The Interrogation (27 page)

Eddie stared at the man mutely.

“So, there it is, boss,” the second man said. He pointed to the mound of clothing. “I don’t want to see that shit here when you leave, understand …
boss?”

The door slammed in Eddie’s face, and for a moment he faced it brokenly. Then he turned and headed back to where Terry Siddell stood beside the curb.

“So what are we going to do, then?” Siddell demanded.

Eddie shrugged. “We’ll pick it up this one time,” he said quietly.

“Not me,” Siddell declared. “You can smell the piss from here.” He turned on his heel and stomped back to the truck.

Eddie bent down and gathered the pile of clothes into his arms. The stench of sweat and urine nearly suffocated him, rushing him to get it done, all of it, the endless night’s ordeal, the clothes piled into the truck and then away from the man’s humiliating taunts, and home to the daughter who loved him, respected him, called him her hero each time he drew her into his otherwise empty arms.
It’s for Laurie
, he told himself as he tossed the smelly bundle into the truck.
Just for Laurie, nobody else.

5:19
A.M.
, Route 6

“Set me up, the little prick,” Blunt muttered. He felt his fingers tighten around the serrated curve of the wheel as
he imagined them around Dunlap’s neck. The only question was why the little prick had done it. What did he have to gain?

Blunt went over it again and again, the sound of the car as it drew near, then a beam of light he’d barely been able to step out of as the man entered the shed.

In all of this, only one thing seemed clear. No one had known that he was coming to that particular shed but Dunlap.

“Set me up,” Blunt repeated in a low, vengeful murmur, “set me up, the prick.”

Again Blunt tried to fathom Dunlap’s angle. He saw the man step into the shed, a black silhouette behind the yellow beam of the flashlight. He’d moved cautiously, as if expecting to be jumped, directing the light left and right until it had lit upon a canvas bag in the corner of the shed. Then he’d bolted forward, as if he’d discovered a chest of gold.

An old bag? Blunt asked himself, glancing now at the briefcase that rested beside him on the front seat. What the fuck had the guy wanted with some filthy old bag?

He felt the swirling confusion of that moment in all its chaotic force. It was the darkness, he thought, the surprise. He’d never been able to deal with surprise. It was like his brain got tongue-tied, started sputtering orders faster than he could obey them. Other guys just looked surprise in the eye and dealt with whatever was in their faces. They maybe argued with it, or pushed it away, or dodged it somehow, this thing that came at them out of nowhere. If he could have done that, maybe the fucking guy would have just taken that goddamn bag and left the shed, and that would have been the end of it. But it was the surprise. He should have known better, that fucking guy. He should have known better than just bull in the way he did. Okay, so, I did
what I had to, Blunt decided, okay, so, he got what he deserved.

He saw the man tumble forward, curling over the bag like he was trying to protect it, shield it with his body, like it maybe was a kid or something. Why the fuck had he done that? He considered the question briefly, then gave up and returned his attention to Harry Dunlap, the ass-kicking that now raced toward him at sixty miles an hour.

5:26
A.M.
, Interrogation Room 3

Cohen placed the photograph of Scott Burke on the table and slid it over to Smalls.

“I know I told you that I wasn’t going to ask any more questions about Cathy Lake. But I have just one more.”

Smalls gave no indication that he’d heard Cohen’s voice. He sat, closed off, behind the high protective barricade.

“The day Cathy was murdered. You said you saw a man on the trail, right? Jay, I want you to look carefully at this picture. Study it, try to remember what the man you saw looked like, and tell me if the man you saw could be the same man as the one in the photograph.”

Smalls picked up the photograph and gazed at it intently, running his finger tenderly over the surface of the picture, as if adding colors and textures, using the tip of his finger like a painter’s brush.

Cohen felt a spurt of impatience. “Well?” he asked.

“It could be him.”

“Could be, but you’re not sure?”

“No.”

Cohen snatched the photograph from Smalls’ hand, shoved back his chair, and walked to Burke’s office.

“I showed the picture to Smalls,” he told the Chief. “He says he doesn’t know if this was the man he saw in the park.” He placed the photograph on Burke’s desk. “Anything else, sir?”

