Gone by Morning

by Michele Weinstat Miller

  “She did her time,” the legal aid attorney continued. “She’s been clean for thirty years and is an upstanding member of the community. Pretrial detention would pose an extraordinary health risk for her at her age.”

  “She is a risk to the community, Your Honor,” ADA Hunter protested.

  The judge nodded. “These are very serious charges.”

  “Your Honor, this was her building, and from what I understand, she did a lot of the building maintenance and cleanup herself,” Lauren added. “It’s likely that her DNA would be found all over the building. These charges are farfetched, and she should have the opportunity to prepare her defense without pretrial detention. Further, it is my understanding that there was an identity theft that emptied out her bank accounts in the last several days. There is no evidence that the defendant was behind in her mortgage payments. It defies reason that an upstanding member of the community would burn down her own building, her own home, and risk her friends and neighbors because of, at most, one late mortgage payment.”

  ADA Hunter raised his voice. “Your Honor, we simply cannot let this woman out to commit this crime again. She is dangerous.”

  The judge looked Kathleen over, probably seeing the frailty that Emily was seeing now, as Emily had seen it on the fire escape. The judge was processing the difference between Kathleen’s demeanor and the charges, the same way Emily was trying to process that the wonderful woman Emily had known for months was also a compulsive liar. Kathleen was the ogre Lauren had been telling Emily about her entire life.

  The judge banged the gavel. “Bail is set at one hundred thousand dollars, cash or bond. Plus, a GPS-monitoring device and house arrest, with the typical allowances for shopping, laundry, and appointments.”

  Lauren turned away without saying anything to Kathleen. One of the court officers approached to snap on the cuffs for Kathleen’s journey back to the bullpen. Lauren shook the legal aid attorney’s hand, then turned. Her furious eyes rested on Emily like a red laser beam before a bullet. She unlatched the gate and passed Emily. “Come on.”

  Emily scurried behind her mother, who power-walked up the aisle without looking back.

  CHAPTER

  40

  THE UNDERSIDES OF low clouds glowed pink as the sun rose from the east behind the criminal court. The sidewalks were still in deep shadow. Lauren hiked on fast-forward past nineteenth-century warehouse buildings containing anonymous multimillion-dollar lofts.

  “Shit, shit, shit. I can’t believe it,” Lauren said a few times as she walked.

  Emily race-walked beside her. Lauren stopped short and turned to Emily at the corner of Church and Leonard Streets, three blocks from the courthouse. The sidewalks were empty, and Tribeca was quiet except for the rattles of delivery trucks speeding over the bumps and valleys of Church Street.

  “How did you meet her?” Lauren asked.

  “You know, through Sophie on Facebook. Sophie heard about an apartment.”

  “Sophie? Do you even know a Sophie?”

  Emily paused, then shook her head. She’d never remembered knowing Sophie.

  “So, I’m only guessing here,” Lauren said with angry sarcasm, “but my criminal mother stalks you on Facebook with a bogus avatar and gets you to move into her building, which god knows how she bought—probably a front for the mob or money laundering. She knew I wouldn’t let you get involved with her, and clearly for good reason. Since you’ve known her, you’ve been a witness in a murder investigation, had to escape a burning building, lost everything you owned, and moved in with a woman charged with trying to kill dozens of people, including you and your child.”

  “She did not burn down her building. That is bullshit!” Emily argued.

  “Oh, you’ve had your bullshit detector on? You’re obviously the last person to recognize bullshit when you see it.”

  “That’s not fair. And I’m not a child, Mom. Jesus Christ.”

  “First off, we’re getting your things from her apartment before she puts up her shell of a building for bail.”

  “I’m not leaving the apartment. Rusty’s coming this weekend. Skye needs to see him again.”

  “For a puppy, Emily? You’ve gotta be kidding.”

