I Will Find You
Harlan Coben
For
my nephews and nieces
Thomas, Katharine, McCallum, Reilly, Dovey,
Alek, Genevieve, Maja,
Allana, Ana, Mary, Mei,
Sam, Caleb, Finn,
Annie, Ruby, Delia,
Henry, and Molly
With love,
Uncle Harlan
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Part 1
Chapter
1
I am serving the fifth year of a life sentence for murdering my own child.
Spoiler alert: I didn’t do it.
My son Matthew was three years old at the time of his brutal murder. He was the best thing in my life, and then he was gone, and I’ve been serving a life sentence ever since. Not metaphorically. Or should I say, not just metaphorically. This would be a life sentence no matter what, even if I hadn’t been arrested and tried and convicted.
But in my case, in this case, my life sentence is both metaphorical and literal.
How, you wonder, can I possibly be innocent?
I just am.
But didn’t I fight and protest my innocence with every fiber of my being?
No, not really. This goes back, I guess, to the metaphorical sentence. I didn’t really care that much about being found guilty. I know that sounds shocking, but it’s not. My son is dead. That’s the lede here. That’s the lede and the headline and the all-caps. My son is dead and gone, and that fact would not have changed had the jury forewoman declared me guilty or not guilty. Guilty or not guilty, I had failed my son. Either way. Matthew wouldn’t be less dead had the jury been able to see the truth and free me. A father’s job is to protect his son. That’s his number-one priority. So even if I didn’t wield the weapon that smashed my son’s beautiful being into the mangled mess I found on that awful night five years ago, I didn’t stop it either. I didn’t do my job as his father. I didn’t protect him.
Guilty or not guilty of the actual murder, it is my fault and thus my sentence to serve.
So I barely reacted when the jury forewoman read the verdict. Observers concluded, of course, that I must be sociopathic or psychopathic or deranged or damaged. I couldn’t feel, the media claimed. I lacked an empathy gene, I couldn’t experience remorse, I had dead eyes, whatever other terminology would land me in the killer camp. None of that was true. I just didn’t see the point. I had been on the receiving end of a devastating blow when I found my son, Matthew, in his Marvel-Hero-themed pajamas that night. That blow had knocked me to my knees, and I couldn’t get up. Not then. Not now. Not ever.
The metaphorical life sentence had begun.
If you think this will be a tale about a wronged man proving his innocence, it is not. Because that would not be much of a story. In the end, it would make no difference. Being released from this hellhole of a cell would not lead to redemption. My son would still be dead.
Redemption isn’t possible in this case.
Or at least, that was what I believed right up until the moment that the guard, a particularly eccentric case we call Curly, comes to my cell and says, “Visitor.”
I don’t move because I don’t think he is talking to me. I have been here for almost five years, and I have had no visitors in all that time. During the first year, my father tried to visit. So had Aunt Sophie and a handful of close friends and relatives who believed me innocent or at least not really guilty. I wouldn’t let them in. Matthew’s mother, Cheryl, my then-wife (she is now, not surprisingly, my ex-wife) had tried too, albeit half-heartedly, but I wouldn’t let her see me. I made it clear: No visitors. I was not being self-pitying or any kind of pitying. Visiting helps neither the visitor nor the visitee. I didn’t and don’t see the point.
A year passed. Then two. Then everyone stopped trying to visit. Not that anyone, other than maybe Adam, had been clamoring to make the schlep up to Maine, but you get my point. Now, for the first time in a long time, someone is here at Briggs Penitentiary to see me.
“Burroughs,” Curly snaps, “let’s go. You have a visitor.”
I make a face. “Who?”
“Do I look like your social secretary?”
“Good one.”
“What?”
“The social-secretary line. It was very funny.”
“Are you being a wiseass with me?”
“I have no interest in visitors,” I tell him. “Please send them away.”
Curly sighs. “Burroughs.”
“What?”
“Get your ass up. You didn’t fill out the forms.”
“What forms?”
“There are forms to fill out,” Curly says, “if you don’t want visitors.”
“I thought people had to be on my guest list.”
“Guest list,” Curly repeated with a shake of his head. “This look like a hotel to you?”
“Hotels have guest lists?” I counter. “Either way, I did fill out something that I don’t want any visitors.”
“When you first got here.”
“Right.”
Curly sighs again. “You got to renew that every year.”
“What?”