"Is he okay?" I asked as I came up to him.
Peak sank the notebook into his jacket pocket. "He's dead," he told me. "I'm sorry."
I didn't shudder at the news, and even now I can hardly recall exactly what I felt, save the curious realization that I would never see my brother alive again. A moment ago, he'd spoken to me. Now he was utterly and forever silent. If I thought or felt more than this at that moment, then those feelings were too vague and insubstantial to make a sustained impression.
"Do you want to identify him?" Peak asked.
"Yes."
"Mind if I ask you a few questions first?"
I shook my head. "I've gotten used to questions."
He drew the notebook out of his pocket and flipped it open. "You spoke to him just before he did it, right?"
"I heard the shot."
This did not faze Peak, and for a moment it struck me that he probably thought it a way of gaining the sympathy he was not inclined to offer.
"What did he say?"
"That my troubles were over," I answered.
"What did he mean by that?"
"That he wouldn't be a bother to me anymore, I guess."
Peak looked at me doubtfully. "You don't think this had anything to do with Amy Giordano?"
"Just the pictures you found on Keith's computer," I said. "They were his."
"How do you know?"
"Warren stayed at our house while he was recovering from a broken hip," I said. "He stayed in Keith's room."
"That doesn't mean the pictures were his," Peak said.
"I know they weren't Keith's."
"How do you know?"
I shrugged. "Why would Warren have done this if the pictures weren't his?"
"Well, he might have thought we'd shift away from Keith," Peak said. "I mean, he all but confessed, didn't he?"
"No, he didn't," I said. "Except that the pictures were his. But he said they weren't ... sexual. That he didn't use them that way."
"Then why did he have them?"
"He said he just thought the kids were ... adorable."
Peak looked at me squarely. "Do you think he had anything to do with Amy Giordano being missing?"
I gave the only answer I could be certain of. "I don't know."
Peak looked surprised by my answer. "He was your brother. If he were capable of something like that, kidnapping a little girl, you'd know it, wouldn't you?"
I thought of all the years I'd spent with Warren and realized that for all we'd shared, parents, the big house we'd lost together, the joint trajectories of our lives, for all that, I simply couldn't answer Peak's question, couldn't in the least be sure that I knew Warren at all, or knew any more than his glossy surfaces. "Can you ever know anyone?" I asked.
Peak released a long frustrated breath and closed the notebook. "All right." He glanced inside the house, then back at me. "You ready to make the identification?"
"Yes."
Peak turned and led me up the stairs, then down the short corridor to Warren's room. At the door, he stepped aside. "Sorry," he murmured. "This is never easy."
Warren had pulled a chair up to the window, facing out toward the elementary school's dimly lit playground. His head was slumped to the right, so that he looked as if he'd simply gone to sleep while staring out the window. It was only when I stepped around to face the chair that I saw the shattered mouth, the dead eyes.
I don't know what I felt as I stared down at him during the next few seconds. Perhaps I was simply numb, my tumorous suspicion now grown so large that it was pressing against other vital channels, blocking light and air,
"Was that all he said?" Peak asked. "Just that your troubles were over?"
I nodded.
"How about before he spoke to you? Did he talk to anyone else in your family?"
"You mean Keith, right?" I asked.
"I mean anybody."
"Well, he didn't talk to Keith. He talked to my wife briefly, but not to Keith."
"What did he say to your wife?"
"I don't know," I told him. "When I got home, she handed me the phone. Then Warren said that my troubles were over—nothing else. When I heard the shot, I called 911, then came directly here."
"You came alone, I noticed."
"Yes."
Peak looked as if he felt sorry for me because I'd had to come to the scene of my brother's suicide alone, without the comfort of my wife and son.
"Do you want to stay a little longer?" he asked finally.
"No," I told him.
I gave Warren a final glance, then followed Peak back down the stairs and out into the yard where we stood together in the misty light that swept out from the school playground. The air was completely still, the scattered leaves lying flat, like dead birds, in the unkempt yard.
Peak looked over toward the playground, and I could see how troubled the sight of it made him, the fear he had that some other little girl was still in peril because whoever had taken Amy Giordano was still out there.
"I read that leads get cold after a couple of weeks," I said.
"Sometimes."
"It's been two weeks."
He nodded. "That's what Vince Giordano keeps telling me."
"He wants his daughter back," I said. "I can understand that."
Peak drew his gaze over to me. "We're testing the cigarettes. It takes a while to get the results."
"And what if they were Keith's?"
"It means he lied," Peak said. "He told Vince Giordano that he never left the house. He said he was inside the whole time."
"And he was," I said, a response that struck me as wholly reflexive.
Peak returned his attention to the deserted playground, held his gaze on the ghostly swings and monkey bars and seesaws. He seemed to see dead children playing there.
"What if your son hurt Amy Giordano?" He looked at me very intently, and I saw that he was asking the deepest imaginable question. "I mean, if you knew he did it, but also knew that he was going to get away with it, and that after that, he was going to do it again, which most of them do, men who kill children. If you knew all that I've just said, Mr. Moore, what would you do then?"
I would kill him. The answer flashed through my mind so suddenly and irrefutably that I recoiled from this raw truth before replying to Peak. "I wouldn't let him get away with it."
Peak seemed to see the stark line that led me to this place, how much had been lost on the way, the shaved-down nature of my circumstances, how little I had left to lose. "I believe you," he said.
***
Meredith was waiting for me when I got home, and the minute I saw her, I recalled the way she'd stood with Rodenberry, and all my earlier feelings rose up, hot and cold, a searing blade of ice.
"He's dead," I told her flatly.
Her hand lifted mutely to her mouth.
"He shot himself in the head."
She stared at me from behind her hand, still silent, although I couldn't tell if it were shock or simply her own dead center that kept her silent.
I sat down in the chair across from her. "What did he say to you?"
She looked at me strangely. "Why are you so angry, Eric?"
I had no way to answer her without revealing the murky water in which my own emotions now washed about. "The cops will want to know."
She bowed her head slightly. "I'm so sorry, Eric," she said quietly. "Warren was so—"
Her feelings for Warren sounded like metal banging steel. "Oh please," I blurted. "You couldn't stand him."
She looked stunned. "Don't say that."
"Why not? It's the truth."
She looked at me as if I were a stranger who'd somehow managed to crawl into the body of her husband. "What's the matter with you?"
"Maybe I'm tired of lies."
"What lies?"
I wanted to confront her, tell her that I'd seen her and Rodenberry in the college parking lot, but some final cowardice, or perhaps it was only fear that if I broached that subject, I would surely lose her, warned me away. "Warrens lies, for one thing. Those pictures the cops found on Keith's computer. They were Warren's."