Chapter 20
The visiting room at FCI Ray Brook was louder in the evening.
During the day it had the feel of a library nobody wanted to be in, all whispers and careful postures, but the evening session drew a different crowd.
Wives who'd driven two hours after work.
Mothers who came every week and would keep coming until they couldn't. A couple of kids running between tables while a correctional officer tracked them but had learned that telling children to sit still in a federal prison was a losing proposition.
Noah signed in at the front desk and went through the same process he'd gone through before.
Phone, wallet, belt. The wand. The walk through two sets of security doors.
The corridor with its polished floors and recycled air.
But this time when they brought Carter Lyle into the room, Noah understood something had changed.
Carter moved differently. The last time Noah had seen him, there'd been a stillness to the man, a conserved energy. He’d learned to make himself small and efficient inside a space that punished anything else.
That was gone. Now Carter walked with his shoulders drawn up and his head on a swivel, checking the room before he sat down.
His left eye was swollen shut, the skin around it a deep purple that had started to yellow at the edges.
A cut ran along his cheekbone, closed with butterfly strips that looked like they'd been applied by someone who didn't care much whether they held.
Carter sat down across from Noah. The chains clinked. He didn't settle into the chair the way he had before. He perched on the edge of it, weight forward, like he was ready to stand again at the first wrong sound.
"What happened?" Noah asked.
Carter touched the edge of the butterfly strips with two fingers, gently, the way you test whether something still hurts. It did. "What do you think?"
"Yard?"
"Chow line. Three of them. One held, two hit. Guards took ninety seconds to respond. That's a long time when someone's working on your face." He dropped his hand. "Someone wants me dead before my time." His good eye fixed on Noah. "Wouldn't be your family, would it?"
Noah scoffed. "You're reaching."
"Am I? Roberts had a lot to say about your family."
"And he will. I put him in this place. He's pissed that he couldn't continue his little corruption game."
"Maybe he's pissed that he's punished for corruption when there are others on the outside still corrupt." Carter studied Noah like he didn’t trust him. "What do you want?"
Noah reached into the folder he'd brought and slid a photograph across the table. Derek Hollis. Taken from his Lyft driver profile. Mid-thirties, dark hair, tattoo sleeve visible on his left forearm.
“Do you know him?”
Carter looked at it. Picked it up with his cuffed hands and held it closer to his good eye. Studied it for a few seconds, then set it back down.
"Depends. What do I get out of it if I say I do?"
"You don't get anything."
Carter smiled. It pulled at the cut on his cheek and he winced but the smile stayed. "Can't judge a man for trying." He sighed and pushed the photo back. "Never seen him before. Who is he?"
"Someone we're looking at."
"For Kara?"
"For other things."
"Other things." Carter repeated it like he was turning it over, checking the weight of it. He leaned back, as far as the chains allowed, and crossed his arms on the table.
"Were you working with anyone on the outside?" Noah asked.
Carter laughed. It was a short, hard sound that drew a glance from the correctional officer stationed by the door. "Oh, I get it. You think because a dead girl shows up wearing Kara Ellison's jacket with her ID in the pocket, that I must have been operating with someone else."
"Were you?"
"No."
"How did you know about the jacket?"
Carter tilted his head toward the wall behind him.
"We have a thing called a TV in here. It's not like the media hasn't had something to say about all those bodies they found recently.
The Brooke Danvers girl. The disappearance of Fiona Spence.
" He paused. "You can imagine what I was thinking when I heard that.
I said it four years ago in court. I was not guilty.
They refused to believe it." He straightened in his chair. "Maybe now they'll believe me."
"I believe you."
The room kept going around them. The murmur of other conversations, a child's laugh, the scrape of a chair being pushed back. But at their table the air changed. Carter's expression shifted from the guarded hostility he'd worn since walking in to something rawer.
"What?" Carter said.
"I believe you didn't kill Kara Ellison."
Carter stared at him. His good eye searched Noah's face for the lie, the angle, the trick.
He'd been inside long enough to know that nobody said anything in a visiting room without wanting something in return.
His jaw worked like he was chewing on a response that kept changing shape before he could spit it out.
"The trouble is we don't have enough evidence yet to pin this on someone else," Noah said.
"And you all waited four years to figure this out?"
"Some of us weren't looking."
"No. You weren't." Carter's voice dropped.
Not anger exactly. Something colder. The accumulated weight of four years of saying the same thing to people who had the power to listen and chose not to.
"Four years. I've been in here four years while whoever took that girl kept walking around breathing fresh air and doing God knows what to God knows who.
