Джеймс Паттерсон - The Red Book

I’m sorry, Billy, I really am .

I’m not the one needs an apology.

Billy—

Can today be about her? Can at least one day be about our little girl and not you or your sadness or your important cases at work?

I’m…so sorry—

My head pops off the desk in my family room, my arm shooting out, knocking over a glass of water, my other hand gripping paper—research I’ve compiled on Nathan Stofer and Antoine Stonewald and General Boholyubov.

“No,” I say, panting, wiping sweat from my forehead.

No. That’s not what happened. None of that happened. I didn’t say those things and I didn’t think those things and you didn’t kill yourself.

I didn’t believe those things. I never said them to you.

You didn’t kill yourself.

They killed you. They killed you.

Sunlight streaming into the family room. Well past dawn. I fell asleep at the desk downstairs, doing research. A dream about Valerie, once again, serving as my alarm clock.

I grab my phone. Clock says half past seven.

It buzzes in my hand, as if on cue, startling me. Caller ID says Griffin, Carla.

“Harney,” she says, “I hate to do this, but I feel like hell warmed over. I’ve been tossing my cookies half the night.”

I shake out the cobwebs, ignore the icy-cold shiver gripping me, try to get my act together to have a conversation.

“The nausea,” I manage to say.

“Yeah. I have to get the bandages on my face changed this morning anyway, and I was thinking maybe I’ll take today off, make it a long weekend.”

I stand up. “No problem.”

“Well, I know we’re about to reopen K-Town, so the timing isn’t great.”

It’s more than great. The timing is actually perfect. Now she won’t be in my way.

I’ll have the next twenty-four hours to myself.

Chapter 81

A FEELING of dread swims through my chest as I pull onto the campus of Stateville Correctional Center, near Joliet. I’ve had more than my share of visits, usually getting background from inmates, sometimes more vital information from snitches, occasionally flipping a guy who’d refused to cooperate but was reconsidering after his initial stretch in this hellhole. It’s never a joyride, seeing the dilapidated, overcrowded, overburdened facility, where the inmates are scared, bitter, hopeless, mentally ill, or usually a combination thereof.

But this is the first time I’ve felt fear.

Antoine Stonewald looks different from his mug shot. He’s shaved his head, for one, which a fair number of inmates do. Some for hygienic reasons: better to have no hair than unclean hair. Others for safety reasons: one less thing someone can grab or twist.

He’s thicker, too—muscular, not fat, the product of weight lifting, one of the only things to do in here. And he’s older. Not because of the passage of four years, but because of the passage of four years inside Stateville.

“What-choo want, po-lice.” He doesn’t say it as a question. That’s learned behavior. Emotion in here is weakness. Weakness gets you a target on your back.

“I want to know if you killed Nathan Stofer.”

He looks at me as if we’re at a poker table, as if he’s trying to read me and doesn’t want me reading him. “The fuck you sayin’? Said I did. Pleaded guilty.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Yeah, you know. You know a lotta brothers plead guilty to shit they didn’t do?”

“Probably,” I say. “First-degree with a gun? You were looking at forty-five minimum, and that’s assuming the felony murder didn’t stick. Probably would’ve gotten sixty or seventy—black guy kills a rich white guy. So yeah, you took twenty. Doesn’t mean you did it.”

Antoine works his jaw, controlling his emotions. Twiddles his thumbs. The shackles rake against the desk between us.

“Go the fuck home, cracker po-lice.”

“Hey, Antoine, you wanna cut the gangsta smack? You were an honor student at UIC, halfway to an accounting degree, engaged to a nice woman, saving up for a down payment on a condo. You ain’t in B unit right now, looking over your shoulder. It’s just you and me in here. So lose the hard-ass routine and talk to me.”

He chews on his lip, sits back, his expression softening.

“I’m trying to help you, kid.”

He lets out a humorless grunt. “A cop wants to help me. That would be a first.”

Okay, at least now he’s talking to me.

“Help me understand why a kid who worked so hard to make something of himself would do something stupid like shoot a guy in a parking garage.”

He shrugs his shoulders, not in a casual, who-knows sort of way, but a violent way. I’m bringing it all back. He’s worked through it; he’s been dealing it with it for years now, telling himself to keep his time good, get that 15 percent shaved off.

“You pleaded out right after your first lawyer died,” I say.

He looks away, remembering. I try not to do the same.

“ Right after she died,” I add. “Four days later.”

“So?”

“So? Any judge would give a continuance to someone whose lawyer suddenly died just before trial. There was no rush. Why plead guilty so fast?”

Antoine leans forward, like he’s finally willing to engage. The shackles rake along the table as he opens his hands. “Maybe I was already planning on pleading guilty before she died.”

“That’s not the way I’m hearing it, son. I hear she was going to bat for you. She had some ideas that somebody else killed Nathan Stofer. What was the lawyer’s name? Maybe…Valerie?”

“Val,” he says. “Val Blinderman. She said only her husband called her Valerie.”

I close my eyes, look away. I can’t let him know my connection. I reach into my pocket and pull out my phone, check it, anything to busy myself, to keep him from knowing that he just drove a stake into me.

Don’t think about her. Think about him.

Another reason, too. You ask an inmate what’s the worst part, they don’t usually say the violence, the crap food. First thing they usually say is the loneliness. You put a guy in a nice interview room like this, give him a chance to have a conversation, he’ll usually take it and run with it.

Takes him a minute, while I stall for time, but then he keeps going.

“Yeah, she was a nice lady,” he says. “I mean, she was all business, for sure, but—but y’know, she’d talk to me. Like a human being? Nobody in County would do that. Nobody in here, either. But she did. She made you feel like…like you mattered.”

I don’t say anything. I can’t, the emotion choking my throat.

“Sometimes we’d just talk. Like, she had a sick kid. A little baby girl who had a stroke. She was, like, in a coma, but she wasn’t going to come out of it. She’d spend the nights in the hospital and the days working my case. You could tell how tired she was. I told her, go be with her, get someone else to represent me. I mean, she was great, I needed her, but…that’s family, man. It’s more important.”

My eyes bore into the black screen of my phone, my body beginning to tremble.

“What did…she say to that?” I say, hardly more than a whisper.

“She said I sounded like her husband.”

I nod, staring into blackness, focusing on anything, anything but the memory. Don’t go there. Stay here, in this room, focus on the job.

“She said, ‘My daughter’s gone. I can’t save her. But maybe I can save you.’ She said her daughter would want that.”

I squeeze my eyes shut. My hand reaches up to my wet face, my shoulders bouncing now, breathing coming in gasps.

She was right. Our little baby girl would have wanted that.

“Hey, man, I didn’t mean to…”