Chapter 97
CHAPTER
We took turns driving back to Washington, both of us silent, the weight of what we’d done and hadn’t done so long ago pressing in around us.
Eamon Diggs had proclaimed his innocence throughout his years on death row and all the way through the appeals process, or almost all the way. He’d been waiting to hear if the U.S. Supreme Court would hear his case when he was stabbed to death in a prison fight.
Afterward, Sampson and I told the relatives of his victims, including Bunny’s brother and Conrad Talbot’s parents, that in a savage way, justice had been served.
The memories made me sick. The memories made me question whether we had made other deadly mistakes in the years we’d been investigating homicides since the white-van murders.
I thought about how painstaking Soneji’s framing of Diggs had been.
I recalled his descriptions of how he’d hunted Bunny Maddox when she’d tried to escape, how he’d strangled Brenda Miles.
How Cynthia Owens had died just because she’d had the bad luck to step into this psychopath’s lair, and how he had planned to abduct Cheryl Lynn Wise long before he’d set his sights on nine-year-old Maggie Rose Dunne and her friend Michael “Shrimpie” Goldberg.
I thought back to that Christmas right after Jannie was born, remembered how Maria, Damon, and my infant daughter had all fallen asleep in my arms on the couch at Nana Mama’s and how I’d looked at the angel on the tree’s top and prayed for my family to be kept safe.
But that had not happened.
After a Virginia grand jury indicted Diggs and Beech for capital crimes, Sampson and I helped the NYPD and the FBI in the hunt for the Butcher of Sligo. Michael Sullivan had eventually come to our home and confronted me, looking for a woman who’d told Maria that the Butcher had raped her.
The following evening, I went to Potomac Gardens to pick up Maria, and as I hugged her hello after a long day’s work, one of Sullivan’s henchmen shot her. The love of my life and the mother of my two young kids died in my arms.
The children and I moved in with Nana Mama. She helped me raise Damon and Jannie.
But Maria’s death sent me into a long, slow, haunted downward spiral.
I became obsessed with catching killers, and I put the hunt for them above everything else in my life. Eventually I became Metro PD’s deputy chief of detectives and then a profiler for the FBI, where I partnered with Ned Mahoney in the Behavioral Science Unit.
During those years, I am ashamed to admit that I neglected my kids too many times and I neglected myself all the time. Most nights I went to bed feeling like a hollow man, like I had little to live for outside of my work and providing for my children.
And now, as Sampson pulled up in front of my house on Fifth Street, I felt the same way, hollowed out, as if all the work I’d done since Maria’s murder were tainted by my involvement in the wrongful conviction of Eamon Diggs and by my inability to see through the veils of deceit Soneji had hung.
Sampson said, “I feel like I’ve been mugged, hit over the head by this. I don’t know what to say or do about it.”
“I feel the same way, partner,” I said, getting out. “I’ll call you later.”
I went into the house and found Bree watching the evening news and Nana Mama doing a crossword.
Bree said, “I thought you wouldn’t be showing up until long after midnight.”
“We had to leave the investigation. Turns out John and I are compromised.”
“What?” my grandmother said, setting her puzzle aside.
“Compromised how?” my wife said.
“Hold that thought,” I said. I went and got a beer, then sat down and told them.
When I finished, there were four empty beer cans on the coffee table, all of them mine, and shock and silence in the room.
“I don’t know what to do to change things,” I said. “To make it right.”
“You can always make some good out of the worst situations,” Nana Mama said.
“Diggs spent nearly twenty years in prison unjustly, and now he’s dead,” I said sharply. “There’s no fixing that.”
“I’m aware,” she replied calmly. “But get outside your head and all this nonsense about the destruction of your reputation. It’s tarnished a little, but that happens to the armor of any great knight. Go play some of your Gershwin. You’ll figure out what to do.”
Bree gazed at me with a degree of sadness. “That’s probably not a bad idea, babe,” she said. “A better one than having another beer, anyway.”
I shrugged and walked, wobbling a little, through the house and out to the porch, where I sat at the piano and once again tried to play An American in Paris.
It was so bad, I almost gave up and went to the fridge for a fifth beer. But I knew in my heart that Bree was right, booze was not a good answer, so I kept playing.
Slowly, as sections of the piece came together, thoughts of Soneji, of Diggs, and of Maria slipped away until I was thinking of nothing but the music.
I don’t know how long I sat there playing.
But when I came back to reality, I knew exactly what I had to do to start to remove the tarnish on my armor and fight the pull of the downward spiral that threatened to swallow me for the second time in my life.