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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

It is later that night, two in the morning, when Molly says, “I left you alone with your dad on purpose.”

Both of us are lying in the dark on our backs.

“I know.”

“Did it help?”

“He thinks we should start again.”

Silence.

“There’s a corporate security job in Florida for me. Apparently, it pays well.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“I’m married to a fabulous woman, and I have a son with her. This isn’t just my decision.”

“Kind of patronizing.”

I smile in the dark. “I realized that the moment the words escaped my lips.”

“I wasn’t asking you to make a decision.”

“I know.”

“I wanted to know how you felt about it.”

“Right,” I say. “There are pros and cons.”

“Want to go over them?”

“At two in the morning?”

“Neither one of us seems able to sleep,” she says, turning to her side and putting a warm hand on my chest. “Pros: the weather.”

“Neither of us likes the cold,” I agree.

“The winters get long.”

“Yet we’ve lived here our whole lives.”

“Does that go in the con column against moving to Florida?” she asks.

“I think so.”

“We are from here,” she says. “We grew up here. We like it here.”

“Even if we don’t like the winters.”

Molly continues: “More pros. The rent would be cheaper in Florida.”

“Much cheaper.”

“You’d have a job with good pay. I’d be able to find work.”

“True and true.”

“Henry could grow up with a real backyard.”

I tilt my head. “Is that a pro?”

“The NYPD would no longer be an issue,” she continues. “You’d be able to move away from your past.”

Silence.

“Sami?”

“You can’t move away from your past,” I say.

“Sure, you can. There is something to be said for out of sight, out of mind. Yes, you’re the same you—but the same you in a different environment is like adding a fresh catalyst to a compound. I know you have demons, Sami. We all do.”

“Not you,” I say. “You’re perfect.”

“Man, do I have you snowed. And I said ‘move away’ from your past, not ‘run away’ or ‘escape’ it. But here is the thing. I get you’ve dealt with demons. So have I. But whatever awful things we went through, it led to us, you and me, being here right now. It led to me having a baby and a life with the most marvelous of men. And you are marvelous, Sami. So the mistakes, the pain, even the deaths—maybe we learned something from all that.”

Her hand is still on my chest. I put my hand over hers and we interlock fingers.

“Suppose,” I say, “that part of what I learned—part of what makes me ‘marvelous’—is that I can’t let it go?”

She takes a second. “Touché.”

“Do you want to go to Florida?” I ask.

“Hell no.”

“Then case closed,” I say.

I manage to fall asleep at five a.m.—and promptly at six, Henry wakes up with a cry. I whisper to my beloved that she should stay in bed, that I’ll handle the wee one, and Molly replies with a gentle snore and closed eyes. I swing my feet onto the floor, grab my phone from the night table, and head to Henry. My son is a happy baby. Even his current cry is soothing rather than alarming or shrill, designed, it seems, to gently wake his parents, rather than agitate them into action. As soon as I bend down over his crib, Henry realizes his basic need is about to be met, and so the crying stops immediately. He smiles at me and coos and figuratively wraps me around his finger. I lift him high, change his diaper, carry him into the kitchen, place him in his high chair. I toss a few Cheerios onto his tray, and as I start to prepare his breakfast, I check my phone.

The first two texts are from Arthur and came in at 6:04 a.m.

The first message reads:

Don’t kill the messenger.

I don’t like this. I scroll down to the second message:

At Tad Grayson’s request, I am forwarding this message to you: ‘Tell Kierce I want to show him the evidence. He should please come to my mom’s place at 198B City Blvd on Staten Island. I’ll be around all day. A call would be appreciated so I know he’s coming.’

I hit reply, and type back to Arthur:

Why do I have to go to him?? Let him come to me.

The dancing three dots tell me Arthur is typing a reply. Then it arrives:

He’s taken over hospice care for his mother. She won’t be around much longer.

I don’t care about Tad Grayson or his dying, lying mother. To express this, I find the violin emoji and type, “ Tell him to pound sand—and play the world’s smallest violin ,” but I don’t hit send and end up deleting it in a rush of maturity. Then I start again:

If he has evidence, why couldn’t he tell me yesterday?

I asked him that.

What did he say?

His reply: ‘Only can see it at my house. Can’t be in the office.’

Again I make a face. I look at Henry. Henry is frowning too, mimicking me. I look at him and say, “I know, right?”

That makes Henry laugh.

My phone pings. Arthur’s text says: Are you going to go?

I type back to Arthur:

Tell him I’ll be there six PM on the dot.

This is a lie. No reason to let him prepare.

I move fast. I hope Molly is awake. She isn’t. So I do it. Gently. Like Henry. She groans but gets it. I slip Henry onto her chest, shower, dress. Then I hop on the subway to the Staten Island ferry.

