“No.”God no.“But you get my point. I could scour my life, as anyone would in this situation, but there’s nothing that stands out,” I say. He doesn’t need to know that I’ve considered every wrongdoing I’ve ever committed—from my minor infractions to the times I’ve threatened people, like my neighbor when I pulled him over, or Jess’s ex-boyfriend when I warned him that it was best to stay out of her life, or poured cola over arude woman’s car window—I’ve done all this even while knowing that it all, every human bit of it, pales in comparison to how I failed Sophie, and Leon, and my own sister, and myself, through my complicity with Railes.
But no one knows about the big one except Railes himself.
I take a deep drag on my beer.
“But the point is”—I wipe the back of my hand over my lips—“even if I had anything to fess up to, there’d be no way I’d confess a damn thing before I developed some kind of understanding of what this person’s after. Maybe if I could get a grip on why he’s doing this, I might have a clue as to what kind of a confession he’s looking for. Until then, there’s no point in me or anyone else throwing stuff out there.” I take another, daintier draw on my beer. “Plus, I don’t plan on smearing my life all over the place. Not my style.”
“Got it, but still, are you telling me there’s really nothing?”
I cock my head nonchalantly, pretend the guilt isn’t throbbing so loudly inside me that it’s deafening, and give him a look that says,Of course there’s a minor thing or two, but I wouldn’t tell ’em toyou.
“Look, I get that you don’t know me, but I think I can help you.”
“Well,that’snice of you. How, exactly?”
“If you read my stuff. I mean, I’m not saying I’m a Pulitzer-winning journalist or anything, but I will say that I do my best to be honest, respectful, and thoughtful. I wouldn’t just throw anything out there for the clicks or kicks. We don’t even need to write about your confession. I want to do a story onyou, what it’s like to be in this awful,awful”—he shakes his head with what looks like actual sincerity and stares me in the eyes—“situation. I write about human beings, not subjects. And my hunch is that you’re a decent, nice person and don’t deserve this.” He points his beer toward the front of the house. “Not many other journalists out there are going to do that, I can tell you. They’re going to rip your life to pieces and throw the scraps to the wolves. They’re going to speculate, exaggerate, flat-out make things up that are twisted bastardizations of the truth. You get that, right?”
“I do.”
“Check out my stuff a little. And give me an exclusive. I’ll turn it into a feature that counters all the asinine stuff that will keep erupting until this guy is caught.”
“And how do you plan to do that?”
“By writing a considerate, careful piece on you. All you need to do is tell me about your life.”
“You probably already know about my life—that I was a cop, that I quit the force, that I’m now a PI.” I wonder how many other things he’s come across. Does he know about what happened in the department?
Does he know about Sophie? My pulse picks up. I want to sink into the counter behind me, become a part of it. I set my beer down and reflexively rub my face with my free hand as if I can hide it from him—shield any tell—but I act like I’m only doing so out of exhaustion.
“I know a few things, and if I go by what’s purely on the web, I could find a thousand ways to pump enough speculation into every one of those things to make you look like you deserve to be in that sketch. In fact, that’s already being done. But you and I both know that’s not the case.”
“What, that I don’t deserve to be in that sketch? It’s not the case for me, or for any of the victims, no matter what they’ve done.” I wince internally, thinking of Coleman’s body hitting the coffee table and falling to the floor. Hadn’t I thought over and over that he deserved what he got, the reason I took the mum’s-the-word stance? How is Jeremy so sure I don’t deserve to be in that sketch?
“True. But you have the right to have a cleaner, clearer picture of yourself out there.”
Do I, though? I’ve far from earned it. “You don’t even know if I’m the actual target.”
“That’s honestly beside the point,” he says. “What’s interesting to me and titillating to the rest of the world isn’t whether it’s you or not, but how itfeelsto be you. How it feels to be someone who’s a dead ringer for the drawing, to be in—no offense—but, you know, in the crosshairs.”
“It feels like shit. There: There’s your scoop.”
This earns me an eye roll.
“Listen,” I say. “You said you don’t think I deserve it, but you don’t know me. You have no idea who or what I am. How do you know I don’t?”
He takes a swig of his beer, his eyes still on mine. The way he’s studying me makes me feel like no one has really ever looked at me before, like he’s seeing all the bad stuff in me, and maybe an ounce of the good, too. “Just a hunch. I did a bit of a deep dive on you before I came out. I know about your roommate in college.”
This drives something sharp and hot through my chest.
“In fact,” he says, “I went to school in Missoula, a few years ahead of you, and even after I graduated, I remember hearing about the whole thing with your roommate, Sophie Scott, and that golfer. And you’re right, I also know about you quitting the police force. Like I said, right now, the people out front are already cooking up ways to twist that a hundred different ways. Trust me, it’ll be red meat for everyone who wants to smear you and sensationalize this. If you check your phone right now, you’ll see new stuff already coming out and it’s not even morning yet.”
I study him back, hoping I display enough dispassion in my eyes to convey that I’m in control, that I’m an investigator, and he is on the other side of who and what I inspect daily. But he doesn’t shrink or look away because ultimately, as a reporter, he is one, too. And he’s shamelessly trying to rake up my deepest regrets. And if I don’t supply them to him, will he find them anyway and expose me whether I give him an interview or not?
And if he’s the killer, maybe even kill me if I don’t confess, not just to him, but to the world.
“What makes you think I care about all the horrible things that people are going to write about me?”
“Crosbie,” he says like he’s known me for a long time. “You’re human, right? Eventually, everyone cares.”
