by Dan Chaon
BY THE TIME Dustin reached his office, the news of the discovery had already begun to circulate. Most people assumed—correctly, as it would later turn out—that the body was that of Peter Allingham, a college sophomore and lacrosse player who had gone missing in the wee hours of November 1, after an evening of barhopping and Halloween parties, dressed in a cartoonish, racially insensitive Native American costume: feathers, buckskin, et cetera. Seen by large numbers of people and then gone—very improbably vanishing, people said, on his way to the bathroom at the Daily Tavern, and he never came back to join his friends.
Aqil Ozorowski was sitting in the waiting room of Dustin’s office, wearing earbud headphones and gazing at his smartphone, texting vigorously. His dark, shaggy hair hung down like blinders on either side of his eyes, and Dustin stood there in the doorway with his briefcase, waiting to be noticed. He felt a bit nonplussed. They didn’t have an appointment, but Aqil had the habit of simply appearing.
He was an odd case. He had ostensibly come to Dustin for smoking cessation hypnotherapy, but his susceptibility to hypnosis was very low. Instead, their sessions had devolved into loose, vaguely intimate discussions, with no clear goal in mind. They’d talk about some conspiracy theory that Aqil had read about on the Internet, or they’d talk about Aqil’s insomnia or about his resentful feelings toward the pop star Kanye West—but after the first few appointments they had all but ceased to mention smoking. “I just don’t think I’m ready yet,” Aqil said. “But I do think you’re helping me, Doctor. You’re a good listener.”
Actually, Dustin wasn’t sure that was true. In fact, he had learned very little about Aqil in the months that they’d been meeting. Aqil was about thirty years old, Dustin guessed, and based on his name Dustin thought he might be biracial, but he wasn’t sure. Aqil had dark, deer-like brown eyes, and his long straight hair was either black or a dark auburn, depending on the light. His complexion could indicate any number of races. He gave no indication of his family background, even when Dustin asked direct questions. “Honestly,” Aqil said, “I’m not really interested in that stuff. These shrinks always want you to tell stories about your childhood and your past, like that’s supposed to explain something. I don’t really do that.”
The one thing that Dustin did know was that Aqil had been a policeman and that he was now on medical leave from the Cleveland Police Department, though that situation, too, had never been clearly explained. Some kind of psychological difficulty, Dustin assumed. PTSD?
Paranoia? There were no medical records that Dustin had been able to access, and even when he’d undertaken a surreptitious Google search it had yielded few results. Aqil was listed as a graduate of the Cleveland Police Academy. There was a grainy photo of him on his high school football team, where he’d been a running back. He had a defunct LinkedIn page. Whatever he’d done to get himself on psychological leave from the police department, it hadn’t made the news.
Still, there was apparently something he needed. He glanced up at last and gave Dustin a grin. He politely pulled the plastic cowrie shell of earbud from his ear, as if Dustin’s waiting room were his own private space and he was surprised to be interrupted.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” Dustin said. “I didn’t realize we had an…” and Aqil blinked a couple of times.
“Did you hear the news about the dead kid?” Aqil said. Dustin turned on the light and set his briefcase on a chair and Aqil stood up and stretched.
“…appointment?” Dustin said.
“Do you want to hear my theory?” Aqil said.
7
“IT’S ABOUT RUSSELL,” Kate said.
“Russell, my brother Russell?” he said, and she said, just listen! and she began to read to him from a news article:
…now nearly twenty-nine years after his arrest, independent DNA tests by three different laboratories, she read.
DNA tests on genetic evidence confirm what Tillman has long contended—that he is not the person who killed his mother, father, aunt, and uncle that June night in
“What newspaper is this?” Dustin said. “This is unbelievable.”
Tillman will be the latest person to be exonerated by DNA, according to officials at the Innocence Project, a nonprofit legal clinic that investigates wrongful convictions. The test results show what Russell has said from the day he was arrested that he is innocent said Vanessa Zuckerbrot an attorney for Innocence Project
“I don’t understand why we weren’t contacted about this,” Dustin said. “When was the last time anybody talked to him?”
