I Will Find You

Chapter 1

I am serving the fifth year of a life sentence for murdering my own child.

Spoiler alert: I didn’t do it.

My son Matthew was three years old at the time of his brutal murder. He was the best thing in my life, and then he was gone, and I’ve been serving a life sentence ever since. Not metaphorically. Or should I say, not just metaphorically. This would be a life sentence no matter what, even if I hadn’t been arrested and tried and convicted.

But in my case, in this case, my life sentence is both metaphorical and literal.

How, you wonder, can I possibly be innocent?

I just am.

But didn’t I fight and protest my innocence with every fiber of my being?

No, not really. This goes back, I guess, to the metaphorical sentence. I didn’t really care that much about being found guilty. I know that sounds shocking, but it’s not. My son is dead. That’s the lede here. That’s the lede and the headline and the all-caps. My son is dead and gone, and that fact would not have changed had the jury forewoman declared me guilty or not guilty. Guilty or not guilty, I had failed my son. Either way. Matthew wouldn’t be less dead had the jury been able to see the truth and free me. A father’s job is to protect his son. That’s his number-one priority. So even if I didn’t wield the weapon that smashed my son’s beautiful being into the mangled mess I found on that awful night five years ago, I didn’t stop it either. I didn’t do my job as his father. I didn’t protect him.

Guilty or not guilty of the actual murder, it is my fault and thus my sentence to serve.

So I barely reacted when the jury forewoman read the verdict. Observers concluded, of course, that I must be sociopathic or psychopathic or deranged or damaged. I couldn’t feel, the media claimed. I lacked an empathy gene, I couldn’t experience remorse, I had dead eyes, whatever other terminology would land me in the killer camp. None of that was true. I just didn’t see the point. I had been on the receiving end of a devastating blow when I found my son, Matthew, in his Marvel-Hero-themed pajamas that night. That blow had knocked me to my knees, and I couldn’t get up. Not then. Not now. Not ever.

The metaphorical life sentence had begun.

If you think this will be a tale about a wronged man proving his innocence, it is not. Because that would not be much of a story. In the end, it would make no difference. Being released from this hellhole of a cell would not lead to redemption. My son would still be dead.

Redemption isn’t possible in this case.

Or at least, that was what I believed right up until the moment that the guard, a particularly eccentric case we call Curly, comes to my cell and says, “Visitor.”

I don’t move because I don’t think he is talking to me. I have been here for almost five years, and I have had no visitors in all that time. During the first year, my father tried to visit. So had Aunt Sophie and a handful of close friends and relatives who believed me innocent or at least not really guilty. I wouldn’t let them in. Matthew’s mother, Cheryl, my then-wife (she is now, not surprisingly, my ex-wife) had tried too, albeit half-heartedly, but I wouldn’t let her see me. I made it clear: No visitors. I was not being self-pitying or any kind of pitying. Visiting helps neither the visitor nor the visitee. I didn’t and don’t see the point.

A year passed. Then two. Then everyone stopped trying to visit. Not that anyone, other than maybe Adam, had been clamoring to make the schlep up to Maine, but you get my point. Now, for the first time in a long time, someone is here at Briggs Penitentiary to see me.

“Burroughs,” Curly snaps, “let’s go. You have a visitor.”

I make a face. “Who?”

“Do I look like your social secretary?”

“Good one.”

“What?”

“The social-secretary line. It was very funny.”

“Are you being a wiseass with me?”

“I have no interest in visitors,” I tell him. “Please send them away.”

Curly sighs. “Burroughs.”

“What?”

“Get your ass up. You didn’t fill out the forms.”

“What forms?”

“There are forms to fill out,” Curly says, “if you don’t want visitors.”

“I thought people had to be on my guest list.”

“Guest list,” Curly repeated with a shake of his head. “This look like a hotel to you?”

“Hotels have guest lists?” I counter. “Either way, I did fill out something that I don’t want any visitors.”

“When you first got here.”

“Right.”

Curly sighs again. “You got to renew that every year.”

“What?”

“Did you fill out a form this year saying you wanted no visitors?”

“No.”

Curly spread his hands. “There you go. Now get up.”

“Can’t you just tell the visitor to go home?”

“No, Burroughs, I can’t, and I’ll tell you why. That would be more work for me than dragging your ass down to Visitors. See, if I do that, I’ll have to explain why you’re not there and your visitor might ask me questions and then I’ll probably have to fill out a form myself and I hate that and then you’ll have to fill out a form and I’ll have to walk back and forth and, look, I don’t need the hassle, you don’t need the hassle. So here’s what’ll happen: You’ll go with me now and you can just sit there and say nothing for all I care and then you can fill out the correct forms and neither of us will have to go through this again. Do you feel me?”

I have been here long enough to know that too much resistance is not only futile but harmful. I am also, truth be told, curious. “I feel you,” I say.

“Cool. Let’s go.”

I know the drill, of course. I let Curly put on the handcuffs, followed by the belly chain so that my hands can be shackled to my waist. He skips the leg cuffs, mostly because they are a pain to get on and off. The walk is fairly long from the PC (protective custody, for those not in the know) unit of Briggs Penitentiary to the visiting area. Eighteen of us are currently housed in PC — seven child molesters, four rapists, two cannibal serial killers, two “regular” serial killers, two cop killers, and of course, one filicidal maniac (yours truly). Quite the coterie.

Curly gives me a hard glare, which is unusual. Most of the guards are bored cop wannabees and/or muscleheads who look upon us inmates with staggering apathy. I want to ask him what gives, but I know when to keep quiet. You learn that in here. I feel my legs quake a bit as I walk. I’m oddly nervous. The truth is, I’ve settled in here. It’s awful — worse than you imagine — but still I’ve grown accustomed to this particular brand of awful. This visitor, whoever it is after all this time, is here to deliver rock-my-world news.

I don’t welcome that.

I flash back to the blood from that night. I think about the blood a lot. I dream about it too. I don’t know how often. In the beginning, it was every night. Now I would say it’s more a once-a-week thing, but I don’t keep track. Time doesn’t pass normally in prison. It stops and starts and sputters and zigzags. I remember blinking myself awake in the bed I shared with my wife Cheryl that night. I didn’t check a clock, but for those keeping score at home, it was four in the morning. The house was silent, still, and yet somehow I sensed something was wrong. Or maybe that is what I believe — incorrectly — now. Memory is often our most imaginative storyteller. So maybe, probably, I didn’t “sense” anything at all. I don’t know anymore. It’s not like I bolted upright in my bed and leapt to my feet. It took time for me to get up. I stayed in my bed for several minutes, my brain stuck in that weird cusp between sleep and awake, floating ever upward toward consciousness.

At some point, I did finally sit up. I started down the corridor to Matthew’s room.

And that was when I noticed the blood.

It was redder than I imagined — fresh, bright Crayola-crayon red, garish and mocking as a clown’s lipstick against the white sheet.

Panic gripped me then. I called out Matthew’s name. I clumsily ran to his room, bumping hard into the doorframe. I called out his name again. No answer. I ran into his bedroom and found... something unrecognizable.

I’m told I started screaming.

That was how the police found me. Still screaming. The screams became shards of glass careening through every part of me. I stopped screaming at some point, I guess. I don’t remember that either. Maybe my vocal cords snapped, I don’t know. But the echo of those screams has never left me. Those shards still rip and shred and maul.

“Hurry up, Burroughs,” Curly says. “She’s waiting for you.”

She.

He’d said “she.” For a moment I imagine that it is Cheryl, and my heart picks up a beat. But no, she won’t come, and I wouldn’t want her to. We were married for eight years. Happily, I thought, for most of them. It hadn’t been so good at the end. New stresses had formed cracks, and the cracks were turning into fissures. Would Cheryl and I have made it? I don’t know. I sometimes think Matthew would have made us work harder, that he would have kept us together, but that sounds a lot like wishful thinking.

Not long after my conviction, I signed some paperwork granting her a divorce. We never spoke again. That was more my choice than hers. So that’s all I know of her life. I have no idea where Cheryl is now, if she’s still wounded and in mourning or if she’s managed to make a new life for herself. I think it’s best that I don’t know.

Why didn’t I pay more attention to Matthew that night?

I’m not saying I was a bad father. I don’t think I was. But that night, I simply wasn’t in the mood. Three-year-olds can be tough. And boring. We all know this. Parents try to pretend that every moment with their child is bliss. It’s not. Or at least that’s what I thought that night. I didn’t read a bedtime story to Matthew because I just couldn’t be bothered. Awful, right? I just sent my child to bed because I was distracted by my own meaningless issues and insecurities. Stupid. So stupid. We are all so luxuriously stupid when things are good in our life.

Cheryl, who had just finished her residency in general surgery, had a night shift in the transplant ward at Boston General. I was alone with Matthew. I started drinking. I’m not a big drinker and don’t handle spirits well, but in the past few months, with the strain on Cheryl and my marriage, I had found some, if not comfort, numb there. So I partook and I guess the drinks hit me hard and fast. In short, I drank too much and passed out, so instead of watching my child, instead of protecting my son, instead of making sure the doors were locked (they weren’t) or listening for an intruder or heck, instead of hearing a child scream in terror and/or agony, I was in a state the prosecutor at the trial mockingly called “snooze from booze.”

I don’t remember anything else until, of course, that smell.

I know what you’re thinking: Maybe he (meaning “I”) did do it. After all, the evidence against me was pretty overwhelming. I get that. It’s fair. I sometimes wonder about that too. You’d have to be truly blind or delusional not to consider that possibility, so let me tell you a quick story that I think relates to this: I once kicked Cheryl hard while we slept. I’d been having a nightmare that a giant raccoon was attacking our little dog, Laszlo, so in a sleep panic, I kicked the raccoon as hard as I could and ended up kicking Cheryl in the shin. It was oddly funny in hindsight, watching Cheryl try to keep a straight face as I defended my actions (“Would you have wanted me to let Laszlo get eaten by a raccoon?”), but my wonderful surgeon wife, a woman who loved Laszlo and all dogs, still seethed.

“Maybe,” Cheryl said to me, “subconsciously, you wanted to hurt me.”

She said that with a smile, so I didn’t think she meant it. But maybe she did. We forgot about it immediately and had a great day together. But I think about that a lot now. I was asleep and dreaming that night too. One kick isn’t a murder, but who knows, right? The murder weapon was a baseball bat. Mrs. Winslow, who had lived in the house behind our woods for forty years, saw me bury it. That was the kicker, though I wondered about that, about me being stupid enough to bury it so close to the scene, what with my fingerprints all over it. I wonder about a lot of things like that. For example, I had fallen asleep after a drink or two too many once or twice before — who hasn’t? — but never like this. Perhaps I’d been drugged, but by the time I was a viable suspect, it was too late to test for that. The local police, many of whom revered my father, were supportive at first. They looked into some bad people he’d put away, but that never felt right, not even to me. Dad had made enemies, sure, but that was a long time ago. Why would any of them kill a three-year-old boy for that kind of revenge? It didn’t add up. There were no signs of sexual assault or any other motive either, so really, when you add it all up, there was only one true viable suspect.

Me.

So maybe something like my raccoon-kick dream happened here. It’s not impossible. My attorney, Tom Florio, wanted to make an argument like that. My family, some of them anyway, believed that I should take that route too. Diminished capacity or some such defense. I had a history of sleepwalking and some of what could have been described as mental health issues, if you pushed the definition. I could use that, they reminded me.

But nah, I wouldn’t confess because, despite these rationales, I didn’t do it. I didn’t kill my son. I know I didn’t. I know. And yes, I know every perp says that.

Curly and I make the final turn. Briggs Penitentiary is done up in Early American Asphalt. Everything was a washed-out gray, a faded road after a rainstorm. I had gone from a three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath Colonial, splashed in sunshine yellow with green shutters, decorated in earth tones and pine antiques, nicely situated on a three-quarter-acre lot in a cul-de-sac, to this. Doesn’t matter. Surroundings are irrelevant. Exteriors, you learn, are temporal and illusionary and thus meaningless.

There is a buzzing sound, and then Curly opens the door. Many prisons have updated visiting areas. Lower-risk inmates can sit at a table with their visitor or visitors with no partitions or barriers. I cannot. Here at Briggs we still have the bulletproof plexiglass. I sit on a metal stool bolted into the floor. My belly chain is loosened so that I can grab hold of the telephone. That is how visitors in the supermax communicate — via telephone and plexiglass.

The visitor isn’t my ex-wife Cheryl, though she looks like Cheryl.

It’s her sister, Rachel.

Rachel sits on the other side of the plexiglass, but I see her eyes widen when she takes me in. I almost smile at her reaction. I, her once beloved brother-in-law, the man with the offbeat sense of humor and the devil-may-care smile, have certainly changed in the past five years. I wonder what she notices first. The weight loss perhaps. Or more likely, the shattered facial bones that had not healed properly. It could be my ashen complexion, the slump from the once-athletic shoulders, the thinning and graying of my hair.

I sit down and peer at her through the plexiglass. I take hold of the phone and gesture that she should do the same. When Rachel lifts the phone to her ear, I speak.

“Why are you here?”

Rachel almost manages a smile. We were always close, Rachel and I. I liked spending time with her. She liked spending time with me. “Not much on pleasantries, I see.”

“Are you here to exchange pleasantries, Rachel?”

Whatever hint of a smile there was fades away. She shakes her head. “No.”

I wait. Rachel looks worn yet still beautiful. Her hair was still the same ash blonde as Cheryl’s, her eyes the same dark green. I shift on my stool and face her at an angle because it hurts to look directly at her.

Rachel blinks back tears and shakes her head. “This is too crazy.”

She lowers her gaze and for a moment I see the eighteen-year-old girl I’d met when Cheryl first brought me to her New Jersey home from Amherst College during our junior year. Cheryl and Rachel’s parents hadn’t really approved of me. I was a little too blue-collar for them, what with the beat-cop father and row-house upbringing. Rachel, on the other hand, had taken to me right away, and I grew to love her as the closest thing I would have to a little sister. I cared about her. I felt protective of her. A year later, I drove her up and helped her move in at Lemhall University as an undergrad and later to Columbia University, where she studied journalism.

“It’s been a long time,” Rachel says.

I nod. I want her to go away. It hurts to look at her. I wait. She doesn’t speak. I finally say something because Rachel looks like she needs a lifeline and so I can’t help myself.

“How’s Sam?” I ask.

“Fine,” Rachel says. “He works for Merton Pharmaceuticals now. In sales. He made manager, travels a lot.” Then she shrugs and adds, “We’re divorced.”

“Oh,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

She shakes that off. I’m not really sorry to hear it. I never thought Sam was good enough for her, but I felt that way about most of her boyfriends.

“Are you still writing for the Globe?” I ask.

“No,” she says in a voice that slams the door on that subject.

We sit in silence for a few more seconds. Then I try again.

“Is this about Cheryl?”

“No. Not really.”

I swallow. “How is she?”

Rachel starts wringing her hands. She looks everywhere but at me. “She’s remarried.”

The words hit me like a gut punch, but I take it without so much as flinching. This, I think to myself. This is why I don’t want visitors.

“She never blamed you, you know. None of us did.”

“Rachel?”

“What?”

“Why the hell are you here?”

We fall back into silence. Behind her, I see another guard, one I don’t know, staring at us. There are three other inmates in here right now. I don’t know any of them. Briggs is a big place, and I try to keep to myself. I am tempted to stand up and leave, when Rachel finally speaks.

“Sam has a friend,” she says.

I wait.

“Not really a friend. A co-worker. He’s on the marketing side. In management too. At Merton Pharmaceuticals. His name is Tom Longley. He has a wife and two boys. Nice family. We used to get together sometimes. For company barbecues, stuff like that. His wife’s name is Irene. I like her. Irene is pretty funny.”

Rachel stops and shakes her head.

“I’m not telling this right.”

“No, no,” I say. “It’s a great story so far.”

Rachel smiles, actually smiles, at my sarcasm. “A hint of the old David,” she says.

We go quiet again. When Rachel starts speaking, her words come out slower, more measured.

“The Longleys went on a company trip two months ago to an amusement park in Springfield. Six Flags, I think it’s called. Took their two boys. Irene and I have stayed friends, so she invited me over to lunch the other day. She talked about the trip — a little gossipy because I guess Sam brought his new girlfriend. Like I’d care. But that’s not important.”

I bite back the sarcastic rejoinder and look at her. She holds my gaze.

“And then Irene showed me a bunch of photos.”

Rachel stops here. I don’t have the slightest idea where she is going with this, but I can almost hear some kind of foreboding soundtrack in my head. Rachel takes out a manila envelope. Eight-by-ten size, I guess. She puts it down on the ledge in front of her. She stares at it a beat too long, as though debating her next step. Then in one fell swoop she reaches into the envelope, plucks something out, and presses it against the glass.

It is, as advertised, a photo.

I don’t know what to make of it. The photograph does indeed appear to have been taken at an amusement park. A woman — I wonder whether this is pretty-funny Irene — smiles shyly at the camera. Two boys, probably the Longleys, are on either hip, neither looking at the camera. Someone in a Bugs Bunny costume is on the right; someone dressed like Batman is on the left. Irene looks a little put out — but in a fun way. I can almost imagine the scene. Good ol’ Pharmaceutical Marketing Tom cheerily goading Pretty-Funny Irene to pose, Pretty-Funny Irene not really in the mood but being a good sport, the two boys having none of it, we’ve all been there. There is a giant red roller coaster in the background. The sun is shining in the faces of the Longley family, which explains why they are squinting and slightly turning away.

Rachel has her eyes on me.

I lift my eyes toward hers. She keeps pressing the photograph up to the glass.

“Look closer, David.”

I stare at her another second or two and then I let my gaze wander back to the photograph. This time I see it immediately. A steel claw reaches into my chest and squeezes my heart. I can’t breathe.

There is a boy.

He is in the background, on the right edge of the frame, almost out of the picture. His face is in perfect profile, like he’s posing to be on a coin. The boy appears to be about eight years old. Someone, an adult male perhaps, holds the boy’s hand. The boy looks up at what I assume is the back of the man, but the man is out of frame.

I feel the tears push into my eyes and reach out with tentative fingers. I caress the boy’s image through the glass. It is impossible, of course. A desperate man sees what he wants to see, and let’s face it — no thirsty, heat-crazed, starved desert-dweller who ever conjured up a mirage has ever been this desperate. Matthew had not yet reached the age of three when he was murdered. No one, not even a loving parent, could guess what he would look like some five years later. Not for certain. There is a resemblance, that’s all. The boy looks like Matthew. Looks like. It’s a resemblance. Nothing more. A resemblance.

A sob rips through me. I put my fist into my mouth and bite down. It takes a few seconds before I am able to speak. When I do, my words are simple.

“It’s Matthew.”

Chapter 2

Rachel keeps the photograph pressed against the plexiglass. “You know that’s not possible,” she says.

I don’t reply.

“It looks like Matthew,” Rachel says, her voice a forced monotone. “I’ll admit it looks like him. A lot like him. But Matthew was a toddler when he...” She stops, gathers herself, starts again. “And even if you judge by the port stain on his cheek — this one is smaller than Matthew’s.”

“It’s supposed to be,” I say.

The medical term for the enormous port-stain birthmark that had cloaked the right side of my son’s face was congenital hemangioma. The boy in the photograph had one too — smaller, more faded in hue, but pretty much on the exact spot.

“The doctors said that would happen,” I continue. “Eventually it goes away entirely.”

Rachel shakes her head. “David, we both know this can’t be.”

I don’t reply.

“It’s just a bizarre coincidence. A strong resemblance with the desire to see what we want — what we need — to see. And don’t forget the forensics and DNA—”

“Stop,” I say.

“What?”

“You didn’t bring it to me because you thought it just looked like Matthew.”

Rachel squeezes her eyes shut. “I went to a tech guy I know who works for the Boston PD. I gave him an old photo of Matthew.”

“Which photo?”

“He’s wearing the Amherst sweatshirt.”

I nod. Cheryl and I had bought it for him during our tenth reunion. We had used that photo for our Christmas card.

“Anyway, this tech guy has age-progression software. The most up-to-date kind. The cops use it for missing people. I asked him to age the boy in the photo up five years and...”

“It matched,” I finish for her.

“Close enough. It isn’t conclusive. You get that, right? Even my friend said that — and he doesn’t know why I was asking. Just so you know. I haven’t told anyone about this.”

That surprises me. “You didn’t show this picture to Cheryl?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Rachel squirms on the uncomfortable stool. “It’s crazy, David.”

“What is?”

“This whole thing. It can’t be Matthew. We are both letting our want cloud our judgment.”

“Rachel,” I say.

She meets my eye.

“Why didn’t you show this to your sister?” I press.

Rachel twists the rings on her fingers. Her eyes leave mine, dart about the room like startled birds, settle back down. “You have to understand,” she says. “Cheryl is trying to move on. She’s trying to put this all behind her.”

I can feel my heart going thump-thump in my chest.

“If I tell her, it’ll be like ripping her life out by the roots again. That kind of false hope — it would devastate her.”

“Yet you’re telling me.”

“Because you have nothing, David. If I rip your life out by the roots, so what? You have no life. You gave up living a long time ago.”

Her words may sound harsh, but there is no anger or menace in the tone. She is right, of course. It’s a fair observation. I have nothing to lose here. If we are wrong about this photograph — and when I try to be objective, I realize that the odds are pretty strong that we are wrong — it will change nothing for me. I will still be in this place, eroding and decaying with no desire to slow that process down.

“She remarried,” Rachel says.

“So you said.”

“And she’s pregnant.”

Straight left jab to the chin followed by a powerful blind-side right hook. I stagger back and take the eight-count.

“I wasn’t going to tell you—” Rachel says.

“It’s fine—”

“—and if we try to do something with this—”

“I get it,” I say.

“Good, because I don’t know what to do,” Rachel says. “It’s not like this is evidence that would convince a reasonable person. Unless you want me to try that. I mean, I could take it to an attorney or the police.”

“They’d laugh you out of the room.”

“Right. We could go to the press maybe.”

“No.”

“Or... or Cheryl. If you think that’s right. Maybe we can get permission to exhume the body. A new autopsy or DNA test could prove it one way or another. You’d get a new trial maybe—”

“No.”

