"Do you recognize this?"
Carter looked at the photo. His expression didn't change. Then he looked at Noah.
"If I say yes, does that prevent my execution?"
"Do you recognize it or don't you?"
Carter was quiet. He picked up the photo with both hands, the chain between the cuffs clicking against the table, and held it close to his face. Then he set it down.
"Yeah. It was mine."
"Was?"
"It was mine. Then it was Eugene's."
"What can you tell me about it?"
Carter leaned back in his chair. The metal scraped against the floor. The guard by the door shifted his weight but didn't move.
"Where do I begin," Carter said. It wasn't a question.
"The beginning."
Carter looked at his hands. The cuffs caught the light. He was quiet for so long that Noah thought he might not speak at all, and then he did.
"Eugene had a kid. Three years old. Jenny used to watch him sometimes when Eugene was working or out doing whatever Eugene did. Jenny was... she was a lot of things. Fun when she was sober. A disaster when she wasn't. And most of the time she wasn't." Carter's voice was flat. Not emotionless but controlled. He’d rehearsed this in his head a thousand times and was finally saying it out loud. "One night Eugene comes to pick up the kid and the kid's on the floor. Not moving. Jenny is on the couch. High. Pills on the kitchen table, just sitting there in the open. The kid had gotten into them. Eugene rushed him to the hospital. His kid survived. Barely."
"And Eugene went after Jenny."
"Not that night. The next day. Jenny was staying at my place. On-and-off, like everything with us. I was out. Eugene came over to confront her about the pills, about the kid. And she..." Carter shook his head. "She laughed. Not at the kid. At Eugene. Like it was his fault for trusting her. Like it was his problem. She said something like, kids get into things. That's what they do."
"And Eugene snapped."
"I had a knife block on the counter. Serrated blade, wooden handle. Good for bread, good for rope, good for nothing a reasonable person needs in their life. Eugene grabbed it right off the block. Right there in my kitchen. I don't think he went there planning to do it. I think he went there to scream at her andshe pushed him past the place where screaming was enough." Carter's jaw tightened. “He stabbed her. Beat her. Left her on the floor of my apartment and called me at two in the morning shaking so hard he couldn't hold the phone."
Noah sat still. He didn't write anything down. There was nothing to write that would help anyone.
"I came home. Saw what he'd done. In my apartment. With my knife. And I knew." Carter's voice dropped. "I knew that if I called the police, they'd look at me. Not Eugene. Me. My history with Jenny. The domestics. The arguments. The calls. My knife. My apartment. Eugene had no record. Nothing. Clean as paper. And I had years of being the guy cops already thought had it in him. Nobody was going to believe Eugene did it."
"So you covered it up."
"We put her in my truck. Drove out to that field off 9N. Burned her." Carter said. He sighed. "Eugene kept the knife. Said it was insurance. Said as long as he had it, we were both safe, because we were both in it together. I told myself that made sense. Brothers looking out for each other."
"But that's not what it was."
"No. That's not what it was. A year later, Eugene and I got into it. Money. Drugs. A car he said was his and I said was mine. Stupid. It was a fight brothers have when they're both in too deep and neither one wants to admit it. And Kara Ellison was all over the news. Missing girl. The whole town talking about it."
"Eugene saw his chance."
Carter nodded. "Walked into the station with the knife. Told your brother Luke that I'd confessed to him. That I'd shown him the knife and said I killed that missing girl." He looked at Noah. “He sold me out. His own brother. To protect himself. Because he knew that if I ever decided to come clean about Jenny, I'd take him down with me. So he took me down first."
"Why didn't you tell anyone? At trial. On appeal. Any of it."
"I told them." Carter's voice broke for the first time. Not much. A hairline crack. "I told them I didn't kill Kara Ellison. I said the cops had it wrong. I said Eugene did this, that he brought in the knife to frame me. But my prints were on the blade. It was my knife, from my kitchen. And somehow the blood on it got linked to Kara. I figured they'd realize it was Jenny's. I kept waiting for someone to catch it. For someone to look at that blood and say this doesn't match, this is wrong, this is someone else. Nobody did." He paused. "And I couldn't exactly stand up in court and say I know whose blood it really is, because then I'm admitting I helped burn her body in a field. That defense doesn't get you a round of applause."
"And Eugene?"
"Couldn't question Eugene. He was sick by then. Cancer. Died a few months before my trial. The one person who could have contradicted the whole story was in the ground before I ever took the stand." Carter looked at Noah. "His kid had already lost his mother to the system. I wasn't going to be the one who took his father's name too. Not for a dead man."
