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Back 3 a.m.
Chapters (67)
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  67. 3:46 a.m.

I want to be sad, but I’m not. I hardly knew my mother. I had a basket full of dusty memories, and everything else I knew was secondhand from my father. But it was a subject he’d shied away from for the last thirty years. It’d been ten years since I uttered the word “Mom” in his presence. I can’t remember exactly what I said, or asked, but I do remember my father shrugging. And that’s exactly what he’d done: he’d shrugged her off long ago. Just like she’d shrugged us off.

For a quick moment, I feel a rush of—I don’t want to say justice, that’s a bit macabre—but more like a karmic subpoena. Maybe falling into the Potomac River and drowning was, if not deserved, then an unintended consequence of a decision made three decades earlier.

I imagine her standing near one of the hundreds of guardrails, bridges, or platforms that escorted the river through DC, Virginia, and onward. Maybe a tear runs down her cheek as she thinks of all those lost years with her baby boy. Maybe her breath catches while she ponders what happened to him. Did he grow into a man? Did his one-hour-a-day constraint hold him back from living a normal life? From happiness? Was he still asleep in the same room where she’d last seen him?

She jumps.

The report lists the contact information for the morgue where my mother’s body is being held. Then Lang goes on to say our contract has been fulfilled, he sends his deepest regrets, and he will reimburse me a prorated amount for the month of October. Signed, Mike Lang.

The next page is a screenshot of the fingerprint database. The print I lifted off a vase in my parent’s bedroom many years earlier is on the left. The print from the Jane Doe is on the right. There are a bunch of numbers and words, but the only ones that matter are near the bottom.

Positive match.

The next page takes me by surprise. AST must have deep connections to have obtained the autopsy report this quickly.

I scan the document for cause of death, already penciling in the word “drowning” in my mind. Or maybe she jumped from a bridge and hit the water and broke her neck. Either way it will be judged an accidental death or a suicide.

But it’s not.

It’s a homicide.

My mother didn’t kill herself.

She was murdered.

:03

Meow.

Lassie stares at me with his yellow eyes.

“I’m not gonna call her.”

Meow.

“Yes, I know my mother was found in Alexandria and that my girlfriend works for the Alexandria Police Department.”

Meow.

“Yes, I know she’s a homicide detective, you moron.”

Meow.