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CHAPTER FIVE

Tad Grayson steps through the prison gates.

The sky is gray. The building is gray. The street pavement is gray. I don’t want to say the mood is gray, but that’s what we are left with, aren’t we? I count three news vans and about ten members of the press standing outside the prison gate. His release is a story but not a huge one. It might have been a few years ago, but nothing is a huge story anymore. We read about something awful, we get pissed off, a new outrage comes along, we move on. The cycles of news, like the cycles of life, are getting faster and tighter with time until eventually we reach oblivion. But now I’m getting deep.

I watch from behind a tree. I don’t want to be spotted, but I won’t care much if I am. Tad Grayson looks awful, I’m happy to say. I hadn’t seen him since they led him out in handcuffs after the guilty verdict, so maybe that’s part of it—the sudden skipping of twenty years and so he’s aging to me all at once—but I think it’s more. I’ve aged. We’ve all aged. But Tad is barely recognizable. Only a few wispy strands remain from his thick mane of jet-blue Superman hair. Those strands are plastered down into a classic combover. His cheeks are sunken. His skin tone is—here it comes again—gray. His walk is an old-man shuffle, though he’s only forty-eight.

He spent more than two decades in prison for murdering a police officer. That might make you a hero among your prison peers, but I am sure the gatekeepers made sure the time passed slowly and with difficulty. My hate is still fresh, raw, but I would be lying if I didn’t say it felt tempered a bit because Tad Grayson looks so broken.

A woman in a business suit—his lead lawyer, I suppose—spreads her arms and Tad steps into them. She hugs him. He rests his face into her shoulder. He may be crying, I can’t say for sure. The woman pats his back and whispers something. With his face still hidden, I can see him nod.

A voice from behind me says, “I figured you’d be here.”

I turn and look up. It’s Marty, my partner when they threw me off the force. Marty’s young and na?ve and tall. He’s far too good-looking to be likable—Molly says that he looks like an “underwear model, only more handsome”—and yet he is also adorably dorky, with the annoying enthusiasm of a born-again puppy. You can’t help but love Marty, even when you want to kick his shins.

“Deducing that I might show up for the release of the man who murdered my fiancée,” I say. “Boy, I’m proud to be your mentor.”

“You’re being sarcastic, aren’t you? I can never tell.”

“No,” I say, “you can’t.”

“Kierce?”

“What, Marty?”

“You use sarcasm as a coping mechanism to obfuscate your true emotions.”

I look up at him and say nothing. A few seconds pass.

“I got a vocabulary-building app on my phone,” Marty says in way of explanation. “ Obfuscate was Tuesday’s word.”

“Glad you could find a real-world use for it,” I say. Then: “Why are you here?”

“One, to make sure you don’t do something stupid. Like, I don’t know, showing up here.”

“So ‘one’ is answered. What’s two?”

The media has set up a podium with their various logoed microphones. The woman in the business suit heads toward it. She is flanked by two what look like male colleagues.

“You sent me a pin last night,” Marty says. “For a location. You wanted to know who lived there.”

“Today,” the woman at the microphone begins, “a terrible injustice has been corrected.”

The woman introduces herself as Kelly Neumeier and then says more stuff around righting wrong and fighting injustices and how the police’s incompetence means the real killer is still out there, but there’s no need to repeat it. I get the need for groups like the Innocence Project and ELI. I get that I had corrupt colleagues and that the blue line protects them and all that, though I found most of the evidentiary abuse comes from being lazy and wanting to cut corners rather than trying to subvert justice. Also arrogance—you know who did it and you just need a little extra juice to prove it, so why not play God a bit?

Yes, I know it’s wrong.

But I also know that Tad Grayson killed Nicole, that the bust was righteous, that the conviction was untarnished except for nonrelated grievances involving me. Their case in a nutshell was this: I, Sami Kierce, violated rules once or twice, ergo every other case I was involved in should be thrown out.

Just so we are clear: I never violated rules for personal gain or profit or even to expedite a conviction.

I wonder what Neumeier and her boy-band background lawyers really think. Do they honestly believe Tad Grayson is innocent—or is this about a higher cause to them? They looked at the evidence. Sure, they were able to use my downfall to get him loose. But they know he did it.

The question is, what can I do about it now?

“Mr. Grayson has gone through an incredible ordeal and injustice. But he still would like to make a brief statement.”

Kelly Neumeier steps aside for Tad. The streets seem to go quiet. Marty moves closer to me, as though worried that I might make a run at him. I won’t. I feel disoriented and not at all like Impulse Me. I don’t think I could move if I wanted to. A weird, horrible thought enters my head. It is so awful and self-centered I am afraid to say it here, but I can’t help it: If Tad Grayson hadn’t murdered Nicole, my son, Henry, would have never been born. This isn’t a profound thought. It is not a thought that gives comfort or changes anything. In fact, when I think about it, it’s ridiculously trite.

Goodbye, Impulse Me. Welcome, Trite Me.

Tad clears his throat. His eyes are on the ground. He blinks and again he looks old and broken. “There are some people I need to thank,” he says, as though this is an Oscar speech. He names people. The lawyers all nod and give a tight-lipped smile when their names are mentioned. When he finishes with the thank-yous, he stops, lowers his head again, raises it again, does the whole summoning-up-the-strength thing again. Now I can see the rehearsed quality to it. I don’t think the media does though.

“Since the day I was arrested,” he begins, “I have claimed my innocence. I was offered a lighter sentence if I confessed. But I didn’t.”

This is a lie, but never mind.

