“I’m not going to hurt you,” I say, but I’m babbling now. “I’ve spent the last five years in jail for killing my son. I didn’t do it. That’s him in the picture. That’s why I escaped. That’s why Rachel and I are here. We are trying to find my boy. Please help us.”
She doesn’t believe me. Or maybe she doesn’t care. Instinct is working here for her too. The most primal instinct—survival.
“He’s telling the truth,” Rachel adds.
Again I don’t think it matters.
“What do you want from me?” Irene asks in a panicked voice.
“Just the pictures,” I say. “That’s all.”
Three minutes later, we are in Irene’s kitchen. There are dozens of photos stuck to the refrigerator of Irene and Tom and the two boys. She sits at the kitchen block and with a shaking hand, she opens her laptop. I notice the way she keeps glancing at the refrigerator. I don’t know if she’s finding strength in her family or reminding me that she has one.
“It’s going to be fine,” I tell Irene. “I promise.”
That doesn’t seem like much of a comfort to her. I feel the pang again, not for myself, but for what I’m doing to her. She’s an innocent in all this. I try to find some consolation in the fact that when I’m vindicated, whatever hint of PTSD that I’m leaving her with today may vanish.
“What do you want me to do?” Irene asks.
Rachel tries to put a comforting hand on her shoulder. Irene shrugs it off.
“Just bring up the photographs from that day, please,” I say.
Irene mistypes, probably due to nerves. I have tucked the gun away so that she can’t see it anymore, but it remains the proverbial elephant in the room. Eventually she clicks on a folder and a bunch of thumbnails start crisscrossing the screen.
She stands up from the stool and gestures for one of us to take over. Rachel sits and clicks on the first photograph. It’s of one of the boys grinning and pointing at a huge green roller coaster behind him.
“Can I go now?” Irene asks. Her voice is shaky.
“I’m sorry,” I say as gently as I can. “You’ll call the police.”
“I won’t. I promise.”
“Just stay with us another minute, okay?”
What choice does she have? I’m the guy with the gun. We start clicking through the photographs. There are more shots involving roller coasters mixed in with shots of costumed characters and some kind of water-dolphin show, that kind of thing. We scour through the background of every photograph.
Eventually we land on the photograph that launched all this. I point to it and ask Irene, “The boy in the background. Do you remember him at all?”
She looks at me as though my face will hold the correct answer.
“I don’t. I’m sorry.”
“He has a port-stain birthmark on his face. Does that help?”
“No, I’m sorry. I don’t…he’s just in the background. I don’t remember him. I’m sorry.”
Rachel zooms in and right away I feel my heart race. The online quality of the photograph is excellent, especially against the version I saw in that visitors’ room, where Rachel snapped a photo of the photo and then had it printed out. I don’t know how many pixels this file has, but as she gets closer to the boy’s face, pressing the plus key to slowly zoom in, I feel my entire body well up. I risk a quick glance at Rachel. She is seeing it too. The blur is gone. Soon the boy’s face takes up the entire screen.
We look at each other. No doubt about it anymore.
It’s Matthew.
Or again, is that just a projection on our part? Want becoming reality. I don’t know. I don’t care. But as I start to wonder whether this is a dead end, Rachel starts to hit the right arrow key. The image slowly moves off the boy’s face.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
Rachel doesn’t respond. She hits the right arrow key some more. We are traveling up Matthew’s little arm toward his hand. And when we do, when we reach his hand, I hear Rachel gasp out loud.
“Rachel.”
“Oh my God.”
“What?”
She points to the man’s hand gripping my son’s. “That ring,” she says.
I can see the purple stone and school crest. I squint and try to get a better look. “Looks like a graduation ring.”
“It is,” she says. Then she turns to me. “It’s from Lemhall University.”
Chapter
36
Do you want to tell me what the hell is going on, Max?”
Sarah was driving. Max was in the passenger seat. Her eyes were on the road, but it felt like her gaze was boring through his skin.
“I’m not sure Burroughs did it.”
“Did what?”
“Killed his kid.”
“You’re a defense attorney now?”
“No,” Max said. “I’m a law enforcement officer.”
“Who is assigned to capture an escaped convict,” Sarah said. “If he didn’t do it, there are courts and laws and an entire legal system that can remedy that. It’s not your job. It’s not my job. Our job is to bring him in.”
“Our job is about justice.”
“He broke out of prison.”
“That’s up for debate.”
“What?”
“He had help. We both know that.”
“You’re talking about the warden.”
“Yes. I spoke to him.”
Max filled her in. Sarah’s face reddened.
“My God,” Sarah said. “We need to arrest Mackenzie.”
“Sarah—”
“Are you listening to yourself, Max? You’re being played.”
“The DNA test—”
“—shows he’s not the father. Big whoop. If anything, this hurts his case.”
“How so?” Max asked.
“The wife. The one we just visited. She’s not telling us everything. You can see that, right?”
“Right.”
“It’s pretty simple, Max. She had an affair. Or a boyfriend. Heck, probably with her current husband. Maybe Matthew is his son, that Dreason guy’s, and David Burroughs found that out.”
“So Burroughs killed the little boy?”
“Sure, why not? You think he’s the first cuckold to kill an offspring? But either way—and I need you to listen to this, Max—we have a legal system to remedy these things. A perfect system? No. In your free time, you can go through all the prisons and find innocent people who have been incarcerated and help free them. Do it. I’ll admire it. But don’t break them out of prison, Max. Don’t give them guns. Don’t let them destroy whatever is left of our tattered, flawed system. We need to capture Burroughs. That’s it. He’s an armed and dangerous felon. We need to treat him like one. You got that?”
“I want to know if he did it or not.”
“Then I’m calling this in,” Sarah said.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m getting you removed from this case, Max. You don’t belong on it.”
“You’d do that to me?”
“I love you,” Sarah said. “I also love our oaths and our legal system. You’re not seeing straight.”