Friday evenings, he often had guests. They always left before midnight. Twice a week he shopped for groceries. At the store, nobody seemed to know who he was. Once he made it home for dinner, he rarely left again before morning.
Moss’s habits were a bit more varied. She and her husband went out every two or three nights, sometimes to an event or party, and other times to a quiet restaurant. Either he or someone else must have done the shopping, because I never saw Moss enter a grocery store. On weekends, she sometimes went to the mall and stayed all day. She did not go with her husband to church. Instead, on Sunday mornings, she went to a country club where she spent an hour on the driving range and then met three other women for a champagne brunch. The tuxedoed maître d’ who guided them to their table always greeted her as Judge.
Although I had unhitched the camper from the truck and left it in the hangar, I still worried the old pickup might attract notice. So during my second week of reconnoitering, I bought a second vehicle, a low-mileage Lexus I found at an estate sale in Boerne. I paid for it with a cashier’s check. The son of the previous owner signed over the title to me, and I put it in the glove box, where, as far as I know, it remains to this day. In my notebook of things that could go wrong, I wrote, If I get pulled over, why am I here?
When I got back to Kansas, I threw the notebook away. Trusting my imperfect memory seemed less risky than keeping a record of my concerns. At the diner I showed off my pictures of Arches and Zion National Parks and made a point of saying they were so vast and alluring, I intended to go back soon. Sitting at breakfast I made a mental list of items I kept in my cell while I was on death row and a separate list of items that were given to me each day. That afternoon I bought everything I needed at a local department store. In the razor aisle I paused. What if my prisoners despaired and tried to kill themselves, or worse, one tried to kill the other? During my time inside, one guy hanged himself and one overdosed on drugs, but no one succeeded in committing suicide with a disposable razor, so I bought a pack of twenty. I’d give them a new blade each week, after I made sure to recover the old one. If, despite my precautions, either nevertheless succeeded in killing him- or herself, I doubted I would lose much sleep, but the logistics of recovering and disposing of the body might be challenging. On Wednesday and Wednesday night I gave the prison another test run, making sure the amenities functioned and trying everything I could to break myself out. First thing Thursday morning I flew back to Texas.
Once I had landed and was inside the hangar, I removed the faux leather backpack from the luggage compartment of the plane and spread its contents on a plywood worktable the previous occupant had left behind. I created passwords to unlock the computer and the tablet: IheartSarah and LeonardIheart, respectively. They’re maudlin, but they’re easy to remember and, I hoped, easy for the authorities to hack. Just in case, though, I wrote the passwords on pieces of tape I stuck to the bottom of each machine. I used two different pens, two types of tape, and different handwriting for each reminder. I also created two e-mail accounts: one for JudgeMossTexas, and another for JudgeStreamTexas. The passwords for each were the same as for the computer and tablet. I made a note to get additional SIM cards for my own phone and dispose of the card I used on my trips to Austin once my mission was under way.
That evening, as Sixth Street in Austin was coming to life, I packed up all the electronic gear and drove the Lexus to the neighborhood in Round Rock where Judge Stream now lived. I parked three doors down from his town house and powered up the laptop computer. I was wearing a Keep Austin Weird sweatshirt and a baseball cap with a Texas flag. If anybody asked me what I was doing, I intended to say I was new in town and trying to find venue information about where I could hear a local band.
But nobody paid me any mind as I sat in my car and tapped the keys. Although I very much wanted to tell Reinhardt what I was planning and doing, for both our sakes, I didn’t. I did, however, need his expertise. Earlier that year I spent half a day at his house in Princeton getting educated about cybersecurity. Most of the questions I asked were innocuous, but one apparently struck him as more dangerous, and he wondered why I needed to know. I said, It’s better if I don’t say. He nodded, and he didn’t ask again. He knew I was hiding something, but by then, he trusted me completely. As I was leaving, he said, If you need anything else, let me know, okay? And be careful.
Sitting in the Lexus near Stream’s house, it took me five minutes to hack my way into his wireless router. Reinhardt would have been proud. I logged on to the e-mail account I had created for him and composed an e-mail: Testing one two three. Please acknowledge. I pushed send, closed my eyes for a moment, then headed to the high-end neighborhood Judge Moss lived in overlooking Lake Travis. It took me a bit longer to break into her network. Using the tablet, I logged on to her account. I wrote: Message received loud and clear. I’m expecting a little more ardor next time, however <seductive grin>.
