“How so?” asked Maclean.
Verraday no longer felt distant from Maclean. He liked this woman, had an urge to share secrets with her, and for a moment, considered telling her the truth: that he felt cheated because he wasn’t the one who had gotten to pull the trigger. But he decided it might be impolitic to tell an officer of the law that he had homicidal impulses toward someone who had just blown his brains out under mysterious circumstances.
So instead he answered, “Because now there’s no chance that he will ever be brought to justice.”
“Maybe it’s karma catching up to him,” replied Maclean.
“My sister believes in that kind of stuff. Do you?” asked Verraday.
“Unfortunately, after eight years as a cop, I haven’t seen anything to convince me of its existence. I just said it because I saw that Buddha in your office. Thought maybe that’s what you believed. But I hope there is such a thing. Because I see way too many people getting away with hurting other people. That’s the part of this job that bothers me the most.” Maclean took another sip of her drink. Then she leaned toward Verraday and spoke softly. “Can I ask you something? About the car crash?”
“Sure,” replied Verraday. “I’m not precious about it. Been over it way too many times for that.”
“Are you one hundred percent certain that it happened the way you said it did in your police file? That Robson was at fault?”
“I’m positive,” replied Verraday. “Penny remembered it the same way as me, right up to when Robson hit us. Then she blacked out. I was in the rear seat on the passenger’s side, farthest from the point of impact, so I got the least of it. I was conscious the whole time. And I remember everything like it was this morning.”
“You remember it through personal experience. But that can be subjective, can’t it? Speaking as a psychologist, how do you know that’s what happened?”
“Science. It’s called flashbulb memory. And it has been tested and proven. It’s a moment in time that’s so vivid, so emotionally arousing that the episode part of your memory takes a snapshot of it, and you remember key details vividly and forever. The cops that interviewed me afterward tried to get me to change my story to say my mother ran the red light. That’s how false memory syndrome happens. But not in my case. I knew she hadn’t. And I still know that. Because I can still picture the green traffic light in front of our car in the intersection. ‘Deck the Halls’ was playing on the radio. I remember the peppermint smell of the candy cane that my sister Penny had in her mouth. I might have only been eight, but unlike Robson, I wasn’t drunk. I remember him coming to the window and shining a flashlight in on us. I could smell the booze on his breath. Whiskey. I knew what it was because I used to smell the same thing on my old man’s breath once in a while, like at New Year’s and Christmas Eve, when he was giving me a goodnight kiss and tucking me into bed. My dad wasn’t much of a drinker though. At least not before the accident.”
“You really remember all that?”
“Let me ask you something. What were you doing when you first found out about the 9/11 attacks?”
Maclean gazed off into the middle distance, then turned back to Verraday.
“I was in my senior year of high school. It was a quarter after seven in the morning. I’d just gotten up. I had this biology assignment with a question about pathogens that I was having trouble with. Since my mom’s a nurse, I knew she’d know that answer, so I was planning to ask her about it. But when I came out of my room, I looked down the hall and saw that her eyes were shiny, like she’d been crying. She was watching CNN, which I remember thinking was unusual, because my mother never watched television in the morning. When she saw me, she said, ‘Somebody flew two jets into the World Trade Center. And one of the towers just came down.’ She was wearing her green scrubs, getting ready to start her shift at the hospital. She told me that we should both go to the Red Cross later that day and donate blood because they were going to need it. I remember seeing the second tower coming down. I’ll never forget that feeling.”
“See? That’s what I’m talking about,” said Verraday. “An event like that is so momentous that our mind freezes everything in time around it. Just like you remember that your mom was wearing her green scrubs and that you had a biology assignment. That’s how I know I saw what I saw when my mom died. Especially because the police pressured me so hard to change my story. Even at that age, it struck me as strange that they kept badgering me, so it kind of made me work it through in my mind.”