by David Bell
“I ran into Michael about six months ago,” he said.
Janet froze in place. She didn’t hit the buzzer.
“I came to Dove Point almost a year ago. I got arrested in Columbus for an assault. I blew the court date, so there was a warrant.”
“You got arrested?”
“I assaulted a guy who worked for the child welfare office. My records are sealed, the ones from when I was a kid. I wanted to see what they said about my parents and if maybe I had any other family members I could look up. Cousins or something. Since they’re sealed, I couldn’t even see them. They’re my records, but I couldn’t see them. And this asshole in the welfare office offered to let me see them for a price. You know, some kind of side deal. We met at some dive bar in Columbus, and when I got there he wanted more money. I punched him. It was stupid, I know, but when the cops came and found me I was only carrying the Justin Manning ID. Some days, that’s all I carried, like I really was him. I went into the system that way.”
“They found the summons in your apartment,” Janet said. “Actually, my daughter found it.”
Steven looked a little surprised, but then he shrugged and kept talking. “I figured I needed to get out of Columbus, so I decided to come back here. At least it was a little familiar, and I figured you might still be here. I thought you’d be married and all that, but who knows? We could reconnect maybe. We could be…I don’t know. Something. Friends? Maybe like family even.”
“What does Michael have to do with this?” Janet asked.
“It’s interesting the way you snap to attention when his name comes up. I don’t even know if Justin’s name gets the same rise out of you that Michael’s does.”
Janet looked into Steven’s eyes, saw the little glint of glee he seemed to be feeling. “Good-bye.” Janet reached for the buzzer.
“You love him, don’t you?”
“He’s my best friend.”
“But you love him, right? You sat around here in Dove Point all those years, like I said, raising your kid and making a life. And it was all good, wasn’t it? Except you always wondered what Michael was doing. Was he having a good time? Was he having an adventure? Was he having it with someone else?”
Janet looked at the floor, the scuffed, filthy linoleum tile, the harsh glare of the overhead lights showing every speck of dirt. He was right. She carried that image of Michael around with her all those years, using it as more than just a distraction. She used it as a spur, something to urge her forward. She didn’t want Michael to come back and find out she’d completely fallen to pieces after high school, that she’d married the first loser who came along and continued to pump out kids. No, she wanted to show him something-anything-if he ever came back. Some might say she lived for him, and would consider this pathetic, but she didn’t see it that way. She wanted a better life for Ashleigh and for herself, and if thoughts of Michael helped her get there, so be it.
“Let me tell you about meeting the golden boy when I came back to Dove Point,” Steven said.
But he didn’t start talking. He waited for something. Janet understood what he wanted, so she went back to the table and took her seat again. He had something important to say, and he needed his audience in place.
“I ran into Michael about six months ago here in Dove Point. Do you know Rodney’s? That bar out on Old Dayton Road?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“I guess it’s not the kind of place you would frequent. I’m not even sure why Michael was there, except maybe he was feeling sorry for himself. He was drinking a lot, you know?” Steven pantomimed throwing a drink into his mouth. “I studied him for a while from across the room because I thought I knew who he was, but I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t seen him in, what, twenty-some years? I wanted to be sure, but after I checked him out for a while, I knew I recognized him. I had all those faces from that day on the playground memorized. He didn’t look that different. Just grown-up is all.”
“Did he recognize you?”
“Recognize me?” Steven laughed. “Janet, people like Michael don’t recognize or remember people like me. Hell, did you recognize me when I came to your door in the middle of the night? Or when you saw me in broad daylight on campus? Did you recognize me?”
“I thought you were familiar.”
“You hoped I was your brother,” he said. “Hoped. But you didn’t recognize me. You didn’t even recognize me when the cops told you my name, did you?”
By not saying anything, Janet knew she was answering his question.
“I told him we went to school together,” Steven said. “I bought him a drink, told him my name. I told him I moved away after the third grade, which is true. I didn’t mention Hope House and all that shit. We started talking. We just shared stories of our lives. And here’s what got me, man-here’s what really got me. As he talked about his life and I talked about mine, I realized that the paths we’d been on, the way we’d been moving through our lives in the years since high school, really weren’t that different. Sure, he had a great time up to a point. The exact opposite of me. But after graduating, the wheels came off for him. He didn’t finish college. He tried a few different careers-salesman, store manager, substitute teacher-but none of them panned out. Nothing ever stuck with him. Or he never stuck with anything. Whatever it was, his life just wasn’t that golden. Do you understand what I’m saying here? Do you understand what a revelation it was to hear all that?”
“You thought his life would have gone better.”
“That’s right. And I bet you thought the same thing all those years you were here and he was out there. Right? Am I right?”
“I did.”
