“I told you, Brightman, I’m not playing.”
Barto shoved me in the back. “Do it!”
“No.”
“Okay, then I’ll do it,” Barto said. Brightman’s eyes got angry, but Barto had the bigger gun. “Moe set Brightman up and goaded him into a confession. Even made him piss his pants. What Brightman didn’t know was that his wife and Thomas Geary had watched and listened to the whole thing. There. Now, can we get this over with?”
I could see in his eyes that Brightman was getting ready for the finale.
“How could I go to the police?” I said. “I had no proof and all the witnesses were dead.”
“I thought you weren’t playing,” he said.
“I waited until you started lying.”
He shoved the. 38 into Katy’s ribs so hard she crumpled in pain. He pulled her back up. The passivity was gone from her eyes.
“That’s right, instead of being satisfied with ruining my career, he had to hurt my wife. Ruining me professionally didn’t really cut it for Moe Prager. No, he wanted to punish me in a personal way, so he used my wife.”
“I always regretted doing that. I realized I’d punished her more than you.”
“Katerina divorced me in about thirty seconds. She couldn’t understand how she could have shared her bed with a murderer and not have known. That question haunted her for the rest of her life. Did you know she-”
“-died last summer. Yeah, I know. I’m sorry. Katerina was really sweet and one of the most stunningly beautiful women I’ve ever met,” I said. “Cancer, right?”
“No, it wasn’t cancer, it was the haunting and the guilt.”
“Guilt?”
“Oh, so there are things you don’t know?” Brightman taunted.
He whispered something into Katy’s ear that I couldn’t hear. There was immediate and crushing ache in Katy’s eyes. I hadn’t seen anything like it since the miscarriage, since Connie Geary’s wedding day, when Katy sat sobbing in a stall of the women’s bathroom at the Lonesome Piper County Club. She sobbed now so that even the tape couldn’t contain the sound of it. She cried so hard that her body seemed to convulse.
“Do you want to know what I told her, Moe?”
No. “Yes.”
“I told her that a week after you confronted me on the street and got me to confess my sins, Katerina had an abortion. She was empty after that, empty ever after. That’s what killed her, not cancer.”
More than anything, I wanted to call him a lying motherfucker. I wanted to accuse him of fabricating that story so he could torture the both of us with it, but I knew he was telling the truth even before the words were fully out of his mouth. And now, finally, I understood why he had gone to such elaborate means.
“Kill me,” I said, spreading my arms out. “Just leave her alone. Don’t repeat my mistake.”
Brightman aimed my. 38 as his mouth formed the word no, but I couldn’t hear him. I couldn’t hear anything above the thwap thwap thwap of the helicopter blades. The downwash kicked up a storm of dirt and rocks. An intense and blinding spotlight encircled us. I shielded my eyes. There was the bark of gunfire. I spun. Barto’s head rocked back. Crimson spray danced in the light. A flash. Several flashes. Something bit hard into my ankle and burned its way into the bone. I went down. More shots. I pushed my face out of the dirt. Brightman was no longer standing. He was on his back, arms thrown out, one leg bent completely beneath him. I crawled over to Katy.
The pain in her eyes was gone, with it had gone the light. I pulled the tape off her mouth and put my lips to hers. They were still warm, but the pressure of my weight on her body forced blood out of her mouth and onto my lips. I smeared her blood across my face. I hoped my tears would never wash it away. I was wrong about my destiny. It didn’t lay in front, but behind me.
There was a hand on my shoulder. I turned to see Agent Markowitz standing at my back, a mournful, pleading look on his face. He was speaking but it was all just twisted lips and a jumble of noise. He pointed at my wrecked ankle, the blood gushing out of it, mixing with the dirt, mixing with the blood of the dead. Markowitz pulled off his shirt and pressed it hard against my leg, his mouth moving the whole time. I was starting to catch words now, a few at a time. He was shouting the same thing at me over and over again. Finally, I understood.
“How do you feel?”
I didn’t answer. Brightman’s words were so loud in my head, I didn’t think I would ever hear anything else again. How does it feel? How did I feel? How would I feel?
Empty.
Empty ever after.
EPILOGUE
Sarah received the videotape about a week after we buried Katy. The tape was from Brightman, mailed by proxy-maybe his lawyer, but probably Connie Geary-shortly after his death. On the tape, he confessed to the murders of Carl Stipe, the little boy from his home town, Moira Heaton, and Patrick Farner, the other Patrick Michael Maloney impersonator. Ralph Barto, he said, had murdered John James, Fallon, Martello, and Mary White. He explained to my daughter why he had murdered her mother. It was, he said, my fault for having slowly killed his ex-wife. He took great pains to discuss the details of my involvement.
When Sarah came to me, there was little I could refute. I hadn’t left things well enough alone all those years ago. I had indeed rejected the offer of the gold shield I had so desperately wanted in order to dig and dig and dig until I found the truth out about Steven Brightman. When I found the truth, I set Brightman up to confess in front of his wife. I had wanted to punish him by using her. And in the end, I shared the truth with almost no one who was directly involved. Carl Stipe’s mother and Moira Heaton’s father went to their graves without knowing what had actually happened to their children.
Sarah hasn’t spoken to me in nearly a year. She took a leave of absence from the University of Michigan and moved into Francis Maloney’s old house on Hanover Street in Janus. To think that I lost Sarah to him not because of anything he did, but because of my own blindness is irony beyond even my ability to comprehend. Sometimes on rainy nights when I can’t sleep, I imagine I can hear him laughing at me. On those nights I pour myself a Dewar’s, look out my window at the black waters of Sheepshead Bay, and raise my glass to him. “Yes, Francis,” I say, “I do believe in ghosts.”
Pete Vandervoort keeps me updated about Sarah. She’s still dating Robby, the deputy sheriff. Pete tells me they’re pretty happy together and that Robby’s a good cop. I’ve got nothing against the kid, but I hope like hell he finds another job or Sarah finds another man. Mostly I hope that Sarah can someday forgive me and try to understand that I meant for none of this to happen and that if I could bargain with God, if there was a god to bargain with, I would gladly sacrifice myself to take back even the least of the damage. But as Brightman remarked that night, “What do intentions ever have to do with anything, especially in the face of murder?”
Brightman gave a lot of other information on the tape, stuff only of interest to me and Feeney and the Ohio and Kentucky cops. He explained how he and Barto had picked Martello as the fall guy- He hated your father maybe more than I did and he tended to act out — how they arranged for fake credit cards in Martello’s name- Ralph Barto was well acquainted with a Nigerian gang that specialized in identity theft — how they induced Mr. Fallon to do the grave desecrations- Money, and the phony deed to a nonexistent house on Galway Bay — how they got Mary White to conspire- We falsified some New York City Department of Public Health forms indicating that Patrick Maloney had been the one to infect her brother with HIV. Of course, Patrick had died years before anyone had ever heard of HIV or AIDS, but our money helped cloud Mary’s memory.
Steven Brightman didn’t deem either John James or Patrick Farner worthy of explanation. Why would he? Chess players don’t bother explaining the sacrifice of their pawns. There was also one other glaring omission in his taped confession. He hadn’t discussed how he managed to finance his revenge. I chose not to discuss it either, at least not on the record.