“What, why?”

“Not yet anyway,” I say. “We can’t let anyone know.”

Rachel looks confused. “I don’t understand.”

“You’re a journalist.”

“So?”

“So you know,” I say. I lean in a little. “If this gets out, it will be a big news story. The press will be all over us again.”

“Us? Or do you mean you?”

For the first time, I hear an edge in her voice. I wait. She’s wrong. She will get that in a moment. When Matthew was first found, the media coverage was kind and sympathetic. They played up the whole human tragedy angle, ladling it with fear that the killer was still out there so you, dear public, must remain wary. Social media wasn’t quite so enamored. “It’s a family member,” an early tweeter stated. “Dollars to donuts, it’s the loser stay-at-home father,” another, who received many likes, claimed. “Probably pissed off by his wife’s success.” And so it went.

When no one was arrested — when the story started to die down — the media got frustrated and impatient. Pundits started to wonder how I could have slept through the carnage. Then the small leaks began to turn into a pour: The murder weapon, a baseball bat that I had purchased four years earlier, had been unearthed near our home. A witness, our neighbor Mrs. Winslow, claimed to have seen me bury it the night of the murder. Forensics confirmed that my fingerprints and only my fingerprints were on the bat.

The media loved this new angle, mostly because it gave a dying story new life and thus eyeballs. They swarmed in. A psychiatrist who had treated me in the past leaked my history of night terrors and sleepwalking. Cheryl and I had been having serious marital issues. She may have been having an affair. You get the picture. Editorials demanded that I be arrested and prosecuted. I was getting preferential treatment, they said, because my father was a cop. What else had been covered up? If I weren’t a white man, I’d be behind bars already. This was racism, this was privilege, there was clearly a double standard at work.

A lot of that was probably true.

“Do you think I care about bad press?” I ask her.

“No,” she says softly. “But I don’t understand. What harm can the press do us now?”

“They’ll report it.”

“Yeah, I get that. So?”

Her eyes latch onto mine. “Everyone will hear about it,” I say. “Including” — I point now to the adult hand wrapped around Matthew’s in the photograph — “this guy.”

Silence.

I wait for her to say something. When she doesn’t, I say, “Don’t you see? If he finds out, if he knows we’re onto him or whatever, who knows how he’ll react? Maybe he’ll run away. Go underground so that we never find him. Or maybe he will figure that he can’t risk it. He thought he was in the clear and now he’s not and so maybe this time he gets rid of the evidence for good.”

“But the police,” Rachel says. “They can investigate quietly.”

“No way. It’ll leak. And they won’t take it seriously anyway. Not with just this photo. You know this.”

Rachel shakes her head. “So what do you want to do?”

“You’re a respected investigative journalist,” I say.

“Not anymore.”

“Why, what happened?”

She shakes her head again. “It’s a long story.”

“We have to find out more,” I say.

“We?”

I nod. “I have to get out of here.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

She looks at me with concern. I get that. I can hear it in my tone too. Some of the old timbre is back. When Matthew was murdered, I crawled up into a fetal ball and waited to die. My son was dead. Nothing else mattered.

But now...

The buzzer sounds. Guards step into the room. Curly puts his hand on my shoulder.

“Time’s up.”

Rachel quickly slides the photograph back into the manila envelope. I feel a longing when she does, a thirst to keep staring at the photograph, a fear that it was all an apparition, and now that I couldn’t see it, even for a few seconds, it all felt wispy, as though I were trying to hold on to smoke. I try to sear the image of my boy into my brain, but his face is already beginning to ebb away, like the final vision of a dream.

Rachel stands. “I’m staying at the motor lodge down the road.”

I nod.

“I’ll be back tomorrow.”

I manage another nod.

“And for what it’s worth, I think it’s him too.”

I open my mouth to thank her, but the words won’t come out. It doesn’t matter. She turns and leaves. Curly gives my shoulder a squeeze.

“What was all that about?” he asks me.

“Tell the warden I want to see him,” I say.

Curly smiles with teeth that resemble small mints. “The warden doesn’t see prisoners.”

I stand. I meet his eye. And for the first time in years, I smile. I really smile. The sight makes Curly take a step back.

“He’ll see me,” I say. “Tell him.”

Chapter 3

“What do you want, David?”

Warden Philip Mackenzie does not appear pleased by my visit. His office is institutionally sparse. There is an American flag on a pole in one corner along with a photograph of the current governor. His desk is gray and metal and functional and reminds me of the ones my teachers had when I was in elementary school. A brass pen-pencil-clock set you’d find in the gift area at TJ Maxx sits off to the right. Two tall matching gray metal file cabinets stand behind him like watchtowers.

“Well?”

I have rehearsed what I would say, but I don’t stick to the script. I try to keep my voice even, flat, monotone, professional even. My words would, I know, sound crazy, so I need my tone to do the opposite. To his credit, the warden sits back and listens, and for a little while he does not look too stunned. When I finish speaking, he leans back and looks off. He takes a few deep breaths. Philip Mackenzie is north of seventy years old, but he still looks powerful enough to raze one of those steel-reinforced concrete walls that surround this place. His chest is burly, his bald head jammed between two bowling-ball shoulders with no apparent need for a neck. His hands are huge and gnarled. They sit on his desk now like two battering rams.

He finally turns toward me with weathered blue eyes capped by bushy white eyebrows.

“You can’t be serious,” he says.

I sit up straight. “It’s Matthew.”

He dismisses my words with a wave of a giant hand. “Ah, come off it, David. What are you trying to pull here?”

I just stare at him.

“You’re looking for a way out. Every inmate is.”

“You think this is some ploy to get released?” I struggle to keep my voice from breaking. “You think I give a rat’s ass if I ever get out of this hellhole?”

Philip Mackenzie sighs and shakes his head.

“Philip,” I say, “my son is out there somewhere.”

“Your son is dead.”

“No.”

“You killed him.”

“No. I can show you the photograph.”

“The one your sister-in-law brought you?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, sure. I’m supposed to know that some boy in the background is your son Matthew who died when he was, what, three?”

I say nothing.

“And let’s say, I don’t know, that I did. I can’t. I mean, it’s impossible, even you admit that. But let’s say it’s somehow the spitting image of Matthew. You said Rachel checked it with age-progression technology, right?”

“Right.”

“So how do you know she didn’t just photoshop his age-progressed face into the picture?”

“What?”

“Do you know how easy it is to doctor photographs?”

“You’re kidding, right?” I frown. “Why would she do that?”

Philip Mackenzie stopped. “Wait. Of course.”

“What?”

“You don’t know what happened to Rachel.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Her career as a journalist. It’s over.”

I say nothing.

“You didn’t know that, did you?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I say. But of course, it does. I lean forward and pin the man I’ve known my whole life as Uncle Philip with my eyes. “I’ve been in here for five years now,” I say in my most measured tone. “How many times have I come to you for help?”

“Zero,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean I haven’t given it to you. You think it’s a coincidence that you ended up in my prison? Or that you got so much extra time in the isolation wing? They wanted you back in regular population, even after that beating.”

It was three weeks after the start of my incarceration. I was in general pop, not here in the isolation wing. Four men whose bulk was only outsized by their depravity cornered me in the shower. The shower. Oldest trick in the book. No rape. Nothing sexual. They just wanted to beat the hell out of someone to feel some sort of primitive high — and who better than prison’s new celebrity baby-killer? They broke my nose. They shattered my cheekbone. My cracked jaw flapped like a door missing a hinge. Four broken ribs. A concussion. Internal bleeding. My right eye only sees fuzzy images now.

I spent two months in the infirmary.

I pull the ace out of my deck. “You owe me, Philip.”

“Correction: I owe your father.”

“Same thing now.”

“You think his marker passes down to his son?”

“What would Dad say?”

Philip Mackenzie looks pained and suddenly weary.

“I didn’t kill Matthew,” I say.

“An inmate telling me he’s innocent,” he says with an almost amused shake of the head. “This has to be a first.”

Philip Mackenzie rises from his chair and turns toward the window. He looks out into the woods past the fence. “When your father first heard about Matthew... and even worse, when he found out you were arrested...” His voice trails off. “Tell me, David. Why didn’t you plead temporary insanity?”

“You think I was interested in finding a legal loophole?”

“It wasn’t a loophole,” Philip says, and I hear sympathy in his tone now. He turns back to me. “You blacked out. Something inside of you snapped. There had to be an explanation. We would have all stuck by you.”

My head begins to throb — another product of that beating, or perhaps his words are the cause. I close my eyes and draw a deep breath. “Please listen to me. It wasn’t Matthew. And whatever happened, I didn’t do it.”

“You were set up, huh?”

“I don’t know.”

“So whose body did you find?”

“I don’t know.”

“How do you explain your fingerprints on the weapon?”

“It was my bat. I kept it in the garage.”

“And what about that old lady who saw you burying it?”

“I don’t know. I only know what I saw in the photograph.”

The older man sighs again. “Do you realize how delusional you sound?”

I stand now too. To my surprise, Philip takes a step back as though he’s afraid of me. “You have to get me out of here,” I whisper. “For a few days anyway.”

“Are you out of your mind?”

“Get me a bereavement leave or something.”

“We don’t offer those to your class of felon. You know that.”

“Then find a way to help me break out.”

He laughs at that. “Oh sure, no problem. And let’s say hypothetically I could do that, they’ll come after you with everything they got. Brutally. You’re a baby-killer, David. They’ll gun you down without a second thought.”

“Not your problem.”

“Like hell it’s not.”

“Suppose this happened to you,” I say.

“What?”

“Suppose you were in my place. Suppose the murdered boy was Adam. What would you do to find him?”

Philip Mackenzie shakes his head and collapses back into his chair. He puts both hands on his face and rubs vigorously. Then he hits the intercom and calls for a guard.

“Goodbye, David.”

“Please, Philip.”

“I’m sorry. I really am.”

Philip Mackenzie diverted his gaze so he wouldn’t see his correctional officer enter and escort David out. He didn’t say goodbye to his godson. After he left, Philip sat in his office alone. The air felt heavy around him. He had hoped that David’s request to see him — the first one David had made in the nearly five years he’d been incarcerated here — would be some sort of positive sign. Perhaps David finally wanted to get help from a mental health professional. Perhaps David wanted to take a deeper dive into what he’d done that awful night or at the very least, try to scratch out some kind of productive life, even here, even after what he’d done.

Philip opened his desk drawer and took out a photograph from 1973 of two men — correction: dumb kids — decked out in military fatigues in Khe San. Philip Mackenzie and Lenny Burroughs, David’s father. They’d both gone to Revere High School before being drafted. Philip grew up on the top floor of a three-family row house on Centennial Avenue. Lenny lived a block away on Dehon Street. Best friends. War buddies. Cops patrolling Revere Beach. Philip had stood as David’s godfather. Lenny had been Philip’s son Adam’s. Adam and David had gone to school together. The two had been best friends at Revere High School. The cycle had started anew.

Philip stared at the image of his old friend. Lenny was lying on his deathbed now. There was nothing anyone could do to help him. It was just a matter of time. The Lenny in the old photo was smiling that Lenny Burroughs smile, the one that made hearts melt, but his eyes seemed to bore right now into Philip’s.

“Nothing I can do, Lenny,” he said out loud.

The photo Lenny just smiled and stared.

Philip took a few deep breaths. It was getting late. His office would be closing soon. He reached out and hit the intercom button on his desk again.

His receptionist said, “Yes, Warden?”

“Get me on the first flight to Boston in the morning.”

Chapter 4

There is never silence in a prison.

My “experimental” wing is circular with eighteen individual cells on the perimeter. The entrance still has old-school see-through bars. In one of the oddest moves, the stainless-steel toilet and sink — yes, they are combined into one — are right by the bars. Our cells, unlike general pop, each have a small private shower in the back corner. The guards have shutoff valves if you take too long. There is a poured-concrete bed with a mattress so thin it’s almost transparent. Handles are built into the bed’s corners for attaching four-point restraints. So far, that has not been necessary for me. There is also a poured-concrete desk and poured-concrete stool. I have a television and a radio that only broadcast religious or educational programming. A single narrow window slot is angled up, so I can only teasingly see the sky.

I lay on said concrete bed and stare up at the ceiling. I know this ceiling intimately. I close my eyes and try to sort through the facts. I go through the day again — that horrible day — and search for something I may have missed. I had taken Matthew out, first to the local playground by a duck pond and then to the supermarket on Oak Street. Had I noticed anybody suspicious at either? I hadn’t, of course, but I reach back now and comb my memory for new details. None are forthcoming. You’d think I would remember this day better, that every moment would still be vivid in my mind, but it all grows fuzzier day by day.

I had sat on a playground bench next to a young mother with an aggressively progressive baby stroller. The young mother had a daughter Matthew’s age. Had she told me her child’s name? Probably, but I don’t remember. She wore yoga clothing. What had we talked about? I don’t remember. What exactly am I searching for here? I don’t know that either. The owner of that hand, I guess — the adult man’s hand holding Matthew’s in Rachel’s photograph. Had he been watching us at the playground? Had he followed us?

I have no idea.

I go through the rest of it. Coming home. Putting Matthew to bed. Grabbing a drink. Flipping channels on the television. When had I fallen asleep? I don’t know that either. I only remember waking up to the smell of blood. I remember heading down the hallway...

The prison lights come on with a loud snap. I shoot up in bed, my face coated with sweat. It is morning. My heart thumps in my chest. I swallow down some breaths, trying to calm myself.

What I saw in those Marvel-themed pajamas, that awful misshapen bloody form... it was not Matthew. That was the key here. It was not my son.

Was it?

Doubt starts to worm its way into my brain. How could it not? But for now, I won’t let the doubt in. There is nothing to gain from doubting. If I’m wrong, I will eventually find out and then I’ll be back to where I am now. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. So for now: No doubts. Just questions about how this could possibly be. Perhaps, I surmise, the brutality had been to cover up the victim’s — yes, good, think of him as a victim, not Matthew — identity. The victim was male, of course. He was Matthew’s size and general shape and skin tone. But they hadn’t run a DNA test or anything like that. Why would they? No one doubted the victim’s identity, right?

Right?

My fellow inmates began their daily rituals. We don’t have roommates in our twelve-feet-by-seven-feet cells, but we can look in on almost every other inmate. This is supposed to be “healthier” than the older ones where there was no social interaction and too much isolation. I wish they hadn’t bothered, because the less interaction the better. Earl Clemmons, a serial rapist, starts his day by offering the rest of us a play-by-play of his morning constitutional. He includes sound effects like cheering crowds and full sportscasting, mimicking one voice for the straight play-by-play and another offering color commentary. Ricky Krause, a serial killer who cut off his victims’ thumbs with pruning shears, likes to begin his day with a song parody of sorts. He twists lyrics, taking old classics and giving them his own perverse spin. Right now, Ricky is repeatedly belting out, “Someone’s in the kitchen, getting vagina,” and cracking up harder and harder as those around him shout for him to shut up.

We get in line for breakfast. In the past, those of us housed in this wing had our meals delivered, which makes it sound like we used DoorDash or something. No more. One of our fellow inmates protested that forcing a man to eat by himself in his cell was unconstitutional. He sued. Inmates love lawsuits. In this case, however, the prison system happily exploited the opening. Serving prisoners in their cells was expensive and labor-intensive.

The small cafeteria has four tables, each with metal stools, all bolted to the ground. I like to meander and wait until everyone else is seated, so that I can find the stool that will put me as far away from the more animated of my fellow inmates as possible. Not that the conversations aren’t stimulating. The other day, several inmates got into a heated one-upmanship over who had raped the oldest woman. Earl “bettered” his opponents with his claim of sodomizing an eighty-seven-year-old after he broke into her apartment via the fire escape. Other inmates questioned the veracity of Earl’s claim — they thought that he might be exaggerating just to impress them — but the next day Earl came back with saved newspaper clippings.

This morning I get lucky. One table is totally open. After scooping up some powdered eggs and bacon and toast — I’ll skip the obvious comment about how awful prison food is — I take a stool in the farthest corner and begin to eat. For the first time in forever, I have an appetite. I realize that my mind has stopped going back to that night or even that photograph and has started to focus on something ridiculous and fantastical.

How to escape from Briggs.

I have been here long enough to know the routines, the guards, the layout, the schedule, the personnel, whatever. Conclusion: There is no way to escape. None. I had to think outside the box.

A tray slamming down on the table startles me. A hand is stuck into my face for me to shake. I look up and into the man’s face. People say that the eyes are the windows to the soul. If that’s true, this man’s eyes flash NO VACANCY.

“David Burroughs, am I right?”

His name, I know, is Ross Sumner. He’d transferred in last week, purportedly waiting on an appeal that would never happen, but I am surprised they’d let him out of his cell at all. Sumner’s case made headlines, the stuff of streaming-service documentaries and true crime podcasts. He was a superrich prep — do they still use that term? — who’d gone psychotically bad. Ross, who was handsome in a Ralph Lauren — ad way, had murdered at least seventeen people — men, women, children of all ages — and eaten their intestinal tracts. That was it. Just the intestinal tract. Body parts were found in a top-of-the-line Sub-Zero freezer in the basement of his family estate. None of these facts are in dispute. Sumner’s appeal is based on the jury’s conclusion that he is sane.

Ross Sumner still holds his hand out and waits for me to take it. There is a smile on his face. I would rather French-kiss a live rodent than shake the man’s hand, but in prison, you do what you have to. I reluctantly shake the hand as fast as possible. His hand is surprisingly small, dainty. As I pull mine back, I can’t help it — I wonder what that hand has touched. Supposedly, he slit his victims open while they were still alive and used his hands — including that hand — to rip open the slit and reach inside the abdomen and grab hold of the intestine.

So much for having an appetite.

Ross Sumner smiles as though he can read my thoughts. He is about thirty years old with jet-black hair and delicate features. He takes the stool directly across from me. Lucky me.

“I’m Ross Sumner,” he says.

“Yeah, I know.”

“I hope you don’t mind me sitting with you.”

I say nothing.

“It’s just that the other men in here” — Ross shakes his head — “I find them rather coarse. Unrefined, if you will. Do you know that you and I are the only college graduates?”

“That so?”

I nod. I keep my eyes on my plate.

“You went to Amherst, am I right?”

He pronounced Amherst correctly, keeping the H silent.

“Fine school,” he continues. “I liked it better when they called themselves the Lord Jeffs. The Amherst Lord Jeffs. Such a majestic name. But of course, the woke crowd didn’t like that, did they? They have to hate on a man who died in the eighteenth century. Ridiculous, don’t you think?”

I play with my powdered eggs.

“I mean, now they call themselves the Amherst Mammoths. Mammoths. Please. That’s so pathetically PC, don’t you think? But here’s something you’ll enjoy knowing. I went to Williams College. The Ephs. That makes us rivals. Funny, no?”

Sumner gives me a boyish grin.

“Yeah,” I say. “Hilarious.”

Then he says, “I hear you had a visitor yesterday.”

I go stiff. Ross Sumner sees it.

“Oh, don’t look so surprised, David.”

He still wears the boyish grin. That grin had probably gotten him far. On a purely physical level, it was a nice grin, charming, the kind that opens doors and lowers inhibitions. It was also probably the last sight his victims saw.

“It’s a small prison. A man hears things.”

That is true. Rumor has it that the Sumner family is not afraid to use their money to influence his treatment. I believe those rumors.

“I try to make it a point of staying informed.”

“Uh-huh,” I say, keeping my eyes on the eggs.

“So how did it go?” he asks.

“How did what go?”

“Your visit. With your... sister-in-law, was it?”

I say nothing.

“It must have been something, right? Your first visitor after all this time. You seemed distracted before I came over.”

I look up. “Look, Ross, I’m trying to eat here, okay?”

Ross throws up his hands in mock surrender. “Oh, pardon me, David. I didn’t mean to pry. I wanted us to be friends. I have been starving for any sort of intellectual stimulation. I imagine you must feel the same. Both of us being graduates of the Small Ivies, I thought we would have a bond. A rapport, if you will. But I see now that I’ve caught you at a bad time. Please forgive me.”

“It’s fine,” I mutter. I take another bite. I can feel Sumner’s eyes on me.

Then he whispers, “Are you thinking about your son?”

The chill starts at the base of my skull and scurries down my spine. “What?”

“How did it feel, David?” His eyes are ablaze. “I am talking on a purely intellectual level. A proper discussion between educated men. I consider myself a student of the human condition. So I want to know. Be analytical or emotional, that’s up to you. But when you lifted that baseball bat above your head and smashed it down on your own child’s skull, what went through your mind? Was it a release? I mean, did you feel you had to do it? Or were you trying to quiet voices in your head? Or was the feeling more euphoric—”

“Go fuck yourself, Ross.”

Sumner frowned. “Go fuck myself? Seriously? That’s the best you can come up with? Really, David, I’m disappointed. I came here for a serious philosophical discussion. We know things others don’t. I want to understand what could possess a man to do something so barbaric. To kill his own son. The flesh of your own flesh. I know that might make me sound like a hypocrite—”

“Lunatic,” I correct.

“—but you see, I kill strangers. Strangers are life’s props, don’t you think? Stage dressing. Deep background for our worlds — the inner world we create. We are all that matter in the end, don’t you think? Think about it. We cry harder when a beloved pet dies than when a tsunami kills hundreds of thousands of humans. Do you see my point?”

I see no reason to open my mouth. That will just encourage him.

Ross Sumner leans toward me. “I killed strangers. Props. Scenery. Window dressing. But to kill your own child, your own flesh and blood...”

He shakes his head as though mystified. I seethe but stay silent. What’s the point? I don’t need to win favor with this psychopath. I look for another seat, but it isn’t as though another table companion would be less disturbing.

Ross Sumner daintily unfolds his paper napkin and lays it on his lap. He takes a tiny bite of the eggs and makes a face. “This food is simply awful,” he says. “Absolutely tasteless.”

I can’t help myself. “As opposed to, say, human intestines?”

Sumner stares at me for a moment. I stare back. You never show fear in here. Not ever. Not for a second. It is, in part, why I made the wisecrack in the first place. Much as you might want to wallow in silence, you can never take shit in here because the shit will just grow exponentially.

