“There’s an Amtrak in Hudson.”
“I could drive you there. Where would you go?”
She thinks for a moment. “One of my friends moved to Philly a few years ago. Her parents are nice. They’d let me stay there for a little while.”
“And then?”
Luna shrugs. “I’ll figure it out.”
She probably will.
“OK. Get your stuff and we’ll go.”
She disappears into the house and returns with a duffle bag and a raggedy blue backpack. It’s probably the same one she used for school.
We listen to the radio on the way to Hudson. The drive takes almost an hour. Capote puts his head in Luna’s lap as she stares out the window, patting him absently.
As we approach the station, she looks at me with an expression I can’t read.
“Why are you helping me?”
I take a deep breath.
“I was like you once. A lost girl.”
Luna shakes her head. “But I’m not lost. I’m running.” She doesn’t look at me when she says it.
“Either way. I was dependent on the kindness of strangers.”
This seems to satisfy her. She slings her backpack over her shoulder. Capote whines.
“Got everything?”
“Yup.”
I hand her my card. “Give me a call in a couple of days, let me know where you are. I won’t tell your parents. I just need to let them know you’re safe.”
She hesitates. You owe me that much, I want to say, but then she takes it.
“Thank you,” she says, quietly, and then walks off into the great dead heart of the country.
I dial Colleen’s number. She picks up on the first ring. I give her the information for the train her daughter was planning on taking.
“I suspect she’ll come home within the week,” I tell her. “If not, give me a call, and I can go after her.”
Colleen’s voice is shaky. I suspect she’s crying. “I know her friend in Philadelphia. She’s a nice girl, her parents are nice people.”
“That’s good.”
“At least she’s not with those terrible church people anymore.”
“No, she’s not.”
“Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“Just doing my job. Like I said, let’s follow up next week.”
“Of course. Thank you. Thank you …”
I let her repeat it a dozen more times before I tell her that I have somewhere to be, and hang up.
Tracy
When Tracy gets home, Erin is asleep in front of the television, underwear on inside out. A T-shirt with Billy Idol’s face on it is pulled tight around her belly, revealing the white scars that decorate her hips. The television, which is playing a commercial for car insurance, is the only source of light in the living room.
It’s tempting, like it always is, to just leave her there. Tracy wets a paper towel and uses it to wash her sister’s face, gently, gently. Erin wakes with a low groan.
“It’s OK, it’s OK, it’s just me.”
“Tired,” says Erin.
How can you be tired when you sleep all day? Tracy wants to ask.
“I know,” she says. “But you need to sleep in your bed. The couch is no good for your back.”
Erin doesn’t move.
“Come on,” says Tracy. She places her hands under her sister’s armpits and tries to lift her.
“Good luck,” Erin says, dully. “I’m way too fat for you to carry me.”
“So get up and walk there yourself.”
“God, why do you care?”
“Because you’ll be up at three in the morning, and then you’ll wake me up.” Because it’s depressing, the sight of her on the couch, because it makes Tracy fucking sad.
“I won’t wake you. Just leave me be.”
“Fine. This is a waste of my time.”
“I agree,” says Erin, closing her eyes.
Tracy heads upstairs to her room. It used to be her mother’s room, and though she’s redecorated it as much as possible—blue wallpaper with white dots, a white desk by the window, framed posters of Marilyn Monroe movies—every time she walks in, she expects to see her mother, dead these past three years, sitting on the bed, brushing her long dark hair.
Erin is the reason that Tracy became a prosecutor in the first place. She even wrote about her in her law school application essay. She did so against the recommendation of her undergraduate adviser, an American history professor who seemed to think of himself, for reasons Tracy never truly understood, as a type of father figure to her.
“It might be too controversial.”
“Controversial, how?” she asked, playing dumb, which was not a strategy she often employed.
“Writing about that kind of thing, it comes across as confrontational, you know, maybe a bit aggressive. And also quite personal, of course. You wrote such a good essay last semester on Coker v. Georgia, perhaps you could use part of that?”
