Murder House

37

SING SING Correctional Facility, thirty miles north of New York City on the east bank of the Hudson River, houses nearly two thousand inmates over fifty-five acres of property. Up the hill from the lower-level secured facilities is Cell Block A — “Maximum A” — one of the largest max-security cell blocks in the world, with over six hundred inmates packed into six-by-nine-foot cells. They are murderers and rapists and sex traffickers and mob bosses and major drug dealers, divided into fierce factions predominantly by race — the Bloods and the Crips, the Latin Kings and Trinitarios, the Aryan Brotherhood. If you belong to one of the gangs, they have your back — you’re protected — but even then you’re not really protected, because the sins of the individual are the sins of the gang, and retaliation in Cell Block A is as common as census counts four times a day. In the last eight days, Cell Block A has been on lockdown four times, as the Latin Kings and the Bloods have worked out their differences the only way they know how. Guns are uncommon; it’s by shanks and razors, anything that can be pried loose and sharpened into a weapon, that most of the injuries are inflicted.

The first time Noah Walker walked into Cell Block A, he was overwhelmed. Overwhelmed by the sheer enormity, the cell block extending four stories high and so far from right to left that there seems to be no beginning or end, just an endless wall of steel and chain-link barriers. Overwhelmed by the noise, a deafening clamor of hundreds of caged men shouting, radios playing, gates slamming.

This is his home now, on the top tier of A-Block, Gallery L, seventh cell. He will live in L-7 for the rest of his life. He will live amid a massive series of cages, covered by a concrete-and-brick dome with windows that miraculously let in very little light, sunshine filtered through filth. The polluted air, the noise, the solitude of hour upon hour spent in a cell no bigger than a normal person’s closet — in the seventy-three days that Noah has spent here, they have had the effect of deadening him, killing his hope, erasing his dreams, leaving him numb.

Outside the cell — the mess hall, the showers, the machine shop, and the prison yard — it’s a different story. Noah is alert at all times, his eyes constantly moving about. Noah is not affiliated. The only real option for a white guy is the Aryan Brotherhood, and he’s not going anywhere near those racist morons. That makes him fair game to everyone. Stick a shank into Noah’s back, or accost him in the shower, or jump him in the yard, and nobody will retaliate. Noah is alone in every sense of the word.

And with every day that passes, he finds that he cares less and less. There is nothing for him here but the passage of time. He is simply waiting for time to move along until he dies.

His tiny cell is barren of personal effects. He hasn’t built up enough in the commissary for a radio, and no television is allowed. He has only two personal items, a photograph of Paige and a copy of his favorite novel, The Catcher in the Rye.

In the photograph, Paige is in Noah’s attic bedroom, her hand up to shield her face from his camera, a look of embarrassed amusement on her face. Strands of her hair curl around her cheek. He likes this photograph because it touches all of his senses. He hears Paige’s voice — Don’t take my picture! He smells her the way he liked her best, sweaty after sex. He feels her hand on his arm while she tries to keep him from snapping the photo with his phone.

Paige. He will never see her again. He told her not to come here, and to drive the point home, he told her he wouldn’t see her if she came. They have no future now, and it’s better she remembers him when life was good, to hold that sweet memory close to herself, rather than having her image of him deteriorate slowly over the years as he grows harder, more bitter.

He met yesterday with his lawyer, who told him there would be a one-month delay in getting his appeal on file. Noah told him that was okay. He doesn’t have a chance. He knows that. He’s in no hurry to find out that his appeal has been rejected.

That’s the worst part, worse than the fear in the prison yard, or the loneliness, or the shame of being convicted of a double homicide. The lack of any hope, of any future, of any meaning to his life, will kill him — if a shank in the neck doesn’t.

Which of those will come first, he has no idea.

38

The machine shop in Sing Sing is in the former “death room,” where the electric chair, “Old Sparky,” killed more than six hundred people, including the spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, over the course of seventy years. “Old Sparky” has been moved to a museum, and the death penalty has been abolished in New York — Noah now often wishes it hadn’t — so instead, Noah works in that space assembling chairs for toddlers, to be used, he assumes, in either an elementary school or a hospital.

If there have been any moments of enjoyment in his two and a half months in Sing Sing, they have come while he’s been doing this work, taking care and pride in putting together these chairs. He’s always enjoyed working with his hands, knowing that there is something tangible to show for his effort. Someone will sit in this chair. Someone will learn something in this chair. Someone will laugh in this chair.

“On the count!” One of the COs walks in for the census, taken four times a day to make sure all prisoners are accounted for. The correctional officers cannot, as a practical matter, follow around every inmate all the time, so they move them in groups through the narrow hallways, always staying to the right of the yellow stripe down the center, and even let them walk on their own when going to the yard or the gym.

At the CO’s call, Noah stands and keeps his hands at his sides. The CO counts off the inmates aloud. There are eleven in the machine shop, divided among the various rooms for printing, woodwork, and welding. There are only three, Noah included, here in woodworking.

Noah gets back to work, squatting down on one knee. Behind him, he hears the other two inmates — both of them African American, Al and Rafer — abruptly put down their tools and walk out of woodworking. Noah senses something.

He gets to his feet just as three men enter the room. Unlike Al and Rafer, these men aren’t black. They are white. He recognizes one of them as Eric Wheaton, the leader of the Aryan Brotherhood here at Sing Sing. His two friends are massive, with shaved heads and skin ink up and down their tree-trunk arms.

Wheaton, himself above average in size but dwarfed by his companions, is the elder statesman of his clan, probably fifty. He shows Noah his teeth. “Well, Noah. Seems like you been avoiding us. My friends have offered to be your friends.”

“I don’t need friends like you,” says Noah. He wishes he had something in hand, like the hammer on the floor.

“You don’t need friends? You’re the only guy in A don’t need friends? How’s a guy like you gonna get along in here with all the mongrels?”

The men on each side of Wheaton fan out, forming a semicircle around Noah. Two more men, nearly as big as the first set of goons, also proud members of the Brotherhood, enter the room. Now it’s five on one.

“So I’m askin’ nice,” says Wheaton. “For the last time.”

Noah takes a breath, steels himself. “I don’t need you or your white-trash racist asshole buddies.”

Wheaton’s smile widens, showing stained, crooked teeth. “He’s too good for us, friends. He’s Jesus. Didn’t you hear? Surfer Boy Jesus. Someone help me remember, now — what happened to Jesus?”

With that, they close in from both sides. Noah keeps his fist in tight and pops one of the goons in the mouth, snapping his head back, and then spins to his right and connects with a roundhouse left to the jaw of the thug from the other side. It’s enough to throw the man off balance but not enough to knock him over. Noah will still have to deal with him and with the other two. He turns back to his left for the oncoming rush, but he’s not fast enough; the biggest of the goons barrels into him, three hundred pounds of force, knocking him to the floor. He kicks out his legs and tries to bench-press the man off him before a boot connects with his temple, sending a shock of lightning across his eyes. Then the man on top of him rises up and slams down a fist. Just in time, Noah ducks his head, and the man’s fist hits the floor instead of Noah’s face. He cries out in pain. Noah lunges up at the midsection like a bucking bronco to topple the man off him.

But they are too many, and too big. After the initial burst of action, it simply comes down to numbers. Five on one. Five men kicking and punching Noah, who is pinned down. Blood flies from his mouth and nose with each kick, each punch, until he can no longer hold his head up. Now he is nothing more than a punching bag. He feels his ribs crack with successive kicks, but he can’t offer any response. He is getting the life beaten out of him, and if they want to kill him, he can no longer stop them.

After a while, the pressure comes off his chest, and he is being tugged by all four limbs. Then he is lifted off the ground and thrown down onto one of the large woodworking tables.

“Keep his arms out, boys,” one of them says. Noah is hardly conscious as his arms are spread out, palms up. Men climb onto the table and sit on each of his forearms, while two others sit on his shins. He is completely pinned down.

By the time he feels the prick of the nail on the palm of his hand, he is unable to even cry out. He looks through the fog, through the tiny slits of his eyes, and sees Eric Wheaton poising the nail over his right hand, a hammer raised above his head.

When the hammer comes down on the nail, it’s like a drilling rig finding oil, blood spurting into the air. Noah lets out an animal cry and his eyes go to the ceiling. They do quick work of it, nailing both hands to the wooden tabletop, while Noah focuses on a single thought.