All these years I knew I wasn’t the one, said Tillman in an interview, I believe there is a higher power greater than me and that’s been helping me all these years, keeping me together
8
WHEN HE MET his wife he was a sophomore in college and six years had passed since the whole thing, the murders, trial, et cetera.
There were whole days when he would only think a little about those events, when the thoughts would graze lightly across the surface of his consciousness and then sink into the waters—he found himself visualizing his memories this way, imagined certain images drifting down into dark green ponds and sending up a few gurgling bubbles as they vanished. He was so spacey during those years, barely tethered to earth, he thought later—
His wife was a student assistant in his American history Revolution to Constitutional Convention class, and as he was leaving class she walked along beside him for a moment and very lightly touched him on the arm.
“What are you taking?” she said. “Ativan?”
“…Huh?” he said. And they looked at one another and he guessed that something in his face made her raise her eyebrows appraisingly.
“Oh my,” she said. “I think you better have a seat over here for a minute, don’t you?” “Well,” he said. “I’m a—” but she took him by the elbow and steered him toward a bench, which sat below a Sargent-like painting of an ancient turn-of-the-century trustee.
“Sit,” she said. “I used to have a problem with BZDs, so I know a little about what you’re going through.” She eyed him thoughtfully. “Don’t worry,” she said, “I’m not like a narc or a religious nut or something, it’s just that you look familiar.”
9
AQIL TOOK OUT a map and unfolded it carefully on Dustin’s desk. “Listen,” he said. “This isn’t just another weird rabbit hole I’m going down. This one is real. And you, Dr. Tillman—I think you are going to get this, more than anybody else I could tell. This is right up your alley.”
Dustin shifted uncertainly. “Why do you say that? Up my alley in what way?”
“Just give me a minute,” Aqil said. “Let me, you know, lay it out for you.”
He placed the map on the desk between himself and Dustin, and Dustin looked down at the little red stickers that had been pasted along the edges of the interstate corridors and the waterways in a kind of curving pattern, possibly a pattern—he thought of the way that light pollution, seen from outer space, revealed the outlines of the Eastern Seaboard and the Great Lakes.
“Look,” Aqil said. “So each of these dots? Each of these dots represents an apparent accidental death, apparent,” he said, and he pointed to the northern corner of the state. “Here: JONATHON FRISBIE,” he said. “Twenty-one years old, student at Ohio Northern University, went missing 1/1/01. Found 1/2/01, Maumee River; cause of death, drowning. Blood alcohol level was 0.23.
“VINCENT ISOLATO, nineteen, student at Ohio Northern University, reported missing 2/20/02, found 4/20/02, Maumee River, cause of death, drowning; MATT POTTS, twenty-one, student at Kettering U. Missing, 3/30/03, East Lansing, Michigan, found 4/02/03, Red Cedar River; cause of death, drowning.”
“I can see where this is going,” Dustin said. “But.”
“Just wait, wait,” Aqil said.
10
HE WAS IN his study when Kate called and he saw her name come up on the caller ID and he felt aware of the old feeling of attraction, not even s
uch a big taboo to be drawn to your cousin when you were a thirteen-year-old boy but he had been embarrassed nevertheless, had never admitted it, though of course the girls knew, surely.
They had been a certain kind of teenage girl, working class, Dustin thinks now, though of course back then they would have never used that term—trailer trashy, maybe people might have said, slutty; at the very least it was clear that these girls were experienced. Shrewd, practical.
Tube tops, short shorts, heavy makeup. Not virginal.