By eight a.m., I am on City Boulevard on Staten Island staring up at the house where the monster Tad Grayson had been raised. The house could politely be called weathered , but it looks more like it’s shedding or even actively falling apart. The structure is oddly asymmetrical and looks as if it was drawn by a child in preschool. All the shades are pulled down except the upper right window, which has wood planks rather than glass. The neighborhood prides itself in small front yards so green they seem ready for a pro golf outing. Not the Graysons’. The weeds here are tall enough to go on the adult rides at Six Flags. I would say the concrete walk had a few cracks in it, but it would be more apropos to say the cracks had a few bits of concrete in them.

I step gingerly toward the door, trying to remember when I had my last tetanus shot. I look for a doorbell. No go. When I knock, careful not to scrape my knuckles or get a splinter, paint chips fly off. I wait. Nothing. I knock again and hear a voice I recognize as Tad Grayson’s say, “Just a minute.”

When he opens the door, I am again surprised, if not pleased, at how gaunt and awful Grayson looks. His breath is ragged as though he’d just finished a run. He wears rubber gloves and is holding a white plastic bag in his hand. I get a whiff of something that is both divinely human and makes me want to hurl.

“You wanted to show me something?” I ask.

“I thought you were coming at six p.m. on the dot.”

I say nothing.

“I should have known from the ‘on the dot,’” Tad Grayson says with a sigh. He steps back. “I’m in the middle of helping Mom get dressed. You’ll have to give us a moment.”

As if on cue, I hear an old woman croak: “Tad?”

“I’ll be right there, Mom.”

He gestures for me to enter. I debate the right move. I don’t like the idea of entering this decrepit dwelling. I could wait outside, where the air will be far fresher, but I had learned from my years as a police detective that when a suspect invites you into their living quarters, unless you suspect serious danger, you accept. A person’s home tells you about them. It is their setting, their choices, their mood. You never know what someone might leave out.

So I enter.

The small house’s tiny foyer bleeds into the living room. The sofa is open to a queen-size pull-out bed. I assume Tad slept here last night. The pull-out takes up all the space, so I just stand there—not that I’d want to go in and sit down on the threadbare furniture anyway. The television is an old-school box console with rabbit ears on the top. The bulbs in the room’s lamps are yellow, so that everything looks jaundiced. There are faded photographs in fingerprint-smeared frames. I study them. Most feature a family of four—mom, dad, two boys. One photo was taken in the front yard of this house when the grass looked more like the neighbors’, another in this very room with the same television. The father, I know, died years ago. I remember that Tad Grayson had a brother named Nathan. Nathan moved to Los Angeles sometime before the murder. I don’t remember him coming back to support his brother after the arrest. That left the mother, Patricia. I recognized her from the trial, though she looks even younger here.

I hear running water and flushing toilets. Two voices—I assume Tad’s and his mother’s—are muffled. His sounds caring, comforting, calming. Hers sounds distressed, confused, scared. I don’t like being here. It’s dark and gloomy, and the entire place reeks of disinfectant and death. It is a smell, oddly enough, that reminds me of Henry’s diapers and yet feels the direct opposite.

Life cycle via odors of human excrement.

I’m finding it hard to breathe.

The bedroom door off the back opens, and Tad Grayson shuffles out. His eyes are red now, I’m not sure from what. I also don’t care.

“She’s dying,” he says to me.

I don’t reply.

“I asked for temporary furlough, you know, a compassionate release. Just for a day or two. So I could say goodbye to her. You know what they told me?”

I don’t reply.

“They said maybe I could get temporary furlough to attend her funeral.” He shakes his head in bewilderment. “What a weird system, right? Funeral leave is compassion, but saying goodbye while the person is alive, while they can still hear and be comforted by it and maybe get some closure, that’s a bridge too far.”

He looks at me as though he expects me to agree.

“Nicole’s mother died four years ago,” I tell him. “Toward the end, she would call out her only daughter’s name. It was the saddest sound I ever heard.”

We just stand there for a moment.

“Where’s your evidence you didn’t do it?” I ask.

“Tell me, Kierce, how does a man prove a negative?”

“That’s what you wanted to tell me?”

“No,” he says. “I didn’t want to tell you anything at all.”

I step back. “I’m not following.”

“My mother does,” Tad Grayson says. “She’s the reason I asked you here.”

He turns back to her door and puts his hand on the knob. He looks back at me to make sure I’m ready. I really don’t want to go in. I’m not good with these sorts of things. Who is? I don’t like hanging with sick people. I’m a bit of a germophobe, and this place is crawling with too many varieties.

But I follow him into his mother’s sickroom.

I expect her to be hooked up to a million machines. She is not. She is sitting up in the made bed, the cover over her lower extremities. Her hair is thin and gray. I can see her scalp. Her skin is ashen. Her eyes seem too large, too bright, too blue, as they follow us. I try to match the woman I see now with the woman in the photographs, with the one I saw take the stand during her son’s trial all those years ago. It’s hard to make that match anyplace but those blue eyes that stare into mine, trying to pierce me, just as she did when she was on the stand.

I don’t flinch.

“Tad?” his mother says.

