Джеймс Паттерсон - The Black Book

I’m supposed to eat four meals a day to get my weight back, but I can hardly stomach three squares. Some days the only things I eat are plain pieces of bread and water. Maybe, in some weird way, I’m readying myself for prison, for the tasteless paste they will slop on my plate every day.

I look at the handgun on the bedside table. I won’t deny that it’s crossed my mind, at my darkest moments, when my memory loss drove me to the precipice, when I wanted to tear my hair out and peel off my skin and scream until I had no voice, when I was convinced that I must have committed murder, that the evidence didn’t add up any other way, and that I will spend the rest of my life in a living hell of prison. I thought about tasting the steel on my tongue, the muzzle so deep in my mouth that I gag, squeezing my eyes shut and willing my thumb to pull the trigger.

I thought about it. But I’m too stubborn to do it. The Irish don’t commit suicide; we just let ourselves be miserable forever.

I have a story. It’s not what I remember, and it may or may not be true, but it’s a story: Kate walked in on Amy and me having sex and opened fire in a jealous rage. That’s what everybody thought at first, before the test results came back, before they had completed their investigation.

Before they discovered that my gun, not Kate’s, was used to kill Amy.

Before they recovered the text messages from Kate’s missing phone.

But it’s the best story I can think up. It matches the crime scene to some extent, and it’s pretty straightforward. A jealous rage, a woman scorned who happens to be heavily armed at the time of said scorn, doesn’t require me to prove a number of different facts. Even if jurors might not do it themselves, they can understand the sting of betrayal and the temptation to act on it, to kill the person who stole your lover from your arms and shoot the cheating bastard, too. It’s been the stuff of movies, of songs, of novels for a reason—everyone can relate to it on some level.

Either that or I put on no defense at all, a sure loser. Or I take the witness stand and sit there like a dumbass, shrug at Margaret Olson’s questions, and simply say, Good question; wish I knew. Don’t remember. Can’t argue with you there. Boy, I agree, that sure looks bad, but there might be an innocent explanation IF I COULD JUST FUCKING REMEMBER —

Enough. Enough of that crap.

I look once more at the log of those text messages, the ones that Wizniewski showed me with such delight, the ones Kate sent as she stood outside Amy’s apartment door only minutes before everything happened.

Open the door, she was texting me:

Need to talk to u

Why would I do that I said in response, as if Kate had picked a terrible time for a chat. And Kate’s answer, those words, those simple words in black and white on the page I hold in my hand, but not black and white, full of fire and fury, rising off the piece of paper and floating in front of me, dancing and taunting me:

Bc she knows u idiot. She knows about u and so do I

I have tried to decipher this message for the seven and a half weeks since I was charged with murder. I’ve tried to remember, and I’ve tried to think logically. But the two things are sewn together. I can’t fit the pieces together when I don’t have the pieces, when I can’t remember what happened. The more I call out for my memory, begging, pleading for it to return, the farther it burrows into the shadows.

I will have to learn to live with it, like a patient with a spinal injury who has to accept that he’ll never walk again. I have to accept that I’ll never remember, that I’ll never really know, that it will lie buried inside me until the day I die.

So I’ll be a good soldier. I’ll learn to cope with it. But still I will wonder—every hour of every day, every day of every year I will wonder.

What did Amy know about me? What could I have done that was so bad?

The Past

Sixty-Seven

“DO YOU solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”

I do . Or at least that’s what I told the clerk before I took my seat on the witness stand. I straightened my tie. I looked over the courtroom, so crowded with reporters and spectators that it felt like the walls would bend outward. The defense table was thick with lawyers, while their clients, including Mayor Francis Delaney and Archbishop Michael Xavier Phelan and a cast of other VIPs, sat behind them in the front row.

The first defense lawyer—the mayor’s lawyer—stood and buttoned his jacket. This wasn’t the trial itself; this was the hearing where the defense would try to convince the judge that I lacked probable cause to enter the brownstone. If they won, the arrests were invalid, and all these guys would walk free. This was their only shot. After all, we caught these defendants in various states of undress with young women. They had no plausible defense at trial—nobody was going to believe that they snuck into a discreet high-society sex club to play Parcheesi with scantily clad women. Their only hope was to wrap themselves in the Bill of Rights, the Fourth Amendment. Their only hope was to tear me to shreds.

Amy’s eyes were on me, but I looked away when I saw her. It was all business now, so it wasn’t the time for me to discuss other matters—other matters such as the glossy full-color eight-by-ten photograph of Amy walking up the steps to the brownstone, the photograph that someone put into a plain envelope and propped against my door last night. The photo that I brought with me today, that was too big to stick in my pocket, so I put it in my briefcase next to the prosecution table. It was hidden, tucked away inside a flap, but it felt radioactive, sending out signals to me that something was not what it seemed—

But no time for that now. Now was all business.

“Detective.” The mayor’s lawyer, Shaw DeCremer, once served under the first President Bush as his attorney general. He had since joined some powerhouse law firm—Readem and Weep, or maybe it was Woulda, Coulda, and Shoulda—and handled cases from coast to coast, usually high-stakes trials involving celebrities and politicians.

“You didn’t have a warrant when you entered the brownstone, did you?” he asked.

“That’s correct.”

“Could you…” DeCremer waved a hand, strolled a bit in front of the defense table. “Could you describe the brownstone?”

I did my best. An old place, freestanding, sandstone and dark wood, arched entry, three stories.

“How many exits and entrances?” he asked.

“One entrance in the front, another in the back.”

“Anything else? Secret tunnels? Any kind of elaborate escape routes?”

I shrugged. “Not that I knew of. But you never know.”

“But the point is you didn’t know. At the time of the raid, you didn’t have any reason to believe there was some clever way that the people in the brownstone could escape or anything.”

“That’s correct.”

“In fact, Detective, you’d never set foot in that brownstone, had you? Before the raid, I mean.”

His point was fairly obvious if you understood the Fourth Amendment, which I pretty much did as a cop. Amy had hammered it into me during trial prep. If you don’t have a warrant when you enter, you better have a good reason. The most common reason is that you’re aware of criminal conduct—you saw drugs or weapons, for example, through a window—and you fear that if you don’t go in immediately, if you take the time to go before a judge and secure a warrant, the offenders will have time to destroy the incriminating evidence if not escape altogether. DeCremer is trying to demonstrate that I didn’t have any such concern the night of the raid.