And now there are bodies in a bog and another girl is missing and you're sitting here telling me you believe me like that's supposed to mean something. "
"It means I'm looking into it."
"A bit late, don't you think?"
Noah let that sit. He didn't have an answer for it that wouldn't sound hollow. Carter was right. It was late. Everything about this was late.
"I need to ask you about Jenny Walters."
The temperature at the table dropped. Carter had been leaning forward, engaged, but at the name he pulled back. His shoulders came up and his jaw tightened and the bruised eye seemed to swell a shade darker, though Noah knew that was just the light.
"What about her?"
"Your ex. The case six years ago. I've read the file but I need to hear it from you. What happened between you and Jenny?"
Carter Lyle stared at him. The surprise from a moment ago was gone. In its place was something harder, something that had been building since the first punch landed in the chow line and maybe since long before that.
"Unbelievable." He said it quietly. "Girls are showing up dead while I'm inside. Bodies in bogs. Another one missing. And you want to know about Jenny."
"I need the full picture."
Carter's fists balled on the table. The chains pulled taut.
"I'm eight days away from being executed.
Girls are turning up dead while I'm sitting in here and you want to rehash Jenny?
" He leaned forward. "You came all the way here to ask me about a case that was already closed.
What do you think I can tell you that changes anything? "
The correctional officer shifted his weight and moved a step closer.
Carter stood. The chair scraped back against the floor and the sound cut through the visiting room noise like a blade. Several heads turned. A mother at the next table pulled her child closer. The officer had his hand on his belt.
"Sit down, Lyle."
Carter didn't sit. He stood there, looking down at Noah with his one good eye and his swollen face and his fists that wanted to do something but couldn't, not here, not with the chains and the guard and the eight days that were all he had left.
Noah didn't move. He held Carter's gaze and waited.
He'd pushed too far and he knew it. The Jenny Walters question was necessary but the timing was wrong.
You don't ask a man with a black eye and eight days to live whether he committed a murder that the system already failed to convict him for.
Not if you want an answer. Not if you want him to trust you.
Carter turned and walked toward the exit.
The officer fell in beside him, one hand on Carter's arm, guiding him through the door.
But before he cleared the frame, Carter stopped.
He turned back and looked at Noah across the room.
The visiting area noise filled the space between them.
Someone's baby was crying. A vending machine hummed against the far wall.
"Don't you ever come back here again." Carter's voice carried but he wasn't shouting. He didn't need to. "That goes for your corrupt brothers too."
The door closed behind him. The lock engaged with that heavy federal sound that Noah had heard before and would remember for a long time.
He sat alone at the table. The photograph of Derek Hollis lay where Carter had pushed it back, face up, a stranger looking at nothing.
Noah picked it up and slid it into the folder.
Around him the visiting room resumed its rhythms. The mother relaxed her hold on her child.
The officer by the door settled back against the wall.
The murmur of conversations rebuilt itself like water filling a space that had been briefly displaced.
Noah gathered his things and stood. He thought about Carter's face when he'd said "I believe you.
" The flash of something vulnerable before the walls went back up.
He thought about the black eye and the butterfly strips and the ninety seconds it took the guards to respond.
He thought about the question Carter hadn't answered about Jenny Walters.
Not because he'd denied it. He hadn't denied it.
He'd refused to engage with it at all, which was different.
A man who didn't kill Jenny Walters would have said so. Would have said no. Would have added it to the list of things he'd been wrongly accused of. But Carter hadn't done that. He'd gotten angry at the question itself, as if the asking of it was the offense, not the accusation.
Noah walked through the corridor, collected his belongings at the front desk, and stepped out into the evening.
The parking lot was half empty. The mountains beyond the facility were dark shapes against a sky that still held the last gray light of the day.
He got in his truck and sat with the engine off.
Eight days. Carter Lyle had eight days left and he'd just told Noah never to come back. The one person who believed him was now the last person he wanted to see.
Because Noah had asked about Jenny.
And Carter, for all his protests of innocence on the Kara Ellison case, had not once said he didn't kill Jenny Walters.
Noah started the truck. The headlights swept across the prison fence and the coiled wire at the top gleamed for a moment before the truck turned and the light moved on.
He drove out of the lot and onto the road that led back toward the mountains and the town and the investigation that was pulling him in two directions at once.
Behind him the facility sat in its clearing, lit and orderly and quiet, holding a man who was either innocent of everything or guilty of the one thing that couldn't save him.