I went back to Stream’s block. I wrote a second e-mail: Excellent! Can you get away this weekend? I know a charming B and B on the coast. (Does this meet her honor’s expectations?) I had one last e-mail to write, a reply from Judge Moss. She answered: It does indeed, and that sounds perfect. Other than preaching to his flock, he will be playing golf all weekend and probably won’t even realize I’m gone. Room service for lunch tomorrow at our usual spot? I signed it with a winking smiley face emoji. I tried to think of what might go wrong, which notes seemed false, but nothing stuck out to me. I was good at this. Either I was a natural, or prison had affected me more than I realized. I shut everything down.
It was a cool, cloudless night. I got out of my car to put all the electronics in the trunk and to stretch my legs. Three bearded men were playing mariachi under a gazebo in a park across the street from the bus station, and I noticed my foot tapping out their rhythm. I bought shredded chicken tamales, frijoles, and two bottles of Carta Blanca at a taco stand on South Lamar and carried it back with me to the hangar as the aroma filled the car. I sat outside in a folding chair and studied the stars. My leg was shaking, and the eager anticipation I felt at that moment I had experienced only twice before: the night La Ventana opened its doors, and the day Tieresse and I became husband and wife. With half my second beer still left in the bottle, I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep. When I woke at sunrise, I was completely refreshed.
I drove the Lexus to a parking lot catty-corner from the courthouse and backed into a space so I was facing the street. I used Stream’s Motorola to call Moss’s Nokia and had a two-minute conversation with myself. Then I sent a text saying, Nice to hear your voice, handsome. I’m running ten minutes late. Don’t get started without me. I signed it with the same winking emoji, then I texted back, You’re getting me so hot I’m not sure I can walk to the hotel. I might have to crawl <Smile>. Two hours later, I sent another text from Stream to Moss: That was an awesome opening attraction to our weekend. She replied with a heart. I powered off the phones and placed them in their aluminum sleeves. I hoped that, in addition to preventing data from being remotely erased, the sleeves would also make tracking them impossible. I couldn’t think of anyone who would want to track them, or of anyone who even knew they existed, but if there is a line between hypercautiousness and paranoia, I was willing to cross it to make sure I didn’t get caught.
For the next eleven months, I flew south each Thursday evening, drove from my hangar to Austin, and sent a text or two that day and an e-mail or two at night. I avoided toll roads and convenience stores with cameras. I wore a cowboy hat or a baseball cap with the brim pulled low. I’d leave Austin after midnight and go somewhere out of state, where I could charge a meal or a hotel room to my credit card, all part of my quest to explore the small towns of the Southwest—and leave a paper trail of my travels no place near the scene of the future crime. On my way back home to Kansas on Sunday, I’d make a quick detour to my hangar and drive again to Austin, where I would impersonate Moss and Stream one more time. Occasionally Moss would express concern her husband was growing suspicious and apologize for backing out of a scheduled weekend tryst. Stream always told her not to worry about it, that the most important thing was to be discreet. They were careful to describe their assignations in general terms—they’d talk about going to a hotel, or the beach, or the hill country—but never in a way that would allow their movements to be traced. Their caution ensured that investigators would not be able to interview any motel or restaurant employees about whether or when they had seen the amorous couple. Her e-mails and texts were flirtatious and coy, his were salacious and sometimes lewd. Scrolling through them, I felt like a sculptor who can see the shape hidden in the stone before he picks up his chisel.
Their Honors did not know it, of course, nobody did, but Judge Moss and Judge Stream were now having a digitally demonstrable torrid affair, and a pretty sordid one at that. I had created an excuse for them to be together and therefore a reason for them to disappear together. And I had a place to put them once they did. What I did not have, though, was any idea how I’d get them there.
And then I got lucky.
I had flown back to Texas so that the lovers could exchange a few e-mails and texts and reminisce about their weekend tryst at a West Texas B and B. It was Saturday morning. I was sitting in the Lexus outside his condo sipping coffee, writing something steamy and ridiculous about how great the sex in the back seat of his car had been as tractor-trailers rattled past them in a rest stop off I-10. I was trying to think of a better phrase than take you, when Stream got into his Porsche and left. On previous weekends I had tailed him while he ran errands in his SUV. I wasn’t sure there was any more useful information for me to gather, and I was wary of taking unnecessary risks. But on the spur of the moment, I made the decision to follow him.
He put the cloth top down and headed east on Highway 71. In Bastrop he exited in front of a strip center with half a dozen fast-food places, but he did not stop to eat. Instead, he continued on, driving southeast on an empty two-lane road. I put half a mile of distance between us. Ten minutes later he turned. I kept on driving past him as he punched a code into an electronically controlled gate, and I parked on the shoulder two hundred yards down the road. It was a private field with a single runway that looked to be around three thousand feet long. Nobody else was there. Through a pair of binoculars I watched Stream spend ninety minutes doing touch-and-go landings in a high-performance single-engine plane.
