I Will Find You

Chapter 16

Max and Sarah took their seats at the interrogation table. Rachel Anderson sat alone across from them. They introduced themselves and asked her yet again whether she wanted counsel present. Rachel waived the right.

“Let me begin,” Max said, “by thanking you for talking to us.”

“Of course,” Rachel said, all wide-eyed and innocent. “But can you tell me what this is about?”

Max glanced at Sarah. Sarah rolled her eyes.

They were in the FBI building in Newark, New Jersey, some five hundred miles from Briggs Penitentiary. Their BOLO — Be On the Look Out — had finally been answered by the Port Authority police when Rachel Anderson’s New Jersey license plate had been picked up on camera crossing the George Washington Bridge traveling west from New York to New Jersey. After calling for backup — the BOLO had stated that escaped convict David Burroughs was armed and dangerous — New Jersey state troopers pulled over Rachel Anderson’s white Toyota Camry on Route 4 in Teaneck, New Jersey.

David Burroughs was not in the vehicle.

Max decided to go the direct route. “Where is your former brother-in-law, Ms. Anderson?”

Rachel’s mouth dropped open. “David?”

“Yes. David Burroughs.”

“David’s in prison,” Rachel said. “He’s serving time at Briggs Penitentiary up in Maine.”

Max and Sarah just stared at her.

Sarah sighed. “Really, Rachel?”

“What?”

“That’s the route you’re going to take with this?”

Max put his hand on Sarah’s arm. “I realize that you’ve waived your right to counsel,” he said to Rachel, “but let me offer you some reassurances.”

“Reassurances?” Rachel repeated.

Max silenced Sarah’s next rejoinder with a gentle squeeze. “We will give you full immunity right now provided you tell us the truth.”

Rachel looked at Sarah, then back to Max. “I don’t understand what you mean.”

Sarah shook her head. “My God.”

“Then let me clarify what I mean by ‘full immunity.’ Suppose — shot in the dark here — you helped David Burroughs escape from prison. If you tell us where he is or what role you played in this very serious federal crime—”

“—a crime that can put you behind bars for many, many years,” Sarah added.

“Right,” Max said, “Thank you. You won’t be charged. You’ll just walk.”

“Wait,” Rachel said, putting her hand to her chest. “David escaped?”

Sarah sat back and plucked at her own lower lip. She studied Rachel and then gestured toward her. “What do you think, Max?”

“Really fine performance, Sarah. You?”

“I don’t know, Max. Don’t you think maybe she’s overselling her shock here?”

“Yeah, a little, I guess,” Max conceded. “Her ‘wait’ before the ‘David escaped’ might have been gilding the lily.”

“And the hand-to-her-chest move. It was too much. If she had pearls, she probably would have clutched them.”

“Still,” Max said. “I would say there has to be Oscar buzz for this performance.”

“A nomination maybe,” Sarah said. “But not a win.”

They both offered up sarcastic golf claps in Rachel’s direction. Rachel stayed quiet.

“When David Burroughs escaped,” Max continued, “we sent a man over to your motel.”

“Person, Max,” Sarah said.

“What?”

“You said you sent a ‘man’ over. That’s a bit sexist, don’t you think?”

“I do. I apologize. Where was I?”

“Sent a law enforcement officer to her motel.”

“Right.” Max turned to Rachel. “You weren’t there, of course. The front desk informed us that you were most likely at the Nesbitt Station Diner. I guess you’d complained about the motel’s Wi-Fi.”

“So?” Rachel countered. “Is it a crime to go to a diner?”

“The waitress told us that not long after the escape alarm sounded, you hurried out of the diner.”

“And right before you hurried out,” Sarah said, “you received a phone call.”

Rachel shrugged. “I may have. So?”

“Do you remember who that call was from?” Max asked.

“I don’t, no. I might not have picked up. I don’t a lot of the time.”

“The waitress saw you answer it.”

“It was probably spam then. I get a lot of those.”

“This wasn’t spam,” Sarah said. “It was from David Burroughs.”

Rachel frowned. “David is a federal prisoner. How would he have a phone?”

“Wow,” Sarah said, throwing up her hands in mock surrender.

“He stole it during his escape,” Max said. Of course, Max didn’t really believe that the phone Burroughs used had been genuinely stolen. He figured that both Philip and Adam Mackenzie had given David their phones as part of the escape plot, but there was no reason to offer that up now. “The caller ID would have shown the name Adam Mackenzie. Do you know who that is?”

“Sure. Adam grew up with David.”

“Do you recall receiving that call from Adam’s phone?”

“I don’t, sorry,” Rachel offered with a faux apologetic smile. “Maybe it went into voicemail. Do you want me to check?”

Max and Sarah exchanged another glance. This was not going to be easy.

“After you left the diner,” Max said, “where did you go?”

“I live here in New Jersey.”

“Yes, we know.”

“Well, that’s where I was heading. Home. I was almost there when a bunch of state troopers pulled me over with guns drawn. Scared the hell out of me. Then I was brought here.”

“So you intended to drive straight home from the diner?” Max asked.

“Yes.”

“But you didn’t check out of the motel. Your clothes are still in your room. Your personal items.”

“I planned on coming back.”

“What do you mean?”

“The room is cheaper by the week,” Rachel said, “so I decided to just hold on to it. I came home to run some errands, check on my place, that kind of thing. I planned on coming back up to Maine on Thursday.” She sat forward. “I’m very confused, Detective.”

“Special Agent,” Sarah corrected. “He is Special Agent Max Bernstein of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I’m Special Agent Sarah Jablonski.”

Rachel met her eye and held it. “Special Agent. You must be very proud.”

Max didn’t want to get sidetracked. “After you left the diner, did you drive straight home, Ms. Anderson?”

Rachel sat back. “I may have stopped along the way.”

“Eight minutes after David Burroughs called you, your Toyota Camry was picked up on CCTV near the Lamy Outlet Center.”

“Right. I thought about doing some shopping.” She turned to Sarah. “They have a Tory Burch store.”

“Did you?” Max pressed.

“Did I what?”

“Shop.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I changed my mind.”

“So you drove there and just left.”

“Something like that.”

“And by stunning coincidence,” Sarah continued, “the Lamy Outlet Center was where David Burroughs hid after his escape.”

“I don’t know anything about that. Did David really escape?”

Sarah ignored the question. “We got a location tap for your iPhone from your cell provider. They pinged your phone, but guess what?”

Rachel shrugged.

“Your phone had been powered all the way down,” Sarah said, “so we couldn’t track it.”

“Is that supposed to be incriminating?”

“It is, yes.”

“Why? I turn my phone off when I’m driving sometimes. I don’t like to be disturbed.”

“No, Rachel, you do not do that,” Sarah snapped. “According to your cell provider, your phone hasn’t been powered off in the past four months. We also know that you turned it off after driving ten miles north of the Lamy Outlet Center, which is in the opposite direction of New Jersey.”

Rachel gave another no-big-deal shrug. “I wanted to see a few sights before heading home.”

“Oh, that sounds reasonable,” Sarah said in pure deadpan. “Your ex-brother-in-law escapes from prison. Soon after, the phone he stole calls yours. You react by driving to the outlet center where he’s hiding. Then for some reason, even though you claim you were heading home without checking out of your motel, you start driving in the opposite direction and suddenly turn off your mobile phone for the first time since updating your software four months ago. That sound about right?”

Rachel smiled at Sarah and then turned her attention to Max. “Am I under arrest, Special Agent Bernstein?”

“Not as long as you’re cooperating,” Max said.

“So if I choose to get up and leave?”

“Let’s not do hypotheticals, Ms. Anderson, if that’s okay,” Max said. “We also know that you kept driving north after turning off your phone. Approximately thirty miles further up I-95, David Burroughs, using a stolen credit card, purchased survival gear of various sorts — tent, pocketknives, sleeping bag, stuff like that — from the Katahdin General Store. The store owner gave us a positive ID on him. Any comment?”

Rachel shook her head. “I don’t know anything about that.”

“It’s all parkland and woods up in that area. Miles and miles of it. Someone could get dropped off and never be seen again. They could slowly make their way to the Canadian border.”

Rachel Anderson said nothing.

Sarah decided to switch gears. Their hope was to keep her off balance and surprised by the wealth of information they’d been able to learn in just a few hours. “Why did you choose to visit David Burroughs now?”

“David was my brother-in-law. We used to be close.”

“But this was your very first trip to Briggs.”

“Yes.”

“He’d been there, what, four, five years?”

“Something like that.”

Sarah spread her hands. “So why now, Rachel?”

“I don’t know. I just felt... I felt like it was time.”

“Do you believe David Burroughs killed your nephew?”

Rachel’s gaze slid to the far left. “I do, yes.”

“You don’t seem that sure.”

“Oh, I’m sure. But I don’t think he meant it. I think he had some kind of blackout or breakdown.”

“So you don’t blame him?” Max said.

“Not really, no.”

“What did you two talk about during your visit?”

“I just asked David how he was.”

“And how was he?”

“Still broken. David didn’t want visitors. He just wanted to be left alone.”

“Yet you came back the next day.”

“Yes.”

“And planned to return again.”

“David and I were close. Before all this, I mean. I... I also confided in him.”

“Do you mind telling us what about?”

“It doesn’t really matter. I’ve had some setbacks of my own.”

“And you thought, what, he’d be a sympathetic ear?”

Rachel’s voice was soft. “Something like that.”

“And by setbacks,” Sarah said, “do you mean your recent divorce?”

“Or,” Max added, “the scandal that ended your career?”

Rachel stayed very still.

Max leaned closer. No reason for subtlety anymore. “It’s all unraveling, Ms. Anderson. You know that, don’t you?”

She didn’t take the bait.

“Look how much Sarah dug up in just a few hours. We are going to catch him. There’s no question about it. If he’s lucky, we will catch him alive, but David Burroughs is a convicted child killer who stole a firearm from a warden, so...” Max shrugged to indicate that this was out of his control. “As soon as we do catch him — probably in the next few hours — Sarah and I will turn all our efforts toward building a case against you for aiding and abetting.”

“You’ll serve a very long time,” Sarah said.

“This is not an idle threat on our part,” Max said.

“Not a threat,” Sarah repeated, giving Rachel the dagger eyes again. “I can’t wait to put you behind bars.”

“Unless, Sarah.”

“Unless what, Max?”

“Unless she cooperates. Here and now.”

Sarah frowned. “I don’t think we need her, Max.”

“You’re probably right, but maybe Ms. Anderson didn’t know what she was getting involved in. Maybe she didn’t understand what she was doing.”

“Oh, she understood.”

“But still — we agreed, Sarah. If Rachel tells us what she knows now, we give her full immunity.”

“That was before, Max. Now I want her to serve time for jerking us around like this.”

“You have a point, Sarah.”

Rachel stayed silent.

“This is your last chance,” Max said. “Your ‘get out of jail free’ card expires in three minutes.”

“Then we arrest her, Max?”

“Then we arrest her, Sarah.”

Sarah folded her hands and put them on the table. “So what do you say, Rachel?”

“I changed my mind,” Rachel said. “I want my lawyer.”

Chapter 17

“Okay, Sarah, give me the most likely working theory,” Max said.

Max and Sarah headed toward Newark Airport to catch a flight back up to Briggs Penitentiary. It had turned out that the attorney Rachel Anderson called was the notorious Hester Crimstein, who promptly got her bail and released.

“Stop chewing your nails, Max.”

“Let me be, Sarah, okay?”

“It’s gross.”

“It helps me think.”

Sarah sighed.

“So what’s our working theory?”

“Burroughs escapes with the help of Philip and Adam Mackenzie,” Sarah began.

“We are sure the Mackenzies are in it?”

“I think we are.”

“I think we are too,” Max said. “Continue.”

“Burroughs gets out of the warden’s car in the underground parking garage at the outlet center. He calls Rachel Anderson, who is waiting for his call at the Nesbitt Station Diner. Rachel drives over to the outlet center. With me so far, Max?”

“Yep. Keep going.”

“She meets up with Burroughs. Burroughs gets in her car.”

“And then?”

“They head up north. We have that last phone ping.”

“Which is odd.”

“How so?”

“Why turn the phone off then?” Max asked. “Why not earlier?”

“If she turns it off at the outlet center, we would know that’s where she went.”

Max frowned. “Yeah, I guess, maybe.”

“But?”

Max shook it off. “Go on.”

“They keep driving to that general store—”

“The Katahdin General Store,” Max added, “in Millinocket.”

“Right, where he buys the survival gear. Based on the traffic patterns and timeline I put together, I’d say she had time to drive him farther north for another half hour or so. Either way, Rachel drops Burroughs off in some heavily wooded area. We have copters and dogs covering it, but the area is black-hole vast.”

“And then?”

Sarah shrugged. “And then that’s it.”

“So what’s Burroughs’s plan now?”

“I’m not sure, Max. Maybe he plans to hide in the national parks. Wait us out. Maybe he plans to sneak across the border into Canada.”

Max worked the fingernail hard.

“You don’t buy it,” Sarah said.

“I don’t buy it.”

“Tell me why.”

“Too many holes. Burroughs is a city kid. Does he have any survivalist experience?”

“Maybe. Or maybe he thinks, how hard could it be? Maybe he thinks he has no choice.”

“It’s not adding up, Sarah.”

“What’s not adding up, Max?”

“Let’s start at the top: Was this escape planned out in advance?”

“Had to be.”

“If so, wow, it’s a pretty wacky plan.”

“I don’t know,” Sarah said. “I think it was pretty ingenious.”

“How so?”

“It’s so simple. Burroughs just grabs the gun and walks out with Mackenzie. No tunnels to dig. No trucks to hijack or garbage cans to hide in. None of that. If that guard... what was his name again?”

“Weston. Ted Weston.”

“Right. If Weston doesn’t look out the window at just the right time — if he doesn’t spot the warden and Burroughs getting into the car — they’re home free. No one would have reported Burroughs missing for hours.”

Max thought about it. “So let’s follow that trail, shall we, Sarah?”

