My brother’s dead. But not quite. No, dead. He’s dead. No one could live like that. It’s a glitch in the works, some reflex trying to hold on. But he’s gone. I saw it, felt it. I know.
My brother was a murderer. All those guys. How many licenses? Gonna have to go through them later. And that bag. God, I don’t want to go through that bag. Got to, though. And then hide it. Where it’ll never ever be found.
I need to find the bodies. What the hell did he do with the bodies? Those families...
Gotta call Mom. And ohmyfuckinggod, Marie. I gotta call Marie. How do I break this to the boys? It’s gonna destroy them.
Yeah. I did the right thing. This is bad enough without...that note. That bag. Those IDs. Those faces. It’s bad enough. I did the right thing, God forgive me.
But what if he lives?
“Sir? Sir, can I help you?”
He’d managed to walk into the E.R. without even realizing it, that was how far gone he was. He needed to pull it together here. He focused on the woman—a nurse wearing scrubs with big pink flowers all over them. She was behind a curved desk looking at him through an open glass partition. “Detective Mason Brown, Binghamton P.D. I’m here for my brother.”
“I can help you with that. His name?” she was already tapping keys.
“Eric Conroy Brown.”
“Eric.” Tap-tap-tap. “Brown.” Taptaptaptap-big tap. She actually backed up from the computer screen a little, and the bright smile vanished. “He’s in the ICU. That’s up—”
“I know where it is.” He was a cop. He knew his way around Binghamton General. He was gone while she was still talking. Wishing him luck or something equally useless. Elevators, buttons to push. Autopilot.
What if he lives?
He still had all the evidence. If his brother lived and was anything more than a bedridden vegetable, Mason was going to have to turn it in and take the consequences for removing it from the scene. It would be the end of his job. Which was nothing compared to the possibility of his brother going on killing.
Eric. Killing. God, he couldn’t even imagine it.
Yes, you can. You know damn well you can.
How the hell had it happened? What had driven him to this? They’d had the same childhood. Not perfect, but no trauma. No abuse. What had made his older brother become a monster?
He’s never been right and you know it. And what about all those cats, huh? Why was it we could never keep a cat? They all disappeared. And when they were gone, the neighbors’ cats started vanishing. Remember how everyone thought there must be a wild animal in the area, preying on house cats? Coyotes. They blamed coyotes. And when I asked for a dog, Dad said absolutely not, and there was this look in his eyes, remember that? This look like the thought of a dog was horrifying somehow. Maybe he knew....
The elevator stopped, the doors slid open. He stepped out into the white hallway. It smelled so clean he didn’t think a germ would dare try to invade. Spotting the nurses’ desk, he went over and repeated his brother’s name to the guy sitting there.
“Are you family?”
Mason hated male nurses. Didn’t know why, it just chafed him. They always seemed, to him at least, to be full of themselves. People who see men in scrubs automatically assume they’re doctors, and privately, he thought most male nurses got a huge ego boost out of that and almost never corrected the misassumption.
“I’m his brother.”
“I’d better take you in. Your brother is—”
“I was there when he pulled the trigger. You don’t need to prepare me. Just point me to the room, okay?”
The chubby Justin Bieber–haired blond came around the desk, anyway. “It’s right over here. He’s on a ventilator, but—”
Mason walked into the room, right up to the bed. Eric lay there. His entire head was bandaged and padded underneath, so it wasn’t as obvious that a lot of it was missing. Someone had washed most of the blood away and put him in a hospital gown. His eyes were closed, sunken unnaturally back into his head.
“Have you called his—your—family?” the nurse asked.
“I was just about to.”
“Good. The doctor will want to talk to them as soon as possible.”
“Why?” Mason took his eyes off his brother to look at the nurse.
“I really have to let the doctor be the one—”
“Come on, kid. Do you really think it matters who tells it? Cut me some slack here. I just watched my brother blow his own head off. Just tell me what you have to say already.”
The nurse lowered his head. “He’s brain dead. The machine is pumping air through his lungs, and forcing his heart to keep pushing oxygenated blood through his body. But he’s not coming back.”
Mason nodded and exhaled long and slow. No vegetable brother wasting away slow for the next twenty years. No recovering murderer brother having to face the consequences of his crimes. No being forced to testify against his own sibling or reveal the nightmare to his mother or sister-in-law or nephews. No being driven out of the job he loved.
It was better this way. Was that selfish? Okay, yeah, a little, but not entirely. It was better for everyone this way.
“So the doctor wants us all here to tell him to pull the plug.” It wasn’t a question.
“And to ask you about organ donation, though technically his wife has to make those decisions,” the nurse said with a nod in the direction of Eric’s left hand. “Most families make it together.”
Organ donation. That hadn’t even occurred to him. He let his eyes travel up and down his brother’s body, completely intact except for his head.
“The ventilator keeps the organs oxygenated until the decision is made,” Nurse Bieber went on.
“I see. So he’s...”
“He’s already gone, Detective Brown. I’m really sorry.”
Mason nodded. “Seems like it would be a shame to just waste them, doesn’t it?” he asked. “The way he wasted the rest of himself.”
“Yeah. It does. There’s someone right now praying they’ll stay alive long enough to get a heart, a liver, a kidney, a lung. Even his corneas are still good. He could make a blind person see again. Maybe for the first time.”
A blind person see again.
Maybe this accident happened for a reason.
Mason turned and looked at the nurse, revising his opinion of him. “They should have you talk to all the families in this situation. You’re good at it.”
“Does that mean you’re going to...?”
“Yeah, I’ll convince the family. Marie...she listens to me. But don’t worry, I’ll let the doctor think he talked me into it. Now, about those corneas—can we pick someone to get those? A specific person? If they’re the same tissue type or whatever?”
“Of course you can. Tissue typing isn’t even necessary for corneas anymore. The latest studies, blah blah blah.”
The nurse’s words faded into the background noise inside Mason’s head, where the gunshot was ringing and echoing endlessly. He was staring at his brother, remembering when they were kids, playing on the tire swing that hung from the giant maple up at the lake, seeing who could swing out farther, dropping into the icy cold water.
How do you go from a laughing ten-year-old to a cold-blooded killer?
“Detective