“No,” Burke told him.

Cohen eased himself back into the corridor, closing the door behind him.

Smalls had risen and was standing at the window when he walked back into the interrogation room.

“Sit down,” Cohen snapped.

Smalls obeyed without hesitation, his feet scuttling across the wooden floor until they brought him once again to the table.

Cohen stepped to the window, cranked it closed, and locked it. “Stay in your seat unless you’re told to leave it,” he snarled.

Smalls nodded slowly. “Yes, sir.”

Cohen pressed himself against the wall and glared down at the pallid, frail figure who sat, arms curled around his belly, a few feet away. What an act, he thought, the whole routine, the childlike delicacy of his features, the pale hands, the liquid blue eyes. Butter wouldn’t melt, he thought angrily, butter wouldn’t melt in his goddamn mouth.

He looked at the clock. Twenty-six minutes until he had to leave the interrogation room, twenty-seven minutes until someone replaced him there, took Smalls downstairs, and set him loose. Where was Pierce? he wondered. But it was not a question he could dwell upon. He had to think about Smalls. Only Smalls. So little time now. Twenty-seven … no, twenty-six minutes. He pulled himself from the wall. One more go, he urged himself, one more.

“Why did you kill her, Smalls?”

“I didn’t.”

“Why did you kill her?” Cohen repeated.

“I didn’t kill Cathy.”

“How about some other little girl?” Cohen asked. “That’s why you won’t tell me about yourself, isn’t it? Where you lived before you came to the city. Where you came from. It’s because you killed a kid, isn’t it? Some kid in some park.”

“I never killed anybody,” Smalls insisted. His eyes drifted to the clock.

“Don’t look at that fucking thing,” Cohen raged. “Look at me. Look in my eyes.”

Smalls did as he was told.

“And don’t give me that sad-sack look,” Cohen snapped. “I’m sick of it. Poor, sad Jay. Poor, misunderstood Jay. All the sorrows of the world on your shoulders. Do you really expect me to swallow that? That you’ve never done anything wrong? Poor Jay, yanked out of a tunnel where he was sleeping, just minding his own damn business. Dragged to jail, accused of murder, but so, so innocent. Well, forget that crap. You’re a goddamn child-killer, and you and I both know it.”

“I never killed a child.”

“Just molest them, is that all you do?”

Smalls’ eyes caught fire. “I didn’t touch her,” he insisted. “I never touched anybody.”

Cohen instantly remembered an earlier moment in the interrogation. They’d been talking about Cathy’s murder, how it could have been prevented if someone had chanced upon the killer before it was too late.

“If someone had been there, he would have stopped. Isn’t that what you told me, Jay? That no matter how much this guy might have wanted to hurt Cathy,
he would have stopped if someone had been there.
Didn’t you tell me that?”

“Yes.”

“You know that’s true, don’t you? Because at some other point, in some other place, someone stopped you. That much wasn’t a lie, was it?”

Smalls hesitated, but Cohen saw his shoulders suddenly lift, as if a great burden had just fallen from them, and knew he had struck upon the truth at last. “I wouldn’t have hurt her.”

“Another little girl?”

“I just wanted to draw her.”

“Draw her?”

“She’d let me do it before.”

“Who?”

“She let me do it before. She was … so pretty.”

“And you … what, Jay?”

“I didn’t touch her. Someone else did.”

“Someone else?” A brutal laugh broke from Cohen. “So now we have yet another man, right? And what did this one look like, Jay? Did he look like you?”

“No.”

“Not another bum, living in the park?”

“He worked in the park, but he didn’t live there.”

“Oh, great. Now we really have something to go on. We have us a whole lot of guys to check out, don’t we? And just how do you know this guy worked in the park?”

“He had on a uniform.”

“Like every other guy who works for the Parks Department.”

“He wore a baseball cap.”

“What kind of baseball cap? What team?”

“I don’t know.”

“How convenient. Okay, tell me something else about this guy.”

“I thought he saved her.”

“Saved her? From what?”

Smalls’ admission seemed to crack his heart. “From me,” he said.

“From you?”

“She saw the way I was looking at her. It scared her so she ran away. Toward this guy. He’s the one who hurt her.”

