Let It Burn (20 page)

The detective looked away from the little observation window. “The long hours are making you delirious, Alex. Like she’d ever do that in a million years.”

I took my turn at the window. It was getting close to midnight. Time for the night-shift officer to relieve us.

Then I saw the headlights.

A beat-up old car came rolling down the street, slowly. It stopped in front of the house. The headlights were turned off.

The driver waited a full minute to get out. When he did, he was just a shadow in the darkness, backlit by the streetlight behind him. But I recognized the body type. I recognized the way he moved.

“Hey, Detective,” I said, not taking my eyes off him. “I thought you said this kid didn’t have a driver’s license.”

“He doesn’t.”

“Well, then we’ll have something else to charge him with.”

He came over to the window and looked out at the house. “Is that our man?”

“He must have missed his mother’s home cooking,” I said. “Let’s go get him.”

We called for backup first. No sense doing anything stupid, now that we had him pinned in the house. As soon as the squad cars rolled up, Bateman dispatched units to all four sides of the house. Then he went up on the front porch and banged on the door.

“Open up! Police!”

Silence.

“Darryl, we can do this the easy way or the hard way! Just come on out and nobody will get hurt!”

The door opened. A figure stood in the doorway.

“Get on the ground!” Bateman yelled, his gun pointed right at the kid’s chest. “Turn around and lie face down! Right now!”

I don’t know if you can give the kid credit for this or not, but he kept standing there, calling the detective’s bluff. Like he was saying, go ahead and shoot me.

In the end, the detective walked right up to him and tackled him. A dozen other officers swarmed the house then, guns drawn. A police dog was barking. The radios were all squawking in unison. I stood back by the sidewalk, watching the pandemonium, feeling oddly out of place. All of these officers belonged to another squad, after all. They were virtual strangers to me. Now they were all working together to back up Detective Bateman on the big arrest.

I was finally called inside to make the official ID. I walked up the porch steps and looked down at the young man lying on the floor. His hands were cuffed behind his back. There was a fresh scrape on his forehead from where he’d been pushed down onto the hardwood floor. He looked up at me.

It was him. This was the man I’d chased down the tracks.

The mother was screaming. The little sister was crying. I saw the brother running down the hallway into the bathroom. If you had anything resembling a human heart, you knew that this was another family devastated by the crime.

Darryl King was picked up off the floor and taken away.

*   *   *

I filled out some paperwork while Darryl King was booked, fingerprinted, and put in a holding cell. He hadn’t said a word yet, not to anybody. Not even to his mother. She had been brought down to the station with her son, because of course you can’t interrogate a minor without a parent or guardian in the room.

I waited around for a couple more hours. The mother was doing all of the talking, telling us all we had made a big mistake. She didn’t want a lawyer for her son. She said Darryl didn’t
need
a lawyer because he hadn’t done anything. It was a mistake I’d seen play out again and again over the years, and it never stopped surprising me. If the police arrest you, put you in a room, then ask you if you know anything about anything, don’t say a word until you have a lawyer at your side. Even if you
know
you haven’t done anything wrong.

But with Darryl not talking and his mother playing the same tape over and over again, there didn’t seem to be much hope of a confession before we had to formally charge him based only on my ID and the fingerprints on the bracelet. The sergeant on duty patted me on the back and sent me home.

Jeannie was asleep when I got home. She was gone the next morning when I woke up. It was late. But I had been given that day off.

I made dinner reservations. I was looking forward to having a normal life again. Maybe recapturing something with Jeannie, before it was too late. That’s what I was thinking.

But then it turned out she had a late class that evening. I had totally forgotten about it, and she didn’t want to skip it. I told her I understood. We made a makeup date for that weekend. She told me she was proud of me. She told me that she loved me. That was the last time she’d ever say that.

That was the last day of June, meaning I was rolling over to nights. At least this time I wasn’t doing it coming off a short shift. But when I got to the precinct for the midnight roll call, there was a little surprise waiting for me.

“Bateman got it,” Sergeant Grimaldi said to me. “He got the confession.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “I thought we had given up.”

“What can I tell you? He took one more shot at it.”

“Did somebody think maybe they should call me and let me know?”

“If Bateman didn’t do that,” he said, “then I should have. I apologize.”

“It’s all right. Can I see the confession, at least?”

“Sure thing. You know what? Detective Bateman will be here when you get back from your shift. So go find him and make him play the tape for you. I don’t think you’ll have much problem getting him to relive his big moment of glory.”

I could tell Sergeant Grimaldi was still feeling bad about how I’d been left out of the loop when the case was closed. So he made sure I got a big round of applause at the roll call. I tried to wave it off, and then I stood up and told everyone that Franklin deserved some of the credit. Which was the absolute truth. I had driven us there, but I was just about to drive away. Then Franklin saw the shirt with the torn sleeve being put on the clothesline.

“You didn’t have to do that,” he said to me when we got in the car.

“Yes, I did. Maybe it’s about time for you to get a gold shield, too.”

He smiled and shook that off. As we rolled out, we knew we had a long eight hours ahead of us. That first night was always the hardest, whether you were short-shifting or not. You’re trying to fool your body into staying awake and alert through eight hours in the dark. Your body knows a lie when it hears one. So you just try to pace yourself, deal with everything that comes up, talk to the knuckleheads, try to keep a lid on things and have as peaceful a night as you can possibly manage.

It was yet another hot summer night. There would be nothing peaceful about it.

*   *   *

There was a disturbance at the hospital on Woodward Avenue. The place was already the epicenter of that city’s hot summer, with gunshot victims being wheeled into the ER every night. It was a job I couldn’t even imagine, dealing with that over and over. Now there was apparently a Code 35 wandering around the ER waiting room. A Code 35 is a mentally disturbed person.

