Let It Burn (14 page)

He let that hang in the air for a moment. It didn’t sound exactly like the beginning of a confession to me, not any I’d ever heard. But I knew there was more.

“Now his mother’s having a fit, and he just tells her to be quiet. At that point I
knew
I had him. Don’t get me wrong, I knew I was cutting the mother right out of the equation, but this guy was a child in name only. Only by the letter of the law. So I told him, I said, ‘Okay then, just between you and me, the two
men
in this room right now, you gotta tell me what happened. Start at the beginning and lay it all out for me.’ So he did. He said he was there at the back of the station when this woman came by.”

“What was he doing back there?” I said.

“What?” The interruption seemed to throw him off track for a second. “He was looking to rob somebody. It was a popular spot for young hustlers to bring their johns, he said. A perfect setup to rob somebody because they’re not going to go to the police.”

“Okay, I got it. Continue.”

“He said he saw her taking photographs of the building, and he told her there were some even better shots inside.”

“Wait, seriously? She went along with that?”

He looked at me like I was an idiot. “No, of course not,” he said. “It was just his first play. When she refused to go inside with him, he pulled his knife.”

“And what, dragged her inside? She didn’t scream?”

Bateman looked at me again. I wasn’t playing the rapt audience he was accustomed to when he told this story. And I knew he had told it, many times.

“The place was deserted back there,” he said. “Darryl was a strong kid.”

“Okay,” I said, still not quite seeing it. “Go on.”

“He takes her inside and up the stairs to the balcony.”

“Why go upstairs? That’s a lot of extra work, isn’t it?”

“He knew there were people coming in that door,” Bateman said. “He wanted to be out of the way, all right?”

“All right.”

“Then he stabs her with his knife. She was screaming at that point, so he just kept stabbing her. Then he took the bracelet off her wrist. He would have taken her money, but she’d left her purse in her car.”

“But he didn’t take the camera bag.”

“No, he didn’t. He said no way he’s gonna carry around an expensive-looking camera case. Might as well put a neon sign over his head.”

“Okay, that makes sense.”

“When he went outside,” Bateman said, “that’s when you showed up. The rest is history.”

“Did you ask him why he threw the bracelet away?”

“Pure reaction at that point. It connected him to the murder. So he threw it away.”

“But he didn’t throw away the knife.”

“Not when you were chasing him, no. He threw that away later.”

I sat there on his boat and worked it over it in my mind. There was a question I wanted to ask, a question that would get to the heart of things and make it all fall apart if it wasn’t really true. But I couldn’t come up with the question.

“The knife was in his pocket,” Bateman said. “He wasn’t about to try to take it out while he was running. It would have been a foolish move, even if he could throw it.”

“But he did throw the bracelet. That wasn’t in his pocket? And that wasn’t a foolish move?”

Bateman looked out at the water. I could tell he was getting frustrated. “Alex,” he said, “he threw it away on the spur of the moment, this thing that didn’t belong to him. He kept the thing that
did
belong to him. Then he threw that away later, when he had time to think about it. It’s really not that complicated.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. So that was his confession.”

“Yes. That was his confession.”

“He didn’t try to take it back later? Say you tricked him or you forced it out of him? I know that happens all the time.”

“No, he stuck by it all the way to the end. The prosecutor worked out a plea to simple second degree homicide, on account of his age, and I don’t know, maybe because he didn’t want to have to bring you back to testify.”

That stopped me dead. “Why wouldn’t I want to testify?”

“I seem to recall, you had more important things to worry about. Like not dying from your gunshot wounds.”

I wiped my forehead with the back of my sleeve. There was no breeze, and it was getting too hot out there in the middle of the lake.

“All right,” I said. “Thank you for telling me all that.”

He sat there looking at me for a moment. “Alex,” he said. “It was a clean confession. I saw a few before that, saw a hell of a lot after that. This one was Grade A kosher.”

“Okay. I got it.”

