“Are there any parts of your code you’d consider letting go of?” Daniel asked.
“No.”
“Are your choices getting you what you want?”
A-Dre bounced forward angrily in his chair. “Maybe not. But at least I fuck up my own self. No one tells me first. No one—” He caught himself.
“What?” Daniel said. “What?”
A-Dre rolled his lips over his teeth, bit down. “No one can tell me I ain’t good enough.”
“Because you always prove it first,” Daniel said. “From the minute they see you.”
“I can’t do shit ’bout how people see me.”
“I have,” Big Mac said. “Am I better than you?”
A-Dre stared at him. Didn’t answer. He was sweating, a sheen covering his arms and face, even the LaRonda tattoo.
“Am I better than you?” Big Mac’s voice boomed off the walls.
“No. You ain’t better than me.”
“Then you can ‘do shit’ about it, too.”
A glimmer appeared in A-Dre’s eyes as he processed this, and then the scowl returned. “We done?” He got up and started to swagger to his regular seat.
“Not quite yet,” Daniel said.
They all waited as A-Dre retraced his steps, radiating contempt.
“Why do you fight?” Daniel asked him once he’d again settled into the hot seat.
“I like it.”
“Why?”
“It’s fun. And I’m good at it.”
The others laughed.
“I won every fight I been in,” A-Dre said. Given his breadth and jutting muscles, this was easy to believe. “You ever fight, Counselor?”
“I was a wrestler—”
Daniel was cut off by assorted hoots.
“A wrestler!”
“—rules and shit—”
“—them little bathing-suit thingies—”
It took Daniel a few moments to steer the room back on track. “What are the good things about fighting?” he asked A-Dre.
A-Dre hesitated, so Lil jumped in. “Nothing.”
“No,” Daniel said. “Not nothing. Don’t give me the shit you think I want to hear. What’s good about it?”
“At least you’re doing something,” A-Dre said. “Not just taking it.”
“Okay. What else?”
“Gets you respect. Gets you girls. Gets you stuff you can take from people. Gets ’em to do what you want.”
Daniel got up and starting writing the pros on the left side of the chalkboard: “Respect. Power. Sexual partners. Control. Money.”
He tossed down the chalk, dusted his hands. “Okay, great. Now let’s talk about what happened after.”
“Like what?”
“Like what happened next. For you, for the people around you.”
X piped up. “Your sis LaRonda.”
“You shut your mouth ’bout LaRonda.”
It was slow going, but Daniel finally got A-Dre to list some consequences of the fights, which Daniel summarized on the other side of the board: “Fired from job. Arrested. Jail stint. Broke up with girlfriend.”
Big Mac snickered as the list grew. “Yep, you sure won all them fights, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, I did. I got some blowback, sure. But look at all the shit I got first.” A-Dre flared a hand at the scrawled list on the left side of the board. “Respect. Power. Shorties. Bling.”
“How many of those things did you have six months later?” Daniel asked.
A-Dre waved off the question. “Six months later I was in prison.”
Daniel set the chalk down in the tray. Asked again, “How many of those things did you have six months later?”
A-Dre’s eyes darted back and forth across the chalkboard, annoyed, and then came a softening of his face. He laced his fingers, stared down at his hands.
“None,” he said.
Chapter 20
When Big Mac took center chair after the break, he sat silently for a few moments, squeezing the grip strengthener. “I had a setback this morning. I can’t be there for my fucking kids because I’m out there working to feed them, right? My daughter’s got asthma. My boy needs books for school. Christmas is coming up, and … I don’t make enough as a waste collector.”
“Dude,” X said, “you a trashman.”
“X, the title on my fucking paycheck is—”
“Refuse Procurement,” X said. “Know what we call that on Earth?”
“Shut the hell up, X,” Martin said. “Let the man talk.”
Big Mac took a deep breath, his broad shoulders settling again. “We’re always tight. Gas bill, groceries, cell phone—”
“Car always breaking down,” Martin said.
