Let It Burn (22 page)

I wasn’t sure how to answer that. Or if I should even try.

“If I find out there was really a connection…” he said. “Hell, how will I ever forgive myself for being such an idiot?”

“Well, let’s just find out first,” I said. “Don’t forget, I was part of this case, too.”

“I tell you one thing, this’ll be a big shock to the brother and the husband.”

“Wait, do you still stay in touch with them?”

“I talk to them all the time. Both Ryan Grayson and Tanner Paige. I’ve even had them up to the lake. Took them out on the boat.”

“Really?” I had a hard time picturing it.

“Sure, why not?”

“What about Elana’s parents?”

“Oh, they both died a while ago,” he said. “One right after the other. That kind of grief is a heavy load. But yeah, Ryan got married, had a couple of kids. If you remember, he had a lot of anger toward his brother-in-law.”

“I remember.”

“He’s got over that, I’m happy to say. He knows it was misplaced.”

“You must have talked to them this past week,” I said, “when they found out about Darryl King’s release?”

“A few times, yes. It really got to them. Sort of brought it all back, you know? Just thinking about your sister’s murderer walking around free. Or your wife’s murderer.”

“They’re not going to do anything stupid, are they?”

“I’d like to think they both have the sense not to. But if this new angle is true … I mean, that puts it all in a different place, doesn’t it? I’m not sure it’s better, but at least they don’t have to think about Darryl King walking around in the sunshine on a nice summer day.”

“I don’t think that’s better.”

“No, you’re right. If this is the same guy, he’s been walking around all this time. Nobody’s even touched him yet.”

“Well, the FBI’s still on this,” I said. “Now they know about this new possibility, at least.”

“I kept copies of the old files, you know. I’ve been going over them all day, looking for what I might have missed. In fact, you should work with me on this, Alex. It’ll be just like old times, you know? Except maybe we’ll get it right this time.”

“Okay, one thing at a time. Let’s start with talking to Darryl King, like you said.”

“All right, fair enough. We’ll do that.”

“I’ll see you in the morning, Arnie. Try to get some sleep.”

“Yeah, sure. You, too.”

Of course, we both knew that would be impossible. I was ready to hit the road right then, drive all night if I had to. I didn’t want to wait for the daylight.

I didn’t want to wait to finally hear our answer from Darryl King himself.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

It was my second trip down to the Lower Peninsula in a week. The first time I’d been on my way down to have a drink with my old sergeant and dinner with Janet. The trip had turned into something else, of course. Now I was heading back down that same road, once again crossing the Mackinac Bridge just as the sun was coming up. Once again it felt like I was leaving a world of stark simplicity and entering another world where I had grown up and become a baseball player and later a cop. Where in one hot summer I had seen the horror of a murdered woman, just days before seeing my own partner die as I lay bleeding on the floor next to him. This world was always there waiting for me, this world of my past on the other side of that bridge. No matter how hard the wind blew off the lake, I would never stop hearing its call.

I made the Houghton Lake exit by eight o’clock in the morning. I drove around the lake to the detective’s cabin, down that same driveway. I pulled in behind his Jeep and got out.

I knocked on the door. Nothing. But then I knew he wasn’t exactly jumping over the furniture to answer the door. I knocked again.

After a full minute, I took out my cell phone and dialed his number. It rang a few times and went to voice mail. I called the number again, but this time I put my head against his door. I could just barely hear the faintest ringtone from somewhere inside.

I knocked on the door again, really banging on it. Then I tried turning the knob. It was locked.

I went around to the back of the cabin. There was a raised deck where the ground sloped away from the house, and there were sliding glass doors on either side of a central fireplace made of stone. I put my face against the glass. I couldn’t see anything inside.

He’s in the shower, I thought. He can’t hear me knocking. He can’t hear his phone. I’ll wait two more minutes and knock again.