“What makes you so sure of that?”

“I heard her … cry,” Smalls answered quietly.

“Ah, so that’s it,” Cohen said mockingly. “You didn’t hurt this kid. Someone else did. Your only crime was not stopping it.”

“I don’t expect you to believe me,” Smalls murmured.

“Well, good,” Cohen snapped. “Because I don’t!” He started to speak, but fell mute before the sheer weakness of mere words to do what had to be done in the minutes that remained for the interrogation. He didn’t want to ask Smalls any more questions. He wanted a pair of pliers. He wanted to put Smalls’ thumb between its metal teeth and squeeze the truth from him. And with that thought, Cohen realized that he’d reached the end of the road. The place you arrive at when you no longer believe that something may yet intervene on your behalf; some particle of luck or a blaze of intuition, that forestalls the death of hope.

5:29
A.M.
, Route 6

The scream of the siren, the sense of moving very fast, gave Yearwood hope that they might make it to the city in time.

Inches away, Pierce lay on a stretcher, his eyes closed, his body utterly still. A spot of blood spread out
from beneath his head, but it was small and no longer growing.

Watching him, Yearwood felt the urge to take his hand. He didn’t for fear of interfering with what struck him as the increasingly desperate movement of the attendants who now worked feverishly around Pierce’s body. He noted the grim glances they exchanged while they talked tersely of “shock” and “decreased respiration.” He had seen all of this before, and it had always signaled a deepening distress, the ebbing, ruthless and irreversible, of a human life.

5:30
A.M.
, Dunlap’s Collectibles

Dunlap glanced nervously at the battered Coca-Cola clock that hung at a slant on the opposite wall, beside a poster of Elvis, which someone had decorated with kisses.

“Where’s that dumb-ass cousin of yours?” Stitt demanded.

“I don’t know, Burt,” Dunlap said edgily. “He should have been here by now. I gave him good directions, but maybe he got lost.”

“Well, he better get found,” Stitt replied coldly. “And soon.”

Dunlap got to his feet, walked to the curtain, and peered through the slit. Light was building on the street now, and he didn’t like it. Business of this kind, he’d long ago decided, was best done in the dark. Within an hour the early risers would be on the street. Some of them would probably see Blunt when he arrived, then Stitt and Blunt when they left. Shit, he thought, goddamn.

“Sit down, Harry,” Stitt barked.

Dunlap immediately did as he was told, at the same
time hating himself for it. How, he wondered, how had he become such a cringing, cowardly thing? He saw his father’s eyes cut over to him.
What are you looking at
—then his massive, factory-worker hand, swift and hard, shoot out, bloodying his mouth—
that way?

“That little fuck pick the hophead’s shit up?” Stitt asked.

“Yeah,” Dunlap replied. He laughed, but it didn’t sound real. “You sure told him off, Burt. You sure gave it to that bastard.”

Stitt grinned mockingly. “Yeah, I scared the shit out of him. Bet he had to change his shorts.” The grin vanished. “You’ll be changing yours, too, if I don’t get my fucking money.”

Dunlap turned away. How could he change his life? he wondered. In high school they’d called him Mouse, he remembered, Mouse because he was like a mouse, scurrying, frantic, panicked. Not a man, he thought, never a man. Still a virgin, for Christ’s sake. At thirty-four.

He stood up again. Fuck Stitt, he thought, this is
my
place. I can fucking get up when I goddamn want to. I can walk to the curtains and part the goddamn things and stare out at the goddamn street anytime I goddamn please.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” Stitt barked.

“Nothing, I was just—”

“Sit down!”

Dunlap felt the familiar cringing fear grip him. “Okay,” he said meekly as he returned to his seat. “Okay, Burt, anything you say.”

5:32
A.M.
, Route 6

“How much farther?” Yearwood asked.

“We’re at the bridge.”

The attendant who spoke was bent over Pierce’s body, tying something or inserting something, Year-wood couldn’t tell.

“Okay, that’s all we can do for now,” the attendant announced, then drew away. “Head shots are always bad.”

“I didn’t know what it was at first,” Yearwood told him. “The sound. Not even loud. Like snapping a dry stick.”