Page 18 of Nobody's Fool

“Like a backpacking kind of thing?”

“Yes. I went with a few friends. But something happened. It has nothing to do with us, I promise, and I want to tell you all about it.”

“But not right now.”

“I want to be there at eight. I need to see his face.”

“Go get dressed,” Molly says. “I can wait.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Tad Grayson steps through the prison gates.

The sky is gray. The building is gray. The street pavement is gray. I don’t want to say the mood is gray, but that’s what we are left with, aren’t we? I count three news vans and about ten members of the press standing outside the prison gate. His release is a story but not a huge one. It might have been a few years ago, but nothing is a huge story anymore. We read about something awful, we get pissed off, a new outrage comes along, we move on. The cycles of news, like the cycles of life, are getting faster and tighter with time until eventually we reach oblivion. But now I’m getting deep.

I watch from behind a tree. I don’t want to be spotted, but I won’t care much if I am. Tad Grayson looks awful, I’m happy to say. I hadn’t seen him since they led him out in handcuffs after the guilty verdict, so maybe that’s part of it—the sudden skipping of twenty years and so he’s aging to me all at once—but I think it’s more. I’ve aged. We’ve all aged. But Tad is barely recognizable. Only a few wispy strands remain from his thick mane of jet-blue Superman hair. Those strands are plastered down into a classic combover. His cheeks are sunken. His skin tone is—here it comes again—gray. His walk is an old-man shuffle, though he’s only forty-eight.

He spent more than two decades in prison for murdering a police officer. That might make you a hero among your prison peers, but Iam sure the gatekeepers made sure the time passed slowly and with difficulty. My hate is still fresh, raw, but I would be lying if I didn’t say it felt tempered a bit because Tad Grayson looks so broken.

A woman in a business suit—his lead lawyer, I suppose—spreads her arms and Tad steps into them. She hugs him. He rests his face into her shoulder. He may be crying, I can’t say for sure. The woman pats his back and whispers something. With his face still hidden, I can see him nod.

A voice from behind me says, “I figured you’d be here.”

I turn and look up. It’s Marty, my partner when they threw me off the force. Marty’s young and naïve and tall. He’s far too good-looking to be likable—Molly says that he looks like an “underwear model, only more handsome”—and yet he is also adorably dorky, with the annoying enthusiasm of a born-again puppy. You can’t help but love Marty, even when you want to kick his shins.

“Deducing that I might show up for the release of the man who murdered my fiancée,” I say. “Boy, I’m proud to be your mentor.”

“You’re being sarcastic, aren’t you? I can never tell.”

“No,” I say, “you can’t.”

“Kierce?”

“What, Marty?”

“You use sarcasm as a coping mechanism to obfuscate your true emotions.”

I look up at him and say nothing. A few seconds pass.

“I got a vocabulary-building app on my phone,” Marty says in way of explanation. “Obfuscatewas Tuesday’s word.”

“Glad you could find a real-world use for it,” I say. Then: “Why are you here?”

“One, to make sure you don’t do something stupid. Like, I don’t know, showing up here.”

“So ‘one’ is answered. What’s two?”

The media has set up a podium with their various logoedmicrophones. The woman in the business suit heads toward it. She is flanked by two what look like male colleagues.

“You sent me a pin last night,” Marty says. “For a location. You wanted to know who lived there.”

“Today,” the woman at the microphone begins, “a terrible injustice has been corrected.”

The woman introduces herself as Kelly Neumeier and then says more stuff around righting wrong and fighting injustices and how the police’s incompetence means the real killer is still out there, but there’s no need to repeat it. I get the need for groups like the Innocence Project and ELI. I get that I had corrupt colleagues and that the blue line protects them and all that, though I found most of the evidentiary abuse comes from being lazy and wanting to cut corners rather than trying to subvert justice. Also arrogance—you know who did it and you just need a little extra juice to prove it, so why not play God a bit?

Yes, I know it’s wrong.

But I also know that Tad Grayson killed Nicole, that the bust was righteous, that the conviction was untarnished except for nonrelated grievances involving me. Their case in a nutshell was this: I, Sami Kierce, violated rules once or twice, ergo every other case I was involved in should be thrown out.

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