I sat down on one of the patio chairs and looked out at the lake. I couldn’t imagine living here and looking out at that calm, flat water every day. Not after living on a lake that sees twenty-foot waves and higher, every fall.

Of course, it would be suicide to take the detective’s pontoon boat out on Lake Superior, so to each his own.

I got up and rapped on the window a few times. I made that glass rattle. No way he couldn’t hear that.

Then it occurred to me to actually try sliding open the glass door.

I pushed the door open, hearing it grind on the tracks. It needed some oil. I was reminding myself to suggest that to Detective Bateman.

Then I stopped dead.

In the deepest, reptile part of my brain, I knew something was terribly wrong. It was probably just the smell in the air. That’s the thing that plugs right into that part of your brain, after all—but it invades every other sense, and all of a sudden you feel like the air itself
looks
wrong. It
feels
wrong against your skin. And even though the house was silent, the silence itself seemed to be spiked with one single high note of wrongness.

“Detective,” I said. “Are you there?”

I walked through the cabin. There were stairs leading up to a loft. There were books piled on the coffee table. I went toward the side door and found the short hallway that led to a bathroom on one side and a half-closed door on the other. Probably the bedroom.

I put my hand on the door and slowly pushed it open.

The detective was lying in his bed. He was tangled in the covers. The fabric was soaked through with blood. His face was destroyed. Utterly destroyed beyond recognition. His head was caved in like a goddamned pumpkin.

I looked away. I made myself breathe.

I looked one more time. At the obscenity of what had happened to this man. There was a pipe on the floor, next to the bed. A heavy steel pipe, maybe two and a half feet long. It was covered with blood, and in the blood there were clumps of hair and other material I didn’t want to think about.

I had spoken to this man the night before. Just a matter of hours before this moment. My voice may have been the last he ever heard.

Unless whoever killed him had something to say to him before swinging this pipe.

Unless whoever killed him had a special message for him, something he’d been preparing in his mind for years.

Because you know exactly who did this, I thought. He got out last night. He came here.

You know who did this.

I had to close my eyes again. I had to stand there and command the room to stop spinning. Then, when I could finally open my eyes, I took my phone out of my pocket and dialed 911.

*   *   *

I had been through this routine before. It’s a testament to my willingness to go looking for trouble, or to my bad luck, or to
something,
I don’t even know what, that I’d had a lot of prior experiences with reporting homicides, even now that I wasn’t carrying a badge anymore. I stayed on the line with the 911 operator. While I waited, I told her that they needed to go find Darryl King, very recently released from prison, living with his mother on Ash Street in Detroit. It felt strange to be dropping the dime on him now, after everything that had happened in the past few days to lead me here. But they had to start with him.
They had to.

There was a Michigan State Police post right in Houghton Lake, just minutes away from where I was standing. I had passed it on the way here. So I figured they’d be responding. I had gone outside to get a better cell signal, and to get away from the air in that cabin. I waited by my truck, leaning against it, knowing that I was already on my way to a very long day.

The cruiser pulled into the driveway. One of the boxy old “Blue Goose” cars with the single red flasher on top. Two troopers hopped out and came right over to me. Both of them had freshly buzzed heads under their trooper hats. I hung up the phone and told them where they could find the dead detective. One of the troopers went inside while the other kept an eye on me. He went back to his car and talked to someone on his radio. I knew there’d be more troopers coming down the driveway soon. Eventually there’d be a state homicide detective on the scene. That might take a while, because he might have to come over from one of the other posts. A homicide detective who would investigate the homicide of a retired homicide detective.

The trooper who went inside came out. He wasn’t looking so happy with his career choice.

I kept waiting, just standing there by my truck, feeling the morning sun on my face. When the detective finally got there, he came up to me first. As he shook my hand, he introduced himself as Detective Gruley. Then he asked me politely to stay put while he went inside. When he came back out, he started asking me the basic questions. Name, address, phone number. He looked me in the eye as I answered, like listening to every word was the most important thing in the world to him.

