Andrew Gross - 15 Seconds

Yes, she had said, I know that, Rick. Because you said so.

“You’re going to make it, Raef,” she whispered in his ear. “You’re going to be healthy again, and do all the things young boys do. You know that, right? You know how we love you, don’t you?” Her eyes filled with tears. “You know that nothing could happen to you…”

She remembered closing her eyes and praying. “If you save my boy’s life…” She was never the religious type, but right now… “You can take anything from me. Anything . I swear to you…”

Not long after that, a nurse touched her shoulder. Carrie turned. “Ms. Holmes, they need you down in the OR…”

She looked at the nurse’s face for a sign that it was okay.

Rick died on the table. He had a stroke caused by an aortic rupture, and they couldn’t stem the flow of blood or get oxygen to the brain. It had probably been there from birth, the doctors said. Through college. Through Iraq. Through law school. Maybe it was the stress of what happened to Raef that caused it to finally rupture, the doctors speculated. Trying to be strong for all of them. The doctors did everything they could.

Now every time she looked in her son’s resilient eyes, she saw him.

Rick.

“So what do I always say to you?” Carrie said, pulling Raef close to her. “C’mere …” The stress of her first day back on the job returned. Losing Martinez. Fielding the call from Steadman. “I need a really big hug.”

“I love you mountains and oceans, right, Mommy?” Her arms nestled around him, tears of joy filling her eyes.

“ Right. Oh, that’s pretty big!” Carrie said with a halting breath, lifting him off the ground.

And as she held him, the oddest thought wormed into her brain.

What Steadman had said on the phone. As if only to her. “I swear on my daughter’s life, Carrie. You’ll know what I mean…”

Yes, I do know what that means, she thought now. She gripped her sweet-smelling boy a little tighter.

“Whatever it looks like, whatever anyone believes, it wasn’t me!”

That’s why the words had hit home the way they did. There was a space in her heart that seemed to open for those very words.

“I swear!” Those words meant everything to her.

Yes, she said to herself, hugging Raef. I know exactly what that means.

Ispent that first night in the Lexus in the empty lot of a large office park.

I also did what that bastard told me to do. I stopped in an Office Max and picked up a couple of disposable phones. I texted the number to Hallie’s phone.

Then I waited. I waited until I couldn’t hold my eyes open anymore.

No reply.

Earlier, I’d found a tool set in the car’s emergency kit and drove around a movie complex until I came across a Honda with Tennessee plates and switched the front plate onto mine. With luck, the owners might not even know it was missing for a while, and even if they did, a stolen, out-of-state plate wasn’t exactly the biggest story of the day with everything else going on. And Lexus SUVs were a dime a dozen on the roads.

I hoped this would buy me some time.

I had my first meal of the day from a Wendy’s take-out window, chomping down the double burger in maybe three large bites along with a box of chicken tenders and a Coke. I normally watched what I ate and would rather die than stuff down a meal like that, but the day’s events had left me empty and ravenous, and, showing up at Ruth’s Chris going, “Table for one, please!” wasn’t exactly an option tonight.

The only plan I had was to assert my innocence and focus on that blue car.

My thoughts drifted back to Hallie and Mike. I tried to think of every possible way he and Martinez might somehow have been connected. Mike was a prominent real estate attorney in town. He would have known police. Then there was the gamecock thing. South Carolina.

But the only real connection between them was me .

I turned on the news, basically just to keep me company, until my eyes finally got heavy and I started drifting off to sleep.

What I heard almost sent my heart through my chest.

“The Jacksonville Murder Spree suspect,” the commentator said. “This is not the first time. He’s done it before.”

The news report said that a television station in New England was claiming that as a student at Amherst, I’d been involved in a fraternity hazing accident in which someone had mysteriously drowned.

“No,” I shot up in the car and shouted. “No, no, no, no…”

I pulled out my iPad and clicked on Google news until I found the link. It was from the website of a WNME in Portland, Maine.

How did they know what had happened back then?

The article read, The Palm Beach surgeon wanted in connection with the murders today of a Jacksonville Florida policeman and a successful businessman has apparently done it before.

My eyes almost bugged out of my head.

A college classmate of Dr. Henry Steadman, a person of interest sought in connection with the cold-blooded killings today, claims that while a student at Amherst College in the 1980s, Steadman and a fraternity brother were involved in the unexplained drowning of a fellow student in a fraternity hazing ritual gone tragically wrong.

Thomas E. Boothby of Bangor, Maine, claims he was a member of a student judiciary board at Amherst called to investigate Steadman’s role in the mishap, which occurred at a local swimming hole known as the Quarry.

As Boothby recounted, a freshman pledge at the Chi Psi fraternity, Terrence Gifford, plunged into the lake from a fifty-foot height in the dead of night, struggled in the icy water, with Steadman near him, and drowned. The incident was ultimately deemed to be “accidental,” and while Boothby claims, “No one can be sure what actually happened in the waters that night,” no charges were ever filed.

“This poor freshman from Minnesota was dragged out at night and ordered to jump into the freezing pond,” Boothby, an EPA administrator in Bangor recalled, “which was about fifty feet down. All anyone knew is that three students went up there and only two came back. While there was never any firm evidence to warrant an arrest or expulsion, there was significant drinking going on; other people nearby heard arguing and thrashing in the water.” He recalled that although Steadman was ultimately dismissed from the fraternity, he was not asked to leave school.

I felt the blood rush in anger into my face. Who the hell was this guy? Boothby . I’d never even heard of him. Whoever he was, he’d twisted the entire thing around. The article also provided details about the events in Jacksonville today and how the suspect’s successful and likable veneer and his stature in the medical community seemed at odds with the heinous nature of the crimes.

“I know everyone feels that way,” Boothby went on to say, “but when I heard who it was, it immediately took me back. All I can say is, I always felt something suspicious took place up on those rocks, a lot more than ever came out. So this doesn’t surprise me.”

School officials have not yet commented on the twenty-two-year-old incident.

“Screw you!” I shouted in the darkened SUV, my blood hitting a boil. A cold sweat sprang up all over my back.

The story wasn’t completely made up, at least not technically, but everything else was twisted. Nothing happened up there. Only a tragic accident. The kid fell. He didn’t want to go through with it and he panicked up on the ledge. I was actually the one who told him he didn’t have to go through with it. And “the argument” this asshole was referring to was actually between me and another Chi Psi dude named Luke Chappelle, who kept insisting that if Giffie didn’t jump, he could kiss Chi Psi good-bye. The kid tried to break away from Chappelle and head back down when he tripped and tumbled over the edge. I’m the one who jumped in after him and tried like hell to bring him back up. The incident killed me for a while. I almost left school. But it wasn’t because I was guilty. We never pushed him. This Boothby jerk had it all wrong. It was a frat ritual. We’d all made the jump multiple times.