“We shall, Max.”

“When it all went wrong — when Weston sounded the alarm — your theory is that they were then forced to improvise.”

“Exactly,” Sarah said.

Max considered that. “That would explain Burroughs’s call to Rachel when she was at the diner. If Rachel was in on it from the get-go, he wouldn’t have had to make that call. She’d have already been in place to pick him up.”

“Interesting,” Sarah said. “Are we now theorizing that Rachel Anderson wasn’t part of the original breakout plan?”

“I don’t know.”

“But it isn’t a coincidence. Her visiting Burroughs on the day he breaks out.”

“Not a coincidence,” Max agreed. He started working on a fresh hangnail. “But, Sarah?”

“What, Max?”

“We are still missing something. Something pretty big.”

Chapter 18

I stand on Twelfth Street in New York City and eat the most wonderful slice of pepperoni pizza ever created, from a place called Zazzy’s.

I am free.

I don’t think I believe it yet. Do you know that feeling when a dream gets weird — good weird, in this case — and suddenly, right in the middle of your nocturnal voyage, you realize that you may indeed be asleep, dreaming, and you fear you’re going to wake up and so you try desperately to stay asleep, clinging tightly to the images in your head, even as they fade away? That is what I’ve been experiencing for the past few hours. I am terrified that soon my eyes will open, and I will be back in Briggs instead of standing on this urine-scented (a smell I welcome because you supposedly don’t have scents in your dream) city street.

I stand across the street from where Harriet Winchester aka Hilde Winslow now resides.

I escaped today. It boggles my mind. Less than twenty-four hours ago, a prison guard at Briggs tried to murder me. Then, when it seemed that I, the victim, would be blamed for the attack, Philip and Adam broke me out. The crazy events of the day — all in this same day that is still ongoing — come hurtling toward me. I try to volley them away and focus on the task at hand.

Hilde Winslow had lied on the stand and helped convict me. The answer to why is my first step in rescuing my son.

Rescuing my son.

Every time I think about that phrase, I need to bite down and fight back the tears and remind myself of what’s at stake. Before Rachel’s visit, my son was dead, murdered, perhaps even by my hands. Now I believed the total opposite: Matthew is alive, and I’d been set up. Why, how — I had no idea. One step at a time.

The first step is Hilde Winslow.

After I rolled out of Philip’s car at that outlet mall, I called Rachel to pick me up. She was at a diner. I explained to her where to go and when to be there. Meanwhile I headed into the employee parking lot. The stores were just opening, so most employees were beginning their shifts. That gave me time. Rachel, I knew, was from New Jersey. When the cops put an APB on her car, that’s what they would be focused on — New Jersey license plates in Maine. I found a beat-up Honda Civic with screws loose enough to take off both license plates. Would the owner notice? Probably not for a while. Most people don’t check to make sure their license plates are in place before they drive. But even so, even if Mr./Mrs. Beat-Up Honda noticed, it would be hours from now after their shift. We would have the head start we needed.

Rachel had wisely done as I asked — maxed out all her credit cards at ATM machines. She used three credit cards, two with an $800 maximum, one with $600. Along with the money the Mackenzies had given me, I was financially flush enough to last a little while anyway. The police would at some point figure out where Philip had really dropped me off. Philip’s story, whatever he concocted, wouldn’t hold water for more than a day or two.

Once Rachel arrived at the back of the outlet mall’s parking lot where I was hiding, I hopped in and told her to just keep driving. Two miles later, we spotted a closed-down restaurant. I told Rachel to pull in behind it. When we were out of sight, I quickly switched out the license plates, so that her white Toyota Camry, one of the most common cars in the world, now had Maine license plates.

“What now?” Rachel asked me.

I knew the manhunt would be massive and immediate, but I also knew that law enforcement is not all-consuming or all-encompassing. The key to any plan was to have a goal. I had but one: Find my son. Period. The end. That was my sole focus.

So what did that mean in a practical sense?

Follow any lead. The biggest one I had — the only one — was Hilde Winslow. She had not only lied on the stand, but she’d changed her name and moved to New York City. So that became my plan: Get to Hilde Winslow as fast as I could. Figure out why she lied.

Once I had a destination, it became all about how to divert and obfuscate and muddy the waters. The police would soon realize that Rachel had visited me in prison and put some kind of tracker on her phone. They would also do the same with Philip’s and Adam’s phones, both in my possession. I’d already shut them down.

“Is your phone on?” I asked her.

“Yes. Oh shit, they can trace that, right? Should I power it down or something?”

“Wait,” I tell her.

“Why?”

Once a phone was off, the cell provider wouldn’t be able to track us anymore, but they’d be able to tell the police where we were when the phone was last on. I had Rachel drive in the opposite direction of my destination. Once we’d headed far enough north so that the police would conclude that we were likely heading toward the Canadian border rather than New York City, I had Rachel power down her phone. If we kept it on longer, it would be too much, I concluded — overplaying our hand. Now it would appear as though we started our escape and realized after about ten or fifteen minutes of driving that we needed to turn the phone off.

“So now what?” Rachel asked.

I was about to have her make a U-turn and start back toward New York, but I wasn’t sure that the phone ping alone would do enough to divert, obfuscate, and muddy.

“Keep heading north,” I said.

Twenty minutes later, we stopped at a store in Katahdin that sold survival equipment. I checked for security cameras near the pumps. None there. Not that it mattered. They’d know that I was here soon enough. Rachel filled up her car while I, shopping quickly yet not conspicuously (or so I hoped), bought survival equipment, the kind of stuff I assumed people used to hike and camp for an extended period of time. I paid for it all with the Mastercard Adam said that he would “forget” to cancel. I figured the police would still find out about the card, but it might take a little longer. If not, when the full APB hit, the old man who rang me up would remember my face.

That was okay too.

With this deed done, Rachel and I headed north for another half a mile (just in case someone asked eventually which way the car had gone) before turning around and driving south. We found a Salvation Army donation bin behind an office complex on the outskirts of Boston. I dumped the survival gear in it. According to a sign on the donation box, the next pickup was four days away. Good. If somehow the Salvation Army got suspicious of the stuff or called the police, it wouldn’t matter. Even if they found us on CCTV up here, so what? We’d be long gone. I just hoped the authorities would buy that I was hiding in the woods.

We then turned around and started the long drive south. At a pharmacy near Milford, Connecticut, I stayed in the car while Rachel bought me a burner phone, clippers, shaving gear, and glasses with the lowest prescription possible. She ended up choosing sunglasses that lightened when you were inside. Perfect. At the next truck stop, I entered the bathroom wearing a baseball cap pulled down low. I rarely shave in prison, maybe once a week when it gets itchy, so my beard was somewhere between stubble and full growth. I shaved now so that only a mustache remained. Then I cut off all my hair and shaved my head and donned the glasses.

Even Rachel was impressed with my disguise. “I almost didn’t let you back in the car.”

When we got close to the George Washington Bridge, I had Rachel pull off on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx. We backed into a spot where I could put her New Jersey license plates back. Then I tossed the Maine ones into an outdoor trash can. If the police were fully on this now — and I suspected that they were — they’d probably pick up her New Jersey plate when she crossed the Washington Bridge. I warned her about that. We had been rehearsing what she should do when the police either pulled her over or came to her house.

“I’m making a lot of problems for you,” I say.

“Don’t worry about it,” Rachel replies. “He’s my nephew, remember?”

“You were a good aunt,” I say.

“The best,” she replies with a hint of a smile.

“But if it gets bad, if you get arrested—”

“I’ll be fine.”

“I know. But if you get backed into a corner, tell them I forced you to do this at gunpoint.”

“You better go.”

The Mount Eden Avenue stop on the 4 train was next door. I got on the subway and took it thirty-five minutes south to 14 Street — Union Square in Manhattan. Once there, I found a Nordstrom Rack and bought the cheapest blazer, dress shirt, and tie I could find. It may have been overkill with the shaved head and mustache and glasses, but if someone did figure out I was in New York City, they probably wouldn’t look for a man in a sports blazer and tie.

From there, it was a ten-minute walk to Hilde Winslow’s address on Twelfth Street. I stopped on the way for a slice of pepperoni pizza and a Pepsi. When I took the first bite, I felt woozy. I know it is beside the point, but I don’t think I ever experienced anything so wonderfully mundane as that first bite of New York City pizza as a free man; it ignited something long extinguished, filling me with memory and color and texture. I was back in Revere Beach at Sal’s with Adam and Eddie and TJ, the whole gang, and man, did that feel right.

Now I wait.

I wonder about Rachel, of course. She would most likely have been nabbed by law enforcement by now. Did she make it all the way home first? Did the cops pull her over? How much trouble is she in? I wonder about Philip and Adam and what the fallout for them will be. And finally, I think about Cheryl, my ex and Matthew’s mother. What would she make of my escape? What would Aunt Sophie make of it? If he was able to understand, what would my dad think?

Doesn’t matter. None of that matters right now.

I walk across the street. Would Hilde Winslow aka Harriet Winchester know that I escaped? I don’t know. The building doesn’t have a doorman. You have to be buzzed in by an occupant. WINCHESTER, H is listed under apartment 4B. I press the button. I can hear it ringing. Once, twice, three times. On the fourth ring, a voice I still recognize from the trial comes cracking through the speaker.

“Yes?”

It takes me a second to gain my bearings. I disguise my voice by throwing a pathetically Eastern-European accent into the mix. “Package.”

“Leave it in the vestibule, please.”

“You need to sign for it.”

I had spent the last few hours planning, and yet now, with the chance to get to her so close at hand, I am messing things up. I am not dressed like a delivery man. I don’t have a package in my hand.

“Actually,” I say, making it up on the fly, “if you give me the verbal okay, I can leave the package here. Do I have your permission to leave it in the vestibule?”

There is a pause that makes me wonder whether I’ve been made. Then Hilde Winslow says slowly, “You have my permission to leave it.”

“Okay, it’ll be in the corner of the foyer.”

I hang up. I’m about to step away and consider what to do when I spot a man coming down the stairs toward the front door. For a moment I wonder whether Hilde has asked a neighbor to grab her package, but no, not enough time has passed. As he pushes open the door, I put the phone back to my ear and say, “Okay, I’ll bring it up to your apartment now.” I needn’t have bothered with the subterfuge. The man passes through the door and heads outside seemingly without a care in the world.

I stop the closing door with my foot and slip inside. I let the door close behind me.

Then I head up the stairs toward apartment 4B.

Sarah’s phone buzzed. She stared at the incoming message. “You were right, Max.”

“About?”

“The license plates.”

Max had found it bizarre that no one had spotted Rachel Anderson’s car during the long trek from Maine back to New Jersey. The first working theory was that she’d kept off the main roads, but a quick review of traffic patterns told them that she wouldn’t have made it on time if she completely stayed off toll roads.

“A guy named George Belbey noticed his license plates were missing when he finished his shift at L. L. Bean.”

“I assume George Belbey is a Maine resident?”

“Yep.”

“So Burroughs or Rachel switched the plates. Took off her New Jersey ones, put on the Maine ones.”

“Except when the Port Authority spotted her car crossing the bridge—”

“She’d switched them back,” Max finished for her. “So the question is, when did she do that? And why?”

“We know why, don’t we, Max?”

“I guess we do, yeah.”

Sarah’s phone buzzed again. She stared at the screen and said, “Whoa.”

“What?”

“We’ve been following up on Rachel Anderson’s recent calls.”

“And?”

“And after she visited Burroughs at Briggs, she reached out to an old colleague from the Globe for a favor.”

“What kind of favor?”

“She wanted to get the murder book on Matthew Burroughs.”

Max mulled that over. “Does the old colleague have that kind of juice?”

“He does not. But Rachel asked for something else specifically.”

“What’s that?”

“She wanted the Social Security number of a witness in the murder trial. A woman named Hilde Winslow.”

“I remember that name...”

“Winslow testified that she saw Burroughs bury the baseball bat.”

“Right. Older woman, as I recall.”

“Correct, Max, but here’s where it gets weird. Apparently, Hilde Winslow changed her name not long after the trial to Harriet Winchester.”

They both looked at each other.

“Why would she do that?” Max asked.

“No clue. But here’s the kicker: Hilde-Harriet also moved to New York City.” She squinted at her phone. “One thirty-five West Twelfth Street, to be exact.”

Max stopped chewing. His hand dropped to his side. “So Rachel Anderson visits David Burroughs in prison. After they meet, she asks about a key witness in the case — one Burroughs claimed lied on the stand — and finds out that she changed her name and moved.” He looked up. “So where do you think Burroughs is heading?”

“To confront her?”

“Or worse.” Max started for the airport exit. “Sarah?”

“What?”

“Get us a car to New York. And call our Manhattan office. I want Hilde Winslow’s place swarming with cops right now.”

Chapter 19

I stand in front of Hilde Winslow’s door.

Now what?

I could knock, of course, but since there is a buzzer downstairs and she’s already naturally wary, I don’t know whether that’s the right move. She would ask who it is. She would use the peephole to see who knocked. Would she recognize me? Probably not. Unless she’s heard the news reports on my escape. Either way, she wouldn’t just open it.

So Option One, simply knocking, probably wouldn’t work.

I wear a Yankees baseball cap I bought from a street vendor on Sixth Avenue, so if she ends up describing me, she won’t know that my head is shaved. I plan on ditching it after I visit Hilde.

Option Two: I could try to kick the door in or, I don’t know, shoot my way in. But come on. Like she wouldn’t scream bloody murder. Like none of the neighbors would report the sound of gunfire. Option Two was a dumb nonstarter.

Option Three... I didn’t really have one. Yet. But I couldn’t just keep lurking in the corridor like this. Someone would spot me and wonder what I was doing. I hadn’t really thought this through, had I? I’d spent all those hours today — today! — in a car with Rachel, and I hadn’t come up with a solid plan. Now I’m paying the price.

