Even with the gunshot residue blackening her features, Patrick recognized her before he saw her name. He’d spoken to Yvette Harvey; he’d been the one to tell her that her only child-a daughter with Down syndrome-had not survived the shooting at Sterling High.
Indirectly, Patrick realized, Peter Houghton’s casualty count was still rising.
“Just because someone collects guns doesn’t mean they intend to use them,” Peter said, scowling.
It was unseasonably warm for late March-a freakish eighty-five degrees-and the air-conditioning at the jail was broken. The inmates were walking around in their boxers; the guards were all on edge. The HVAC patrol, which had been called in on the pretense of humane incarceration, was working so slowly that Jordan figured they’d master their trade just in time for the snow to start falling again outside. He’d been sitting in a sweatbox of a conference room with Peter for over two hours now, and felt as if he’d soaked through every last fiber of his suit.
He wanted to quit. He wanted to go home and tell Selena that he never should have taken this case, and then he wanted to drive with his family to the eighteen stingy miles of beach that New Hampshire was blessed with and jump fully clothed into the frigid Atlantic. Dying of hypothermia couldn’t be any worse than the slow kill Diana Leven and the DA’s office had in store for him in court.
Whatever small hope Jordan had kindled by discovering a valid defense-albeit one that had never been used before a judge-had been steadily eroded in the weeks following the hearing by the discovery that had arrived from the DA’s office: stacks of paperwork, photos, and evidence. Given all this information, it was hard to imagine a jury caring why Peter had killed ten people-just that he had.
Jordan pinched the bridge of his nose. “You were collecting guns,” he repeated. “I suppose you just happened to be storing them under your bed until you could get a nice glass display case.”
“Don’t you believe me?”
“People who collect guns do not hide them. People who collect guns do not have hit lists with photos circled.”
Perspiration beaded on Peter’s forehead, around the collar of his prison uniform, and his mouth tightened.
Jordan leaned forward. “Who’s the girl that got erased?”
“What girl?”
“In the photos. You circled her, and then you wrote LET LIVE.”
Peter looked away. “She’s just someone I used to know.”
“What’s her name?”
“Josie Cormier.” Peter hesitated, then faced Jordan again. “She’s okay, right?”
Cormier, Jordan thought. The only Cormier he knew was the judge sitting on Peter’s case.
It couldn’t be.
“Why?” he asked. “Did you hurt her?”
Peter shook his head. “That’s a loaded question.”
Had something happened here that Jordan didn’t know about?
“Was she your girlfriend?”
Peter smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “No.”
Jordan had been in Judge Cormier’s district court a few times. He liked her. She was tough, but she was fair. In fact, she was the best judge Peter could have drawn for his case-the alternative superior court justice was Judge Wagner, who was a very old, prosecution-biased judge. Josie Cormier had not been a victim of the shooting, but that wasn’t the only scenario that would compromise Judge Cormier as the justice for the trial. Suddenly Jordan was thinking of witness tampering, of the hundred things that could go wrong. He was wondering how he could find out what Josie Cormier knew about the shooting, without anyone else learning that he’d been looking into it.
He was wondering what she knew that might help Peter’s case.
“Have you talked to her since you’ve been in here?” Jordan said.
“If I’d talked to her, would I be asking you if she was okay?”
“Well, don’t talk to her,” Jordan instructed. “Don’t talk to anyone except me.”
“That’s like talking to a brick wall,” Peter muttered.
“You know, I could rattle off a thousand things I’d rather be doing than sitting with you in a conference room that’s as hot as hell.”
Peter narrowed his eyes. “Then why don’t you go do some of them? You don’t listen to a word I say, anyway.”
“I listen to every word, Peter. I listen to it, and then I think about the boxes of evidence the DA dropped at my door, all of which make you look like a cold-blooded killer. I hear you tell me you were collecting guns, like you’re some kind of Civil War buff.”