What happened next is a story that changes a little bit every time I tell it. It was all too much to take in when it was actually happening. Years go by and I’ll remember little details for the first time.

We went into the lobby. We talked to the receptionist. She told us that the man had been bothering the inpatients all night. At one point he had tried to hide behind the plants.

She had heard this man lived down the street, in a high-rise apartment building. It was a building Franklin and I had visited, more than once. It was one of those addresses you knew immediately, as soon as you heard it on the radio. Oh great, this place again.

The elevator was broken. We had to take the stairs. Franklin complained with every step. His knee was hurting. We had gone back to the sports banter that night, everything back to normal. Football versus baseball, the endless argument.

The man was named Rose. We went into his apartment and sat him down at his kitchen table. There was aluminum foil on the walls.

In the middle of our pleas for him to stop bothering the people at the hospital, he took out the Uzi from beneath the table. It had been taped to the underside. In that endless minute he had the gun pointed at us, ready to shoot the second either of us moved, he told us he had found it in a Dumpster. Not an unusual find in a summer filled with gun battles over the crack trade.

I hate thinking about what comes next. It’s something I replay in my head and I always try to make turn out differently. But of course it never does.

He shot Franklin five times. He shot me three times. That’s what you can do with an Uzi, before either one of us could even get our revolvers out of their holsters. I lay on the floor, looking up at the ceiling, which Rose had neglected to line with aluminum foil. I can still see that ceiling when I close my eyes at night.

Franklin died on the floor next to me. He left behind a wife and two daughters. I was still in the hospital when they held the service for him, then put him in the ground.

Jeannie told me she would stick it out, but the wife-of-a-cop thing had already been wearing her down. This was much worse, and I can still remember that expression on her face as she looked down at me in my hospital bed. Like this was all just too much. When I finally got back on my feet, I spent a lost year drinking and taking painkillers, and one day, a few weeks into that dark period, Jeannie left me. Although I suppose you could argue that I had already left her, in my own way. I guess it doesn’t really matter in the end.

I was off the police force on two-thirds disability. I never went back.

When I was pulling myself back together after that year, I came up to Paradise to sell off the cabins my father had built. I’ve been up here ever since. But if I thought I could run away from my past, I was sorely mistaken. It always finds you, even in the most remote little town you can imagine. Even in a town called Paradise.

Even now, when I think I’ve finally come to terms with everything that happened in my life, I find something new. I can look back on that last summer in Detroit, past the shooting, to that one last big case I helped solve. All these years later, and somehow it’s just coming to me that I never did get the chance to see that confession, and that this young man may have been innocent of the crime for which he was charged. And worse, that the real killer walked free. Possibly to kill again. Possibly all because we missed something that would have pointed to him.

We could have stopped him then. That was the one thing I couldn’t get over. If we were so goddamned smart, we could have charged Darryl King with robbery and maybe tampering with a crime scene, put him on probation, given him back to his mother, and then gone out and found the man who really killed Elana Paige.

I was cut down by a madman myself, after all. A madman who got caught just a few days later and put away forever. So how could I live with myself now, knowing that in that same hot summer, I may have missed my chance to catch an even bigger monster?

PART TWO

THE FALL

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

My first call that morning was to FBI Agent Janet Long. When she picked up, I was smart enough to thank her one more time for dinner before launching into my question.

“This is going to sound a little strange,” I said, “but bear with me.”

“I’m listening.”

“Somewhere in your bureau, there’s an agent or two who are aware of several unsolved homicides throughout the Midwest.”

There was a brief silence on the line.

“Yes,” she said. “More than one or two agents, actually. What about it?”

“All women, all multiple stabbings. I know of cold cases in Cleveland, Metro Chicago, and Milwaukee. Are there more?”

“Alex, what are you getting at?”

“Look, you know I was involved in that case in Detroit. The woman who was stabbed in the train station.”

“That’s the case you were telling me about at dinner. With the killer who’s getting out soon.”

“Right. But let’s just suppose for a minute that he didn’t really do it. If you happened to add Elana Paige to that list of unsolved stabbings … I mean, I can’t help thinking that would be something useful to whoever’s tracking those other cases.”

“If it’s the same killer, yes. Of course it would. It’s usually one case that breaks the whole thing. That one time he makes a mistake of some kind.”

“That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

“Just to get it straight,” she said, “you’re talking about the man who was convicted of killing that woman in the train station, right here in Detroit. The man who confessed to the crime. That’s the case you’re talking about.”

“Yes.”

She stopped talking again. I could hear her tapping away at her keyboard.

“Elana Paige,” she finally said. “In Detroit. That was before the other murders.”

“I was wondering if that was the case. So yes, maybe that’s the one time he made a mistake. If it was his very first time.”

“But just because it was a multiple stabbing, that doesn’t necessarily connect it with the others. Especially with a confession and a man in prison. Who obviously couldn’t have killed anyone else while he was in there.”

“That’s my point, Janet. If Darryl King confessed to a crime he didn’t commit…”

“I’ll pass this along to the right person,” she said. “If there’s an angle here and it helps break these other cases, then everybody will be happy. But you have to promise me something right now.”

“What’s that?”

“By giving it to me, you let it go. Are we clear?”

“Even if I wanted to,” I said, “what could I do? These are major cases in other states, going back years.”

“Something tells me you’d find a way. So promise me.”

“I promise. I just wanted to let you know. That’s all.”

“Okay,” she said. “I appreciate it.”

“Will you at least let me know if you guys find something?”

“Yes. You’ll be the first person to know, outside the bureau.”

One more silence. Maybe both of us realizing that there wasn’t much else to say. We didn’t make another dinner date. We didn’t even say “See you soon.” I just thanked her and told her to take care of herself.