There is a door to the fire stairs to my left. Maybe I could hide there and try to keep an eye out for her opening the door. But it’s getting pretty late. Hilde/Harriet is in her eighties. Would she be going out again tonight? Probably not.

I am still debating my next move when I see the doorknob at 4B start to turn.

Someone is opening the door.

No plan, so I work on pure instinct. I don’t know why the door is opening right now, though I suspect that perhaps Hilde Winslow was curious about the purported package left in her vestibule and has decided to venture out to retrieve it. Doesn’t matter. I don’t hesitate. As soon as the door opens a crack, I throw my shoulder against it.

The door flies open.

I worry for a moment that I’ve been too aggressive, that I’ve knocked an old woman down with a heavy door, but when I burst through, Hilde Winslow is still standing there, wide-eyed. She backs up and opens her mouth to scream. Some primitive part of my brain has taken over and so again I don’t hesitate. I hurry toward her and clumsily yet firmly cover her mouth with my hand. With my foot, I kick the door closed behind me. I pull her toward me so that the back of her head presses up against my chest, my hand still covering her mouth.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” I whisper.

Did I really just say that? If so, I don’t think my words offer much comfort. She squirms and grabs hold of my hand. She fights back. I hold on hard. I want to be kind here, rational, polite, but I don’t see how that approach will help me or Matthew in any way.

With my free hand, I pull out my gun and show it to her.

“We just need to talk, okay? Once I get the truth, I’m out of here. Nod if you understand.”

With the back of her skull still against my chest, she manages a nod.

“I’m going to take my hand away now. Please don’t make me hurt you.”

I sound like something out of an old movie, but I really don’t know what else to say or how to handle this situation. I let her go and hope to hell she doesn’t scream, because I’m not going to shoot her if she does. I’m not going to hit her with the butt end or any of that either. Or will I?

Hilde Winslow lied about me. She lied under oath and helped convict me of killing my own child.

So how far will I go? I hope she doesn’t press me into finding out.

Hilde Winslow turns to me. “What do you want?”

“Do you know who I am?” I ask.

“You’re David.”

Her voice is surprisingly steady, confident. She doesn’t look away. She isn’t exactly defiant, but she doesn’t look frightened or intimidated either.

“What are you doing here?” Hilde asks.

“You lied.”

“What are you talking about?”

“At my trial. Your testimony. It was all a lie.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

There really is no choice here. I lift the gun and press it against the old woman’s forehead.

“I need you to listen to me,” I say, hoping my voice doesn’t crack. “I have nothing to lose. You understand that, right? If you lie to me again, if you don’t tell me the truth, I’m going to kill you. I don’t want to. I really don’t. But right now, it is my son or you.”

Her eyes start doing the rapid-blink thing.

“That’s right,” I continue. “My son is still alive. No, I don’t think you’ll believe me on that, and I don’t have time to convince you. All that should matter to you right now is that I believe it. And because of that, I will have no qualms about killing you to find him. Do I make myself clear?”

“I don’t know what to tell you—”

I hit her in the cheek with the barrel of the gun.

No, this isn’t easy for me to do. And no, I didn’t hit her hard. It was a tap. No more. But it’s enough to both get the message across and make me feel awful. “You changed your name and moved away,” I say. “You did that because you lied on the stand and needed to escape. I’m not looking for revenge or any of that. But there’s a reason you lied, and that reason might lead to my son. So I’m going to either learn why or I’m going to kill you.”

She stares at me. I stare back.

“You’re delusional,” Hilde-Harriet says.

“Could be.”

“You can’t possibly think your son is still alive.”

“Oh, but I do.”

Hilde’s hand flutters up to her lips. She shakes her head and closes her eyes. I don’t lower my gun. When she opens her eyes, I see a change. The defensiveness and defiance are gone. “I can’t believe you’re standing here, David.”

I stay silent.

“Are you taping this?” she asks.

“No.” I quickly pull out my phone and show it to her. Then I drop it on the table, just to emphasize the point. “This is just between us.”

“If you tell anyone, I’ll just deny it.”

I feel my pulse quicken. “I understand.”

“And if someone is taping this, I’m just telling a story to appease a crazy killer who is threatening me with a gun.”

I nod encouragingly.

Hilde Winslow looks up at me and meets my eye. “I’ve imagined this moment for a long time,” she says. “You standing in front of me, me confessing the truth.”

She takes a deep breath. I hold mine, afraid that even the slightest movement on my part will break this spell.

“First off, I justified what I did because I thought my testimony wouldn’t matter. You would have been convicted anyway — I was icing on the cake. That’s what I told myself. I also genuinely believed you’d committed the murder. That was part of the sales pitch — I was helping put away a killer. And do you want to know the truth, David?”

I nod.

“I still think you did it. The evidence against you was overwhelming. That helps me sleep at night. The knowledge — the certainty — that you’d done it. But that doesn’t really let me off the hook, does it? I was a philosophy professor at Boston U. Did you know that?”

I did know that. My attorneys dug deep into her background, looking for something that we could use on cross-examination. I knew that she’d been widowed when she was sixty, that she had three children, all married, and four grandsons.

“So I have studied all the ‘ends justifying the means’ type rationales. I did that here too, trying to defend my actions, but there is no way around the fact that my testimony sullied the trial. Worse, I sullied how I saw myself.”

Her phone buzzes then. She looks up at me. I nod that it’s okay to check it.

“No caller ID,” she says.

“Don’t answer it.”

“Okay.”

“You were saying?”

“It was my daughter-in-law. Ellen. She’s a physician in Revere. An MD.”

I remember this from the file. “She’s married to your oldest son, Marty.”

“Yes.”

“What about her?”

“She had — probably still has — a gambling problem. A chronic one. I didn’t know that at the time. She’s a respectable ob-gyn. Delivered all my friends’ grandchildren. Marty, I guess he tried everything. Gamblers Anonymous. Shrinks, therapy, controlling her access to money. But you know how it is with addictions. You’ll find a way. Ellen did. She got in deep. Too deep to get out of. Hundreds of thousands. That’s what they told me on the phone. Ellen was way behind in the money she owed, but she could get out from under — if I did them a small favor.”

She rubs her face and closes her eyes. Again I stay still.

“You want to know why I testified against you. That’s why. This man, he visits me. He is very polite. Nice manners. Big smile. But his eyes, I mean, they were black. Dead. You know the type?”

I nod.

“He also has poliosis.”

“Poliosis?”

She pointed to the middle of her head. “A white forelock. Dark black hair with a white streak right in the middle.”

I freeze.

“Anyway, this man, he tells me the situation with Ellen. He says I’d be doing the world a favor if I helped them. He says that you definitely did it, smashed your own child’s skull with a baseball bat, but you’re going to get off because your old man is a crooked cop and so the fix is in.”

I swallow. The white forelock. I know the man she’s talking about. “This man mentioned my father?”

“Yes. By name. Lenny Burroughs. He says that’s why they need me. To help assure justice is done. If I help them with this, they’ll help Ellen. He has on expensive loafers with no socks. He lays it all out for me. Do you want to know what I told him?”

I nod.

“No. I say I’m not going to do it. Let Ellen figure a way to pay it back. That’s what I tell him. This little man, he says ‘okay, fine.’ Just like that. He doesn’t argue with me. Doesn’t make any threats. The next morning, the same little man calls me. He says in a polite tone, ‘Mrs. Winslow? Listen.’ And then...” She squeezes her eyes shut. “I hear this loud crack and then Marty starts to scream. Not Ellen. My Marty. The little man snapped my son’s middle finger like it was a pencil.”

In the distance, Hilde Winslow and I hear the sounds of the city — whooshing traffic, faint sirens, the beep of a truck backing up, a dog barking, people laughing.

“So,” I say, “you agreed to help?”

“I had no choice. You understand.”

“I do,” I say, even though I’m not sure that’s true. “Mrs. Winslow, what was the little man’s name?”

“What, do you think he left a calling card? He didn’t give me his name — and I didn’t ask.”

It doesn’t matter. I know who it is. “Didn’t you ask Marty or Ellen about him?”

“No. Never. I did what the man asked. Then I sold my house and changed my name and moved here. I haven’t talked to Marty or Ellen in five years. And you know what? They haven’t reached out to me either. No one wants to go back there.”

It is then that I hear someone out on the street start to shout.

A young woman from the sound of it. At first, I can’t tell what she is saying. Hilde and I both look at one another. I move toward the window. The woman is still shouting, but now I can make out her words:

“Warning! The fucking cops are here! I repeat: The fascist pigs are here!”

Someone else joins in, yelling the same thing. Then someone else.

I glance out her window and spot squad cars double-parked in front of the building door. Four uniformed cops are running to the building’s entrance. Two more squad cars come roaring down Twelfth Street.

Oh shit.

No doubt in my mind. They are here for me. I have to get out — and now. I hurry back toward Hilde Winslow’s door, but when I open it I can already hear the cacophony of footsteps racing up the steps. The sound grows. I hear voices. I hear the cackle of radios.

They’re getting closer.

I hurry down the corridor to the fire door and stairs. I open the door. More voices, more cackles of radios.

They’re coming from both directions. I’m trapped.

Hilde is still standing in her doorway. “Come back in,” she says to me. “Hurry.”

I don’t see how I have any choice. I rush back into her apartment. She slams the door shut. “Go to the window in my bedroom,” she says. “Take the fire escape. I’ll try to stall them.”

No time to hesitate or even think it through. I rush toward the bedroom, toward the window, and throw it open. The breeze feels surprisingly refreshing. I wonder for a second whether the cops have the backyard covered. Not yet. At least, I think not yet. It’s pretty dark below me. It is also narrow, maybe twenty feet between the back of Hilde’s building and the back of one on Eleventh Street. I crawl out and close the window behind me.

Now what?

I start down the metal escape when once again I hear the cackle of cop radios followed by voices.

Someone is below me.

It’s nighttime. The lighting is almost nonexistent, which perhaps works in my favor. From inside the apartment, I can hear pounding on Hilde’s door, followed by shouts. Hilde yells that she’s coming.

I can’t go down. I can’t go back inside. That only leaves one route. Up. I start climbing toward the fifth floor. I don’t remember how many floors the building is. Five, six at most. I stop at the landing outside the fifth-floor window. The apartment is dark. No one home. I try to open the window. Locked. I debate breaking a pane with my elbow, but I can’t see any way to do that without making too much noise. And even if I do, won’t the police be on me pretty fast? I couldn’t hide in another apartment indefinitely.

Keep moving.

I head up another level, hoping that the window will be unlocked there. But there’s no sixth floor. I’m at the roof. I hoist myself up and onto it. My heart is pounding in my chest. Here is one cliché about a prison that is absolutely true: You exercise a lot. I do free weights in the yard when I can, but mostly, I’ve created my own boot camp in my cell — dips, squat thrusts, squat jumps, mountain climbers, and mostly, push-ups. I do at least five hundred push-ups a day in a variety of styles — traditional, diamond, wide hands, claps, staggered, Sphinx, flying, one-arm, handstand, finger. I am not the first to note the irony of taking people serving time often for violent crimes and putting them in an environment where the only self-improvement is making them physically stronger, but the truth is, I have never been in better shape, and it’s finally paying off.

I hope.

How the hell did the cops find me so fast? Unless Rachel... no. She wouldn’t. There are other ways. I didn’t plan well enough. I am rushing, and I am missing stuff. This is all a good reminder that I’m not as clever as I think I am.

Still, here’s the headline: I was able to question Hilde Winslow — and I’m not crazy. She had lied on the stand. I didn’t bury the baseball bat in some fugue state.

She. Had. Lied.

And I know who made her do it.

I have a lead now.

I have to escape. If I’m caught, whatever lead is out there will dry up.

So what’s my next move?

I consider hiding up on the roof. Hilde seems to be on my side for now. She might tell the cops that she hasn’t seen me. She might tell them that I had come and gone. I could just stay, wait, venture down when the coast has cleared. But would she lie to the police, especially if they pressed her? Is she really on my side — or had she sent me to the fire escape because she wanted me out of her building for her own safety? Is she telling them about me right now?

Will they search the roof eventually anyway?

I have to believe the answer to that last question is yes.

The night sky over Manhattan is clear. The Empire State Building is lit up in red, but I have no idea why. Still, it is a stunning sight. Everything is. We, of course, never appreciate what we have. That’s what they say. But it really isn’t that. It’s just conditioning. We take for granted what we become used to. Human nature. I want to revel in this for a few minutes, but alas, that’s not possible. I said before that I never cared about being locked up. Matthew was gone and it was my fault, so I was content — if that’s the right word — with having no life. I didn’t want to feel. But now that I’m back out in the world, now that I’m tasting that city air, that electric current, that vivacity of sound and color, my head is reeling.

When the cops burst open the roof door, I am ready. I have been eyeing the jump since I got up here. I don’t know how many feet it is. I don’t know if I can make it. But I am on the southeast corner of the building. I run with all my strength, my arms pumping. The wind is rushing in my ear, but I still hear the warnings:

“Stop! Police!”

I don’t listen. I don’t think they will shoot, but if they do, they do. I accelerate and time my steps so that I spring off my left foot just inches from the roof’s northwest corner.

I am airborne.

My legs bicycle-run in the air, my arms still pumping. It is dark on the neighboring roof. I can’t see if I will make it and for a moment I flash back to the cartoons of my youth, wondering whether I am going to pause running in midair like Wile E. Coyote before I drop like a stone to the ground beneath me. I feel my propulsion slow as gravity starts dragging me down.

I begin to fall. I close my eyes. When I land hard on the roof across the way, I tuck and roll.

“Stop!”

I don’t. I somersault to a standing position. Then I do the same thing again. I run, I leap, I hit the next roof. Then the next. I’m not scared anymore. I don’t know why. I feel exhilarated. Run, leap, run, leap. I feel as though I can do this all night, like I’m freaking Spider-Man or something.

When I find a roof that’s truly dark, when I think I’ve put enough distance between me and the cops on the roof of Hilde Winslow’s building, I stop and listen. I can still hear the cops and the commotion, but it feels as though they are somewhat distant. The back of the building is dark and really, how much longer can I play Spider-Man?

