“I can’t reassure you now,” I whispered. “I can’t tell you everything is going to be all right, because it won’t be. Attorneys and the media will go after Lucy and me. They will dash us against the rocks, and Carrie may go free. There!”
I held his face in my hands.
“Truth and justice. The American way,” I concluded.
“Stop it.”
He went still and his eyes were intense on mine.
“Don’t start again,” he said. “You didn’t used to be this cynical.”
“I’m not cynical, and I’m not the one who started anything,” I answered him as my anger rose higher. “I’m not the one who started with an eleven-year-old boy and cut off patches of his flesh and left him naked by a Dumpster with a bullet in his head. And then killed a sheriff and a prison guard. And Jayne—Gault’s own twin sister. Remember that, Benton? Remember? Remember Central Park on Christmas Eve. Bare footprints in snow and her frozen blood dripping from the fountain!”
“Of course I remember. I was there. I know all the same details you do.”
“No, you don’t.”
I was furious now and moved away from him and gathered together my clothes.
“You don’t put your hands inside their ruined bodies and touch and measure their wounds,” I said. “You don’t hear them speak after they’re dead. You don’t see the faces of loved ones waiting inside my poor, plain lobby to hear heartless, unspeakable news. You don’t see what I do. Oh no, you don’t, Benton Wesley. You see clean case files and glossy photos and cold crime scenes. You spend more time with the killers than with those they ripped from life. And maybe you sleep better than I do, too. Maybe you still dream because you aren’t afraid to.”
He walked out of my house without a word, because I had gone too far. I had been unfair and mean, and not even truthful. Wesley knew only tortured sleep. He thrashed and muttered and coldly drenched the sheets. He rarely dreamed, or at least he had learned not to remember. I set salt and pepper shakers on corners of Carrie Grethen’s letter to keep it from folding along its creases. Her mocking, unnerving words were evidence now and should not be touched or disturbed.
Ninhydrin or a Luma Lite might reveal her fingerprints on the cheap white paper, or exemplars of her writing might be matched with what she had scrawled to me. Then we would prove she had penned this twisted message at the brink of her murder trial in Superior Court of New York City. The jury would see that she had not changed after five years of psychiatric treatment paid for with their taxes. She felt no remorse. She reveled in what she had done.