A week later, John sat in front of the parole board, looking them each in the eye in turn, telling them how he had finally come to realize that he had no one to blame for his incarceration but himself. He had hated Mary Alice Finney. He was jealous of her popularity, of her friends, her status. He had been a drug addict, but that was not an excuse. The coke had only lowered his inhibitions, his ability to judge between right and wrong. He had followed her home the night of the party. He had broken into her bedroom and brutally raped her. When he started to come down from the coke, he realized what he had done and murdered her in cold blood, mutilating her body to make it seem as if a psychotic stranger had killed her.

His record was remarkably clean. John had been a model inmate with only two infractions on his record, both over a decade old. He had attended every class the prison offered: Victim Impact, Family Violence, Corrective Thinking, Depression Group, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Life Issues, Communication Skills, Anger Management, Focus Group and Worry Control. He had finished his GED, completed a bachelor’s degree and was in the middle of completing a postsecondary degree when an amendment to the 1994 Crime Bill banned federal education grants to prisoners. John volunteered at the prison hospital where he taught CPR and basic hygiene to the other inmates. He had attended on-the-job training sessions in horticulture and food preparation. A letter penned by John and attached to his file stated that his mother was sick, and he just wanted to go home and be there for her the way she had been there for him all these years.

The official notice granting him parole came on July 22, 2005.

Emily had died two days earlier.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

JANUARY 6, 2006

Cousin Woody. The cool one, the popular one. He had a weight machine in the garage and he spent most of his days working out and smoking dope. His chest was ripped, six-pack abs separated by a trail of hair leading down to his privates. Girls climbed all over him like kudzu up a pine. He drove a silver Mustang hatchback, brand-new. He got the kids at the local school to sell some of his stash for him so he always had money burning a hole in his pocket. His widowed mother was on the fast-track at her law firm, always working late nights, always leaving her son alone. Mr. “Come Upstairs,” Mr. “You Wanna Toke?” Mr. “Just Snort It Up Your Nose.”

Cool Cousin Woody.

John had been following Woody for almost two months now, parking the Fairlane at the Inman Park MARTA station because gas was too expensive to use the car for anything but business. That’s how John thought about it: business. He was the CEO of Keep John Out of Prison. The fucking chief financial officer, the vice president, the secretary, all rolled up into one.

From the beginning, Woody had made it easy for John to keep tabs on him. He had always been a creature of habit, and his adult life had proven no different. John could set his watch by the guy. He went to work every day, came straight home after, kissed the wife if she was home, tucked in the kid, then planted himself in front of the television for the rest of the evening. He did this every evening the first week, and John was beginning to think he was wasting his time when Sunday rolled around. The kid wasn’t there—the wife hadn’t brought him back from church and John assumed he had been left with a family member. The wife left around six, dressed for work, leaving her husband all alone in the house.

Woody waited about thirty minutes after she was gone, then he got into his car and drove away. Weeks passed with him doing this, then a month, then another. Every Sunday night, Woody was in that car like clockwork.

With time, John had gotten good at keeping his distance, making sure Woody couldn’t see the Fairlane trolling along behind his car. Not that Woody seemed to be looking anywhere except toward the row of women who lined the streets of downtown Atlanta. He’d stop, wave one over, then drive her into an alley or park on an empty street. John would see the woman’s head go down for a few minutes, then it’d bob back up for good and she’d get out and Woody would move on down the road, have himself back in front of the TV an hour later.

Then one night, he’d changed the pattern. He took a left out of his street instead of a right, heading east up Highway 78. John had been forced to hang back farther than usual because there weren’t many cars on the road. He’d jerked the steering wheel hard at the last moment to take an exit, following Woody up a winding road for about twenty minutes, passing a sign that read, Welcome to Snellville…Where Everybody’s Somebody!

John had parked the car on a residential street, going on foot because that’s what Woody was doing. It was cold out, the first week of December, but John was sweating bad because he was smack in the middle of a neighborhood, sleeping kids packed into every house around him. He got so caught up in his fear that he lost sight of his target. He scanned the empty streets, walking down dead-ends, getting so turned around that he couldn’t even find the Fairlane.

John was worrying about his own safety now. He hid in the shadows, tensed at every noise, certain some cop would pull up, run his record and wonder what brought a pedophile to this neck of the woods.

Suddenly, in the distance, he saw a man walking with a little girl beside him. Both of them got into Woody’s car and drove off. John found the Fairlane five minutes later, cursing himself the whole way back to Atlanta. The next two weeks, he scanned the papers, looking for news of something bad happening in Snellville—an abducted child, a murder. There was nothing, but he knew it was just a matter of time.

The truth was simple: Woody was using John’s identity for a reason. He was trying to cover his tracks. John had spent enough time surrounded by criminals to know when he was seeing one in action. It was just a matter of time before whatever Woody was up to landed squarely back on John’s shoulders.

John decided then and there that he would kill himself, or find someone else to do it for him, before he would go back into prison. He had already lost twenty years of his life rotting away among pedophiles and monsters. He would not go back to that. He would not put Joyce through that pain and humiliation again. He had been strong on the inside, his will hardened steel, but the outside had made him soft and he knew that he could not take the loss of what little life he had carved for himself. He would put a bullet in his own brain before he did that.

John saw his sister around this time. Just before Christmas, Joyce had called him at the boardinghouse and he had been so surprised to hear her voice that he thought maybe someone was playing a joke on him. Only, who would play a joke? He didn’t know anybody, didn’t have any friends on the outside.

They met for coffee at a fancy café off of Monroe Drive. John had worn a new shirt and his only good pants, the chinos Joyce had sent to him so he would have something to wear when he left Coastal. The custom was to just give the inmate back the clothes he’d come in with, but John was several sizes larger than that scrawny kid who’d ridden the prison transport down to Savannah.

The night before, he had taken off work early so he could go to the gift shop down the street. John had spent an hour picking out a Christmas card for Joyce, going back and forth between the cheap ones and the nice ones. The weather had made business at the Gorilla sporadic. Art was laying off guys left and right. John had saved as much money as he could during the flush times, but he had finally had to get a winter coat. Even though he told himself he was never going to wear used clothes again, John had no choice but to go to the Goodwill Store. The only coat he could find that halfway fit him was torn at the collar and had a funky smell to it that he couldn’t wash out at the Laundromat. It was warm, though, and that was all that mattered.