I find a fire escape and half run, half shimmy down it until I’m about ten feet off the ground. I stop again, look, listen. I’m in the clear. I let myself dangle for a moment from the bottom rung of the ladder and then I let go. I land hard, knees bent, a smile on my face.

When I straighten, I hear a voice say, “Freeze.”

My heart sinks as I turn. It’s a cop. He has his gun trained on me.

“Don’t move.”

Do I have a choice?

“Hands where I can see them. Now.”

The cop is young and alone. He is pointing his gun toward me while he bends his neck to talk into one of those clipped-on microphones. Once he does, this backyard will be flooded with cops.

I have no choice.

There is no hesitation, no fake, no juke. I simply launch myself straight at him.

It has been less than a second since he told me not to move. I am hoping the suddenness of my attack will catch him off guard. It is a dangerous move obviously — he’s the one pointing the gun — but the cop looks hesitant and a little scared. Maybe that will play to my advantage and maybe it won’t.

But what options do I have?

If he shoots me, okay, whatever. I probably won’t die. If I do, well, that’s a risk I’m willing to take. More likely, I’ll be wounded and end up back in prison. If I surrender peacefully, I end up in the same situation. Back in prison.

I can’t allow that.

So I lower my head and bull-rush him. He has time to start to yell “Freeze!” again, but I get there before he can complete the word. It ends up sounding more like “Free!” and because I’m hyped up and desperate, I take that as a good omen. I tackle him around the waist, jangling his utility belt and heavy vest and all the things that weigh modern cops down.

Keeping my momentum going, I follow through like a pile driver as we land hard on the concrete walk behind the townhouse. His back takes the impact hard, and I can hear the woosh sound as the air comes out of him.

He is struggling for breath.

I don’t let up.

I take no joy in this. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I know that he is just doing his job and that the job is just. But it is him or Matthew and so again I have no choice.

I rear my head back and then fire my forehead toward his nose. The head butt hits the cop hard, like a cannonball hurled at a ceramic pitcher.

Something on his face cracks, gives way. I feel something sticky on my face and realize that it’s blood.

His body goes slack.

I hop up. He is moving, groaning, which both scares and relieves me. I’m tempted to hit him again, but I don’t think there’s a need. Not if I move fast.

As I rush toward Sixth Avenue, I take off my blazer and wipe the blood off my face. I toss the blazer and my baseball hat into the shrubbery and keep moving.

When I reach the street, I try to slow my breath.

Keep moving, I tell myself again.

A crowd has formed. Most stop to watch for a few seconds. Some stand to see how it all plays out. I lower my head and let myself blend in with the onlookers. My pulse is back under control now. I start whistling as I walk east, trying so hard to look casual and inconspicuous that I feel like I stick out like a cigarette at a fitness club.

A few blocks later, I risk glancing behind me. No one is following me. No one is chasing me. I start whistling louder now, and a smile, a real live smile, comes to my face.

I’m free.

Chapter 20

When Rachel finally got to her front door, bone-weary exhausted in a way she had never experienced before, her sister Cheryl was pacing on the front stoop.

“What the hell, Rachel?”

“Let me just get inside, okay?”

“You helped David escape?”

Rachel opened her mouth, closed it. “Just come inside.”

“Rachel—”

“Inside.”

She pulled her keys out of her purse. Rachel lived in what was generously dubbed a “garden apartment.” She’d recently applied for a job with a free local paper, a job for which she was immensely overqualified — but hey, beggars can’t be choosy. The editor, Kathy Corbera, one of her favorite journalism professors, had advocated for her, but in the end, the publisher knew about her past and wanted to avoid even the slightest whiff of scandal. Understandable in today’s climate.

Rachel pushed open the door and headed straight for the kitchen. Cheryl was close behind her.

“Rachel?”

She didn’t bother to respond. Every part of her ached and begged for numb. Rachel had never needed a drink so badly. The Woodford Reserve was in the cabinet next to the refrigerator. She grabbed the bottle.

“You want one?”

Cheryl frowned. “Uh, I’m pregnant, remember?”

“One won’t hurt,” she said, pulling down a glass from the cabinet. “I read that somewhere.”

“Are you for real?”

“You’re sure you don’t want some?”

Cheryl just stared daggers. “What the actual fuck, Rachel?”

Rachel filled the glass with ice and poured. “It’s not what you think.”

“You call me all mysterious yesterday. You say you’re visiting David, just like that, out of the blue. You say we need to talk when you get back home and now...?”

Rachel sucked down a sip.

“Was this what you wanted to tell me?” Cheryl continued. “That you were going to help him escape?”

“No, of course not. I had no idea he was going to escape.”

“So, what, your being up at Briggs was just a wild coincidence?”

“No.”

“Talk to me, Rach.”

Her sister. Her beautiful, pregnant sister. Cheryl had been through such hell. Five years ago, Matthew’s murder had knocked her to her knees, and Rachel never thought that her sister would be able to get up again. To the outside world, Cheryl was moving on. New husband, pregnant, new position. But she wasn’t. Not really. She was trying to build something, something new and strong, but Rachel knew that it was still flimsy and flyaway. Life is fragile at the best of times. The foundation is always shifting beneath our feet.

“Please,” Cheryl said. “Tell me what’s going on.”

“I’m trying.”

Her sister looked suddenly small and vulnerable. She was almost cringing, as though waiting for the blow that she knew was coming. Rachel tried to rehearse the words in her head, but they all came out sounding stilted and weird. You could rip this bandage off slowly or quickly, but either way, this was going to hurt.

“I want to show you something.”

“Okay.”

“But I don’t want you to freak out.”

“Seriously?”

Rachel had given the hard copy she’d printed out to David, but she had the amusement-park pic she’d snapped at Irene’s house on her phone. She took one more gulp of the bourbon, closed her eyes, let it warm her. Then she grabbed her phone. She hit the Photos icon and started swiping. Cheryl had sidled up next to her. She was watching over Rachel’s shoulder.

Rachel found the photo and stopped.

“I don’t understand,” Cheryl said. “Who’s this woman and these kids?”

Then Rachel put her thumb and index finger on the boy behind them and zoomed in on his face.

Chapter 21

The FBI surveillance van carrying Max and Sarah sped to a stop in front of Hilde Winslow’s building. Max spotted six cruisers and an ambulance. Sarah was staring at a computer monitor and talking via her earpiece to someone on the phone. She signaled that it was important and for Max to go out on his own. Max nodded as the van’s side door slid open.

An agent Max didn’t know said, “Special Agent Bernstein? The suspect got away.”

“I heard on the radio.”

“The police are in pursuit. They’re confident they’ll catch him.”

Max wasn’t so sure. It was a big city with plenty of nooks and crannies and human beings. It was always easier to vanish when in plain sight. He and Sarah had been watching the attempted capture in the high-tech FBI van, live-streaming four of the pursuing officers’ bodycams as they ascended to the roof.

There was something that bothered him.

“Where’s Hilde Winslow?”

The agent frowned at his notebook. “She calls herself Harriet—”

“Winchester, yeah, I know,” Max said. “Where is she?”

The young agent pointed toward the ambulance. It was open in the back. Hilde Winslow sat up, a blanket wrapped around her like a shawl. She sipped on a juice box through a straw. Max headed over and introduced himself. Hilde Winslow’s eyes were bright and locked in on his. She looked small, wizened, and tougher than an armor-plated armadillo.

“Are you okay?” he asked her.

“Just a little shaken up,” Hilde replied. “They insisted on taking care of me.”

The paramedic, an Asian woman with a long ponytail, said, “Just relax, Harriet.”

“I’d like to go home,” she said.

“You can go back up when the police say it’s okay.”

Hilde Winslow gave the paramedic a sweet smile and sipped some more on her apple juice. She looked to Max like both an old woman and a little girl at the same time.

“You said you were a special agent with the FBI,” Hilde said to him.

“Yes, ma’am. I’m in charge of recapturing David Burroughs.”

“I see.”

He waited for her to say more. She sipped her juice.

“Can you tell me what Mr. Burroughs said to you?”

“Nothing really.”

“Nothing?”

“There was no time, you see.”

“So you don’t know what he wanted?”

“No idea.”

“Can we back up, Mrs. Winslow?”

He’d intentionally used her old name. He waited for her to correct him. She didn’t.

“What happened exactly?” Max continued.

“He knocked on my door. I opened it—”

“Did you ask who it was at first?”

She thought about that for a moment. “No, I don’t think so.”

“You heard a knock and just opened it?”

“Yes.”

“Do you always do that? Without asking who it is?”

“You have to be buzzed in the building.”

“Did you buzz him in?”

“No.”

“Yet you just opened the door?”

She smiled at him. “It’s a friendly building. I thought it was a neighbor.”

“I see,” he said.

Why, he wondered, was she lying to him?

“I’m also old. So sometimes I’m forgetful. But you’re right, Special Agent Bernstein. That was a mistake on my part. I’ll be more careful in the future.”

He was being played. Like with Rachel Anderson. He understood Rachel’s motive as a loving sister-in-law. But why would Hilde Winslow be lying to him?

“So David Burroughs knocked on the door,” Max continued, “and you opened it.”

“Yes.”

“Did you recognize him?”

“Oh heavens no.”

“What did he look like?”

“Just like, well, a man. I tried to give the police detective a description, but it all happened so fast.”

“What did you say to him?”

“Nothing.”

“What did he say to you?”

“There was no time for any of that. I opened the door. And suddenly there was this big commotion coming from downstairs. I guess the police were already inside and rushing up to my floor.”

“I see. So what happened next?”

“I guess he got spooked.”

“David Burroughs?”

“Yes.”

“What did the spooked Burroughs do?”

“He jumped into my apartment and closed the door behind him.”

“That must have been scary.”

“Oh yes. Yes, it was.” She turned to the paramedic. “Annie?”

“Yes, Mrs. Winchester?”

“Can I have another juice box?”

“Of course. Are you feeling okay?”

“I’m a little tired,” Hilde Winslow said. “It’s a lot of questions.”

Annie the paramedic gave Max a baleful eye. Max ignored it and tried to right the teetering ship.

“So Burroughs is in your apartment with you and the door is closed now?”

“Yes.”

“You’d been standing in the doorway, right? Did he push you to get in? Did you step back?”

“Hmm.” Dramatic pause. “I don’t remember. Does it matter?”

“I guess not. Did you scream?”

“No. I didn’t want to upset him.”

“Did you say anything?”

“Like what?”

“Like who are you, what are you doing here, get out of my apartment, anything?”

She thought about that. When Paramedic Annie came back over with the juice, she smiled and thanked her.

“Mrs. Winslow?”

Again calling her by the old name.

“I may have. I probably did. But it all happened so fast. He ran to my window and threw it open.”

“Right to the window,” Max said. “Without a word.”

“Yes.”

“And the window,” Max said. “It was in your bedroom, right?”

“Right.”

“The windows in your main room, the living room, are closer to the door, right?”

“I don’t know. I never measured the distance. I guess they are.”

“But they don’t lead to fire escapes, do they?”

“That’s right.”

“Only the one in your bedroom does,” Max said. He tilted his head to the right. “How do you think Burroughs knew that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You didn’t tell him?” Max asked.

“Of course not. Maybe he got the lay of the building beforehand.”

“Are you aware that David Burroughs escaped from custody just this morning?”

“One of the nice police officers told me that.”

“You didn’t know before?”

“No, of course not. How would I?”

“I called your phone thirty minutes ago and left a voice message.”

“Oh, really? I never answer my phone. It’s always some con man trying to scam an old lady. I let it go to voicemail, and truth be told? I don’t even know how voicemail works.”

Max stared at her. He was buying none of this.

“Why do you think Burroughs came directly to you?”

“Pardon?”

“First thing. He gets out. He drives to New York City. He comes to see you. Why do you think that is?”

“I don’t know...” Suddenly her eyes open wide. “Oh my God.”

“Mrs. Winslow?”

“Do you think... do you think he came here to hurt me?” Her hand fluttered to her mouth. “Is that what you think?”

“No,” Max said.

“But you just said—”

“If he wanted to hurt you, I think he would have pushed you when he came in, don’t you? Or hit you? Or something like that?” Then Max noticed something. “Is that a mark on your cheek?”

“It’s nothing,” she said too quickly.

“David Burroughs also has a gun. Did you see it?”

“A gun? Heavens no.”

“Think about it a second. You’re David Burroughs. You spend five years in prison. You finally escape. You head straight to see a witness you claim lied about you—”

“Special Agent Bernstein?”

“Yes.”

“It’s been quite an ordeal,” she said sweetly. “I’ve told you all I know.”

“I’d like to just ask you a few questions about your testimony.”

“No,” she said.

“No?”

“I’m not dredging this all up again, and...” She turned. “Annie?”

“Yes, Mrs. Winchester.”

“I’m not feeling so great.”

“I told you, Harriet. You need to rest.”

Max was about to protest when he heard Sarah’s voice call out, “Max?”

He turned. She was standing in the side opening of the FBI van waving him over urgently. He skipped the goodbye and hurried toward her. Sarah saw his face as he approached.

“What?” Sarah said.

“She’s lying.”

“About?”

“Everything.” He hoisted up his pants. “Okay, what’s so important?”

“I got the CCTV on Rachel’s prison visit to Burroughs. You’re going to want to see this.”

Cheryl just stared at the photo.

“It was taken at an amusement park,” Rachel said.

“I can see that,” her sister snapped. “So?”

Rachel didn’t bother explaining about Irene and all that. She’d zoomed in to the little boy in the background — not too much because then his face became too blurry. She’d handed her phone to her sister. Cheryl continued to stare.

“Cheryl?”

With her eyes still on the photo, Cheryl whispered, “What are you trying to do to me?”

Rachel did not reply.

Tears started to come now. “You showed this to David.”

Rachel wasn’t sure if it was a question or not. “Yes.”

“That’s why you went to Briggs.”

“Yes.”

