Chapter 50

Charlie threw the photograph and envelope to the floor, asking himself one unanswerable question.

Why her?

Clearly, a deeply disturbed and divided man lurked inside him. The names on the kill list were the names of those he blamed for his downfall. Could it be that his mother represented some deep-seated anger over his lost childhood? Was this twisted retribution perhaps for the attention she’d given to Joe and not to him?

Finding the truth would require a conversation with a part of his mind that was unavailable to him. Nothing about the Charlie present in the room wanted any harm to befall his mother, any more than he had wanted the murders of Yardley, Mackenzie, and Rudy Gomes. But the evidence against him was overwhelming.

To follow through with that gruesome promise seemed impossible, given the manhunt to find him. Yet that notion brought little comfort. His private Mr. Hyde seemed capable of following through with any plan, even under the most challenging circumstances. Charlie picked up the photograph. He tucked it in his pants pocket. His mother’s fate, so long as he lived and roamed free, was in a peril far greater than a coma.

Charlie heard the siren wail of a police cruiser’s or fire engine’s approach. He raced to the window, peeling back the curtain to see if the sirens were headed in his direction. One police car, then another, sped past the motel on Ocean Avenue. They were heading west toward the Wonderland train station. Then something else caught his eye. Parked out front of his motel room was a BMW. It was without doubt his car’s make and model.

Charlie hesitated before opening the motel room door. He half-expected a hail of bullets to greet him. When he realized that might just be the greatest gift of all, he threw open the door and stepped outside into the cool fall morning air. Frost from the night before encased the BMW’s windows. As a gesture of brotherly affection, Joe had repaired the broken window after retrieving the car from the tow yard. Without opening the BMW and looking inside, it would be impossible to conclude if the car was his own.

He looked around and noticed nothing unusual or alarming. The parking lot was mostly empty, as it had been the night before. No other motel guests milled about. Ocean Avenue was just beginning to fill with morning commuters.

Charlie wondered what day it was, and sighed. The day of the week, like his life, felt irrelevant.

He approached the driver’s side door and peered into the window. The car was equipped with the latest model InVision system. Charlie tried the door and found it unlocked. The interior was devoid of any papers, coffee cups, pens, or loose change. It was exactly how he kept his car. He didn’t bother to check the glove compartment. He already knew. This was his car. The key was still in the ignition.

Sitting in the driver’s seat, Charlie envisioned a scenario that held the horrifying possibility of being both plausible and true. In some sort of psychotic split, he speculated, he might have taken a cab or train back to his childhood home in Waltham. There he could have slipped inside the house, using a key hidden under a rock in the backyard. Once inside, he could have taken his car key hanging on a hook by the front door and driven to Concord or to Lincoln, where he knew Mackenzie lived. Then he would have driven back to the Seacoast Motel, parked the car in front of his room, and fallen asleep on the bed. At some point, he took the photograph from the frame in the living room, inscribed the death threat to his own mother on the back, and taped it on top of the box filled with body parts, which he slid under the bed. Lastly, a note taped to the TV would remind him to look in the morning.

Though he had no conscious memory of having done any of that, the timing would have worked. All the notes, from the very first Post-it note he found on the inside flap of his BlackBerry case, were perhaps his own personal silent alarm—a plea to stop before it was too late.

Unlike all the mysteries haunting him, the route driven by his car was verifiable. InVision would have a record of his travels. It was a product feature he himself had championed and consumers seemed to like. In a number of instances, clients had used the trip-log feature to verify infidelity and other unscrupulous behaviors. At no point when he planned the work for the current model did he ever imagine it would do the same for him.

With a turn of the key, the car came to life.

“Hello, Charlie. I hope you’re having a great day,” InVision announced in its programmatically cheery default greeting.

With a couple of keystrokes, Charlie retrieved the trip log. It showed, as he had already suspected, a thirteen-mile drive from Waltham to Concord. The next trip was an eight-mile drive to Lincoln, Massachusetts, that ended near Flint’s Pond. The trip to Concord occurred at 2:20 a.m. this morning. The trip to Lincoln started at 4:00 a.m., with the last trip logged from Lincoln to Revere. Most of that drive took place along Route 2, and it was finished just after 5:30 in the morning. Simon, Charlie knew, ran at an obscenely early hour every morning. It was part of his type A, take-no-prisoners personality.

Mackenzie’s body, Charlie believed—without any conscious recollection—would be discovered in the woods surrounding Flint’s Pond. His wife had probably already reported him missing. The time line, according to InVision, had given Charlie plenty of opportunity to write the notes and put the box under the bed.

Charlie scanned the interior of the car for any evidence of blood. Nothing was noticeable. He popped the trunk with a pull of a lever under the dashboard casing and exited the car. He didn’t need to open the trunk to detect a smell coming from inside that was not unlike the smell from underneath the motel room bed. Once the trunk was opened, he peered inside it and staggered back a few steps at the sight of the bloodied hacksaw inside. There was blood all over the trunk’s carpeting, too, but at least no other body parts were visible.

The only other item in the trunk brought him a feeling of relief. There was a way out of the nightmare, and he now knew it. His mother’s life would be spared. Joe’s life, too, in a way, for her death would shorten his brother’s life substantially. He couldn’t face a lifetime in prison. He was certain of that. Especially having to live each day without any memory of the crimes for which he’d be convicted. There was, however, a simple way out. And he was looking right at it. Charlie reached down and pulled out his father’s .38 Special. He must have taken it from the house when he went there to get the keys to his BMW. The chamber was loaded.

There wasn’t any note to guide him on what to do next. Eddie Prescott didn’t speak to him. But now none of that was necessary. Only one course of action made any sense.

With the gun in hand, Charlie climbed back into the front seat of his BMW. He felt comforted by the gun’s steely weight and coolness. It was the first time since he was a kid that he had touched the gun, at least the first time he remembered. His mother had kept it in a shoe box in the attic. It was a memento from her former life, but she wasn’t one to let go of much. The house, with its old furniture and appliances, was testament to that.

Charlie hoisted the gun to his head. His finger trembled on the trigger.

How much pain will I feel? he wondered. How much pain have I caused?

With the gun pressed against his temple, Charlie closed his eyes and prayed that the end wouldn’t hurt as much as he imagined.