That kind of thing. He couldn’t even say the word rape out loud. Tracy thanked him for his advice but didn’t follow it. For the rest of her life, she would continue to think about him with pity and disdain.
Erin is sad, but Tracy is angry enough for the two of them. Rage has sustained her for thirty years. Other people would burn out doing this job. Tracy just burns.
She opens the window to let in some air and turns on the radio. Mendelssohn wafts through the room, tinny but still beautiful. Tracy takes off her shoes and her bra and lays her files out on the bed. She knows that she will not be able to sleep until she’s finished reading this report.
Someone told her a long time ago that she shouldn’t work in bed, that it confuses the body and makes it difficult to sleep. But it is the place in the world she feels the safest, with its locked door, her big dog sleeping on the floor. She puts on her glasses and spreads the papers across her pillow.
A college student was murdered by her boyfriend, a schizophrenic whose friend said that they had all done acid together the day the girlfriend went missing. The boy’s lawyer is pushing for not guilty by reason of temporary insanity.
Tracy’s instinct, regarding the NGRI, is: Fuck no. The victim, Sara Rose Morgan, was found after two days, her throat cut so deeply she was nearly decapitated. The defendant, Blake Campbell, is a boy from a nice family with an expensive lawyer, and though Tracy will do her best to keep this from prejudicing her against him, it does, a little. A young woman is dead for no reason, and someone ought to be held responsible.
But the court-appointed psychiatrist states that the boy is severely schizophrenic, his grip on reality tenuous at best, that he hears voices and instructions from gods and gurus. He has no prior history of violence. According to friends of both Campbell and Morgan, they were happily in love and talked about getting married.
When Tracy watched the tape of his confession—sobbing, saying over and over again that he just loved her too much, it was unendurable—she felt a flicker of that old anger. If you loved her, you wouldn’t have killed her, she wanted to say, even though, of course, people kill people they love all the fucking time. She wants a more precise word than love, a better definition, one that doesn’t allow for cutting anyone’s throat open.
Campbell’s lawyer is well known for his ability to make dead girls despicable, but he’ll have a hard time with Sara, with her 3.8 GPA and her big brown eyes. From what Tracy knows, Sara never got a parking ticket or a grade below a B. Which doesn’t mean Campbell’s lawyer can’t still turn her into a dumb slut, or a conniving succubus, or whatever he thinks will persuade the jury that she deserved to die. But if Campbell is truly insane, none of that matters.
Tracy is handling Campbell mostly by herself while the rest of the District Attorney’s office focuses on the John Logan case.
She was doing dishes when she got the call from the Poughkeepsie police department that led her to interviewing a serial killer. Just hours after being arrested, Logan, for reasons perhaps best k
nown to himself, asked to speak to a prosecutor. Tracy was the only one they could get in touch with on a Sunday morning.
The confession took nine hours. He told her how many women he killed, and why, identified their photographs, and explained where he hid the bodies. At the end, Tracy cried, humiliatingly, while a cop she didn’t know held her tightly.
She cried for about ten minutes, then cleaned herself up in the bathroom, refused the cop’s offer of a ride, and drove home. By the time she got there, a terrible, intoxicating thought occurred to her—that it was incredibly unlucky that she was now, technically, a witness, because prosecuting Logan would have been great for her career.
“Everyone loves a serial killer,” said Erin, wisely, when she found out. “I would know. I watch TV all day.”
It was hard to argue with that.
The Logan case was devouring the DA’s time and resources. Even though Logan confessed, a jury still had to decide whether to execute him.
A sound from downstairs startles her. Tracy goes down to see what’s going on. It’s just a particularly loud commercial for Applebee’s. She turns the volume down slightly. Erin is still asleep, though she’s kicked her blanket to the floor. Tracy leans down to pick it up.
