Page 115 of Return of the Spider
“A nineteen-year-old named Joyce Adams was evidently the first to be tortured, killed, and buried here,” I said.
“Joyce Adams?” Sampson said, squinting. “I have no idea who—”
“She was a freshman who disappeared from Princeton University a long time ago, more than a decade before Maggie Rose Dunne was kidnapped from the Washington Day School,” I said. “Bunny Maddox is buried here too.”
Sampson blinked and shook his head slowly as he turned from me. “No.”
“Yes, John,” I said firmly. “And I believe ballistics will provethat the forty-four-caliber Bulldog pistol down in that room fired the bullets that killed Conrad Talbot and the two hospital techs. The rope we found in the van? Soneji stole it from Diggs’s game pole to use on Brenda Miles. It was all an elaborate frame job designed to ensure that evidence of Soneji’s early killings pointed straight at Diggs and Beech.”
Looking into the middle distance, my oldest friend shook his head again, then faced me. “Diggs kept telling us he was innocent.”
“I remember.”
“Everyone said the evidence against him was ironclad. Jury. Appeals courts. Everyone.”
“Every single one,” I replied.
Sampson’s defenses broke down then. There was a tremor in his voice and a glassiness in his eyes when he choked out, “We helped put an innocent man…”
“We did,” I said, and the damage to my reputation and my belief in the judicial system felt completely and utterly irrevocable.
CHAPTER
97
We took turns drivingback to Washington, both of us silent, the weight of what we’d done and hadn’t done so long ago pressing in around us.
Eamon Diggs had proclaimed his innocence throughout his years on death row and all the way through the appeals process, or almost all the way. He’d been waiting to hear if the U.S. Supreme Court would hear his case when he was stabbed to death in a prison fight.
Afterward, Sampson and I told the relatives of his victims, including Bunny’s brother and Conrad Talbot’s parents, that in a savage way, justice had been served.
The memories made me sick. The memories made me question whether we had made other deadly mistakes in the years we’d been investigating homicides since the white-van murders.
I thought about how painstaking Soneji’s framing of Diggs had been. I recalled his descriptions of how he’d hunted Bunny Maddox when she’d tried to escape, how he’d strangled Brenda Miles. How Cynthia Owens had died just because she’d had the bad luck to step into this psychopath’s lair, and how he had planned to abduct Cheryl Lynn Wise long before he’d set his sights on nine-year-old Maggie Rose Dunne and her friend Michael “Shrimpie” Goldberg.
I thought back to that Christmas right after Jannie was born, remembered how Maria, Damon, and my infant daughter had all fallen asleep in my arms on the couch at Nana Mama’s and how I’d looked at the angel on the tree’s top and prayed for my family to be kept safe.
But that had not happened.
After a Virginia grand jury indicted Diggs and Beech for capital crimes, Sampson and I helped the NYPD and the FBI in the hunt for the Butcher of Sligo. Michael Sullivan had eventually come to our home and confronted me, looking for a woman who’d told Maria that the Butcher had raped her.
The following evening, I went to Potomac Gardens to pick up Maria, and as I hugged her hello after a long day’s work, one of Sullivan’s henchmen shot her. The love of my life and the mother of my two young kids died in my arms.
The children and I moved in with Nana Mama. She helped me raise Damon and Jannie.
But Maria’s death sent me into a long, slow, haunted downward spiral.
I became obsessed with catching killers, and I put the hunt for them above everything else in my life. Eventually I became Metro PD’s deputy chief of detectives and then a profiler for theFBI, where I partnered with Ned Mahoney in the Behavioral Science Unit.
During those years, I am ashamed to admit that I neglected my kids too many times and I neglected myself all the time. Most nights I went to bed feeling like a hollow man, like I had little to live for outside of my work and providing for my children.
And now, as Sampson pulled up in front of my house on Fifth Street, I felt the same way, hollowed out, as if all the work I’d done since Maria’s murder were tainted by my involvement in the wrongful conviction of Eamon Diggs and by my inability to see through the veils of deceit Soneji had hung.
Sampson said, “I feel like I’ve been mugged, hit over the head by this. I don’t know what to say or do about it.”
“I feel the same way, partner,” I said, getting out. “I’ll call you later.”
I went into the house and found Bree watching the evening news and Nana Mama doing a crossword.
