truly sorry for your sins, well, you'll have no one to blame but yourself.'
The blade cut through the bindings on his ankles.
Fletcher helped him to his feet. Bryson coughed, tried to catch his breath. Hands cuffed behind his back, it was difficult to stand.
Fletcher gripped his arm and moved him into the hallway. As Bryson made his way up the stairs, wobbling like a drunk, that odd sense of calm transformed itself into something different, a feeling of bliss that took away the fear, the pain, everything.
A door opened and Bryson saw a flat roof that seemed to stretch for miles. Three drunken steps and then Fletcher shoved him back against a brick wall and pressed the blade of the knife underneath his chin.
'Say hello, Timmy. And remember our agreement.'
Fletcher pressed a cell phone against Bryson's ear.
'Hello?'
'Detective Bryson? This is Tina Sanders – Jennifer's mother. We met at the police station.'
Bryson heard a dim voice scream at him to run, run as fast as you can.
'I was told you have information on the man who killed my daughter.'
Where could he run? He wouldn't get far, not with a knife pressed to his throat, not with this peaceful, drunken dreaminess that made him feel like he was an angel floating on air.
'Please, I -' Tina Sanders' voice caught. She cleared her throat, collected herself. 'I need to know what happened. I've been living with this so long, I can't stand not knowing. Please tell me.'
'I don't know what happened to your daughter.'
'I was told a man named Sam Dingle killed Jenny.'
'I don't know anything about that.'
'This man… is he in jail?'
Bryson shivered underneath his wet clothes, his teeth chattering as he scrambled to recall the pieces of carefully constructed lies he had stitched together over the years in case this moment ever came.
Fletcher stuck the tip of the knife through his throat. 'Make a choice, Timmy.'
'My daughter was dying,' Bryson said. 'Emily had a rare form of leukaemia. My wife and I tried everything. The doctors wanted to give her an experimental treatment but my health insurance wouldn't cover it.'
'What's this have to do with Jenny?'
The truth floated to the surface. Bryson closed his eyes, surprised at how easily the words came.
'Sam Dingle used his belt to strangle one of the women. We found a fingerprint. That was the only evidence we had. We had no witnesses, and Dingle's mother said her son was with her the night those women disappeared. We were building a case against him when I approached Dingle's father. I told him I could make the belt disappear for the right price.'
In the distance was the sound of fire engines. Just keep talking. Lang knows you're in here so just keep talking until he finds you.
'I needed the money for my daughter's treatment,' Bryson said. 'I couldn't get any more loans, we were already maxed out. We couldn't borrow any more money. I was desperate. My daughter was looking to me to save her life and when Dingle's father agreed to pay, I made him promise me to get his son treatment at a psychiatric hospital. He went to Sinclair.'
'You son of a bitch,' Tina Sanders said. 'You rotten son of a bitch.'
'Emily was eight, she was only eight years old, and this treatment was supposed to save her life. She couldn't do any more chemotherapy, her body -'
Fletcher moved the phone away and pressed it against his ear. 'Hello, Miss Sanders… yes, it's me. Now about Detective Bryson, have you given any thought about our previous discussion?… I see. That is, of course, your choice. I'll call you back shortly.'
Malcolm Fletcher flipped the phone shut. Bryson ran.
57
Bryson took one step and his legs buckled.
Lying on the roof, hands cuffed behind his back and sirens blaring in the cold night air, he stared up at the sky bursting with the kind of bright stars that made him think of the warm summer evenings when Emily, as an infant, was cradled in his arms. He held her bottle, rocking back and forth on the front porch, back and forth until she finally fell back asleep.
Then he saw Malcolm Fletcher looming above him, his eyes as black as the night sky.
'I didn't kill her daughter,' Bryson said. His voice sounded so far away.
'Oh but you did,' Fletcher said. 'That belt would have sent Mr Dingle to jail or, depending on his legal representation, permanently confined him to a mental asylum like Sinclair. If you did your job, Jennifer Sanders would still be alive.'
'I'm sorry.'
'The sympathy in your voice is overwhelming.'
'I didn't have a choice.' In his mind's eye Bryson saw his bald daughter lying in the hospital bed, skin ashen from the chemotherapy, arms bruised from the IV lines. He saw Emily sucking on ice chips. Emily throwing up in a pail and Emily crying out for her mother and Emily screaming as the nurse injected her with morphine to take away the pain.
'I didn't have a choice,' he said again.
'What day was Sammy released from Sinclair?'
'I don't know.'
'You didn't keep a close eye on him?'
'No.'
'Did you look for Sammy after his discharge?'
'No.'
'I didn't think so.' Fletcher picked him up by the arms. 'You know Sammy killed those women. Since Sammy voluntarily admitted himself under the guise of having a nervous breakdown, you knew he could release himself whenever he wanted, or at least until his parents stopped paying the hospital bill, which they did, incidentally, six months later.'
'I did what you asked. I told the truth.'
'You did, and I'm very proud of you. See the fire escape at the end of the roof?'
'Barely,' Bryson said. Everything was blurry.
'I'm going to escort you there now.' Fletcher helped him across the roof. 'That's it, watch your step. I wouldn't want you to trip and hurt yourself.'
Bryson wanted to get out of this terribly cold air. He couldn't stop shivering.
'In case you're wondering, Sammy wandered across the country performing menial construction and landscaping jobs,' Fletcher said. 'He did, however, manage to return east once to collect his portion of his parents' rather meagre estate. During his visit, he raped and tortured Jennifer Sanders over a period of days before strangling her and leaving her body to rot.'
Bryson wanted to close his eyes and go to sleep.
'Like you, Detective, I knew Sammy had killed those women he dumped along the highway. Unlike you, I never stopped searching for him. It took me years to find him, but I never gave up hope. I finally found him last year in Miami, where he had resumed his nocturnal activities. Sammy couldn't recall where he dumped their bodies, but he did remember all the names of his victims and could recall, in vivid detail, how he had killed them. I think his memory was aided by the recordings I found in his home. Sammy taped his… experiences with each of his victims. I'll spare you the grisly details. I would hate to place an additional burden on your conscience.'
Bryson closed his eyes and saw himself at ten climbing the big oak in the backyard, he wants to reach the top and watch the homes on Foster Avenue, brick-faced houses with three-car garages and big backyards of nice lawns and swing-sets and dollhouses where kids in nice clothes played under the supervision of their nannies and