The blanket is made out of soft fake velvet. It barely covers Erin’s body, all the pinkish flesh spilling out of her clothes. For just a second, Tracy allows herself to despise her sister.
Erin has not had a boyfriend, has not been on a date, since that night thirty years ago. At least I won’t die a virgin, she once said.
The boys who raped Erin were Eliot Karr, seventeen, Larry Reid, eighteen, and Anthony Fox, seventeen. Karr lives in San Francisco, works in advertising, and is twice divorced, with no kids. Reid is an anesthesiologist in New Mexico, where he lives with his wife and twin daughters. Fox died in a drunk-driving accident when he was twenty-three. Tracy saw the photos. His car looked like it was turned into scrap metal.
Rape isn’t about sex, an assistant DA had said to her recently. They were discussing the case of a teenage girl who had been assaulted by her friend’s father during a sleepover. The ADA sounded so smug when he said it that Tracy wanted to slap him. Actually, she wanted to rip his throat out with her teeth. It was such a stupid thing to say. What made him think rape was about anything? It was like debating whether murder was about death. Ultimately the case never went to trial, because the girl refused to testify. Tracy didn’t bother trying to convince her. She doubts they would have won anyway.
Because winter marks the anniversary, this time of year is hard for Erin. The lights strung in trees and the carols played in stores must remind Erin of how excited she had been for Winter Formal, of buying a dress from Nordstrom with the money she saved from babysitting. Larry was her date. He brought her a corsage, red roses that clashed with her pink dress.
What happened to her sister was terrible, but worse things have happened to people. In fact, Tracy has met some of those people. As an ADA, Tracy has worked with a woman whose drug dealer cut off her hand as a punishment for a missed payment, a teenage girl whose father chained her to a radiator, and the father of a boy who was killed and partially eaten by his gym teacher. They are fucked up, but at least they’re still functional. They haven’t forfeited their lives to fate the way Erin has.
Who knows, maybe Erin would have turned out like this anyway, even if she had never met any of those boys. Maybe she is exactly who she is meant to be.
According to the psychiatrist, Campbell’s psychosis was severely exacerbated by his use of LSD. If you’re already schizophrenic, Tracy thinks, irritably, shouldn’t you not do drugs that make you even crazier?
If Tracy wanted to, she could take some of Erin’s sleeping pills, but they might make it hard to wake up tomorrow. Instead, she allows herself a single Xanax. Erin, if she notices, will understand.
Because she takes pills so rarely, the Xanax hits Tracy hard, and she falls asleep with her clothes still on, the files next to her on the bed. She wakes up to Erin looming over her.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” says Erin, and laughs a little. “I came to check on you. I thought you were dead.”
“Why would you think that?” snaps Tracy.
Erin shrugs. “Worked yourself to death, maybe?”
“Did you have a bad dream?”
“Yes. But not that bad.”
“Do you need anything?”
“Nope. Just wanted to say hi.”
Tracy rubs her eyes with the back of her hand.
“Can I sleep here?” Erin asks.
“If you want.” Tracy gathers her files and puts them in a pile on her desk. “I haven’t showered, though.”
“I can tell.” Erin curls up next to her. Tracy strokes her soft hair. When they were kids, their mother let them watch TV in her bed whenever they were sick. It was such a treat then. “Is everything OK with you?”
For a moment she considers lying: I can’t sleep, I’m afraid, I see dead girls out the corner of my eye. Let Erin know that she’s not the only person who suffers. But she decides against it.
“Work is just fucking exhausting.”
“I bet. It’s a lot to deal with. For anyone. Even you.”
Even you. She means this as a compliment, Tracy thinks. Even someone as tough and smart and strong as you would be shaken by a serial killer.
“It’s not Logan that’s getting to me,” she admits. “It’s this other case. The Crawford kids.” Out loud, “Crawford kids” sounds so silly, like a series of books about orphans who solve mysteries.
“Oh yeah? I’m not sure you told me about that.”
