He stopped talking. His chest started to heave. Right now, today, this moment—this was probably the last time he’d ever see Lenny. The thought hit him out of nowhere. Like a punch he didn’t see coming. He felt tears start to come to his eyes, but he bit them back. He blinked hard, turned away. He stood and put his hand on his friend’s shoulder. There was no flesh there, no muscle. It felt like he was touching naked bone.
“I better go, Lenny. You take care of yourself, okay? See you soon.”
He walked toward the door. Sophie met up with him at the threshold.
“You okay, Philip?” she asked.
He nodded, not trusting his own voice.
Sophie met his eye. It was almost too much for him to bear. Then she looked over at her bedridden brother. She gestured for Philip to turn around. He slowly followed her gaze. Lenny had not moved. His face was still that skeletal death mask. His eyes still stared out, lifeless, the mouth still slightly open in some awful silent scream. But he saw what Sophie was trying to show him.
A single tear track glistening off Lenny’s ashen skin.
Philip turned back toward her. “I have to go.”
She led him back down the corridor, past the grandfather clock and the piano. She opened the door. He stepped out onto the stoop. The fresh air felt good. The sun shone in his eyes. He shielded them for a moment and smiled weakly at her.
“It was good seeing you, Sophie.”
Her smile was tight.
“What?” he said.
“Lenny always told me you were the strongest man he ever knew.”
“Were,” he repeated. “Past tense.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m just old.”
Sophie shook her head. “You’re not old, Philip,” she said. “You’re just scared.”
“I’m not sure there’s any difference.”
He turned away. He did not look back as he descended the concrete steps, but he could feel her eyes on him, heavy and perhaps, after all these years, unforgiving.
Chapter
6
I’m too fired up to sleep.
I pace back and forth in my tiny cell. Two steps, turn, two steps, turn. The adrenaline from my altercation with Ross Sumner pumps through my veins. Sleep didn’t come last night. I’m not sure when it will again.
“Visitor.”
It’s Curly again. I’m surprised. “I’m still allowed visitors?”
“Until someone tells me otherwise.”
Every part of me aches, but it is a good ache. After the guards jumped in, both of us were taken to the infirmary. I was able to walk there. Ross had to be carried on a stretcher. Them’s the breaks. The nurse dabbed some peroxide on the bite marks and scrapes before sending me back to my cell. Ross Sumner, alas, was not so lucky. He was, as far as I know, still in the infirmary. I should be above feeling good about this. I should recognize that my private glee-filled gloating comes from a primitive place that this harsh prison has nurtured in me, but too bad.
I am taking great satisfaction in Ross’s pain.
Curly leads me down the same route to the visiting area in total silence. Today I strut more than walk.
“Same visitor?” I ask, just to see what I’ll get in return.
I get nothing.
I sit on the very same stool. Rachel does not bother hiding her horror this time.
“My God, what the hell happened to you?”
I smile and deliver a line I never thought I would: “You should see the other guy.”
Rachel openly studies my face for a few long moments. Yesterday she tried to be more circumspect. All of that pretense is over now. She points at me with her chin. “How did you get all those scars?”
“How do you think?”
“Your eye—”
“I can’t see much out of it. But it’s okay. We have bigger concerns.”
She keeps staring.
“Come on, Rachel. I need you to focus. Forget my face, okay?”
Her eyes trace over the scars for another few seconds. I stay still, let her get on with it. Then she asks the obvious question: “So what do we do?”
“I got to get out of here,” I say.
“You have a plan?”
I shake my head. “For mental exercise, to keep myself semi-sane, I used to dream up ways of getting out of here. You know, escape plans. Nothing I’d ever act on. Just for the hell of it.”
“And?”
“And using my investigative skills, not to mention my innate wiles, I came up with”—I shrug—“nada. It’s impossible.”
Rachel nods. “No one has broken out of Briggs since 1983—and that guy was caught in three days.”
“You did your homework.”
“Old habit. So what are you going to do?”
“Let’s put that aside. I need you to research a few things for me.”
When Rachel whips out her reporter’s notebook, the familiar four-by-eight-inch kind with the wire spiral on the top, I can’t help but smile. She’d used them for years, even before getting the job at the Globe, and it always made it look like she was cosplaying a reporter, like she was going to don a fedora with a card reading PRESS jammed into the rim.
“Go ahead,” Rachel says.
“First off,” I say, “we need to figure out who the real murder victim was.”
“Because now we know it wasn’t Matthew.”
“Know may be an optimistic word, but yes.”
“Okay, I’ll start with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.”
“But don’t stop there. Go to any websites you can think of, social media pages, old newspapers, whatever. Let’s start by making a list of any Caucasian male children between the ages of two and, say, four years old who were reported missing within a two-month span of the murder. Try to keep the search within a two-hundred-mile radius. Spread out after that. Go a little younger, a little older, farther away, you know the deal.”
Rachel jots it down. “I may have a few sources I haven’t burned in the FBI,” she says. “Maybe one of them can help.”
“Sources you haven’t burned?”
She shakes it off. “What else?”
“Hilde Winslow,” I say.
We both go silent for a moment.
Then Rachel asks, “What about her?”
My throat closes. It is hard for me to speak.
“David?”
I signal that I’m okay. I put myself together one piece at a time. When I trust my voice again, I ask, “Do you remember her testimony?”
“Of course.”
Hilde Winslow, an elderly widow with twenty-twenty vision, testified that she saw me burying something in the woods between our homes. The police dug at that spot and uncovered the murder weapon covered with my fingerprints.
I feel Rachel’s eyes on me, waiting.
“I could never explain that,” I manage to say, trying to give myself some distance, pretending that I’m talking about someone else, not me. “At first, I thought that maybe she saw someone who looked like me. A case of mistaken identity. It was dark. It was four in the morning. I was pretty far away from her back window.”
“That was what Florio said on cross-examination.”
Tom Florio was my attorney.
“Right,” I say. “But he didn’t make much headway.”