But then, New York was that way. When she’d been at Columbia, she’d been insulated; the college and her friends had offered a haven from the anonymity of the city. When she’d married, her husband had taken over that role. He’d been joined in time by friends, then her son. Now Nick was gone. Nicky was gone. Other than Maura, there were no friends she cared to call. She was an anonymous face in an anonymous world. She was alone.
* * *
Two weeks later, on a Sunday, Sabrina went to see Nicky. The Greens had suggested that she plan on monthly visits, but this first time she needed to see him sooner. She needed to know that even without forewarning, she’d find her son clean and well cared for.
“And was he?” Derek asked several hours later. He and Sabrina were walking the perimeter of the yard.
She nodded, but didn’t speak. Seeing Nicky had been a heart-wrenching experience. Seeing Derek helped, but she was still feeling a little bruised.
He caught one of her hands and threaded his fingers through hers. “Want to talk about it?”
She looked up at him, smiled sadly and shook her head. “I’d only be repeating things I’ve said before. I’d bore you.”
“Nah.”
But she really didn’t want to talk about Nicky today. She had already talked too much about Nicky, about Nick, about herself. So she remained quiet, holding Derek’s hand, walking.
“More crowded today,” she commented.
“It’s a Sunday. You’ve never been here on a Sunday.”
“No.” She nodded at one of the other visitors, a woman she’d come to recognize over the course of five months. A bit later she smiled at another. They no longer seemed as coarse or downtrodden to her, but had taken on the identities that Derek had helped flesh out. Each was an individual. A sad individual.
“New York is weird,” she said.
“Weird?”
“Lonely.”
“You feel that way because Nicky’s in Vermont.”
“No. It’s New York. I’m not sure I want to stay.”
“Where would you go?”
“I don’t know. Some place peaceful … friendly.”
As they walked on, Derek pictured a place like that. Two years before, he’d have equated peaceful and friendly with boring and nonproductive. Now peaceful and friendly sounded nice.
At length, they stopped beneath a tree and slid down against its trunk. The prison was behind them; before them were the woods. A bluejay alighted on the top of one of the fences. A bee buzzed nearby. The smell of newly mown grass surrounded them.
“Deceptive,” Derek said, and she knew just what he meant.
“How does the jay know which fence to land on?”
“He doesn’t.”
“Aren’t some of them electrified?”
“One of the three. Don’t know which one.”
She shuddered. “The birds must take a beating.”
“Actually, most know not to come anywhere near us. The jay is a little perverse, that’s all. And cocky. He likes to stand at the top of the heap, so he takes his chances. Once in a while he gets burned.”
Derek’s somber tone drew her eyes away from the bird. She studied him, saw that his gray eyes had gone cloudy, knew what he was thinking. And she was thinking about it, too. She’d been thinking about it a lot as she’d wandered through New York.
She was tired of talking about herself. It was time to turn the tables.
“Tell me about it, Derek. Tell me about what happened that night.”
He tipped his head back against the tree and closed his eyes. A pair of geese flew overhead. Bested, the jay left its perch and returned to the woods.
“I told the court what happened.”
“You told them the bare facts. But there’s more. You have a theory. I know you do. Tell me.”
His jaw tensed. “There’s no point in hashing and rehashing.”
“You do it.”
“I don’t have any other choice. There isn’t a hell of a lot else to think about around here.”
“Maybe if you could share it…”
He shook his head.
“Don’t you trust me?”
“Of course I do,” he muttered, opening his eyes to scowl at her. “But, God, Sabrina, it’s so damned frustrating! I’ve been over the facts hundreds and hundreds of times, and I can’t see it any other way. Sometimes I wonder if I’m going mad.”
“Do it one more time, Derek. For me. I’ll let you know if you’re off the wall.”
He didn’t know why he decided to tell her. Maybe it was because he needed to talk to someone, needed a fresh opinion. Maybe it wasn’t just anyone he needed to talk to, but Sabrina.
He chewed on the inside of his cheek for a minute, then slowly released it and began to speak. “I was working on a story for the show. It was on the accuracy of eyewitness testimony. I was spotlighting three cases where men had been convicted of crimes and then subsequently released when eyewitnesses recanted their testimony.” He fell silent, staring off into the depth of the woods.
“Go on,” she prompted softly.
“I wanted a pièce de résistance to make the story special. So I started looking into the case of a Massachusetts man who had been convicted of armed robbery and given a pretty stiff sentence. He was an unlikely armed robber—black, but an engineer, distinctly white-collar. There was no motive to speak of. His conviction was based largely on the testimony of three eyewitnesses. During the trial, the defense tried to cast doubt on their testimony. Not only was it dark on the night of the robbery, but it was a while—several months—before the eyewitnesses had come forward. On top of that, two of those eyewitnesses had criminal records, while the third was on bail awaiting trial.”
Sabrina was intrigued. If what Derek was telling her had come out during his trial, it never made the papers. She’d never heard this part of the story. “Were they being blackmailed into testifying?”
