“So I read every single word of every legal document about my case I could get my hands on. I read law books. I got enrolled in this print-based college degree thing, you know, a correspondence course. Wrote about a thousand poems, wrote letters to the lawyers, the cops, everyone I could think of. Trying to keep busy, right? Busy busy busy, fight fight fight.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “But busy doesn’t mean shit. There is no through it. Through it means I’m dead. And no amount of fighting is going to change that.” He shrugged. “The only real way through it is to accept it. Otherwise, it’ll just tear me up all over again every single day.”
I wanted to believe that I was working for an innocent man. I also wanted to believe that if I was wrongfully accused of a crime, I’d be fighting every minute. But there was a sad kind of wisdom to his words. “Okay,” I said. “Forget all the other questions, forget every other person who has tried to help you or hurt you or whatever. Nobody knows as much about this case as you do, right?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“So let’s start totally fresh. Just educate me about your case. Pretend I don’t know anything.”
He finally seemed to accept I wasn’t going anywhere. “It was a Thursday,” he said. “I worked till nine at Subway. Sarah came by after school, it was just a short bike ride. Maybe three thirty, she got there. I took my lunch and we sat in the car and talked. We made plans to see a movie later—the theater’s in the same plaza as Subway. She was going home for dinner but she’d come back. And that was it. She got back on her bike and I went into the restaurant.”
“What about after your shift?”
“I waited, in the car,” he said. “I waited for a long time. I thought maybe she was just running late. I called her house from a pay phone in the parking lot but there was no answer. By then it was probably ten thirty. I drove over to her house, and there were ambulances and all these cop cars, it was just insanity. No one would tell me what happened. They asked me to come to the station and they said I was free to go whenever I wanted, but it didn’t feel like that.”
“How long were you there?”
“They talked to me for hours, I mean, hours. They still wouldn’t tell me what had happened, exactly. I thought Sarah was hurt or something, I thought that’s what it was, they were only asking me questions about her. In the morning they gave me a lift back to my car, and I went home, and it wasn’t until I saw the news with my mom that I heard what really happened. We were shocked. Like, we just stared at the TV—and then the cops came to the door. They wanted me to come answer more questions, and their tone was all different, asking me all about knives, do you own any, did you ever go hunting, all this crap. They’d gotten a warrant to search my room and my car, while I was talking to them. And I thought they were making it up, that they found a knife in there. I never had a knife. I honestly didn’t believe it.”
“So how’d the knife get there?” I said. “What actually happened that night?”
“If I knew, you think I’d be sitting on that information?”
“I think you’ve had an awful long time to formulate some kind of opinion, Brad.”
He looked up at the ceiling again, shaking his head. “I saw this episode of Dateline one time, okay? Where this family was killed and there was absolutely no explanation, no reason whatsoever. No one could figure it out. But then, it turned out these guys had been hired to kill some other family, and they had a similar kind of address, like Court instead of Street or something. But they went to the wrong house and killed the wrong family.”
“And you think it’s like that.”
“Yeah.”
“It was just a mistake.”
“I mean, what else was it? They were nice people. There’s no reason for them to be dead, and no reason for Sarah to be gone, and no reason for me to be in here. It’s just a mistake.”
“But the knife, Brad. The universe got the address wrong,” I said, “but somehow got the right car?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know how it got there. Like, I was in the prison hospital all doped up and staring at the ceiling and I got to thinking that aliens put the knife there. And that sounds stupid, but that’s as good a guess as any.”
“Where was your car when you were talking to the police? At Sarah’s house and then at your house?”
He nodded.
“When was the last time you were in it?”
“Like after I talked to the cops the first time,” he said. “I got a ride back to the car from the station, and then I drove it home.”
“And you didn’t notice anything weird, like someone had been in there?”
“No.”
“Doors locked?”
“The locks were busted. So I had to leave it unlocked.”
“Anyone else know the locks were busted?”
“Whoever I gave a ride to or whatever. Sarah knew, obviously. Kenny. My sister. Lots of people.”
“And there’s no way Sarah was involved,” I said.
“No, there’s no way. There isn’t much I can say for sure, but I can say that. She was a good person. Fundamentally good. The lawyer was like, Come on, I know you think you were in love with her, but the fact is, she’s not in here, and you are, so be realistic. But I’d rather die than try to save my skin by saying she did something she didn’t do.”
“Literally.”
“Literally,” he said.
“I don’t think most people could stick to that.”
“I’m not most people.”
“That might not be something to be proud of.”
“But maybe it is,” Brad said.
“Maybe it is,” I said. “And you’re not protecting her.”
His eyes crinkled up. “I wish that’s what this was.”
“Even after all this time.”
“Protecting her would mean she was okay. But I don’t know what happened. I don’t.” He rubbed his hand over his face.
I wanted to think I could help him, but it wasn’t easy. Not when he didn’t think I could. He didn’t think he could help himself either, and he’d had nothing but time to come up with a way to do it. I didn’t know what to make of Brad Stockton yet. But I also didn’t think that was the end.
FIVE
I went to Dirty Frank’s on Fourth downtown and placed a carryout order for dinner—a hot dog topped with sriracha cream cheese and Fritos and a side of Tater Tots. While I was waiting, I sat at the bar and ordered a Crown Royal on the rocks. The restaurant was small and pleasantly warm, and the chill from the prison started to fade away. I was staring into my drink and thinking hard about whether I bought Brad Stockton’s I’d rather die than sell out my beloved routine when I felt a hand between my shoulder blades. I jumped, spinning around on my barstool to see my father’s former partner right behind me.
“Hi, sorry,” Tom Heitker said quickly. “Was that creepy?”
“Extremely creepy,” I said, letting myself smile. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
He grinned at me, stepping in closer to let a waiter squeeze past with an armful of the red baskets that served as plates.
“And what are you doing way down here, dressed in jeans?” I said.
“There was a community policing meeting in Twelve Precinct. I wanted to go incognito so I could eavesdrop.”
Even in jeans and a fleece half-zip, he’d get pegged as a cop anywhere. It was his posture, or maybe something about the eyes, a guarded squint. He was in his late thirties, and he’d worked with Frank for his entire career as a detective, till now. He had lost weight since my father died, twenty pounds from a frame carrying an extra forty, and he looked good. But then, he had looked good before.
“And?” I said.