Let me die, he prays.

39

“Almost ready, babe?”

I flip the page, then flip back, reading through police reports and investigation summaries and cross-referencing trial transcripts.

“Babe?”

“Um. Yeah. Almost ready.”

Well, not so much. I’m sitting on the bed, feet up, doing work. But I can get ready fast.

Matty pokes his head into the room. He’s wearing a new Hugo Boss sport coat and cologne of the same label. His hair is freshly slicked back from his shower.

“What are you doing? You haven’t even showered?”

“No, I — sorry,” I say. “Just reading.”

“Reading what? Christ, Murphy, do you ever stop working? And that comes from someone who works on Wall Street.” He walks over to the bed, where I’m sitting with the transcript on my lap. Matty reaches for the stack of paper I’m reading, revealing the solid-gold cuff links on his sleeves.

“This is the guy who killed your uncle? The ‘Surfer Jesus’ guy?”

“Yeah.” I look up at him. “Just checking something.”

“Checking what? That guy went down, what, four months ago? What is there to check?”

I shrug. “There was a shooting at Bridgehampton School a long time ago. Halloween of ninety-five.”

“And that has what to do with what?”

“Noah was arrested for it.”

“Noah,” he says. “Now you’re on a first-name basis with the guy.”

“I pulled the file yesterday,” I say. “Let me run this by you, okay?”

“Hurry.” Now he’s at the bedroom mirror above the dresser, checking himself over, fixing the collar of his new shirt.

“Fifteen people were shot that day in the southern playground,” I say. “Noah was on the east end of the yard, by the trees. Of the fifteen shot, about eight of them were hit within thirty feet of where he was standing with his BB gun.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Another seven were walking up to the school but farther away, farther west.”

“Oh. Okay.” He smoothes his hair, looks himself over once more, and reaches a favorable conclusion.

“They were more like sixty, seventy feet away. One of the kids on the farther west end, a kid named Darryl Friese, took a BB in his eye.”

“Yeah? Wow.”

“His left eye.”

Matty doesn’t answer. He walks into the bathroom and runs the water. When he walks back out, wiping his face with a hand towel, he nods at me.

“You still aren’t in the shower,” he says.

“You’re not listening to me.”

“Sure I am.”

I’m tempted to ask him what I said. But that would embarrass both of us.

“If Darryl Friese was walking north up to the school, and Noah was shooting from the east, how did he hit Darryl on the left side of the face?”

Matty tosses his shoulders. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t care, either. He finishes with the towel and gives me a sideways glance. “I’ve seen this guy Noah on TV,” he says. “Handsome dude. Should I be jealous?”

“Matty—”

“Who’s better-looking, him or me?” he asks.

“Are you kidding me?”

He points at me. “That’s a nonanswer. You think that guy’s got something on me? He doesn’t make seven figures, does he? C’mon, Murphy, give it up,” he says, grabbing my ankle. “You like that guy more than me?”

I move my leg, forcing his hand off my ankle. I get off the bed and walk out of the room. He follows me down the hallway.

“What? I was listening. But Murphy, what’s your deal? That thing was a lifetime ago. I mean, I know you miss your uncle, and I’m sorry and all that—”

“That’s very sweet of you,” I deadpan.

“—but seriously, you gotta snap out of this. You’re turning into a real drag.”

I stop and spin on him. “Am I?”

“Yeah, you wanna know the truth. You are.”

I take a step toward him. “This is the guy who killed my uncle. I’m trying to understand him.”

“Why? You trying to get closure or something?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Well, can you get ‘closure’ when we don’t have reservations at Quist in... now it’s twenty-four minutes,” he says, checking his watch.

“I can still get ready,” I say.

“Yeah, you’ll wash your hair and tie it into a ponytail and throw on something too casual for where we’re going. God forbid you try to look hot when I’m in town. God forbid you put on some makeup and spend more than two minutes on your hair. You’re this... you’re the hottest woman I know, but it’s like you don’t give a shit about that.”

I narrow my eyes to get a better look at this man named Matt Queenan. “I don’t give a shit about that,” I say. “Did you just figure that out?”

“Y’know, I’m gonna let you in on a little secret, princess.” He wags a finger at me. “A lot of women would want to look hot for me. You think I don’t get overtures all the time? Every day? You think there aren’t a dozen women who’d jump at the chance to date me?”

“Oh, I’m sure there are hundreds,” I say, not hiding my sarcasm. “You’re the great Matty Queenan! You make seven figures a year! Why don’t you go find one of those women tonight?”

I return to the bedroom. As I pass him, he grabs my arm. “You know what, I think I will,” he says through his teeth.

I yank my arm free and give him a forearm shiver to the chest. “Don’t grab my arm.”

“Don’t fucking push me,” he says, knocking me back into the wall.

My Irish up now, I lean in and punch him right in the kisser, connecting with his teeth and feeling his jaw crunch. “Is that better?”

He stumbles backward, unprepared, touching his mouth and then checking his fingers, finding blood. “You fucking bitch. Nobody hits me.”

I shrug. “Hit the road, Matty,” I say. “Or I’ll hit you again, a lot harder.”

“Yeah?”

He moves at me, but I feint toward him and he backs off. He’s a lightweight. He knows I could take him. He couldn’t handle the embarrassment.

“Have a nice life in this shithole town with your shithole job,” he says, turning to leave. “I’ll have another date by the time I get back to Manhattan.”

40

After Matty drives away, I throw on a baseball cap and head to my car. I don’t feel like being around here, smelling his lingering cologne, thinking of him. My nerves are still rattled, but I know, in my heart, that I wasn’t going anywhere with him. It was going to happen sooner or later.

I try to avoid the knowledge, also buried deep within, that I’m probably not going anywhere with any guy, that I’m not cut out for a relationship. I always rolled my eyes at the cliché of the cop who’s married to the job, but now I can see the merits of the stereotype. It’s not that I don’t care about anything besides my job — it’s that the job doesn’t let you leave. You see death and misery and suffering, and you don’t just click that off when you go home; it doesn’t wash off in the shower or vanish with a lover’s embrace. You are polluted, toxic, and so you hold back so you don’t infect someone else with the poison. You keep part of yourself segregated, hidden.

And as long as I’m being brutally honest with myself: The truth is I’ve always felt alone, long before I was a cop. Always different. The “red sheep” of my family, I always called myself, because of my shiny red hair contrasted with the blond hair of Ryan and my parents. (I’m told my red locks came from a great-grandmother I never knew; I’ve only seen a black-and-white photo of her.) I was tall and athletic, while Ryan was stout and bookish. I was a restless troublemaker, while Ryan was calm and content. I was a rebel without a clue, in a loving, happy family, as if I somehow missed out on the one gene that allowed me to just fit in like everyone else.

I drive to Uncle Lang’s cottage on North Sea Road. The shrubbery remains well maintained, courtesy of the Realtor who’s listing it. The door is locked, but I have a key. The house has been cleaned, the rugs shampooed, the kitchen scrubbed, the fridge emptied of perishables. It feels weird being here without the clothes strewn about, the smell of dirty socks and fried food — the house as it became after Chloe left Lang.

Chloe, Lang said to me, when I saw him before he was wheeled into surgery. Look up Chloe. One of his last thoughts was the love of his life. But even they couldn’t maintain a relationship. What chance do I have?

This is the question I pose as I unscrew the bottle of Beefeater gin. I decide to be an optimist and view the bottle as half full, and thus available for my consumption.

Oh, look at me. I’m a cop with an attitude on her last chance, in a town that gives her sweaty, breathless nightmares almost every night, who drinks too much and can’t connect with members of the male species, and with an acting police chief who’s no fan of mine, who’s probably hoping to run me out by boring me to death with lousy assignments. I’m surprised Matty only walked out on me, instead of sprinting.

I find a stray coffee cup in the cupboard, pour myself some gin, and head into Lang’s second bedroom, where his remaining effects have been boxed up. A roomful of boxes is so lonely. His desktop computer still sits on a simple wood desk, with the keyboard on a lower shelf that slides out. I boot up the computer and stare at the screen as it requests a password. I feel a pang in my heart as I type the password — JENNAROSE — and watch the computer come to life.

