The Rag and Bone Shop (4 page)

“Well, okay,” she said, “do your best, Jason.” To Officer Kendall she said: “He’s been upset by all this.”

This time, it was Jason’s turn to frown. “Aw, Ma,” he said.

And she smiled wanly.

“Be on your way, then,” she said.

And here he was, in this barren office, wondering if his mother was right to be worried. He hadn’t seen anything unusual. He would probably be revealed as a fake.

The doors swung open and Officer Kendall was back with two guys Jason recognized. Jack O’Shea and Tim Connors. Jocks. They usually wore turned-around baseball caps, always passing a basketball between them. No baseball caps or basketball now, although they came into the room in that loose-limbed jiggling walk typical of jocks. They were followed by a kid named Danny Edison who sometimes sat at the same cafeteria table with Jason. Danny was a thin intense kid, face raw with acne.

Jason was glad to see Jimmy Orlando appear. Jimmy was a normal kid. Not a jock, not a major brain. Just a regular kid. Like what Jason hoped others saw when they looked at him.

Officer Kendall said: “Lieutenant Braxton will be here in a minute and give you fellows the lowdown on everything. He’s in charge of the investigation.”

After he left the room, they all stood around awkwardly. The two jocks meandered toward the window and huddled together like conspirators. Jimmy pulled a paperback book from his pocket and, leaning against a wall, started reading.

Danny approached Jason and they looked at each other for a moment.

“This is kind of neat, isn’t it?” Danny said, almost whispering. “I mean, being part of an investigation and everything.”

Jason nodded, glad to be talking to somebody.

“What do you think’s going to happen?” Jason asked.

“I don’t know. Give statements. I hope we don’t have to write anything down, like an essay. I’m rotten at composition.”

“Maybe they’ll record our answers,” Jason said. “And all we have to do is talk.”

They fell silent. The jocks continued to confer at the window but glanced now and then at Danny and Jason. Jimmy turned a page of his book but Jason had a feeling that he wasn’t really reading.

“Don’t you feel, like, kind of weird?” Danny asked.

“Right,” Jason said. “Because I don’t know what I’m going to say. I mean, I didn’t see anything unusual that day.”

Danny shook his head. “I mean, about Alicia Bartlett. That you were the last person to see her alive.”

Jason frowned in surprise. He hadn’t realized that his visit with Alicia on Monday had become common knowledge. Is that why he’s talking to me? Jason wondered. Curious, looking for inside information?

“
One
of the last to see her alive,” Jason amended.

Danny lowered his eyes. When he blushed, his acne seemed to come alive, the rawness of the zits emphasized.

“Sorry,” he said. “That’s what I meant.”

At the same time, Jason became aware of the jocks looking his way, their eyes lingering on him. He grew uneasy. He didn’t like to have attention focused on him. That was why he never raised his hand in class. He could feel his own cheeks getting warm, glad that he had been spared acne, at least. Had
everyone
heard about him and Alicia Bartlett?

Silence again. Jimmy Orlando closed his book and remained leaning against the wall. The jocks again turned their backs on the room and looked out the window. Danny seemed to be staring at something over Jason’s shoulder. The room suddenly became colder, as if the air-conditioning had been turned up.

Finally, the door swung open and Lieutenant Braxton stepped in. Still thin and intense, as if he were made of wire instead of bones and muscle.

“I’m Lieutenant Braxton and we’re ready to get started, guys,” he said in his brisk, businesslike way. “We really appreciate your cooperation and hope that we can come up with some vital information, information that you don’t even know you have.”

He looked at each of them in turn and his eyes finally rested on Jason. He gave no sign of recognition.

“Here’s how it works.” He took a notepad out of his jacket pocket and flipped it open. Eyes on the pad, he said: “Experts at interrogation will be questioning you. Two of you, John O’ Shea and Timothy Connors, will be questioned simultaneously because you were together most of that day. The others will be questioned individually.” Looking up, he said: “Time is of the essence, gentlemen, so let’s get started.” Consulting the pad again, he said: “First up is Jason Dorrant.”

He directed his eyes to Jason, recognizing him for the first time. “Okay, Jason, I’ll take you along to your expert.” To the others, he said: “I’ll be right back.”

