The story carries on. I wait for her to pitch the fact that Finding the Dead is on the same network as them, but she doesn’t. At one point the camera focuses on Carl Schroder. He looks tired. The reporter confirms Schroder works for the TV station that produces Jonas Jones’s show. It confirms Schroder was present when the body was found. Then it focuses on Jonas Jones, who is being spoken to by the same woman who escorted me out to the farm yesterday.
Watching it unfold, I feel buoyed by the entire situation. Not just because there is now a guaranteed payday, but because if there are people out there who believe in psychics, and there are people out there who watch their shows, then that means there are people out there who will believe anything.
That means there are people who will believe in my innocence.
Chapter Forty-Five
Some warmth is finally starting to creep into the day. What isn’t creeping into the day is any more traffic, for which Melissa is thankful. She hates getting caught in traffic. She always has a fear of somebody rear-ending her, some kind of confrontation, some weird shitty set of coincidences lining up in which she gets caught. It’s happened in the past—not to her, but to others like her, other people who have taken lives have been caught by parking tickets and speeding tickets and flashed by red-light cameras. The sooner she is off the roads the better, and she wants to get this over with and back home because, after all, she still has a homelife that she’s been neglecting. She needs to get things prepared for Joe.
She gets back to the office. Again she gets the same parking spot. The door is closed, but hasn’t been repaired and swings open without any resistance. She carries the gun up to the office. She peeks behind the curtain and stares out at the back of the courthouse, and she visualizes the tree she just shot, she visualizes Joe standing there, and now she’s even less confident this is going to work. She is sure Raphael will take the shot—but is he good enough? A hand shaking a fraction of an inch up here can result in a few feet down there. But there is no alternative. She spent months trying to think of other ways to get Joe out of jail—and this is it. It’s not that this is the best of a bunch of bad ideas—the fact is this was always the only idea.
She has two bullets left, plus the armor-piercing round. She leaves the armor-piercing round as it is. The bullet puller she bought from the gun store is shaped like a hammer and uses kinetic energy to separate the bullet from the casing. It takes one bullet at a time. Arthur sold her the right-sized components, and the bullet slots easily into the end of the device. She crouches down and has to strike it against the floor, just like swinging a hammer, and after three hits the bullet comes apart. The second bullet takes four hits to come apart. She’s good with tools. Joe could verify that. She can imagine people doing the same thing with pliers and vise grips and blowing their fingers off. Using the tool is easy. It separates the bullet from the cartridge. She removes the powder. Then she uses the second tool she bought from Arthur—a bullet-seating die, to reassemble them. The bullets look and feel like the real deal—and the weight difference without the gunpowder is negligible.
She puts the gun away just as it was left, all ready for Raphael to come along and use tomorrow morning. She has plans for the rest of the day, but she takes a moment to steal one more glance out over the back of the courthouse. Tomorrow is either going to go really well for Joe or really badly for Joe, but either way, by the end of the day Joe will no longer be a prisoner.
Chapter Forty-Six
When Ali arrives and I’m escorted through to see her, I’m nervous. Suddenly there’s a lot more riding on me convincing her I’m an innocent man. I may have just earned myself fifty thousand dollars, but I’d gladly part with every one of them to have her believe me.
“Tell me about your mother,” she asks, once we’re seated and I’m cuffed to mine.
“My mother? Why?”
“Because I asked.”
I shrug, the handcuff rattling against the chair. “Well, Mom is Mom,” I say. “There’s not much to say,” I add, which is about as much as I feel like adding.
“You have a good relationship with her?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”
“Most serial killers have very strained relationships with their mother,” she says.
“Can you not use that term?” I ask her.
“Serial killer?”
“Yeah. It sounds so . . . I don’t know. Something. I don’t like the label,” I say.
“You don’t like the label.”
“That’s right,” I say.
She stares at me as if she can’t really believe I just said that. As if innocent until proven guilty isn’t relevant in my case. “Whether you remember it or not,” she says, “you still killed those people. The serial-killer label is accurate.”
“Is that the label my lawyer will be using?”
She nods. “I get your point,” she says. “But let’s get back to my point, which is most people in your . . . situation . . . don’t have great relationships with their mother.”
“Joe isn’t most people,” I tell her, and truer words have never been spoken.
“How long did you live with her for?”
“I moved out of the house when Dad died,” I tell her.
“Why?”
“My mother became unbearable. When Dad was alive it gave her somebody to talk to all day long, but when he died that only left me.”
“She ever abuse you?”
“What?” I say, and the handcuff goes tight as I pull my arm up. “No. Never. Why would you ask something like that?”
“You sure?”
“Of course I’m fucking sure,” I tell her. “My mom’s a saint.”
“Okay, Joe. Try to stay calm.”
“I am calm.”
“You don’t sound it.”
I take a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” I say, which are words I’m not sure I’ve heard myself address to anyone before other than my mother. “I just don’t like it when people think bad things about my mother,” I say, but I’m not sure anybody has ever had good thoughts about her either. “Plus I miss my goldfish,” I tell her.
“What?”
“My goldfish. There were two of them. Pickle and Jehovah. They were murdered.”
“We were talking about your mother,” she says.
“I thought we had moved on,” I tell her.
She jots down something on her pad. Then the pen moves back and forth as she underlines something. I’d almost give my right—and only remaining nut—to see what that is.
“You killed your goldfish?” she asks.
I try to stay calm, but I can feel the anger building up inside of me. For her to ask that means she just doesn’t get me. It seems to be a common problem. What is wrong with people? First she thinks my mom abused me, now she thinks I killed my fish. What is the world coming to? Now I’d almost certainly give my right and only remaining nut to get hold of the pen she’s using and drive it into her neck.
“No. No I didn’t,” I say forcefully. “It was a cat.”
“You look angry, Joe.”
“I’m not angry. I just hate the fact people always think the worst of me.”
“You killed a lot of people,” she says.
“I don’t remember any of them,” I say, “and I sure as hell didn’t hurt my fish.”
She writes something else down. She underlines it, then she rings a couple of circles around it. I’m pretty sure she’s doing it deliberately. I think she’s trying to throw me off guard, and that’s why her questions are all over the place. It’s not going to work. I think good things about my mom and about my fish, good things about Melissa. I think about doing good things to Ali once I get out of here. I might be a bad-thoughts kind of guy, but I’m a good-things kind of person. I’m Optimistic Joe. It’s how I roll.