Lang kept copies of his “murder books” — police reports, investigators’ notes, crime-scene photos, autopsy reports, interview summaries for a given case — in his home office; they’re packed up now and sitting in his garage. He also wrote up summaries of each of these cases in individual word-processing documents, narrative versions of the events from crime to conviction. He’d talked for years about writing his memoirs when he retired, hoping for a boost to his nest egg and also a way of looking back on his tenure, recording it for posterity. If they made it into a TV series, I could live with that, too, he used to joke.

There are over fifty files in his CASES folder, going back decades. I look for the one from 1995, the BB gun shooting at Bridgehampton School, but there’s no entry for it. I don’t know why I want to understand what happened there. Matty, asshole that he is, did have a point. But that’s me in a nutshell, the kind of cop I am — I have to fit every piece of the puzzle together. And no matter how minor a detail a school shooting from almost seventeen years ago may have been, it’s still a piece that doesn’t fit.

I stare at the home screen of the computer, the icons for the antivirus and the recycle bin, the Microsoft Word file folder. One small file sits in the corner, not in any folder, a Word document entitled CHLOE.

Look up Chloe, Lang said to me in the trauma center before he died. “Look up” Chloe? I assumed he meant contact her, let her know what had happened, ask her to come to the hospital.

Look up... Chloe, the document?

I double-click on the icon and wait for the document to pop up. A handful of seconds later, it appears. It’s a letter, dated two days before his death.

My dearest Chloe, it begins. I have to tell someone, and even now, with you gone from me forever, I want that someone to be you.

“Oh my God,” I say to the empty room as I read the letter. “Oh my God.”

41

“L-7.” The guard taps on the cell door with his pen. He gets no answer. “L-7,” he says again. “I’m doing the go-round.”

Noah raises his head out of his hands, blinks into the light.

“Where you gonna be after lunch, L-7?”

Noah shakes his head. He’s been back in A-Block for three weeks now, after spending over a month in the prison hospital and having multiple surgeries at Phelps Memorial, where he was kept under heavy security and cuffed at the ankles to his bed. Since returning to A-Block, Gallery L, cell number 7, he has only left his cell for required trips — the mess hall, classes, and the occasional psych visit. He doesn’t have a job, still not having regained a sufficient range of motion in his hands to do much of anything, and won’t go to the prison yard or the gym. So even though inmates are allowed out of their cells in the afternoon, after lunch, he has stayed within this cramped, dreary space, staring at the walls, for almost the entire day. He sleeps, he supposes, but in the zombie-like daze in which he finds himself, it’s hard to distinguish between sleep and wakefulness, between dream and reality. His life has become a meaningless fog. There is no hope or despair, no fear or happiness.

“L-7?” It’s one of the “white shirts,” the senior correctional officers, joining the other CO. “You in pain, L-7? You know we have meds for you. All you have to do is tell us who did this to you.”

The warden cut off pain medication as soon as Noah was released from the prison hospital, trying to get Noah to implicate the Aryan Brotherhood in the attack. Everyone knows who attacked Noah, but they can’t prosecute them or even write up a disciplinary ticket without Noah’s cooperation.

Noah’s no snitch. He’d like nothing more than to stick it to Eric Wheaton and his buddies, but it’s just not in him to rat someone out. Growing up with his buddies, that was the one rule you didn’t break. You might bend the law or outright fracture it; you might fail to do unto others as you would have them do unto you — but you never snitched.

“That’s your choice, L-7.” The lieutenant and the other CO leave.

Time passes in slow motion. Noah goes to the mess hall for lunch but doesn’t touch his food; he’s lost almost twenty pounds since the attack.

Later in the afternoon, another CO shows up at his cell. “Mail, L-7,” he says, and he reaches through the bars and drops a single envelope into the small bucket reserved for such things. “Sorry for your troubles.”

He’s sorry? Noah looks up at the CO, who gives a grim shake of the head and moves down to the next cell. They read the inmates’ mail in Sing Sing, unless it bears the seal of an attorney-client communication, so the sorry must pertain to the mail he just received.

How, he thinks, could things possibly get worse?

Noah’s limbs are stiff when he gets up; he’s sat in the same position for almost three hours straight. He reaches into the bucket and grabs the envelope, perforated at the top by whoever read it. When he opens it, there is a Post-it that simply says Sorry and then a newspaper article, folded up. He unfolds it with a knot in his stomach and reads the headline: MANHATTAN SOCIALITE’S DROWNING RULED SUICIDE. Along with the article is a photo of Paige Sulzman in a sundress at some fancy gala.

“No!” he cries out. “No!” He forces himself to read a bit of the article, enough to know that Paige was found dead in her pool, before he grabs hold of the prison bars and shakes them. “No!” His bandaged hands start to bleed through the gauze and pads, but he doesn’t care, doesn’t even feel the pain. He screams until he has no voice, hundreds of other inmates hearing his cries and joining in with shouts and catcalls of their own.

Finally, exhausted, Noah crumples to the floor, leaning against the cell door. “Not her,” he whispers. “Not Paige.” She was supposed to move on. She was supposed to forget about him and get on with her life. She was supposed to leave John Sulzman and start the interior design business she’d always dreamed of having. She was supposed to have a life. She promised him. He made her promise she’d do that.

He cries, for the first time that he can remember. The tears pour out until he is gasping for air, coughing and gagging.

And then he has nothing left. He lies flat on his cell floor, oblivious to the dust, to the insect that crawls past his face. He stares into nothingness. He finds consolation in one and only one thing.

That the first chance he gets, he’ll see Paige again, this time in another world.

“L-7?” a CO calls out. “Everything okay?”

Noah raises his head, turns to the guard.

“Hey, CO,” he says. “I want to go into the yard.”

“There’s less than an hour left of yard time,” the CO replies.

But that’s okay. Noah won’t need longer than that.

42

The prison yard for A-block is a large swath of concrete and dead grass, plus a full basketball court, all of it surrounded by fence and razor wire. It is unseasonably mild in late February, but most of the inmates still wear the allotted jacket and cap.

Noah Walker moves into the yard with a purpose, turning in the direction of the basketball court. He is not wearing either the jacket or the cap, because he doesn’t plan to be out here very long.

Beyond the basketball court, on a set of low wooden bleachers, Eric Wheaton and four of his Aryan brothers sit, smoking cigarettes and engaging in animated banter. They snap to attention when they see Noah Walker heading their way. For a moment, they look amused, even pleased, but the closer Noah gets, his body tensed, his fists closed tightly, the more they sense this is not a social call.

Two of the biggest Aryans — the bodyguards, they call themselves — jump to their feet and approach Noah. They aren’t looking for a fight, but they won’t back down from one, either.

“Well, well,” says Eric Wheaton, getting to his feet as well.

“How are the hands?” calls out one of the bodyguards.

Noah slows. His hands are not fully healed. A couple of the tendons were damaged badly, and a couple of the fingers on his left hand do not fully close into a grip.

Luckily, Noah is right-handed.

Noah looks to his right, then spins left and lands his right fist on the jaw of one of the bodyguards, feeling a satisfying crunch. The other two goons with Wheaton, plus the other bodyguard, converge on Noah, but he lowers his head and plows through the center of them like a halfback running for daylight. Prepared for a fistfight, and not expecting his evasive move, the Aryan brothers are unable to stop him.

“No!” Eric Wheaton calls out, raising his arms and trying in vain to move along the bleachers to avoid Noah’s charge. Noah bears down on Wheaton and leaves his feet, tackling Wheaton in midair and knocking him over the back of the wood supports. They both fall hard to the ground, but Wheaton gets the worst of it, hitting his head with a wicked thud. Noah turns him over on his back and puts his hands on Wheaton’s neck, pressing his thumbs on his throat with all his might. He hears the calls of the other Aryans; the roar of the other inmates enjoying the show; the whistles of the COs; the voice over the loudspeaker calling for the inmates to retreat to the far corner, like a referee moving a boxer during a ten-count.

Someone knocks him off Wheaton with a force that feels like a truck. It could be an Aryan. Could be a CO. He doesn’t care. Several bodies fall on top of him. He hears utter chaos around him and closes his eyes and his mind to it. He takes several hits to the back of the head, and then his hands are zip-tied behind his back and he is lifted off his feet, facedown, blood dripping from his nose and mouth. He doesn’t care about this, either. He doesn’t care if he killed Eric Wheaton or just gave him a very, very sore throat. Either way, the ultimate result will be the same for Noah.