Jason followed Lieutenant Braxton out of the office, wondering again if he had made a mistake coming here.

W
hen Trent stepped into the limousine, immersing himself in the sudden flood of air-conditioning, he was surprised to find a young woman seated inside.

“My name is Sarah Downes and I’m with the district attorney’s office in Wickburg,” she announced. “Lieutenant Braxton asked me to ride down to Monument with you and provide you with background information.”

“That was kind of Braxton,” Trent said, disguising his dismay and his irritation. He didn’t enjoy surprises, either in his private life or in his interrogations. He had anticipated a long quiet ride, alone with his thoughts, reviewing the procedures that lay ahead. Yet he supposed a personal briefing now would save time later. And time was always a factor with interrogations.

“Your reputation precedes you,” Sarah Downes said. “I’ve read your transcripts and listened to your tapes. They’ve helped my own interrogations.” She hesitated, as if she wanted to say more, then decided not to.

“Thank you,” Trent said, settling back as the limo moved smoothly forward, the tinted windows sealing them off from the rest of the world. The driver was a dark shadow at the wheel behind a glass partition.

“Braxton said to tell you that they’re all set to carry out the scenario. The suspect is being taken to police headquarters along with four other neighborhood boys. Under the pretext, of course, that they’re helping the investigation. The suspect will be isolated for you. All of this timed with your arrival.”

Something in her voice, a tone, an inflection, that he could not immediately pin down, caused him to glance at her. Devoid of makeup, except for a faint pink lipstick, wearing a gray career suit, white blouse. Everything about her understated and elegant. Thirty years old, give or take a year or two. Attractive in a subdued unflamboyant way.

Trent felt old beside her. Her freshness and crispness in contrast to his own—what? Not only age, although he was maybe ten or fifteen years older. All the confessions, all those terrible acts he had listened to, that had somehow become a part of him, that separated them more than the years. Entire worlds separated them.

“Give me some background,” Trent said.

“You read the fax. Braxton is very thorough.”

“I’d like to hear it from you. Tell me about the suspect.”

“His name, as you know, is Jason Dorrant. He’s twelve years old. Shy, somewhat introverted. No previous arrests. But he attacked a classmate last year in the school cafeteria. Apparently unprovoked. He knew the victim, lived on the same street, was one of the last people—if not the last—to see her alive. Braxton is convinced that he’s the perpetrator.”

That tone of voice again, the hint of doubt. Trent’s instincts were seldom wrong—that was why he had scored so many successes. And he allowed his instincts to lead him now as he asked, “And you?”

She looked at him in surprise. “Me?”

“Yes, are you convinced the boy’s the perpetrator?”

“What I think doesn’t matter,” she said.

“Yes, it does,” Trent replied. “Everything matters. And I have to know everything that’s possible to know before I proceed.”

She shrugged. “All right, I admit that I’m somewhat doubtful. There is absolutely no physical evidence. Nothing to link the boy to the crime scene. And I wonder whether Braxton is yielding to pressure. The town, the senator. Acting too quickly . . .”

“Any other suspects?”

“Not really. Family members are always questioned, of course. But the father, mother and brother all can account for their time and movements. Father at the office, mother shopping with a friend. The brother, a boy named Brad, thirteen years old, was with two friends the entire afternoon. No other leads. That leaves us with Jason Dorrant.” A wisp of hair had loosened, falling across her forehead. She swept it back. “I’m uneasy about the situation, about this boy, Jason.”

“You’re overlooking one thing, Ms. Downes.”

“What’s that?”

“The interrogation.”

Her face tightened, her cheeks becoming taut.

“Don’t you think the interrogation will bring out the truth?” Trent asked.

She sighed, turning to him. “It should.” Then that shrug again. “But . . .”

“But what?”

As if she’d made a sudden decision, she turned and looked at him directly. “You’re in the business of obtaining confessions,” she said. “That’s why you’re being brought in. That’s what bothers me.”

“Don’t you think I’m also looking for the truth?” he asked. “That the truth comes out of the interrogation?”

“Not always,” she said. “The Blake case, and Abbott. Both confessions recanted . . .”