Ross Sumner keeps up the eye contact for another second or two before throwing his head back and bursting out in laughter. Everyone turns toward us.

“Now that,” he exclaims when he catches his breath, “was funny! No, really, David, that’s what I was talking about. That’s why I sat here. For that kind of give-n-take. For that kind of mental stimulation. Thank you. Thank you, David.”

I don’t reply.

He is still laughing as he rises and says, “I’m going to grab some toast. May I get you something while I’m up?”

“I’m good.”

I close my eyes for a moment and rub my temples. A headache is crashing through me like a freight train. They started after that first beating, the remnants of a concussion and cracked skull. The prison doctor called them “cluster” headaches. I am still massaging my temples, stupidly letting my guard down, when an arm snakes around my neck. Before I can react, the arm snaps back hard, crushing my windpipe. My throat feels as though it’s about to spurt out the back of my neck. My eyes bulge, my hand clawing impotently at his forearm.

Ross Sumner tightens his grip. He pulls back harder now. My legs shoot up, my shins smacking the table. The utensils jump. I start falling backward. Sumner releases his iron grip as the back of my head slams against the floor.

I see stars.

I blink. When I look up, Ross Sumner is leaping high in the air. That boyish grin is way north of maniacal now. I try to roll away. I try to raise my hands to ward him off. But I’m too late. Ross lands on me with his full weight, both knees pulverizing my rib cage.

I see more stars now.

I try to call out, try to scramble away, but Sumner straddles me. I wait for him to start throwing punches, wondering what I can do to stop him. But that’s not what he does. Instead, he opens his mouth wide and lowers his head toward my chest.

Even through my prison jumpsuit, the bite breaks my skin.

I howl. Ross sinks his teeth deeper into the fleshy area right below my nipple. The pain is excruciating. The other inmates quickly surround us and lock arms, a fairly common prison technique to keep the guards away. But somewhere in the deep recesses of my brain, I know that no guards will step in. Not yet anyway. Not until one of us is unconscious. It’s safer for them. Guards don’t like risking injury.

I am on my own.

Still on my back, his teeth drawing blood, I draw on whatever reserves are left in my empty tank. I lift my hands up, palms facing each other, and with all my limited strength, I box Ross Sumner’s ears. The blows do not land flush, but Sumner’s jaw still unclenches. That’s all I could have hoped for. I roll hard, trying to get him off me. He goes with my momentum. When his feet hit the ground, he pounces on my back. He threads the arm back around my windpipe.

His grip tightens.

I can’t get air.

I twist back and forth. Ross holds on. I try to buck and flail. Ross’s grip does not slacken. Pressure is building in my head. My lungs are crying out for air. The stars are back, swirling, but what I mostly see now is night. I struggle for one breath, just one, but that’s a no-go.

I can’t breathe.

My eyes start to close. My fellow inmates’ cheers are one indistinct blur. Ross Sumner lowers his head closer to me.

“That ear looks tasty.”

He is about to bite down on my ear. I barely care. I try again to buck, but there is nothing behind it. All I can think about is being able to breathe. Just one breath. That’s all. His lips are right up against my ear now. I struggle like a dying fish on the line.

Where the hell are the guards?

By now, they should be stepping in. They don’t want a dead inmate. That’s not good for anyone. But then I remember Ross Sumner’s wealth, his family’s proclivity for payoffs, and again I realize that no one is going to save me.

If I lose consciousness — and I’m about to — I die.

And if I die, where would that leave Matthew?

Seconds now from passing out, capillaries bursting in my closed eyes, I lower my chin and let myself go limp. This isn’t easy. It goes against every instinct. But I pull it off. There is only one thing left to do. Fight fire with fire.

I open my mouth and bite down on Ross Sumner’s arm.

Hard.

His cry of pain is the most satisfying sound I have heard in a long time.

The grip on my windpipe immediately eases as he tries to pull his arm away. I greedily gulp air through flaring lips. But my teeth don’t let go. He screams again. My jaw clenches down even stronger. He shakes his arm. I hang on like a bulldog. I feel the hairs of his arm against my face. I bite down even harder.

His blood trickles into my mouth. I don’t care.

Ross has managed to stand. I am on my knees. He throws a punch. I think it hits the top of my head, but I don’t feel it. He tries to gather enough leverage to pull his arm free, but I’m ready. The crowd is on my side now. I throw an elbow at his groin. Ross Sumner collapses like a folding chair. His weight tears his arm free from my teeth, but some flesh stays behind.

I spit it out.

I jump on him, straddle his chest, and start throwing punches.

I flatten his nose. I can actually feel the cartilage spread under my knuckles. I grab his collar and pull him up. Then I cock my fist again, take my time, and throw hard at his face. Splat. I do it again. Then again. Sumner’s head lolls now as though his neck is a weak spring. I’m almost giddy now. My eyes are wide. I pull back again to hit him, but this time, someone hooks my arm. Then someone tackles me from behind.

The guards are on me now, pinning me to the ground. I don’t resist. I keep my eyes on the bloody mess of a man lying on the floor in front of me.

And for a brief moment, I actually smile.

Chapter 5

Warden Philip Mackenzie’s plane touched down at Boston’s Logan Airport without incident. He had grown up a stone’s throw away from Logan in nearby Revere. Back in those days, Logan Airport’s main landing route had flown the noisiest of jets over his house. To a little boy, the sound had been deafening, earth-shattering. His two older brothers, who shared the bedroom with him, would somehow sleep through it, but Little Philip would grasp the railing of his top bunk as the planes passed, the bed shaking so hard he feared falling off. Some nights, the planes seemed to be swooping so low they’d rip the fraying roof right off the house.

Back then, Revere Beach had been a blue-collar community right outside of Boston. It still was in most respects. Philip’s father had been a house painter, his mom stayed home (no married women worked in those days — single women could be teachers, nurses, or secretaries) with the six Mackenzie kids — three boys sharing one bedroom, three girls sharing another, one bathroom for all of them.

The taxi dropped Philip off in front of a familiar four-family home on Dehon Street. The dwelling was decaying brick. The front door was shedding faded-green paint. The large stoop, the stoop where Philip had spent countless childhood hours with his buddies, especially Lenny Burroughs, was made up of chipped concrete. For thirty years, the Burroughs family had taken up all four apartments. Lenny’s family was on the first floor on the right. His cousin Selma, who had been widowed young, had the apartment above with her daughter Deborah. Aunt Sadie and Uncle Hymie were on the first floor left. Other relatives — a churning potpourri of aunts, uncles, cousins, who-knows-what — took turns in the fourth apartment above Hymie and Sadie’s. That was how this neighborhood was in those days. Immigrant families — Philip’s being Irish, Lenny’s Jewish — had poured in from across the Atlantic over a three-decade period. Those already here — they took in family. Always. They helped the newcomers find jobs. Some relatives slept on a couch or a floor for weeks, months, whatever. There was no privacy, and that was okay. These homes were breathing entities, in constant motion. Friends and family members constantly flowed through the corridors and stairwells like lifeblood through veins. No one locked their doors, not because it was super safe — it wasn’t — but because family members never knocked or were denied access. Privacy was an alien concept. Everybody minded everybody else’s business. You celebrated one another’s victories and mourned their defeats. You were one.

You were family.

That world was gone with so-called progress. Most of the Burroughses and Mackenzies had moved on. They now lived in quasi-mansions in wealthier suburbs like Brookline or Newton with shrubs and fences and fancy marble bathrooms and swimming pools and where the very idea of living with non-nuclear family was nightmarish and incomprehensible. Other family members had moved to gated communities in warmer states like Florida or Arizona, sporting leathery tans and gold chains. Newer immigrant families — Cambodians, Vietnamese, whatever — had taken over a lot of the old homes. They, too, worked hard and took in all manner of extended family members, starting the cycle anew.

Philip paid the cabdriver and stepped onto the cracked sidewalk. He could still get a faint whiff of the salty Atlantic Ocean two blocks away. Revere Beach had never been a glamour spot. Even in his youth, the threadbare mini-golf and rusty roller coaster and worn Skee-Ball machines and assorted boardwalk arcades had been on their last legs. That didn’t bother him and Lenny and their friends though. They hung out behind Sal’s Pizzeria and smoked and drank Old Milwaukee because it was the cheapest and rolled dice. The guys they hung out with — Carl, Ricky, Heshy, Mitch — all became doctors and lawyers and moved out. Lenny and Philip stayed in town as local cops. Philip debated taking a quick walk down to Shirley Avenue to see the house where he and Ruth had raised their five children. But he decided against it. The memories were pleasant enough, but he was not in the mood to be distracted.

Memories always sting, don’t they? The good ones most of all.

The concrete steps were too damn high. As a kid, as a teen, as a young man, Philip took them two at a time, with a skip and a jump. Now he winced through the creak in his knees. Only one of the four apartments still housed Burroughses. Lenny, his oldest friend, his former partner in the Revere Police Department, was back in the same first-floor apartment on the right that his family had called home seventy years ago. He lived here now with his sister Sophie. For some reason, Sophie had never moved on, almost as though someone had to stay behind to watch the old homestead.

He thought about Lenny’s son serving a life sentence at Briggs. The whole incident was beyond heartbreaking. David wasn’t well. That was obvious. Philip was David’s godfather, though they managed to keep that secret so that they could conspire to get David into Briggs. David had no siblings (Lenny’s wife, Maddy, had a “condition” of some sort — in those days, you never talked about such things), but Philip’s oldest son, Adam, was David’s best friend and nearly a brother, their relationship not unlike Philip’s with Lenny. Adam too had spent hours here, in this four-family dwelling, just as Philip had. The Burroughs household had been a strange and wonderful place in those days. Back when Philip was young — and even when his son was young — this was a house of warmth and color and texture. The Burroughses lived life out loud, like a radio always set on high. Every emotion was felt intensely. When you argued — and you argued a lot in here — you did it with passion.

Then David’s mother, Maddy, died and everything changed.

Now the building stood silent, joyless, a withering apparition. For a moment, Philip couldn’t move. He just stood there on the stoop, staring at the door. He was about to knock when that faded-green door opened. Philip froze. If he had been disoriented before, he felt completely lost now. Being in the old neighborhood had brought on a bout of nostalgia, but seeing Sophie’s face again, still beautiful despite the years, plunged him back. She too was closing in on seventy, but all Philip could see was the breathy teen who’d answered the door for him on this very spot the night of senior prom. A lifetime ago, Philip and Sophie had dated. They had fallen in love, he guessed. But they were young. Something happened — who remembered what anymore? The military, the police academy. Whatever. Fifty years ago. Sophie had married an army guy from Lowell named Frank. He died in some kind of training exercise in Ramstein, making Sophie a widow before her twenty-fifth birthday. She’d moved in with Lenny after Maddy’s death to help raise David and never remarried. Philip had been betrothed to Ruth for over forty years, but some nights he still thought about Sophie more than he cared to admit. The sliding door. The road not taken. The big what-if. The good one he’d let get away.

Was that a crime?

He stared at Sophie now, his mind still traveling through some alternate universe where he hadn’t let her go.

Sophie put her hands on her hips. “I got something stuck in my teeth, Philip?”

He shook his head.

“Then why are you staring?”

“No reason,” he said. Then he added, “You look good, Sophie.”

She rolled her eyes. “Come on in, Silver-Tongue. Your charm is making me woozy.”

Philip stepped inside. Little if anything had changed. He could feel the ghosts surround him.

“He’s resting,” Sophie said, heading down the corridor. Philip followed. “He should be awake soon. Want some coffee?”

“Sure.”

They reached the kitchen. It had been updated. Sophie used one of those new coffee pod machines everyone seems to have. She handed him the thick mug, not asking how he took it. She knew.

“So why are you here, Philip?”

He forced up a smile over the brim of the mug. “What, can’t a man visit an old friend and his beautiful sister?”

“Remember what I said about your charm making me woozy?”

“I do.”

“I was joking.”

“Yeah, I figured.” He put down the mug. “I need to talk to him, Sophie.”

“This about David?”

“It is.”

“He’s sick, you know. Lenny, I mean.”

“I know.”

“Almost completely paralyzed. He can’t talk anymore. I don’t even know if he knows who I am.”

“I’m sorry, Sophie.”

“Is this going to upset him?”

Philip thought about that. “I don’t know.”

“Not sure I see the need.”

“There probably isn’t one.”

“But this is what you two do,” Sophie said.

“Yes.”

Sophie turned her head toward the window. “Lenny wouldn’t want to be spared. So go ahead. You know the way.”

He put down the mug and rose. Philip wanted to say something, but no words came to him. She didn’t look at him as he left the kitchen. He made the right and headed toward the bedroom in the back. The grandfather clock still stood in the hallway. Maddy had bought it at an estate sale in Everett a hundred years ago. Lenny and Philip had picked it up in Philip’s old pickup truck. The thing weighed over two hundred pounds. It took them forever to disassemble it and move it. They had to wrap the pendulum and the main spring and the cable and the chains and the weights and the chime rods and Lord knows what else in heavy blankets and bubble wrap. They used masking tape to affix cardboard over the beveled glass door and then something still chipped off the toe molding. But Maddy loved it and Lenny would do anything for her and hey, when you add up the pros and cons, there was no doubt Philip got the better end of the deal on the friendship. Not that either would ever keep track.

Philip stopped when he reached the bedroom. He took a deep breath and plastered on a smile. When he entered, he fought hard to keep that smile locked in place and hoped his eyes didn’t betray the sadness and shock. For a moment he stayed near the doorway and just stared at what had been his best friend. He remembered how powerful Lenny had been. Lenny had been all coiled muscle, built like a bantamweight fighter. He had been a health nut before it was in fashion, a careful eater in the days before that became so mainstream. Lenny did a hundred push-ups every morning. Exactly. Without break. His forearms had been steel cords, his veins thick and ropey. Now those powerful arms looked like milky reeds. Lenny’s filmy eyes had the thousand-yard stare of the guys who had seen too much action in Nam. His lips were colorless. His skin resembled parchment paper.

“Lenny,” Philip said.

No reaction. Philip forced himself to take a step closer to the bed. “Lenny, what the hell is going on with our Celtics? Huh? What happened to them?”

Still nothing.

“And the Pats. I mean, they were so good for so long so we can’t complain, but come on.” Philip smiled and inched closer. “Hey, remember when we met Yaz after that Orioles game? That was something. Such a good guy. But you said it early on. Free agency. It’s going to kill the teams, just like you predicted.”

Nothing.

From the doorway behind, he heard Sophie’s voice. “Sit next to him and take his hand. Sometimes he’ll squeeze it.”

She left them alone. Philip took the seat next to Lenny. He didn’t take his hand. That’s not what they were about. All that touchy-feely stuff. Maybe David and Adam were into that, but not him and Lenny. Philip had never told Lenny he loved him. And vice versa. They didn’t have to. And despite what David had said, Lenny had never told him that Philip owed him one. That wasn’t their way.

“I got to talk to you, Lenny.”

Philip dove in. He told Lenny about David’s visit to his office. The whole story. Everything he could remember. Lenny, of course, did not respond. His eyes kept that same stare. His expression may have grown grimmer, but Philip chalked that up to his own imagination. It was like talking to a bed frame. After some time passed — when Philip was getting closer to the end of the story — he did indeed slide his hand over his old friend’s. The hand didn’t feel like a hand either. It felt like some distant inanimate object, a frail object, like a dead baby bird or something.

“Not sure what to do here,” Philip said, as he started to wind down. “It’s why I came to you. We’ve both seen perps try every which way to claim innocence or justify what they did. Hell, we spent our careers listening to that psychobabble. That’s not what this is. I truly believe that. Your son wouldn’t do that. David believes it. He’s wrong, of course. I wish it was true — God, do I wish it — but Matthew is dead. David did it in some kind of fugue state. That’s what I think. You and I talked about this already. He doesn’t remember and hell, I don’t know about guilt or blame. Neither of us were big fans of insanity defenses, but we also both know David is a good kid. Always has been.”

He looked at Lenny. Still nothing. Only the rising and falling of his chest told Philip that he wasn’t talking to a corpse.

“Here’s the thing.” Philip leaned a little closer and, for some reason, lowered his voice. “David wants me to help him break out. I mean, that’s nuts. You know that. I know that. I don’t have that kind of power. And even if I did, I mean, where would he go? There’d be a massive manhunt. He’d probably end up being gunned down. We don’t want that for him. I still wish he’d tried to get help, maybe a new trial, something. That’s his best chance, you know what I mean?”

A radiator pipe started banging. Philip shook his head and smiled. That damn pipe. It had been banging for, what, forty, fifty years? He remembered trying to bleed the radiators with Lenny, but they could never figure out what caused the banging. Trapped air or something. They’d go down and fix it and it would be okay for a few weeks and then — bang, bang — it would come back.

“We’re old men, Lenny. Too old for this crap. I’m retiring in another year. Double pension. I could lose it all if I mess up. You know what I’m saying? I can’t risk that. It wouldn’t be fair to Ruth. She’s got her sights set on some gated community in South Carolina. Nice weather year-round. But you know I’ll always look out for David. No matter what. Like I promised. He’s your boy. I understand that. So I want you to know. I’ll look out for him...”

He stopped talking. His chest started to heave. Right now, today, this moment — this was probably the last time he’d ever see Lenny. The thought hit him out of nowhere. Like a punch he didn’t see coming. He felt tears start to come to his eyes, but he bit them back. He blinked hard, turned away. He stood and put his hand on his friend’s shoulder. There was no flesh there, no muscle. It felt like he was touching naked bone.

“I better go, Lenny. You take care of yourself, okay? See you soon.”

He walked toward the door. Sophie met up with him at the threshold.

“You okay, Philip?” she asked.

He nodded, not trusting his own voice.

Sophie met his eye. It was almost too much for him to bear. Then she looked over at her bedridden brother. She gestured for Philip to turn around. He slowly followed her gaze. Lenny had not moved. His face was still that skeletal death mask. His eyes still stared out, lifeless, the mouth still slightly open in some awful silent scream. But he saw what Sophie was trying to show him.

A single tear track glistening off Lenny’s ashen skin.

Philip turned back toward her. “I have to go.”

She led him back down the corridor, past the grandfather clock and the piano. She opened the door. He stepped out onto the stoop. The fresh air felt good. The sun shone in his eyes. He shielded them for a moment and smiled weakly at her.

“It was good seeing you, Sophie.”

Her smile was tight.

“What?” he said.

“Lenny always told me you were the strongest man he ever knew.”

“Were,” he repeated. “Past tense.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m just old.”

Sophie shook her head. “You’re not old, Philip,” she said. “You’re just scared.”

“I’m not sure there’s any difference.”

He turned away. He did not look back as he descended the concrete steps, but he could feel her eyes on him, heavy and perhaps, after all these years, unforgiving.

Chapter 6

I’m too fired up to sleep.

I pace back and forth in my tiny cell. Two steps, turn, two steps, turn. The adrenaline from my altercation with Ross Sumner pumps through my veins. Sleep didn’t come last night. I’m not sure when it will again.

“Visitor.”

It’s Curly again. I’m surprised. “I’m still allowed visitors?”

“Until someone tells me otherwise.”

Every part of me aches, but it is a good ache. After the guards jumped in, both of us were taken to the infirmary. I was able to walk there. Ross had to be carried on a stretcher. Them’s the breaks. The nurse dabbed some peroxide on the bite marks and scrapes before sending me back to my cell. Ross Sumner, alas, was not so lucky. He was, as far as I know, still in the infirmary. I should be above feeling good about this. I should recognize that my private glee-filled gloating comes from a primitive place that this harsh prison has nurtured in me, but too bad.

I am taking great satisfaction in Ross’s pain.

Curly leads me down the same route to the visiting area in total silence. Today I strut more than walk.

“Same visitor?” I ask, just to see what I’ll get in return.

I get nothing.

I sit on the very same stool. Rachel does not bother hiding her horror this time.

“My God, what the hell happened to you?”

I smile and deliver a line I never thought I would: “You should see the other guy.”

Rachel openly studies my face for a few long moments. Yesterday she tried to be more circumspect. All of that pretense is over now. She points at me with her chin. “How did you get all those scars?”

“How do you think?”

“Your eye—”

“I can’t see much out of it. But it’s okay. We have bigger concerns.”

She keeps staring.

“Come on, Rachel. I need you to focus. Forget my face, okay?”

Her eyes trace over the scars for another few seconds. I stay still, let her get on with it. Then she asks the obvious question: “So what do we do?”

“I got to get out of here,” I say.

“You have a plan?”

I shake my head. “For mental exercise, to keep myself semi-sane, I used to dream up ways of getting out of here. You know, escape plans. Nothing I’d ever act on. Just for the hell of it.”

“And?”

“And using my investigative skills, not to mention my innate wiles, I came up with” — I shrug — “nada. It’s impossible.”

Rachel nods. “No one has broken out of Briggs since 1983 — and that guy was caught in three days.”

“You did your homework.”

“Old habit. So what are you going to do?”

“Let’s put that aside. I need you to research a few things for me.”

When Rachel whips out her reporter’s notebook, the familiar four-by-eight-inch kind with the wire spiral on the top, I can’t help but smile. She’d used them for years, even before getting the job at the Globe, and it always made it look like she was cosplaying a reporter, like she was going to don a fedora with a card reading PRESS jammed into the rim.

“Go ahead,” Rachel says.

“First off,” I say, “we need to figure out who the real murder victim was.”

“Because now we know it wasn’t Matthew.”

“Know may be an optimistic word, but yes.”

“Okay, I’ll start with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.”

“But don’t stop there. Go to any websites you can think of, social media pages, old newspapers, whatever. Let’s start by making a list of any Caucasian male children between the ages of two and, say, four years old who were reported missing within a two-month span of the murder. Try to keep the search within a two-hundred-mile radius. Spread out after that. Go a little younger, a little older, farther away, you know the deal.”

Rachel jots it down. “I may have a few sources I haven’t burned in the FBI,” she says. “Maybe one of them can help.”

“Sources you haven’t burned?”

She shakes it off. “What else?”

“Hilde Winslow,” I say.

We both go silent for a moment.

Then Rachel asks, “What about her?”

My throat closes. It is hard for me to speak.

“David?”