“You’re going to the Box, tough guy,” one of the COs grunts at him. The Box, officially the Special Housing Unit — solitary confinement — is a short, wide building separated from A-Block. The upper floors are reserved for inmates in protective custody because they are rats or because they are believed to be on the verge of violence, usually attack victims expected to retaliate when they return to general pop. But the bottom floor is where Noah will be sent. In a prison known to house the worst of the worst criminals, the lower level of the Box is for the worst of the worst of the worst — humans by designation, but closer to animals, violent predators, locked in small cells with tiny windows and low ceilings.

Noah is thrown inside one of those cells, the floor sticky and reeking of urine and feces. His fellow inmates howl like hyenas and scratch and claw at their cell bars. Noah’s zip-ties are cut, the COs make a hasty retreat, and the door slams him into darkness.

It will come now. It won’t take long. A correctional officer, probably, aligned with the Brotherhood. The saying in Sing Sing is The only difference between an inmate and a CO is the color of the uniform. But it doesn’t matter to Noah. It doesn’t matter if it’s a shank in the mess hall or an assault in the yard, or a visit from a CO late in the night. It will come soon now.

Time passes. He can’t measure it, doesn’t even try. But at some point, the outside door to the Box opens, and then he hears footsteps. One, two, three COs, wearing full inmate-extraction gear — hats and bats, they call it: helmets with face shields, heavy boots and gloves, vests, pads on their knees and elbows, thick batons. In the darkness of his cell, he can’t see their faces, only their silhouettes from the light streaming in behind them: The men are as big as houses, more muscular than the Aryan bodyguards, and prepared for action.

“On your feet, hands backward through the bars,” one of them says. “You give us any trouble and we’ll beat you down.”

He complies. He won’t give them any trouble. They walk him through the open air and he lifts his face up to the stars, feeling the cool air on his skin for the last time, as he takes his final walk — the waltz, they used to call it, when there was an electric chair, the walk from Death Row to the execution chamber.

They take him through another door, walk him down a hall, footsteps echoing on the hard surface. He is disoriented, thinking of Paige, humming symphonic music fit for a waltz, ready now, however it will come.

Then his feet are on carpet, a surface they have not touched for many months. He doesn’t understand. He looks up at a door that says WARDEN’S OFFICE.

Two COs see Noah and give him a smirk. Then they open the double doors, and Noah is pushed into the warden’s office. So this is how it happens? Right here in the warden’s office?

Then he sees the warden, a lean, aging black man. Standing next to him is...

No.

“What... what is this?” he says.

Detective Jenna Murphy says, “I’m having you transferred, Noah. We’re sending you back to Suffolk County Jail, pending a postconviction hearing.”

“A... hearing on what?”

“You were framed, Noah,” she says. “And I can prove it.”

43

The courtroom is wall-to-wall with spectators and media, cops and prosecutors, people from the community, standing room only once again. The room is so quiet that you can actually hear that ringing sound that absolute silence produces, everyone craning forward, eagerly awaiting the next words that will come from the mouth of this witness — even the judge, peering over his glasses at the witness stand, his brow furrowed, his lips pursed.

The news leaked out yesterday — CNN picked it up first — but not the details. The details are for today. For this hearing. For this moment.

Detective Jenna Murphy, dressed in a blue suit, has testified for over an hour thus far, setting the table for what will come next. Noah’s defense lawyer, Joshua Brody, has proceeded methodically, establishing her credentials, her minor role in the investigation, and going through a lot of technical questions and answers that the court needs to establish the “authenticity” of the letter found on her uncle’s computer. Ultimately, the judge decided that the letter could be admitted into evidence, which paved the way for Brody to cut to the heart of this hearing.

“My uncle was the chief, so he could take over any crime scene he wanted,” says Detective Murphy. “He took over the investigation of the crime scene at 7 Ocean Drive, and he removed the bloody knife and Melanie’s charm necklace before any investigators arrived. Then he controlled the search of Mr. Walker’s house after his arrest.” She shrugs. “He could do whatever he wanted. Nobody would know.”

Joshua Brody nods. “So you’re telling us—”

“I’m telling you that my uncle taped the knife and necklace under the heating duct and pretended to ‘discover’ them there,” she says. “I’m telling you that my uncle planted the evidence in Noah Walker’s kitchen.”

A release throughout the courtroom, a collective gasp. Behind him, footsteps — reporters, prohibited from using smartphones in the courtroom, rushing out to send off a text message, a tweet, a quick phone call. That courtroom exit is probably like a revolving door right now, journalists stepping out for the breaking news, then returning to hear if there’s anything more.

But Noah Walker won’t turn back to look. His eyes are forward, on Jenna Murphy. The woman who spin-kicked him in the face the first time they met, who broke into his house and fired a bullet only inches from his head the second time, who provided the crucial testimony, the testimony that led to his conviction, the third. And who now, after reading a letter from her uncle on his computer, is coming forward to stand up for Noah.

“There was testimony at trial,” says Brody, “that my client confessed to the murders of Melanie Phillips and Zach Stern.”

Murphy nods, blinking slowly, her expression blank. If she is enjoying this, she doesn’t show it; if she’s conflicted, she hides that as well. Something tells Noah she’s good at that, at concealing her thoughts, her feelings.

“That’s what the chief told me,” Murphy says. “But it was a lie. He lied to me, and I repeated the lie to the jury without realizing it was false.”

Another audible reaction from the spectators, another banging of the gavel from the judge. “Anyone who is unable to sit quietly,” says the judge, “will be removed.”

“Noah didn’t confess to Dio Cornwall,” Murphy says. “I talked to Dio after I found this letter on my uncle’s computer. Chief James told him he would get a better sentence if he lied about Noah confessing to him — and a worse sentence if he didn’t. He gave Dio information so Dio could tell a convincing lie to the prosecutors. Everything my uncle admitted to in this letter, Dio confirmed to me.”

“I see.” Brody nods. “And what about Noah’s so-called confession to the chief himself?”

“It never happened.” Murphy shakes her head. “He lied to everyone about that. He lied to his lieutenants. He lied to prosecutors. He...”

She pauses, clears her throat, the first sign of any emotion at all from her.

“He lied to me,” she says.

A thrill courses through Noah, tears filling his eyes. He wouldn’t let himself believe it. This roller coaster, this sensation of free-falling through the air, this entire terrifying journey through a system with murky rules and mysterious procedures — he’s never been able to trust it. Not even coming here today. He wouldn’t allow his hopes to rise, only to crash to the ground again.

But now. Now it’s happening.

“If I may ask, Detective,” says Brody. “Why did you come forward? This man was your uncle. You could have easily brushed this aside.”

Jenna Murphy, eyes cast downward, shakes her head. “Because it’s not supposed to be like this,” she says. “It’s supposed to be about justice, not winning. Because deep down, even my uncle understood that, which is why he wrote that letter.”

Noah begins to tremble uncontrollably, the tears streaming down his face. So many times he gave up hope, so often he wanted to die. He thinks of Paige, who can’t be here to see this, and squeezes his eyes shut, crying harder than he ever remembers crying.

His lawyer’s arm comes around him, while Noah hears the voice of the prosecutor, Sebastian Akers, reminding the court that the prosecution, through Detective Murphy, brought this information to light, that the prosecutor is just as concerned with the proper administration of justice as anyone.

And then someone else is talking. The judge, the Honorable Robert Barnett, known as one of the county’s toughest judges.

“Listen, Noah,” his lawyer whispers to him.

Noah raises his eyes, his vision blurred by the tears, the catch in his throat leaving him speechless.

“Based on the material that’s been submitted to the court, as well as the testimony today,” says the judge, “and the lack of any objection from the State, there is only one conclusion this court can reach. The defendant has been the victim of a blatant miscarriage of justice. The defendant’s Article 440 motion is well taken.”

The judge removes his glasses and looks at Noah, pausing first, considering his next words.

“Mr. Walker, the State of New York owes you an apology. You have spent nearly a year of your life under this cloud. And I understand you have suffered greatly while incarcerated — incarcerated for a crime that, it is now clear to me, you did not commit. I only hope that you won’t let this ordeal consume you with bitterness and anger, that you can find something positive out of this experience. If I could give you back the last year of your life, I would. But I can’t. All I can do now is find, as a matter of law, that your convictions cannot stand.”

