He is guilty, Hathorne typed. Know that, and that he will pay. Soon.
What now? came the reply.
There will be further instructions. How are your circumstances?
My what? My life? It sucks. When do I get my money? I’ve done what you asked.
Soon enough. You’ll be able to do whatever you want very soon.
There was a long pause and then: Really not sure this is worth it. Who are you, anyway? Who’s the guy who gave me this computer? I get orders from him through text messages, but I haven’t seen him since.
You’ll know what you need to know when it’s right for you to know. And it’s almost right. You’ll get what you want. Every bit of it.
What do you know about me? What do I want, anyway?
Hathorne narrowed his eyes and stared at this for a few seconds. There were the distant sounds of a toilet flushing and a man coughing down the hall. Otherwise, the ward was deathly quiet and dark. His thin fingers hovered over the little device on his chest. He clicked his tongue and typed out, Light.
Then he turned off the program, and the word and the light vanished.
CHAPTER 14
Sunday, July 16, 2017
Bay Thirty-Fourth Street
Bath Beach, Brooklyn
2:45 a.m.
Joe lay in his oversize bed, sweat soaked and dry mouthed. He had just woken from a dream in which he was floating in black water, down a river in darkness, toward some loud, rushing sound he never reached. It was unsettling, but it hadn’t scared him. What was scaring him was the sand in his shoes, the shoes he had, by all appearances, recently worn to a beach nearby.
Yes, and perhaps the same beach where a woman who is apparently your mother was found murdered by some guy with strong hands. She is a woman you have seen somewhere else, but cannot place.
She was there again, in his mind’s eye, the discarded-looking creature at the medical examiner’s office. The one he was never supposed to have recognized. He had seen no familial resemblance. He had felt no deep stirring, nothing that told him he was attached to the dead woman in any way. Still, he had seen her before, and not long before. That was undeniable.
I didn’t kill that woman, he thought for the thousandth time, and then corrected it to I didn’t kill my mother. He cursed himself for even entertaining the idea. God, of course I didn’t. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t pick her out of a lineup! The internal dialogue went on, the warring voices in his head relentless.
Then why was the woman familiar? Who was she?
I don’t know! I don’t know, but there’s an explanation. I didn’t kill my mother. Why? Because I haven’t seen her in forty years, and I haven’t cared in probably thirty. I would have no reason. I would have no desire, no ability.
The dead woman is your mother, though. And she was someone you had seen before recently.
So what? At some point I saw a woman, somewhere, who got murdered near where I live. I did not know her by name, or by any other identifier. I told them truthfully that I did not know who she was. And if—if—I did go for a walk on a beach somewhere? So what? I live near a beach. That’s it. End of story. I’m not a killer. Of anyone. The worst that happened is I took a walk, and I don’t remember it because I was soused.
That wasn’t really the worst, though. The worst was that he couldn’t remember a goddamn thing about the night in question.
Blackout.
That’s what he had experienced, and it was haunting him now that he was faced with these strange circumstances. It’s also why Halle had been so upset. The true nature of the matter was that Joe didn’t have a “true nature” when he was in a state like that. If he willed himself to reflect on it long enough, it chilled him to the bone.
Blackouts were an occasional consequence of drinking that he still hadn’t gotten a full handle on, or at least that was the official explanation he gave to himself. It was deceptively easy to dismiss the problem; in two years of working for his former and now current boss, Craig Flynn, he hadn’t missed so much as a morning meeting. He functioned, solidly, during the week. It was just weekends, and sometimes Thursdays, when he let loose.
Wrong. It’s more than letting loose. You go way, way too far.
That was a reality he could not avoid, even with the cleverest distortion of thought. What Halle had said on Saturday morning was basically true: It wasn’t that Joe had forgotten what the detectives had told him, along with most of the other events of the past weekend. It was that his brain hadn’t encoded most of those events in the first place. That’s what a blackout was—a failure of memory to encode because of the temporary loss of function to parts of the brain. There might be flashes of memory, things that made it into the vault when brain activity momentarily snapped back into gear, but most of it would be lost, never recorded.