“No, it’s not funny at all, and the last thing I wanted to do was tell you this, but you’re really leaving me no choice here. Suzan with a z existed. She lived a few doors down from the house you lived in for six months when your other place was being fixed up. Her real name was Julia Barnes and I think you killed her.”

WMD PLUS TWO HOURS

It’s been an hour since the argument. Ten minutes since your last drink. The online video now has over a hundred thousand hits. You’ve been called ten different types of gay and ten different types of asshole, and a hundred types of everything else. The office door is slightly ajar, which means you can hear other sounds from around the house, the last of which was the bedroom door softly shutting when Sandra went up to bed. You’ll be sleeping on the couch tonight, though you won’t have to get too used to it—you’ll be sentenced to the nursing home very soon.

This may be one of your last free moments in the office, so you’re feeling nostalgic. Some details are fuzzy, others are clear. You can remember the time Eva got stung by a bee when she was nine years old, which led to her throwing out a plushy bee toy she’d had since she was a baby, plus every one of her children’s books that had pictures of bees in them. You can remember the day your mother called with news dad had died. You can remember teaching Eva to fly a kite, how the string broke, how it disappeared on the wind and you convinced her it was going to head into space, and how every night for the following few weeks she would ask where the kite was now, and you would say it was near Mars, near Jupiter, how it was stuck on the rings of Saturn but working its way free, and she asked how you knew all this and you said NASA would call every night because they were tracking it with one of their giant telescopes. For the last few hours you’ve let multiple memories flood your brain, enjoying the process, very well aware that soon they will be walled off by the changing landscape of neurological pathways.

The video has now had more than a hundred and ten thousand hits. Hard not to wonder what it will max out at, or wonder if your publishers know about the speech, or what tomorrow will bring. So many people you know will have seen that video, from your editor to your doctor to your lawyer to the florist. Hard not to wonder what these people are all thinking of you right now.

All this wondering . . . you need a walk. You need some time apart from the Madness Journal. It’s time to sneak out the window, maybe find a bar somewhere and just . . . sit. Kind of like your dad used to do instead of coming home to the life that was making him unhappy. Maybe take a nap first.

Good news—let’s see . . . you’re still alive.

Bad news—you’re still alive.

Jerry stays on the couch while Hans goes into another room. He sips at his bottle of water while he watches the news. The story has something to do with gas prices going up, and he realizes that’s one thing he’ll never have to worry about again, and with that thought comes another one—it’s also something that Fiona Clark won’t have to worry about. A sense of recognition quickly follows, and he realizes he’s done this before—not kill somebody, that he has never done—but watched the news only to see a dead woman on the television screen, his imagination on overdrive as it fills in the blanks. Sometimes the imagination of a crime writer is a powerful thing. In fact he’d go as far as to say it’s a curse. It’s one reason he used to try and avoid the news—when he sees somebody murdered, his mind goes to the event, he pictures their last few moments, what they went through, the fear, the begging, the desperation to survive. It’s the five stages of grief on an escalated scale. His mind takes him there, but it also takes him to the moments before, those choices made on the way home when the victim could have turned left instead of right, made that green light before it turned red, if they hadn’t skipped their coffee—decisions and processes bringing them closer to death. His imagination runs the other direction too, moving forward after the crime, a mother collapsing at the news, a husband punching a wall, children confused and scared, a boyfriend begging the police to have five minutes alone with whoever did this, people being sedated the same way he had to be sedated yesterday. He scratches at his arm, the needle prick still itching from the injection.

Hans comes back with a laptop and sits next to him on the couch. He sets the laptop on the stool and drags it closer.

“I don’t think I can handle one more nail in the coffin,” Jerry says.

“We can still go to a strip bar,” Hans says.

“Let’s just get this over with.”

Within a minute Hans is pulling up stories, and there is Suzan with a z, only she isn’t Suzan with a z but Julia with a J and with a face Jerry can remember, a face he can picture when he thinks of the book he put her in, this is the woman he thinks about when he confesses to murder. Julia without a z, whose backyard he stood in thirty years ago while embracing the darkness. Blond hair and big blue eyes, athletic, his neighbor, the woman he would see jogging in the mornings, her ponytail bouncing up and down, this girl not much older than Eva is now. They read the articles. Julia had broken up with her boyfriend six weeks earlier, a guy by the name of Kyle Robinson. According to her friends, he was harassing her. He was phoning her all the time, showing up at her work, showing up at her home, he would send her flowers and, on one occasion, he placed a dozen dead roses on her doorstep. Her friends told her to contact the police, to get a restraining order, but she defended him. She said he wasn’t really that bad, even though he had hit her a few months before they broke up, just the once, if you don’t include the other time he’d pushed her hard into the wall. She thought reporting him would aggravate the situation. Then her body was found, and the boyfriend was suspect number one. It was a label he couldn’t shake, and within forty-eight hours he was arrested and charged with her murder, and a year later he was found guilty and sentenced to fourteen years in jail. Eleven years into his sentence another inmate stabbed him in the throat and the boyfriend left the prison system three years early in a body bag.

“There’s nothing here to suggest anything other than the boyfriend killing her,” Jerry says.

“He always said he was innocent,” Hans says, leaning back into the couch.

“But we wouldn’t be having this conversation if you didn’t think I killed her,” Jerry says.

“You used to talk about her a lot. From the day you moved onto that street, you used to talk about how hot the girl was that lived opposite you. Talked about her all the time, right up until she died. It was not long before you met Sandra. For those few days after she was found, and before the ex was arrested, you were as nervous as hell. I figured, you know, it was just because somebody you liked was murdered and that it upset you, but I also remember wondering if she’d still be alive if I hadn’t shown you how to pick a lock.”

Jerry can’t remember any of that, then suddenly he’s talking with Sandra, they’re talking about going to the movies on a date, he’s telling her he’s a closet Trekkie and she’s asking him what else he was keeping in his closet. What did he tell her? He told her he was keeping the body of his ex-girlfriend in there. Jesus, was it more than just a joke? If he can remember that, then surely he should be able to remember Julia. Only he can’t.