“It was beginning to look that way. The man awaiting trial got away with probation on a larceny charge that should have earned him hard time. And more than one person I interviewed said that the other two got away with hell after testifying.”
Sabrina shifted to lean against one of Derek’s bent knees and face him. “Who could have been behind it? The police?”
“More likely an ambitious D.A. who wanted a conviction for at least one of a series of armed robberies that had the people of the county riled up.”
“And the phone call you got? Where does that fit in?”
“This particular robbery had taken place in a small town in the southwestern part of the state. I’d been fairly visible talking with people there, so I wasn’t surprised when I got a call from a man who said he could personally place those two other witnesses on Cape Cod at the time of the robbery. He said he had proof—signed IOUs from a poker game, motel receipts—but he said that if I wanted them, I’d have to come quickly, because his wife was very nervous about his sticking his neck out and she’d already threatened to destroy the papers.”
Derek looked at Sabrina. “He sounded legitimate, so I went.” His lips twisted in self-disgust. “Dumb of me. Shortsighted to have gone alone, but it was late at night. I decided that—based on what he’d said about his wife—the man would never permit himself to be filmed, so I didn’t bother with a camera crew. And it seemed crazy to wake the producer from a sound sleep when I could do the work myself.” His voice grew tighter. “If only I had. If only I’d called someone—anyone—to go with me. Then I’d have had a witness of my own. If only I’d called someone and that person had refused for an invalid reason, I’d have been able to point a finger.”
Sabrina ran her hand around his neck and kneaded the taut muscles she found. He rolled his head in appreciation, then sighed.
“Anyway, I went alone. I drove up from New York—it was an easy enough drive at that hour—and I was familiar enough with the town so that I had no trouble finding the spot he’d named. It was a parking lot behind a block of
stores. Pitch-black, let me tell you, and deserted except for one other car, a Cutlass, just as he’d said. I remember thinking to myself, ‘What harm can there be? He’s a poor henpecked schnook.’ So I parked, got out of the car and waited. The door to the other car opened and a man got out. We must have been about thirty feet apart. I called his name—he’d said it was Walsh. He called mine for confirmation. Then we started walking toward each other.”
Sabrina’s eyes were wide. Her hand had come to rest on his collarbone. “When did you see the gun?”
“I didn’t. It was too dark. But when he was about ten feet away I noticed that there was something odd about his shape, odd about the way he was holding his arm.” Derek didn’t move, but his body had tensed to a state of coiled readiness. He was back in that parking lot, reliving the moment of awareness. “I never saw the gun with my eyes, only with my mind in a flash of recognition. The way he was holding his arm, at just that angle, supporting just that much weight. It was an instinctive thing. A split-second image. A gut conviction.” He sent Sabrina a pleading look. “Does that make any sense?”
“I can imagine it happening.”
The pleading look remained for a minute more, then faded. “Well, the prosecutor couldn’t. He made a big thing about why I didn’t just assume the guy was holding the papers he’d promised.”
“But why would that have mattered?”
“I claimed I’d come to that meeting totally innocent of a setup. The prosecutor claimed that I knew there would be trouble. If I’d been truly innocent, the prosecutor went on to say, I wouldn’t have been on the lookout for a gun.”
“He must be equating innocent with dumb,” Sabrina commented a bit dryly. “It was dark. You were alone and unarmed. Only a fool would have been blind to the possibility of foul play.”
“The thing is, Sabrina, that I wasn’t considering the possibilities at that point. It all happened so quickly.” He took a shuddering breath. “My mind told me he had a gun. I dove and tackled him. We struggled, the gun went off, he fell back.”
His pulse had picked up speed. She could feel it beneath her hand, beneath the heat of his skin. Beneath his hair, his forehead was misted with sweat. And in his eyes she saw something she’d never seen before. Sheer terror.
For the very first time, Sabrina realized that on top of everything else, Derek McGill had to deal with the knowledge that he’d ended a human life.
Whispering his name, she went forward and wrapped her arms around his neck. It was a minute before she felt his arms complete the circle, but their strength more than made up for the delay. “I’m sorry I asked,” she whispered. “I didn’t mean to put you through it again.”
“I do it nearly every night,” came his hoarse reply. “What’s one more time?”
“It helps me understand when I hear.”
“As long as you don’t write it.”
She drew back her head. “I want to. You know that.”
The terror was gone from his eyes, replaced by determination. “And you know that I don’t want you to.”
“It would be so good to have your side of the story put into print.”
“You haven’t heard half of my side of the story.”
“I’m ready whenever you are.”
“I’m not now.”
“Then when?”
“Maybe never.”
“But maybe before never? Come on, Derek. Let me give it a shot.”
But he was shaking his head in slow, firm shakes. “I can’t let you do it. Not yet. It could spoil everything. No one can give me back the twenty months of my life that I’ve lost, but someone’s going to be very sorry for having made me lose—”
Her fingers covered his mouth, cutting off his threat. She gave a quick head shake to deny both the words and the vengeful look in his eye. But the look didn’t go away, and when she released his mouth, he immediately said, “I mean it, Sabrina. Someone’s going to pay.”