“I was offered more privileges inside if I confessed. But never, not once in the past twenty years, have I wavered. I will say this again. I didn’t kill Nicole Brett. I know most of you don’t believe me. I do admit that I became obsessed. I do admit that I did things that I’m not proud of. Those awful texts? I sent them. But I didn’t kill her.”

The “awful texts” came in incremental threats, the final one stating “ I’m going to put a bullet in your brain ,” which is exactly what happened. Nicole didn’t tell me about the texts. Tad Grayson was a mistake, she said. An obsessive ex and harmless. She had it handled. When I noticed him hanging around, when I wanted to sneak up on him and send him a message—yes, beat the living shit out of him—Nicole admonished me for my sexism. Did I think she couldn’t handle herself? Did I think she needed a man to protect her?

So we stopped talking about him.

A reporter shouts out, “Do you blame the police for this? The prosecutors?”

Guess what Tad does? He lowers his head, raises it. The dude is half marionette. I wonder how he will handle this question. Finally he says, “I’ve thought about that a lot.” He manages a wry smile. “You get a lot of time alone to think when you’re in a cell for twenty-three hours a day. I have looked at it from every conceivable angle. I have gone through the gamut of my emotions—and the emotions of others. There were times of great anguish and of great resolve.”

I get up on my toes to whisper in Marty’s ear. He bends down to meet me halfway. “Does this sound completely rehearsed?” I ask him.

“He had to be expecting the question, to be fair. And like he said, he’s had plenty of time to think about the answer.”

I frown.

“In the end, I don’t know for sure, and I’m confident that my attorneys will tell me that their actions were malicious, but I think the authorities honestly believed that I was the killer. I’ve been told that is too generous a response.”

I almost stick my finger in my throat to indicate that what this lying scuzzball is saying makes me want to hurl.

“And this certainly doesn’t excuse their actions. But at the end of the day, I didn’t kill Nicole. That means whoever did may still be out there.”

Another reporter shouts out, “Are you going to swear to find the killer?”

Another adds: “Like OJ?”

That leads to some snickers. I like that. Tad, I can see, does not. He opens his mouth as though he’s going to reply, but then Neumeier puts her hand on his back and steps forward and says no more questions. She leads him to a car. He slides into the backseat. She slides into the backseat. They pull away.

And that’s it.

I’m just standing there with Marty.

The news crews grab their microphones. I don’t move. I just stand there. Marty gives me the space. I watch as the news vans drive away.

Then I say to Marty, “You were saying about my dropped pin.”

“Yes.”

“What about it?”

“You were in Connecticut.”

I turn and again look up at him. “I can’t tell you what pride I take in the fact that I trained you.”

“You also use humor as a defense mechanism.”

“I wish I still carried a firearm.”

“More humor.”

“I know I was in Connecticut, Marty. Of course I know. I thought this was clear from my text, but just in case: I dropped that pin at someone’s residence. I want to know whose.”

“You also realize, I assume, that you were in a very high-end district when you dropped that pin.”

“I do.”

“On private property.”

“Yep.”

“I checked several satellite maps. The aerial footage over that area is blurred on all of them.”

“I know,” I say.

“You also dropped the pin late at night.”

“Marty?”

“Yes?”

“Why do you keep telling me things I already know?”

“What the hell were you doing there, Kierce?”

I don’t answer. There is no one left by the prison gate. I still stare at the spot where Tad Grayson has been standing. He was free. The man who had murdered Nicole was free. I bet his lawyers take him out for dinner. Probably a fancy steakhouse. Celebrating the man who blew away Nicole’s beautiful face.

Marty isn’t good with silence. I know that. He is a babbler. It takes a few more moments and then he lets loose a sigh. “The property is owned by an LLC.”

“Any name attached?” I ask.

“Not yet.”

I am not surprised by this. Someone is working hard to keep that property secret. Why? And why would Anna, a woman I thought was murdered in my presence over twenty years ago—perhaps by my own hand—be staying there?

“I tried a few other ways to look up the owners, but I didn’t get anywhere. Yet. You know how it is. You sent me that location late last night. Most places are just opening now. I’ll make some calls.”

“Thank you,” I say.

Then he asks the same question Molly did: “Does this have something to do with…?” He gestures toward the prison gate.

“No,” I say.

But then I tilt my head.

“What?” he asks.

I met Anna in Spain more than twenty years ago. Five years later, I was engaged to Nicole and she was murdered by Tad Grayson. I never put the two together. Why would I? They had nothing to do with one another. The only connection was, well, me. And I certainly see no connection between Anna—should I keep calling her Anna or should I move back to Maybe Anna, I don’t know anymore, let me stick with Anna—showing up at my class yesterday and the release today of Tad Grayson. None. Except for one thing.

The timing is curious.

Coincidences happen more often than we know. I’ve done a lot of studying on this. Fatalism, Jung-Pauli theory on synchronicity, probability, chance, apophenia—but I mostly go with something closer to a chaos theory. Coincidences happen. But coincidences assume a randomness, that there is no connection, not even a casual one, between two events.

But again there is a connection. The connection is yours truly.

So though I can’t see how—the real definition of coincidence states that it is a remarkable occurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection—could somehow the reappearances of both Anna and Tad Grayson in my life be connected? Or am I the one now guilty of narcissism or metaphysical solipsism or, more simply put, egocentrism—that is, the world revolves around me?

My head is starting to hurt.

My phone buzzes. It’s a text from Arthur:

WHERE ARE THE PHOTOS??!!

I check my watch—an old Casio I found abandoned on a bus bench. I had taken the visitors’ bus out here from Jay Street and the Metro-Tech Center in Brooklyn, but the bus back was still forty-five minutes away from leaving.

“I assume you drove here?” I ask Marty.

“Yes.”

“Can you give me a lift back to midtown?”