  Emily could feel her own anger heating her jaw, spreading up her cheeks. “Kathleen was lying about a lot of things. You’re right. I don’t know what to think about that. But what was she supposed to do if she wanted to know me? You just said you’d never let her know me. She knew you’d poisoned my mind against her. And check your own bullshit detector. Did you know she wasn’t bullshit? Did you even know she was clean? Did you give her a chance to show you she’d changed? You kept me away from my grandmother and kept yourself from your own mother without knowing anything about her, based on events that happened thirty years ago.”

  “Events? Like leaving me homeless on the streets at fifteen years old? Events!” Lauren resumed walking furiously on Church Street toward the subway, past tiny storefronts with garish signs for cheap takeout and lotto tickets. “I knew all I needed to know.”

  “You said your mother was too busy partying to come to family court when you signed yourself into drug treatment.”

  Lauren’s gaze snapped to Emily, and she stopped walking. Emily could see the confusion in her mother’s eyes.

  “She said she was hallucinating when her husband died,” Emily pressed on. “She had cocaine psychosis. She thought snakes were coming out of the walls and out of him when he died. She was terrified. They arrested her and took her to Bellevue. They had proof she picked up the drugs for your father from his dealer. She wasn’t even a heroin addict, but he was in withdrawal and begged her to do it. They charged her with murder because she bought the drugs that killed him.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. Then she pled to manslaughter and went to prison for five years.”

  “Why didn’t the caseworkers tell me that?” Lauren asked, as much to herself as to Emily.

  “Maybe they thought it was better to keep you away from your crazy addict mother. Maybe they were afraid you’d change your mind about treatment if you thought she needed help.”

  Lauren’s eyes were distant, looking toward the World Trade Center to the south but staring a thousand miles away, probably seeing the early days of her drug treatment as a teenager. “At first, they needed her signature to consent to my treatment. They got it and showed it to the judge. Children’s Services didn’t need to work with her to help her get me back home if I was in residential treatment … and I would be an adult by the time she came home from prison.” Emily could tell Lauren was tapping into her knowledge of family law, fitting it in with her teenage memories. “The program helped me file emancipation papers once I was there. They did that as a matter of course for teens who’d been living on their own, whose parents were dysfunctional … addicts. They didn’t want unstable parents to interfere and throw their kids off course. But she was in jail.”

  Lauren teared up. She spoke almost to herself. “It’s true, she wasn’t a heroin addict. I remember the day my father died. That morning, I think he was dope-sick, sweating but shivering under blankets. She was scared, but she always seemed scared. I couldn’t focus on that. I hated her too much.”

  The two began walking again, silently.

  “Look, Mom, I don’t know what to think of her,” Emily said gently. “I don’t trust her. She has a lot of explaining to do. But one thing I’m sure about is that she did not start the fire. Believe it or not, I do have a working bullshit detector—working imperfectly, maybe. But the only thing I have no doubt about is that she wouldn’t burn down a building filled with her neighbors and me, and Skye. And the thing that bothers me is that it doesn’t feel like a coincidence that so much has happened since her friend Sharon died.”

  CHAPTER

  41

  ON RIKERS, EACH cell on Kathleen’s floor had a rolling metal door that was left open for a ten-minute window each hour until lockdown at night. During that ten mi
nutes, each woman could freely walk in and out of her cell and choose whether to stay in, reading, writing, or sleeping, for the remainder of the hour. If a woman stayed out, she could spend her fifty minutes in a dayroom with a TV, tables, and the other inmates, or she could hope to make a phone call. For the current hour, ten hours after her arrival on Rikers, Kathleen waited in line for a chance to use the phone.

  Several feet above them, the corrections officers looked out from what was known as “the bubble,” a fortified glass guard station with a view of the corridor of cells and the dayroom. From there, they could also keep an eye on the phone, a frequent cause of fights.