Cheryl kept staring at the image and shaking her head. “Where did you get this?”

Rachel gently took the phone back and unzoomed the photograph back to the original. “This is a friend of mine. She went to Six Flags with her family. Her husband took the picture. She was showing it to me and...”

“And what?” Cheryl’s voice was pure ice. “You saw a boy who somewhat resembles my dead son and figured you’d blow up everyone’s life?”

Not your life, she thought, but Rachel figured that it was best not to voice that.

“Rachel?”

“I didn’t know what to do.”

“So you showed it to David?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Rachel didn’t want to get into how she wanted to protect Cheryl, so she said nothing.

Cheryl pressed on. “What did he say?”

“He was shocked.”

“What did he say, Rachel?”

“He thinks it’s Matthew.”

Cheryl’s face turned red. “Of course he does. If you throw a drowning man an anvil, he’ll mistake it for a life preserver.”

“If David killed Matthew,” Rachel said, “you’d think he’d know it was an anvil, right?”

Cheryl just shook her head.

“It never made sense, Cheryl. David killing Matthew. Come on. You know that. Even in a fugue state or whatever. And the whole ‘buried weapon’ thing. Why would David have done that? He’d know better. And that witness. Hilde Winslow. She changed her name and moved away. Why would she do that?”

“My God.” Cheryl stared at her sister. “You believe this nonsense?”

“I don’t know. That’s all I’m saying.”

“How can you not know? Or maybe you’re desperate too, Rachel.”

“What?”

“For a story.”

“Are you serious?”

“For redemption. For another chance. I mean, if my son is alive, this would be huge, right? Networks, front pages—”

“You can’t—”

“And if it’s not Matthew, if it’s just a kid who has a passing resemblance to him, all of this — David’s escaping, David finally talking to someone after all this time — well, it’s still a big story.”

“Cheryl.”

“My murdered son could be your ticket back.”

Rachel reeled back as though she’d been slapped.

“I didn’t mean that,” Cheryl said quickly, her voice softer now.

Rachel didn’t reply.

“Listen to me,” Cheryl continued. “Matthew is dead. And so is Catherine Tullo.”

“This has nothing to do with her.”

“It’s not your fault she’s dead, Rachel.”

“Of course it’s my fault.”

Cheryl shook her head and put her hands on her sister’s shoulders. “I didn’t mean what I said before.”

“You meant it,” Rachel said.

“I didn’t. I swear.”

“And maybe it’s true. I feel sorry for myself, for what I lost. But I pushed too hard, and now Catherine Tullo is dead. She is dead because of me. I got what I deserved.”

Cheryl shook her head. “That’s not true. You were just...”

“Just what?”

“Too close to it,” Cheryl said. “You think I forgot?”

Rachel didn’t know what to say.

“Halloween Night. Your freshman year.”

Rachel turned away. She closed her eyes and wished the memories away.

“Rach?”

“Maybe you’re right,” Rachel told her sister. She stared down at the photograph. “Maybe I am seeing what I want to see. Maybe David is too. Probably, in fact. But there’s a chance, right? He’s got nothing. David — he’s as bad as you imagine. Worse. So let him search. It can’t hurt him. It can’t make him worse. That’s why I didn’t show you the pic. If it’s nothing — and yeah, sure, the odds it’s nothing are pretty strong — then it goes nowhere. No harm, no foul. We end up where we began. You’d have never found out. But if it is Matthew—”

“It’s not.”

“Either way,” Rachel persisted. “Let David and I see it through.”

“Here’s the footage from Rachel Anderson’s first prison visit,” Sarah told Max. “As I told you before, this was Burroughs’s first visitor since he arrived at Briggs five years ago.”

The surveillance van was a modified Ford. The back van windows appeared tinted, but they were painted black for complete privacy. Your only view of the outside world — and it was a good one — came from hidden cameras strategically placed around the van. Max and Sarah sat side by side in reclining and ergonomic seats at a workstation with three computer monitors. It was more comfortable than you’d think, what with agents spending hours at a time back here. Two agents sat in the driver’s cabin. One was the tech expert, but Sarah knew her way around the system as well as anybody.

“Can you turn up the volume?”

“There is no volume, Max.”

He frowned. “Why not?”

“There was a lawsuit a few years ago,” Sarah said. “Something about privacy being violated.”

“But privacy isn’t being violated with the CCTV?”

“Once Briggs lost the right to use audio in court, they claimed the video was a matter of security and didn’t infringe on privacy.”

“The courts bought that?”

“They did.”

Max shrugged. “So what did you want me to see?”

“Look here.”

Sarah started playing the video. The camera must have been placed on the ceiling somewhere behind David Burroughs’s shoulder. They had a face-on shot of Rachel, who took a seat on the other side of the plexiglass. Sarah hit the fast-forward button, and the two figures moved jerkily. When on-screen Rachel pulled out what looked like a manila envelope, Sarah stopped the fast forward and hit the play button. The speed returned to normal. Max frowned and watched. On the screen, Rachel looked down as though she were trying to muster strength. Then she took something out of the envelope and pressed it flat against the glass.

Max squinted. “Is that a photo?”

“I think so.”

“What’s it of?”

Even with no sound, even with mediocre quality in terms of pixels and lighting, Max could feel everything in that visitors’ room change. Burroughs’s body stiffened.

“I don’t know yet,” Sarah said.

“Maybe it’s an escape plan.”

“I tinkered with it before you got here.”

“What could you see?”

“People,” Sarah said. “One of them could be Batman.”

“Pardon?”

“Maybe, I don’t know. I’ll need more time, Max.”

“Let’s also get a lip reader.”

“On it. Legal says we have to apply for a warrant.”

“That privacy lawsuit?”

“Yes. But I forwarded it anyway. I don’t think the pixel quality will be good enough.”

“Can you zoom in more?”

“This is the best I have so far.” Sarah clicked a key. The image blew up. She paused so that the pixilation could catch up, but it never really became clear. Max squinted again.

“We need to ask Rachel Anderson about this.”

“Her lawyer barred her from answering any questions.”

“We have to try. We still have eyes on her, right?”

“Right. She’s home. Her sister came over.”

“Burroughs’s ex?”

Sarah nodded. “She’s pregnant.”

“Wow,” Max said. “We have taps on all the phones?”

“We do. Nothing yet.”

“Rachel Anderson drove with Burroughs for hours. They planned this out. She won’t be stupid enough to use her phone.”

“Agreed.”

“We both know her history,” Max said.

“That me-too article?”

Max nodded. “Any chance that has something to do with this?”

“I can’t see how, Max. Can you?”

He thought about it. He didn’t. Not yet anyway. “How’s the deep dive into the financials going?”

“Ongoing,” Sarah said. Max knew what a slow-go it was to comb through a person’s financials. It was how most white-collar criminals were able to stall for years. “But I do have something.”

“On.”

“Ted Weston.”

“The prison guard Burroughs tried to kill?”

She nodded. “The guy is in debt, totally underwater, but there’s been two recent deposits for exactly two thousand dollars each.”

“From?”

“Still checking.”

Max sat back. “A payoff?”

“Probably.”

“It never made sense to me,” Max said.

“What didn’t?”

“That Burroughs would try to kill Weston.” Max started gnawing at his fingernail. “This is feeling like a lot more than a prison break, Sarah.”

“Could be, Max. You know how we find out for sure?”

“How?”

“We do what we do. We don’t get distracted. We bring in Burroughs.”

“Truer words, Sarah. Let’s drag Weston’s ass in before he has a chance to lawyer up.”

Chapter 22

Gertrude Payne stood on the cliffside of the Payne estate. The moon reflected off the churning waters of the Atlantic. She’d let her gray hair loose and closed her eyes. The wind felt good on her face. The crashing waves soothed her. She could still hear Stephano approaching, but she kept her eyes closed for another ten seconds.

When she opened them, she said, “You didn’t get him.”

“Ross Sumner failed us.”

“And that guard, the one who told you about the sister-in-law’s visit.”

“He failed too.”

She turned away from the ocean. Stephano was a beefy man with jet-black hair cut into Prince Valiant bangs, making him resemble an aging rocker who was trying a little too hard to hang on to his youth. Stephano’s suit was custom-made but still fit his square frame like a cardboard box.

“I don’t understand,” Gertrude said. “How could he have escaped?”

“Does it matter?”

“Perhaps not.”

“It’s not as though he’s a threat.”

She smiled.

“What? You think he is?”

She knew the odds of David Burroughs causing any lasting damage were miniscule, but you don’t reach what her husband used to nauseatingly call the Payne Pinnacle without adding the other P:

Paranoia.

But she also knew the way the world worked. You simply never know. You believe you are safe. You are certain that you considered every angle, thought about every possibility. But you didn’t. Not ever. The world doesn’t work that way.

No one gets it right all the time.

“Mrs. Payne?”

“We need to be prepared, Stephano.”

Chapter 23

I hurry-walk the streets of Manhattan.

I don’t want to be conspicuous by running, but I also want to put distance between myself and that apartment on Twelfth Street. I head north. I pass the Fourteenth Street subway station and then the Twenty-Third Street one, resisting the urge to head down because if there is some kind of manhunt or dragnet, they’ll probably cover all nearby subway stations.

Or not.

The truth is, I have no idea.

I have a destination, of course.

Revere, Massachusetts. My hometown.

The man who blackmailed Hilde Winslow? The one with the forelock? That’s where he lives.

I know him.

I assume the FBI will have someone watching my father’s house, but then again, the police can’t be everywhere all at once. We get used to that viewpoint from television and movies, where every bad guy is quickly brought to justice by unlimited surveillance or a fingerprint or a DNA sample.

I also don’t know what Hilde Winslow may have told the cops. She seemed to genuinely sympathize with my plight, and she had helped me escape. But it’s hard to say for certain. It could have been an act. It could have been that she feared what would happen if the police broke in and I was near her. I don’t know.

But I really don’t have a choice. I have to risk going up to Revere.

When I arrive in Times Square half an hour later, I realize how in over my head I am. I had thought about crowded places like these — the people, the noise, the bright lights, the big screens, the neon signs — but I am ill-prepared for what I’m experiencing right now. I stop. There is too much stimulation. The swirl and onslaught of hums, of hues, of smells, of faces — of life — it all sends me reeling. I’m like a man who has spent five years in a dark room and now someone is shining a flashlight into my eyes. My head spins to the point where I have to lean against a wall or fall down.

The adrenaline that had kept me going isn’t so much ebbing away as turning into smoke and vanishing into the night air. Exhaustion overtakes me. It’s late. The trains and buses to the Boston area are done for the night. I need to be smart about this. I know what I need to do when I’m back in Revere, and I will need full command of my faculties to pull it off. In short, I need to sleep.

There are a lot of subway stops near here — too many for the cops to cover — but in the end I choose to walk. The shaved head should still throw them — Hilde Winslow only saw me with the ditched baseball cap — but I also wear a surgical mask. Not many people are wearing them anymore, so I worry I may stick out with it. But it’s also a great disguise. Should I keep it on? Hard call. So is deciding where to go to sleep. I think about walking north to Central Park. There are plenty of places to hide and make shelter, but again, would that be a place the police might cover? I check my burner phone. Only Rachel, who bought it for me, knows the number. I wait for her to contact me, but she hasn’t yet. I’m not sure what that means, if anything. She probably still feels watched.

I make a plan. I keep the mask on, and I head up to Central Park. I take the path into the lush Ramble, the park’s nature preserve, near Seventy-Ninth Street. The trees are thicker up here. I find a spot as deep and secluded as I can find. I lay out branches everywhere near me and hope like hell that if someone approaches me, I’ll be able to hear and react. I lay down and listen to the babbling stream mixed in with the city sounds. Then I close my eyes and fall into a mercifully dreamless sleep.

At rush hour, when I know Penn Station will be packed, I board an Amtrak to Boston. I have the cleanly shaven head. I wear a mask. Sometime during the ride it hits me that I’ve now been free for twenty-four hours. I am on edge the whole time, but when I go to the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror, I realize that there is nearly zero chance anyone will recognize me. I don’t know how risky taking this train is, but really, what choice do I have?

When I’m an hour outside of Boston, my burner phone finally rings. I don’t recognize the incoming number. I hit the answer button, but I don’t say anything. I hold the phone to my ear and wait.

“Alpaca,” Rachel says.

Relief washes over me. We came up with seven code words to start every conversation. If she doesn’t open with the code word, it means that it is not safe and someone is forcing her to make the call or listening in. If she reuses a password — if on the next call she says “Alpaca” — I’ll again know someone, somehow, is listening in and trying to fool me.

“All okay?” I ask.

I don’t have a return password or code. I didn’t see a need. There is a fine line between careful and ridiculous.

“As well as we could expect.”

“The cops questioned you?”

“The FBI, yes.”

“They figured out where I was headed,” I say.

“The FBI?”

“Yes. They almost caught me at Hilde’s.”

“I didn’t say anything, I swear.”

“I know.”

“So how?”

“I’m not sure.”

“But you got away?”

“For now.”

“Were you able to question her?”

She means Hilde Winslow, of course. I tell her yes and fill her in on some of what I learned. I tell her that Hilde admitted lying on the stand, but I leave out the gambling debt and the connection to Revere. If somehow someone is listening in — man, all of this can make you so damn paranoid — it’s better not to give them the slightest hint of my destination.

“I’m getting as much cash together as I can. I’m going to figure a way to lose any tail that the FBI has on me, just like we talked about.”

“How long will that take?”

“An hour, maybe two. Pin-drop me your location when you get where you’re going. I’ll come to you.”

“Thanks.”

“There’s one other thing,” Rachel says when I finish.

I wait.

“Cheryl visited me last night.”

I can feel the tightness in my chest. “How did that go?”

“I showed her the photo. She thinks we are both delusional.”

“Hard to argue.”

“She also said that my personal issues could be interfering with my judgment.”

“Those being?”

“I’m going to forward you some links, David. Read them. It’s easier than trying to explain.”