And later, years later, there was this moment when he had been visiting Kate at her place in L.A. and she had seemed so amused—this was when he was speaking at USC at a conference—and Kate had said, so tell me about being a therapist. What’s that like? She had never been to college—she had worked as a hairdresser her whole life—had no interest in that kind of thing and he was aware that her only concepts of “therapists” were from TV or movies or whatever, the tweedy dithering absentminded snob, and she was smiling at him her eyes turned slyly sidelong and she said, what do you talk about with them, have any of them been really, like, dangerously crazy? I just can’t imagine…
And now here he was, a forty-one-year-old man in his “study,” how pretentious, at his desk, at his computer, checking his email and going over his “notes” and he picked up the phone and he wanted to be in the mode that was the person he would have been if
11
“JESSE HAMBLIN,” Aqil said, “twenty-one, student at Michigan State, missing 4/4/04.
“Never found.
“CLINTON COMBE, nineteen, student at Brownmeyer College, missing 5/5/05. Found 5/16/05, Olentangy River. Cause of death: drowning. Blood alcohol level: 0.34.
“ZACHARY OROZCO, eighteen, freshman at Ohio University, missing 6/6/06; that sends up some flags, right? Found 6/8/06, Hocking River, cause of death: drowning. Blood alcohol level 0.34.
“JEFF WAMSLEY, twenty-one, Ohio Northern University, missing 7/7/07, found 7/24/07, Maumee River. This is interesting—his father says to reporters that, and I quote, rumors circulating that there might be some kind of mad drowner in our midst.
“Now look at this one. JOSHUA McGIBONEY. A microbiology major, from University of Dayton. Went missing…you guessed it, Doctor, I can see…8/8/08, after leaving a rugby party, his body found three days later facedown in Wolf Creek. Blood alcohol level: 0.40. It’s hard to imagine how he could get so drunk and walk away—
“It’s interesting, right? It makes you curious, doesn’t it, Doctor?
“LUKE GORRINGE, Delta College student from Bay City Michigan, reported—note: reported—missing 9/11/09, East Lansing, Michigan. Found 10/15/09, Red Cedar River.
“VINCE NORBY, another student from Brownmeyer College—went missing 10/10/10.
“Found 2/11/11. Olentangy River.”
“How many are there?” Dustin said. He looked at the folder that Aqil was holding, a sheaf of paper, and Aqil gave him a wry smile.
“How many? Including Peter Allingham, do you mean?”
12
THIS WAS THE day that Kate called to tell him about Russell, about the DNA evidence, Russell to be released from prison, a few days after Peter Allingham’s body was recovered from the pond near campus. There was no real connection to be made between the two events except that later they adhered in Dustin’s mind.
“So I’m just a little confused about the time line of all of this,” he said to Kate. “The dates. At what point did this group—Innocence Project, right?—at what point did they begin to work on Russell’s case? And I don’t understand why they didn’t contact us. Why they weren’t required by law to contact us since we are the victims’ families and we were the ones who testified.”
“Listen,” Kate said, “I’m as freaked as you are, honey. Believe me.”
“But it doesn’t make any sense,” Dustin said. “Surely this whole thing has been under way for a long time, and the fact that we aren’t hearing about it until he is practically out the front gates of the”
“I know,” Kate said. “I’m in, like, shock. I don’t even know what to think. It’s like one blood test and suddenly your whole life is—”
13
…KIND OF UPSETTING, he thought. Extremely, extremely upsetting.
A chilly April afternoon but he was outdoors wearing only that wool herringbone sports jacket that looked so much like a psychologist would wear that it was a little embarrassing, actually, and he glanced over his shoulder.
He was standing in the backyard along the side of the house holding an unlit cigarette when he heard the boys coming up the driveway, home from school; it was later in the day than he realized, and he bent down on his haunches and buried the cigarette in the dirt of a newly planted wisteria bush—
“Hey,” Dustin said as the boys appeared. Aaron and Dennis and their friend Rabbit, that loping, clumsy yet vaguely predatory gait that teenage boys develop, and they looked at him.
“Hey, Dad,” Dennis said laconically. “What are you burying?”
“Nothing,” Dustin said. “Just checking this, um…” He gestured.
