Russell roared, “Brian? Brian who?”
He was trying to distance himself from the fact of Hayley’s death, but it was a valid question nonetheless. I told him. And when I explained who his father was, I watched Russell carefully. He blanched and then his eyes fixed on a point across the room in a hundred-yard stare.
“How in the hell did he and Hayley…?” he asked, looking bewildered.
“We think Brian sought her out,” I said.
Russell covered his face with his hands, then rubbed his temples. He choked back a sob and began to pound the arm of the couch. “No, no, no!” He spit the words out as though they were rocks that’d been stuck in his throat. Then he suddenly jumped to his feet and began to storm around the room. “That goddamn crazy asshole! That psychotic son of a bitch raised a fucking lunatic of a kid! I want that piece of shit obliterated!”
Throughout all this, Raynie keened like a wounded animal, arms wrapped around her midsection, rocking back and forth. “No, no, no, no!” Her agony was almost too painful to witness. She folded forward and hugged her knees, head on her lap.
I could see that Bailey was feeling the heartbreak as deeply as I was. We did what we could to console them, but nothing can make you feel more useless than trying to assuage the pain of losing a child. It was a tragedy like no other. The death of a son or daughter upends the universe-parents predecease children, not the other way around. And I knew that the hole we’d just torn in Russell’s and Raynie’s lives today would never be fully healed.
Before we left, Bailey and I promised to do everything in our power to bring Brian to justice. Raynie nodded and whispered, “Thank you.”
But I knew what she was thinking. We could catch Brian, we could take him to trial, we could get him convicted and locked up forever. But we could never bring Hayley back.
We headed back downtown in silence. In the past few hours, the sky had gone from a deep, penetrating blue to an ominously heavy cloud bank of blacks and grays. We drove through a darkness that made mid-afternoon feel like the dead of night. I rolled down the window and the thick damp breeze clung to my face and crawled down my neck. A weird stillness filled the air, as though the planet were waiting for something.
At the corner of Fifth and Broadway, a man in a black top hat, dressed in jeans and a black blazer, waited at the light. He was sitting on a piece of canvas stretched across the frame of a walker, except the walker had four wheels and a basket. When the light changed, he popped up and pushed the contraption across the street, whistling the chimney-sweep song from
