Page 110 - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

had come by the phone but it was easy to tell how long he’d had it because the

photo album was full of selfies he’d taken. He posed in exactly the same way in
each one, fingers held up in a peace sign. Only the backgrounds were different.
He favored empty rooms and, occasionally, the backdrop of two or more of his
fellow inmates doing their best to bash each other’s heads in.

—

SOLOMON WAS MUCH more communicative with her, but that didn’t mean she

understood him any better. His record was something of a puzzle in that he’d
only turned to a life of crime relatively recently. For the first fifteen years of his
life his record was spotless, then one day he’d approached a gang whose
members had been torturing him on and off, joined, and became their leader. His
explanation of the change he’d made: “It was time.”

Jill was aware that Solomon’s younger brother had been struggling with
illness for years, and that the brother’s brain tumor had gone into remission
when Solomon was thirteen. The beginning of Solomon’s career of criminal
violence coincided—if you could really call that a coincidence—with doctors
detecting a recurrence of cancerous cells in his brother’s brain. This made Jill
afraid for Solomon, and afraid of him too. He admitted to wanting to help his
brother, but would say nothing more about it. He was like a boy in a fairy tale;

there was a set of steps he was to follow with no concession whatsoever as to
how others viewed his actions. Then at the end of it all there’d be a reward.
Solomon had just heard from his family—his brother’s cancer was back in
remission. But the young man showed no relief; the news only deepened the
look of concentration in his eyes. This is what Jill saw when she tried to see life
Solomon’s way: Your brother had been selected at random and hurt, so by

selecting others at random and hurting them, you won relief for your brother. If
that’s how it was then Solomon would eventually be compelled to select one
more person at random and kill them so that his brother could live. Much of
what she said to him was mere diversion, her attempt to knock down the tower
of logic he was building. Sometimes she thought it was working. Sometimes he
cried when she made him realize a little of what he was doing. He wasn’t a
sniffler so the tapes didn’t catch his remorse. And when she asked herself

whether she’d support a recommendation for his early release a year from now,
she very much doubted being able to do that. For a while he would hate his false
friend Doctor Akkerman, obsess, fixate, and possibly decide that the life he’d
take for his brother’s sake should be hers. She was only 100 percent sure of these