Peter flinched. “Fine. You want to know if I was going to use the guns? Yeah, I was. I planned it. I ran through the whole thing in my head. I worked out the details, down to the last second. I was going to kill the person I hated the most. But then I didn’t get to do it.”
“Those ten people-”
“Just got in the way,” Peter said.
“Then who were you trying to kill?”
On the opposite side of the room, the air conditioner suddenly choked to life. Peter turned away. “Me,” he said.
One Year Before
I still don’t think this is a good idea,” Lewis said as he opened the back door of the van. The dog, Dozer, was lying on his side, fighting to breathe.
“You heard the vet,” Lacy said, stroking the retriever’s head. Good dog. They’d gotten him when Peter was three; now, at twelve, his kidneys had shut down. Keeping him alive with medications was only for their benefit, not his: it was too hard to imagine their house without the dog padding through its halls.
“I wasn’t talking about putting him down,” Lewis clarified. “I was talking about bringing everyone along.”
The boys fell out of the back of the van like heavy stones. They squinted in the sunlight, hunched their shoulders. Their broad backs made Lacy think of oak trees that tapered to the ground; they both had the same habit of turning in their left foot when they walked. She wished they could have seen how very alike they were.
“I can’t believe you dragged us here,” Joey said.
Peter kicked at the gravel in the parking lot. “This sucks.”
“Language,” Lacy warned. “And as for all of us being here, I cannot believe you’d be selfish enough to not want to say good-bye to a member of the family.”
“We could have said good-bye at home,” Joey muttered.
Lacy put her hands on her hips. “Death is a part of life. I’d want to be surrounded by people I love when it’s my time, too.” She waited for Lewis to haul Dozer into his arms, then closed the hatch of the door.
Lacy had requested the last appointment of the day, so that the doctor wouldn’t be rushed. They sat alone in the waiting room, the dog draped like a blanket over Lewis’s legs. Joey picked up a Sports Illustrated magazine from three years ago and started to read. Peter folded his arms and stared up at the ceiling.
“Let’s all talk about our best Dozer memory,” Lacy said.
Lewis sighed. “For God’s sake…”
“This is lame,” Joey added.
“For me,” Lacy said, as if they hadn’t even spoken, “it was when Dozer was a puppy, and I found him on the dining room table with his head stuck inside the turkey.” She stroked the dog’s head. “That was the year we had soup for Thanksgiving.”
Joey slapped the magazine back on the end table and sighed.
Marcia, the vet’s assistant, was a woman with a long braid that reached past her hips. Lacy had delivered her twin sons five years ago. “Hi, Lacy,” she said, and she came right up and folded her in her arms. “You okay?”
The thing about death, Lacy knew, was that it robbed you of your vocabulary for comfort.
Marcia walked up to Dozer and rubbed him behind the ears. “Did you want to wait out here?”
“Yes,” Joey mouthed toward Peter.
“We’re all coming in,” Lacy said firmly.
They followed Marcia into one of the treatment rooms and settled Dozer on the examination table. He scrabb
led for purchase, his claws clicking against the metal. “That’s a good boy,” Marcia said.
Lewis and the boys filed into the room, standing against the wall like a police lineup. When the vet walked in, bearing his hypodermic, they shrank back even further. “Would you like to help hold him?” the vet asked.
Lacy moved forward, nodding, and settled her arms around Marcia’s.
“Well, Dozer, you put up a fine fight,” the vet said. He turned to the boys. “He won’t feel this.”
“What is it?” Lewis asked, staring at the needle.
“A combination of chemicals that relax the muscles and terminate nerve transmission. And without nerve transmission, there’s no thought, no feeling, no movement. It’s a bit like drifting off to sleep.” He felt around for a vein in the dog’s leg, while Marcia kept Dozer steady. He injected the solution and rubbed Dozer’s head.
The dog took a deeper breath, and then stopped moving. Marcia stepped away, leaving Dozer in Lacy’s arms. “We’ll give you a minute,” she said, and she and the vet left the room.