“’Zactly. And my wife, I don’t ask much of her. Just stay off my back, cook, and clean.”
“That’s all you want out of her?” Lil asked. “You want to be married to a cleaning lady?”
“Hey, fuck off,” X said. “I am a cleaning lady.”
Daniel kept his attention on Big Mac. “Go on.”
Clank-clank. Clank-clank. Then, “So she’s on me this morning, right? First thing, over the Cap’n Crunch. About the holidays coming up. Get a promotion. It’s that easy, right? Like I can just get a promotion. And I … uh, put my fist through the wall. And she’s still going on. So I put my hands on her. Openhanded, but still. And the kids, they’re scared of me. I can see it. They’re too polite, you know. Even though I’ve never hit ’em—I’ve never touched them. They’re too polite to me, and they clear the fucking table and go into their room until their mom can drive them to school. And I go in there, and they’re sitting on their beds like”—his voice caught—“like they don’t know what to do. And I try to say I’m sorry, and they just say, ‘It’s okay, Dad, it’s okay,’ like they just want me to leave them alone. Which they do. Want me to just leave. And they don’t know I’m really sorry. They don’t know I’m really sorry.”
X’s breath hitched in her chest, and Daniel glanced across at her. Big Mac’s story had captured her complete focus; it was the first time Daniel had seen her let down her guard. No one else noticed her reaction.
“Look,” Big Mac said, “I didn’t even have a dad. My old man left when I was eight, my mom checked out when I was fourteen, so my kids are one better, but still. This ain’t how you think it’ll go, right? When you’re in the hospital holding them in that swaddle, kissing those tiny feet. You don’t hope for them sitting there on their beds staring at you scared like they wished you were gone already. I’m worn down and short-tempered from working for my kids, and then they’re scared of me because I’m worn down and short-tempered.”
“They should understand,” X said. “They should understand why you did what you did.”
Again Daniel noted her quiet sincerity—something about Big Mac’s interaction with his kids had struck her deep—but he didn’t want to halt the room’s momentum by switching to focus on her right now.
“—my wife,” Big Mac was saying. “I love her, but fuck. Riding me, trying to piss me off.”
“Is there another explanation?” Daniel asked. “Besides her trying to piss you off?”
“Maybe she’s tired, too,” Lil said. “Or as scared about money as you are.”
“I tell her all the time what I’m doing for the family.”
“What else do you tell her?” Daniel asked.
Big Mac studied his large, rough hands. “I love her, okay? She knows that. I don’t have to say it. She can tell by what I do, how I work to support her.”
“So you never tell her you love her?” Lil asked.
“There’s no point.”
“Why not?” Daniel asked.
Silence. Then, “She’s just gonna leave anyway.” His turtle eyes blinked. “Her. The kids. Might as well get it over with.”
“How you know she’s gonna leave?” A-Dre asked. His first question about another group member, that tiny initial step into the circle.
Big
Mac took a breath, his vast chest expanding. “Everyone leaves,” he said.
Daniel let the sentence linger. Then he said, “But you don’t want them to. You want to be with your family.”
“Everyone leaves,” Big Mac repeated. “I learned that young.”
“If you learned it,” Daniel said, “that means you can unlearn it.”
“But it’s what happens.”
“Okay.” Daniel held up his hands, slowing things down, putting together the emotional equation. “If everyone leaves, then how do you treat them?” A blank stare. He tried again. “You’ve decided that everyone close to you is gonna leave. So what else have you decided about how to act toward them?”
Big Mac rasped his palm across an unshaven cheek. “Don’t trust anyone,” he answered. “Don’t let anyone close.”
“If you lived with someone who didn’t trust you and never let you get close, what would you do?”
Big Mac swallowed once, hard. The pink rims of his eyes sagged. “Leave,” he said.
* * *
They spent the rest of the session untangling Big Mac’s beliefs, pulling at loose strings and seeing what came unwound. X remained withdrawn, lost in thought. She didn’t speak at all, not even a single wisecrack, an aberration of mammoth proportions.