Noah, emotionally overloaded, shaking, manages to nod in response.

“The defendant’s motion is granted,” says the judge, banging the gavel. “The defendant’s convictions for the murders of Melanie Phillips and Zachary Stern are hereby vacated. The defendant shall be discharged from custody immediately.”

44

The gate opens, and Noah Walker strides through it, looking around as if he’s entering a new world. It may feel that way to him. Prison, from my experience on the other side of the bars, at least, is a universe unto itself, especially for the lifers. The loss of hope is a powerful toxin, like being dead while alive.

I’ve sent a lot of people to Sing Sing, murderers and rapists and even some drug dealers, but there’s nothing fun about doing it. If I could run the world, I’d find another way to treat most of these criminals — most of them, not all of them — but we find widespread solutions to widespread problems in this country, so we just build big prisons and stick everyone inside them and, for the most part, forget about them once they’re gone.

Noah stops short when his eyes come to rest on me where I’m leaning against my car. He looks different — not just the short prison haircut, which makes him look younger, but also something in his eyes, more relaxed, even refreshed.

“They said I had a ride,” he says.

“That’s me.”

He looks at me, considering.

“Don’t look so happy,” I say.

He raises an eyebrow.

“Hey, I’m not putting a gun to your head.”

“No, you did that once already.” He has a small bag with him, things he brought into the prison. He walks over and gets into the car.

I walk around to the other side and climb in. My ten-year-old Chevy isn’t exactly a limousine, but it beats the hell out of a prison transport bus.

“Your own personal copy,” I say, dropping a New York Post on his lap, the front-page headline NEW YORK OWES YOU AN APOLOGY — quoting the judge — with the text underneath, Officer’s Emotional Testimony Clears “Surfer Jesus” of Murder Charges.

Noah reads a little of the article, then exhales and gazes out the window. “I didn’t think your testimony was emotional,” he says. “I couldn’t tell how you felt.”

“That makes two of us.”

He looks over at me but doesn’t say anything. Pure heat radiates off him, the source of which I can’t place. Maybe anger, aggression, bottled-up rage. I kick on the air-conditioning. Must be the unseasonably warm March weather. That must be it. Yeah.

Not a word passes between us as I turn onto the Long Island Expressway. I focus on the road and flip through the radio channels; no kind of music seems right, so I go to talk radio, all about spring training for the Yankees and Mets. It’s been so warm in New York this March, I’m not sure the Yankees even needed to travel to Tampa to practice.

All the while, Noah says nothing, just stares at me. Once again, I turn the AC down — or up, whatever, I make it colder — and pull my shirt off my sticky chest. Something flutters through me, some sense of foreboding, danger, anxiety.

“You wanna stop staring at me?” I say.

“Are you gonna arrest me?”

I look over at him, his prison haircut — high and tight — accentuating his thick neck and shoulders, concealed previously by his long hair. The beard is gone, too, but he hasn’t shaved in a couple of days.

“You’re sweating,” he says.

“No, I’m not.”

“My mistake.” But he’s still turned toward me, as if, at any moment, he might lunge at me or something. That wouldn’t be a smart move for a guy who’s finally tasting freedom again. But maybe he likes doing that, living on the edge, pushing his luck. Or maybe he just wants to make me nervous.

We drive like that for a while. I turn up the radio, as if hearing the speculation over Mariano Rivera — will 2012 be his last year? — at a higher volume will somehow shield me from Noah’s stare.

As we’re driving through Queens, he breaks the silence.

“Do you expect me to thank you?”

“No,” I say. “I don’t need your gratitude.”

“Good. Because you don’t have it. You lied at the trial. You’re the reason I got locked up to begin with.”

I whip the car to the right, swerving across a lane of traffic, just making the exit for Little Neck Parkway. I find a small park by Horace Harding and pull the car over.

“Get out,” I say as I push the car door open. I walk into the park and wait for him to meet me there. He walks toward me briskly. For a moment, I think he’s not going to stop, that he’s going to knock right into me, or put his hands on my throat. He stops just short of me, close enough that I can see a tiny nick above his lip, that I can smell him, that prison smell of sweat and rage.

“Did you kill them?” I ask.

His eyes narrow and his head tilts slightly, like he doesn’t get the question.

“You have double jeopardy now,” I say. “No one can ever prosecute you again for Melanie and Zach. So now it’s just you and me. Did you kill them?”

He smiles, bemused. “You gotta be kidding.”

“You were framed, yes, but that doesn’t mean you’re innocent. Lang thought you were guilty. He just didn’t think he could prove it. You can frame a guilty—”

“No,” he spits. “I didn’t kill them.”

My heart banging against my chest, choking my throat, my hands balling into fists, I ask my next question. “What about my uncle?”

He shakes his head. “You’re unbelievable.”

“Tell me,” I say.

He regards me for a moment. He takes another step forward, leaning into me so close, it’s as if he’s about to make a pass at me. I hold my breath and steel myself.

“I... don’t think I have double jeopardy for that murder, now do I, Detective?”

“You might as well,” I say. “You’re a media darling. We’d look vindictive if we prosecuted you again. Sebastian Akers would sooner swallow his own tongue. So what’s it gonna be, cowboy?”

His nose almost touching mine, his breath on my face, his eyes searching mine, that heat radiating off him. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll answer your question.”

His face moves around mine, his razor stubble against my cheek, his lips touching my ear.

“I didn’t kill your uncle,” he whispers. He draws back, turns, and walks to the car.

45

When I arrive at work the next morning, I get a lot of stares, a lot of whispers as I pass. These days at Southampton Town Police Department, I’m about as welcome as a venereal disease. I’ve given the department a black eye. Oh, there are probably a few people who would admit, if pressed, that I did the right thing, that I prevented a miscarriage of justice, even if I had to tarnish the department, and the memory of a beloved chief, in the process.

But most people just seem to remember that last part — that I’ve brought shame on the department, that I crossed the thin blue line.

“Chief wants to see you,” says one of the assistants, passing me.

More good news: My old partner, Isaac Marks, is now running the show. The town supervisor took the Acting off his title two weeks ago, making Isaac the new, permanent chief. You might think I’d benefit from that, that my former partner would look kindly on me, but you’d be wrong. Isaac was at Noah Walker’s house during the search, when my uncle planted the incriminating evidence, and since my testimony, Isaac has had to answer questions from reporters and the town supervisor. He’s denied any wrongdoing, of course — he had no idea, he says, that Lang planted the knife and necklace — but nobody is completely convinced, so he’s beginning his tenure under a dark cloud — thanks to me!

He should feel lucky they gave him the job before all of this came out about Lang; if the decision were made today, he surely wouldn’t have received the promotion.

But when I walk into his office, Isaac doesn’t look like he feels lucky.

“Morning,” I say.

“Sit, Murphy.” He throws something across the desk. A folder full of something, with the words SAFE IN SCHOOL INITIATIVE across the top. I have a pretty good idea what’s coming.

“After that school shooting in Ohio in February,” he says, “the school board here has been anxious to review the safety procedures for the school. Evacuation, prevention, that kind of thing. You’re going to run it. You’ll be reassigned to Bridgehampton School for a couple of months. It’s all in the folder.”

I stare at the folder in my hand, dumbfounded. This is not an assignment for a veteran detective. Both of us know it. Isaac can’t fire me, because I’m too protected right now — the media would pick up on it, and it would look like exactly what it was, that the STPD was retaliating against me for coming forward with the evidence against Lang — but there are other ways to punish a rogue cop like me, the best of which is to give me shitty assignments, to bore me to death until I quit in disgust.

“Isaac,” I say.

“What did you call me?” His head snaps up.

“I’m sorry, Chief — Chief, I’ve been doing some looking into the murders at 7 Ocean Drive, now that they’re ‘unsolved’ again—”

“They’re not unsolved. We know who killed them. We let the killer walk free, didn’t we, Detective?” A bit of color to those plump cheeks of his.

“I... understand,” I say. “Could I just tell you what I’m thinking?”

“Tell me what you’re thinking, Murphy. I can’t wait.” He throws up his hand, like he’d rather have a needle stuck in his eye, and leans back in his chair.

“Besides those murders, there’s my uncle’s murder. And that murder that you and I were looking at, the prostitute in the woods, impaled on the tree stump.”

