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for drugs. He’d been arrested for murder. Two, in fact—both young women, neighbors of his in that apartment building on Chestnut Street.

Chapter 2

    F IVE DAYS AFTER Skeet’s arrest and three days after his arraignment hearing, Jackie went to Essex County Jail for the first time. She went alone. The jail was a two-story, blue-and-white modular structure made of cinder blocks, surrounded by two concentric rectangles of ten-foot-high chain-link fences. Sandwiched between the Passaic River and the New Jersey Turnpike, the atmosphere smelled of toxic, unfamiliar elements due to the General Chemical plant directly across Doremus Avenue, a towering cistern of polyaluminum hydroxychloride used in wastewater treatment.
    Passing through checkpoint after checkpoint—and asked at each what her relationship was to the prisoner, to which she replied succinctly, “He’s my son’s father”—she felt herself racking up distance from the outside world. She knew only as much as Carl did, which was hardly anything. Her lone hope, aside from the whole situation turning out to be a wrong place–wrong time misunderstanding, was that it would be resolved quickly. She knew that this impulse was selfish; she was thinking about the adjustments she’d have to make to get on with her life. She still hadn’t told Rob. That a week had passed without her son seeing his father was uncommon but not truly strange. The boy hadn’t asked, but she knew he was attuned to the anxiety coursing through the house on Chapman Street; she knew that the question was coming.
    A guard escorted her down a hallway, past the reception room for prisoners held here on lesser offenses, who were allowed to sit in open air across a table from their friends and family. Jackie was led to a narrow room with concrete walls, tight cubicles, low stools, guards stationed on either side of the Plexiglas partitions. Knowing that her son would ultimately come here to visit, she’d hoped the place would be less than completely grim. It wasn’t. A buzzer sounded, the steel-reinforced door across from her opened, and Skeet entered wearing bright orange, with his wrists manacled together and palms facing toward her.
    She hadn’t expected him to be smiling, but the fact that he wasn’t jarred her nevertheless. Even during the worst of their arguments over the years, Skeet had been able to grin his way through any conflict. He seemed curiously energized, but the energy was an uncomfortable one: fidgety, pent, his eyes darting everywhere except into her own.
    They had fifteen minutes. He asked her if she could find him a lawyer to handle the bail situation and get him out of here quickly. At the arraignment hearing, bail had been set at $500,000. That amount had to be lowered if he were to get out, plan his defense, talk to some people, and see his son.
    He didn’t seem to comprehend yet that his charge could not be evaded through guile and charm. She wanted to tell him this, tell him that people— two young women —were dead, and he might very well be sentenced to pay for their lives with his own. Instead, she said she didn’t know any lawyers and didn’t have the money for one anyway. She spoke clearly and directly, leaving no room for Skeetesque rebuttals. The maintenance man at Jackie’s workplace had told her in the intervening days about lawyers and the hours they billed. This was a capital case. Good lawyers would be beyond unaffordable; bad lawyers would be ill equipped for the task. And even the cheapest lawyer around would find a way to bill five figures, minimum. He’d told her that contacting the public defender’s office might be the best option. Skeet could get lucky by being assigned one who truly became invested in the client. Not likely, but possible.
    She tried as hard as she could to look at him and not see a man who had killed others, to commit herself to the idea of innocent