Judge Stream was a pilot. The gods were winking at me, and my plan began to form.
For the entire two hours he was there, nobody else came or went. I wrote down the tail number of the plane and later learned Stream was its registered owner. Over the next few months I discovered he spent time in the air every other Saturday, weather permitting, so on a beautiful spring day, I flew to Bastrop to eavesdrop.
At airports without control towers, pilots communicate with one another on a common frequency, alerting aircraft in the area of their location and their plans. That way, two pilots will not try to land at the same time, and nobody will line up to take off as someone else is landing. I wanted to know how Stream phrased his calls. Ten miles north of the field, I flew in a tight circle at three thousand feet and listened to him on the radio, announcing his intentions to anyone who could hear. I made an audio recording of his calls on takeoff, approach, and landing. When he announced his final landing, I turned north and flew back home.
On my thirty-seventh birthday, Tieresse brought two glasses of fresh grapefruit juice into our bedroom while I was still asleep. She opened the shades and said, Rise and shine, birthday boy, I have a surprise.
We got in her car and she drove south toward the coast. I said, Galveston? But she said, Shhh, no guessing, and before we got to the causeway, Tieresse turned onto a pockmarked road and drove west. After a few minutes more we pulled into what I thought was a farm. Around back stood a prefabricated aluminum building, an unpaved runway, and a large twin-engine turboprop plane. Tieresse was taking me skydiving.
It was just the two of us. We sat in a space like a classroom with a dozen folding chairs and a whiteboard and played footsie as two jumpmasters lectured about safety precautions and things that could go wrong. After two hours they asked whether we wanted a bite to eat before going up and Tieresse said, I can assure you, young man, that would be a very bad decision. Now let’s get in the air already.
Tieresse and I followed the two experts onto the plane. There were no seats, just two benches running parallel to the fuselage. The pilot was already on board, running through a checklist. Tieresse stared out the window as we climbed sharply and banked steeply to the left. She was giddy. I was not. At fifteen thousand feet, with my wife and myself attached to people I sure hoped were experts, we jumped. Within seconds we were falling at more than one hundred miles an hour. I saw Tieresse’s mouth moving, she was saying something, but the roar of the wind in my ears drowned out her words. I tried to read her lips, but she just smiled. The young man I was attached to tapped an altimeter I was wearing on my wrist, reminding me to check the altitude so I would not forget to deploy the parachute at five thousand feet. I reached my right arm back, flailing for the rip cord. The jumpmaster took my hand and placed the cord inside. I yanked. The chute opened and we jerked to a slow descent, and soundlessness replaced the deafening noise of a moment before. I could hear Tieresse hyperventilating and my jumpmaster asking whether I was okay. To the north I could see Houston’s downtown skyline, and then we pivoted 180 degrees and I stared out over the Gulf of Mexico to the south. We landed simultaneously in a field of cordgrass that sloped down to a brackish pond.
Tieresse ran over and hugged me while my arms were still shaking. She said, Happy birthday, my love.
I said, That was terrifying. Thank you, corazón.
She said, You’re welcome. When you get your color back, let’s do it again.
And so we did.
I remembered something else as well, a scene from my childhood. We were living in Chiapas. Mamá and I were standing at the edge of a field blooming with coca. The plantation was owned by the Mexican man my father worked for, but the field hands were mostly from Guatemala and spoke a dialect I couldn’t understand. They laughed, and my mother eyed them warily. She held my tiny hand in one of hers, and with her other she shielded her eyes from the setting sun. She said, Mira tu papá, él está muy bajo. I turned to see my father flying parallel to the rows of green, not fifty feet above the ground. In an instant he rolled, and he was flying upside down. I believe I might have squealed with delight. The Guatemalans seemed to cower. As he shot by my mamá and me, he waved, and I could see his grin and the light in his eyes, and I jumped up and down and clapped my hands.
Out of those two memories came my plan. So early Monday morning I drove to the aviation academy near my home. I told the instructor I was not interested in becoming an elite expert in performing eight-point rolls or 180-degree inverted turns. I was merely interested in taking aerobatic lessons to be a better and safer pilot. I kept the real reason to myself. Aerobatics was my excuse to buy a parachute.
The following month I enrolled in a skydiving course. I paid cash in advance for a package that would have me certified after twenty-five solo jumps over two weeks. But once I was reasonably sure I could land more or less where I wanted to, assuming the wind was not terribly strong, I told the instructor I was having sinus problems and would have to take some time off. He said how sorry he was, but considering he had my money already, I held some doubt as to his sincerity. I told him I’d call him when I was healed, and I shook his hand. I planned to never see him again.
