Donnally took the final turn.
Brown’s chair was empty.
The chains that had held him lay snaked on the floor.
Donnally grabbed a two-by-four, cocked it like a baseball bat, and ducked toward the space under the stairs.
Empty.
He tossed down the board and ran back up the steps.
Brown wasn’t hiding in the downstairs bathroom or in Janie’s office.
Janie.
Donnally ran up the next flight. Her bedroom door was open and her bed was in disarray. The bathroom light was on. He pulled his gun, imagining Brown standing over her bloody body lying in the tub.
Four steps later, he faced an empty bathroom.
He heard a muffled sound from down the hallway, then spun back toward the door and ran to the next bedroom. The door was closed.
He heard a voice from within. Janie’s. “No.”
At least she was still alive.
An image of Brown strangling Anna flashed through Donnally’s mind. He was sure Brown was kneeling over Janie. If he shot at Brown and missed, he’d hit her. He slipped the gun back into his holster, wishing he’d brought the board from the basement and imagining the thunk of wood against the back of Brown’s skull.
Donnally eased his hand around the doorknob and turned it. He heard a soft click of the bolt sliding past the strike plate. He pushed the door inward an inch, then allowed the knob to turn back. He lodged his forearm against the door and set himself to spring across the ten feet between it and the bed, grab Brown by his shoulders, and throw him to the floor.
He flung the door open, took a step, then froze.
Brown was curled into a fetal position at the head of the bed. Janie was sitting at the foot, dressed in her robe. They both flinched and looked up at Donnally, Brown in terror, Janie in anger.
“What are you doing?” she asked, raising her hands in complaint.
“I should be asking you that.”
“You said it’s my house. And in my house I can do what I want.”
Donnally extended his palm toward her. “Don’t put him in the middle of us.” He stepped forward. “Let me do what I brought him here to do.”
She rose and blocked his path. “No.”
“No what?”
“I’ve decided to make him my patient.”
“And have him do to you what he did to Anna when she took him in?”
“How do you know he did anything to her?”
Donnally glanced at the ceiling and rolled his eyes. “You’re as nuts as he is.”
Janie reached toward the dresser and picked up a plastic pill bottle. She tossed it to Donnally. He looked at the label. Lithium prescribed at the Santa Rita jail.
“He’s been on that since he first appeared in court. His attorney insisted on it. Perkins wanted him to be competent to stand trial. She wanted to know the truth, too.”
“The truth? You think he was ever going to tell the truth to her? Or you?”
“In time.”
Donnally locked his hands on his waist and glared past her at Brown. “The time is now.” Then back at her. “Ask him why his fingerprints were on the windowsill?”
“I already know.”
“How could you know? You haven’t seen the ID tech’s report.”
“Which way were the fingerprints facing?” Janie asked.
“The way they’d be if someone let themselves down.”
“Or pulled himself up to look in?”
Donnally drew back, feeling himself wrenched around by the change in perspective.
“What?”
“He says he pulled himself up to look inside.”
“More likely he climbed inside to attack her after she locked him out.”
Janie pointed down toward the dining room. “Get the report.”
Donnally walked downstairs. His legs were weak. The fixed point toward which he had been marching had tumbled away.
He gave his head a shake. Not yet. Brown had years to figure out a story that matched the evidence. Surely he had moments of clarity long enough to accomplish that.
The reports lay in an accordion file on the table. Donnally slipped off the rubber band and flipped through them until he found the crime scene diagram and photographs.
He dropped into a chair and inspected a photograph of the outside of the house below the window. Scuff marks. Wide at the top. Thin at the bottom. Someone trying to push himself up. His shoes slipping. But none higher than two feet off the ground.
He then rose and walked to the double-hung window behind him. He imagined himself climbing in. His hands first gripping the sill, then twisting as he pulled himself over and in.
He turned around and looked down at the photograph. No twist. Just the fingers and palm of each hand facing inward, a little smudge forward and a little smudge back.
Donnally closed his eyes.
What had Brown said in front of the Noe Valley Bakery?
“They told me I killed her. Do you know if I killed her?”
Then what did he say? Something about Atascadero.
“They put me in Atascadero. I started to remember.”
Remember what?
Donnally felt gravity sucking him down as he forced himself to climb back upstairs, struggling under the weight of his misplaced certainty. He paused on the landing, recalling Saam Ji telling him in the park that Brown gave him the willies because of the way he looked at women.
“Rover’s really gonna hurt somebody someday,” Saam Ji had said.
But Brown hadn’t. He’d mostly only hurt himself, punching walls and trees and news racks. Even the injury to Katrisha had been the result of a similar kind of blind lashing out.
Maybe Brown did have delusions about women, about Anna, maybe even now about Janie. Maybe he truly did believe that Anna wanted him to touch her, and it was the delusion alone, and not the evidence, that had made him seem guilty, even to his own lawyers, over all these years.
Chapter 30
D onnally, Janie, and Brown sat the kitchen table, their breakfast plates before them.
“Did you want to take lithium after you were arrested?” Janie asked Brown.
“They said it would help, but it didn’t. It made me sick. They tied me to the bed, but it gave me diarrhea and they wouldn’t let me go to the toilet. And I kept throwing up, laying on my back. I was choking. I begged them to stop.”
Janie looked over at Donnally. “They gave him too much at the beginning. In those days, dosing amounts were still a mystery.”
“And you told your attorney?” Donnally asked him.
“The judge made them stop.” Brown stared down at his half-eaten scrambled eggs. “Anna told me Dr. Sherwyn was bad, but I thought he wanted to help me.”
Donnally glanced at Janie, his expression telling her that Brown was delusional, unable to recall the sequence of events that led him to meet Sherwyn only after Anna was dead.
“Are you sure it was Anna?” Janie asked.
Brown’s head jerked up and down with such force that his body shook.
“That was after they argued about Star Wars.”
Donnally slumped in his chair and exhaled.
“R2D2. They argued about R2D2 and RT. She said to Dr. Sherwyn, ‘I know who you are. A rabbit.’ She said he was a rabbit. And he called her Alice in Wonderland.”
Donnally looked into Brown’s eyes, now darting. Obviously hallucinating.
“Where were they talking?” Janie asked.
“In Anna’s living room.”
“Where were you?”
Brown looked around. “Here.”
“What do you mean, here?” Donnally asked.
“The kitchen. I mean her kitchen. I peeked around the door. He looked like a rabbit.”
Donnally smiled to himself. Despite his delusions, Brown had gotten that right. Even in his mid-sixties and probably thirty pounds heavier than back then, Dr. Sherwyn still had a pointy face and disproportionate ears.
Brown scrunched up his nose, exposing his upper teeth. “He did that when he was thinking.”
That was a tic that Donnally had noticed during Sherwyn’s testimony, but he thought it was just a defensive grimace prompted by Blaine’s attacks.