Fall by Tracy Clark: Featured Excerpt

Chapter 1

Detective Harriet Foster stared at her son’s killer. She told herself that she needed to see if he’d changed in the four years since she’d seen him last, but that wasn’t it. The test was for herself. Could she look at him and despise him less? Could she be in the same room again with Terrell Willem and not feel rage and contempt and an ungodly impulse to forfeit everything she was to end him?

Willem was here for a resentencing hearing. She was here to give another impact statement. Willem couldn’t have appeared more disinterested as he sat sullen in his tan prison two-piece, his paunchy body, fueled by cheap prison carbs, squeezed into the county-issued uniform, its washed-out V-neck top revealing a dingy white T-shirt beneath. Foster stood at the front of courtroom 211 at the Cook County Courthouse, her hands resting on the lectern, but Willem wouldn’t look at her. Slumped at the hearing table, dull eyes focused on his feet, he was here in body only.

His lawyer, a young public defender outwardly nervous, sat beside him fiddling with file papers, her bright green eyes, pixie cut, and rosy cheeks, strangely out of place in a place like this. Willem, now twenty-two, had spent the last five years in prison for murdering her son, Reg. But the look on the young man’s dark face, the sneer, the vacantness of expression, told her that five years could have been fifty for all the difference they had made. No change. Terrell Willem was the same. Prison, free, here, there, he would always be this and only this. She might have been able to bring herself to lament the loss of his potential were it not for the fact that this waste had cost her the life of her fourteen-year-old son, her only child. But she was angry at more than Willem.

Willem didn’t amount to nothing on his own. Cognitively disadvantaged, slow, he’d been failed by a lumbering, inefficient school system and by a fifteen-year-old mother who hadn’t a clue how to parent. Willem could barely read, had never held a job. He robbed and sold drugs and whatever else he needed to do to feed himself. His arms and neck were covered in violent tattoos that glorified death and killing and the gang to which he’d sold his soul. Detached from civility, devoid of remorse, Willem was a hard and nasty chaos machine with no conscience. 

Harri had memorized his arrest record; she had learned all she could about Willem. Know thy enemy, keep him close. She knew him by the sour twist of his thick, dry lips, saw him in the false bravado that had him leaning back in his chair, his long legs spread wide under the table, as though nothing worried him, as if he had no stake in what was being said or by whom. He was a child in a man’s body. A child who hadn’t been taught, who’d been allowed to grow as a destructive weed might and live like a feral dog that lurched undeterred from impulse to impulse. Willem had wanted Reg’s bike, so he took it, but that hadn’t been enough. He had to take Reg too. 

Waddnt no big thang. People die all the time, dawg, so what? Gave me the bike, but he too slow givin’ up them good shoes, tho. It’s what he had said at trial. Then he’d chuckled, revealing two gold teeth. Foster still heard that chuckle in her nightmares. There’d been sneers at the trial too, and eye rolls, more blank looks. At one point during the proceedings, Willem had appeared to fall asleep and had to be nudged awake by his court-appointed lawyer. A bike or a life, shoes or a wallet, all the same to him.

Harri stood with her back straight, her eyes on the killer at the table. She’d worn a black suit, her badge clipped to the belt at her waist, but hidden. Her gun too. Both were tools of her trade, tools that defined her, marked her, steadied her hand.

Resentencing. That’s what they were here for. Because Willem had been just seventeen at the time of her son’s murder, a lawyer, not Pixie Cut, had successfully argued that he deserved a break on his sentence of ninety-nine years and a day, no parole. Willem’s side was trying to whittle his punishment down to seventy-five years with parole on the table. Foster was here to stand for Reg. Willem was damaged goods, lost half a lifetime ago to abuse, neglect and depravity. And she wanted him to serve every minute of that ninety-nine years, even the day tacked on behind it. She wanted Willem to die in prison. On bad days, and there were many, she dreamed of being there when he did.

She glanced around the old courtroom, its dark wood and brass fixtures harkening back to a foregone era when Al Capone or one of his associates might have strutted along the marble floors on their way to the witness stand. The room felt close and hot as heat hissed out of the heavy vents, the old school building’s answer to the February chill outside the heavy, leaded windows. Harriet had been here a million times or more testifying in cases, doing her job locking up killers like Terrell Willem. But what happened next in rooms like this wasn’t up to her. There were always lawyers and judges. Always Willems.

