Bright Young Women(107)

Carl snaps his fingers and points at me. Exactly. He sips the coffee a staff member made him. Iced, so no one ends up with third-degree burns. “There was a theory,” he continues, “that he confessed on those tapes.”

“Why would he confess?” I wonder indifferently, though my heart is about to beat through my skin.

“Oh,” Carl muses, as though it could be any number of things. He is building anticipation, enjoying my audience. I am in agony. Finally, “Utah [Colorado] had the death penalty, but Washington did not. And you know. After that first escape, he was in a bad way. He’d spent a week trying to survive in the mountains without shelter or food or sleep. His strategy was to bait the Seattle detectives, give them something that would make them want to muscle in and extradite him. Save him from the Caryn Campbell trial, which he was almost certain to lose after the escape attempt. Guilty people don’t try to escape. He knew the prosecution would use that against him if the Caryn Campbell case went to trial, and it would end with his neck in a noose.”

I raise my eyebrows. Murmur, “That makes a lot of sense.” And it does. Carl doesn’t say anything for a spell, and I look over to see that he’s staring angrily at the door to the visitors’ lounge. There is no one there. It’s just us in the khaki-painted room with the red-striped club chairs and the tan couch with the matching red-striped pillows. This is what’s called luxury senior living, though the facility looks like a four-star hotel built in the early aughts and left untouched ever since. But then—

“Seattle PD didn’t like that,” Carl says, and the memory attached to this statement revives his mood. He turns his focus back to me, beaming as he remembers his hard-bitten journalist days. “The pressure from the public to get him back from Florida was already so intense. Seattle was just trying to keep a lid on things long enough that they could hand down their own indictments, and all of that takes time, if they wanted to get it right, that is. Not rush things just for the sake of saying they did something, like the other jurisdictions did. But I’m not letting it go, and they realize they have to give me something.” Carl’s pupils have dilated; his cheeks look like mine after a morning workout—flushed with accomplishment. “One of the detectives suggests I go out and talk to the mother of one of their victims. That mother—” Carl whistles with wide eyes. What a piece of work. “She tells me she doesn’t even think her daughter is a victim.” He makes a disbelieving expression. He is sharing all of this with me in the present tense, as if he is on Shirley’s doorstep right this moment. “It’s obvious she’s covering for something. But then—” Carl cuts out abruptly, like someone’s pulled his plug.

I can’t help myself. “But then what?”

Carl brings his fists up to his ears, like he can’t bear the judgment in my voice. “They catch him. And everyone wants to talk to him, get his story.” He blinks at me, childlike and full of regret. He has hardly any eyebrows left, but his eyes are still that mineral shade of green.

“How did you get it out of him?” I prod gently.

Carl cups his hands around his mouth and confesses in a whisper, “I wrote to him. I said”—he scrutinizes the empty doorway again—“I had evidence to support his innocence in one of the crimes he was accused of, and he put me on the visitors’ list right away. And from there, we developed a sort of friendship, and…” Carl is back to speaking in the past, as though he needs distance from the person who did this. His eyes are flicking to the door and back to me, to the door and back to me. “Please,” he begs me, and he cowers in abject terror.

I angle my shoulders to the side and slightly away from him, assuming an unthreatening stance, as Dr. Donnelly advised if I felt like he was starting to go.

“If I tell you where to find it,” Carl says in a frightened whisper, “can you get her to leave me alone?” By her, I assume he means me.

In an ideal world, Carl would be an undiminished man who could withstand a blistering castigation from me, something I used to dream about giving him when I was younger and hamstrung by my own inexperience. But that’s an urge that, over time, has diminished for me as the years reordered the rungs on my priority ladder. Carl’s comeuppance moved lower and lower until it was succeeded by something more sophisticated than vengeance.

“She won’t bother you anymore,” I promise him, and I don’t even have to feign kindness. Tina told him to go to hell, and all these years later, that’s exactly where he is.





PAMELA


Miami, 1979

Day 541

Judge Lambert was copying something out of the case file when his secretary escorted me into his chambers, five minutes past our scheduled meeting time.

“Good morning, Your Honor,” I said, bowing my head and standing a respectful distance from his vast desk, the way I do now when someone enters their pin at the ATM. Mr. Pearl warned me not to sit until I was invited to, to which I shot back, I know that. Though I didn’t, not really. That wasn’t standard courtroom etiquette, that was just Judge Lambert.

Judge Lambert did not acknowledge me. His secretary gave me a maternal smile, as though to infuse the place with some human warmth, before shutting the door quietly behind her, cowing slightly at a squeak emitted from the hinge pins. It was the expression I would one day make while trying to get out of my daughter’s room noiselessly after hours of rocking her to sleep.