As the group readied to go, Daniel remembered Lyle Kane’s approaching deadline, now two hours away. The return to cold reality was bracing, and he felt another rush of gratitude for the warmth they’d created in the room.
He cleared his throat. “I just want to tell you that you’ve been a real bright spot for me in the past couple of days. The courage you show in here, it’s … inspiring, really.”
Big Mac smiled broadly. “Look at Counselor getting all Hallmark on us.”
“I know,” Daniel said. “Lapse in judgment.”
X gathered her schoolbooks quickly and was the first to head out. She paused with one hand grasping the jamb, seemingly on the verge of a classic “doorway moment”—dropping a revelation at the end of a session when there’s no time left for scrutiny. She turned only slightly, showing them her profile. The others were still talking and collecting their things, but Daniel watched her, rapt.
“I had a baby when I was seventeen,” X said.
The room went silent, the group members freeze-framed in their various positions.
“Gave her up when I went to the Hall,” X continued. “She’s lost in foster care somewhere.” Still she refused to face the room fully. “She’d be two today.”
Before anyone could reply, X had vanished.
* * *
After the others dispersed and Fang headed to the garage to retrieve his employment form, Daniel took a moment alone to tilt his head back and breathe in the silence. He found himself itching to call Inspector Dooley to see if she’d made headway in locating Lyle Kane, but he resisted; she was no doubt stressed enough, watching the clock as anxiously as he was and bracing for bad news. In the quiet room, he felt the weight of every passing second.
Fang returned nervously holding a coffee-stained piece of paper, like a report card. Reluctantly, he relinquished it, and Daniel took a look.
It struck him immediately that Fang was dyslexic, the scribbled lines calling to mind the death-threat letters and putting a charge into Daniel’s chest. But as he’d seen before, the handwriting was quite different, a wide, undisciplined scrawl.
He settled his nerves and worked with Fang to gather information for a referral, watching him write, examining his pencil grip, and taking a history. Though he did his best to push thoughts of Lyle Kane aside, the countdown to midnight pervaded everything like the deep thrumming of a plucked string. Finally he saw Fang off and headed to the common office on the second floor to leave a message for Sue Posada, an occupational therapist he’d met at a continuing-education course. It wasn’t easy to find people in that field who would work closely with violent offenders, but he and Sue went back a ways, and she trusted his referrals.
Waiting for her office voice mail to pick up, he tapped his pen against the top page of Fang’s handwriting sample—I went to the park tobay.
His mouth went dry.
He stared at the word. No longer heard the ringing of the line. Though there was no air-conditioning vent overhead, the room felt suddenly arctic.
He squeezed his eyes shut, forced that unsettling handwriting to inhabit the darkness behind his lids.
lyle kane
316 bay st
san fransico
Back to Fang’s paper.
Tobay.
Today.
Bay St
Day St
The phone line gave a staticky silence—Sue’s recorded message must have beeped already. Numbly, he hung up. The home screen on his iPhone showed 11:37.
Twenty-three minutes.
Jamming his thumb at virtual buttons, he called Dooley.
She picked up her office line on one ring. “Yes, I’m here. Yes, I’m aware that we’re down to twenty-three minutes.”
“The killer’s dyslexic.” Daniel tried to slow his words, to little avail. “He flipped a letter. Substitute Day Street for Bay Street.”
He closed his eyes, listened to Dooley type. Time seemed to stretch out with a dreamlike intensity.
“Nope,” she said. “There’s no Lyle Kane at 316 Day Street.”
Disappointment blew through him. He fought it away, refocusing. What other mistakes might a dyslexic make? The errors could be inconsistent depending on the writer’s concentration, speed, stress. Closing his eyes again, he pictured that cramped little address. “Turn the six upside down. Try 319 Day Street. Is there a Lyle Kane there?”
He heard her hammering again at her keyboard. His breaths came fast and shallow, making him light-headed. The delay lasted an eternity, and then Theresa said, “Nope—”
He bowed his head.