Days got shorter. Kansas got cold. Two feet of snow covered the ground. I spent another two nights in the silo to make sure it was warm. The timers worked, the temperature was comfortable, the water was clear. I did wake myself twice coughing, so I made a note to replace the air filters. If I hadn’t had six years of practice (and, of course, the knowledge I could walk out whenever I wanted to), the claustrophobia of spending two nights belowground buried beneath the snow and ice would have made me suicidal. But the point is, I had.
I began spending more time at the diner, choosing a booth instead of a spot at the counter. I’d order a bowl of soup or a BLT, and I’d nurse my meal while I sat there and wrote. I told anyone who asked I was writing a book. It would be about my life with Tieresse and what happened to me when that life ended. Susanna refilled my coffee and asked if I had a publisher.
I said, Not yet, but I’ve got time.
In fact, three literary agents, two in New York and one in Hollywood, had gotten in touch with me and promised they could sell my story for a million dollars, which proved to me they didn’t know my story, which is why I did not even bother to reply to their queries. A famous movie producer left a message on my phone. I called my lawyer and asked her to please not give out my number. She said, I’ve never given out your number to anyone except Reinhardt and I don’t intend to. I apologized and ended the call, and spent the rest of the week worried it was possible for strangers so easily to find me.
My book swelled to more than two hundred pages. The snow continued to fall. Farmers planted winter wheat.
Earlier that year I had started buying MREs from the army surplus store in Leavenworth, military meals, pretending these were what I ate when I traveled. I had accumulated enough food for two people to survive three years. The packages sat on industrial metal shelves on level 5 of my silo, next to the automatic dog food dispensers I had programmed to drop three meals a day. In another few weeks, I would have all the MREs I would need. According to the labels, they would expire in five years. But the ambient air temperature on level 5 was in the upper fifties, so I was thinking they might last a year or two longer. Either way, I wasn’t concerned. If the meals expired, my prisoners could eat rancid food, just like I had.
On Christmas Day I flew to a town near Big Bend in West Texas, took a shuttle to the park, and spent ten nights in my tent. Before dawn broke I would look up at the stars that tiled the sky like a planetarium and talk to Tieresse. She told me not to do anything I might regret. I answered her by saying I had gotten to the place in life where regret has no meaning.
She said, There is no such place.
I said, I didn’t used to think so either.
During my second year on the row, a few days after I’d paid McKenzie a hundred dollars for a six-pack of Valium, my house got tossed by a helmeted crew while he stood outside and watched. As they confiscated my stash and left, he said, Find a better hiding place, scumbag.
Sargent had been standing behind his door, watching. He’d been here longer than I had. He knew what I was thinking. He said, Long as they be capable of pissin’ you off, Inocente, they be winning, you feel me? He sent me a kite with four small white pills and two Sufi meditative chants. The next week McKenzie sold me back the same pills I’d already paid for once. I hid them in the same place I’d kept them before.
For Christmas I bought everyone in the diner a gift. They were grateful and surprised. They knew my story, but not that I was rich.
During the first week of the New Year I was in Austin, sending forged e-mails and writing fake texts. Moss wrote she hoped next year they would be spending New Year’s Eve together, together and under the sheets, she said, and she apologized again for not being with him two nights earlier. Stream texted back an emoji of a crying face and said, I understand. But I’ll see you for lunch tomorrow <grin>. I took the truck and camper to a do-it-yourself wash, then, once back at the hangar, scrubbed every inch with bleach, inside and out. I would never drive or touch the truck again.
As I set up to land at my home back in Kansas, I put my right hand on the right seat and was surprised to feel Tieresse’s thigh. She had visited several times since my release, and I talked to her often, but never before had I physically felt her presence. Again I wondered whether it was a sign of healing. She said, In business, angry men make bad decisions. I said, I know, mi corazón. But I am not angry. I am indifferent, completely indifferent, and nothing could feel more liberating. As I spoke those words to her, I felt her lips brush my cheek, and I knew for the first time beyond any doubt my plan would succeed.
It was now just a matter of time. Using different public computers around the state, I would periodically enter each of their names into a search engine. Most of what I learned was banal, like Stream being honored at the annual gala to raise money for the Fraternal Order of Police, or Moss giving the keynote address at the Constitution Day luncheon of the DAR. On Easter Sunday, though, I finally struck gold.
According to a newly issued press release, Judge Stream was scheduled to give a presentation on stand-your-ground laws at a program put on by the American Bar Association in Key West, Florida, the following May. I had just over a month to work out the details.