Lacy was used to holding new life in her hands, not feeling it pass from the body in her arms. It was just another transition-pregnancy to birth, child to adult, life to death-but there was something about letting go of the family pet that was even more difficult, as if it were silly to have feelings this strong for something that wasn’t human. As if admitting that you loved a dog-one that was always underfoot and scratching the leather and tracking mud into the house-as much as you loved your biological children were foolish.
And yet.
This was the dog who had stoically and silently allowed two-year-old Peter to ride him like a horse around the yard. This was the dog who had barked the house down when Joey had fallen asleep on the couch while his dinner was cooking, until the entire oven was on fire. This was the dog who sat beneath the desk on Lacy’s feet in the dead of winter as she answered email, sharing the heat of his pale, pinkened belly.
She bent over the dog’s body and began to weep-quietly, at first, and then with loud sobs that made Joey turn away and Lewis wince.
“Do something,” she heard Joey say, his voice thick and ropy.
She felt a hand on her shoulder and assumed it was Lewis, but then Peter began to speak. “When he was a puppy,” Peter said. “The time we went to pick him out from the litter. All his brothers and sisters were trying to climb over the pen, and he was on the top of the stairs, and he looked at us and tripped and fell down them.” Lacy raised her face and stared at him. “That’s my best memory,” Peter said.
Lacy had always considered herself lucky to have somehow received a child who was not the cookie-cutter American boy, one who was sensitive and emotional and so in tune with what others felt and thought. She let go of her fist-grip on the dog’s fur and opened her arms so that Peter could move into them. Unlike Joey, who was already taller than her and more muscular than Lewis, Peter still fit into her embrace. Even that square span of his shoulder blades-so expansive underneath a cotton shirt-seemed more delicate underneath her hands. Unfinished and rough-hewn, a man still waiting to happen.
If only you could keep them that way: cast in amber, never growing up.
At every school concert and play in Josie’s life, she’d had only one parent in the audience. Her mother-to her credit-had rearranged court dates so that she could watch Josie be plaque in the school dental hygiene play, or hear her five-note solo in the Christmas chorale. There were other kids who also had single parents-the ones who came from divorced families, for example-but Josie was the only person in the school who had never met her father. When she was little and her second-grade class was making necktie cards for Father’s Day, she was relegated to sitting in the corner with the girl whose dad had died prematurely at age forty-two of cancer.
Like any curious kid, she’d asked her mother about this when she was growing up. Josie wanted to know why her parents weren’t married anymore; she hadn’t expected to hear that they were never married. “He wasn’t the marrying type,” she’d told Josie, and Josie hadn’t understood why that also meant he wasn’t the type to send a present for his daughter’s birthday, or to invite her to his home for a week during the summer, or to even call to hear her voice.
This year, she was supposed to be taking biology, and she was already nervous about the unit on genetics. Josie didn’t know if her father had brown eyes or blue ones; if he had curly hair or freckles or six toes. Her mother had shrugged off Josie’s concerns. “Surely there’s someone in your class who’s adopted,” she said. “You know fifty percent more about your background than they do.”
This is what Josie had pieced together about her father:
His name was Logan Rourke. He’d been a teacher at the law school her mother had attended.
His hair had gone white prematurely, but-her mother assured her-in a cool, not creepy, way.
He was ten years older than her mother, which meant he was fifty.
He had long fingers and played the piano.
He couldn’t whistle.
Not quite enough to fill a standard biography, if you asked Josie, not that anyone ever bothered to.
She was sitting in bio lab next to Courtney. Josie ordinarily would not have picked Courtney as a lab partner-she wasn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier-but that didn’t seem to matter. Mrs. Aracort was the teacher-adviser to the cheerleaders, and Courtney was one of those. No matter how skimpy their lab reports turned out, they still always managed to get A’s.