Rachel texts me links to three different articles on her proposed me-too article and the subsequent suicide of a young woman named Catherine Tullo. I settle back and read all three. I try to study the situation objectively, as though it does not involve a person I adore as much as Rachel.

But it’s hard to be objective for a lot of reasons.

I have questions for Rachel, but they can keep.

I lay back and close my eyes until I hear the call for North Station in Boston. I look out the window as we pull up to the platform, fearing a huge police presence. There are scattered cops, which is normal, I guess, but they don’t look particularly wary. That doesn’t mean much, but it’s better than seeing a hundred with guns drawn. I head out of the station and into my home city. I can’t help but smile. I head down Causeway Street and hit the Boston-ubiquitous Dunkin’ on the corner of Lancaster Street. I grab half a dozen donuts — two French crullers, two chocolate glazed, one toasted coconut, one old-fashioned — and a large cup of unflavored black coffee because I hate flavored coffee, especially from Dunkin’.

I head down Lancaster Avenue with the Dunkin’ bag in my hand. I’m still wearing the surgical mask, but eventually I will risk that to eat the French cruller. My mouth is watering at the thought. Fifteen minutes later, I’m at the Bowdoin Street subway and on the Blue Line heading toward Revere Beach. I try to flash back to past times when I made this journey in my youth. We had a group of guys back then, all of us in the same class at Revere High. I was closest to Adam Mackenzie, but we had TJ, Billy Simpson, and the man I was on my way to visit, Eddie Grilton.

Eddie’s family owned the pharmacy at Centennial Avenue and North Shore Road, a stone’s throw from Revere Beach station. His grandfather started the place. Everyone I know got their prescriptions filled there, and way back when, first Eddie’s grandfather and then his father ran numbers and books for the Fisher crime family.

The small parking lot behind the pharmacy was completely isolated from the street. Back in the day, it was our main hangout. We drank beers and smoked weed. Of course, that was a long time ago. The crew was mostly gone now. TJ was a physician in Newton. Billy opened a bar in Miami. But Eddie, who had wanted out of this town more than any of us, who hated his grandfather’s life and his father’s life and the teen years he’d been forced to work in the pharmacy too, was still here. He’d ended up going to pharmacology school, just like his old man wanted. After he graduated, he worked that high counter until the old man, like the grandfather before him, keeled over and died of a heart attack. Now Eddie ran the place and waited his turn to keel over.

When I get off at Revere Beach station, I grow wary again, not just because of the possible police presence but because this is my old neighborhood and if anyplace will see through my disguises, it’s here. I am within a thousand feet of my childhood home, the Mackenzie home, Sal’s Pizzeria, Grilton Pharmacy, all of it.

Grilton Pharmacy looks slightly worse for wear, but it had been slowly deteriorating for as long as I can remember. The watered-down brick was barely red anymore. The neon sign above the store was rusting on the edges. When it was turned on, the letters spasmed illumination. I keep my head lowered and move down the alleyway toward our old hangout in the back. There was one parking space. I remember Eddie’s dad always kept his Cadillac back there. It meant something to Eddie’s dad, that car, and he kept it perfectly waxed at all times. Now Eddie kept his Cadillac ATS in the same spot. Things change and yet everything stays the same.

I get deep when I’m tired.

I huddle behind a garbage dumpster. The coffee is still hot. That’s Dunkin’ for you. I inhale a French cruller and slow down midway through the coconut. Prison has its share of abuses, but I guess I’d overlooked the inherent cruelty brought upon my taste buds. I’m giddy from the flavor or the sugar high. Or maybe it’s experiencing freedom. It is so easy to shut down in prison, to make yourself numb, to not let yourself feel or experience anything remotely connected to pleasure. It helps really. It kept me alive. But now I’ve been forced out of that protective shell, now that I’ve let myself think about Matthew and the possibility of redemption, all the “feels” are rushing in.

I check the time. No one uses this back entrance. I know this from the decades we gathered here. It won’t be much longer, I think, and sure enough, the back door opens and Eddie steps out, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips. He has the lighter in his hand and the moment the glass door closes behind him, he hits the flame and puts it up to the end of the cigarette. His eyes shut on the deep inhale.

Eddie looks older. He’s skinny and stooped with a paunch. His once-coarse hair is fading now, leaving him somewhere between receding and bald. He has a pencil-thin mustache and sunken eyes. I don’t exactly know how to handle this, so I step into view.

“Hey, Eddie.”

He goes slack-jawed when he sees me. The dangling cigarette falls from his lips, but Eddie grabs it midair. That makes me smile. Eddie had the fastest hands. He was the best ping pong player, the group pool shark, a whiz at video games or pinball or bowling or mini-golf — anything involving hand-eye coordination and little else.

“Holy shit,” Eddie says.

“Do I have to ask you not to scream?”

“Fuck no, you kidding me?” He hurries over to me. “I’m so happy to see you, man.”

He hugs me — that new/old sensation — and I stiffen, afraid that if I give in to this I’ll collapse and never get back up. Still, the hug is welcome. Even the stench of cigarette is welcome. “Me too, Eddie.”

“I saw on the news about your escape.” He points to the top of my head. “You losing your hair too?”

“No, I’m in disguise.”

“Clever,” Eddie says. “Can we get one thing out of the way?”

“Sure.”

“You didn’t kill Matthew, did you?”

“I did not.”

“Knew it. You got a plan? Forget it, the less I know the better. You need cash?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Business is in the crapper, but I got some money in the safe. Whatever’s there, it’s yours.”

I try not to well up. “Thanks, Eddie.”

“That why you’re here?”

“No.”

“Talk to me.”

“You still running book?”

“Nah. That’s why business is so bad. We used to do it all in the old days. I mean, my grandfather ran numbers. My dad, he took everyone’s bets. The cops called them both crooks. No offense to your old man.”

“None taken.”

“How is he, by the way?”

“You probably know more than I do, Eddie.”

“Yeah, I guess. Where was I?”

“The cops called your dad and granddad crooks.”

“Right. But you know who finally put us out of business? The government. Used to be numbers were illegal. Then the government called it a lottery and gives shittier odds than we ever did and now, bam, it’s legit. Gambling was illegal too, and then some online assholes paid off a bunch of politicians and now, boom, you click online and your bets are in. Marijuana too, not that my old man ever sold that.”

“But you were booking five years ago?”

“That’s around when it all started to tank. Why?”

“Do you remember a client named Ellen Winslow?”

He frowned. “She wasn’t one of mine. Reggie on Shirley Avenue took her bets.”

“But you know the name?”

“She was in deep, yeah. But I can’t imagine why you’d care.”

Eddie still wears the white pharmacy smock. Like he’s a doctor or a cosmetics salesman at Filene’s.

“So she’d have owed the Fisher brothers?”

Eddie doesn’t love where this conversation is headed. “Yeah, I guess. Davey, why are you asking me all this?”

“I need to talk to Kyle.”

Silence.

“Kyle as in Skunk Kyle?”

“They still call him that?”

“He prefers it.”

That had been his nickname when we were kids. I don’t remember when Kyle moved to town. First grade, maybe second. He had the white forelock even then. With the white streak against the black hair and kids being kids, he immediately got the obvious nickname Skunk. Some kids would have hated that. Young Kyle seemed to revel in it.

“Let me get this straight,” Eddie says. “You want to talk to Skunk Kyle about an old debt?”

“Yes.”

Eddie whistled. “You remember him, right?”

“Yes.”

“Remember when he pushed Lisa Millstone off that roof when we were nine?”

“I do.”

“And Mrs. Bailey’s cats. The ones that kept disappearing when we were like, twelve?”

“Yes.”

“And the Pallone girl. What was her name again? Mary Anne—”

“I remember,” I say.

“Skunk hasn’t gotten better, Davey.”

“I know. I assume he still works for the Fishers?”

Eddie gives his face a vigorous rub with his right hand. “You going to tell me what this is about?”

I see no reason not to. “I think the Fishers kidnapped my son and set me up for murder.”

I give him the abridged version. Eddie doesn’t tell me I’m crazy, but he thinks it. I show him the amusement-park photo. He looks at it quickly, but his eyes stay mostly on me. He drops his cigarette butt to the cracked pavement and lights another one. He doesn’t interrupt.

When I finish, Eddie says, “I’m not going to try to talk you out of this. You’re a big boy.”

“I appreciate that. You can set it up?”

“I can make a call.”

“Thank you.”

“You know the old man retired, right?”

“Nicky Fisher retired?” I say.

“Yep, retired, moved someplace warm. I hear Nicky golfs every day now. Spent his life murdering, robbing, extorting, pillaging, maiming, but now he’s in his eighties enjoying golf and spa massages and dinners out in Florida. Karma, right?”

“So who’s the boss now?”

“His son NJ runs the show.”

“Do you think NJ will talk to me?”

“I can only ask. But if it’s what you think, it’s not like they’re going to confess.”

“I’m not interested in getting anyone in trouble.”

“Yeah, but it’s not just that. If they really wanted to set you up for killing your own kid — and I won’t go into the million reasons why that makes no sense — why wouldn’t they just call the cops on you now?”

“The Fishers calling the cops?”

“It wouldn’t be a good look, I admit. Of course, they might just kill you. That’s more their style than this Count of Monte Cristo tale you’re coming up with.”

“I don’t really have a choice, Eddie. This is my only lead.”

Eddie nods. “Okay. Let me make a call.”

Chapter 24

Rachel didn’t know whether she was being followed or not. Probably.

Didn’t matter. She had a plan.

She walked to the train station and took the Main/Bergen line. The train wasn’t crowded at this hour. She checked her surroundings, changed train cars twice. No one seemed to be following or watching her, but they could be good at their job.

She exited the train at Secaucus Junction and headed for the train into Penn Station in New York City. Pretty much everyone else on the train did the same. Again, she tried to keep an eye out, but no one seemed to be watching her.

Didn’t matter. She had a plan.

She walked the streets of Manhattan for the next forty-five minutes, winding her way through various midtown locations until she reached a high-rise on Park Avenue and Forty-Sixth Street where Hester Crimstein, her attorney, had told her to go. A young man was waiting for her. The young man didn’t ask Rachel her name. He just smiled and said, “Right this way.” The elevator door was already open. They went up to the fourth floor in silence. When the doors opened, the young man said, “It’s down the hall on the left.” He waited for her to exit and then led the way. She opened the door and went in. Another man stood by a sink.

“Have a seat,” the other man said.

She sat with her back to the sink. The man worked fast. He cut her hair short and dyed it a subtle red. No words were exchanged during the whole process. When he was done, the first man, the younger man, came back. He led Rachel back to the elevator. He pressed the button for G3, which, she assumed, was the third floor of the garage. In the elevator he handed her a car key and an envelope. The envelope had cash, a driver’s ID in the name of Rachel Anderson (her maiden name), two credit cards, a phone. The phone was some kind of clone. She could get normal calls or texts, but the FBI wouldn’t be able to track where she was. At least, that was how the young man explained it to her.

When they reached G3, the elevator doors slid open. “Parking spot forty-seven,” the young man said. “Drive safely.”

The car was a Honda Accord. It wasn’t stolen or a rental, and Hester had assured her that there was no way it could be traced to either of them. She checked the phone as she slid behind the wheel. David had just sent the pin drop.

Whoa.

She was surprised to see he was in Revere, not far from his old home. She wondered about that. Going home had not been part of the plan. In fact, David had been careful to stress the dangers in going anywhere familiar.

That meant something Hilde Winslow had told him brought him back to Revere.

Rachel didn’t get why, but she didn’t have to yet. She started up the car and drove north.

When Eddie gets off the phone, he tells me it’s going to be a few hours before the meet.

“You want to stay in my back room until then?” Eddie asks.

I shake my head and give him the number of my burner phone. “Can you call me when you know a time?”

“Sure.”

I thank him and start across the street. I know this neighborhood like the proverbial back of my hand. Things may change, but in places like this, not much. By the water, sure. There are new high-rises overlooking Revere Beach. But here, where I grew up, the row houses may have fresh paint jobs or aluminum siding or the occasional addition, but it’s all pretty much the same. A big part of my childhood was about cutting through every yard to save a step or avoid being seen or maybe it was just about adventure.

I am so close now to my father.

I realize the danger here. There is, I’m sure, a fairly massive manhunt for me. That may mean that they are watching my childhood home, where my father and aunt still reside. It makes sense. But as I noted before, the cops can’t be everywhere. They know that last night I was in New York City. Do they think I would come up to Revere from there? It would depend, I guess, on what Hilde Winslow has told them, but I would highly doubt she would confess to committing perjury during my trial.

I check all the angles as I duck into the backyards of my youth. I realize that surveillance doesn’t require a van parked in front of the house, but I see nothing indicating danger. I wonder whether it’s safe. I wonder whether this even makes sense. Taking a step back for a moment: What’s the point in seeing Dad and Aunt Sophie after all this time? Won’t my visit just upset them?

But I’m drawn to my old home. I am an escaped convict with a few hours to kill, and I want to see the people I love the most. Is that so strange? No. But my motive and focus remain locked on finding Matthew.

I feel safe as I hit the backyards between Thornton and Highland. The homes, mostly multi-dwellings, were stacked close together so that you never really knew where your property ended and the next one started. That had led to some interesting battles over the years. When I was fourteen, the Siegelmans claimed that Mr. Crestin’s garden went over the property line, and so they wanted some of Crestin’s award-winning tomatoes. I pass by that disputed border right now and reach Mrs. Bordio’s place. Mrs. Bordio lived there with her son Pat, who had what we used to call a lazy eye. They moved out in the early 2000s, and the place looks well cared for by the new owners. Mr. Bordio, Pat’s father, died before my time, in Vietnam, and the yard was always overgrown. My old man finally set up a rotating schedule where the men in the neighborhood took turns mowing her lawn. Mrs. Bordio repaid the men with her homemade peanut brittle. Mr. Ruskin — I’m walking past his place now — had spent an entire summer building an enormous pizza oven out of brick and concrete. It’s still there, of course, even though the Ruskins moved out in 2007. If a tornado ever took out this neighborhood, that oven would be the only thing left standing.