“So tell me what happened,” he said. “Start at the beginning.”

I gave him the rundown. My background first, then the current timeline from the moment I had heard Darryl King was getting out of prison to my discovery of Detective Bateman’s body.

He listened intently, writing down only the occasional word in his notepad. When I was done, he stood there nodding to himself. Then he took a step closer to me.

“Let me get this straight,” he said in a low voice. “The two of you were going down to Detroit this morning to confront the man you put away for murder, back when you were both on active duty?”

“We weren’t going to
confront
him,” I said. “We were going to ask him if he really did it. Seeing as how we’ve both developed some doubts about his confession.”

Gruley kept nodding. “Did he know you were coming down to ask him this?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m positive. I mean, I know I didn’t say anything to him. I’ve had no communication with him at all.”

“Since back in the day, you mean. When you arrested him.”

“The detective made the actual arrest. But yes. No contact since then.”

“So it would seem,” Gruley said, “that Mr. King had already made plans for his first day out of prison, independent of this little mission of yours.”

“I guess it looks that way,” I said. “May I ask if you’ve located him yet? I gave his name and address to the 911 operator.”

“No, I don’t think he’s been located yet. Detroit PD is helping us out on that one.”

I might have caught just a hint of the patented Michigan State Police superiority complex as he said that. Like this part of the operation is out of our hands, so God only knows if it’ll get done correctly.

“This is a former Detroit cop we’re talking about,” I said. “I’m sure they’ll be all over it.”

“I’m sure they will be, yes.”

“Look, Detective, I know this whole thing sounds crazy. For it to turn out this way … I still can’t believe this happened.”

“You see the irony,” he said. “You thought maybe this man was innocent of murder, yet he ends up killing someone within hours of getting out.”

“If it was him.”

“If it was him, yes. By the way, you see where he might logically take this next, right?”

I looked at the detective. My stomach hurt and I was starting to feel a little light-headed.

“You were also closely involved with his conviction,” the detective said. “Surely you must understand the stakes here.”

I put my hand out to the hood of my truck.

“Mr. McKnight, are you okay?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s been a rough morning.”

“No doubt. But I hope you understand what I’m trying to tell you. If this man made a list of people to get back at, the minute he got out of prison … Well, yours may be the second name on his list.”

Yeah, no kidding, I thought. I never would have made that connection on my own.

“You don’t look so good,” he said. “I think we should get you out of the sun. Get you some water.”

He took me over to his car and opened up the passenger’s-side door. He started the car and turned the air on. Then he pulled out a bottle of water from a cooler in the backseat. I took a long drink and started to feel better.

“You never get used to seeing something like that,” he said. “I don’t know how the crime scene guys do it.”

“I never did get those guys. They were a breed apart.”

“When you’re up to it, I’d like to take you back to the post and get an official statement.”

I took one more drink and felt the cold air from the dashboard vent on my face.

“Ready when you are,” I said, “but I’m not sure this story is going to look any more sane on paper.”

*   *   *

I spent a good part of the day there. I knew I would. You get into a police station, or a state police post, or any law enforcement building in the world probably, and time stands still. Sometimes they make you wait for a reason. To soften you up, to let you stew in your own guilt, whatever mind games they feel will help their cause. Other times it’s just a matter of them doing things their own way, one slow step at a time. They’ll apologize at every turn, tell you you’ll be on your way in just a few more minutes. But then the wheels keep grinding away, as slow as the hour hand on the clock.

I sat in their interview room. I answered some more questions. I wrote out my statement. I sat some more. I had some coffee. I declined the offer of lunch, because I couldn’t stand even the thought of eating. I had some more coffee. It was late afternoon by the time Detective Gruley finally drove me back to my truck. By that time, the crime scene unit had descended upon Detective Bateman’s property. I took one more look around the place, including the pontoon boat docked on the lake. Then I left.