Every Last Fear(67)

“Good night, Noah.”

He nodded, his expression defeated. “Send me those papers Sampson’s wife gave you,” he said. “Maybe there’ll be something we can use for the pardon.”

Inside Cindy’s house, Liv went to Tommy’s bedside and watched him sleeping. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, praying he would never learn that the strands of hair she’d sent along with the paternity test weren’t Evan’s. They were Noah’s.





Excerpt from

A Violent Nature

Season 1/Episode 2

“They Just Got in My Head”

INSERT – A school photo of DANNY PINE in his football uniform.

INSERT – PRISON TELEPHONE RECORDING

EVAN PINE

I don’t understand. They said you confessed to hurting Charlotte. Why would you say that, Danny? It doesn’t make sense.

DANNY

(sobbing)

I don’t know why. I don’t remember, but I’d never hurt her. I, I, I—

EVAN

I know, son. I just don’t understand why—

DANNY

It’s horrible in here.

EVAN

I need you to stay strong, buddy. I’m getting you a lawyer. We’ll get this straightened out. But I need to know: Did those cops threaten you? Did they hurt you?

DANNY

I can’t explain why I said it. They just got in my head.





CHAPTER 41


DANNY PINE

Some people remember vividly where they were when Kennedy was assassinated. Or when the space shuttle Challenger blew up. Or when Princess Diana’s car crashed. Or when the planes struck the Twin Towers. Memories formed under intense emotions are seared into our thoughts, branded by the hot iron of trauma. Danny Pine had thought a lot about memory over the past seven years.

Everyone always wanted to know Why can’t you remember? At first it had been the police, though they thought he was lying. Then his parents. Then Dave, his ponytailed criminal defense lawyer. Then those filmmakers. Hell, even the generally uncurious felons at Fishkill. One of them, a psychiatrist convicted of manipulating patients into blowing him, even offered to hypnotize Danny. Ah, no thanks.

Nearly everyone was convinced that the truth—what really happened to Charlotte—was packed away in the deep recesses of his brain, and if they could just unlock the memories …

It wasn’t like his mind was a complete blank. Initially all Danny remembered were flashes of the party at what’s-his-name’s house. Fragments. Running out the back door when someone yelled Cops! A bonfire in a cornfield. The dented metal kegs of beer. Then waking up in his bed, a jackhammer pounding his skull, his little sister standing there with a concerned look on her face. The police are at the door. Where’s Mommy?

But slowly other things came back to him. The ponytailed lawyer said those memories—Charlotte at the party, her face twisted in anguish, I need to talk to you—weren’t helpful, so he might best keep them to himself.

One thing Danny Pine wished he could forget was his first day inside after his conviction. Them stripping him down, delousing him, shoving a folded stack of prison blues into his arms. Entering the gallery. The rapists and murderers and other scum in the rafters calling down to him and the parade of newbies.

Fresh meat! Fresh meat! Fresh meat!

The sound of his cell door clanging shut on the sweltering top floor, where all the horrid smells of the prison found a home. Looking back, as traumatic as it was, the experience was hardly unique. Every month Danny saw it play out again and again.

He was a different person now. Not a better person, different. When he was transferred to Fishkill last year, he held his head up defiantly as he made the walk that first day. This time the hard cases chanted, Fresh Fish! Fresh Fish! Fresh Fish! Not the most original people in the world, prisoners. The young guy in front of him was crying. Danny didn’t even warn him to stop.

By now Danny felt like a hardened lifer, and what passed for famous behind these walls. He’d never seen the documentary. But he understood it had been a big deal. The prison library had newspapers. He also received letters, “fan mail,” and had visits from high-priced attorneys. His father said that the new lawyers were the real thing, not in over their heads, like Ponytail. More like Louise Lester, his post-verdict lawyer from the Institute for Wrongful Convictions. Celebrities were tweeting about his case, and virtually the entire country had turned against his hometown, particularly those two cops who’d interrogated him. Even the president’s daughter—that’s right, the president of the United States—announced she was on Team Danny. But slowly, the attention, like his hope, faded.

Now things had turned dangerous for him. Word spread that his parents had left him a fortune in life insurance. You did not want to be known as someone with a fortune in this place. Worse, he’d heard that Damian Wallace had a beef with him. He didn’t know why. But in here it could be anything.

The stretch of hall he was walking that morning was the most dangerous—narrow halls, crowded, only two cameras at each end, none in the middle—so he was on high alert. He walked the line, his eyes hunting for threats. Looking for Wally. The downtrodden line of blue shirts flowed past, no shoulder bumps, no hard looks, no scuffles to create a diversion for the guards.

After surviving the hall without a sharpened toothbrush in his ribs, he exhaled with relief. This place. This fucking place! Fishkill had once been a hospital for the criminally insane and Danny swore he was going mad. Would he ever roam outside its bleak walls?