I signal that I’m okay. I put myself together one piece at a time. When I trust my voice again, I ask, “Do you remember her testimony?”

“Of course.”

Hilde Winslow, an elderly widow with twenty-twenty vision, testified that she saw me burying something in the woods between our homes. The police dug at that spot and uncovered the murder weapon covered with my fingerprints.

I feel Rachel’s eyes on me, waiting.

“I could never explain that,” I manage to say, trying to give myself some distance, pretending that I’m talking about someone else, not me. “At first, I thought that maybe she saw someone who looked like me. A case of mistaken identity. It was dark. It was four in the morning. I was pretty far away from her back window.”

“That was what Florio said on cross-examination.”

Tom Florio was my attorney.

“Right,” I say. “But he didn’t make much headway.”

“Mrs. Winslow was a strong witness,” Rachel confesses.

I nod, feeling the emotions start to rise up and overwhelm me again. “She seemed to be just a sweet little old lady with a steel-trap mind. She had no reason to lie. Her testimony sunk me. That was when those closest to me started having serious doubts.” I look up. “Even you, Rachel.”

“And even you, David.”

She meets my glare without the slightest flinch. I’m the one who turns away.

“We need to find her.”

“Why? If she was mistaken—”

“She wasn’t mistaken,” I say.

“I’m not following.”

“Hilde Winslow lied. It’s the only explanation. She lied on the stand, and we need to know why.”

Rachel says nothing. A young woman, still a teen, I would bet, walks behind Rachel and takes a seat on the stool next to her. A beefy inmate I don’t recognize, blanketed in razor-scratch tattoos, comes in and sits across from her. Without preamble he starts cursing at her in a language I can’t make out, gesturing wildly. The girl hangs her head and says nothing.

“Okay,” Rachel says. “What else?”

“Prepare.”

“Meaning?”

“If you have any affairs to get in order, do it now. Max out your ATM card every day. Same with your bank. Get out as much cash as you can, keeping it below ten grand a day so it doesn’t signal anything to the government. Start today. We need as much cash as possible, just in case.”

“Just in case what?”

“I find a way out of here.” I lean forward. I know that my eyes are bloodshot, and judging by the look on her face, I look... off. Scary even. “Look,” I whisper, “I know I should give you the big speech now — about how if I manage to escape — I know, I know, but just hear me out — if I manage to escape, you’ll be aiding and abetting a federal inmate, which is a felony. If I were a better man, I would hand you a line about how this is my fight, not yours, but the truth is, I can’t do that. I have zero chance without you.”

“He’s my nephew,” she replies, sitting up a little straighter.

He’s. She said “he’s.” Present tense. Not “he was.” She believes it. God help us both, we really believe that Matthew is still alive.

“So what else, David?”

I don’t reply. I’ve gone quiet. My eyes wander off, my thumb and forefinger plucking at my lower lip.

“David.”

“Matthew is out there,” I say. “He’s been out there all this time.”

My words linger in the still, stilted, prison air.

“The last five years have been hell for me, but I’m his father. I can take it.” My gaze locks on to her. “What have they been like for my son?”

“I don’t know,” Rachel says. “But we have to find him.”

Ted Weston liked using the nickname Curly at work.

No one called him that at home. Only here. In Briggs. It gave him distance from the scum he had to work with every day. He didn’t like these guys using or even knowing his real name. When Ted finished work, he showered in the correctional officers’ locker room. Always. He never wore his uniform home. He showered with very hot water and scrubbed this place off him, these horrible men and their horrible breath that may still linger on his clothes and in his hair, their sweat and DNA, their evil which feels to him like a living, breathing parasite that attaches itself to any decent microcosm and eats away at it. Ted showers all that away, scrubs it off with scalding water and industrial soap and a harsh-bristled brush, and then he carefully puts on his civilian clothes, his real clothes, before he goes home to Edna and their two daughters, Jade and Izzy. Even then, when he first gets home, Ted showers again and changes clothes, just to be sure, just to be certain that nothing from this place contaminates his home and his family.

Jade is eight and in the third grade. Izzy is six and autistic or on the spectrum or whatever damn term the so-called specialists use to describe the sweetest daughter God ever created. Ted loved both of them with all his heart, loved them both so much that sometimes at the kitchen table, he would look across and just stare at them and the love would pump into his veins so hard, so fast, that he feared he would burst from it.

But right now, as he stood in the prison infirmary by the bedside of a particularly evil inmate named Ross Sumner, Ted scolded himself for even thinking about his daughters, for letting that kind of purity enter his mind while he was in the presence of a monster like Ross Sumner.

“Fifty grand,” Sumner said.

Ross Sumner was in the infirmary. Good. David Burroughs had put a beating on the guy. Who knew Burroughs had it in him? Not that either guy was what Ted would call “hardened,” as opposed to simply awful. Still, Sumner’s pretty-boy face had been busted open. His nose was broken. His eyes had swollen mostly shut. It looked like he was in pain and Ted was happy about that.

“Did you hear me, Theodore?”

Sumner, of course, knew his real name. Ted didn’t like that. “I heard you.”

“And?”

“And the answer is no.”

“Fifty grand. Think about it.”

“No.”

Sumner tried to sit up a bit. “The man murdered his own child.”

Ted Weston shook his head. “You’re the killer, not me.”

“Killer? Oh, Ted, you have it all wrong. You wouldn’t be a killer. You’d be a hero. An avenging angel. With fifty thousand dollars in his pocket.”

“Why do you want him dead so badly anyway?”

“Look at my face. Just look at what Burroughs did to my face.”

Ted Weston did. But he wasn’t buying it. There was something more going on here.

“A hundred grand,” Sumner said.

Ted swallowed. A hundred grand. He thought about Izzy and the price of all those specialists. “I can’t.”

“Of course you can. You already tipped us off about Burroughs’s visitor with the photograph.”

“That was... That was just a little favor.”

Sumner smiled through the bruises.

“So think of this as another favor. A larger one perhaps, but I have a plan. An utterly flawless plan.”

“Right,” Ted scoffed. “Never heard that one in here before.”

“How about I tell you what I’m thinking? Just theoretically. Just listen, okay? For fun.”

Ted didn’t say no or tell him to shut up. Ted didn’t walk away or even shake his head. He just stood there.

“Let’s say a correctional officer — someone like you, Ted — brought me a blade of some sort. A prison shiv, as they say. As you know, there are plenty around in a place like this. Let’s say, just hypothetically, that I clutch the shiv in my hand to make sure my fingerprints are on the weapon. Then, again hypothetically, let’s say the correctional officer dons gloves. Like, for example, the ones here in the infirmary.” Ross smiled through the pain from the beating. “I then take the blame. I then confess, freely, easily — after all, what do I have to lose? If anything, this will help me get free.”

Ted Weston frowned. “Help you how?”

“My appeal is based on my mental sanity. Killing Burroughs will make me appear to be even more loony. Don’t you see? They’ll have the murder weapon with my fingerprints on it. They’ll have my confession. Dozens of witnesses just saw our altercation, a fight nearly to the death, which will thus add in motive for me.” He turned both palms to the ceiling. “Case closed.”

Ted Weston couldn’t help but squirm. A hundred grand. That was more than a year’s salary. Plus it would be cash, no taxes taken out, so it was closer to two years’ worth. He thought about what he and Edna could do with that kind of cash. They were drowning in bills. That kind of money wouldn’t just be throwing them a life preserver. It would be throwing them a damn yacht. And he knew Sumner was good for it. Everybody knew that. He had already transferred two K into his and Bob’s account to look the other way in the cafeteria, which they’d done until it went south.

Looking away for two grand was one thing. Getting $500 a month to report on what Burroughs was up to, as Ted had for years now, that was nice too. But one hundred grand — man oh man, the number staggered Ted. And all he had to do was stab a worthless baby-killer who should have gotten the chair anyway, a man who, if Sumner wanted him dead, would end up dead no matter what. So what was the harm? What was the big deal?

Sumner was right. Nobody would finger Ted. Even if it went wrong, Ted was liked in here. His colleagues would back him.

It would be so easy.

“Theodore?”

Ted shook his head. “I can’t.”

“If you’re trying to negotiate for more money—”

“I’m not. This isn’t who I am.”

Sumner laughed. “Oh, you’re above it, is that what you think?”

“I need to be right with my family,” Ted said. “With my God.”

“Your God?” Sumner laughed again. “That superstitious nonsense? Your God who lets thousands of children starve every day but lets me live to murder and rape? Do you ever think about that, Theodore? Did your God watch me torture people? Was your God too weak to stop me — or did he choose to watch my victims suffer horrible deaths?”

Ted didn’t bother replying. He stared down at the floor, his face reddening.

“You don’t have a choice, Theodore.”

Ted looked up. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I need you to do this. You’ve already taken money from us. I can let your bosses know — not to mention local law enforcement, the press, your family. I don’t want to do that. I like you. You’re a good man. But we are desperate. You don’t seem to appreciate that. We want Burroughs dead.”

“You keep saying ‘we.’ Who is we?”

Sumner looked him dead in the eye. “You don’t want to know. We need him dead. And we need him dead tonight.”

“Tonight?” Ted couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Even if I—”

“I can make further threats if you’d like. I can remind you of our wealth. I can remind you that we still have resources on the outside. I can remind you that we know all about you, that we know where your family—”

Ted’s hand shot out for Ross Sumner’s throat. Sumner didn’t so much as flinch as Ted’s fingers closed around his neck. It didn’t last, of course. Ted let go almost immediately.

“We can make things bad for you, Theodore. You have no idea how bad.”

Ted felt lost, adrift.

“But let’s dispense with such unpleasantries, shall we? We are friends. Friends don’t make idle threats. We are on the same side. The best relationships are not zero-sum, Theodore. The best relationships are win-win. And I feel as though I’ve behaved poorly here. Please accept my apology. Plus a ten-thousand-dollar bonus.” Sumner licked his lips. “One hundred and ten thousand dollars. Think about all that money.”

Ted felt sick. Idle threats. Guys like Ross Sumner don’t make idle threats.

Like the man said, Ted had no choice. He was about to be pushed across a line from which there was, he knew, no coming back.

“Tell me your plan again,” Ted said.

Chapter 7

Back in her room, Rachel stared at the maybe-Matthew photograph, picked up her phone, and debated calling her sister Cheryl and blowing up her world.

It was odd that David didn’t ask her to show him the photograph again. She had been prepared for that. Doubt burrows in when the photograph isn’t front and center. When you’re staring right at it, you somehow know that it has to be Matthew. When you put it away, when you rely on your imagination instead of something as concrete as the actual image, you realize how ridiculous your supposition is, that your belief that a distant view of a young child is somehow evidence that a toddler murdered five years earlier is, in fact, still alive is beyond ludicrous.

She shouldn’t call Cheryl. She should keep this from her.

But did Rachel have the right to make that call?

Rachel was staying at the Briggs Motor Lodge of Maine, famed, she imagined, for having walls made of some kind of gauze or cotton mesh. Right now, she could hear her neighbors fervently and lustily enjoying their stay as though they were sharing this bed with her. The woman kept yelling out “Oh, Kevin,” and “Go, Kevin,” and “Yes, Kevin,” and even — oh, how Rachel hoped this was something the woman shouted lost in the throes of passion rather than trying to be cute or funny — “Take me to Heaven, Kevin.”

A little afternoon delight, Rachel mused somewhat bitterly. It must be nice.

When was the last time she’d had an afternoon like that?

It wasn’t worth thinking about. Rachel was still coming down from a full-fledged panic attack brought on, she assumed, by the combination of seeing David and going off her antianxiety medicine. The medicine didn’t work for her. Not really. She took the Xanax or whatever, hoping to deaden the pain of being responsible for another human being’s death, but while it may have put some of the guilt at a distance — made it feel more elusive — the guilt clung on.

She blinked her eyes and tried to focus on doing the right thing here.

She should call her sister and tell her. That was what Rachel would want if their roles were reversed and Cheryl was the one holding this photo. Rachel picked up her mobile. Service was spotty up here in rural Maine. This was a prison town. Everyone staying at this motor lodge was somehow connected to Briggs Penitentiary — visitors, vendors, suppliers, deliverers, that kind of thing.

She had enough bars to make the call. Her fingers clicked the Contacts icon and scrolled to Cheryl’s name. Her finger hovered above the call button.

Don’t do it.

She’d promised herself that she would keep this from Cheryl — protect her sister — until she knew for certain. Right now, when you stripped out the emotion, she still knew nothing. She had a photograph of a boy who resembled her dead nephew. Period. The end. David’s enthusiasm notwithstanding, they had diddly-squat.

She flicked on the motor lodge’s television. On the sign outside, the Briggs Motor Lodge of Maine actually boasted that all rooms had a COLOR TV, spelling out each letter in a different color — the C was in orange, the O in green, the L in blue — to emphasize that fact, though Rachel figured that the real draw would be if the motor lodge still had black-and-white televisions. She flicked through the stations. Mostly daytime talk shows and bad-take cable news. The commercials — buy gold, get a second mortgage, consolidate your debt, invest in crypto — all seemed like legal versions of Ponzi schemes to her.

The American economy relies more on the con than we like to think.

The festivities next door reached a crescendo when Kevin repeatedly announced with great gusto that he was nearing the finish line. A few seconds later, the symbolic cymbals crashed and then all went quiet. Rachel was tempted to applaud. David had asked her about her journalism career, and she’d balked at answering. There was no reason to get into how she’d messed up and destroyed herself, how she’d been fired and humiliated and how, in truth, a story like this might be the only chance to resurrect her career. It wasn’t worth discussing. It was a distraction. She would be here anyway. That was what she told herself, and it was probably true.

Her phone was on the bed.

The hell with it.

She picked it up and before she could talk herself out of it, Rachel hit her sister’s number, the top one in her favorites. She put the phone to her ear. No ring yet. Still time to hang up. She closed her eyes as the first ring sounded. Still time. On the second ring, Rachel heard the phone being answered. A clipped voice, not her sister’s, said, “Hello?”

It was Ronald, Cheryl’s new husband.

“Hello, Ronald,” Rachel said. And then, even though the phone undoubtedly had caller ID, she added, “It’s Rachel.”

“Good afternoon, Rachel. How are you?”

“Fine,” she said. Then: “Isn’t this Cheryl’s phone?”

“It is,” Ronald said. He was always Ronald, never Ron or Ronny or the Ronster, which told you everything you need to know about his diction and affect. “Your sister is just getting out of the shower, so I took the liberty of answering for her.”

Silence.

“If you’d like to hold a moment,” Ronald continued, “she will be with you soon.”

“I’ll hold.”

She could hear him put the phone down. Rachel’s skull had a touch of the alcohol swirls going on, but she felt pretty firmly in control. There were mumbled voices before Cheryl got on the line sounding a little frazzled.

“Hey, Rach.”

Rachel realized that some might view her distaste for Ronald Dreason as either overblown or unfair. That was probably accurate, of course. Cheryl’s fault. Her introducing this new man into her life had been poorly timed.

“Hi,” Rachel managed to say.

She could almost see her sister’s frown. “You okay?”

“Fine.”

“You been drinking?”

Silence.

“What’s wrong?”

Rachel had been rehearsing her words in her head since she got back to her room, but that all flew out of her head now that the time had come. “Just checking in. How are you feeling?”

“Pretty good. The morning sickness stopped. We have an ultrasound on Thursday.”

“Terrific. Will you learn the sex?”

“Yes, but don’t worry — no reveal party.”

Thank God for small favors, she thought. Out loud she said, “That all sounds great.”

“Yeah, Rach, terrific, great, whatever. Do you want to stop stalling and tell me what’s wrong?”

Rachel lifted the photograph again. Irene and Bugs Bunny and that boy’s profile. She thought about David’s scarred face through the plexiglass, the way his head had tenderly tilted to the side as he lifted his finger up to the image, the naked, haunting pain in his hollow eyes. She had been right before. David had nothing. Cheryl had a life. She had suffered immeasurably, losing her child and then finding out the cause was her own husband. It was not fair to uproot her over what was probably nothing.

“Yo,” Cheryl said. “Earth to Rachel.”

She swallowed. “Not over the phone.”

“What?”

“I need to see you. As soon as possible.”

“You’re scaring me, Rach.”

“I don’t mean to.”

“Fine, come over now.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?” Cheryl asked.

“I’m not home.”

“Where are you?”

“In Maine. Briggs County.”

The silence was suffocating. Rachel gripped the phone and closed her eyes and waited. When Cheryl finally did speak, her voice was an anguished whisper. “What the hell are you trying to do to me?”

“I’m leaving tomorrow. Meet me at my place. Eight p.m. And don’t bring Ronald.”

There is a fine line between day and night in Briggs.

We have “lights out” at ten p.m., but that just means dimming them. It never gets dark in here. Perhaps that’s a good thing, I don’t know. We are all in our own cells, so it isn’t as though we could walk around and bother one another. I have a lamp in my cell so I can read late into the night. You would think that I would do a lot of that in here — read and write — but I have trouble focusing due in part to my eye trouble from the first assault. I get headaches after more than an hour at either task. Or maybe it isn’t just physical. Maybe it’s more psychosomatic or something. I don’t know.

But tonight, I put my hands behind my head and lay back on the flimsy pillow. I open the mental floodgates and for the first time since I entered this place, I let Matthew in. I don’t stop the images. I don’t put a block on them or filter them. I let them flow in and surround me. I practically bathe in them. I think about my father, no doubt dying in that same bedroom he shared with my mother. I think about my mother who died when I was eight years old and yes, I realize that I never quite moved past that. I can’t see her face anymore, haven’t been able to conjure up her image in many years, relying on those photos we had on the piano more than anything from my memory banks. I picture Aunt Sophie, my wonderful Sophie, the kind and generous woman who raised me after Mom died, the celestial being whom I love unconditionally, still trapped in that house, caring no doubt for my father until his final breath.

A sound by my cell door makes me cock my head.

Night sounds are not uncommon here. They are awful sounds, sounds that chill a man’s blood, unescapable, constant. This wing is not full of men who sleep soundly. Many cry out in their sleep. Others like to stay up at all hours and chat through the bars, reversing their internal clocks, staying awake all night vampire-like and sleeping during the day. Why not? There is no day or night in here. Not really.

And of course, there are men who openly masturbate with far more lusty pride than discretion.

But this sound, the one that makes me cock my head, is different. It is not coming from another cell or the guard booth or anything involving the general population blocks. It is coming from the door to my cell.

“Hello?”

A flashlight lands on my face, momentarily blinding me. I don’t like that. I don’t like that at all. I block it with a cupped hand and squint.

“Hello.”

“Stay still, Burroughs.”

“Curly?”

“I said stay still.”

I don’t know what’s going on, so I do as he asks. We don’t have traditional locks and keys in Briggs. My cell door works off what’s called a “slam lock,” an electromechanical system that automatically deadlocks. It is all controlled by levers in the guardroom. The doors only work on keys as a backup.

Which Curly was using now.

I have never seen the key used before.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“I’m taking you to the infirmary.”

“No need,” I say. “I feel fine.”

“Not your call,” Curly says in a near whisper.

“Whose call it is?”

“Ross Sumner has filled out an official complaint.”

“So?”

“So the doctor needs to catalogue your injuries.”

“Now?”

“Why, you busy?”

His words are typically sarcastic, but his voice is tight.

“It’s late,” I say.

“You’ll get your beauty sleep later. Get your ass up.”

Not sure what else to do, I stand. “You mind taking the light out of my eyes?”

“Just move.”

“Why are you whispering?”

“You and Sumner got this place riled up. You think I want to do that again?”

That makes sense, I guess, but again the words ring hollow. Still, what choice do I have? I have to go. I don’t like it, but really, what’s the big deal? I’ll go. I’ll see the doctor. Maybe I’ll smirk at Sumner lying in the bed.

We leave our block and start down the corridor. Distant shouts from the general population bounce off the concrete walls like rubber balls. The lights are dimmed. My footwear is prison-issue canvas slip-ons, but Curly’s shoes are black and echo off the floor. He slows his step. I do the same.

“Keep walking, Burroughs.”

“What?”

“Just keep going.”

He stays half a step behind me. We are alone in this corridor. I sneak a glance behind me. Curly’s face is ashen. His eyes glisten. His bottom lip is quivering. He looks as though he might cry.

“You okay, Curly?”

He doesn’t reply. We pass a checkpoint, but there is no guard here. That’s odd. Curly unlocks the gate with some kind of fob. When we reach the T-intersection, he puts his hand on my elbow and steers me to the right.

“The infirmary is the other way,” I say.

“You have to fill out some forms first.”

We move down another corridor. The sounds of the prison have gone from faint to nonexistent. It is so quiet I can hear Curly’s labored breaths. I don’t know this section of the prison. I’ve never been here before. There are no cells. The doors here are pebble-glassed like shower doors. Philip’s office had a door like this. I assume I’m in some kind of executive area where we will meet up with someone who will help me fill out the paperwork. But there are no lights coming through the pebbled glass. It feels very much as though we are alone.

I notice something else now that I hadn’t before.

Curly is wearing gloves.

They are black latex. Guards rarely wear them. So why now? Why tonight? I am not one who believes you always go with your gut or follow your primitive instincts. They often lead you in the wrong direction. But when you add it up — the gut, the instincts, the hour, the excuse, the gloves, the route, Curly’s attitude, his demeanor — something is definitely off.

A few days ago, I wouldn’t have cared much. But everything has changed now.

“Up ahead,” Curly says. “It’s the last door on the left.”

My heart is thumping in my chest. I look up ahead, at the last door on the left. That too has a pebble-glass door. That one too has no light coming through it.

Not good.

I freeze. Curly stays behind me. He isn’t moving either. I hear a small sound coming from him. I slowly turn. Tears are flowing down his face.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

Then I see the glint of steel.

A blade is heading straight toward my stomach.

There is no time for thought or anything beyond a reaction. I lean my body to one side while hammering down toward the blade with my forearm. The blade veers off course just enough — it misses my right side by no more than an inch. Curly pulls the blade back hard toward him, slicing through the flesh of my forearm. Blood spills, but I don’t feel pain. Not yet anyway.

I leap back. Curly and I are a few feet apart now, both in fight crouches.