I flew to Padre Island and checked into a chain hotel. After breakfast the next morning, once my room had been cleaned, I hung the Do Not Disturb sign on the door and flew to the grass field where my car was parked. I drove to Austin, parked outside his house, and wrote her a text. It read, Not sure if you saw I am giving a talk in Key West in May. One big boondoggle. How about coming with me? I pushed send and drove across town. Parked on the block next to hers, I wrote, I’d love to honeybuns. What are the dates so I can set up the story? I headed back to his house. I wrote, I love a meticulous woman. Let’s work out the details Monday after our lunch. He signed it with an emoji of a man winking and blowing a kiss. I flew back to Padre Island and got drunk enough that night to be noticed at an oyster bar on the beach. The next afternoon I flew back home.
I’ve never been a religious man. Even on my worst days on the row I was never tempted to pray. But that night I did. I prayed for good weather for the third Thursday in May.
At the field where Stream kept his plane, I landed on Wednesday morning and parked across the strip from his hangar. Using a handheld radio to monitor the traffic, I trotted across the runway and checked the door. The main was locked but it didn’t take me long to jimmy open the pedestrian door around back. From inside, the main hangar door opened with a doorbell button. I left it closed.
His plane was unlocked, and the key hung from the ignition. There were two headsets in the plane, top-of-the-line avionics, and paper sectional maps covering most of Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma in the back. Stream’s flight bag holding his log book was in the luggage compartment. He’d made cross-country flights across Texas, and as far east as Alabama. The engine oil was clean, and both gas tanks were full. The pilot’s operating handbook was in a pocket behind the right seat, and I opened it to the limitations section. Fully fueled and with five hundred pounds of passengers and baggage, the plane had a range of eleven hundred nautical miles. I quickly calculated how much fuel I would need to burn and hoped it would be enough.
My radio crackled. Someone was inbound from five miles north. I jogged back across the runway and waited by my plane. A taildragger came to a stop fifty yards away, and two slender middle-aged women emerged. I asked one if she knew whether there were hangars for rent here and whether there was fuel. She gave me the name and number of the family who owned the field, and the cell number for a fuel truck that all the locals used. I said, Thank you kindly, ma’am. I tipped my hat and hoped neither was paying attention to my face or the tail number on my plane.
By the middle of the week, I had purchased paper sectional maps for East Texas, southern Florida, and all the area in between. A direct flight to Key West would be nine hundred nautical miles, but nearly all that distance would be across the open water. I wondered whether Stream was the kind of pilot who would fly directly across the ocean at night in a single-engine plane. I certainly wasn’t, but he was going to prove a braver pilot than I.
I headed south. At a gun show in McAllen I bought a .45 automatic, a .38 revolver, and ammunition for each. I’d never shot a gun in my life. I’d have to watch a video to learn how to use them. From a different vendor I bought a knife with four-finger fist rings and a serrated six-inch tungsten blade. At a sporting goods store I bought a headlamp and, at a department store, a duffel bag, a small overnight suitcase, a casual dress, a navy sport coat, and underwear for a woman and a man. I divided the clothes into the two bags, along with toothbrushes, razors, and the three-pack of condoms I’d bought close to three years before, and I placed the bags in the back of Tieresse’s plane.
Sargent had told me that several years before I arrived, back when death row inmates were still allowed out of their cells to work, five guys had tried to escape. They wrapped themselves in corrugated cardboard and duct tape and sprinted toward the fifteen-foot-tall razor-topped fence. Guards opened fire, shooting over their heads. Two of the escapees lay facedown and surrendered before ever reaching the fence. One dropped to the ground after climbing halfway up. The fourth dropped down on the other side but immediately raised his hands in surrender. The fifth kept running.
For a week and a half he was a legend. Texas troopers fanned out across the state searching. They formed a noose at the border crossing points to Mexico. They searched empty cabins and set up random checkpoints on the interstates and two-lane roads. Using tracking dogs and on horseback, prison officials scoured a perimeter that grew longer every day.
On the tenth day a fisherman found him floating in the Trinity River. His body was bloated with gas. The cardboard that kept the razor wire from disemboweling him as he flopped over the fence had grown waterlogged and heavy when he jumped into the river to hide his scent from the dogs. His mother later told investigators he couldn’t swim. The lone escapee had probably drowned within an hour that very first day. Searchers had been chasing a corpse.
Sargent said, Same shit that saves you can kill you if you ain’t careful. Two faces a Janus. I had said, I only understand about half of what you tell me, Sargent. He’d laughed and said, That ought to be enough.
I went over my plan again and again, certain I was missing something. What was the unknown that might kill me? It’s not that I was afraid to die. I wasn’t, and I had no fear. But I did still have my pride.
