Because Neal knew where. That was the thing he had carried in his chest for fifteen years like a swallowed stone. In 2010, the year before, Sean had been pulled over on Route 24 at one in the morning doing eighty-one with a half-empty bottle of Fireball on the passenger seat. The trooper had been a kid, new. Sean had given him his license, and the kid had seen the name and asked, and Sean had said yes, my dad's a sergeant in Brockton, and the kid had called it in, and somebody had called somebody, and by morning there was no OUI. There was a written warning for speed. Neal had gotten the call at six a.m. from a lieutenant in the State Police he had known since the academy who said, cheerfully, Your boy's a lucky boy, Neal, tell him he owes me a beer, and Neal had said thanks, I owe you one, and had hung up and gone upstairs and stood in the door of Sean's room while Sean slept face-down across the bed in his clothes with one sneaker still on, and Neal had not woken him. He had meant to have a talk with him. He had meant to. He had stood in the door and thought, I'll scare him tomorrow, and then tomorrow there had been a shift, and the day after that a Little League fundraiser, and the talk had become one of those things that was going to happen, and then the night on Ash Street came along and made it a thing that never would.
The boy had learned that the name worked. He had learned it from his father, who had learned it from the job, who had taught it to him without ever saying a word of it out loud. You do not need a weapon if you have a name. And then one night the name did not work, a twenty-year-old with his hands up said he did not care, and the boy reached for the next thing.
That was what the three pages folded in Neal's jacket were supposed to be about. He had been writing them since April. He had started a dozen times. Every draft came out sounding like a man explaining the brakes failed.
Through the inner glass he saw the outer world come in: a heavyset man in a dark suit with a rolling briefcase who had to be the DA's office, and then, a few minutes behind him, a young woman in a black blazer with a laptop bag and a sheaf of folders who had to be Attorney Raman, Sean's lawyer from the law school clinic, whom Neal had spoken to on the phone a dozen times and met twice and who had told him, in the gentlest possible way, that the most important thing the family could do at the hearing was not try to minimize anything at all. Raman nodded at Neal and Maureen through the glass. Then she saw Antoinette Reddick and went straight to her, and bent, and the two women put their heads together over the manila envelope, and Raman laughed at something and touched her shoulder.
"Go back in," Maureen said. "I want a minute out here."
"Mo."
"Go in, Neal. I'm going to stand here and look at the trees. I'll be right in."
He went in. He went to the coffee urn because it was somewhere to go and poured a cup he did not want and stood holding it. The DA's man had sat down on the far end of the chrome-armed chairs and was reading something on his phone. Raman had gone through the inner door. Antoinette Reddick sat where she had been sitting, the envelope on her knees, and she was not reading now; she was looking at the corkboard across the lobby, or at nothing.
He made himself walk over. He did not take anything out of his jacket. He kept his hands where she could see them, holding the paper cup, and he was aware of doing it, and he was aware that she was aware.
"Ms. Reddick," he said. "I'd like to say it better."