Chapter Forty-Six

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

I've never seen a murder room before.

This one is located in the basement of a redbrick rambler in a tidy Silver Spring, Maryland, neighborhood. After my Waze app directed me to turn down this street, I passed a woman pushing a baby in a stroller, a few kids shooting a basketball into a hoop in a driveway, and an old guy in a muscle shirt working on his Chevy.

I'm familiar with this kind of neighborhood; I lived in one when I was young. Working-class families who take pride in the house and yard their hard-earned dollars bought; people who mind their own business yet still look out for one another.

Do any of them know of the horrors contained in this windowless basement?

"I brought a lot of this home with me when I retired," Samuel Prinze tells me.

I came straight here from the Barclays', after Samuel—who told me everyone calls him Sam—said he was free to talk today, and it would be best to do it in person.

Now he leans against the doorframe, arms crossed, watching me take it all in: the old, yellowing newspaper clippings neatly taped to the walls, macabre headlines screaming. Photographs of victims—on a playground, on train tracks, in a bedroom. Mug shots of the perpetrators, the captions revealing their names and ages: A pair of ten-year-old schoolboys who kidnapped and murdered a toddler. A twelve-year-old girl who stabbed her younger brother to death. A fourteen-year-old who killed his mother, then poisoned other family members.

Poison. A vision of Rose taking the syrup of ipecac in Beth's drawer and sprinkling drops into the freshly shucked oysters flits through my mind.

This windowless room is like a tumor deep within the walls of the cozy house Samuel shares with his second wife, where the yeasty aroma of something delicious baking floats through the air and the living room couches are covered in a floral pattern.

I turn away from the wall and face Sam.

He's short statured with close-cropped, receding gray hair, and he still retains the muscular physique of a younger man. Everything about him is tidy: His chinos and blue golf shirt are pressed, his glasses are smudge-free, and his mustache is neatly trimmed.

His workplace is the same: files stacked up in a perfectly straight pile on his desk, a map on the wall with color-coded pins, and index cards covered with clear, blocky handwriting tacked to a bulletin board. There are no extraneous objects here—no jacket slung over the back of his desk chair, no pair of shoes kicked off in the corner, not even a coffee cup half-full of lukewarm liquid.

I think of my own personal tic of not being able to bear leaving dishes in the sink or dirty laundry on the floor, and I get it.

When we're surrounded by danger and uncertainty, it feels important to keep our personal space controlled.

I open my mouth to ask my first question. But the one I'd planned doesn't come out. Instead, I say, "How can you bear looking at this every day?" I gesture not only to the photos of the victims, but to the young killers.

Sam takes a moment to answer. It seems everything he does is considered.

"I don't blame you if you want to look away. But I can't."

His answer is like his workspace: clear and sparse.

Sam gestures that I should take the straight-backed chair in the corner. I do, and he seats himself across from me at his desk chair, wheeling it a bit closer.

He doesn't want pleasantries. He's a cut-to-the-chase guy.

"Everything I'm about to tell you is hypothetical," I begin. "But first I need to ask if you're recording this conversation."

He lifts an eyebrow. "No, I'm not. Are you?"

"No." I shake my head. "Let's say you know of a child who may have violent tendencies."

Sam interrupts. "How violent?"

"Homicidal."

He nods for me to continue, his expression unchanged.

"There's some possible evidence this child could kill—maybe even has killed. But you're not certain. Where do you go from there?"

"Does this hypothetical child hurt animals?"

I think of Sugar and Tabasco, and start to shake my head. Then I realize I don't know. When I brought Rose with me to Lucille's, she seemed tender with the squirrels. Of course she knew she was being watched. If she felt the urge to clench her hands tight, squeezing the life out of the fragile little animals she was holding, she wouldn't have shown it to us.

Sam is a man who seems comfortable with silence. He appears to be waiting me out, letting my thought process unspool.

I cast my mind deeper back into that afternoon at Lucille's, bringing the scene into sharper focus. The piece that stood out for me the most was the missing box cutter. Now I examine other moments of our encounter. Rose seemed moved by the different pictures of animals Lucille showed her; the success stories that had come and gone.

But the one she stared at for a particularly long time was a picture of a hawk with an injured wing. The hawk was the only creature in Lucille's album that was badly hurt.

I thought Rose's gaze held compassion. But maybe I projected what I wanted to see.

Perhaps Rose was fascinated by the pain and suffering of this creature. Or, worse, titillated by it.

"I have no evidence she has ever mistreated an animal," I finally say. "But I can't rule it out."