Curly is crying. He holds the blade in front of him, like a scene from a poor man’s West Side Story. Sweat coats his face, mixing in with the tears.

“I’m sorry, Burroughs.”

“What are you doing?”

“So sorry.”

He regrips the knife. I’m holding my forearm, trying to stem the blood that’s seeping now through my fingers.

“You don’t have to do this,” I say.

But Curly isn’t listening. He lunges at me. I jump back. There is a rushing sound in my ears. I don’t know what to do. I know nothing about knife fighting.

So I do the simplest thing I can.

“Help!” I scream as loud as I can. “Somebody, help me!”

I don’t rely on that, of course. This is a prison. I’m a prisoner. People are yelling crazy shit in here twenty-four seven. Still, the suddenness of my scream makes Curly pull up. I use that. I turn and sprint down the corridor, back toward where we came from. He chases me.

“Help! He’s trying to kill me! Help!”

I don’t turn around. I don’t know if he’s closing in on me or not. I can’t risk it. I just keep pumping my legs and screaming. But now I’m reaching the end of the corridor, that same checkpoint we had gone through earlier. No one is there.

I ram the gate. Nothing. I try to pull it open.

No go. It’s locked.

Now what?

“Help!”

I glance back over my shoulder now. Curly is closing in. I’m trapped. I turn to face him. I keep screaming for help. He stops. I try to read his face. Confusion, anguish, rage, fear — it is all there. Fear, I know, is always the overwhelming emotion. He is scared. And the only way to not be scared anymore is to silence me.

Whatever led him to this, whatever doubts he may have had, they are no match for his need to survive, to save himself, to worry about his self-interest above all else.

And that means killing me.

I am backed up against the gate with nowhere to go. He is about to lunge for me when a voice from behind me says, “What the fuck is going on here?”

Relief courses through my veins. I am about to turn and explain that Curly here is trying to kill me when I feel something hard smack the back of my head. My knees buckle. Blackness closes in around me.

And then there is nothing.

Chapter 8

Cheryl grabbed a cup of coffee and a section of the morning paper and sat in the breakfast nook across from her husband Ronald. It was six a.m., and this had become her blessed morning routine. She and Ronald wore matching one hundred percent cotton spa robes with thick shawl collars and cuffed sleeves; Ronald had ordered them during a luxurious stay at the Fairmont Princess Hotel in Scottsdale.

Most people had moved on to online papers, but Ronald insisted on going old-school with an actual daily newspaper delivery. He started with the front section while Cheryl preferred reading the business section first. She didn’t know why. She didn’t know much about business, but something about the dynamic read to her like a great soap opera. Today, no matter how hard she tried to focus, there was zero comprehension. The words swam by in meaningless waves. Ronald, who normally offered a running commentary on whatever he was reading — an act she found endearing and annoying in equal measure — was quiet. He was, she knew, studying her. She had not slept well after her sister’s call. He wanted to ask what was wrong, but he would not ask. One of Ronald’s strengths was his wonderful sense of when to pry and when to let it be.

“What time is your first patient?” he asked.

“Nine a.m.”

Cheryl’s practice saw patients three days a week starting promptly at nine a.m. The other two weekdays were saved for surgery. Cheryl was a transplant surgeon. It was, without a doubt, the most interesting field of medicine. She mostly worked on kidney and liver transplants, which was both high-stakes and challenging, but her patients, unlike other surgeons’, always needed a great deal of follow-up, often years’ worth, so she could see the results of her labor. In order to become a transplant surgeon, you start with general surgery (six years in her case at Boston General) plus one year of research plus another two years of a fellowship in transplant surgery. It had been staggeringly difficult, but after the disasters, after the tragedy and the fallout, the medical center — her education, her occupation, her calling, her patients — had sustained her.

Her work. And Ronald, of course.

She met her husband’s eye and smiled. He smiled back. She could see the concern etched on his handsome face. She gave her head the smallest of shakes as if to say all was fine. But it was not fine.

Why was Rachel at Briggs Penitentiary?

The answer was obvious, of course. She was visiting David. On one level, okay, fine, do your thing. David and Rachel had always been close. He’d been up there for nearly five years now. Maybe Rachel felt that was enough time. Maybe she felt she should reach out, that he deserved some level of, if not support, sustenance. Maybe, with all the professional and personal heartache in Rachel’s life over the past year, Rachel would find — what? — comfort in visiting a man who had always believed in her and her dreams.

No.

It had to be something else. In the same way Cheryl loved being a surgeon, Rachel had loved her job as an investigative journalist. She had lost it all in a snap, fair or not, and now she wasn’t the same. Simple as that. Her sister had been wounded. The experience had changed her, and not for the better. Rachel used to be reliable. Now her judgment was something Cheryl constantly questioned.

But why would she be at Briggs?

Perhaps she saw David as an opportunity. David had not spoken to the press. Not ever. He had never told his side of the story, as though there was one, or tried to elaborate on his own theory about what had happened that awful night. So maybe that was Rachel’s game. Her sister was still an investigative journalist at heart, so maybe she went to visit David on the pretense of caring about him. She was good at being a sympathetic ear, at getting people to open up. Perhaps Rachel could get a story out of David, a huge headline-making, true-crime-podcast type of story, and maybe, just maybe, Rachel could use that to regain her professional standing and get “uncanceled.”

But would Rachel really do that?

Would Cheryl’s own sister dredge all this horror up again, rip apart Cheryl’s sutures (to use a surgical analogy) just to get back in the game? Could Rachel be so cold?

“How are you feeling?” Ronald asked.

“Great.”

He smiled at her. “Is it corny or romantic to say my wife looks extra-hot pregnant?”

“Neither,” she said. “More like you’re horny and trying to get some.”

Ronald faked a gasp and put a hand to his chest. “Moi?”

She shook her head. “Men.”

“We are a predictable lot.”

She was pregnant. Such an all-consuming marvel. And it had happened so easily this time. Ronald was watching her again, so she forced up a smile. They had redone the kitchen last year, knocking down a wall, expanding the space by fifteen feet, adding a mudroom (for when they had muddied little feet traipsing through the backyard), putting in floor-to-ceiling windows, and topping it off with a six-burner Viking stove and oversized Northland Master Series refrigerator and freezer. Ronald had designed the kitchen. He liked to cook.

Maybe, Cheryl thought, it was simpler. Maybe Rachel had figured that it was finally time to reach out to her ex-brother-in-law. Cheryl could sympathize with that. Hadn’t she wanted to stand by her then-husband too? Hadn’t Cheryl stayed by David’s side, even when the investigation began to circle back to him? The idea of David hurting Matthew was preposterous. At the time, she would have believed space aliens had been responsible for the brutal murder over her husband.

But as the evidence mounted, doubt started to burrow its way under her skin and fester. The two of them hadn’t been good for months, their marriage a plane on nosedive though Cheryl told herself they’d gain control of the aircraft in time and pull out of the plunge. They had been together a long time — since their junior year at Revere High. Good times, bad times, they always stayed together. They’d have made it.

But would they have?

Maybe not this time. That’s the thing with trust. Once David lost it in her, nothing was the same. And once she lost it in him...

As the suspicion started to circle in, Cheryl tried to maintain a supportive facade, but David saw through it. He reacted by pushing her away. The strain of it became an unbearable weight. By the time the trial rolled around, by the time the courtroom surprises came to light, the marriage was over.

In the end, David had murdered their son. And Cheryl was a big part of the reason.

Ronald took too loud a slurp of his coffee, jarring her back into the sunlit breakfast nook. She looked up, startled. He put down the mug.

“I got an idea,” he said.

She plastered on the fake smile. “I think you already made your idea pretty clear.”

“How about tonight we go out to Albert’s Café for dinner? Just the two of us.”

“I can’t,” she said.

“Oh?”

“Didn’t I tell you? I’m meeting Rachel.”

“No,” he said slowly. “You didn’t tell me.”

“It’s not a big deal.”

“Is she okay?”

“I think so, yes. She just asked me to come over. It’s been a while since we’ve seen each other.”

“It has,” he agreed.

“So I thought I’d stop by after rounds. I hope that’s all right with you.”

“Of course it’s all right with me,” Ronald said with a little too much bravado. He found his newspaper, snapped it open, started reading again. “Have a nice time.”

Cheryl felt the anger start to boil up inside her. Why? Why the hell would Rachel do this to her? If her sister wanted to forgive David, fine and dandy, go for it. But why drag Cheryl in? Why now, when she was rebuilding and pregnant? Rachel had to know what a strain a call like that would be. Why would she do that?

That was the question that really troubled Cheryl. Rachel was a good sister. The best. They were there for each other, always and forever, good times and bad, all that. And even though Cheryl was the older sister by two years, Rachel had — until recently anyway — been the more prudent and overprotective of the two. She knew how hard Cheryl had worked just to get herself out of bed after Matthew’s murder. David, well, not to put too fine a point on it, but Cheryl had cut him from her life, from her thoughts. In order to move on, as far as she was concerned, David had never existed. But Matthew...

Oh, that was another matter.

She would never forget her beautiful little boy. Never. No matter what. Not for a second. That was what she realized. You don’t move past something like that — you learn to live with it. No matter how much pain you are in. You don’t fight that pain. You don’t push it away. You embrace it and let it become a part of you. It’s the only way.

The only thing more painful than remembering Matthew was the idea she might actually forget him.

A groan escaped her lips. She quickly smothered it with the heel of her palm. This wasn’t the first time. Grief rarely attacks from the front. It prefers to sneak up on you when you least expect it. Ronald shifted in his seat, but he did not look up or ask. She was grateful for that.

So again the question rose up in her: What does Rachel want to tell me?

Her sister was not one for melodrama, so whatever it was, it had to be important. Very important. Something concerning David maybe.

But more likely: Something concerning Matthew.

Chapter 9

“Good morning, Staaaaaar-shine! The earth says hello...”

I must be dead, I think. I am dead in hell, where I sit in blackness and hear Ross Sumner mangle the soundtrack from the musical Hair for all eternity. My head pounds as though someone is driving a stake through my forehead with a mallet. I start to see light through the darkness. I blink.

Ross Sumner: “You twinkle above us, we twinkle below...”

“Pipe down,” someone tells him.

I swim up to consciousness. My eyes open, and I stare into the overhead fluorescent light fixture. I try to sit up, but I can’t. It isn’t exhaustion or pain or injury that is stopping me. I look to my left. My wrist is cuffed to the bedrail. Same with the right and both ankles. Classic four-point restraint.

Ross Sumner whoops with maniacal laughter. “Oh, how I love this! What joy this brings me!”

My vision is still blurred. I take calm breaths and absorb my surroundings. Green-gray concrete walls. Lots of cots, all empty except mine and Ross’s. Ross’s face is still a pulpy mess, a strip across the broken nose. The infirmary. I’m in the infirmary. Okay, good. I know where I am, at least. I turn the other way and see not one, not two, but three prison guards by my bedside. Two are seated next to me like visiting relatives. One is patrolling behind them.

All three are giving me their most menacing glares.

“You are truly screwed now, old boy,” Ross Sumner says. “Truly, truly screwed.”

My mouth feels as though I’ve been chewing sand, but I still manage to croak out, “Hey, Ross?”

“Yes, David.”

“Nice nose, asshole.”

Sumner stops laughing.

Never show an inmate fear.

I turn my gaze back toward the guards now. Same thing here. Never show fear — not even to the guards. I meet all of their gazes one at a time. The rage I see in theirs does not sit well with me. They are righteously pissed off at something, and apparently that something is me.

Where, I wonder, is Curly?

A woman I assume is the doctor approaches my bed. “How are you feeling?” she asks in a tone that isn’t even pretending to care about the answer.

“Groggy.”

“That’s to be expected.”

“What happened to me?”

She glances over at my glaring guards. “We are still piecing that together.”

“Can you at least untie me?”

The doctor gestures toward the glaring guards. “That’s not my call.”

I look at the three unyielding faces and see no love. The doctor leaves the room. I am not sure what to do or say here so opt for silence. There is an old black-hands white-face clock on the wall. It reminds me of the kind I would stare at, hoping those hands would move a little faster, back in the day at Garfield Elementary School in Revere.

It’s a little after eight. I suspect it’s a.m. rather than p.m., but with no windows in here, I can’t know for sure. My head hurts. I try to piece together what I assume was last night, right up until the time I heard a voice I thought might rescue me. I mostly remember Curly’s face, the fear, the panic.

So what happened?

The pacing guard is tall and thin with an overly prominent Adam’s apple. His real name is Hal, but everyone calls him Hitch because he’s constantly hitching up his pants because, as one of the inmates put it, “Hal got no ass.” Hitch rushes toward me, still glaring, and leans so close that our noses are practically touching. I push my head back in the pillow to get a little space. Nothing doing. His breath is awful, like a small gerbil climbed into his mouth, died, and is now decaying.

“You’re a dead man, Burroughs,” he hisses in my face.

I nearly choke on the stink. I am about to make a rejoinder about his breath, but a fly-through of sanity stops me. One of the other two guards, a somewhat decent guy named Carlos, says, “Hal.”

Hitch Hal ignores him. “Dead,” he repeats.

Anything I say right now would either be superfluous or harmful, so I stay quiet.

Hal starts pacing again. Carlos and a third guard, a man named Lester, stay in their seats. I lay my head back on the pillow and close my eyes.

I’m clearly unarmed yet I’m being held by a four-point restraint and watched closely by three guards. Three guards. At the same time.

That seems like overkill to me.

What the hell was going on here? And where was Curly?

Did I hurt him?

I think I remember everything, but based on my history, could I be sure of that? Maybe I blacked out. Maybe that other guard, whoever heard me yell, didn’t unlock the gate fast enough. Maybe, instead of Curly getting the better of me, I grabbed the shiv from him and...

Oh damn.

And while all these theories are swirling in my head, the big tornado keeps ripping through, throwing everything else out of the way: Is my son still alive?

The back of my head pressed down on the pillow, I try to pull my arms and legs free, but they are shackled. I feel helpless. Time passes. I don’t know how much. I am plotting, and I’m coming up with nothing.

The wall phone rings. Carlos stands, walks toward it, picks it up. He turns so his back is to me and speaks low. I can’t make out what he’s saying. After a few seconds, he hangs the receiver back on the wall. Lester and Hal both turn to Carlos. Carlos nods.

“It’s time,” Carlos says.

Hal takes out a small key. He unlocks my ankles first, then my wrists. Carlos and Lester stand over me as though they expect me to break for it. I obviously don’t. I massage my wrists.

“Get up,” Hitch Hal snaps.

I feel woozy. I sit up slowly — too slowly for Hitch. He reaches down and grabs me by the hair and pulls me up. Blood rushes south. My head reels in protest.

“I said,” Hitch spits out between clenched teeth, “get up.”

Hitch rips the blankets off me. I hear Sumner start laughing again. Then Hitch picks up my feet and throws them to the side. I swing with them so that they land on the floor. I manage to get myself to a standing position. My legs are rubber. I take a step and stumble like a marionette before I’m able to get my footing.

Ross Sumner is enjoying this. He sings, “Nah nah nah, nah nah nah, hey hey hey...”

My skull aches. “Where are we going?” I ask.

Carlos puts a hand on my back and gives me a gentle shove. I almost trip and fall.

“Let’s go,” Carlos says.

Hitch and Lester stand on either side of me. They take hold of my arms, making sure they grip that pressure point beneath both elbows hard. They half escort, half drag me out of the infirmary.

“Where are you taking me?”

But the only reply is Ross Sumner finishing up his repeat of the opening stanza and waving, “...Goodbye!”

I try to clear my head, but the cobwebs cling stubbornly to the corners. Carlos leads the way. Lester is on my right arm, Hitch on my left. Hitch’s stare is palpable, a beating thing of hate. My pulse picks up. What now? Where the hell are we going? And a reminder:

A guard tried to kill me last night.

That’s the headline here, right? Curly had taken me into an abandoned corridor in the hospital and tried to stick me with a shiv. The wound on my forearm from that blade is wrapped now in thick gauze, but I can feel it pulsating.

The four of us trudge down a corridor and through a tunnel lined with light bulbs protected by metal cages. The walk is doing me some good. My head clears. Not completely. But enough. At the end of the tunnel, we head up a flight of stairs. I see daylight through a window. Okay, so the clock was at eight a.m., not p.m. Made sense. A sign lets me know we are now in the ADMINISTRATIVE WING. It is quiet, but office hours don’t start, I know, until nine a.m.

So what are we doing here now?

I debate trying to make a move of some kind, just to make sure someone would know where I am. But what good would that do? Like I said, it’s just after eight in the morning. No one is even here yet.

Carlos stops in front of a closed door. He knocks and a muffled voice tells him to come in. Carlos turns the knob. The door opens. I peer inside.

Curly is standing there.

My stomach drops. I try to backpedal, but Hal and Lester have both my arms. They shove me forward.

Curly sneers at me. “You son of a bitch.”

Our eyes lock. He is trying yet again to look so tough, but I can see that once again, Curly is scared and close to tears. I am about to protest, to ask him why he tried to kill me, but again, what’s the point? What’s the play here?

Then I hear a familiar voice say, “Okay, Ted, that’s enough.”

Relief floods my veins.

I lean into the room and turn to the right. It’s Uncle Philip.

I’m safe. I think.

I try to catch the old man’s eye, but he does not so much as glance in my direction. He is dressed in a blue suit and red tie. He stands by the window for another second before crossing the room and shaking Curly Ted’s hand.

“Thank you for your cooperation, Ted.”

“Of course, Warden.”

Philip Mackenzie’s gaze sweeps past me and finds the three guards who escorted me here. “I’ll handle the prisoner now,” he says. “You all go back to your regular duties.”

Carlos says, “Yes, Warden.”

I hadn’t really thought about this before, but I am still clad only in my flimsy hospital smock, which opens in the back. I wear socks that I assume are hospital issue. I don’t have my canvas shoes anymore. I feel suddenly exposed and near naked, but to them, all of them, I must also appear like no threat.

Curly heads toward either me or the door, it is hard to know which. He slows as he gets closer to me and tries again to give me his toughest gaze, but there is nothing behind it. It’s for show.

The man is terrified.

As Curly reaches the door, Philip Mackenzie says, “Ted?”

He turns back toward the warden.

“The prisoner will be with me for the rest of the day. Who is working your block?”

“I am,” Ted said. “I’m on until three.”

“You’ve been up all night.”

“I feel fine.”

“Are you sure? You can take this shift off. No one would blame you.”

“I’d rather work, Warden, if that’s okay.”

“Very well then. I doubt we’ll be done with him before your shift is through. Just as well. Tell your replacement.”

“Yes, Warden.”

Curly steps out of the room. Hitch Hal greets him with a buddy-clap on the back. Philip has still not so much as glanced my way. Curly and Hal start down the corridor. Lester follows. Carlos leans his head in and says, “You need me, Warden?”

“Not right now, Carlos. I’ll contact you if I need a statement.”

Carlos looked over at me, then back to Philip. “Okay then.”

“Carlos?”

“Yes?”

“Please close the door on your way out.”

“You sure, Warden?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

Carlos nods and closes the door. Philip and I are alone. Before I can say anything, Philip signals me to take a seat. I do so. He stays standing.

“Ted Weston says you tried to kill him last night.”

Label me surprised.

Philip folds his arms and leans across the front of his desk. “He claims you faked an illness to get him to take you to the infirmary. Because of your earlier altercation with an inmate named Ross Sumner where you sustained injuries, he took you at your word.”

Philip turns his head to the right and points to the shiv — I assume it’s the one Curly used last night — on his desk. The blade is sealed in a plastic crime-scene bag. “He further claims that once you were alone, you pulled this on him and tried to stab him. You two fought. He wrestled the weapon away from you, slicing your arm in the process. Then you ran down the corridor. Another correctional officer heard the commotion and subdued you.”

“It’s a lie, Philip.”

He says nothing.

“What motive would I have?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Didn’t you come to see me yesterday for the first time and beg me to get you out?”

“So...?”

“So maybe you became desperate. You get in a fight with a high-profile inmate—”

“That psycho jumped me—”

“And that gets you to the infirmary. Maybe that’s part of your escape plan, I don’t know. Or maybe you get the weapon from Ross Sumner once you’re there. Maybe you’re working together.”

“Philip, Curly is lying.”

“Curly?”

“That’s what we call him. I didn’t do this. He woke me up. He walked me to that corridor. He tried to kill me. I got injured trying to defend myself.”

“Right, sure, and I guess you expect me — and the world at large — to take the word of a convicted baby-killer over the word of a fifteen-year correctional officer with a spotless record.”

For the moment, I say nothing.

“I saw your father yesterday.”

“What?”

“Your aunt Sophie too.”

He looks off.

“How are they?”

“Your father can’t talk. He’s dying.”

I shake my head. “Why did you go see him?”

He doesn’t reply.

“Yesterday of all days. Why did you go to Revere, Philip?”

He starts toward the door. “Come with me.”

I don’t bother asking where we are going. I stand and follow him. We start down the corridor and down the steps. We walk side by side. Philip keeps his spine ramrod straight, his eyes straight ahead. Without turning to me, he says, “You’re lucky the correctional officer who subdued you was Carlos.”

“What?”

“Because Carlos called me right away. To report the incident. I immediately ordered three correctional officers, including Carlos, to watch you around the clock.”

I stop and take hold of Philip’s sleeve. “So no one could finish the job,” I say. “You were afraid someone would kill me.”

Philip stares down at my hand on his sleeve. I slowly let him go.

“You’re still in danger,” he says. “Even if I put you in solitary. Even if I get you an immediate transfer. A correctional officer who is now claiming a vendetta wants you dead, plus you still have Ross Sumner and the Sumner fortune on your back — all of that is not conducive to a healthy outcome.”

“So what do I do?” I ask.

Philip replies by opening the door to his office, the one I had visited just yesterday. When I see Philip’s son Adam standing there in his full police uniform, my heart soars for the first time in I don’t know how long. For a moment, I just stare at my best friend. He smiles and nods as if to tell me that this is real, he is there, right in front of me. I let my mind fall back to another era, to the locker room before basketball practice at Revere High or double-dating with the Hancock sisters at Friendly’s or hanging out in the last row of the Fenway Park bleachers and razzing the opposing team’s right fielder.