“—but there’s a Kyle Lane.”
Daniel leapt up, the chair banging over behind him, clattering on the floor. He pulled the iPhone from his face to check the time—down to twenty-one minutes—but he could still hear Dooley’s voice issuing from the slit of the receiver: “Meet me there, Brasher.”
He barged out the door and sprinted down the empty corridors, his footsteps pounding almost as loud as his heartbeat.
Chapter 21
The unattached house pinned down a modest square of grass on an unremarkable block of Noe Valley. When Daniel screeched around the corner in the ridiculous smart car, he spotted an ambulance and four cruisers at the curb ahead, lights strobing. An elderly neighbor stood on his porch in boxers and an unsashed bathrobe, gesticulating into a cell phone, and a cluster of others were being herded away from the curb by a patrolman. The dashboard clock showed 12:03—late again—but the cops had clearly been here for at least a few minutes.
A paramedic smoked a cigarette before the laid-open rear doors of the ambulance, and Daniel made out the gurney still inside, undeployed. Which meant what? His gaze jerked to the porch. No body bag in sight, but a fall of light announced the front door as open.
He did a drive-by. The front door sagged crookedly, and even from this distance he could make out a splintered panel from where it had been kicked in. Rolling past, he spotted a couple of uniformed cops convening in the foyer, one holding a clipboard, the other speaking animatedly to someone just out of sight.
Lowering his window, Daniel braked before the patrolman. “Did you get here in time?”
“We don’t look busy?” the guy said. “We’re out here at midnight just standing around, hoping to answer questions from rubberneckers—”
“I’m here to see Inspector Dooley. I’m the one who—”
“Get out of here so Inspector Dooley can do her job. Move it. And buy a real car.”
“He’s fine!” Dooley appeared in the open doorway, shouting down the front walk. She beckoned Daniel with a flick of two fingers, a woman used to having her commands obeyed.
The patrolman grimaced and s
tepped aside to let Daniel park. An angry wind caught him in the face as he climbed out, and he hunched into it as he made his way up the walk.
Dooley waited for him on the porch beneath an elaborate set of wind chimes, looking displeased.
“How’s Kyle Lane?” Daniel asked.
“Not here, that’s how he is.” They paused by the shattered front door. “Not that that stopped this probe here from going all Vin Diesel on the front door.”
A young officer ducked his head sheepishly and slapped a clipboard into her waiting hand. She shoved it at Daniel. “Sign the crime-scene log. And follow me.”
A grizzled patrolwoman reached over and took the clipboard from Daniel. She cast a wary look at Dooley. “Hang on, now. The lieutenant—your lieutenant—told me to keep the scene airtight. You know damn well the press is warming up to this one, Dooley. And now you’re marching in a witness?”
“He’s not just a witness,” Dooley said. “He is inside this case. Which means he has a vantage no one else does. I need his eyes and I need his expertise, and if adding one more name to the log’s gonna get me an inch closer to the Tearmaker”—Dooley lifted the clipboard from the woman’s thick hands—“then I’m adding one more name to the log.”
She shoved it at Daniel, who signed, then returned it apologetically to the peeved patrolwoman. Dooley took his arm and pulled him inside. The house’s bland exterior did not prepare him for the elaborate furnishings. Red velvet flocked wallpaper darkened the living room, and a few bordello lamps, capped with fringed shades, cast a guttering glow across an antique coffee table stacked with art books about Tuscany. An ornate china hutch displayed kitschy Lladró figurines and a menagerie of wineglasses suited to any varietal. On the closed lid of a baby grand, a carapace of framed photos captured different groups of men in various settings—sunning on a beach-house deck, posing beneath the high barrel-vaulted and coffered ceiling of the grand opera house’s lobby, mugging for the camera outside a Castro bar.
Theresa watched him peruse the photos. “Yep,” she said. “Gayer than a Christmas tablecloth.”
One face recurred in each picture, a dark-eyed man in his mid-forties with a wispy ponytail and a receding chin. Kyle Lane.
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