“See, we’re just alike in that sense,” Steven said. He smiled, his eyes glowing at what he saw as a deep, connecting bond between them. “You sat here in Dove Point all those years thinking Michael was out conquering the world, sleeping with every girl who came along, making a lot of money, living a big life. Except he wasn’t. He was a nothing, a failure. He was the classic case of a guy who peaks when he’s about seventeen, and the rest-” Steven held his right hand out, parallel to the table, like it was an airplane. Then he dropped his hand, fingers first, against the tabletop. “It all just falls away.”
Janet thought back to that first day when she saw Michael standing in the parking lot on campus. As soon as she recognized him, she’d noticed the changes the years had marked on him and chalked them up to simple age. But the light wasn’t as bright in his eyes, and the force of his personality seemed dimmer. And since then, whenever they talked, he seemed to be a little scared, a little off his game. Not the same Michael at all.
“It’s funny the effect alcohol will have on people,” Steven said. “If you give them enough of it, they’ll tell you anything. It helps if they’re a little desperate to share their story, especially with someone they think really knows or understands them. Michael didn’t see me as the loser kid from Hope House that night. He didn’t see me as the kid he watched get smacked with a soggy football. He saw me as a guy from his past, someone who had lived in the same town and gone to the same school. He thought we shared something. It let him open up to me.”
“What did he tell you?”
“What didn’t he tell me?” Steven laughed. “You know, I have to be honest with you-a part of me talked to him because I wanted to find out something about you. I’d taken on Justin’s identity. I’d looked you up in the phone book and on the Internet. I knew where you worked. Hell, I’d driven by your old house, the one you used to rent before you moved in with your dad. That’s how I figured out you’d moved. But Michael, he didn’t want to talk about you. I asked about Janet Manning, but he kept changing the subject. He wanted to talk about something else. Or someone else, I guess.”
“Who?”
“His old man. His dad.”
“What did he say about him?” Janet asked.
“He’s not a big fan of his dad. I can tell you that. Apparently, the old man used to suppo
rt him. He sent Michael money out in California. Michael made it sound like he just needed the money for the short term, but I got the sense it was more than that. I figure the old man was carrying Michael a lot of the time. I guess Michael’s dad left his mom at some point, and he’s an only child. You can see that the old man might feel so much guilt he’d shell out whatever he could to keep the kid happy. I wish I had someone who could do that for me.”
“I hear his dad is getting remarried.”
“Right. Well, maybe that’s why the old man cut him off. And Michael didn’t like that one bit. Who would, right? If you have a nice meal ticket, who wants to see it go away? But I’m not really interested in Michael’s ramblings about his dad. I couldn’t care less if he hates his old man. I wish I knew my old man so I could hate him, but I don’t. So I tried to steer the conversation back to you again. I thought, what’s the one thing I could bring up about you that might get him off this riff about his dad? Do you know what that is?”
“The murder?”
“The murder. I remembered from growing up that Michael was there that day. I knew the two of you were close friends. So I ask, what happened that day in the park? Do you mind talking about it?”
“And did he?”
“Did he? No, he didn’t mind. He spilled his guts. How you all were playing there and how your brother ran away into the woods and Michael went to bring him back to the playground. He told me all of that. And he said that he saw his old man in the woods that day, right where they ended up finding Justin’s body. I guess, from the look on your face, that you’ve heard all of that before.”
“Michael told me.”
“So the system chewed up another black man, another less fortunate, for a crime he didn’t commit.”
Janet couldn’t meet his eye then. She felt the guilt twist in her gut, a metal coil that wound through her insides.
“You feel bad about it, right?” Steven leaned forward, trying to resume eye contact.
“Of course.”
“And you understand why I would take that information and use it to get closer to you? Here I was looking for a way to find out about your life and establish some sort of relationship with you, and Michael just handed it to me. What would you want more than anything else except to know what really happened to your brother?”
“Why didn’t you just come and tell me that? Or better yet, why not go to the police and tell them?”
“I had a warrant out on me, remember? And what was I going to tell them? Some guy who used to bully me in grade school told me he thinks his dad murdered some kid twenty-five years ago? What would they think of that?”
“You could have tried.”
“I told you.”
“You didn’t tell me anything,” Janet said. “You strung me along.”
“I did. You’re right. I figured that was my one chance to get close to you, to give you something, so I tried to make it last. I shouldn’t have done that.”
“I’m not sure I believe you,” Janet said.
“I guess you told Michael I came and saw you.”
“I did.”
“He came to see me a couple of times. He came not long after that first night we talked in the bar. And then he came again after I talked to you on campus.”
“Why did he come to see you?” Janet asked.
“Good question.”
Janet waited. “Are you going to answer it?” she finally asked.
He nodded. “Sure. Why not?” He licked his lips. “I guess you told him that some strange guy had shown up at your house in the middle of the night, and Michael wanted to know if it was me. I admitted it was, of course. I didn’t have anything to hide, even though I suspected he wanted to chew me out for bothering you. You know, the whole knight in shining armor thing. Right?”
Janet didn’t answer, but she did want to think Michael was there on her behalf.