Up ahead I can see the back of my childhood home.

The shrubbery is thicker here. One of my earliest memories — I must have been three or four — is my dad and Uncle Philip building a swing set in the yard. Adam and I watched our dads in awe. It was a hot day and mostly I remember the way my dad would pick up a bottle of Bud and bring it to his lips. He’d take a deep sip, lower it, notice me watching, wink.

And of course, I remember my high school girlfriend Cheryl.

As I make my way closer to my home, my strongest memory is a sacrilegious one involving the tent that Mr. Diamond put up every year to celebrate Sukkot. A sukkah tent, if you will, is normally a hut-like structure made out of twigs and branches with no roof. You keep it outside. That’s a must. I don’t remember all the religious details anymore. The guys in prison are oddly the most religious I’ve ever met. I do not fit into that camp.

Anyway, the Diamonds’ sukkah was a step above everyone else’s in the neighborhood. It was a large tent with rich color and Hebrew lettering, and when Cheryl and I were seventeen years old, late on a cool October evening, we sneaked into the Diamonds’ sukkah tent and lost our virginities.

Yep. Just like that.

I can’t help but smile and wince at the memory.

Man, I loved Cheryl.

I’d had a crush on her since her family moved onto Shirley Avenue when we were in eighth grade, but it wasn’t until right before junior prom that Cheryl reciprocated at all, and even then, we’d end up going to the prom as “friends.” You know the deal. We were in similar friend groups and neither of us had anyone to go with. We ended up making out that night, in her case more out of boredom than anything else.

That’s when we became a couple.

I lean against the tree in the Diamonds’ old backyard. Cheryl and I had been good for so long. We had a brief breakup in college. That was more my doing than hers. Everyone told us that we were too young to settle down and never experiment with anyone else. We gave it a try, but for me no one else measured up. We got engaged our senior year of college, but we promised ourselves no marriage until Cheryl finished med school. We stuck to that plan. Then we got married and she got the residency of her dreams and then, following on this smooth, predictable, happy streak, we decided to have kids.

This is where things went wrong for us.

Cheryl — or should I say we? — couldn’t get pregnant.

If you’ve had fertility issues, you know the stress and strain. Cheryl and I both wanted kids. Badly. It had been a given. We wanted four. That was our plan. We had agreed to that. But we tried for months and months and nothing happened. When you want to get pregnant, it seems as though everyone else in the world — the worst people, the most undeserving people, the people who don’t even want children — are all getting pregnant. Everyone is getting pregnant but you.

We visited a specialist who ran tests and more tests and discovered the culprit was me. Yes, we all know that it’s “no one’s fault,” that you’re in this together, that it doesn’t make you less of a man yada yada yada, but discovering that my sperm count was too low to have children messed with my head in an awful way. I know better now, I guess. I know about toxic masculinity and all that, but when you grow up the way I did, in a place like this, a man has certain jobs and responsibilities and if he can’t even get his own wife pregnant, well, what kind of man is that?

I felt shame. Dumb, I know. But your feelings don’t know from dumb.

Cheryl and I tried and failed at IVF three times. The strain between us grew. Every conversation was about having a baby or worse, when we tried not to let it consume us — we’d been told that sometimes if you just relax, it magically happens — it became the figurative elephant not only in the room but in the bed. That elephant never left us.

Cheryl was great about it.

Or so I thought.

She never blamed me, but being an idiot with self-esteem issues, I let my imagination run wild. She is looking at me differently, I thought. She is looking at me and finding me wanting. She is looking at other men — virile, fertile men — and wondering how she ended up with such a dud.

It almost destroyed us.

Then we got some good news. One of my dad’s old Revere buddies was a general practitioner in New Hampshire. Dr. Schenker told me that he’d had the same issue and got cured with varicocele surgery. I don’t want to go into the details and you don’t want me to, but in short, you remove swollen veins inside the scrotum. Long story short: It worked. Suddenly my sperm count soared past normal.

Four months later, Cheryl was pregnant with Matthew.

It was all good again.

Except it wasn’t.

The years of infertility hell had played havoc with us and our relationship, but once Matthew was born, I thought that it would be behind us. And it was. Until I found out that while saying all the right things to me, Cheryl had gone behind my back and visited another fertility clinic to look into donor sperm. She hadn’t gone through with it. That’s what she kept reminding me. She explained it so clearly — she had been desperate not just to have a baby but to put us both out of this purgatory and so for a moment, a brief stupid moment, she considered getting donor sperm, something she knew that I would never agree to, and not telling me.

It was, she admitted, an awful thing to even consider. She apologized profusely. But I didn’t accept the apology. Not at first anyway. I was hurt. Her actions played into all my stupid insecurities and so then I lashed out. She had broken my trust — and I compounded the issue by handling it badly.

Through the back window of my family home, I see movement. I move behind a shrub, and when I see my aunt Sophie enter and sit down alone at the kitchen table, my heart bursts. She wears a blue formless housedress. Her back is hunched. Her hair is in bobby pins but some wisps have escaped and dangle in her face. A potpourri of emotions course through me. Aunt Sophie. My wondrous, generous, kind, fierce aunt who raised me from the time my mom died of cancer. She looks weary, spent, old before her time. Life had sucked away that vitality. Or had it been my father’s illness?

Or me?

Aunt Sophie always believed in me. Others caved. But never, ever Sophie.

I am not sure how to handle this, but I find myself tentatively approaching the back window. She has the radio on. Sophie always loved playing music in the kitchen. Classic rock. Of course, it might not be a radio anymore. It might be an Alexa or some other kind of speaker device. I can hear Pat Benatar belt out that we are young, heartache to heartache. Sophie had loved Pat Benatar and Stevie Nicks and Chrissie Hynde and Joan Jett. I creep up the back porch steps and without thinking about it, I lightly rap my knuckles on the window.

Sophie looks up and sees me.

I expect her to be startled or confused or — at the very least — thrown off by my sudden appearance. I expect some kind of understandable hesitancy, even for a moment or two, but with Aunt Sophie, there is none of that. She has always meant unconditional and ferocious love, and that’s all I’m seeing here. She jumps up and beelines straight for the back door. Her face is already a sun shower — bright smile, wet tears on her cheeks. She flings open the door, looks left and right in a protective way that tweaks my heart, and says, “Get in here.”

I listen. Of course. I flash back to the days my dad would come home late from a night shift and wonder where I was, and Aunt Sophie would make up an excuse and sneak me in through this back door so he wouldn’t know. I step inside and close the door. She hugs me. She feels smaller now, frailer. I’m afraid at first to squeeze too tight, but she’ll have none of that.

I want to hold back, stay upright and focused, to not give in to the emotion of the moment, but I don’t stand a chance. Not with Aunt Sophie. Not with an Aunt Sophie hug. I feel my knees buckle and maybe I let out a small cry, but this frail woman of towering strength holds me up.

“It’s going to be okay,” she tells me.

And I believe her.

Chapter 25

Briggs Correctional Officer Ted Weston told Max and Sarah his story once, twice, thrice. Max and Sarah stayed quiet for most of it. Max nodded encouragingly. Sarah stood leaning against a corner of the prison office they were using as an interrogation room, arms folded. When Ted finished his tale for a third time, proudly winding down with how he spotted the warden and the prisoner getting into the warden’s car, Max kept nodding and then he turned to Sarah and said, “I like that last part best. Don’t you, Sarah?”

“The part about spotting the warden’s car, Max?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, me too.”

Max started plucking his lip with his index finger and thumb. He did this to stop himself from biting his nails. “Do you want to know why Sarah and I like that part best, Ted? I can call you Ted, right?”

Ted Weston’s smile was uneasy. “Sure.”

“Thanks, Ted. So do you want to know why?”

Weston gave a half-hearted shrug. “Sure, I guess.”

“Because it’s true. I mean it. That part of the story — the way you looked out the window and spotted the car and did kind of a ‘whoa hold up a moment’ thing — when you tell that story, your face beams with honesty.”

“It really does,” Sarah added.

“Like you’re using a high-end moisturizer. The rest of the time — like when you’re telling us about how you took poor sick David Burroughs to the infirmary late at night—”

“—in a way that defies all protocol,” Sarah added.

“—Or how he turned on you suddenly—”

“—with no motivation.”

“You’re right-handed, aren’t you, Ted?”

“What?”

“You are. I’ve been watching you. Not a big deal except whenever you’re telling us about getting Burroughs from his cell and taking him to the infirmary, your eyes look up and to the right.”

“That’s a sign you’re lying, Ted,” Sarah said.

“It’s not foolproof, but it’s accurate more often than not. If you are really trying to access a memory, a right-handed person—”

“—eighty-five percent of us anyway—”

“—looks upwards and to the left.”

“And the darting eyes, Max.”

“Right, thanks, Sarah. This is kind of fascinating, Ted. I think you’ll like this. Your eyes dart around a lot when you lie. Not just you. That’s most people. Do you want to know why?”

Ted said nothing. Max continued.

“It’s a throwback, Ted. It’s a throwback to an era when humans felt trapped, maybe by another human, maybe by an animal or something, and so their eyes would dart around looking for an escape route.”

“Do you really buy that origin story, Max?” Sarah asked.

“I don’t know. I mean, no doubt about it — darting eyes usually indicates a lie. But if that’s the origin, I don’t know, but it’s a compelling story.”

“It is,” Sarah agreed.

“Darting eyes,” Ted Weston repeated, trying to look confident. “I don’t need to take this.”

Max looked back at Sarah.

Sarah nodded “Very manly, Ted.”

Weston stood. “You don’t have any proof I’m lying.”

“Sure we do,” Max said. “Do you really think we’d just rely on that eye thing?”

“He doesn’t know us, Max.”

“He doesn’t indeed, Sarah. Show him.”

Sarah slid the bank statement across the table. Ted Weston was still standing. He looked down at it. His face lost color.

“Sarah was kind enough to highlight the important part for us, Ted. Do you see that?”

“You should have asked for cash, Ted,” Sarah said.

“Yeah, but then where would he have put it? It’s nice they kept the amounts under ten grand. Figured no one would notice.”

“We did.”

“No we, Sarah. You. You noticed. How was Ted here to know you’re the best?”

“I’m going to blush, Max.”

Sarah’s phone buzzed. She stepped aside. Ted Weston collapsed back into his seat.

“Do you want to tell me what really happened,” Max asked him in a stage whisper, “or do you want to get thrown into general population and see how the other half lives?”

Ted kept staring at the bank statement.

“Max?”

It was Sarah. “What’s up?”

“Facial recognition may have gotten a hit on our boy.”

“Where?”

“Getting off a train in Revere Beach.”

“You can’t stay,” Aunt Sophie tells me. “The FBI was here this morning. They’ll be back.”

I nod. “Can I talk to him?”

She tilts her head to the side and looks sad. “He’s asleep. The morphine. You can see him, but I don’t think he’ll know you’re there. I’ll take you up.”

We pass the piano, the one with the lace top and all the old photographs on it. I notice that Cheryl and my wedding picture is still front and center. I don’t know what to make of that. Most of my friends in this neighborhood have at least two or three siblings, often a lot more. I was an only child. I never asked why, but I suspect that whatever caused my issue may have been hereditary, the worst kind of “like father like son,” which could have led, of course, to no son at all. But that’s speculation on my part.

I take the chair next to his bed — Dad’s old desk chair — look down at him. He’s sleeping, but his face is twisted up in a grimace. Aunt Sophie stands behind me. I love my father. He was the best father in the world. But I also don’t really know him. He didn’t believe in sharing his feelings. I have no idea what his hopes and dreams were. Maybe that’s best, I don’t know. We get a lot of grief nowadays about that, about men bottling up their feelings, about toxic masculinity. I don’t know if that was it or not. My dad fought in Vietnam. His dad fought in World War Two. My grandmother told me that the two men who came home were not the same as the ones who left. That’s obvious, of course, but my grandmother also said that it wasn’t that they had changed, but that whatever they had seen over there, whatever they had done and experienced, these men felt the need to keep it locked away. Not for their sake, but because they didn’t want to expose those they loved to those horrors. These men weren’t cruel or distant or even damaged. They were sentinels who wanted to protect those they loved, no matter what the cost to themselves. When Matthew was born, I tried to remember every single thing my father had done with me. I wanted to be that kind of dad. I wanted to make him feel safe and loved and strong. I wondered how my dad did it, like a child watching a master magician. I wanted to know his secrets so I could perform them for Matthew.

I love my dad. He would come home exhausted, change into a white T-shirt, and go outside to throw a ball with me. He took me to Kelly’s for a roast beef sandwich and a shake on Saturdays for lunch. He’d let me tag along to the dog track and explain about the favorites and the odds. I cheered him on when he pitched for the Revere Police softball team, especially when they had their annual game against the firefighters. He taught me how to tie a tie. He let me pretend-shave with him when I was seven, lathering up my face and giving me a razor with no blade in it. He took me to Fenway Park twice a year to watch the Red Sox. We would sit in the bleachers and I’d get a hot dog and Coke and he’d get a hot dog and beer and he’d buy me a pennant of the opposing team so I’d remember the game. We watched the Celtics over at Uncle Philip’s house — he had the big-screen TV. My dad never made me feel like a nuisance or burden. He valued his time with me, and I valued my time with him.

But all that said, I don’t know my father’s hopes and dreams, his worries and concerns, how he felt about my mother dying or if he wanted more or less from this life.

I sit now and wait for him to open his eyes and recognize me. I expect the miracle, of course — that my coming home would somehow cure him, that my very presence would make him rise from the bed, or at least, he’d have a moment or two of clarity and a final word of wisdom for his only child.

None of that happened. He slept.

After a while, Aunt Sophie said, “It’s not safe, David. You should go.”

I nod.

“Your cousin Dougie is away for the month on a shark expedition. I have the key to his place. You can use that for as long as you need.”

“Thank you.”

