Miracle Creek(29)

Put it like that, and Matt wanted desperately to say, No, Pak didn’t do this, Elizabeth did, and now you’re taking some fucking call to say … what, that Pak blew up his own business? Killed his patients for money? It was ridiculous. He saw Pak during the fire, saw his desperation to save his patients, never mind the risk of injuries and even death to himself. But the relief of knowing that Pak was the target, not him—it was overwhelming, the relief. Matt’s respect for Pak, his firm belief in Pak’s innocence, his need to see Elizabeth punished—his relief engulfed all these things, submerged and smothered them away. Besides, answering yes was nothing more than a logical extension of everything else he’d already admitted. He wasn’t saying Pak set the fire. There were four thousand steps between this phone call and the explosion.

So Matt told himself it was no big deal and said, “Yes.” He heard buzzing, the sound of horseflies feasting on a carcass. Or maybe it was the whispered murmurings of the spectators in the back.

Pak’s face was red—with shame or anger, Matt couldn’t tell. Shannon said, “Doctor, are you aware that, on the night of the explosion, Elizabeth found a note by the creek, written on paper with the H-Mart logo on it, saying, ‘This needs to end. We need to meet tonight, 8:15’?”

It was automatic, the reaction. His eyes zoomed to Mary like metal to a magnet. He blinked, hoped no one caught his mistake. He moved his gaze around, like he was scanning the whole Korean clan. “No, I never heard that. I know that paper, though.” Matt turned to the jury. “H-Mart is a Korean supermarket. We shop there sometimes.”

“Isn’t it true that Pak Yoo always used that notepad?”

Matt had to force himself not to sigh in relief. Shannon thought the note was from Pak. It hadn’t even crossed her mind that Matt had written it. And Mary—she wasn’t a factor at all. “Yes, Pak used it,” Matt said.

Shannon slowly turned her gaze to Pak, then back to Matt. “What is your understanding of where he was at 8:15 that night, until the explosion ten minutes later?”

Something about the way she said “your understanding” unnerved Matt. “Um, Pak was in the barn.” Was there any question about that?

“How do you know that?”

He had to think. How did he know, other than just assuming it to be true because that’s what everyone said? All the Yoos were in the barn, they said. When the DVD died, Pak sent Young to their house to find batteries. She took too long, so Mary went to help, but she noticed something behind the barn, walked there, and boom. But if Pak did this … could the Yoos have been lying? Covering for him? Then again, if he’d set the fire, Pak wouldn’t have risked his life in the rescue, and he undoubtedly would’ve made sure Mary was nowhere nearby. No. Matt said, “I know because he supervised the dive. He sealed us in, he talked to me, and after the explosion, he opened the hatch and got us out.”

“Ah, the hatch opening. You said earlier, it takes as little as one minute to depressurize and open the hatch. Correct?”

“Yes.”

“So if he’d been present, the hatch should’ve opened one minute after the explosion?”

“Yes.”

“Doctor, let’s try something. Here’s a stopwatch. I’d like you to close your eyes and go through in your mind everything that happened from the explosion until the hatch opening. Then stop the timer. Could you do that?”

Matt nodded and took the stopwatch, a digital one that counted in tenths of seconds. He laughed at the ridiculousness, trying to remember a year later whether the incineration of a boy’s head took 48.8 seconds or 48.9 seconds. He clicked START, closed his eyes, and went through it. The face-blink-fire, the thrashing, the flames whooshing from the shirt around his hands. When he reached the screech of the hatch opening, he clicked STOP. 2:36.8. “Two and a half minutes. But this hardly seems reliable,” he said.

Shannon held up a folded piece of paper. “This is a report from the prosecution’s own accident-reconstruction expert, including an estimate of the time between the explosion and the hatch opening. Would you read it, Doctor?”

He took the paper and unfolded it. Highlighted in fluorescent yellow, buried in the middle of the report, were five words. “Minimum two, maximum three minutes.”

“So you and the report agree,” Shannon said. “The hatch opened more than two minutes after the explosion, more than a full minute after it should have if Pak Yoo had been present.”

“Again,” Matt said. “This doesn’t seem very scientific.”

Shannon looked at him with amused pity, the way teens look at kids who still believe in the tooth fairy. “Now, the other reason you thought Pak Yoo was in the barn: you talked through the intercom. Yesterday, you testified, quote, ‘It was chaos in the chamber, very noisy, so I couldn’t really hear.’ Do you remember that?”

Matt swallowed. “Yes.”

“And since you couldn’t really hear, you assumed it was Pak Yoo, but you can’t know for sure, isn’t that right?”

“No, I couldn’t hear all the words, but I heard the voice. I know it was Pak,” Matt said, but even saying it, he wondered if that was true. Was he just being stubborn?

Shannon looked at him like she was sad for him. “Doctor,” she said, her voice softer, “are you aware that Robert Spinum, who lives by the Yoos, has signed an affidavit that he was outside on a call from 8:11 until 8:20 that night, and that for the entirety of that call, he saw Pak Yoo a quarter mile outside the barn?”