He turned his chair and started up the engine. “Let’s get you back to shore,” he said. “It’s hotter than hell out here.”

We made our way back to his dock, taking a direct line now so it only took half of forever. When we had the boat tied off and I had carried the cooler up to the cabin, he shook my hand.

“Before you go,” he said, “I have to say one more thing to you.”

“What’s that?”

“I should have let you make the arrest. It’s bothered me ever since.”

“Detective, you can stop thinking about it right now. Because I did a long time ago. It was a pleasure working with you back then. And it was a pleasure seeing you again today.”

“Thanks,” he said. “That means a lot to me.”

As I turned to my truck, he called after me.

“We got our man, eh? That’s the important part.”

I didn’t answer him one way or another. I just gave him a wave and then I left. As I drove back to the freeway, I knew the whole thing should have been resolved in my mind. Every question was answered, I said to myself. You can let it go now.

So how come I still couldn’t?

CHAPTER TEN

I got up early the next morning. I didn’t wake Jeannie. I let her sleep as I left the house in the pale light of dawn. I drove to the station on Woodward Avenue, not sure if I was ready for everything that would happen that day.

Detective Bateman was already there. He was shaved, showered, caffeinated, smartly dressed, and ready to roll. He said good morning to me, and then two minutes later we were in his unmarked Plymouth Gran Fury, driving to Corktown.

“We’ve got two sets of prints back on the clasp of the bracelet,” he said as he drove. He didn’t have lights or a siren, but he still drove like he owned the road. “One was Mrs. Paige herself. The other was presumably our suspect, although we didn’t get a hit on it. So he’s not in the system.”

“That would explain my big swing and miss on the mug shots.”

“I still can’t believe he’s been under the radar his whole life,” Bateman said, shaking his head. “I don’t care how young he is. If he’s capable of doing something like this…”

“I’m out here every day,” I said. “Sometimes it feels like we only catch the dumbest ten percent, and everybody else is just doing whatever they want.”

“I’d hate to think that’s true.”

He took us right to the train station. There was still crime scene tape along the back side of the station. A pair of night-shifters in their last hour of duty were standing guard.

“They’ll keep working the crime scene,” Bateman said, “now that the sun is up. But really, I think it’s all going to come down to hustle. As usual.”

“So why are we here at the train station?”

He stopped the car in the lot. Then he got out and looked up at those mostly empty eighteen floors. I did the same.

“When in doubt,” he said, “start at the beginning. Now show me again exactly where he ran.”

We got back in the car. I directed him over to Bagley Street, to the bridge over the tracks where our man had scrambled up from the fence. From there, we went up Rosa Parks Boulevard, where I had thought I had spotted him when I went after him in my car. We cut over to Trumbull, up to the stadium. Then across the freeway where I was sure I had him trapped. We stopped at that same intersection where I had stood looking off into the distance. West, north, or east, all of the streets he could have taken at that point. It was hardly more than twelve hours ago, and yet it felt like he could be anywhere in the world by now.

“There aren’t many houses until you get up past Temple Street,” he said. “And you’d have to cut all the way over past the high school if you lived east of here.”

He moved his finger in the air like he was drawing a map.

“The freeways sort of isolate this one part of the city,” he said. “Like a big horseshoe. West, east, and south. So pretend you’re him for a minute. You’re running away and trying to get back home. Would you risk coming up Trumbull and getting yourself trapped in this horseshoe if you didn’t live here?”

“Probably not. Not if I was thinking straight.”

“You said you usually only catch the dumb ones. Hell, he led you right through the stadium traffic, didn’t he? A great way to lose you. So let’s assume he knew exactly what he was doing.”

“Okay, so he’s in this horseshoe,” I said. “That’s still a lot of real estate.”

“Get back in the car. We’ve got some ground to cover.”

We spent the next hour driving, first up Trumbull to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, then cutting west through the apartment complexes. We agreed, this felt like about as far north as he’d reasonably live, assuming he had to start his day here, then walk down to the train station looking for trouble.