Harriet scanned the room, glancing over the handful of observers that included her ex-husband, Ron Jamison, in the first row, and Willem’s mother and two sisters across the aisle in the back, as if they’d chosen the furthest point to sit for fear of recrimination. Willem’s family looked just as hard, just as broken as he was, she thought, the meanness, the misplaced defiance, the confusion on their faces an explanation for Terrell, but not an excuse. The room smelled of sweat and furnace and oiled leather from her holster and Ron’s and the guards’ who’d brought Terrell in. 

She wasn’t naïve. She knew abuse was generational. She knew poverty and race played a part, and lack of opportunity made up the rest of it. That crime and gangs became the reality when there was nothing to counterbalance them, and that boys like Willem almost never made it past thirty. Harriet knew all this because she was charged with fixing it, or at least arresting it.

Harriet turned back to Willem, having memorized every line on his face from before. His was the last face her son had seen and knowing that made it difficult for her to sleep. Willem could have taken the bike, the shoes, he didn’t have to take Reg, but he did. He did because Reg meant nothing, because life held no great value, because prison or free, ninety-nine years or seventy-five, was all the same.

“When you’re ready, Ms. Foster,” Judge Ceresti said gently. He didn’t have to identify her as cop. Everyone knew it. But she wasn’t here in that capacity. She was here as the mother of a murdered son.

Harriet pulled her eyes away from Willem and stared at the statement she’d written, the edges of the single sheet of paper curled and damp with her sweat. These were her reasons for wanting Willem to stay where he was. Ninety-nine years felt like justice. Seventy-five felt like compromise. 

When she looked again at Willem, she was met by his oily golden smile, then his devil eyes slid from hers and his chin dropped to his chest. She watched as he picked at his cuticles, like he couldn’t be bothered, like they were keeping him from something more important. She heard RJ shift in his seat and clear his throat. She could hear the heat hissing. Harriet turned to look at RJ in his shirt and tie, his trench coat slung over the back of the wooden bench, his service weapon duly secured at his side. He’d always been an attractive man, tall, dark, steady. Not hers, someone else’s now. They both served and protected their city and the people in it, but that hadn’t been enough to save Reg from Terrell Willem.

“Reginald Stewart Jamison,” she began, her voice strong, unwavering. The breath she took afterward was not because she was afraid to face the monster, but rather because it was taking everything in her not to do the other thing, to forget who she was and forfeit all. Even reciting her son’s name, saying it out loud, having it burn her throat, and having to listen to its echo as it bounced off the wood and the brass, made her want to scream. She flicked a look at Willem’s mother, who glared at her as though Harriet had been responsible for putting them all here. It was a cycle, she knew. This. And she saw no end to it. There were millions of Terrell Willems. Millions of mothers who shouldn’t be mothers. Millions of failures, missteps, lost chances, acts of violence, deaths, bikes, shoes.

What good would a statement do? What impact would it have? She plunged a hand into her blazer pocket and felt around for the half dozen or so paper clips she’d secreted there. It had become her habit to mark tiny triumphs in getting through the day by slipping a clip into a pocket. The clips were a tangible reminder that this too would pass. She turned to the judge, who waited for her, but she folded up the paper. She didn’t want to say those things anymore.

She let a moment go. “My son would have been nineteen years old now. Off to college. On his way. He loved music and astronomy, and dogs. He was loved, and we miss him.” She turned to address Ceresti. “He Terrell Willem didn’t kill to defend himself. He didn’t kill because he was hungry and needed to survive. He killed for a bike. He made a choice. He could easily have made another. Given the same chance, he’d do the same again, and we all know it.”

Willem’s eyes fired. He glared at her like he wanted to gut her. “I ain’t scared of you.” His muttered words echoed in the quiet room. “No woman.” His lawyer leaned over to quiet him, but he snatched his arm away from hers. “Naw. She ain’t nothin’.”

Harriet’s eyes held his. He was afraid. She could see it, smell it. He’d likely been afraid his whole life, and yet she could muster up no forgiveness for him. She held tight to her hatred of Terrell Willem. But he was wrong, she thought. She wasn’t nothing. She was Terrell Willem’s boogeyman. She was the ghost who was going to haunt every step he took until the day he died.

This is an excerpt of FALL by Tracy Clark, available December 5 wherever books are sold. To learn more, visit https://tracyclarkbooks.com.