“I ask because your uncle Mike was involved in human services too, right?”
“Well, yeah, but . . . he died in 1985, and Robbie was barely around when we lived with him. I don’t think my uncle inspired him to work with disabled people. I think it was just a job he came by. And then it became an opportunity to steal.”
“Do you know what he does at the current job? Security? An attendant?”
“Like an orderly, I guess. He cleans up, assists the staff.”
“And he works afternoons, mostly? I think that’s what you mentioned.” She flipped back a few pages in her notes.
“Yeah, lately, that’s been his shift. Like a one thirty to ten or something.”
“Any idea if his alibis check out for the nights in question? I won’t get discovery for a while, but I assume they told you something.”
“They check out,” he said and sagged lower. “Everything checks out except for me.” He dropped his eyes to the floor, linoleum scratched and faded in the shadow of the chair.
“Joe, stay with me,” she said.
He lifted his eyes and nodded. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I know it looks hopeless.”
“And maybe it should.” He sighed but pressed on. She needed to hear this. “My brother is an asshole, but he told me something the other day that resonated. I never really faced what happened to us as a kid, Aideen. Not really.”
“The abandonment by your mother.”
“That, yes. The whole process. The blackout. I just ended up rolling the horror of that night into more of them.”
“More of what?”
“More blackouts,” he said. His mouth went dry. He had a feeling that his eyes looked hollow, on the edge of madness. But he hoped she understood that he was saner at that moment than he had been in years. It wasn’t just kicking the booze. He felt more present than he ever had. He could make a dark joke and say it had taken jail to do that to him, but it was so much worse than that. Maybe, in fact, it had taken two innocent lives.
“You have a drinking problem,” she said. “It sounds like you’re dealing with it better than most who go cold turkey. That doesn’t make you a murderer.”
“I’ll tell you what I told my brother.”
“Oh, Christ, please tell me you didn’t confess to him!”
“No, no. I just . . . I told him that if I did do it, I needed to understand why.”
“Dear God,” she said and sighed. She dropped her pen. “If they call him as a witness—”
“I’m sorry, okay? Yeah, I said a dumb thing. I meant it, though. I need you to understand that, Aideen. If you’re serious about seeing this through with me, I need you to understand it.”
“I get it,” she said. For a moment it looked like her energy was flagging, but then it seemed to roar back. Her eyes lit up, crackling with blue fire. “Just talk to me from now on, okay? No one else. No one in here. Not your goddamn brother. Just me.”
“Of course,” he said. He felt chastened and childish. A little nauseous also. “I need to face something ugly, though. I need to grapple with the possibility that I retreated into liquor in a way that made me something else. Something I couldn’t imagine. That first blackout? In ’77? That was on the universe. The ones that followed are all on me. I let them ruin my life. I need to understand what else they might have made me capable of.” For a long moment, neither of them spoke.
“Can you do this ‘grappling’ without confessing to me?” She put air quotes around grappling.
“I suppose so.”
“Good. Just don’t go down that road. I mean, a blackout drove you to black out and commit murder? It’s poetic to the point of being silly.”
“Now that’s the Aideen I know and love.”
“Whatever. Just . . . don’t stew too much, okay? I know that’s hard to avoid in this place. You’ve got nothing else to do but stew. But don’t lose heart. Not yet.”
“The DNA . . . ,” he started, then trailed off.
“We need to know more,” she said. “Of course, it’s bad. It’s why you’re in here, but it’s not a ray gun that points at you and says, ‘Guilty.’ I’ll know more when I talk to Mimi Bromowitz. She seems decent. I think she’ll be up front with me. What else should I be thinking about? Has anything else unusual happened since the fourteenth?”
His thoughts circled for a few seconds: Robbie, Halle, Hathorne, the misery of it all. Then he remembered. There were two things, actually. The first was the sand he had found in his shoes the morning after he learned that Lois was dead, but he pushed it back below the surface. It was foolish to withhold information from one’s lawyer, but that was just too frightening to mention, at least for now. The other thing, he was ready to tell her about.