“Yes, Mom.”

“Did you offer our guest a drink?”

I handle that. “He didn’t, I’m not a guest, and I don’t want a drink.”

Her eyes slide toward her son. “Wait outside, please.”

That seems to catch Tad off guard. “Mom?”

“Please, Tad,” and while the voice is weak, I think he still hears steel from his childhood in it. “Wait outside.”

Tad leaves, closing the door behind him. I don’t move. The smells are all still here, fighting past some kind of lemon-scented spray that somehow makes them even worse. There is a chair pulled up next to the bed. I don’t take it. I don’t move. I just stay standing.

“Tad was here with me,” she says, “the night Nicole was shot.”

This is not news to me.

“Yeah, I was in the court when you testified, remember? You had nothing to corroborate your alibi. No one else who lived on your street saw Tad that night. The jury didn’t buy it then. I don’t buy it now.”

“I’m dying.”

“I know,” I say. “That doesn’t change anything. A mother’s dying declaration to get her son off doesn’t add weight to your testimony. Another witness saw your son right near the murder scene at the same time you claim he was here.”

“Brian Ansell,” she says.

“Yes.”

She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and says, “I’ve thought about that for a long time.”

“And?”

“Ansell lied on the stand. That’s what I thought for a long time.”

“And now?”

“Now I wonder,” she says, her voice breaking. She struggles to sit up. I don’t go to help her. “Did you ever think that maybe it was a setup?”

I say nothing.

“Tad went to Pennsylvania to buy a gun,” she continues. “Maybe someone knew about that. Maybe someone followed him and stole the gun and dressed like him.”

“Mrs. Grayson,” I say. “I think I should leave now.”

“She came here two days before she was murdered. Did you know that?”

I stop.

“Nicole, I mean. She came to visit me.”

I try to slow my pulse. “Why?”

“Because Tad was acting out. Nicole didn’t love him anymore. We both knew that. But she still cared about him. Nicole… she was that kind of person.”

Part of me wants to slap her silent. The other part of me wants to hear anyone who knew Nicole and could talk about her because, outrageous as it seems, the world has moved on from her.

Me, the love of her life, especially.

“Nicole and I were close,” Mrs. Grayson says. “You know that, Sami.”

I don’t like her using my first name. It enrages me. But I need to keep myself steady. The man who murdered Nicole is right outside my door. Between his release and Victoria/Anna’s return, my emotions are ricocheting all over the place. I’m not thinking straight. I know that.

“So,” I say, trying to be analytical, “Nicole came to you because she was worried about the violent threats your son was subjecting her to—your son, who had just purchased a gun that was used to kill her. Do I have that right?”

No reply.

“I don’t know how to break this to you, Mrs. Grayson, but this information hardly clears him.”

“That’s not all she said.”

“Oh?”

“Nicole told me about a case.”

“A case,” I say, arching a skeptical eyebrow.

“Yes. She was investigating someone she thought might harm her.”

“How convenient,” I say. “Mrs. Grayson—”

“Patricia.”

“Mrs. Grayson,” I say, “Nicole was a cop. We looked into all her cases to see whether there was anyone who held a grudge who might have done it. We checked every lead in that direction. There was nothing.”

“It wasn’t a police case,” Mrs. Grayson tells me.

I try not to roll my eyes. “You don’t say.”

“It was something personal. Something involving her own family.”

“So she came to you to tell you that your son was threatening her—”

“She wasn’t scared of Tad. She knew he was harmless.”

“—and then say, ‘By the way, I’m looking into a case that isn’t a police case but it involves my family and I’m really scared about that too.’ That just about do it?”

Her bright eyes flash dark now.

“And, just so I have this story completely straight,” I continue, “you never told anyone about this visit, correct?”

“Correct,” she says. “And you know why.”

I spread my hands. “I really don’t.”

She coughs into a handkerchief. She turns and looks at the water next to the bed. I don’t know if she’s expecting me to help her get it or what. I don’t move. “If I told the police that Nicole came to me about Tad’s texts, the prosecutors would have twisted what I said to use against him. Like you just did. But listen to me. I won’t last much longer. Tad was with me that night. I have never wavered from that. Not once. Someone… maybe someone Nicole was investigating and worried about… they’re the ones you should be after. You need to find out what Nicole was working on.”

I nod, more than ready to leave. “Is there anything else?”

Patricia Grayson is growing exhausted. Her head is back on the pillow. She is no longer looking at me, but the ceiling above her. “What if you’re wrong?”

I don’t reply.

“What if you put my son in that hellish prison for eighteen years and left him the husk of a man you see today because you wouldn’t face the truth? And what if a small part of you now knows it, knows you did some grave injustice, but simply can’t let yourself see because it would be too horrible for you to ever admit? How will you live with yourself, if it ends up Tad didn’t do it?”

I say nothing.

“I’m a dying woman. This is my deathbed confession. My son was with me the night Nicole was murdered. He didn’t do it.”