Adam spreads his arms and steps forward and I fall into his bear hug. I squeeze my eyes shut because I’m afraid I’ll cry. I feel my legs give way, but Adam holds me up. How long has it been since I’ve experienced any physical affection? Almost five years. The last person to hug me with any genuine feeling or caring? My father, who now lay dying, on the day the jury read the guilty verdict. But even with him, even with the father I loved like no other man, I had sensed some hesitancy in the embrace. My father loved me. But — and perhaps this is me projecting — there had been some doubt, as though he wasn’t sure whether he was embracing his son or a monster.

There is no doubt in Adam’s hug.

Adam doesn’t release me until I finally let go of him. I step back, not sure I can even speak. Philip has already closed the door. He stands next to his son.

“We have a plan,” Philip says.

Chapter 10

“What plan?” I ask.

Philip Mackenzie nods at his son. Adam smiles and starts unbuttoning his shirt.

“You’re about to become me,” Adam says.

“Say again?”

“I would have liked more time to plan,” Philip says, “but I meant what I said. If you stay here, no matter how hard I try to protect you, it won’t end well. We got to do this now.”

Adam takes off his uniform shirt and hands it to me. “I’m wearing the smallest size I have, but it’ll still be loose.” I take hold of the shirt. Adam undoes his belt.

“Here’s the plan in a nutshell,” Philip continues. “You set us up, David.”

“I did?”

“You came to me yesterday for the first time — that meeting is on file — and you said that you wanted to be rehabilitated for your crimes. Gave me a whole big sob story of how you wanted to make amends and confess and get real help.”

I slip off my hospital gown and throw Adam’s white T-shirt over my head. Then I shrug into the uniform. “Go on.”

“You begged me to bring your old pal Adam in to see you. That’s where you wanted to start — with someone who’d listen and still accept you. Because of my loyalty to my old friend — your father — I fell for it. It made sense to me. If anybody could pull you back from the abyss and get you to confess the truth, it was Adam.”

Adam hands me his pants. He is grinning.

“So I arranged a long visit today — just like I told the correctional officers out there. You and Adam were going to spend the day together.”

The pants are too long. I roll them up and create cuffs.

“What I didn’t know was that you had a gun.”

I frown. “A gun?”

“Yes. You pulled it on us. You made Adam undress and then you tied him up and locked him in the closet.”

Adam smiles. “And me being afraid of the dark.”

I return the smile, though now I remember that as a child Adam had a Snoopy night-light near his bed. It kept me up sometimes when I slept over. I would stare at Snoopy and not be able to close my eyes.

Funny the memories that stay with you.

“Then,” Philip continues, “you put on Adam’s uniform, including his trench coat and cap. You forced me at gunpoint to take you out of here.”

“How the hell did I get a gun?” I ask.

Philip shrugs. “It’s a prison. People smuggle in a lot of things.”

“Not guns, Philip. And I just spent the night in the infirmary surrounded by three guards. No one is going to buy that.”

“Good point,” Philip says. “Wait, hold up.” He opens his desk drawer and pulls out a Glock 19. “You took mine.”

“What?”

Philip opens his suit jacket to reveal an empty holster. “I had the gun on me. We were reminiscing. You started to cry. I foolishly moved to comfort you. You caught me off guard and grabbed my gun.”

“Is it loaded?”

“No, but...” Philip Mackenzie reaches into his drawer and draws out a box of ammunition. “It is now.”

This plan is insane. There are a dozen holes. Big holes. But I am being swept out to sea in the riptide. There is no time for second-guessing. This is my chance. I have to get out of here. If Philip and Adam end up facing consequences or making sacrifices, so be it. My son is alive and out there somewhere. Selfish or not, that trumps all.

“Okay, so what’s next?” I ask.

Adam is down to his underwear. I take a seat and slip on his socks and start on the shoes. Adam is two inches taller and while we used to be around the same weight, he probably has twenty or thirty pounds on me now. I tighten the belt to keep my pants from falling down. I throw on the trench coat, which helps.

“I had Adam wear his cap on the way in,” Philip says, tossing me the police hat. “That’ll cover your hair. Walk fast and keep your head down. We only pass one checkpoint on the way out to the parking lot. When we get to my car, you will order me — at gunpoint, of course — to drive to my house. Stupid me, I went to the bank yesterday and took out five thousand dollars in cash. I would have taken more but that would be too obvious.”

Adam tosses me his wallet. “I have a thousand dollars in there. And maybe I’ll forget to cancel one of my credit cards. That Mastercard maybe. I never use it anyway.”

I nod and try not to get too emotional. I need to focus, stay in the moment, think it through while still moving. The Mastercard, for example. Could I use it? Or would that make it too easy to track me?

Later, I tell myself. Think about it later. Concentrate. “So when do we head to your car?”

Philips checks his watch. “Right now. We should get to my house before nine. You’ll tie me up, and I’ll escape at, say, six tonight. That should give you a decent head start. I’ll be panicked when I finally get free, especially because you tied up my son and left him in the closet. I’ll rush back here to let him out before I tell anyone what’s going on. Then I’ll sound the alarm. Probably around seven tonight. That should give you a solid ten-hour head start.”

I tighten the laces of Adam’s shoes so they don’t slip off. I have the cap’s brim tilted down over my eyes. Adam thinks about putting on the hospital gown, but there’s no point in that.

“Get in the closet,” Philip tells his son.

Adam turns to me. We hug deep and hard.

“Find him,” Adam says to me. “Find my godson.”

Philip tosses him a few candy bars along with restraints I might have used to tie him up. I don’t know if someone will buy that or not, but with luck, he won’t be found until later tonight — and by his father. Philip closes the closet door and locks it with his key. He picks up the Glock and presses the button on the hand grip, ejecting the magazine. I know that this Glock can hold fifteen rounds, but without an autoloader, arming it is slow. You have to insert ammunition one bullet at a time into the top of the magazine, making sure the rounded side is forward. Philip throws in six or seven bullets and then slams the magazine back into the handle.

He hands me the weapon.

“Don’t use it,” he says, “especially not on me.”

I manage a smile.

“You ready?” he asks.

I feel the adrenaline kick in. “Let’s do this.”

Philip Mackenzie is one of those guys who exude confidence and strength. When he walks, he walks big and with purpose. His strides are long. His head is high. I try to keep up with him, the brim of Adam’s cap pulled low enough to provide a modicum of disguise but not so low as to be conspicuous. We stop at an elevator.

“Press the down button,” Philip tells me.

I do as he asks.

“There’s a camera in the elevator. Flash the gun a little in there. Threaten me with it. Be subtle, but make sure the gun is visible.”

“Okay.”

“When I get back here, there will be questions. The more they can see I felt in mortal danger, the easier it’ll be.”

The elevator dings and the doors slide open. Empty.

“Got it,” I say as we step in. I have the gun in the pocket of the trench coat. It feels so playact-y, as though I’m threatening him with my finger. I take the gun out and keep it close to my side but in line with the camera overhead. I clear my throat and mutter something about not making any false moves. I sound like a bad episode of TV. Philip doesn’t react. He doesn’t throw his hands up or panic, which, I agree, adds to the realism of my “threat.”

When the elevator stops on the ground level, I put the gun back in my pocket. Philip hurries out of the elevator. I rush to keep up with him.

“Just keep walking,” Philip says to me in a low voice. “Don’t stop, don’t make eye contact. Stay a little bit behind me and on the right. I’ll block security’s line of vision.”

I nod. Up ahead I see a metal detector. I almost freeze, but then I realize it is only checking people incoming, not outgoing. No one is really paying attention to who is exiting except in the most cursory way, but then again this is the administrative branch. Inmates are never in here. There is only one guard. From a distance he looks young and bored and reminds me of a stoned hall monitor in a high school.

We are ten yards away. Philip steps on without hesitation. I try to slow down or speed up, gauging what angle would keep my face blocked by Philip’s big shoulders. As we get closer, as the young guard spots the warden barreling toward him, he throws his feet down and stands. He looks first at the warden, then at me.

Something crosses his face.

We are so close to that damn door.

I realize with something approaching dread that I still have the gun in my hand. My hand is in my pocket. Without conscious thought, my grip on the weapon tightens. I slide my finger onto the trigger.

Would I shoot? Would I really shoot this guy to escape?

Philip nods to the guard as we pass him, his face firm. I manage to make a nodding motion too, figuring that Adam might do that.

“Have a good day, Warden,” the guard says.

“You too, son.”

We are at the exit now. Philip presses hard against the bar, pushing the doors open.

Two seconds later, we are out of the building and on our way to his car.

Ted “Curly” Weston sat in the break room with his head in his hands. He couldn’t stop shaking.

Oh God, what had he done?

Messed up. Messed up big-time. He’d known better, hadn’t he? He’d tried to live his life on the straight and narrow. “A solid day’s work for a solid day’s pay.” That’s what his father had always said. His father worked as a butcher in a huge meatpacking plant. He woke up at three in the morning and spent his day in refrigeration and dragged himself home in time to eat dinner and go to sleep because he had to wake up the next day at three in the morning to get to work. That was his life until he keeled over and died at the age of fifty-nine of a heart attack.

Still, Ted had lived on the up-and-up for the most part. Did he take some graft in here? Sure. Everyone did. Everything in life is graft when you think about it. That’s life, man. We are all scamming one another. Ted had been better about it. He wasn’t a pig, but with the crap wages they pay you, you’re expected to skim to make up the difference. To supplement your earnings. That’s the American way. You can’t live on what Walmart pays you. Walmart knows that. But they also know the government will make up the difference with food stamps and Medicare or whatever. So yeah, maybe this is all self-justification, but when someone asks him to keep an eye on a prisoner, like he’d done over the years with Burroughs, or when a family wants to give him a tip — that was how Teddy viewed it, like a gratuity — to sneak a relative some sort of comfort item, well, why the hell not? If he said no, the next guy would say yes. It was expected. Everyone does it. It makes the world go round. You don’t rock the boat.

But Ted had never hurt anybody.

That was important to note here. He may have turned his back when these animals wanted to clobber one another. Why the hell not? They’d find a way to clobber one another anyway. One time Ted had gotten in the middle of one of those scrums and an inmate who looked like a walking venereal disease had scratched him deeply with his fingernail. His fingernail! Damn wound got infected. Ted had to take antibiotics for like two months.

He should have stayed away from Ross Sumner.

Yeah, the money had been big and real. Yeah, he didn’t so much need a “better life” — he had a pretty great one, really — but man, to just get above that pile of bills that were smothering him, drowning him, just to be able to float above those bills, just to go through a few days and not worry about money, maybe have enough to take Edna out to a nice dinner — was that too much to ask? Really?

Ted searched for a donut on the table, but there were none. Damn. Some jackass had brought croissants instead. Croissants. Ever try to eat a croissant and not get the crumbs all over you? Impossible. Yet that was the thing now. They were French, someone said. They were cultured and classy.

Are you kidding me?

Two of his fellow correctional officers, Moronski and O’Reilly, stuffed croissants in their pie holes, the flakes sputtering out of their mouths like out of a wood chipper, as they argued over best bosom point-of-view on Instagram. Moronski favored “deep cleavage” while O’Reilly was waxing poetic on the “side boob” shot.

Oh yeah, Ted thought. The croissants add a touch of class.

“Hey, Ted, you got an opinion on this?”

Ted ignored them. He stared down at the pastry and debated taking a bite. He started to reach out for one, but his hands were shaking.

“You okay?” O’Reilly asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“We heard about what happened,” Moronski said. “Can’t believe Burroughs would try something like that. You do something to piss him off?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Not sure why you’d take him to the infirmary without letting Kelsey know.”

“I buzzed him,” Ted lied, “but he didn’t reply.”

“Still. Why not wait?”

“Burroughs looked bad to me,” Ted said. “I didn’t want him dying on us.”

Moronski said, “Leave him alone, O’Reilly.”

“What? I was just asking.”

Enough, Ted thought. The big question: What was Burroughs telling the warden right now? Probably his version of the truth — that Ted had been the one with the shiv, not him. But so what? Who’d believe a baby-killer like Burroughs over Ted Weston? And O’Reilly’s questions notwithstanding, his fellow guards would back him. Even Carlos, who seemed pretty shook up when he came upon the scene last night, would fall into line. No one in here makes waves. No one in here is going to buck the system or side with an inmate.

So why didn’t Ted feel safe?

He had to think about his next move. The first thing was, put it behind him. Get to work. Act like it was no big deal.

But my God, what had Ted almost done?

True, Sumner had backed him into a corner, had really blackmailed him into it, but suppose if Ted had been “successful,” he would have killed a man. Murdered a fellow human being. That’s the part he still couldn’t get over. He, Ted Weston, had tried to kill a man. Part of him wondered whether he had subconsciously sabotaged himself, that it wasn’t so much that Burroughs had been quick or good at self-defense, but rather that Ted, no matter what else was true, knew that he could not go through with it. He thought about that now. Suppose the blade had hit home. Suppose he had punctured Burroughs’s heart and watched the man’s life leave his body.

Ted was in a panic now. But if he had gone through with it, if he had succeeded, would he be any better off?

He grabbed a cup of coffee and scarfed it down like an aardvark on an anthill. He checked the clock. Time to start his shift. He headed out of the break room.

Ted Weston was starting up the stairwell, fear still coursing through every vein in his body, when something outside the caged window caught his eye. He stopped short and hard, as if some giant hand had grabbed him by the shoulder and yanked him back.

What the...?

The window looked out over the executive parking lot. The bigwigs parked there. The correctional officers, like Ted, had to park way out back and take a shuttle to their respective wings. But that wasn’t what bothered him right now. Ted squinted and looked again. The warden had been pretty specific: He was going to spend hours, if not the entire day, with Burroughs.

Yeah, okay, whatever.

So why was the warden getting into his car?

And who was the guy with him?

Ted felt something cold slide down his spine. He couldn’t say why. In many ways, this was no big deal. Ted watched the warden get in on the driver’s side. The guy with him — some guy in a hat and trench coat — got in on the passenger side.

So if the warden was heading out, where the hell was David Burroughs? Ted had his radio. There had been no call about a prisoner pickup. So maybe the warden had put him in solitary. No, if that had been done, they would have been informed. So maybe the warden left Burroughs with someone else, an underling, to interrogate him further.

But Ted knew it was none of those things. He felt it in his bones. Something was wrong here. Something big.

He hurried over to the wall phone and lifted it.

“It’s Weston, sector four. I think we got a problem.”

Chapter 11

I can’t believe I’m in Philip’s car.

I look through the front windshield. It’s a gray morning. Rain will be coming soon — I can feel that in my face. I have heard of arthritis sufferers who can predict rainstorms by the pain in their joints. I can feel it, strange as this sounds, in my cheek and jaw. Both had been shattered in that first prison beating. Now, whenever a rainstorm is on the horizon, the bones ache like an infected wisdom tooth.

Philip starts the car up, puts it in reverse, and pulls out. I look out the window at the fortresslike edifice and I shudder. I won’t be back, I tell myself. No matter what. I won’t ever let myself come back here.

I turn to Philip. His big bushy eyebrows are lowered in concentration. His thick hands grip the steering wheel as though he’s preparing to rip it off.

“People are going to wonder how I got your gun,” I say.

He shrugs.

“You’re taking a big risk.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Are you doing this because of what happened last night,” I ask, “or because you believe me about Matthew being alive?”

The older man chews on that for a moment. “Does it matter?”

“I guess not.”

We fall into silence as Philip makes the turn into the circle. Up ahead, I can see the guard tower and exit gates we will soon be driving through. Less than a hundred yards away now. I sit back and try to stay calm.

It won’t be long now.

Sitting on the floor of the dark closet, Adam Mackenzie tried to make himself somewhat comfortable. If all goes well, he should be stuck in this dark closet for ten or eleven hours. He sat up against the back of the closet. He’d left his phone in his father’s car because there’d be no way “Crazed David Burroughs” would have let him keep it with him. Still. Ten or eleven hours sitting in the dark in this closet? Adam shook his head. He should have brought a flashlight and something to read.

He closed his eyes. Adam was exhausted. His father had called him after midnight to tell him about David’s incident with the guards and his bizarre claim about Matthew being alive. It was nonsense, of course. It had to be. He remembered when David asked him to be Matthew’s godfather, just as David’s father had once asked Adam’s father to do the same. It had been one of the proudest moments of Adam’s life. He’d always felt that way about his relationship with David. Proud, that is. David was special. He was that guy. Men wanted to be him, women fell for him, but there were demons there. It was why, when Adam first heard the speculation about David being the killer, sure, on the outside, Adam refused to believe it, but there was a small part of him, a little gnawing in the back of the brain, that couldn’t help but have doubts. David had a temper. There had been that fight during their senior year of high school. Adam had been the team’s leading scorer and rebounder, but still it was David, the role player, the guy who hustled, the gritty defender, who’d been voted captain by their teammates. It has always been that way. Adam the finesse player, David his more popular enforcer. Anyway, during their senior year, Revere High had lost to their rivals from Brookside, 78–77, when Adam, who’d scored 24 points, missed a layup with four seconds left to play. That missed layup haunted Adam. Still. Today. But it was later that night, when several guys from Brookside mocked Adam for the big miss, that David took matters into his own hands. He beat the shit out of two guys in an attack so filled with fury that Adam had to pull David away and get him in a car.

More than that, there was David’s father, Lenny. Lenny and Adam’s own father — what was the saying?

The sins of the father shall be visited upon the sons.

He should have been visiting his old friend all along. So why hadn’t he? At first, David refused any visitors. Yeah, okay, but Adam could have tried harder. He just gave up. He didn’t have the strength. That was what he told himself. The man incarcerated in this hellhole wasn’t his best friend. His best friend was gone. He had been bludgeoned to death and left for dead with his son.

Adam was about to shift his legs when he heard the door to his father’s office swing open.

A gruff voice said, “What the hell is going on?”

Oh shit.

Adam grabbed the ropes and began to wind them around his legs. He lifted the handkerchief up to his mouth so that it would appear to be a gag. The plan was simple. If anyone found him before his father got back, Adam was supposed to make it look like he was in the midst of escaping.

Another voice said, “I told you. He’s gone.”

Gruff Voice: “How the hell can he be gone?”

“What do you mean?”

“Where’s the inmate?”

“You mean he didn’t return him before he left?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“I work in that wing. I think I’d know if the inmate who tried to murder me was back in his cell.”

Adam stayed very still.

“Maybe another guy escorted Burroughs back.”

“No, that would be my job.”

“But you just said you were on break, right? Maybe the warden was in a rush, you know? Maybe he got one of the other guys to do it.”

“Maybe.” But Gruff Voice sounded dubious.

“I’ll call and check. I don’t know what you’re worried about.”

“I just saw him with somebody. The warden, I mean. In the parking lot.”

“That was probably his kid.”

“His kid?”

“Yeah, he’s a cop.”

“He brought his kid today?”

“Yep.”

“Why?”

“How the hell am I supposed to know?”

“I don’t get it. The warden gets a call one of his correctional officers was nearly killed by a prisoner — and he decides it’s Bring Your Son to Work Day?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

Gruff Voice says, “Think we should sound the alarm?”

“For what? We don’t even know if Burroughs is missing. Let’s call your cell block and solitary. See if he’s there first.”

“And if he’s not?”

“Then we sound the alarm.”

There was a short pause. Then Gruff Voice said, “Yeah, all right. Let’s make the call.”

“We can use my phone. It’s next door.”

Adam heard the two men leave. He stood. The closet was suddenly stifling. Adam felt trapped, claustrophobic. He tried the knob. Locked. Of course. His father had locked him in to make it all look good.

Christ, so now what?

Things were unraveling fast. It wouldn’t be long now. They’d make the call. They’d find out there was no David. The alarm would sound. Damn. He tried the knob again, turning it harder. No go.

No choice now.

He had to break down the door. The shoulder wouldn’t work as well. Trying to break a door down with your shoulder only leads to dislocation. With his back pressed against the back of the closet, Adam lifted his foot. He checked to see which way the hinges were facing. If the door opens toward you, there is little chance for success. But that wasn’t the case here. Very few closets open to the inside. Not enough space. Second thing, you always kick to the side where the lock is mounted. That’s the weakest part. Using the back of the closet as leverage, Adam drove his heel hard into the area just below the knob. It took three tries, but eventually the door gave way. Adam blinked into the light and stumbled toward his father’s desk.

He picked up the landline. It took him a few seconds to remember his father’s number — like most people, Adam hadn’t seen a need to memorize it — but it came to him.

Adam dialed and heard the phone ring.

When Philip’s car glides to a stop behind a large white truck, a guard comes toward us with a handheld device.

“Just keep your brim down,” Philip says.

The guard circles the car, staring at the device in his hand. He pauses by the trunk before continuing his sweep.

“What is that?” I ask.

“A heartbeat monitor,” Philip replies. “It can actually sense a beating heart through walls.”

“So if anybody is hiding in the back or in the trunk...”

Philip nods. “We find them.”

“Thorough,” I say.

“There hasn’t been an escape at Briggs since I’ve been warden.”

I keep my face turned away until the guard is back in his booth. He nods at Philip. Philip gives him a friendly wave. I wait for the electronic gates to slide open. It seems to be taking an inordinately long time, but I imagine that’s more in my head than reality. I stare out at the twelve-foot-high fence of chain-link, topped with coiling circles of barbed wire. The grass along the perimeter is surprisingly lush and green, like something you might see on a golf course. On the other side of the grass, not far past the fence, the landscape becomes thick with trees.

I start breathing faster. I’m not sure why. I feel as though I’m hyperventilating and maybe I am.

I have to get out of here.

“Steady,” Philip says.

Then the phone rings.

It’s hooked up to the car, so the sound is jarringly loud. I look at the screen and it reads NO CALLER ID. I turn to Philip. His face registers confusion. He takes the phone off the cradle and puts it to his ear.

“Hello?”

Sounds like Adam. I can’t make out his words, but I hear panic in his tone. I close my eyes and will myself to stay calm. The gates start to slide open with a grunt, as though reluctant to move. The white truck is still in front of us.

“Damn,” Philip says to the person on the phone.

“What?” I ask.

