The college he works at is small and lush, one of those campuses out of a brochure with a quad, picturesque dorms, an arboretum and a small lake. I take a map from the admissions office and find the anthropology department easily. It’s finals season and the air is tense; students chain-smoking in front of the library, a stern quiet canopying the school.

I looked up Professor Newburn’s open-door office hours, and in my jeans and sweatshirt I blend in well with the other students going in and out of the academic building, a baseball cap on my head in case anyone is a true crime junkie.

He’s with a student when I get to his office, so I wait patiently in a chair, its vinyl upholstery worn thin. Tom had told me about his brother, Brandon, how growing up he felt so inferior to him, and I wonder if anything had changed once Tom got rich, if Brandon started harboring resentment toward Tom, whether their dynamic had changed later in life. I want to know Tom’s psychology, what made him commit such atrocities. Anything I could glean about his childhood. Next, I would force myself to talk to more of Tom’s friends, try to wring information out of them, put all the pieces of the puzzle together. Anything to squash him even further and more messily into the ground.

Brandon, I knew, had refused to make a public statement, aside from saying how sorry he was for the Patterson family. I hoped that I could wriggle something out of him, a little morsel that could help Quinn, could help his story, help me. Something he would feel guilted into saying when confronted with a survivor of his own brother’s brutality, especially one as pretty and pitiable as I.

Once the student slips out, I slip in, closing the office door behind me. The walls are covered in maps, colorful low relief ones, peeling from the walls. He’s behind a large dented metal desk, papers scattered in folders in no organized fashion that I’m aware of. It takes Brandon a moment to look up; he’s in the middle of underlining something in red, presumably a student’s paper.

“Hello! Um...forgive me, what’s your name again?” He gazes at me, trying to figure out where to place my face. He’s shorter than Tom with a crooked nose, graying hair, five o’clock shadow on his puffy jowls. They have the same eyes, though, and it takes me a moment to compose myself.

“It’s Vera. Vera MacDonald. I knew your brother.”

He startles. I can see him trying to gauge how he can get out of this, how quickly he can run to the door. I sit down across from him, just as a student would.