“Yeah?” He scratches his neck. “So?”

“Well, all four of these have one thing in common — they resulted in slow, torturous deaths,” I say. “But especially my uncle and the prostitute in the woods. Both of them were impaled. I think that could have meaning. I think they’re connected.”

“Noah Walker killed Zach and Melanie. He probably killed Lang, too, but now that you’ve gone and made Noah untouchable, you couldn’t get the DA to prosecute him if God came down from heaven and declared Noah guilty. And the prostitute? Who the fuck knows who killed her? Let Sag Harbor worry about that.”

Just another hooker adiosed in the Hamptons, Uncle Lang had said.

“I don’t want you investigating those murders,” Isaac says. “I want you at the school. Effective immediately. If you go near those cases, you’ll be disciplined. That’s all.” He flicks his hand at me, a shooing gesture.

Looks like I’m going to have to eat this shit for a while. I return to my desk and start to gather my things.

A woman’s voice calls out to me. I turn and see a uniform, a rookie, the only female patrol officer working Bridgehampton, all of six weeks on the force.

“Haven’t had the chance to introduce myself,” she says. “Officer Ricketts.”

We shake hands. Ricketts is probably in her midtwenties but looks more like she’s in her midteens, big wondering eyes and cropped blond hair.

“Nice to meet you, Ricketts. Call me Murphy. Let me know if I can ever help.”

“Well,” she says as I begin to turn away from her.

“Well, what?”

“I was wondering if I could be any help to you,” she says. “I’ve heard a lot about you. I’d like the chance to work with you.”

I remember being that young, being green, being a woman on a male-dominated force. Being hungry. Looking for a chance to prove myself.

And, actually, there is something...

“This would have to be on your own time,” I say. “Off the record.”

“Sure, no problem,” she says, not hiding her eagerness.

Well, what the hell? “Okay, Ricketts,” I say. “Get me a list of all unsolved murders on the South Shore over the last decade. Focus on victims of knife attacks, or some spearing instrument.”

“Knife... or spearing,” she repeats, writing it down on a note-pad.

“Stabbed, impaled, sliced, diced, whatever,” I say. “This guy likes to cut people.”

46

When I enter Bridgehampton School, red brick and white pillars on Main Street — Montauk Highway, if you prefer — I am directed to the school principal, a woman named Paulina Jacoby. She looks like a school principal, conservatively dressed, her gray hair neatly combed, a humorless way about her. Her office is simply decorated, with a nice view of the massive school grounds to the south. Behind her, yearbooks going back to the seventies line an entire bookcase.

We spend a few minutes with small talk — they had a good relationship with the former chief, she tells me; she knows I’m his niece, pretty much everybody knows that by now. “We were... pleasantly surprised to hear from Chief Marks,” she says.

Chief Marks. It will take a long time before I’m used to hearing that.

“But we’re always happy to hear from the STPD. There is no such thing as a school that has too much security.”

True — but what she’s saying is, we called her, not the other way around. That isn’t surprising. Isaac was trying to find the least desirable assignment he possibly could for me, without being too obvious about it. If he assigned me to parking meter duty, it would be blatantly clear that he was punishing me. A school assignment is just perfect, from his perspective. Who can be against school security in this day and age? But that doesn’t change the fact that this is an assignment for a much younger cop than me. He’s a devious one, Isaac, that little fuck.

“We’ve been lucky,” the principal says, knocking on her wooden desk. “We haven’t had a school shooting for sixteen — well, now I guess it’s seventeen years.”

Right. That’s right. “The BB gun shooting in 1995,” I say. I point out the window. “Out there on the south grounds.”

She nods, looks through the window. “That was Halloween. We banned costumes at the school for over a decade after that.”

“It was Noah Walker,” I say. “Noah shot those kids with the BB gun.”

She looks at me, unsure of how to answer. Because Noah was a juvenile at the time, the criminal proceedings against him would have been sealed. The school would have been prohibited from publicly announcing his name.

“Well,” she says, “I guess it’s not much of a secret, after it came out last year during his trial.”

Not a secret at all. But she’s getting a little squirmy, so I don’t push the point.

“Well, let me introduce you to our security personnel,” she says, getting out of her chair. “Is there anything else you’ll need from me?”

“Maybe just one thing,” I say. “Could I take a look at the school yearbook from 1995?”

Once I have some time alone, after meeting with the school security personnel, and once I’m shown to a small office, cramped and windowless, that probably was once a janitor’s closet, I crack open the yearbook, heading to the index in the back and finding the name Walker, Noah.

I flip to the page and run along the names on the right column until I come to his. Noah would have been, what, twelve or thirteen back then. I admit to a curiosity — and maybe more than curiosity — about how a guy with a ripped physique and rugged good looks would have appeared as an adolescent.

I find his name, but when I look across to the corresponding picture, there is no face staring back, just a NOT PICTURED graphic. Okay, that probably makes sense; he was suspended from school after the Halloween shooting that year, so he probably was gone by the time they were taking yearbook photos. I let out a sigh, disappointed, but then catch myself — why am I disappointed? And why am I thinking about Noah Walker’s muscles?

Next to the graphic for Noah: a weaselly-looking kid with straw hair parted down the middle, a skinny face, and eyes too close together. He isn’t smiling or frowning; he looks confused, actually, like the invention of the camera was a revelation at that moment.

But I know this guy. I look at the name on the side and square it up. This is Aiden Willis. Right. Aiden Willis, the raccoon eyes, the squirrelly guy who works at the cemetery — I saw him at Melanie’s funeral, then again at the Dive Bar, when I bought him a beer and he disappeared.

Small town. You forget that. The locals all grew up together, know one another.

I flip to the index, then find the page for Isaac Marks. Isaac, my former partner and new boss, asswipe that he may be, was the same age as Noah and Aiden. In his photo, he is wearing a stern expression, like he’s trying to look tough. That feels about right. Isaac, back then, probably dreamed of being important, of having the respect he probably didn’t receive in school. All speculation, of course, but it fits with the kind of guy he is now — and we don’t really change that much, do we?

I look up. Noah, Aiden Willis, and Isaac Marks. Isaac and Noah, the same age, the same class; Aiden, one year older. They all would have known one another back then. A tiny school. Everyone knew everyone.

I pick up my phone and dial the extension for the school principal. After a moment, they put me through.

“Ms. Jacoby?”

“Please, it’s Paulina,” she says.

“Paulina,” I say. “Do you have anyone on staff who was here during that school shooting in 1995?”

47

The south side of Bridgehampton School is over an acre of open grass, with a baseball diamond closer to the school and a playground next to it for the younger kids. To my right, but a healthy distance away, are the woods, a thick layer of trees providing the eastern border of the school grounds. As I move closer to the school, to my left — northwest — I see the parking lot that bends around from Main Street.

“Here,” says Darryl Friese, walking with me. “I was right here. I didn’t even know what happened at first. I mean, my first thought? I thought, like, an insect had flown into my eye or something. Dumb, right?”

I shake my head. “There’s no such thing as dumb in a situation like that.”

Darryl turns to me. He was nine in 1995, which makes him twenty-six, maybe twenty-seven now, but these seventeen years have not been kind to him, his hair receding badly, an unhealthy gut hanging over his slacks. His left eye looks odd because of the color, grayer than his other eye, which is solid blue, but otherwise there’s no lingering trace of the BB injury.

“Okay, so let’s get this exactly right,” I say. “Stand at exactly the same angle, the same position.”

He adjusts himself. “It was just like this. I remember because this girl, Angela Krannert — God, haven’t thought about her for a long time — anyway, Angie was standing by the back entrance of the school, and I was walking toward her. I remember — the last thing I was thinking, before the BB hit me — I was trying to think of something that would make Angie laugh.”

He is facing directly north. If he walked straight forward from this angle, he’d eventually walk right into the school’s back door.

He points over by the woods. “You see that little alcove there?” he says. “Kids used to go there to make out or smoke cigarettes. Because you were technically still on school property, but you were hidden.”

I nod. I see it. A tree stump, a small clearing. “That’s where Noah was set up?”

“Yeah.”

I line it up. Noah, from his position, would have been almost directly to Darryl’s right.

“So how did he shoot me in the left eye?” Darryl laughs. “Believe me, I’ve always asked that. They just chalked it up to the pandemonium. I mean, it was chaos. I was out of commission, basically. I was on the ground screaming. But nobody could hear me because they were all screaming, too. Nobody knew it was a BB gun, not at first.”

