“Yes, in April. I was on a senior trip overseas. My birthday was the eleventh. I was scheduled to get back on the seventeenth, but Mike went into a coma, and the tour company sent me back early. I got to the hospital in time to see him before he died, but he was out of it. We never spoke. I watched him die and then packed up what I could. Like I said, it seemed like he had laid some stuff out that he wanted me to have, I guess. I think he wanted to explain it, but . . . that didn’t happen.”
“I’m sorry for that.”
“I am too,” he said, with feeling. “He was getting sicker, that whole winter. I shouldn’t have gone, but he wanted me to go. You know how when you’re a kid you don’t think bad things will really happen? Or if they do, somehow they’ll be on your timeline?”
“Sure.”
“Well, that was me.”
“Maybe it was him too,” she said. “The timeline thing. Maybe he thought he had more time.”
“Maybe. I never knew what was going on in his head.”
“The baby rattles,” she said, “and the pictures. How did your uncle get them? I thought there wasn’t much contact between your family and him when you were little.”
“You’re a good detective,” he said, looking genuinely impressed.
She smiled. It was a good question.
“He got them from a suitcase my mother packed. It was in the station wagon, the one she ditched us in. We’d been living with Mike a week or two when he tracked the car down. After the blackout, the city towed it to an impound lot on the West Side. There were storage fees and a fine to get it out, so Mike just left it, but a decent guy over there let him take the luggage and the boxes out of the car. That was how my brother and I had coats and long johns a few months later. And let me tell you, that following winter was cold, no matter how hot the summer was.”
“I’ve heard that,” she said. She held up both rattles, one in each hand. “They’re the same, you know. Your mother must have gone back to the same store when she was expecting you.”
“Probably,” he said with a shrug. “Staten Island was smaller then. Not sure what choices she had. It’s weird, you know? I haven’t seen those rattles in years. I never gave them much thought, but you’re right—they’re identical. As for Robbie and me? Nothing could be further from the truth.”
CHAPTER 22
Thursday, July 27, 2017
New York County Superior Court, Part Thirty-Four
Manhattan
2:30 p.m.
The crime scene photos, ten by twelve inches, were old school. Not the pixelated wizardry of digital photography, no. These had been developed in a lab, on glossy blank paper swished around in a chemical-filled tray until the images floated up from shadows. For three decades they had yellowed in an evidence bin.
Their subject was a woman, still alive but beaten so badly that she was nearly unrecognizable. She was in the entrance of the elevator where she had collapsed, thirty-five years and six days before the hearing where the images of her were again relevant. In the black-and-white photos, the heavy scarred door of the elevator rested against her left thigh, unable to close. At the judge’s request, Joe handed them forward. Judge Feldman sifted through them and grimaced.
“Why the hell were they taking her picture if she was still alive?” he asked in a loud whisper. He was looking down at the two lawyers—Joe and Joe’s adversary—before the bench. “I know it was a long time ago, but still.”
“They didn’t know she was alive, at first,” Joe said. “The responding officers had a crime scene photographer with them, and he started to snap photos when she gasped or coughed or something.”
“Oh,” the judge said. He shifted his eyes to the subject of the hearing, Evan Bolds, who sat calmly at counsel table with his hands in his lap. He was fifty-three, according to the file, and hefty. He had graying hair, a mustache, and small eyes that made him look a little like a walrus. Bolds had raped the woman in the photo after breaking into her apartment. She had broken free afterward and had run screaming and half-dressed out the front door toward the elevator. Bolds had followed and squeezed into the elevator with her just as the doors were closing. It was in the elevator that he had let loose on her, grabbing her by the neck, slamming her face repeatedly into the button panel, and beating her until it must have seemed like she was dead.
The issue today was not whether Bolds was guilty of the rape and attempted murder. In the steaming summer of 1984, he had been found guilty of both in a courtroom right across the street from where he was now. He had served almost thirty-three years—plus two years of probation afterward—for those crimes. The issue now was whether, as in the case of Aaron Hathorne, Bolds could be shown to have a “mental abnormality” and continued on supervision, even though his criminal sentence had maxed out.