  Wearing a green hospital gown that exposed legs that oozed with abscesses from shooting up, a young heroin addict stood in front of Kathleen in line. They hadn’t distributed clothing to the newcomers yet, so Kathleen had washed her clothes in the sink and also wore a hospital gown while her street clothes dried, draped over a bed rail. After ten hours on Rikers, Kathleen’s panties and bra were drying on her body, where they stuck to her uncomfortably like a wet bathing suit during a drive home from the beach. It was luckily a warm day, so the incessant breeze penetrating the roomy armholes of her gown didn’t cause goose bumps to rise on her skin the way it had when she’d first been on Rikers in late October, decades ago.

  Nothing had changed about the phone routine. At an appointed hour, the CO opened a slot in the bubble, placing the phone on a shelf outside it. The women lined up, waiting for twenty minutes, a half hour, or more to make a call that clicked off automatically after five minutes. The COs put the phone out for inmate use once or twice a day. The women waited, chatting with the person next to them in line or silently inside their own heads, all of them having plenty of angst about their criminal cases and upended lives to keep them mentally busy.

  The whole process was so familiar that Kathleen expected to see a dial on the phone when the CO placed it on a ledge outside the bubble, but they’d switched to touch-tone phones since her last incarceration. She suspected she was the only inmate here old enough to know how to dial a phone.

  Kathleen had been lucky that a CO had let her copy down a few contacts from her cell phone before locking up her property. So far, Kathleen’s ability to cope with jail and the strip searches—squat on command and let them look between her legs—had come back to her like riding a bike. She thought the COs were taking it easy on her, looking away, handling her gently when they snapped the cuffs on and off, because of her age. And the large, masculine woman, Doris, who’d talked to Kathleen in the bullpen, had made clear to everyone on the floor that Kathleen was OG, facing big time. There was a certain respect that came with that, and many of the women were looking for someone older to play mom for them, so Kathleen’s stay had been uneventful so far.

  Of course, that didn’t mean Kathleen could let down her guard for even a moment. She’d have no ready-made allies in jail based on neighborhood or common friends or gang affiliation. And the old prison adage remained generally true anyway: there are no friends in jail. At her age, it would be only her wits and the sympathy the inmates naturally felt for someone they viewed as a suffering old woman that would keep her safe.

  The worst thing was the return of her fear, the desolation, the darkness that was settling within her. And seeing Lauren, standing right next to her for the first time in decades, had yanked open old wounds. She was sitting in jail, again feeling all the pain of losing her child, and now she feared losing her grandchild and her great-grandchild too. Like before, she was caught in something entirely unexpected, and it was going in a terrible direction.

  She kept coming back to Client 13. He was the common thread. Yet Kathleen had never found him threatening. He had so much to lose by engaging in this kind of crazy conspiracy. She could no longer dismiss that as impossible, but why would he do it? It had to be something other than an affair that produced a love child twenty years ago.

  “Bitch, you better step off.” A squeaky voice spoke behind Kathleen. “I’ll wreck your fucking ass.”

  Kathleen looked toward the commotion. A tiny woman with South American features, who stood under five feet tall, moved to stop a stocky woman ten inches taller and seventy pounds heavier than her from jumping the line in front of her. Kathleen took the stocky aggressor for a mugger by vocation. Muggers had a certain vibe to them. The little one had to speak up to defend her place in line and fight if she needed to, even if she lost, or she’d be victimized for the rest of her stay on the Island. Plus, if she got a bad reputation here, it could follow her to state prison if she had to do more than a year.

  Kathleen knew she might have to fight too. Her muscles and joints felt every moment of the decades she’d aged since she’d last been behind bars, and she imagined her bones were even worse. She’d fallen on ice a couple of years back, and her wrist had snapped as if it were hollow. She’d worn a cast for the rest of the winter. That experience had given her the caution of an almost-old person when she walked Manhattan’s icy sidewalks, and she had no denial about the implications of using her old bones and tendons to defend herself against a young person. But for now, she just hoped the two women wouldn’t fight and the CO wouldn’t remove the phone as punishment.