Philip ignores me. “How much time do we have before—?”

The prison’s escape siren shatters the still air.

The siren is deafening. I look at Philip. His expression is understandably grim. The gate, which had been almost fully open, stops and reverses course. I can see the tower guard on the phone. He drops the receiver and picks up a rifle.

“Philip?”

“Point the gun at me, David.”

I don’t ask for clarification. I do as he says. Philip hits the accelerator. He swerves to the right and then speeds in front of the white truck. He is headed toward the closing gate. He tries to drive through the opening. No go. The gate is no longer open enough for us to get through. Philip noses the car in. He stomps the accelerator to the floor. Our tires spin. He doesn’t let up on the gas pedal. The gate gives way, just a little. Not enough.

The guard with the rifle bursts out of the tower.

“Keep the gun on me!” Philip shouts.

I do.

The guard with the rifle suddenly stops and points the weapon at the car.

Philip shifts the car into reverse. He backs up, the gates scraping the sides of his car. He puts it back in drive and rams the gates again. They budge, but not by much. Two more guards are rushing at us now, both armed with handguns. I watch them close in. The gun feels heavy in my hand.

The guards are almost on top of us now. The siren continues to blare.

I look at the gun in my hand. “Philip?”

“Hang on.”

The car leaps forward. There is a crunching sound. The gates open a bit more, the nose of the car jammed between them. Philip hits the gas pedal, stops, hits it again. The engine thuds and whirs.

The guards are yelling at us, but I can’t hear them over the siren.

The car begins to squeeze through the opening now. We are almost out, almost in the clear, but the gates are still closing, squeezing the car. It reminds me of that trash compactor scene in Star Wars and all the old TV shows where the heroes are trapped in a room with the walls closing in to crush them.

The first guard is at my car window. He’s shouting — I don’t know or care what. Our eyes actually meet. He starts to raise the weapon. I don’t see how I have a choice. I can’t go back. I can’t give up. My gun is pointed at Philip, but now I spin toward the guard.

Aim for the legs, I think.

Philip shouts. “Don’t!”

The guard has the gun in his hand, pointing it at me. Him or me. That’s how it is. I hesitate, but I really have no choice. I am about to fire when the car suddenly lunges forward, snapping my head back. The gates hold on to the car for another second, no more than that, and with one last scrape, we break free.

The guards run after us, but Philip keeps his foot on the gas. The car accelerates to full speed, hurling us down the road. I turn around. The guards stand there. They, along with Briggs Correctional Facility, grow smaller and dimmer until I can no longer see a trace of either.

But even then, I can still hear the siren.

Chapter 12

Rachel heard the siren too.

She was having breakfast at the Nesbitt Station Diner, an eatery inside two converted railcars with a menu only slightly shorter in word count than your average novel. Her favorite listing on the menu, listed under forty different ways of having a burger (beef, bison, chicken, turkey, elk, portobello mushroom, wild salmon, cod, black bean, veggie, plant-based, lamb, pork, olive, etc.) was the “My Wife Doesn’t Want Anything,” which was their way of supersizing your French fries order and throwing in two mozzarella sticks. The diner had a sign at the door saying OPEN 24 HOURS BUT NOT IN A ROW before stating their working hours, which went from five a.m. until two a.m. Monday through Saturday. Another sign read: BYOB BUT WE ENCOURAGE YOU TO SHARE WITH YOUR SERVER.

The Air Fryer Cheeseburger last night had been pretty good, but the draw of this place for Rachel was the excellent Wi-Fi. The Briggs Motor Lodge’s Wi-Fi was so bad she thought she heard a phone-modem shriek when she tried to access it. The Lodge, a word with too many meanings, also didn’t have a bar or restaurant, just a foyer by the front desk that featured free “Continental” breakfast, a truly upmarket term for a stale roll and a half-melted margarine packet.

The diner’s clock had all number 5s on it, with the words NO DRINKING UNTIL AFTER FIVE across the face. Still an hour until visiting hours — enough time to continue her research. That was why she had camped out here last night and again this morning, nursing coffee and ordering enough so as not to draw eye daggers for taking up a booth.

Her laptop had been humming all night, unearthing a mixed bag of information. On the negative side, she had not been able to find one Caucasian male between the ages of two and three anywhere in the country who had disappeared — and remained missing some five years later — that would fit the timeline of Matthew’s murder. Not one. Some boys that age had died. Some had even been kidnapped, usually in custody battles, and eventually found. Three had even vanished for as long as eight months before their bodies were located.

But so far, not one child who could fit the criteria remained unaccounted for, thus raising the most troublesome question: If the body wasn’t Matthew’s, whose was it?

Of course, it was still early. She would widen the search, try more months, farther away from the area, check other databases. Maybe the dead boy in Matthew’s bed — God, that sounded so crazy — had been younger or older or light-skinned Black or Eurasian or something else entirely. Rachel would be thorough. Before her scandal, she had been known as a ruthless researcher. Still, there was no other way to spin it: This “no body” news was a blow to any theory about Matthew being alive.

Matthew alive. Seriously, how crazy pants was that theory anyway?

The more positive news, if you could call any of this positive, involved the main witness against David, the “sweet old lady” (as the media had naturally dubbed her) Hilde Winslow. Locating the elderly widow should, in theory, have been no problem. When it first proved difficult, Rachel wondered whether the woman had passed away in the last five years. But there was no record of her dying. In fact, Rachel had only been able to find two people with that name. One of the Hildes was thirty years old and lived in Portland, Oregon. The other was a fourth grader in Crystal River, Florida.

Nope and double nope.

The name Hilde was derived from the more common name Hilda. No surprise there. The court documents from David’s case and all the pursuant media listed her as Hilde, but just to cover all the bases, Rachel tried Hilda Winslow. There were only two of them as well and neither fit the profile. Then she tried Hilde Winslow’s maiden name — women often go back to using that — but that too bore no fruit.

A dead end.

The siren — Rachel assumed that it was some sort of fire alarm — kept screeching.

Her phone buzzed. She checked the number and saw it was Tim Doherty, her old friend from her days at the Globe, calling her back. Tim had been one of the few to stick with her when the shit hit the fan. Not publicly, of course. That would have been career suicide. She didn’t want that for him or anyone else.

“I got it,” Tim said to her.

“The entire murder file?”

“The court documents and transcripts. There’s no way the cops are going to let me look at their murder book.”

“Did you get Hilde Winslow’s Social Security number?”

“Yes. Can I ask why you wanted it?”

“I need to find her.”

“Yeah, I figured that. Why not go the regular routes?”

“I did.”

“And you got nothing,” he said.

She could hear the lilt in Tim’s voice. “That’s right. Why? What did you get?”

“I took the liberty of running the Social Security number.”

“And?”

“Two months after your brother-in-law’s trial, Hilde Winslow changed her name to Harriet Winchester.”

Pay dirt, Rachel thought. “Whoa.”

“Yes,” he said. “She also sold her house and moved to an apartment on Twelfth Street in Manhattan.” He rattled off the address. “By the way, she turns eighty-one this week.”

“So why would a woman of her age change her name and move?” Rachel asked.

“Post-trial press?”

“Come again?”

“This murder was a big story,” Tim said.

“Yeah, but come on. Once her part was over there was no more scrutiny on her.”

The press was like the worst womanizer. Once it metaphorically bedded someone, it quickly grew bored and moved on to something new. A name change, while perhaps explainable, was extreme and curious.

“Fair,” he said. “Do you think she lied about your brother-in-law?”

“I don’t know.”

“Rachel?”

“Yes?”

“You got something big here, don’t you?”

“I think so.”

“Normally I would ask for a taste,” he said. “But you need it more than I do. You deserve another chance, and this world doesn’t like to give that to people anymore, so if you need anything else from me, you let me know, okay?”

She felt tears come to her eyes. “You’re the best, Tim.”

“I know, right? Talk soon.”

Tim hung up. Rachel wiped her eyes. She stared out the diner window, into the crowded parking lot, the siren still blaring in the distance. The world may eventually give Rachel another chance, but she wasn’t sure she deserved it. It had been two years since Catherine Tullo’s death at Rachel’s hands.

Catherine wouldn’t get another chance. Why should Rachel?

It had been the most important story of Rachel’s career. After an exhaustive eight-month investigation, the Globe’s Sunday magazine was going to feature her exposé of Lemhall University’s beloved president Spencer Shane for not only turning a blind eye over the past two decades to sexual assault, abuse, and misconduct by certain male professors but participating in a pattern of systemic abuse and cover-ups at one of the country’s elite institutions. It was a case so egregious yet so frustrating and slippery that Rachel grew obsessed in a way no journalist should. She lost perspective, not on the outrageousness of the crime and culture — there was no way you couldn’t be outraged about that — but on the frailty and decency of the victims.

Lemhall University, her alma mater, managed to get a lot of NDAs signed, so no one could or would go on record. While Rachel kept it from her editors, she herself had been pressured to sign one her freshman year after a disturbing incident at a Halloween party. She refused. The school mishandled her case.

Maybe that was where it started. She lost then. She wouldn’t lose again.

So she went too far.

In the end, the charges were too loaded for the Globe to publish because no one could slip past the NDAs. Rachel couldn’t believe it. She went to the local DA, but he didn’t have the appetite to take on such a popular figure and institution. So she went back to her former classmate Catherine Tullo and begged her to break her NDA. Catherine wanted to, that’s what she told Rachel, but she was afraid. She wouldn’t budge. So that was it. That was what was going to kill the entire story and allow an institution — an institution that had let Rachel’s own attacker skate — to remain unblemished.

Rachel could not allow that.

With no other alternatives available, Rachel went harder at Catherine Tullo: Do the right thing or get exposed anyway. If Catherine couldn’t put other victims first, then Rachel saw no reason to protect her. She would take the story online herself and reveal her sources. Catherine started to cry. Rachel didn’t budge. Half an hour later, Catherine saw the light. She didn’t need the money from the settlement. She didn’t care about the NDA. She would do the right thing. Catherine Tullo hugged her friend and sorority sister and told her that tomorrow she would give Rachel a longer interview and go on the record, and then that night, after Rachel left her apartment, Catherine Tullo filled a bath full of water and slit her wrists.

Now Catherine haunted her. She was here right now, sitting across the diner booth from her, smiling in that unsure way she always did, blinking as though awaiting a blow, until Rachel heard her waitress, a blue-haired diner special if ever she’d seen one, say to the customer at the table next to Rachel, “I haven’t heard that go off in, how long, Cal?”

The man she assumed was Cal said, “Oh, years now.”

“You think—?”

“Nah,” Cal said. “Briggs is probably just running a drill. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

Rachel froze.

“You say so,” the waitress said, but judging by the expression on her face, she wasn’t fully buying it.

Rachel leaned over and said, “Excuse me, I don’t mean to pry, but is that siren coming from Briggs Penitentiary?”

Cal and the waitress exchanged a glance. Then Cal nodded and gave her his most condescending smile. “I wouldn’t worry your pretty head over it. It’s probably just a drill.”

“A drill for what?” Rachel asked.

“An escape,” the waitress said. “They only blow that whistle when an inmate escapes.”

Her cell phone buzzed. Rachel stepped away and put the phone to her ear. “Hello?”

“I need your help,” David said.

Chapter 13

Three cop cars, all with flashing lights atop them, are on us now.

I feel numb. I am out of Briggs for the first time in five years. If they catch me, I will never get out again. Never. I know that. There is no second chance here. My fingers curl around the gun. The metal feels oddly warm and comforting.

The police cruisers spread out in a V formation.

I turn to Philip. “It’s over, isn’t it?”

“You willing to risk your life?”

“What life?”

He nods. “Point the damn gun at me, David. Keep it up where they can see it.”

I do so. The gun feels heavy now. My hand shakes. The adrenaline — from the fight with Sumner, from Curly’s attack, from this makeshift escape plan — seems to be ebbing away. Philip hits the accelerator. The police cruisers stay right with us.

“What now?” I ask.

“Wait.”

“For what?”

As though on cue, the car phone rings again. Philip’s face is a stern mask. Before he answers it, he says, “Remember you’re a desperate man. Act it.”

I nod.

Philip picks up the phone and says a shaky hello. A voice immediately says, “Your son is safe, Warden. He managed to untie himself and break the door down.”

“Who the hell am I talking to?” Philip asks. His voice is brusque and hostile.

There is a moment of hesitation on the other line. “I’m, uh... this is—”

Again Philip’s voice booms. “I asked who the hell this is.”

“I’m Detective Wayne Semsey—”

“Semsey, how old are you?”

“Sir?”

“I mean, have you always been an incompetent moron or is this a relatively new thing?”

“I don’t understand—”

Philip glances over at me. “I have a desperate inmate holding a gun against my ear. Can you appreciate that, Semsey?”

I press the gun against his ear.

“Uh, yes, sir.”

“So tell me, Semsey. Do you think the wisest course of action is to upset the inmate?”

“No—”

“Then why the hell are those cruisers riding up my ass?”

Philip gives me the smallest of nods. I take my cue. “Give me that!” I shout, grabbing the phone from him. I try to sound crazed, on edge. It doesn’t take much for me to get there. “I’m not in a chatty mood,” I scream, spitting out the words, trying to sound as menacing as possible, “so listen up. I’ll give you ten seconds. I won’t even count. Ten seconds. If I see a cop anywhere near us after that, I’m going to put a bullet in the warden’s head and drive myself. Do you hear what I’m saying?”

Philip adds, “Jesus, David, for God’s sake, you don’t want to do that.”

I worry he’s overselling it, but he’s not.

On the phone, I hear Semsey say, “Whoa whoa, David, let’s all slow down here a minute, okay?”

“Semsey?”

“What?”

“I’m serving a life sentence. I kill the warden, I become the most popular guy in Briggs. You understand me?”

“Of course, David. Of course. They’re dropping back right now. Look.”

I do. The squad cars are giving us distance.

“I don’t want them dropping back. I want them all the way gone.”

Semsey gives me the soothing voice. “Listen, David. Can I call you David? That’s okay, right?”

I fire the gun through the back window. Philip raises a surprised eyebrow. “The next one goes between the warden’s eyes.”

Philip gets fully into character: “Jesus, no. Semsey, listen to him!”

Semsey’s words turn into a panic sputter. “Okay, okay, hold up, David. They’re stopping. See? I promise. Look out the back window. Take a look. We can still make this right, David. No one has gotten hurt yet. Let’s talk it out, okay?”

“What’s your phone number?” I ask.

“What?”

“It says NO CALLER ID. I’m going to hang up now. I’ll call you back in five minutes with my demands. What’s your number?”

Semsey gives it to me.

“Okay, get paper and pen ready. I’ll call back.”

“I already have paper and pen, David. Why don’t you just tell me now? I’m sure we can work—”

“Keep back and nobody gets hurt,” I say. “If I even sense a cop car, this ends with a bullet in his brain.”

I hang up the phone and look over at Philip. “How long will that buy us?” I ask.

“No more than five minutes. They’re probably getting a copter airborne now. They’ll be able to keep surveillance on us from the air.”

“Any ideas?” I ask.

Philip thinks about it a moment. “There’s a big factory outlet center up ahead in a few miles. It has an underground garage. We’ll be out of sight for maybe ten seconds. You can jump out then without them seeing you. There’s a Hyatt attached to it. They used to have a taxi stand, but I don’t know if it’s still there with Ubers or whatever. From there, well, you’re on your own. It’s the best I can do. There’s a train and bus station a mile away, if you want to try that.”

I don’t like it. “When they see us go underground, won’t they know what’s up?”

“I don’t know, to be honest.”

I look behind me. I don’t see any cop cars, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any. I open the window and stick my head out. No sign of any helicopter. No copter sound yet either. I could call Semsey back and make more threats about staying away so that maybe they won’t see us going into the mall. But would that work? I don’t know. Police aren’t magicians. We think that when we watch them on TV, but we do have time. The helicopter isn’t in the air yet. If they were using long-range surveillance — telescopes, cameras, whatever — they take time to set up. The same with getting some kind of location lock on either Adam’s or Philip’s mobile phone.

I have time. But not a lot of it.

“How far out are we from that underground garage?” I ask.

“Maybe three, four minutes.”

An idea comes to me. It’s not a perfect idea by any stretch, but my father the beat cop, who worried about my obsessive need for perfection, used to quote Voltaire to me: “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” I’m not even sure this idea would qualify as good, but it’s all I got.

I still have the car window open. Now we both hear the sound of a copter.

“Shit,” Philip says.

“Give me your wallet, Philip.”

“You have a plan?”

“Keep heading for the underground garage. I’m going to get out there. I’ll have stolen your wallet. Tell them you only had like twenty dollars. Adam should say the same. They’ll put traces on your credit card, but I’ll use the cash.”

“Okay,” he says.

“I’m going to call Semsey back on your cell phone and start making crazy demands.”

“Then what?”

“We go into the underground garage while I’m talking to him. I’ll get out quickly, like you didn’t even stop. The only difference is, I’m going to keep your phone with me so I can keep talking to him.”

Philip nods, seeing where I’m going with this. “They’ll think you’re still in the car.”

“Right. You keep driving. The copter is above us, but they won’t be able to see me get out. If I keep talking, they may still think I’m with you. Drive as far away as you can. In exactly ten minutes, I’ll hang up. Find another underground area — is there another mall like this? Or some kind of office complex?”

“Why?”

“You drive though. Then you stall a few seconds. Pretend I made you stop there and that’s where I ran off.”

“Meanwhile you’ll be here,” Philip says.

“Exactly.”

“Then I pull out of the underground area and signal to them that you’re gone. I can’t call because you took my phone.”

“Right.”

“So they go searching for you there, not here.”

“Yes.”

Philip mulls it over. “Hell, it might work.”

“You think so?”

“No, not really.” He glances at me. “This distraction won’t last long, David.”

“I know.”

“Get on the first train or bus or whatever. You any good with the survivalist stuff?”

“Not really.”

“The woods would be a good place to hide. They’ll send dogs, but they can’t be everywhere. Don’t visit your father. I know you’ll want to, but they’ll have the place covered. Same with your ex-wife’s or sister-in-law’s. All relatives. You can’t rely on anyone close to you. They’ll be watched.”

I have no one close to me anymore, but I get his point.

“I’ll talk to your dad. I’ll tell him I believe you — that you didn’t do it.”

“Do you believe that?”

Philip lets out a deep breath as he makes a right at the exit sign for the Lamy Outlet Center. “Yeah, David, I do.”

“How bad is he, Philip?”

“Bad. But he’ll know the truth. I promise you that.”

I check behind me. Still no cop cars. Now or never. My pockets are stuffed — Adam’s phone, Adam’s wallet, Philip’s wallet, the cash they gave me.

“One more thing,” Philip says.

“What?”

“Leave the gun behind.”

“Why?”

“You plan on using it?”

“No, but—”

“Then leave it behind. If you’re armed, they’ll be much more likely to not bring you in alive.”

“I don’t want to be brought in alive,” I say. “And why would I leave the gun behind? Who’s going to buy that? They’ll know you were involved.”

“David...”

But there is no time to debate this anymore. I pick up the mobile phone and call Semsey’s number. He picks up immediately.

“I’m glad you called back, David. You guys okay?”

“We are both fine,” I say. “For now. But I need a way out of here. Some transportation, for starters.”

“Okay, David, sure.” Semsey spoke with the we’re-in-this-together-pal voice. He sounds calmer now, more in control. The five minutes have helped him. “We can try to arrange that.”

“Not try,” I snap.

We have reached the Lamy Outlet Center. Philip veers to the left. We start down toward the parking garage. I grab the car door handle and get ready.

“I want it done. No excuses.”

Philip adds for Semsey’s listening pleasure, “David, put down the gun. He’ll do what you want.”

“I need a helicopter,” I tell Semsey. “Fully fueled.”

Dialogue straight from an old TV show. But Semsey seems okay with it. He plays his role: “That might take a few hours, David.”

“Bullshit. You have a copter in the air. You think I’m stupid?”

“That’s not ours. It’s probably a traffic copter. Or maybe a commuter. You can’t expect us to shut down—”

“You’re lying.”

“Look, let’s stay calm.”

“I want that copter away from us. Now.”

“I have a guy calling the closest airports now, David.”

“And I want my own helicopter. With fuel and a pilot. And the pilot better be unarmed.”

Philip nods up ahead. I’m ready.

“Okay, David, no problem. But you have to give us a little time.”

Philip stops the car. I pull the handle, open the door, roll out. As soon as I hit the pavement, Philip drives off. It all happens in a matter of two, three seconds tops. I crouch down and hide behind a gray Hyundai as I say, “How much time?” to Semsey without missing a beat. “I don’t want to shoot the warden.”

“Nobody wants that.”

“But you’re forcing my hand. This is all bullshit. Maybe I’ll shoot him in the leg. Just so you know I’m serious.”

“No, David, look, we know you’re serious. That’s why we’ve been keeping our distance. Just be reasonable, okay? We can make this work.”

I dart between cars, heading toward the entrance to the mall. No suspicious cars have followed us in. No suspicious people are in the area. “Listen, Semsey, here is exactly what I want.”

I enter the lower lobby of the mall and take the up escalator.

I’m free. For now.

Chapter 14

Max — FBI Special Agent Max Bernstein — paced the warden’s reception area in a fury.

Max was always in constant motion. His mom used to say that he had “ants in his pants.” Teachers complained that he was disruptive because he never stopped squirming in his chair. One teacher, Mrs. Matthis in fourth grade, begged the principal to let her strap him to the back of his chair. Right now, as always when he entered a new space, Max paced the room like a dog getting used to his surroundings. He blinked a lot. His eyes darted everywhere except to the eyes of another human being. He chewed his fingernails. He looked disheveled in his oversized FBI windbreaker. He was short of stature with a thick steel-wool head of hair he could never quite comb into place on the very few times a year he tried. His constant yet inconsistent jittery movements had led to him being good-naturedly dubbed Twitch by his fellow federal officers. Of course, back in the day, when he’d first come out of the closet at a time when no other federal agents were following suit, the ever-creative homophobes had switched the moniker from Twitch to — ha, ha, ha — Bitch.

Feds can be funny.

“He got away,” Detective Semsey, the local cop who had unsuccessfully tried to handle this, told him.