Steven smiled. “Well, he must have left his white knight suit at the cleaners. He didn’t come to tell me to lay off you. Quite the contrary. He was only mad at me because I wasn’t pushing his version of the story. See, he wanted me to go to you and tell you that his old man killed your brother. He wanted me to push his agenda instead of my own. When I told him to screw off, we got into an argument, a pretty loud one.”
Janet felt something drop inside her, like a driver in the midst of a long descent.
“He just wanted to use me,” Steven said. “He wanted me to get you stirred up, to get you to come around to his way of thinking about the murder. He wanted you to believe his dad committed the crime as much as he did.” Steven leaned back in his chair, looking smug. “He wanted me to be just another pawn in his game.”
Chapter Forty-eight
Stynes was on the phone when Janet Manning emerged from the detention area of the station. A uniformed officer guided her out, and Stynes could see, even from across the room, that the conversation with Steven Kollman had left Janet shaken and disturbed. She looked at the floor as she walked, and her step lacked its characteristic energy. Stynes ended the call he was on and wondered if his first instinct hadn’t been correct-that he shouldn’t have let Janet talk to Kollman.
“Rough going in there?” he asked when she reached his desk.
Janet nodded.
“Here,” he said. “Sit.” He held out a chair, and Janet sat. When she was settled, he said, “That’s the most he’s talked to anybody since he’s been in here.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good thing,” she said.
“Can I get you some water or something?”
“No, I’m okay.”
“What did he tell you?” Stynes asked. “I don’t mean to be so blunt about it, but if he told you something I need to know about your brother’s case, then I’d like to hear it.”
“He told me a lot of things,” Janet said. “I don’t know how much is relevant to you. I’m still trying to get my mind around it all.”
Stynes took a seat in the chair opposite Janet. He needed to tell her a few things before she left the station. He hoped that what he had to tell her would be seen as good news and go some of the way toward mitigating whatever she experienced with Steven Kollman. He decided not to press her on the conversation with Steven, at least not yet. He had other things to tend to, so he decided to give her time to decompress.
“I’ve been working on something about your brother’s case,” Stynes said. “This morning I found out about a witness who will also testify to seeing Ray Bower in the woods that day.”
Janet looked up, her face alert.
“I can’t reveal much more than that, but I can say that his testimony pretty strongly corroborates what Michael Bower has told you. It’s someone who was in the park on the day Justin died, someone who was unwilling to come forward in the past but will now. We’re not at the point of filing charges yet, but we’ve been in touch with Ray Bower’s attorney. Apparently, Ray is feeling better, but he’s still in the hospital, and soon we’re going to be able to speak to him and ask him some of these questions.”
Stynes stopped talking. He’d already said too much about the case. He chose to tell Janet only because…because things with her and the Mannings just seemed different. After twenty-five years and all the false hopes, they deserved to know something definitive. And he wanted to give that to them-to her-if he could.
But he couldn’t read Janet. Her face didn’t change. Maybe it was the encounter with Kollman or maybe it was the impact of his words, but she didn’t seem to be fully processing what he was saying to her. He had expected a more substantial response. Grief, elation, regret-something.
“Michael,” she said.
“Michael?”
Her eyes cleared a little. “Does he know? Michael.”
“I was going to ask you about that,” Stynes said. “We want him to come in and give a statement as well, but he’s nowhere to be found. Still. Even his mother hasn’t heard from him.”
“It’s weird,” she said.
> “What is?”
“He was so determined to see Ray punished. Why would he leave now?”
“Maybe it’s too hard for him.”
Stynes saw the hurt on her face-and the fear, the fear that Michael left without saying good-bye. His paternal instincts toward Janet kicked in. He made a silent wish that she’d find someone to treat her decently before too long. And if Michael Bower served as a continuing source of pain or anxiety in her life, then he wished he would finally stay away. He just needed him to make that statement-and if Ray Bower felt like unburdening his soul without a trial, he wouldn’t even need that much.
“Well, I have another stop to make before I’m able to go to the hospital,” he said. “I do want to talk to you more about what you discussed with Steven Kollman. We’re going forward with the charges against him as well.” Stynes stood. “Do you need a ride somewhere?” he asked.
“No, I’m fine. I can drive.”
“Are you sure? I can get an officer to give you a lift.”
The steel returned to Janet’s posture. She stood up, pushed her shoulders back. “Really, Detective,” she said. “I’m doing just fine.”
Stynes drove across the tracks into East. While he bounced over the uneven railroad ties and into the neighborhood that didn’t want him, he thought about what he was about to do. He may have given a measure of false hope to Janet Manning by telling her about Ray Bower before any confession or plea agreement had been struck. But it was a calculated risk. Stynes weighed her years of frustration against the possibility that he’d spoken too soon about a suspect in the case. What he couldn’t be sure of anymore, what he really couldn’t decide no matter how much he thought about it, was who had suffered more: Dante Rogers or the Mannings? Which was worse: losing a loved one and spending a life not knowing how it happened? Or spending the prime of your life incarcerated for a crime you didn’t commit?