that risk? Where was the possible gain there? He wants to explain to her that back then, he didn’t feel he had anything to lose. There was no new job sitting on the table that night. There was nothing.
She stares back, that faint smile of hers hovering ever so slightly on her lips. This time he doesn’t like it. It’s one of those smiles that an older woman bestows on a younger man when she’s charmed by his innocence. He hadn’t minded seeing it in his twenties, and even his early thirties, but now it only grates on him.
“So, when do you think they’ll arrest me?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “But the important thing is that you remain calm when they show up, especially if they do it at the hospital. Don’t say anything. I’m going to give you all my numbers. You can always page me. If I can’t come right away, I’ll have somebody else come.”
He nods, clenching his jaw, suddenly reminded of the blunt Chinese doctor, Dr. Liu, who told people they were going to die. He looks out the window of the restaurant, depressed. Outside, it’s still pouring, and there’s a BMW sitting at a stoplight, its windshield wipers going full blast. With each swipe of the wipers, he hears the good doctor’s voice. You have lung cancer, you are going to die. You have lung cancer, you are going to die. The blades are like metronomes.
21/ BLUE FORD
April 11, 2007—6:03 p.m.
TWO WEDNESDAYS LATER, AROUND SIX, STANDING AT THE KITCHEN window, Cogan notices a patrol car cruise past the house. It slows, and as it does, his chest tightens. When it doesn’t stop, he breathes a sigh of relief and tells himself he’s being paranoid, a patrol car usually checks the neighborhood twice a day—once in the morning and once late in the afternoon. But twenty minutes later, when the unmarked blue Ford sedan pulls up in front of his house, he has a sinking feeling his paranoia is justified.
Breathlessly, he watches Madden and his partner get out of the car. They’re in no hurry. They stand for a moment next to the car and straighten their ties. Then they head slowly up the walkway to his front door.
The doorbell rings.
He knows what to expect when he opens the door, but for some reason when he finally does, his eyes open wide. He looks at the detectives as if they’re complete strangers, even aliens.
“Dr. Cogan,” Madden says. “Sorry to disturb you. But I’m afraid you’re going to have to come down to the station with us. We have a warrant for your arrest. You’ve been charged with rape in the third degree, and you should know that anything you say can and will be used against you . . .”
And so it is, just as he’d imagined it would be only no one’s watching. He’d somehow expected a small crowd. Or the disbelieving stares of doctors and nurses as they led him out of the hospital. For that he’s thankful: that they’d spared him the embarrassment and come here, not the hospital. The only person to see him leave his house that day with the detectives is a little girl out riding her new bike. And she doesn’t even know what’s happening.
“Hi, Dr. Cogan,” she calls out to him gleefully, as she usually does.
“Hi, Katie,” he calls back.
He doesn’t think of it then, but later, when they’re a few blocks from the station, he realizes that he was about her age the last time he’d taken a ride in the back of a cop car. It had been almost thirty years.
Back then, he’d cried, afraid of what his father would do to him when he found out he was a shoplifter.
Now he wishes his father were still alive to punish him.
PART 3
DISCOVERY
22/ SOCIAL LOGICAL
Excerpts from the diary of Kristen Kroiter:
Jan. 16
So Carrie finally did it! She went up to Josh Stein and talked to him. She’s been talking about it for weeks but she never knew what to say. We’d be right about to go up to him but then she’d say, What am I going to say? And I’d be like I don’t know. Just say something. And she’d be like I can’t just say anything. And we’d go back and forth like that and afterward we’d just laugh and feel really stupid because he and his friends are such dweebs.
Anyway, today at lunch we walked over to their little area at the edge of