We rise. I study my father’s limp hand for a moment. There used to be such power in that hand. It’s gone now. The knotty muscles on his forearm as he would work a screwdriver or wrench are gone too now, replaced with spongy tissue. I kiss my father’s forehead. I wait one more second for his eyes to open. They don’t.

“Do you think I did it?” I ask Aunt Sophie.

“No.”

I look at her. “Did you ever—?”

“No. Not for a second.”

We leave him then. I realize that I will probably never see my father again, but there is no time or need to process that. My phone buzzes. I check the message.

“Everything okay?”

I tell Aunt Sophie that it’s Rachel. She’s half an hour out. I text her Dougie’s address and tell her to come in through the back entrance.

“Rachel’s helping you?” my aunt says.

“Yes.”

She nods. “I always liked her. Shame what happened. You’ll be safe at Dougie’s. Both of you. Contact me if you need anything, okay?”

I hug her then. I close my eyes and hold on. Then I ask something stupid, something that has been annoying me like a sore tooth I keep probing with my tongue: “Did Dad think I did it?”

And because Aunt Sophie can’t lie: “Not at first.”

I don’t move. “But then?”

“He’s an evidence man, David. You know that. The blackouts. The fights with Cheryl. The way you used to walk in your sleep as a teenager...”

“So he...?”

“Not on purpose, no.”

“But he thought I killed Matthew?”

Aunt Sophie lets go of me. “He didn’t know, David. Can we leave it at that?”

With the bob cut, I barely recognize Rachel.

“What do you think?” she asks, trying to keep the mood light.

“Looks good.”

And it does. The Anderson sisters have always been considered beautiful, albeit in different ways. Cheryl, my ex, was a little more traffic-stopping. You noticed her. It hit you right away. Rachel’s beauty came at you slower and grew with time. She had what Aunt Sophie called — and she meant this in the best of ways — an interesting face. I got that now. What society would call imperfections made it more like a painting where you keep discovering new things every time you look at it and it changed depending on the time of day or light in the room or angle at which you stood. The bob suited her, I guess. It accentuated the cheekbones or something, I don’t know.

I fill Rachel in on what’s happened with Hilde and Eddie and the Fisher family. As I do, the phone chirps with a text from Eddie:

Don’t come back here. Cops were here looking for you.

I write back that they seem to know I’m around. He replies:

Revere’s crawling with them. Meet is at Pop’s Garage. 280 Hunting Street in Malden. 3PM. Can you get there?

I tell him I can.

Pull into the bay on the left. Come alone. That’s what they told me to tell you.

Rachel is reading over my shoulder. Dougie is a fifty-four-year-old bachelor, and the place is done up as if to prove that. The walls are all dark wood paneling like a dive bar. He has a dart board, and a huge-screen TV takes up an entire wall. The carpet is green shag. The chairs are faux leather recliners with metal poking through the footrests. There’s an old oak bar with oversized neon beer signs — one for Michelob Light, one for Blue Moon Belgian White hanging over the bar. The place was dark when I came in except for those neon signs. I didn’t turn any lights on or off, so right now they provide the only illumination.

“I’ll drive you,” Rachel says.

“You saw the ‘come alone’ part?”

“I still don’t get it,” she says. “The Fishers are all about extortion and drugs and prostitution, stuff like that. Why would they be involved in Matthew’s...” She stopped. “I don’t even know what to call it.”

“Let’s call it kidnapping,” I say.

“Okay. Why would they be involved in that?”

“I don’t know.”

“And you expect them to just tell you?”

“We don’t have any other leads.”

“But maybe we do,” Rachel says, opening up her laptop. She clicks on a file, and photographs start downloading. “I started going through various image searches in line with what we know about Irene’s photo from Six Flags. We know the location. We know the date. I started with that. I looked up on Instagram, for example, any photo that was tagged for Six Flags on that day. I spread it out three days forward to start because I figured some people wouldn’t get to posting right away. Then I did image searches of Irene and her family, hoping that maybe they’d be in photographs someone else posted, all hoping maybe we’d get another glimpse of Matthew.”

“And?”

“And the search came up with six hundred eighty-five photos and videos from across social media — Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, whatever. We have a little time. I figure we could go through them.”

They are organized in time sequence — time posted, not time taken — and then further subdivided by social media outlet. I see couples and families on rides, getting on rides, coming off rides, waving from the Ferris wheel or the merry-go-round or hanging upside down on roller coasters. I see posed shots, candid shots, distance shots of the rides. I love rides. I was always the adult who would readily volunteer to take cousins, nephews, nieces — anyone — on the harshest coasters there were. My dad loved rides too, even when he got older. I think about that now. I took Matthew a few times. He was obviously too young for any of the major roller coasters, but he loved the little train, that airplane ride, the slow boats. Matthew looked like my dad. That’s what everyone said, and once again, after my visit to my dad, I can only think about what passes down, from my grandfather to my father to me to Matthew. It’s all there in the echoes.

Some of the photos are of people driving to the park. Some are with animals from the park’s drive-thru safari. Some are with ice cream or burgers or waiting on long lines. Some feature dressed-up characters like Batman or Bugs Bunny or Porky Pig. Some are of arcade prizes like a stuffed turtle or blue dog or assorted Pokémon characters.

Amusement parks are diverse melting pots. There is every creed, religion, what have you. I see boys in yarmulkes and girls with head coverings. Everyone is smiling.

There are a surprising number of group shots with ten, twenty, or even thirty people. We stop here and zoom on every face. The children I understand. We are trying to find Matthew, of course. As for the adults, we are both looking for anyone we recognize in any way, anyone who might be — I don’t know — suspicious.

We find Tom and Irene Longley and their two boys in a group photo with sixteen other people. We take our time with that one, but we get nothing.

I check my watch. We may not have time to get through them all before I need to head to my meeting at Pop’s Garage in Malden. We start picking up the pace, realizing we can go through them later, when we pass another photograph of the Longley family with actors dressed up as yellow Minions from the Despicable Me movie.

Rachel hits the button to continue, but I say, “Wait.”

“What?”

“Go back.”

She clicks back.

“One more.”

She does. It’s the Longleys. Just the Longleys. No one else in the photo. But that isn’t what catches my eye.

“What are they standing in front of?” I ask.

“Looks like one of those screens for corporate events.”

It is one of the backdrop banners people use to advertise the movie being premiered or the company holding an event, normally decorated with a repeat logo. But that wasn’t the case here. There are various logos.

“I think Irene said they were at a corporate event,” Rachel said. “I told you that her husband works for Merton Pharmaceuticals. That’s their logo over there.”

There are others. I see one for a common over-the-counter pain medication. I see one for a popular line of skin care products.

“It’s a huge conglomerate,” Rachel says. “They own food brands, pharmaceuticals, chain restaurants, hospitals.”

“Do you think they rented out the whole park?”

“I don’t know. I can ask Irene. Why, what’s up?”

“There are other photos like this, right? In front of the banner?”

“Yeah, a bunch, I think. We’re just getting to them now. Usually, you take a picture like this when you come in, but I guess they wanted to wait to the end of the day.”

“Keep clicking,” I say.

I see it on the third click. When I do, I feel my entire body freeze.

“Stop.”

“What?” she asks.

I point to a logo on the bottom right. I’d been able to see part of it with the Longley family, enough to make me pause, but now I can see it clearly. Rachel follows my finger. She sees it too.

It’s a stork carrying three words in what looks like a sling:

Rachel stares another second before turning to me.

My mouth feels dry. “That’s where she went,” I say. “Cheryl, I mean.”

“Yeah, so?”

I say nothing.

“What does that have to do with anything, David? I mean, this company also owns pizzerias. You’ve been to those.”

I frown. “My marriage didn’t fall apart because of a visit to a pizzeria.”

“I don’t understand what you’re trying to say here.”

“Your sister went to that” — I make quote marks with my fingers — “‘institute’ behind my back.”

“I know,” she says in a voice so soft and gentle it almost feels like a caress. “But it led to nothing. You know that too.”

“Except it didn’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“I stopped trusting her.”

“You didn’t have to, David. Cheryl was in pain. You could have understood that. She didn’t go through with it.”

I see no reason to argue and perhaps she’s right. I stare at the logo and shake my head. “This isn’t a coincidence.”

“Of course it is. I just wish you could have understood.”

“Oh, I understood,” I say, my voice surprisingly matter-of-fact. “I was shooting blanks. It was putting a strain on our marriage. Cheryl figured maybe she could get pregnant with a donor and claim the baby was mine. I’m surprised she just didn’t fuck another guy and cut out the middleman.”

“That’s not fair, David.”

“Who’s she married to now, Rachel?” I counter. “You didn’t tell me that part.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It’s Ronald, isn’t it?”

She says nothing. I feel my heart crack again. “Just a friend. That’s what she kept saying.”

“That’s all he was.”

I shake my head. “Don’t be naïve.”

“I’m not saying Ronald didn’t hope for—”

“It doesn’t matter,” I say because it’s true and I can’t listen to another word of this. “The only thing I care about now is finding Matthew.”

“And you think this” — she points at the stupid stork logo — “is the answer?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“How?”

But I don’t have the answer, so we sit in silence for a while.

After some time passes, Rachel says, “Are you still going to meet with that Skunk guy?”

“Yes.”

“You better go then.”

“Yes.” I look at her. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“Nothing,” she says.

I keep looking at her.

“It’s just a coincidence,” Rachel says. “Nothing more.”

And I don’t know if she’s trying to convince me or herself.

Chapter 26

“Pixie?”

Gertrude turned away from the window with the magnificent view and toward the little boy. This Payne house, completed only four years ago, was altogether different from the museum-quality Payne House of yesteryear. Yes, the property was expansive. There was a tennis court and swimming pool and horse trails and all that. But instead of the old mammoth tomb-like marble, this estate was light, airy, postmodern modern, a complex of white cubes and wall-to-ceiling windows. It surprised guests, but Gertrude loved it.

“Yes, Theo?”

“Where’s Dad?”

She smiled at him. Theo was pure light despite all the darkness. He was a good boy, kind, intelligent, thoughtful. He spoke not only English but French and German as well, because he had spent most of his life at a boarding school in St. Gallen. The Swiss school had fewer than three hundred students, horse stables, mountain climbing, sailing, and cost nearly $200,000 per year. Hayden, not wanting to be an absentee father, spent a lot of time in the area. This had been the boys’ (that was how she thought of them) first journey back to the United States in a long while. They’d been staying at the Payne estate with her now for three months. Gertrude had been in favor of the trip. She was getting older and wanted to spend time with them.

But it had been a mistake.

From behind the boy, Hayden entered the room. “I’m right here, buddy.”

Hayden put his hands on the boy’s shoulders. The boy blinked. This had been his issue from the start. He was a wonderful boy, truly, and after the initial transition stage, he seemed to be in a decent place. But there was a skittishness to Theo, a wince and a cringe almost as though he expected to be struck. He wouldn’t be. He hadn’t been. But sometimes, even though the boy didn’t know the truth, it was as if something inside of him, something primordial, did and involuntarily threw up safeguards.

Hayden gave Gertrude a tight smile, and she could see immediately that something was wrong. She summoned Stephano, who would lead Theo outside to play. Stephano closed the door behind them, giving grandmother and grandson some privacy, though Stephano was privy to all the family skullduggeries.

“What is it, Hayden?” she asked.

“He assaulted a police officer.”

She had not yet checked the news. While Gertrude understood technology and the completely connected world, she believed that the secret to longevity was a mix of routine and new experiences. Her mornings, though, always started the same way. Seven a.m. wake up. Twenty minutes of stretching. Twenty minutes of meditation. Coffee and a novel for an hour if time permitted. Then, and only then, did she bother with the news. As she aged, she realized that the news became more about entertainment — stressful entertainment at that — than enlightenment.

“I assume they captured him?”

“No. Not yet.”

That surprised her. David Burroughs was more resourceful than she’d imagined. “You can’t stay. You know that.”

“Do you think David knows something?”

Something? Yes. But there was no way he could know enough. “This assault,” she said. “Where did it take place?”

“New York City.”

Gertrude didn’t understand. “Do they know why he was there?”

“The rumors are he was seeking revenge on a witness.”

“Any idea which one?”

“Almost all the witnesses were local experts.”

“Except one,” Gertrude said. “That woman who lied about seeing him with the baseball bat.”

Hayden nodded slowly. “Could be.”

That had puzzled her, of course. They’d known the woman was lying. They had no idea why.

“I’m tired of hiding him, Pixie.”

“I know, Hayden.”

“He has Payne blood coursing through his veins.”

“I know that too.”

“We even ran the tests. He’s my son. Your great-grandson. He’s a Payne man, after all.”

She almost smiled at that. A Payne man. Like that was a good thing. The damage those men had done. Surprise pregnancies, blackmail, extortion, even murder — all covered up with the mighty dollar. Back in the day, Gertrude hadn’t been surprised in the least by the Kennedy Chappaquiddick incident — she had only been surprised that it hadn’t been covered up before word leaked out. That sort of thing happened a lot. The rich pay off the family. That’s the carrot. But the rich use the stick too. Sure, you could try to stand up for the loved one who’d been knocked up or injured or killed, but it will only make it all much worse in the end. You’ll never get justice. The rich will deny and obfuscate and bribe and pressure and bankrupt and sue and threaten and if none of that works — and that almost always works — you’ll be made to disappear. Or maybe you have other children who will suffer. Something. Anything.

So when you wonder how a family can seemingly take money in exchange for something like the death of a daughter, it isn’t because they are greedy or immoral.

It is because they have no choice.

“I know, Hayden,” she told him.

“There has to be another way.”

Gertrude did not respond.

“Maybe,” Hayden said, “the truth should come out.”

“No,” she said.

“I mean, even if they somehow find Theo—”

“Hayden?”

“—what can they prove?”

“Hayden, stop.”

Her tone silenced him more than her words.

“We will make arrangements for you both to leave this afternoon,” she said, ending the conversation. “In the meantime, I don’t want that boy to leave the estate.”