“They said you must have spun around, giving him a clear shot at you.”

He laughs. “That’s exactly what they said. And I get it, I was just a punk kid, nobody believed me. I have a seven-year-old now, and the things that come out of his mouth?” He shakes his head with conviction. “But I’m telling you, I got hit with the BB before anybody knew what was going on. There was no screaming, no chaos, nobody scattering in different directions. I was probably the first one shot. No,” he says, “I was walking straight for Angie at the back door.”

I survey the place again. The woods, Noah’s perch, directly east, to my right.

And to the northwest, the school parking lot.

With a healthy row of shrubbery separating the parking lot from the south grounds. A perfect place to hide.

“Is this part of some investigation?” Darryl asks me. “Are you investigating the Halloween shooting again?”

“No,” I tell him. “Nothing like that.”

Which is technically true. I’m not investigating the 1995 Halloween shooting per se. I’m just trying to learn more about Noah Walker, and by extension the people with whom he associated. I don’t know, yet, who ran with Noah back then, back when they were preteen punks.

But I do know this much: One of them was the second shooter that day.

48

“You just try to find something that interests them,” says the phys ed teacher, a man named Arnie Cooper, an aging African American man. He’s tall and well-built, age adding a few inches to his midsection, but you can still see the remnants of an athlete — the high hurdles, from what I’ve heard, and what I’ve seen in glass cases near the gym, in framed photos on the walls. Born and raised in Bridgehampton — “south of Main Street,” he is quick to say — state champion in the high hurdles in 1978, a member of the US Olympic team that didn’t compete in the 1980 games in Moscow because of the US boycott.

Behind us, the south grounds of the school are littered with multicolored foam archery targets, the bull’s-eye yellow, the next ring orange, then powder blue and black. Half of the fourth graders are missing the target altogether, the rubber-suction-cupped arrows sailing in the air and falling harmlessly to the grass.

“Hard to get kids to run around and play anymore,” the teacher says. “They got their faces buried in those phones and contraptions. That’s all I did when I was a kid. I always remember running.” He gestures to an older student out on the yard, some kind of teacher’s assistant. “Brendan, I’m gonna be a few minutes, okay?”

Coop, as he demands everyone call him, walks with a limp these days, the years of clearing hurdles and pounding his feet having taken a toll. “I was running okay in my thirties, though,” he tells me as we walk along the yard. “And I was definitely running okay the day of the shooting.”

He stops and gestures toward the back door of the school. “I was in the gym shooting hoops when I heard the screaming,” he says. “At first, it didn’t mean anything to me. Just kids shouting, y’know? But then it did. I think it was... hearing an adult voice. Some of the parents walk the little kids up to the school. When I heard a parent yelling, I knew something was wrong. So I came out that door.”

“And what did you do?” I ask.

“Well, soon as I came out — I mean, it was all wrong. There were kids lying on the ground, there were parents covering up their kids, people were scattering like cockroaches, y’know what I mean? I’m thinking, These kids have been shot. I mean, really shot. With bullets. But there wasn’t really any blood I could see, so it was confusing.” He stops, puts his hands on his hips, shakes his head. “Man, it had been a long time since I was that scared.”

“So you—”

“So someone was pointing over by the east side of the school, and someone was saying, ‘He went that way, he went that way,’ and someone else was saying, ‘He’s dressed as Spider-Man, he’s Spider-Man,’ so I started running around the side of the school toward the front, toward Main Street, looking for Spider-Man.”

We start following that same route, walking east and then turning north, moving along the immaculately landscaped grass and trees, toward the paved drive off Main Street.

“I practically ran right into the street,” he says. “I didn’t know where he was.” I follow him until we’re standing just along the curb on Main Street.

He gestures to his right, down the street to the east. “That’s where I found him,” he says. “Right next to Small Potato.”

A little shack of a nursery stand, painted red with white supports, covered in chicken wire, empty this time of year, its quaint green sign proclaiming it the OLDEST FARM STAND IN THE HAMPTONS. I bought my Christmas tree here after Thanksgiving.

“Back then, they were selling pumpkins,” he says. “But they’d pretty much packed up by then. There wasn’t anyone there. But Noah, he was sitting on a bench just past the nursery, in a Spider-Man costume with the head part removed. He wasn’t moving. He was wearing headphones. He looked — I mean, I know how this sounds — but he looked like he was waiting for a bus.”

“Well — was the rifle nearby?”

He raises his shoulders. “I didn’t see it. They found it later. He tossed it in the bushes behind him. I just told him he had to come with me, and I gripped him pretty tight and hauled him back toward the school, but he didn’t resist me. He didn’t fight. All he said was ‘What did I do?’”

What did I do? “So,” I say, “this kid shoots a couple dozen people with a BB air rifle, runs around to the front of the school, and sits down on a bench like he’s... like he’s waiting for a bus. Like nothing’s wrong.”

Coop shakes his head, laughs in agreement. “I know. I hear what you’re saying. I figure it’s one of two things.”

I turn and face him.

“Either he didn’t do anything wrong,” he says, “or he’s one cold-blooded son of a bitch. The kind who doesn’t feel anything. Who could slice someone open while he’s smiling at them, and then look you in the eye and deny it. You know what I mean?”

“I think maybe I do,” I say. I drop my eyes and nod slowly. “I think maybe I do.”

49

I turn off Sag Harbor Turnpike onto the gravel drive, my car crunching over the rocks. I pull up to a small shingled shack with a tent over the entrance and an old, beat-up wooden sign with a single word — TASTY’S — carved into it.

The parking lot is full, and so is the restaurant, when I walk in to the scent of delicious seafood. I love places like this, no-frills dives, simple tables with paper tablecloths, random photos and signs hanging on the walls, food served in paper trays. The menu is on a chalkboard on the wall — both kinds of clam chowder, steamers, shrimp two ways, scallops two ways, oysters on the half shell, mussels, fried clam strips, about four versions of lobster, and hand-cut French fries.

Ricketts, the rookie cop who’s off duty today, has a table for us. She’s already nursing a bottle of Miller High Life. There’s a second bottle on the table, either for her or for me. Either way, I decide I like this kid.

“Hey, rookie.”

“I love this place,” she says. “Best seafood on the South Fork, and the cheapest. They haven’t raised prices in a decade.” She’s a little looser than the first time I met her, when she was in uniform at the station. She’s wearing a sweater and jeans and her short blond hair is tousled.

A man appears with a Mets cap on backward and a gray shirt. Ricketts orders the scallops, so I do the same, along with a couple of waters, and we’ll split a cone of fries.

Ricketts reaches down to her purse and removes a file folder. “Your list of unsolved murders over the last decade on the South Shore,” she says. “Anything involving a knife or cutting.”

I nod. “How many?”

“Eight,” she says.

“Eight?” I reach out my hand for it. “Gimme.”

She pauses. “You, uh... might want to eat first. You might not have an appetite afterward.”

“That bad, huh?” Okay, fair enough. “But eight?”

“Well, I counted Melanie and Zach as unsolved.”

“As you should.”

“The prostitute found impaled on the tree trunk last summer, too.”

“Definitely.” Bonnie Stamos. Some images will never leave your mind, and one of them is that poor girl, her body split in half over that tree stump.

“And I’m including... you know—”

“Chief James.” I nod. “As you should.”

She finishes a swig of beer. “Then that’s eight.” She gestures around the place. “You know, this is where Melanie Phillips worked.”

I partake of the alcoholic beverage she’s offered me, because I don’t want to seem rude, or make her feel lonely.

“Oh, you knew that. Of course you did. Sorry. I’m — maybe I’m—”

“Relax, Ricketts. I’m hard to offend.”

She takes a deep breath. “I was kind of nervous to meet you, actually. I saw you one other time in the station, but I was intimidated, actually.”

“By me?” The beer is tasting good. “You shouldn’t be. We girls have to stick together.”

“I know, but you’re like, this — pretty much everyone’s intimidated by you. Y’know, coming from Manhattan, and you’re smart and tough and... well, beautiful. Most of the men don’t know how to handle you. Most of them want to sleep with you, from listening to them. But they also want to see you fall on your face.”

