into the station!
But he did show her the porn.
Because he needed a confession to keep his job, a baby might die. So Paul Ryan felt guilty-a guilt that kept him awake through the night and pacing the house until a sense of shame had overwhelmed him: Baby Sarah.
By 4:00 A.M., whether born of a need for personal redemption or simply sleep deprivation, Paul Ryan had made a life-altering decision: he would do the right thing.
By 6:00 A.M., Jennings had done it for him.
Ryan was standing outside Gary Jennings’s cell, looking in at his lifeless form hanging there, one leg of his white jail pants tied around his neck, the other tied around the pipes of the new sprinkler system the town had installed last month to meet code.
Innocent suspects don’t commit suicide.
It was Wednesday morning and Coach Wally was whistling as he walked up to the entrance to the Post Oak Town Hall. Unlike most visitors who would arrive today to pay traffic tickets, Wally Fagan was a happy man. Happy and a bit proud of himself-heck, he felt so downright patriotic he wanted to salute his reflection in the glass doors.
He was here to free an innocent man.
At the entrance, Wally paused and checked himself over and adjusted the clip-on tie he had added to his short-sleeve shirt just in case cameras were present. Shoot, he might even make the national news, maybe even get interviewed by Katie Couric. They might even call him a hero.
He pulled open the door and entered the building. Just inside the door was a security checkpoint with metal detectors, like at the airport, manned by a uniformed cop. Wally began emptying his pockets into a small plastic container but looked up when another cop hurried over; he was grinning like he had just won a lifetime supply of donuts.
“Sonofabitch offed himself!”
The other cop’s mouth fell open. “No shit?”
“Yep.” The grinning cop grabbed his neck, stuck his tongue out the side of his mouth, and made a gagging sound. “Hung himself in his cell last night. Course, he might’ve been playing some kind of perverted sex game with himself.”
The two cops laughed merrily, but a sick feeling crept over Wally. He didn’t want to ask, but he had to know.
“Who?”
The grinning cop turned his way and said, “Jennings. Guy that abducted Gracie.”
“He’s… dead? ”
“As a doornail. Did the world a favor. No trial, no appeals, no execution. Case is closed.”
At that moment, the double doors behind Wally flew open and excited reporters and cameramen rushed inside and pushed past Wally.
“Is it true?” they shouted. “Jennings committed suicide?”
“Yep,” the first cop said, waving them through the checkpoint without checking. “Give himself the death penalty.”
In a split-second, Wally Fagan’s mind played out two alternate paths in life for him to choose from, as clearly as if he were watching a movie of his life, a choice he knew would determine the future course of his life. The first path was to continue inside, straight to the chief’s office, which would be crowded with the media, stand in front of the microphones and bright lights and cameras and tell the world what he knew, what he had remembered last night at work: the blond man in the black cap and plaid shirt who had asked about Gracie after the game was missing his right index finger. Gary Jennings was not. He had all of his fingers. Jennings was not the abductor. He was innocent. But now he was dead. And it was Wally’s fault. That’s what they would say-the chief, the press, the FBI, Jennings’s pregnant wife, the world. Wally Fagan would make the national news all right, but they wouldn’t call him a hero. They would blame him for the death of an innocent man.
Someone is always blamed.
Wally chose the second path. He retrieved his personal items from the small plastic container, stuffed them into his pockets, and exited the building, vowing to take his secret to the grave.
At seven in the morning Texas time, being eight on the floor of the NASDAQ exchange in New York City, only ninety minutes prior to the opening trade in the BriceWare. com IPO-that is, on the day all of his dreams were supposed to come true-the company founder, president and CEO, chairman of the board, and creative genius, John R. Brice, who boasted a Ph. D. in algorithms from MIT and a 190 IQ, lay crashed on the couch in his home office. He was curled up under a Boston Red Sox souvenir blanket. His boyish face was buried in the thick folds of soft leather where the couch back met the seat. He was wondering why his wife did not love him.
And he was sure she did not love him.
They had had sex exactly two hundred forty-nine times-twice a month for the ten years and four months they had been married plus once before marriage. Which sounded like a lot of sex when you said it out loud, way more than he had ever hoped for at MIT, once every fifteen days. But then, major league pitchers take the mound every fifth day. FYA (For Your Amusement), during the same period, Roger Clemens had pitched three hundred two games!
He didn’t think Elizabeth enjoyed sex with him, much less had orgasms. But he was too afraid to ask. Little Johnny Brice had asked his only other sex partner, a sixteen-year-old Army brat who had done every soldier’s son before him at Fort Bragg, if she had had an orgasm; she had laughed in his face and said, “It takes me longer than five seconds, stud.”
Sex was not plug and play.
For him, sex was plug and pray, female orgasms being so highly nontrivial and all, what with hardware that had to be booted and software that had to be tweaked for optimal performance. No point-and-click on the female architecture. No Help button. No Progasm Wizard to guide him through the procedure. So he had searched for technical solutions, even buying a user’s manual- The Female Orgasmand learned to his dismay that writing twenty-five thousand lines of code was cake compared to bringing a full-grown female to orgasm. But John R. Brice, Ph. D., was nothing if not determined; he had devoted his considerable intelligence to learning the deep magic of orgasms, because he knew, as well as he knew the back of his computer, that if he could take Elizabeth Brice to orgasm just once- just freaking once! — her indifferent attitude toward him would instantly morph into extreme love.
Geeks need love, too.
He had studied the manual’s recommended troubleshooting techniques as if studying for a final exam at MIT, applying a new one every two weeks until he had tried them all; he even did algorithms in his head during sex to prevent premature cache burst. In the hacker world, that was known as the brute-force method, trying every conceivable solution to a problem until you found one that worked. He had employed that method on numerous occasions at work and with great success. But not with Elizabeth. He had no doubt that pilot error was to blame, that he simply wasn’t up to the manly task of driving a beautiful and complex woman like Elizabeth to brain-banging orgasms-as they say in the tech support department when the customer doesn’t have a clue, PEBKAC (Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair). John R. Brice didn’t have a clue.
And the few times he had thought the techniques might be enabling her, when he had felt her body responding to his hardware, just at the moment when he thought she might experience a power surge, she seemed to freeze up, as if he had performed an illegal operation and her control panel shut down her program. He had downloaded his content and uninserted his floppy; she had gotten out of bed, gone into the bathroom, and left him alone to wallow in unexplained failure. Why didn’t women come with a freaking Error Message box?
He had never forgotten her birthday, their anniversary, Valentine’s Day, or Mother’s Day, always sending flowers and gifts to her office. He had even signed up with the company’s personal trainer and worked out daily. But