I’d been capturing his keystrokes with a program I had installed on his home computer when he clicked on a link in a phishing e-mail alerting him to suspicious activity on his credit card account. I wondered if I would have a chance to remove the program once he disappeared and, if I didn’t, how big a risk it presented.
Judge Stream had bought a ticket to fly from Austin to Key West, with a stop in Miami, departing Thursday morning and returning Saturday afternoon. Because the real Judge Moss was not attending the conference, she had not bought any commercial tickets, but I had to do something about Stream, so I intended to cancel the reservation once I ensured he’d be unable to discover what I had done. And then I entered the danger zone.
On Wednesday morning I flew to the airport where Stream kept his plane for what I hoped was the third to last time. This was one part of my plan I couldn’t entirely control. But I was lucky. Winds were calm and nobody was there. I taxied to Judge Stream’s hangar. I entered through the back as I had done three times before and hurriedly raised the main door. There was just enough room for my plane, wing to wing next to his. I took the suitcase and duffel packed with clothes and loaded them into Stream’s plane’s baggage compartment. The day before, I had called the fuel truck, pretended to be Stream, and asked to have both tanks topped off for a long cross-country flight. Later I would spend a nervous two hours burning off that fuel, but first I needed to get my hands on the judge. I got on my bike and set off on the twenty-five-mile ride to his house. My backpack held the guns and the knife I had purchased in South Texas, a bottle of water, two pillowcases still in their packaging, three pairs of handcuffs I bought at a police surplus store outside Dallas, a wool blanket, and a roll of duct tape. If a DPS trooper decided to search me, I was probably going to jail.
Nobody was on the street. By remotely activating the camera on his computer I was reasonably sure he did not have an alarm or a dog. I rang the doorbell twice. The gate to the backyard was unlocked, as I knew it would be from watching the yardman open it every Friday morning. I hoped to get lucky and find an unlocked window or door, but I didn’t. I looked around for a hidden key, also without success. I was prepared to do it the hard way, but until then, I was hoping I wouldn’t have to.
At a few minutes after eight, as he had done every Wednesday since I’d been observing him, Stream arrived. I heard the Porsche’s low rumble from two blocks away. I pressed against the garage’s outside wall. I heard the electric door rattle up and the Porsche edge slowly in. A drop of sweat stung my eye. All at once, Stream killed the ignition and opened the door, and I was standing there before he could move, pointing the .45 at the middle of his chest. He said, Take whatever you want, and I said, I plan to. I told him to exit the car and turn around, and when he did, I cuffed his hands behind him. I pushed the button to close the garage door, and at last I relaxed. I said, Shall we go inside?
I was wearing blue jeans, a black T-shirt, and running shoes, and as we entered, I pulled on a pair of latex gloves. It was not yet completely dark outside, but I turned on a light in the kitchen anyway. I patted him down and took his phone. I said, I’m surprised, I would have taken you for a concealed-weapon kind of guy. He said, I do not know if you know who I am, but you are making a big mistake. I did not reply. He said, I’m supposed to be meeting people for dinner. I said, Where are the keys to the SUV?
I spun him around by his arm so he was facing me and pressed the tip of the knife against his throat. I said, Here’s the thing: My first choice is not to kill you, but I can live with my second choice if I have to. Understand? He nodded. I said, Good. No talking and no noise. I covered his mouth with duct tape and pulled a pillowcase over his head. I said, Let’s go, and led him back to the garage. I put him and my bike in the back of the SUV and covered them with a blanket. I said, If I hear any noise or I get pulled over, I’ll shoot you in the head. I opened the passenger door to the Porsche and retrieved a bag holding three cartons of hot Chinese.
As we drove back to the private field, keeping our speed a steady two miles below the limit, dusk turned to night. At the hangar, I put a second set of cuffs around his ankles and pushed him into the rear of my plane. I lifted off the pillowcase and peeled away the duct tape. I powered off his cell phone and put it back in his car. I said, Prepare for takeoff, Your Honor. He said, So you do know who I am. I said, Same deal as before. You make a sound, I will kill you.
Shortly before one A.M. we landed. I removed the leg cuffs and said Watch your step, and the two of us descended six stories underground, with me holding Stream’s elbow in my left hand and a handgun in my right. I was wearing a headlamp. Except for the narrow beam it cast, the silo was dark as an underwater cave. I opened the padlocks and put Stream in his cell, and I locked the gate behind him.
I said, Hands, inmate.
He said, Huh?
I said, Turn around with your back against the bars.
After retrieving my handcuffs I said, Step away from the bars now and face me. I pointed my gun at his chest. I said, Take off all your clothes except your underwear and drop them over here.
