“Same visitor?” I ask, just to see what I’ll get in return.
I get nothing.
I sit on the very same stool. Rachel does not bother hiding her horror this time.
“My God, what the hell happened to you?”
I smile and deliver a line I never thought I would: “You should see the other guy.”
Rachel openly studies my face for a few long moments. Yesterday she tried to be more circumspect. All of that pretense is over now. She points at me with her chin. “How did you get all those scars?”
“How do you think?”
“Your eye—”
“I can’t see much out of it. But it’s okay. We have bigger concerns.”
She keeps staring.
“Come on, Rachel. I need you to focus. Forget my face, okay?”
Her eyes trace over the scars for another few seconds. I stay still, let her get on with it. Then she asks the obvious question: “So what do we do?”
“I got to get out of here,” I say.
“You have a plan?”
I shake my head. “For mental exercise, to keep myself semi-sane, I used to dream up ways of getting out of here. You know, escape plans. Nothing I’d ever act on. Just for the hell of it.”
“And?”
“And using my investigative skills, not to mention my innate wiles, I came up with” — I shrug — “nada. It’s impossible.”
Rachel nods. “No one has broken out of Briggs since 1983 — and that guy was caught in three days.”
“You did your homework.”
“Old habit. So what are you going to do?”
“Let’s put that aside. I need you to research a few things for me.”
When Rachel whips out her reporter’s notebook, the familiar four-by-eight-inch kind with the wire spiral on the top, I can’t help but smile. She’d used them for years, even before getting the job at the Globe, and it always made it look like she was cosplaying a reporter, like she was going to don a fedora with a card reading PRESS jammed into the rim.
“Go ahead,” Rachel says.
“First off,” I say, “we need to figure out who the real murder victim was.”
“Because now we know it wasn’t Matthew.”
“Know may be an optimistic word, but yes.”
“Okay, I’ll start with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.”
“But don’t stop there. Go to any websites you can think of, social media pages, old newspapers, whatever. Let’s start by making a list of any Caucasian male children between the ages of two and, say, four years old who were reported missing within a two-month span of the murder. Try to keep the search within a two-hundred-mile radius. Spread out after that. Go a little younger, a little older, farther away, you know the deal.”
Rachel jots it down. “I may have a few sources I haven’t burned in the FBI,” she says. “Maybe one of them can help.”
“Sources you haven’t burned?”
She shakes it off. “What else?”
“Hilde Winslow,” I say.
We both go silent for a moment.
Then Rachel asks, “What about her?”
My throat closes. It is hard for me to speak.
“David?”
I signal that I’m okay. I put myself together one piece at a time. When I trust my voice again, I ask, “Do you remember her testimony?”
“Of course.”
Hilde Winslow, an elderly widow with twenty-twenty vision, testified that she saw me burying something in the woods between our homes. The police dug at that spot and uncovered the murder weapon covered with my fingerprints.
I feel Rachel’s eyes on me, waiting.
“I could never explain that,” I manage to say, trying to give myself some distance, pretending that I’m talking about someone else, not me. “At first, I thought that maybe she saw someone who looked like me. A case of mistaken identity. It was dark. It was four in the morning. I was pretty far away from her back window.”
“That was what Florio said on cross-examination.”
Tom Florio was my attorney.
“Right,” I say. “But he didn’t make much headway.”
“Mrs. Winslow was a strong witness,” Rachel confesses.
I nod, feeling the emotions start to rise up and overwhelm me again. “She seemed to be just a sweet little old lady with a steel-trap mind. She had no reason to lie. Her testimony sunk me. That was when those closest to me started having serious doubts.” I look up. “Even you, Rachel.”
“And even you, David.”
She meets my glare without the slightest flinch. I’m the one who turns away.
“We need to find her.”
“Why? If she was mistaken—”
“She wasn’t mistaken,” I say.
“I’m not following.”
“Hilde Winslow lied. It’s the only explanation. She lied on the stand, and we need to know why.”
Rachel says nothing. A young woman, still a teen, I would bet, walks behind Rachel and takes a seat on the stool next to her. A beefy inmate I don’t recognize, blanketed in razor-scratch tattoos, comes in and sits across from her. Without preamble he starts cursing at her in a language I can’t make out, gesturing wildly. The girl hangs her head and says nothing.
“Okay,” Rachel says. “What else?”
“Prepare.”
“Meaning?”
“If you have any affairs to get in order, do it now. Max out your ATM card every day. Same with your bank. Get out as much cash as you can, keeping it below ten grand a day so it doesn’t signal anything to the government. Start today. We need as much cash as possible, just in case.”
“Just in case what?”
“I find a way out of here.” I lean forward. I know that my eyes are bloodshot, and judging by the look on her face, I look... off. Scary even. “Look,” I whisper, “I know I should give you the big speech now — about how if I manage to escape — I know, I know, but just hear me out — if I manage to escape, you’ll be aiding and abetting a federal inmate, which is a felony. If I were a better man, I would hand you a line about how this is my fight, not yours, but the truth is, I can’t do that. I have zero chance without you.”
“He’s my nephew,” she replies, sitting up a little straighter.
He’s. She said “he’s.” Present tense. Not “he was.” She believes it. God help us both, we really believe that Matthew is still alive.
“So what else, David?”
I don’t reply. I’ve gone quiet. My eyes wander off, my thumb and forefinger plucking at my lower lip.
“David.”
“Matthew is out there,” I say. “He’s been out there all this time.”
My words linger in the still, stilted, prison air.
“The last five years have been hell for me, but I’m his father. I can take it.” My gaze locks on to her. “What have they been like for my son?”
“I don’t know,” Rachel says. “But we have to find him.”
Ted Weston liked using the nickname Curly at work.
No one called him that at home. Only here. In Briggs. It gave him distance from the scum he had to work with every day. He didn’t like these guys using or even knowing his real name. When Ted finished work, he showered in the correctional officers’ locker room. Always. He never wore his uniform home. He showered with very hot water and scrubbed this place off him, these horrible men and their horrible breath that may still linger on his clothes and in his hair, their sweat and DNA, their evil which feels to him like a living, breathing parasite that attaches itself to any decent microcosm and eats away at it. Ted showers all that away, scrubs it off with scalding water and industrial soap and a harsh-bristled brush, and then he carefully puts on his civilian clothes, his real clothes, before he goes home to Edna and their two daughters, Jade and Izzy. Even then, when he first gets home, Ted showers again and changes clothes, just to be sure, just to be certain that nothing from this place contaminates his home and his family.