“Plant?” Dennis said.
“Bush?” Aaron said.
They had decided that it was hilarious to finish Dustin’s sentences, because he had long had the habit of drifting off into ellipses, groping through increasingly long silences for the right word and not finding it. Distracted, always distracted, maybe even to the point of something wrong with his brain.
“—Wist,” he said. “Wisteria,” he said, and the boys exchanged glances; grins.
14
RUSSELL AND DUSTIN—RUSTY and Dusty, that’s what their parents sometimes called them, as if they were a matching set.
Though of course they hadn’t chosen Russell’s name. Russell was a foster boy when he came to them, son of a drug-addict mother, father unknown. He’d been living with a different foster family for several years, but then there had been a house fire, and he was orphaned again.
Dustin’s father had been deeply moved by this tragedy.
Russell was fourteen when they adopted him, and Dustin was eight, and Dustin can remember that day. There had been a party, and after the party had dispersed he had seen Rusty standing in the backyard, staring out toward the horizon. Western Nebraska, bordering on Colorado: the fields, lined with telephone poles; the grasshopper oil wells, gently nodding their sleepy heads. At the edge of the horizon, a ridge of low hills rose up from the flatland. Along the tops of the hills were gnarled volcanic cliffs and boulders, pocked and jagged. In the summer, when the sun was right, the shadows of the cliffs and rocks could be said to resemble faces, or the figures of animals.
Dustin sat on the back steps and looked out along with Rusty. After a time, Rusty turned.
His face was solemn, maybe brotherly.
“What are you staring at?” Rusty said, and Dustin shrugged.
“Come over here,” Rusty said, and when Dustin did, Rusty didn’t say anything for a while.
He considered Dustin’s face. “You want to know something?”
“What?” And Dustin breathed as Rusty’s eyes held him.
“My actual mom died,” he said. “They say that she hung herself, but I think they probably killed her.”
“Who?” Dustin said. “Who killed her?”
But Rusty only shrugged. Then, abruptly, he gestured at the sky. He pointed. “You see that?” he said. “That’s the evening star.”
He put his palms firmly over Dustin’s ears and tilted Dustin’s head, swiveling it like it was a telescope. “You see it now? It’s right…there!”
And he drew a line with his finger, from Dustin’s nose to the sky.
Dustin nodded. He closed his eyes. He could feel the cool, clay-like dampness of his brother’s palms against his head. The sound of the hands was like the inside of a shell.
“I see it,” Dustin said softly.
15
HIS WIFE’S MAIDEN name had been Jill Bell, which she loathe
d. She said that it always made people think that she was going to be a nicer person than she was, it always made the teachers think that she would be a placid, goody-goody little girl, the name, she said, of a fairy or a milkmaid or a flower that people sang about in the nineteenth century—“When Springtime Jill Bells Are A-Bloomin’,” she said, and she even had a tune for it, which resembled something Stephen Foster might have composed.
In any case, she liked Jill Tillman better: There was something a little snappier about it, more acerbic, which suited her. She got on the phone—to talk to one of the boys’ teachers, or a construction contractor whose work wasn’t quite up to par, or some bureaucratic functionary—and she had found a perfect, crisp snap to the words. “This is Jill Tillman,” she would say, and a perfectly pleasant chill would spread across the syllables. “May I speak to your supervisor, please?”
It was the kind of voice that had gotten them through the first years of their marriage, when he had been a PhD candidate and she was in law school and they had the boys one after the other. It should have been a disaster but she was a person who liked to put things in order, to make lists and schedules, to discover neat little shortcuts and inventions.
She knew about Dustin’s past, of course, but was not interested at all in the psychology of it, in dwelling on it, in dredging things up and examining them.
This was one of the things he loved most about her.
16
DUSTIN WALKED DOWN the hallway to the bedroom where his wife was stretched out on top of the covers in her jeans and bare feet, reading a book. It was about ten o’clock at night.