  Doris stepped from the line. She’d been standing a few places behind the South American woman. She moved toward the line-jumper, looking down on her. “Get. The. Fuck. Out. The. Line. We ain’t having that shit here.”

  The line-jumper seemed ready to hash it out with Doris, but, jaw jutting, she looked the tall woman up and down and thought better of it.

  Kathleen reflected on Doris. You could find good souls in jails, maybe the best of them—people who kept their humanity in the most dehumanizing circumstances.

  A woman sitting on a schoolroom chair next to the bubble hung up the phone. Kathleen moved to take her turn. She dialed Greg, her building manager. She needed to know why her application for bail had been denied. She knew her bank account was empty, but why weren’t they accepting her building as collateral? The building was a burnt shell, but it was still valuable Manhattan real estate. She’d expected to be out of jail already. Disappointment washed over her when Greg’s phone went to voice mail. She’d get no answers today. There were no return calls to jail.

  She pushed down her distress and forced words out. “I’ll call you tomorrow, Greg. I want to know what’s wrong with the building’s title.” She hung up and spoke through a grating in the bubble. “Officer, I got a voice mail. Could I have another call?”

  She heard profane grumbling from the line of women behind her, but luckily nobody objected.

  “Okay. Just one more,” the CO said.

  Kathleen dialed.

  CHAPTER

  42

  HECTOR TOOK SKYE to the playground before he headed to work in the afternoon. Emily needed to get through dozens of emails for work after taking off the morning to sleep. She set up her laptop in the kitchen and felt a shot of excitement when she saw an email from the director of IT. They’d forwarded a batch of potential Mattingly emails.

  The FBI had provided IT with a preliminary word search list that their behavioral science team had put together. Each email contained words a person who committed mass violence might use. This batch of emails mentioned conspiracies. They were mostly from mentally ill people whose minds had woven tentacles of plots against them.

  Hector dropped off Skye, and Emily set her up to eat an early dinner in her booster seat. Red sauce and spaghetti quickly splotched her cheeks and the floor. Emily called Carl at his office while Skye ate.

  “Hey, Dad,” Emily said when she heard his voice.

  “Ms. Silverman,” he said with affectionate formality. “Do I take it this is our first official call?”

  Emily chuckled. “It is, indeed, Agent Cintron. I’ve got a batch of emails for you from the conspiracy theory search. Hundreds.”

  “Excellent.”

  “A surprising number of people think there are government plots brewi
ng against them. They’re all at the center of their own pizza pedophilia ring, and the mayor delivered the pizza. I hope the emails help.”

  “Most won’t,” Carl said. “But we’re approaching the forensics problem from as many angles as possible. Besides searching for emails from Mattingly’s known IP and email addresses, we’re looking at the conspiracy theory emails to see if there was anything connected to Beacon, the New York City subways, that sort of thing. Mattingly could have emailed with a disguised IP address and an email address we don’t know about.”

  “I didn’t see anything like that,” Emily said. “There’s one from a guy who thinks zombies are breeding giant rats in the subway. Anyway, Mattingly seems like he was more of a psychopath than delusional, don’t you think?”

  “You’re right, no one has reported him talking about any delusions,” Carl said. “But conspiracy theories have become almost mainstream. If he shared a conspiracy theory, a lot of people would probably agree with him.”

  After she hung up with Carl, Emily wiped sauce from Skye’s hands and face. She changed Skye’s spattered T-shirt, and they took the subway to the Upper West Side. She was glad Carl had stuck to business and hadn’t questioned her about staying in Kathleen’s Airbnb. By now, Lauren must have told him everything.

  “I guess there’s no harm,” Lauren had finally said about Emily staying at the rental. They’d talked more about it while riding the train uptown together after court. “Especially with Kathleen in jail.”

  “Nobody knows where the apartment is, so it’s safe, even if she’s being targeted by somebody.”

  Lauren had looked sideways at her. “You bought that whole story?”