“But upheld by the courts,” he countered. “It’s hard to deny what’s on the record, the spoken word . . .”

And now Trent knew what disturbed him about Sarah Downes, beyond her doubts about his interrogations. Somehow, she reminded him of Lottie. Not on the surface. Sarah Downes was cool and poised and elegant. Lottie had been disorganized, often in disarray, particularly after a few margaritas with her friends. She had also been warm and affectionate toward everyone, from stray kittens to old men on park benches.

But the skepticism, the doubt in Sarah Downes’s voice and manner echoed Lottie and that last sad conversation with her the night before she died.

“I don’t know you anymore,” Lottie had said. “Who are you, anyway?”

And because she’d obviously been drinking, Trent answered lightly: “What you see is what you get.”

“I’m not sure what I see,” Lottie retorted, alert suddenly, eyes flashing, voice crisp and flat.

Taken aback by the lightning change in her manner, Trent thought of his days and nights away from home, time spent at the department, on the road for interrogations, the endless pursuit of the right answers. He saw how much he had neglected her, having assumed that she was content with her volunteer work at the animal shelter, her afternoon drinks with friends, the books in which she immersed herself.

“But, wait,” she said, “I do know who you are.” Voice rising as if she’d made a startling discovery. “You are an interrogator. That’s what you do. And you are what you do.”

You are what you do.

Like an accusation.

That had been their last conversation. She’d been asleep when he went to bed after studying his notes for the Lane case and still sleeping soundly when he left for headquarters early the next morning. By nightfall, he stood beside her hospital bed in a hopeless vigil. She had been the victim of a freak accident, a minor collision of automobiles in which the air bag and seat belt conspired to cause her death—trapped by safety devices suddenly turned lethal. Lottie died during the night, without regaining consciousness. Thus began the period of mourning from that day to this, eighteen months later, mourning the lost years ahead they might have shared and the past years that had been wasted.

You are what you do.
Her final indictment of him.

He shook off these thoughts, bringing himself gratefully back to the limo, the landscape passing muted and surrealistic outside the tinted window. And Sarah Downes sitting beside him, legs crossed now, one foot in the sensible low-heeled shoe swinging back and forth, back and forth.

Body language. At which Trent had made himself adept for his interrogations. The small clues of movement, the use of hands and feet, the body tense or relaxed, leaning forward or drawing away, the attitude of the chin and the trembling of eyelids, all the telltale signs. What clues did Sarah Downes now supply? That swinging foot, her folded arms guarding her chest, the small beat of the pulse in her temple.

“Tell me about the victim,” Trent said. “The child.”

“Alicia Bartlett. Seven years old,” she said, sighing. “Precocious. But a nice little girl. Polite and well bred. Excellent grades in school. Utterly feminine. Loved her American Girl doll Amanda. Hobby: jigsaw puzzles, even in this day of computer games. She and Jason Dorrant worked at a puzzle during that last visit.”

Trent conjured up pictures of twelve-year-old Jason Dorrant with seven-year-old Alicia Bartlett, heads bent together as they worked over a jigsaw puzzle. They, too, were a puzzle to be solved.

Sarah Downes’s swinging foot now stopped.

Trent waited. Finally she said: “I wonder . . .” Then faltered, shifted her body and fell silent.

“And what do you wonder, Ms. Downes?” His voice light, but not playful, suspecting a revealing remark.

“First, you can call me Sarah, since we’ll be working together.”

Trent withdrew a bit. He had admitted no one into his privacy, had avoided intimacy since Lottie’s death. No first-name greetings, no first name given. He wanted to operate alone, travel light. Yet he wanted somehow to convince this young woman that he was more than just an interrogator, not some sort of monster who neglected the human condition of his subjects and their victims.

“All right, Sarah,” he said, conceding her name but withholding his own. “What do you wonder about?”

“How you can stand it. All those confessions. I’ve often wondered how priests handle it, sitting in the dark, listening to all the sins, all the foul things people do to each other.”

The foul things.

I must lie down where all the ladders start,

In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

The old poem which had become a sort of credo through the years.

He said the words aloud but almost to himself: “ ’Down where all the ladders start, in the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.’ ”