I handed him a thick cotton robe. I said, Lights and TV should come on at seven. There’s a lamp on the table. See you tomorrow. Sweet dreams.
He said, What the hell is going on here?
I closed the bank vault door and climbed back upstairs. If he was making any noise, the silo’s fiberglass insulation was absorbing every sound.
By the time Judge Moss’s husband left their house for his church staff meeting Thursday morning at seven, I was parked across the street in Judge Stream’s SUV. I used Stream’s fake cell phone to send a text to Moss’s fake cell phone, saying he’d pick her up in an hour. At eight, the garage door went up.
As soon as she closed the driver’s side door, I turned into the driveway, parked behind her car, and got out with my gun. I said, If you honk the horn or make a sound, I will kill you. She said, I do not have any money. You can have my ring. I said, Get out and turn around. Once I had searched her, cuffed her wrists, and put duct tape over her mouth, I said, I’m going to leave you this way for just a second. I used the other set of handcuffs to attach her to the steering wheel of her car. I went back to the SUV and pulled it inside, parking next to her sedan. I said, It’s Leonard’s. How do you like it? Her eyes grew wide. I said, No need to worry. He’s perfectly safe. I gave her the same speech I had given Stream. I dropped a pillowcase over her head, put her in the back of the SUV, and covered her with a blanket. I said, I am going to tell you something. When I finish, I am going to ask you if you understand. If you do, lift your legs enough for me to see the blanket move. I told her we would be in the car for around thirty minutes and that if I got pulled over, I would shoot her in the head. I told her when we arrived at our destination, she was to do what I told her to without making a sound. I said, If you do exactly as I direct, I will not harm you. Do you understand everything I just said? The blanket moved. I said, All right then, and I got behind the wheel.
Traffic was heavier than I expected. As we neared Austin’s commercial airport, a highway trooper passed us going in the opposite direction. Involuntarily I glanced at the speedometer. I was well below the limit. I looked in the rearview mirror anyway. The trooper didn’t turn around.
At Stream’s airport, the electronic gate was already open when I arrived. My heart began to race. I rolled down the window and heard a buzz. Was another pilot doing pattern work? Would whoever was here wonder why I was pulling into Stream’s hangar? I sat there at the keypad, cursing myself for not having a plan b. The buzzing noise grew louder. I slowly inched forward.
Across from Stream’s hangar, a man wearing overalls and earbuds was on an air-conditioned tractor, mowing the grass. I raised my arm out the window and waved. I drove quickly into the hangar and lowered the door. I was shaking, trying to picture what the man on the tractor would have seen if he were looking.
I remembered the story Sargent had told me about the guys who tried to escape from the row, and how the one escapee had drowned. I’d said, For all he accomplished, he might as well have surrendered as soon as he cleared the fence. Sargent had said, I s’pose if you’re a utilitarian that might be so, but that ain’t the way I see it, Inocente. If they plan on killing you no matter whether you’re running toward ’em or away, I’d head away every time. Some victories cain’t be measured in conventional terms. I peeked outside, and the mower was still at work. I said to myself, What he saw was Stream’s SUV pull into Stream’s hangar. Nothing out of the ordinary. I think I should be okay.
I removed the pillowcase from Moss’s head and held the knife to her throat while I asked her if she could send an e-mail from her phone. I said, Nod once if you understand. She did, and as I held the knife at my side, she wrote a note to her secretary saying she was going to a conference. At my instruction she wrote, I apologize, it completely slipped my mind. I’ll see you Monday.
Outside, the noise from the tractor had stopped. I peered through the door, hoping he was not just taking a break. The mower was gone. I said, It’s like a hot streak at the blackjack table. Moss said nothing. I said, Okay, you’re right. There’s no such thing. It’s all the law of averages. Come on, let’s go. It’s departure time. I put her phone and her shoes into Stream’s plane, where his phone already was, and said, Up and at ’em. Moss did not move. I pointed the revolver at her face and said, That means I am ready for you to walk. I guided her by the elbow and fastened her seat belt. Moments later, we were in the air.
Later that morning we landed at the silo. I said, No talking until I say so. I escorted Judge Moss down six flights and looked through the peephole. The lights and TV were on. Stream was sitting on the bottom bunk. But I was not going to take a chance. I pulled the .45 from my waist. Moss gasped. I said, Relax, Judge, I’m not quite ready to shoot anyone. I opened the locks and swung open the door. Moss said, Oh my God, Leonard, what is going on? I said, I don’t recall giving you permission to speak, but I’ll overlook it just this once.
Stream looked like he had not slept at all. He was blinking repeatedly.
I said, Shit, do you wear contact lenses? I hadn’t thought of that.
He said, No.