“College girl’s boyfriend slit her throat, left her in the woods to die. He’s a diagnosed schizophrenic. Defense is saying he was having a psychotic episode, didn’t know what he was doing.”
“Do you believe them?”
“I don’t want to. I want to believe that this guy is another spoiled brat who thinks he can do whatever he wants to women, and then I want to put him away for the rest of his life. But shit, what if he really …” Tracy’s cheeks are getting warm.
“What if he really didn’t mean to hurt her?”
“Yeah. Either he did know what he was doing, and now he’s pretending, in which case he’s an evil motherfucker. Or he really didn’t know what he was doing, in which case he’s …” Tracy gnaws on her thumbnail. “There isn’t even a word for it. Imagine it’s true. Imagine you really lost your mind, and then you come back to reality and your girlfriend’s dead and you’re the one who killed her.”
“It’s a nightmare,” Erin answers. “Everyone knows bad things happen to good people—that’s just life. Good people doing bad things, that’s what’s really scary.”
Tracy sighs. “If I get all philosophical about it, I’ll probably lose my mind.”
“I really think you should talk to someone.”
Tracy bristles.
“I’m talking to you, aren’t I? And I’m not actually losing my mind.”
“Why are you mad at me? It’s just a suggestion. I’m trying to be helpful.”
Her thumbnail is now bleeding. Tracy sucks on it. “I’m just tired.”
“I’m sorry you’re having a hard time. I just want you to be OK.”
“I know.” Erin curls up with her back next to Tracy’s waist. Tracy strokes her hair until Erin is snoring softly. Then she creeps downstairs to the kitchen.
She pours herself a glass of water and drinks it while staring out the window into the dark nothingness. Then she calls Larry Reid. She has had the number written on a sticky note in her office for so long she has memorized it, though this is the first time she’s actually dialed it. She presses the numbers slowly, making sure each one is correct.
She suspects that he’ll deny it, just like he did thirty years ago. I’m sorry she’s having a hard time, he will say, but I never touched your sister. Or worse: I did touch her, but only because she wanted me to.
But
what if he apologizes? After all, the world is changing, isn’t it? Maybe somewhere along the way, he realized what he did. That does happen. Tracy sees it all the time. Maybe he’s been waiting for this phone call, for a chance at absolution. He will say: I am so sorry. Please ask her to forgive me.
And Tracy will say no. She will say, We live with this burden, so you must, too. This is a debt that cannot be repaid.
The phone rings three times.
“Hello,” says Tracy. Her throat hurts.
“Hello? Who is this?”
It is a young girl’s voice: high, sweet, confused, unafraid. Tracy hangs up the phone.
Jessica
October 8, 2000
Dear Mr. Logan,
As an assignment, my English teacher made us write a letter to a person living or dead, who we admire, and ask them some questions. I wrote to Buzz Aldrin and asked if after he came back from space our world was a letdown. But the person I really wanted to write to was you. So I am.
I don’t exactly admire you (sorry!) but I do have some questions only you can answer. The big one is about Sara Morgan. She was my babysitter for four years. She looked after me and my sister Maggie. After she went away to college she still took care of us sometimes during the summer. She was murdered in 1997 and I want to know if you’re the one who killed her.
I know that you are in prison for the rest of your life anyway so it doesn’t really matter if you did or didn’t so I hope you will just tell me. I won’t tell anyone else. I know you don’t necessarily believe me but I actually won’t. I just want to know. The newspapers said her boyfriend killed her but he didn’t go to prison and there isn’t very much information about it. I have spent a LOT of time looking!
The reason I think it might have been you (no offense) is that Sara was pretty and dark-haired like your victims and she was killed in December 1997 and you were arrested that same month. I don’t know the exact dates though like I said I have been trying really hard to find out!
I know you probably think I am some dumb girl and I hope I am not annoying you but please just tell me? If you say you did I won’t judge or anything not that I think you would care but also if you say you didn’t I will believe you.
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