“Don’t say it. Don’t even think it.”
“Why not?” he asked coolly.
“Because it’s dangerous.”
“Someone should have thought of that when he set me up first to be murdered, then to take the fall for murdering my would-be murderer.”
“Who was it, Derek?”
His angry mouth stayed closed.
“Do you know?” she asked.
“I have a pretty good idea.”
“And you’re going to pay him back,” she said, nodding as she slid from his lap. “That’s brilliant. You could well end up right back here and for a much longer stretch next time.”
He stiffened his spine. “Come on, Sabrina. I’m not that dumb. I’m not planning murder. Believe it or not, I’m not a violent man.”
“I do believe it—except for the times when you get that look of revenge in your eye. If it isn’t violent, nothing is.”
“That’s anger you see, and yes, it’s violent. It seethes inside and is as violent as anything I’ve ever felt. I am my father’s son in that sense. But man evolves. Each generation is a little more advanced than the one before. I have more smarts than the old man did. Before my anger escapes, it passes through the filter of my mind. I’m a calculating man. No, I don’t have anything like murder in mind. Murder would be too easy.”
“A very trite expression.”
“Sometimes things are trite because they express very simple truths.”
“And what is the truth here? Is it mental torture you have in mind?”
He clenched his jaw. “You could say that.”
“Do it through a book, Derek. Do it through my book. Wouldn’t that be vengeance enough—to lay it all out in black and white for the world to see?”
“No.”
She drew her knees up and fastened them in with her arms. “I see. Simple vengeance isn’t enough. You want”—she dropped her voice and droned—“re-ven-ge. Y’know, you should speak with my brother. J. B. has all sorts of meaty ideas for inflicting mental torture.”
Derek’s eyes were dark, as was his mood. “Make fun of it if you want, but you haven’t been the one rotting here for twenty months. You haven’t been the one sitting and stewing, watching the world go by without you. You haven’t been the one to look back on your past and see years of effort go down the tubes. You can make fun of it, Sabrina, but that just goes to prove where you’re coming from, and where you’re coming from isn’t where I’m coming from.”
“You’re wrong, Derek.”
“Oh? What do you know of me? What do you really know of me, of my life?”
“Not much. You’ve guarded the facts like gold bars at Fort Knox.”
“And you want to know why? Because I was protecting you. You’re clean, you’re good. You’re like the fairy princess I might have read about when I was a kid, except that I didn’t have much time to read because I was too busy defending my name on the street.”
“I’m not a weakling, Derek. I can handle just about anything you give me.”
“As you handled the beating I got? I’ll never forget the look of disgust on your face when you took a good, close look at mine.”
All too clearly she remembered that day, remembered Derek walking toward her, trying to look normal even though his body listed and his face was a mass of bruises. “That wasn’t disgust,” she said quietly. “It was horror—which you’d have realized if you’d been in less pain. Would you rather I’d looked at you and laughed?”
“I’d rather,” he said in a low, tempered voice, “you mind your own business when it comes to something that doesn’t concern you. Whether or not I exact revenge is no concern of yours.”
Sabrina was stung. She had honestly thought that Derek and she had come beyond that. She thought they were friends—no, more than friends. Friends didn’t kiss the way they did, or ache to touch each other as they did. She’d simply assumed that they’d see each other when Derek was released. And now he was telling her that his future was no concern of hers?
“You are a
self-pitying bastard,” she heard herself say as she scrambled to her feet.
“Where—Sabrina, wait!” Derek was up, loping after her, catching her by the arm and halting her flight.
Blond hair flying in a shimmering arc, she rounded on him with a fury that was born of very deep, private, very new feelings. “You think you have a monopoly on pain, but you don’t, Derek, you don’t.” She shook off his hand. “The last three years of my life have been a living hell. If you want to talk anger or frustration or waste, I know all about it. I’ve been in a cage just as binding as the one you’re in, and the worst of it is that now I’m out, there’s nothing I can do. There’s no one to blame for what happened to Nicky. I couldn’t take revenge if I tried. But you”—she gasped for a breath—“you have choices. A wrong was done you. You can trace that wrong, document it in detail, do something with the information. You want to be your father’s son … Okay, track down the man who set you up, then follow him, follow him wherever he goes, let him know you’re following him, let him know that when you get tired of following him you’ll pick up a rifle with an infrared long-range sight and shoot him. Let him shake a little. How does that sound?”
Shaking, herself, she rushed on before Derek could speak. “Of course, you’ll be wasting that many more years of your life if you do that. You won’t be moving ahead. You’ll be giving that creep the satisfaction of knowing that he’s taken not two, but three or four or five years of your life. Think of the sense of power he’ll have. And you? You won’t be an investigative reporter anymore. You won’t be any kind of reporter, because you won’t have the time. And even if you did, you’d be branded obsessed. No one would want to work with you. And that goes for me. You want me to mind my own business when it comes to things that don’t concern me? Fine. You’re right. I deserve more.”
Commitments Page 20
