I bet it would be a relief to get it off your chest. I’m here to listen,” I said. “Confession is good for the soul, you know.”
“I haven’t got anything to confess.” At the table, he fanned his hands out, palms up, as if pleading with me to be reasonable. “I don’t know what you think you know, but there’s nothing to know.”
“Well, that’s not true,” I countered. “Is it?”
“Chief Jefferies, you solved this case, all four murders, the attempt on my life,” he argued. “I heard about all the demonstrators in town, demanding you leave. Instead of riling people up, why not take credit for your hard work? You’ve earned it. If you do, maybe folks won’t hate you anymore.”
I crumpled my lips and frowned. “I’m not feeling much like listening to praise I don’t deserve,” I said. “Because we didn’t get it right, did we?”
“You did,” he said, his voice thin with strain. “And my family will vouch for you, tell everyone how you figured out who murdered my wives and children. They’ll believe us, because they know us. We’re of them, in high standing in the community.”
“I solved your case, did I?” I asked, leaning back in the chair and staring at him.
“Yes, absolutely,” he said, with a slight grin, the kind that’s meant to be reassuring. “You got Carl. You proved that he massacred my family.”
I considered the man seated across from me. “Carl was your best friend, wasn’t he?”
“I thought he was,” Jacob replied with an irritated shrug.
“Then why did you agree so quickly that he was the one behind it? As soon as we said Carl did it, you embraced it. You never put up an argument that it couldn’t have been him.”
“You had evidence,” he said, his voice rising, incredulous. “You explained what you knew.”
“And you accepted it without question,” I said.
“Well, I, I meant to talk to you about that. You see, I haven’t been totally honest with you.” He focused on me, his eyes centered on mine but timid, as if reluctantly confiding about a great transgression.
“You haven’t?”
“Well, no. I have been remembering some. Off and on, I’ve had flashbacks.” Jacob’s frown curved ever farther down. “I was having them all along, I guess, but after you told me about Carl, it became clear. With what you and Max told me, I understood what the flashbacks meant.”
“What flashbacks?” I asked.
Jacob hunched forward, his shelf of thick blond hair falling over his eyes, his smoothly shaven face slightly flushed. His eyes narrowed as he implored me to listen. “You understand, I’m sure, that this has been hard on me. Carl was my compadre. We were like that,” he said, holding up his right hand with the first two fingers entwined. I noticed the bandage was gone. The cut on his hand not deep, it had already begun to heal. “But sometimes I’ve seen Carl in nightmares and such, or just off and on in flickers of memories as it came back to me.”
“And what happens in these nightmares, these flickers of memories?”
“Someone comes at me from behind, and I feel the knife at my throat.”
“And you think that was Carl?” I asked.
“I know it was. It was hazy at first, but the memories get clearer all the time. In the last couple of days, I’ve seen his face,” he said, his words coming fast and urgent. “Sometimes I even feel a searing pain in my throat.” He reached up and put his cuffed hands to his neck, covering the bandage. “I remember falling to the floor, and when I looked up, Carl was standing over me, a look like a crazy man on his face, blood dripping from the knife.”
I stared at him and said nothing. Jacob shifted in the metal chair, the aluminum seat squeaking as it rubbed a table leg. A cloud of Old Spice surrounded us, a favorite of the men in town. Jacob had applied it heavily, and I thought about how he’d fussed for his wedding, four days after his wives and children were murdered.
Once he appeared sufficiently uncomfortable, I smiled at him. “I’m glad you’re getting your memory back. That will make it easier to clear all this up.” I glanced at the ceiling and verified that the red record light was lit on the camera mounted on the wall. I’d told Jacob that we were making a video of our conversation, but when people get tense, they tend to forget such warnings. The more they