A dissected cat brain was sitting on the front desk next to Mrs. Aracort. It smelled of formaldehyde and looked like roadkill, which would have been bad enough, but in addition, last period had been lunchtime. (“That thing,” Courtney had shuddered, “is going to make me even more bulimic.”) Josie was trying not to look at it while she worked on her class project: each student had been given a wireless-enabled Dell laptop to surf the Net for examples of humane animal research. So far Josie had catalogued a primate study being done by an allergy pill manufacturer, where monkeys were made asthmatic and then cured, and another one that involved SIDS and puppies.
She hit a browser button by mistake and got a home page for The Boston Globe. Splashed across the screen was election coverage: the race between the incumbent district attorney and his challenger, the dean of students at Harvard Law School, a man named Logan Rourke.
Butterflies rose inside Josie’s chest. There couldn’t be more than one, could there? She squinted, leaning closer to the screen, but the photograph was grainy and there was a sunlight glare. “What’s wrong with you?” Courtney whispered.
Josie shook her head and closed the cover of her laptop, as if it, too, could hold fast to this secret.
He never used a urinal. Even if Peter just had to pee, he didn’t want to do it standing next to some gargantuan twelfth grader who might make a comment about, well, the fact that he was a puny ninth grader, particularly in his nether regions. Instead, he’d go into a stall and close the door for privacy.
He liked to read the bathroom walls. One of the stalls had a running series of knock-knock jokes. Others blurted the names of girls who gave blow jobs. There was one scribble that Peter found his eye veering toward repeatedly: TREY WILKINS IS A FAGGOT. He didn’t know Trey Wilkins-didn’t think he was even a student at Sterling High anymore-but Peter wondered if Trey had come into the bathroom and used the stalls to pee, too.
Peter had left English in the middle of a pop quiz on grammar. He truly didn’t think that in the grand scheme of life, it was going to matter whether or not an adjective modified a noun or a verb or just dropped off the face of the earth, which is what he was sincerely hoping would happen before he had to go back to class. He had already done his business in the bathroom; now he was just wasting time. If he failed this quiz, it would be the second in a row. It wasn’t even his parents’ anger that Peter was worried about. It was the way they’d look at him, disappointed that he hadn’t turned out more like Joey.
> He heard the door of the bathroom open, and the busy slice of hallway noise that trailed on the heels of the two kids who entered. Peter ducked down, scanning beneath the stall door. Nikes. “I’m sweating like a pig,” said one voice.
The second kid laughed. “That’s because you’re a lard-ass.”
“Yeah, right. I could beat you on a basketball court with one hand tied behind my back.”
Peter could hear a faucet running, water splashing.
“Hey, you’re getting me soaked!”
“Aaaah, much better,” the first voice said. “At least now I’m not sweating. Hey, check out my hair. I look like Alfalfa.”
“Who?”
“What are you, retarded? The kid from the Little Rascals with the cowlick thing on the back of his head.”
“Actually, you look like a total fag…”
“You know…” More laughter. “I do sort of look like Peter.”
As soon as Peter heard his name, his heart thumped hard. He slid open the bolt in the stall door and stepped outside. Standing in front of the bank of sinks was a football player he knew only by sight, and his own brother. Joey’s hair was dripping wet, standing up on the back of his head the way Peter’s sometimes did, even when he tried to slick it down with his mother’s hair gel.
Joey flicked a glance his way. “Get lost, freak,” he ordered, and Peter hurried out of the bathroom, wondering if that was even possible when you’d been missing most of your life.
The two men standing in front of Alex’s bench shared a duplex, but hated each other. Arliss Undergroot was a Sheetrock installer with tattoos up and down both arms, a shaved head, and enough piercings in his head to have set off the metal detectors at the courthouse. Rodney Eakes was a vegan bank teller with a prized record collection of original cast recordings from Broadway shows. Arliss lived downstairs, Rodney lived upstairs. A few months back, Rodney had brought home a bale of hay, planning to use it for mulching his organic garden, but he never got around to it and the hay bale remained on Arliss’s porch. Arliss asked Rodney to get rid of the hay, but Rodney hadn’t moved fast enough. So one night, Arliss and his girlfriend cut the twine and spread the hay out over the front lawn.
Nineteen Minutes Page 25