That sounds about right, that last part. “Keep your head down and do a good job,” I say. “The acclaim will come, if it’s deserved. You have to prove yourself to these cavemen by your actions. Let the rest of that stuff slide — the sexist comments, all that crap. It will all fall away if you do a good job as a cop.”

“Okay,” she says, nodding compliantly like a student.

“Don’t sleep with other cops,” I say. “Because then it won’t matter how good you are. You’ll just be the girl that fucks.”

She takes a deep breath.

“I didn’t say it was fair, rookie. I’m just trying to help you avoid headaches. You’ll be subjected to double standards all over the place. You’ll have to be better than the men to be considered equal to them.”

“Okay.” She nods. “Okay.”

“There’s a lot of good men on the force. I’m only talking about a few bad apples here. Unfortunately, some of those bad apples are the ones calling the shots. So keep your head down and work your ass off. Always have your partner’s back. And call me, anytime, day or night, if you need anything.”

Her face lights up. “Yeah?”

“Of course.”

“Here you go, guys. Scallops and a cone of fries.” A different man, wearing a button-down shirt and blue jeans. Tall and trim, bronzed skin, a nice smile, thick brown hair swept to one side. The kind of guy your parents would want you to bring home. And I thought the scallops looked yummy.

“Hey, Justin, this is Jenna Murphy. Jenna, this is Justin Rivers. This is his place,” Ricketts says.

“Here every day,” he says. “Great to meet you.” He wipes his hand on his jeans and offers it to me, a strong grip when I shake it.

“Likewise,” I say. “So you’re the guy who hasn’t raised prices in a decade.”

“Yep, yeah, that’s right.” He makes eye contact with me, holds it for maybe one meaningful beat longer than normal, but then breaks it off. A shy one. Not a slickster. I like the shy, awkward ones. Why do I always pick the jerks to date instead?

No ring on his finger, either. A girl always looks.

“Well,” he says, clapping his hands, “nice meeting you, and enjoy your food.”

“I will,” I say as he walks away. “I will.”

“I know, right?” Ricketts laughs. “Now you know why it’s my favorite place.”

The scallops are the best I’ve ever had, cooked just perfectly, a touch of butter and lemon but not overplaying it, letting the seafood speak for itself. The fries are nicely seasoned and the creamy garlic sauce accompanying them is enough to make me change religions. We top it all off with a second round of beer, but I’ll stop there.

“Okay,” I say, now that we’ve gotten a peek at the hunky owner of this place, I’ve dispensed my advice, and I’ve had some of the best seafood I’ve ever eaten. “Now it’s time to ruin my appetite.”

“It will,” she says. “It definitely will.”

50

“Okay, here.” Ricketts removes a piece of paper from her file folder. “Eight victims over the last decade. All unsolved.”

“I know about the ones last year, summer of 2011,” I say. “Zach and Melanie, Bonnie Stamos, my uncle. Let’s start with the older ones, before I came here.”

“Good,” she says. “That’s what I did.”

“Dede Paris,” I say, reading the first name. “Last seen May 9, 2007.”

“The first two go together,” says Ricketts. “Dede Paris and Annie Church. Yale sophomores. May ninth was when they left New Haven that summer. They lied to their friends and family about how they were spending their summer. They came here to the Hamptons. That was discovered later, through cell phone records and then their car, which was ultimately found in Montauk after a lengthy search.”

She removes two photos from her file folder and hands them to me. “Dede is the blonde, Annie the brunette.”

Dede’s photograph is from a volleyball game. She’s tall and athletic, with blond hair cropped tight against her head. The photo of Annie is a school photo, probably from high school, a bright smile and warm eyes, her hair past her shoulders, reddish brown.

“So they were killed in Montauk?” I ask.

Ricketts shrugs. “Nobody knows. That’s where their car was found. Their bodies were never found. Or, I should say, most of their bodies was never found.”

I look at the document she typed, organized and professional. “Her finger,” I say, reading her one-line summary for Dede.

“Yeah, they found one of Dede’s fingers in the woods near Montauk, two years after they disappeared. We always assumed foul play but didn’t know it until somebody’s dog found the finger. Then they got a DNA match.”

So they were killed in 2007, and a single finger was found in 2009. Two years, and nobody found it. Well, that’s possible, sure, but...

“Tell me about the finger,” I say. “Was it decomposed? Was there anything distinctive about it?”

“No and yes.” She opens her folder again and shows me a photograph of the finger. “Not decomposed much at all, well preserved, with a ring on it — a class ring from... Santa Monica High School, if I’m reading that right.”

“Okay,” I say, handing her back the photo. She slides it into her folder. “So after that, we have the third one... Brittany Halsted,” I say. “July 2008.”

“Prostitute,” says Ricketts. She hands me another photo. A mug shot. Oh, she’s young, not more than eighteen or nineteen in this photo. She is thin, blond, attractive but with a beat-up look about her that most working girls have.

“She used the name Barbie on the street,” says Ricketts. “Last seen alive getting on the back of a motorcycle outside a nightclub in Shirley. She told her friends she was going to be gone for the night.”

The whole night. Smart of him. Nobody would be expecting her back. It would give the offender some time before anyone would be looking for her.

“Last seen alive,” I say. “So they found her.”

“They found Brittany.” She hands me another photograph. “A couple of miles down Sunrise Highway from where she was picked up on the motorcycle.”

She is lying facedown in a bed of leaves, her head turned toward the camera, her eyes shut. She has the ghostly mannequin look of a corpse dead for at least a couple of days. A pool of blood surrounds the lower half of her body.

“This photo doesn’t show it,” says Ricketts. “But he carved her up. He disemboweled her. The ME thought he used a corkscrew.”

“Oh, God, a corkscrew?” I say, as if there were a nice way of disemboweling someone.

I look at the remainder of the sheet. “So then, in 2010, we have Sally Pfiester. And then we move up to 2011, to Melanie and Zach, Bonnie Stamos, and my uncle. That’s interesting.”

“Why’s that interesting?”

I look at Ricketts, who is watching me carefully. She’s a pup, looking to learn a thing or two, so I explain my thoughts. “We don’t know if this is the same offender,” I say. “But if it is, look at the timing. He kills in 2007. Then, in 2008, he kills again. Then he doesn’t kill again until 2010, with Sally Pfiester.”

“So — what does that mean? He didn’t do anything in 2009.”

“Well, he did do something in 2009,” I correct. “He planted Dede Paris’s finger for us to find. Clearly, he’d preserved that finger, or it would have been badly decomposed. And just in case we had trouble identifying it, he made sure her high school class ring was on it. He might as well have posted a sign saying, ‘Look, everyone, this is Dede’s finger!’”

“He wanted us to know,” she says. “Why?” Ricketts sits quietly, her eyes moving around the room, her mental machinery fully in gear.

“He was struggling,” I say. “He didn’t want to kill anybody else. But you know what else was bothering him?”

“What?”

“He wasn’t getting any attention,” I say.

She draws back. “Attention? You think he wants to get caught?”

“Oh, no. This guy does not want to get caught. Quite the opposite — this guy gets off on the thrill of getting away with it. Of doing something so terrible and walking away scot-free. I’m sure the stories about Annie and Dede were all over the South Shore papers in 2007. Two Yale undergrads gone missing? It was probably huge news on the South Shore. And the murder of the prostitute in 2008? Well, not as big, but still a gruesome murder, right? So once again, he’s getting attention, he’s reminded of how powerful he is. Big, newsworthy crimes, crimes that he committed, and he’s reading about them in his bathrobe with a cup of coffee.”

“But his conscience was bothering him,” she says.

“Right.” I point to her. “So in 2009, he’s struggling. He doesn’t want to kill again. But he needs the adulation, the feeling of power. So what does he do?”

“He reminds everyone of what he did in 2007.”

“Exactly. He plants Dede’s finger with the class ring, and voilà! There were probably a ton of stories, all over again, this time assuming the Yale students are dead, how tragic, how horrible, how mystified the police are—”

“And how powerful he is.”

“How powerful and impressive he is.” I sweep a hand. “He gets the thrill of it without the bloodshed or the risk.”

“That’s fascinating,” she says, leaning her head on one hand. “How your mind works.”

I wave it off. “I could be all wrong. Might not even be the same person.”

Her eyebrow rises slightly. “Well, it makes sense to me. Especially when you see what he did to Sally Pfiester in 2010.”