Sam's eyes sharpen beneath his heavy brows at my slip. My hypothetical child now has a pronoun.

I take a breath and look around his murder room again. Even though I sense I can trust Sam, I need to be more careful in my speech.

My eyes are drawn to a brittle-looking newspaper clipping about an eleven-year-old boy who was convicted of first-degree murder for shooting his stepmother in the head while she slept. I lean closer to read the caption. Years later, the child was exonerated. But his life was shattered by what appears to have been a rush to judgment.

The enormity of the responsibility I've undertaken hits me again.

"Two hours a day," Sam tells me, breaking my spiraling thought process. "That's my deal with my wife: I don't stay down here one minute longer. And when I go upstairs, I leave all this behind. I don't want my job to kill another marriage."

I doubt Sam really leaves it behind, but I nod.

"I've spent my career dealing with the same question you must have," he says. "Is evil a natural force in some people, or is it created by man?"

My mouth goes dry. Sam is not a man to be underestimated. He has cut to the crux of the confusing thoughts swirling in my mind.

"What did you conclude?"

He leans forward, steepling his fingertips. "Take two kids who were raised in the same home. They were subject to and witnesses of horrific abuse. Yet they turn out as opposites. One becomes a pattern-breaker and devotes his life to putting away killers. The other remains on the same familiar track, deepening the family legacy of violence and mayhem."

Sam stands up and walks to the far wall of his office. He stands in front of pictures of two boys who look to be about twelve and fourteen, and I realize the example Sam just described to me isn't a hypothetical scenario, either.

I can see it in the faces of the boys: They're both dark-haired and unsmiling. But there's something in the younger one's heavy-lidded eyes that chills me to my bones.

I'm almost unable to pull away my gaze—such is the force of his venomous energy, even through an old photograph.

Then I glance at the older boy and suck in my breath.

I recognize the heavy brows and prominent chin. It's a younger image of the man now standing in front of it—it's Sam as a teenager.

I can tell by Sam's expression he knows I've registered what he shared with me. But he doesn't otherwise acknowledge allowing me to understand such a vital piece of his past.

"I believe evil is a natural force, like a hungry virus, perpetually swirling through the air and seeking places to infiltrate. Most of us bar the door against it." Sam walks back to his chair and sits again. "Others welcome it in."

Sam has lived with a child capable of extreme violence; he told me as much when he called my attention to the picture of his younger brother. And he has spent his entire career trying to counterbalance whatever his brother has already done or will do. He's the opposite side of the coin, the disruptor in his dark family legacy.

I lean forward, eager to soak in whatever he will say next.

"If a child has murdered someone and enjoyed it, he or she will do it again. It's not a question of if. Only when. It could happen in ten years. It could happen tomorrow."

"So there's nothing I can do? I just have to wait and see if the child kills again to know if they're a murderer?"

Sam releases a long exhale. "There is another way to try to find out."

The temperature in the room feels like it has plummeted. I am equal parts desperate and terrified to hear what Sam is about to tell me.

"Think about what triggered the first murder," Sam says softly. The overhead light gleams off his clear glasses, and it's difficult to see his eyes. "A big stressor, perhaps? An enormous life change?"

I think about Tina and Ian's affair, and her secret pregnancy. Rose would have known her world was about to implode if she overheard Tina telling Ashley her plans to reveal the baby's existence to Ian that very night.

"Yes. A huge looming life change could have triggered it."

"If there is another, similar stressor coming up, the child may react in the same way. She may try to get rid of the agent of change."

Tina was the first agent of change—and now she's gone.

Sam's voice grows louder and more urgent. "You've got to pressure this child. That's when people snap. Make her snap."

I've spent my career trying to help kids, to ease the pressure and pain they feel.

Now Sam is telling me to do the opposite.

More than that, he's instructing me to set up a scenario in which I position myself as a target. If I do it, I will truly be following the footsteps of Tina during the final weeks of her life.

Because I am the new agent of change.

Above us, a faint beeping sound erupts and is silenced a moment later. There's the clatter of metal that must mean Sam's wife is pulling something out of the oven. Then silence descends again.

"I understand," I tell Sam.

He nods. When he speaks again, I hear a weary, almost despairing edge in his voice. Sam already let me know the toll his work getting into the minds of children who kill has taken on his relationships. But this is the first indication of what his near obsession has cost him; he's a man who has no peace.

"If this is who she is, she will explode under pressure," Sam tells me. "Be very, very careful. Never make the mistake of underestimating her just because she's a child."