“This is good,” he said. “See, I wanted to get the lay of the land before we started sending out the troops. Now that we’ve got it narrowed down, we can get officers out here knocking on doors. Get some handbills up on every telephone pole, too, asking for anybody with information to contact us.”

“That would work a little better if people in this city thought we were on their side.”

He looked over at me. “We’re not asking them to snitch on a drug dealer. This is a psychotic murderer. I’m sure they don’t want him living next door.”

I raised both hands in surrender, but I wasn’t convinced. I knew many people in this city saw us as the enemy. It’s something I dealt with every day. On the other hand, it would only take one neighbor to drop a dime on this guy. Just one mindful neighbor. That’s all it would take.

He checked his watch. “Come on, it’s time for roll call.”

A few minutes later, we were back at the precinct. The day-shifters were all sitting there in the room, listening to Sergeant Grimaldi run down the assignments. There was no joking today. The whole building felt different.

Detective Bateman took over for a few minutes, giving everyone the details about our case. Or at least the few details we knew at that point. He wasn’t trying to act like a big shot today. He wasn’t the basketball coach or the clotheshorse or the man with the big smile. He was a homicide detective, and he knew he wouldn’t break this case without help.

“Somebody saw this young man,” he said to the assembled officers. “It would be impossible for that not to have happened. We need to get out there on the streets and we need to find that witness. Officer McKnight and I have identified a likely target area. Now it’s time to start knocking on doors.”

Everyone had the description of our suspect. Everyone had the sketch, as inadequate as it might be. Everyone knew the stakes. This was not your regular murder case.

“The target area overlaps with the Third Precinct,” Bateman said, “so expect to see them. Obviously, we need to respond to every other call, as usual. But the sergeant will be sending extra units to the area throughout the day. So please just be extra observant today. I’d like to tell the family of this woman that we have this man in custody, ideally by the end of the day.”

He thanked them. The sergeant dismissed them.

Franklin came up to me then and put one of those big hands on my shoulder and squeezed. He asked me how I was doing. I told him I was thinking about finding this guy and not much else. He went off to do his thing with his new temporary partner.

“I know I don’t have to tell you this,” Franklin said to me, “but keep your eyes open today, huh? I know you want this guy more than anyone.”

I found the detective at his desk a few minutes later. All of the homicide detectives sat together in a random assortment of desks on the second floor. He was reading something. It took a moment for him to even notice me standing there. He asked me to sit down.

“This is the initial coroner’s report,” he said. “I’m not sure how much of this I should share with the family.”

“What does it say?”

“She was stabbed twenty-three times. There were many defensive wounds on her hands. Meaning she fought back. Also meaning it probably took a while for her to lose consciousness.”

I took my hat off and held it in my hands.

“She was not sexually violated prior to the stabbing,” he said. “But several of the stab wounds were, um … let’s just say, in that area.”

He didn’t say any more. He didn’t have to. He sat there looking down at that sheet of paper. At that string of words that could never really capture what she went through.

“We’re going to find him today,” he said, finally looking up at me, “if I have to personally take you to every house in the city.”

Of course it wasn’t that easy. It never is. By the end of that workday, we had a few dozen leads that went nowhere. The case was once again the lead story on Channels 2, 4, and 7, only now they had a sketch to show and a plea to call the Detroit police with any information. That led to a number of phone calls, none of which panned out. I had been out in the car with Detective Bateman all day. I was still at the station when the calls came in. It was another double-shift day for me.

By the time I went home, it was dark. Elana Paige had been dead for thirty hours.

*   *   *

We went through the same process the next day, although this time there was a backlog of leads for us to follow up on. Information developed by officers on patrol, or tips called in to the station. Toward the end of that day, the detective asked me to accompany him on one more trip. It was starting to get dark now. We were no closer to finding our suspect. The detective was starting to wear his frustration as visibly as one of his tailored sports jackets. God help you if you happened to be standing in his way while he was walking down the hall, or making any noise while he was on the phone.