“So we heard,” Max said.

They’d set up home base in Warden Philip Mackenzie’s reception area because the actual office was still a crime scene. A street map of Briggs County was hung on a wall to trace the path of the warden’s car with a yellow highlighter. Old-school idea, Max thought. He liked that. There was a laptop computer providing a feed from the helicopter’s camera. Semsey and his cohorts had watched it all go down. By the time Max and his partner, Special Agent Sarah Jablonski, arrived, it was all over.

There were seven other people in the reception area with Max, but the only one he’d known before five minutes ago was Sarah. Sarah Jablonski had been Max’s partner, his lieutenant, his right hand, his indispensable associate, whatever other term you need to understand that he adored her and needed her, for sixteen years. Sarah was a big redhead, a full six feet tall, broad at the shoulders, and she dwarfed Max, who was more than six inches shorter. Their size difference led to a somewhat comical appearance, something they used to their advantage.

Two of the other men in the room were federal marshals under his command. The other four were with the prison system or local police. Max sat down in front of the computer monitor. His right leg jackhammered in what would probably be diagnosed as restless legs syndrome if Max ever decided to look into it. Everyone in the room watched Max as he replayed the end of the video over and over.

“You got something, Max?” Sarah asked.

He didn’t reply. Sarah didn’t press it. They both understood what that meant.

Still staring at the screen, Max asked, “Who here from the prison is highest ranked?”

“I am,” a meaty man who’d sweated through his short-sleeve dress shirt said. “My name is—”

Max didn’t care about his name or rank. “We are going to need a few things pronto.”

“Like?”

“Like a list of any visitors Burroughs had in recent days.”

“Okay.”

“Any close family or friends. Cellmates he might have talked to or who’ve been released. He’s going to need to reach out to somebody for help. Let’s get eyes on them.”

“On it.”

Max rose from the chair and began pacing again. He gnawed on the nail of his index finger, not gently or casually, but like a Rottweiler breaking in a new toy. The others exchanged glances. Sarah was used to this.

“Is the warden back yet, Sarah?”

“He just arrived, Max.”

“We ready?”

“We ready,” she said.

Still pacing, Max gave a big nod. He stopped in front of the laptop and hit the play button again. On the tape, Warden Philip Mackenzie was stepping out of his car and waving his hands in the air toward the helicopter filming him. Max watched. Then he watched it again. Sarah stood over his shoulder.

“You want me to bring him in now, Max?”

“One more time, Sarah.”

Max started the video from the beginning. Periodically he would leap with the grace of a wounded gazelle from the computer screen to the map, trace the route with his gnawed-on index finger, go back to the computer screen. All the while Max fiddled with the dozen rubber bands — exactly a dozen, never eleven, never thirteen — he kept around his wrist.

“Semsey,” Max barked.

“Right here.”

“Give me the play-by-play of this ending.”

“Sir?”

“When did Burroughs get out of the car?”

“In the Wilmington Tunnel. You see here?” Semsey pointed on the map. “That’s where the warden’s car entered the tunnel.”

“You were talking to Burroughs?”

“Yes.”

“As they entered the tunnel?”

“He hung up right before that.”

“How long before that?”

“Uh, I’m not sure. Maybe a minute. I can check the exact time.”

“Do that later,” Max said, still staring at the computer screen. “How did the call end?”

“I was supposed to call him back when the copter was ready.”

“That’s what he said to you?”

“Yes.”

Max frowned at Sarah. Sarah shrugged. “Go on.”

“The rest, well, it’s all on the video,” Semsey said. “When the warden’s car enters the tunnel, we lose sight of them.”

They play that part on the computer screen.

“Burroughs knew that, right?” Max said.

“Knew...?”

“He mentioned there was a copter in the air, didn’t he?”

“Oh, yeah, I guess so. He made the copter, what, fifteen minutes earlier. He told us to get it away from him.”

“But you didn’t comply.”

“No. We just moved it farther away so he couldn’t see or hear it.”

“Okay, so they enter the tunnel,” Max prompts.

“They enter. Our copter waits on the other end because, well, we can’t see into the tunnel. The ride from one end to the other shouldn’t take more than a minute or two.”

“But it took longer,” Max says.

“The warden’s car didn’t emerge for over six minutes.”

Max presses the fast-forward button. He hits play again when the warden’s car exits the tunnel on the other end. Almost immediately, the car pulls to the shoulder. The warden gets out on the driver’s side and starts to wave furiously.

The end.

“So what do you think?” Max asked Semsey.

“About?”

“What happened with Burroughs.”

“Oh. Right. Well, we know now. The warden told us. Burroughs knew the copter couldn’t see him in the tunnel, so he made the warden stop in the middle of it where no one could see him. Then he carjacked another car. We have roadblocks set up.”

“Is there CCTV in the tunnel?”

“No. They have like a booth in there, but it’s rarely manned anymore. Budget cuts.”

“Uh-huh. Sarah?”

“Yeah, Max.”

“Where’s the warden’s son?”

“He’s by the infirmary with his father.”

“He okay?”

“Yeah, just procedure.”

“Please send the warden and his son in. I want everyone else out of the room.”

They cleared out. Five minutes later, Sarah opened the door, and Philip and Adam Mackenzie entered the room. Max did not glance in their direction. His eyes remained on the computer monitor.

“Tough day, huh, guys?”

“You can say that again,” Philip Mackenzie said. The warden stepped toward Max and stuck his hand out. Max pretended like he couldn’t see it. He bounced bumper-pool-style between the television screen and the map.

“How did he get the gun?” Max asked.

Philip Mackenzie cleared his throat. “He took mine when I wasn’t expecting it. You see, I had brought the inmate—”

“Inmate?”

“Yes.”

“Is that what you call him?”

Philip Mackenzie opened his mouth, but Max waved him off. “Never mind. Detective Semsey filled me in on all this. How he took your gun and forced your son here to give him his uniform and then he made you take him to his car at gunpoint. I got all that.” Max stopped, stared at the map, frowned.

“What I meant to ask is,” Max continued, “why are you lying to me?”

The silence filled the room. Philip Mackenzie stared at Max, but Max still had his back turned. He turned his furious glare toward Sarah. Sarah shrugged.

Philip Mackenzie’s voice boomed. “What did you say?”

Max sighed. “Do I really have to repeat myself? Sarah, didn’t I make myself clear?”

“Crystal, Max.”

“Who the hell do you think you’re talking to, Agent Bernstein?”

“A warden who just helped a convicted child killer escape from prison.”

Philip’s hands formed two fists. His face reddened. “Look at me, dammit.”

“Nah.”

He took a step closer. “When you call a man a liar, you better be ready to look him in the eye.”

Max shook his head. “I never bought that.”

“Bought what?”

“That look-me-in-the-eye stuff. Eye contact is so overrated. The best liars I know can look you straight in the eye for hours on end. It’s a waste of time and energy, maintaining eye contact. Am I right, Sarah?”

“As rain, Max.”

“Warden?” Max said.

“What?”

“This is going to be bad for you. Very bad. Nothing I can do about that. But for your silent son here, there may be a sliver of daylight. But if you keep lying, I’ll bury you both. We’ve done that before, haven’t we, Sarah?”

“We enjoy it, Max.”

“It’s kind of a turn-on,” Max said.

“I sometimes tape moments like this,” Sarah said, “and then I use it as foreplay.”

“Feel my nipples, Sarah,” Max said, jutting his chest out toward Sarah. “They’re hard as pebbles.”

“I don’t want to get written up by HR again, Max.”

“Ah, you used to be fun, Sarah.”

“Maybe later, Max. When we throw the cuffs on them.”

Philip Mackenzie pointed at Max, then Sarah. “You guys finished?”

“You crashed the car through the gate,” Max said.

“Yes.”

“I mean, you slammed your car through a half-closed gate at full speed.”

Philip grinned, trying to look confident. “Is that supposed to be proof of something?”

“Why did you hit the gas with such enthusiasm?”

“Because a desperate inmate was pointing a gun in my face.”

“Hear that, Sarah?”

“I’m standing right here, Max.”

“Big Phil was scared.”

“Who wouldn’t be?” Mackenzie countered. “The inmate had a gun.”

“Your gun.”

“Yes.”

“The one that your secretary says you never wear and never keep loaded.”

“She’s wrong. I keep it holstered under my jacket, so people don’t see.”

“So discreet,” Sarah said.

“Yet,” Max continued, “Burroughs managed not only to see it, but to pull it free and threaten you both with it.”

“He caught us off guard,” Philip said.

“You sound incompetent.”

“I made a mistake. I let the inmate get too close.”

Max smiled at Sarah. Sarah shrugged.

“You also keep calling him inmate,” Max said.

“That’s what he is.”

“Yeah, but you know him, right? He’s David to you, no? You and his father are old buddies. Your son here — the so-far-silent Adam — grew up with him, am I right?”

A flash of surprise hit the warden’s face, but he recovered fast. “That’s true,” Mackenzie said, standing up a little straighter. “I’m not denying it.”

“So cooperative,” Sarah said.

“Isn’t he though?”

“And that’s why—” Philip began.

“Wait, don’t tell me. That’s why Burroughs was able to get close enough to get a gun your secretary swears you never wear—”

“Or load,” Sarah added.

“Or load. Thanks, Sarah. Yet somehow Burroughs was still able to reach into your jacket, unsnap your holster, and pull the loaded gun free while the two of you stood and did nothing. That pretty much it, Warden?”

Adam spoke for the first time. “That’s exactly what happened.”

“Whoa, it speaks, Sarah.”

“Maybe he shouldn’t, Max.”

“Agree. Let me ask you another question, Warden, if you don’t mind. Why did you visit David Burroughs’s father yesterday?”

Philip Mackenzie looked stunned.

“Sarah, do you want to fill the warden in?”

“Sure, Max.” She turned toward Philip. “You took the eight-fifteen flight on American Eagle to Boston yesterday morning. Flight three-oh-two, in case you’re interested.”

Silence.

“I can see the gears a-whirring in his head, Sarah.”

“Can you, Max?”

Max nodded. “He’s wondering: Should I admit I visited my old buddy Lenny Burroughs — or should I claim I was in Boston for another reason? He wants to do the latter, of course, but the problem is — and you know this, Warden — if you lie about it, you have to wonder if Sarah here will be able to track down the Uber or taxi you took from Logan to the Burroughses’ house in Revere.”

“Or vice versa, Max,” Sarah added.

“Right, Sarah, or vice versa. The taxi you took back to the airport. And before you answer, let me just warn you: Sarah is damn good.”

“Thanks, Max.”

“No, Sarah, I mean it. You’re the best.”

“You’re making me blush, Max.”

“It looks good on you, Sarah.” Max shrugged his shoulders and turned toward the Mackenzies. “It’s a tough choice, Warden. I don’t know what I’d do.”

Philip cleared his throat. “I was in Boston visiting a sick friend. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

Max took out his wallet and smiled. “Dang, Sarah, you were right.”

She put out her palm. “Five bucks.”

“I only have a ten.”

“I’ll give you change later.”

Max handed her a ten-dollar bill.

Philip Mackenzie plowed ahead. “You’re right, of course. I’m close to David. And he’s been acting irrationally lately. So yes, I wanted to speak to his father about it. Like you said, Lenny and I, we go way back—”

“Wait, let me guess.” Max held up his hand. “You brought your son here today for that very reason. Because Adam and David were close, and David was acting so irrationally.”

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

Max grinned and held out his palm. Sarah frowned and handed him back the ten-dollar bill.

“Do you two think you’re funny?” Philip snapped.

“We’re not called the FBI Desi and Lucy for nothing, are we, Sarah?”

“Mostly we’re called that because I’m a redhead, Max, not because we’re funny.”

Max frowned. “Seriously, Sarah? But I’ve been working on a modern rendition of ‘Babalu.’”

There was a knock on the door. The meaty prison executive and Semsey stepped into the room. The executive said, “David Burroughs had only one visitor during his entire incarceration. His sister-in-law. Her name is Rachel Anderson. She was here yesterday and the day before.”

“Wait, Burroughs’s only visitor came yesterday and the day before?” Max put his hand to his chest. “Gasp. Oh. Gasp. Another coincidence, Sarah.”

“The world is full of them, Max.”

“It’s full of something, Sarah. What say you, Warden?”

This time, Philip Mackenzie stayed quiet.

Max turned back to the meaty guy. “Do you know where the sister-in-law is staying?”

“Probably the Briggs Motor Lodge. The majority of our visitors stay there.”

Max looked toward Semsey. Semsey said, “I’m on it.”

Meaty Exec added, “She might also have stayed at the Hyatt by the factory outlets.”

“Whoa.”

Max’s head spun around like someone had pulled it on a string. He did his jitterbug step back to the map. The room fell silent. Max studied the route. Then he jumped back to the computer monitor.

“Bingo, Sarah.”

“What, Max?”

“Semsey?”

The detective stepped forward. “I’m right here.”

“You said Burroughs was on the phone call right before they entered the tunnel, right?”

“Yes.”

“And Burroughs initiated that call?”

“Yes. He asked for five minutes and called me back.”

“What time was that? Exactly? Check your phone.”

“Eight fifty.”

“So the car would have been...” Max found it. “Here. On Green Street. Which would have been right before they hit the mall’s underground parking lot.” He turned to Philip Mackenzie. “Why did you drive through that underground garage, Warden?”

Philip glared at him. “Because the inmate told me to. At gunpoint.”

Max leapt back toward the map. He pointed at the Lamy Outlet Center and traced over the nearby vicinity. “Sarah, you see what I’m seeing?”

“The train station, Max.”

Max nodded. “Semsey?”

“What?”

“Stop the trains. And if any pulled out after eight fifty, I want them boarded. Let’s get every cop we can over to that mall.”

“Roger that.”

Chapter 15

At the Payne Museum of Art in Newport, Rhode Island, Gertrude Payne, the eighty-two-year-old matriarch of the New England branch of the Payne family fortune, watched her grandson Hayden take to the podium. Hayden was thirty-seven years old and while most expected him to have a genteel or patrician bearing, he looked more like his great-great-great-grandfather Randall Payne, the gritty man who founded Payne Kentucky Bourbon in 1868, thus creating the Payne family dynasty.

“On behalf of my family,” Hayden began, “especially my grandmother Pixie...”

Gertrude was Pixie. That was the nickname given to her by her own father, though no one really understood why. Hayden turned and smiled at her. She smiled back.

Hayden continued: “...we are thrilled to see so many of you at our annual fundraising luncheon. All proceeds from today’s event will go into the ‘Paint with Payne’ art development charity, which will continue to provide classes and materials for underserved youth in the Providence area. Thank you so much for your generosity.”

The polite applause echoed in the marble ballroom of Payne House on Ochre Point Avenue. The mansion had been built in 1892 and overlooked the Atlantic Ocean. In 1968, not long after Gertrude had married into the family, she had spearheaded the idea of creating an art museum and selling the home to the preservation society. Payne House was indeed beautiful and majestic, but it was also drafty and cold in both the literal and figurative sense. Most believe that these mansions are donated so that others may enjoy them. That only happens when it is financially beneficial for the family. Most of the famous tourist mansions, like the Breakers or the Marble House or, as here, the Payne House, are purchased by preservation societies at a profit for the wealthy owners.

There is, Pixie knew, always an angle when you’re rich.

“I know that this year holds extra excitement,” Hayden continued, “and as promised, after we finish this delicious lunch provided by our local caterer, the divine Hans Laaspere...”

A smattering of applause.

“...we will provide you, our prime benefactors, a private tour of the museum and, of course, the highlight, the reason most of you are here today, a special premiere viewing of an infamous painting not seen in public for over two decades, Johannes Vermeer’s The Girl at the Piano.”

Cue the oohs and aahs.

The Vermeer in question had been stolen nearly a quarter century ago from Gertrude’s cousins on the Lockwood side of the family and had only recently been discovered at a bizarre murder scene on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The painting, which measured only a foot and a half high, had already been an invaluable masterpiece, but then when you add notoriety into the mix — art heist, murder, domestic terrorism — The Girl at the Piano was considered one of the most valuable works of art in the entire world. Now that it had finally been recovered, Gertrude’s cousin Win felt that the painting should not languish in a dingy parlor at Lockwood Manor but rather travel the world and be enjoyed by thousands if not millions. The stolen Vermeer was about to start making the rounds of museums around the world with its opening one-month exhibition right here in Newport, Rhode Island.

Getting the Vermeer first had been an immense coup. The tickets for today’s luncheon had started at fifty thousand dollars per person. Not that the money mattered. Not truly. The Payne family was worth billions, but philanthropy amongst the well-to-do had always been about social climbing, with perhaps a smidgeon of guilt thrown into the mix. It was an excuse to socialize and throw a party, because to be this obscenely wealthy and simply have a party would be too gauche, too tasteless, too showy — ergo you attached a charity as cover, if you will. It was all pish, Gertrude knew. The wealthy in the room could have just written a check to support the Payne charities for underserved youth. None would ever miss the money. Not only doesn’t anyone “give until it hurts” — they don’t even give until they feel it in the slightest. Gertrude understood that no one voluntarily shrinks or lessens their lot. Oh, sure, we may all claim to want better for those less fortunate than ourselves — we may even mean it — but we all want that without any kind of sacrifice on our part. This, Gertrude had surmised years ago, was why the rich could seem so awful.

Hayden continued: “The Payne Foundation’s programs for the underserved have helped tens of thousands of needy children since our patron saint Bennett Payne created the family’s first orphanage for boys in 1938.”

He gestured toward the large oil portrait of Bennett Payne.

Ah, the wonderful, revered Uncle Bennett, Gertrude thought. Few knew that Uncle Bennett had been a pedophile in the days before such a word seemed to exist. “Generous” Bennett chose to work with poor youth for one simple reason — it gave him unfettered access to them. Uncle Bennett kept his predilections a secret, of course, but like most human beings, he also justified his actions. He convinced himself that in sum, he was doing good. These children, especially the extremely poor, would have died without the Paynes’ intervention. Bennett fed them, clothed them, educated them — and wasn’t sex an act that pleased both participants? What was the crime here? Uncle Bennett traveled the world, often with like-minded missionaries, so he could have sex — now, they correctly called it rape, didn’t they? — with a wide variety of children.

For those wondering about karma, for those wondering whether Bennett Payne, who never knew hunger or thirst or discomfort, who never worked a real job or knew anything but great wealth, eventually paid for his misdeeds, the answer, alas, is no. Uncle Bennett died of natural causes in his sleep at the ripe old age of ninety-three. He was never found out. To this day, his portrait hangs in every Payne Foundation charitable institute.

The irony here is that the Payne Foundation now does a fair amount of good. What started as a vehicle for Uncle Bennett to rape children now truly helps those less fortunate. So how do you reconcile that? Gertrude knew of so many causes that started with the best of intentions before devolving into something awful and corrupt. Eric Hoffer once said, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” So true. But what happens when it works the other way around?

All men, Gertrude believed, tended to have some sociopathic qualities coupled with a wonderful ability to self-justify any behavior. Yes, she was generalizing, and yes, from the back of the room, she is sure someone is yelling, “Not all men.” But close to. Her father had been an alcoholic who beat her mother and demanded obedience. He justified it via biblical verses. Gertrude’s own husband, George, had been a serial philanderer. He justified it via the scientific argument that monogamy was “unnatural.” And Uncle Bennett, well, that had been covered up. He wasn’t the only one in the family with that particular predilection. Gertrude had only one son, Hayden’s father, Wade, who in her mind was the exception that proved the rule, but perhaps she’d seen her son through “Mommy glasses,” as today’s youth like to call it. Wade had also died at the age of thirty-one, in a private plane crash with Hayden’s mother as they headed to Vail on a ski trip, perhaps before whatever sociopathy ran in his loins could reveal itself. The death had crushed her. The orphaned Hayden was only four years old at the time. It was left to Gertrude to raise Hayden, and she had done a poor job. She had not looked out for him. And he had suffered for it.

Her phone buzzed. Gertrude found modern technology fascinating. Of course, like too many things in the present day, it led to obsessions, but the idea that you could communicate with anyone at any time or see pages from all the libraries in all the world with a small device she kept in her handbag — how do people not appreciate such things?

“So once again,” Hayden finished up, “I want to thank you all for supporting this wonderful cause. We will visit the stolen Vermeer in fifteen minutes. Enjoy your dessert.”

As Hayden smiled and waved, Gertrude sneaked a glance at her phone. When she read the message, her heart dropped. Hayden wended his way back to her table. When he saw her face, he said, “Are you okay, Pixie?”

She put a hand on the table to steady herself. “Walk with me,” she said.

“But we—”

“Take my arm, please. Now.”

“Of course, Pixie.”

They both kept the smiles on their faces as they made their way out of the grand ballroom. One wall of the ballroom was mirrored. Gertrude spotted herself right before they exited and wondered who that old woman in the mirror was.

“What is it, Pixie?”

She handed Hayden the phone. His eyes widened as he read it. “Escaped?”

“So it seems.”

Gertrude looked toward the door opening. Stephano, the family’s longtime security head, was always in sight. He met her eye, and she gave him a head tilt that indicated they would need to talk later. Stephano nodded back and kept his distance.

“Maybe it’s a sign,” Hayden said.

She turned her attention back to her grandson. “A sign?”

“I don’t mean strictly in a religious way, though maybe that too. More like an opportunity.”

He could be so foolish. “It’s not an opportunity, Hayden,” she said through clenched teeth. “They’ll probably catch him within a day.”

“Should we help him?”

Gertrude just stared at her grandson until he turned away. Then she said, “I think we should leave now.”

He gestured back toward the ballroom. “But Pixie, the patrons—”

“—only want to see the Vermeer,” she said. “They don’t care whether we are here or not. Where is Theo?”

“He wanted to see the painting.”

She passed the two security guards and entered what had once been the family music room, where the Vermeer now hung. A young boy stood in front of it, his back turned toward her.

“Theo,” she said to the boy, “are you ready to go?”

“Yes, Pixie,” Theo said. “I’m ready.”

When the eight-year-old turned toward her, Gertrude’s gaze couldn’t help but land on the telltale port stain on the boy’s cheek. She swallowed hard and stuck her hand out for him to take.

“Come along then.”