This has been the Lucas family home fortwenty-twoyears. Three children were born here, and the house beats with the memories of those lives. The babies learning to crawl. The toddlers learning to walk. Adolescents and teenagers coming and going, day in and day out. And then the sickness that crept inside and cloaked those memories with something heavy.
As we sit around the coffee table, I notice that the room is dark. No lights are on anywhere in the house, and the shades are all drawn—maybe this reflects their mood or maybe they are still hiding from the outside world. Whatever the reason, I fear that my calculations were accurate and my visit needs to be brief.
“I apologize for the intrusion,” I say, looking at the folder in my hands as they study my face—searching for something that might tell them how horrible I feel, or perhaps not. Perhaps I am disdainful, among those who would judge them and cast blame. They knew I had struggled, taken a leave of absence. I had not smiled or shown gratitude at the award ceremony at town hall. I have not given a single interview. So they wonder.
I want to meet their eyes and let them see what this has done to me. That killing their child has killed a piece of me and now put my own family in danger. But instead I open the folder and take out the photo of the young man with the red circle drawn around his face. I reach out with the photo in my hand and don’t look up until their eyes have shifted from my face to this image I have asked them to see.
They take the photo and huddle together to study the young man. Now I am the one who watches their faces, searching for any sign of recognition. This is what I am trained to do. This is what I would do if Rowan were here and this was just a case from a dusty box. But what I really do is look for a reason to blame them. I feel it suddenly, like a reflex. The pain of being here in their home, sitting where Clay might have sat, my feet on the carpet over which he might have crawled and walked and ran. I don’t want this pain. I can’t stand it. And so I search for reasons to blame these people for making a child I was forced to kill.
This meeting has to end. And quickly. We are, all three of us, too human to tolerate the intolerable situation I have created by coming here.
A moment passes, and I see it. Sandra Lucas leans back, away from the photo and the man whose image it has captured. Her face contorts into something unpleasant and then shifts to sadness.
“The rehab,” she says quietly. Her husband nods, also remembering. “The last one.” Her eyes begin to tear, and her husband strokes her arm as she closes her eyes, and then he looks back at me.
“At the hospital?” I ask, though I know the answer. I know every facility that treated Clay Lucas. Every doctor. Every therapist.
His father nods. “This boy was there with him. It was three years ago, and he was older than Clay, so he must be in his early twenties now. He was there under a court order. Part of a plea deal for a drug charge. They put all of them together. Clay had been using.Self-medicating, they call it, but it doesn’t matter why any of them do what they do. They pile them up in one warehouse and treat them all the same because they know none of it will stick.”
I try to swallow, but my mouth, my throat, are too dry.Wide-eyed, I watch Clay’s mother, who fights to hold back the tears, and Clay’s father, who protects her by telling the story and whose anger radiates through the darkness in the room. I can’t look away no matter what it does to me. I know the wounds are happening, but I can’t feel them. Not yet. The pain will come later when I relive this moment. Over and over and over.
“His name was Nix. That’s what Clay called him. He was on his meds while he was there. Have you ever seen someone on heavy antipsychotics?” he asks me.
I nod.
“Then you know. It’s not like he was just a different version of himself. To sedate what happened inside his mind—well, it acts like a medical lobotomy. He spoke like a child and needed help the way a child does. A small child. Help getting dressed and eating and using the bathroom. It was all day every day, the care he still needed when he wasn’t—” He stops talking suddenly like he’s remembered a promise he made to himself before I knocked on their front door. He does not want to start down this path, and I am grateful when he gets ahold of himself.
“Do you remember anything else about this young man?” I ask. I stare now at the parents of Clay Lucas, and I see his nose and his eyes and his jawline and his shoulders and then my gun pointed at his head and the bullet entering from behind, the explosion of flesh and the fall to the ground and the twisted leg.
I don’t how much more of this I can take.
They both shake their heads. All they can tell me is when and where and why he was there with Clay. And the name Clay called him, which sounds like it wasn’t his real name, but still a solid lead. All of it is solid. Not just for me, but for Wade, who has already found him.
I reach out, and they hand back the photo. I put it in the file and stand.
They follow me, each sighing with relief as we walk to the door. When we get there and I step outside, I turn quickly and open my mouth because the words are screaming to escape.
I feel the blood pulse as my cheeks flush and my eyes cloud with tears and I start to say them, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for your loss. I have children. I know...” I told myself not to do this. It isself-indulgentand cruel trying to take from these people more than I already have. Trying to extract forgiveness from those who need to place blame the same way others do. The way I wanted to do just moments before.
Bruce Lucas speaks as his wife walks away and lets out a cry that slices through my heart. “Thank you,” he manages. Then he closes the door before I can finish.
He does not mean those words. He isn’t thankful for anything. But he’s a good man, struggling with what he wants to say to me as he hears his wife cry and what he feels he should say so that he has no regrets after I drive out of sight.
Which I do. I run to my car and peel away from the curb and don’t look back.
I have a new mission now. A mandate. Wade is steps ahead of me—five, ten, a hundred. I can’t possibly know. The student has graduated. I can’t make assumptions. Just because this kid knew Clay Lucas in rehab doesn’t mean he helped him get a gun. Just because he was under the bridge, his face captured and circled in red marker, doesn’t mean Wade has done more than find him, watch him, and take pictures.
It could be a trap. Bait. A misdirection to cause me to react in a way I’ll come to regret.
It could be a gift, a way to find peace if this kid was dealing guns and put one in Clay’s hands and we can now find him and take him off the street.
When I’m far enough away from the Lucases’ home that my heart settles and the adrenaline drains, I decide that what I need resides in the twisted mind of this man I helped create.
It’s there I now have to go.
ChapterTwenty-Four
the kill room