There were two unopened MREs on the floor in the cells.
I said, Looks like the timers are working.
Stream looked up to the ceiling but did not reply.
I said, I am going to ask you some questions I know the answers to. If you lie, I will shoot you in the knee, capiche?
He nodded.
I said, What day of the week do you practice touch-and-go landings?
He said, Saturday.
I said, Every week?
He said, No. Mostly every other week.
I said, When you fly cross-country do you file a flight plan?
He said, Not usually.
I said, Do you contact ATC for flight following?
He paused. He said, Sometimes.
I said, What about weather updates from flight services?
He said, Yeah, most of the time.
I said, You pass, Your Honor. Now turn around and give your colleague some privacy.
I put Moss in her cell and took her clothes. I gave her a robe like Stream’s. I said to them both, I’ve got to run, so I’ll give you the long explanation later. For now, I’ll just cover the essentials. I pointed at the shower curtains on either side of the set of bars separating their cells. I said, Either of you can close the curtain for privacy. The toilets are the kind you find in an outhouse. They won’t flush. I pointed first at the ceiling then at the portable showers. I said, Three meals will drop each day, along with a liter of water. When I’m around, I’ll bring hot food every now and then. Those plastic bags hanging from the bars should fill with water one hour from now and every forty-eight hours after that. I have the nozzles set on medium. That will give you a six-minute stream. If you lower the pressure, you can make it last longer. You’ll find soap, shampoo, toothpaste, and a toothbrush in those desk drawers. That’s it for now. See you tomorrow. I looked around to make sure I had locked their cells and not forgotten anything, and I started to leave.
Stream said, Do you plan to tell us what is going on here?
Moss said, My husband has probably already called the police.
I said, I doubt that very much, and I gently closed the door.
By the time I landed again at Stream’s airport, it was getting dark. I used Moss’s phone to send her husband a text. It read, I cannot remember whether I told you I have to be at a conference today and tomorrow. I will be back Saturday. I placed Stream’s phone and wallet inside the flight bag, and Moss’s purse next to her luggage. From the back of my plane I removed the parachute. I checked the fuel levels in Stream’s plane one more time, then I said, Here we go, Tieresse, and I took off to the west.
I leveled off below three thousand feet and flew in a circle for three hours, burning fuel, then I climbed to forty-five hundred feet, flew west for ten miles, made a U-turn as I climbed to fifty-five hundred feet, and set the autopilot for a direct flight to Key West. I radioed flight service, identified myself with Stream’s plane’s N-number, and asked for a weather report over the western Gulf. It was clear below twelve thousand feet, with unlimited visibility and winds from the east. I thanked the controller and wished her a good night. I moved the baggage to the passenger seat and opened the suitcase and duffel. I put the clothes Stream and Moss had been wearing earlier that day on top. I double-checked my parachute, and when the GPS showed I was almost directly over Stream’s airport, I opened the pilot’s side door and jumped.
In seconds I was plummeting to earth. I was counting out loud but couldn’t hear myself over the sound of the rushing wind, or possibly my pulse pounding in my ear. When I got to fifteen I pulled the cord, estimating my altitude at thirty-five hundred feet. I couldn’t see anything on the ground except for highway traffic lights to the north. It was quiet and moonless. There was no breeze, and as I slowly drifted down, my fear of landing on the highway dissolved. In the distance I could see city lights in Austin and San Antonio, and I thought to myself, This is beautiful. Then I thought, If I die, Stream and Moss are going to be in prison for the rest of their lives.
I landed in a pasture, less than two miles from the field where I’d taken off. Cows were lowing but no people were around. I quickly refolded the parachute, loaded a map on my phone, and took less than half an hour to jog back to my plane. I touched down in Kansas as the sun was rising in an infinite and cloudless sky. No one was waiting for me. Everything looked exactly the same as it had two days ago. For the first time since the night before, I felt myself relax.
At almost the exact same time I was parking my plane in its hangar, Stream’s was making its final descent into the ocean. According to a report by the Austin affiliate of NPR, a four-seat single-engine plane owned by Judge Leonard Stream, believed to be carrying him and one other passenger, crashed into the Gulf of Mexico three hundred miles from shore. Stream was thought to be en route from Texas to Florida, where he had a speaking engagement scheduled for the following day. The FAA reported there had been no distress signal or radio calls. According to an oceanographer at Texas A&M, the sea was deep in the area where the plane was believed to have gone down, but the water was warm, and if the passengers were alive on impact, they could survive for days. A coast guard official said a rescue mission was under way, and the NTSB announced it would begin an investigation once the wreckage was located. I clicked off the radio, took a long hot shower, and quickly shaved. Then I went to bed.