Let It Burn Page 11

  “It wasn’t my first confession,” he said. “You know that was sorta my thing.”

  “So I had heard, yes.”

  “The secret is approaching each suspect on their own terms. Everybody’s different. Everybody’s got their own story. Something that might work on one person will get you nowhere with the next one. So you can’t go in already married to one strategy. You gotta react to the situation and you gotta be quick.”

  He gave an ironic grimace of pain as he resettled his bad hip on the chair. The man’s last quick day must have felt like a distant memory.

  “So remember, the clock is ticking here, right? We got the kid in the room. His mother’s there with him, because that’s the law. Darryl’s not saying a word, but Mama’s telling everybody to let them go because her little boy ain’t done nothing.”

  Having just spent time with Mrs. King, I knew she was a hell of a lot more articulate than that, but I let him go on.

  “I know we’re running out of time before we have to charge him or let him walk. I think you’d already gone home at that point, right?”

  “Sergeant Grimaldi told me to go home, yes. He didn’t think there’d be anything else to see.”

  “That’s right,” Bateman said. I could tell he was happy to hear it put this way. Like fourth and long from your own one-yard line, just a few seconds left on the clock. So everybody’s already on their way out of the stadium.

  “So I finally go in the room,” he said. “I sit down in front of him. His mother starts talking, but I tune her out. It’s just me and Darryl. I don’t try to get real close to him like I might to some guys. Get right in his face or anything. I just sit back and I don’t say anything for a while. He’s looking right back at me. I had to remind myself he was only sixteen years old.”

  Another boat roared by. He took a sip of his beer and gave the boat a quick glance. Then he was back to that day in the interview room.

  “Finally, I just say to him, ‘You think you’re a man already, don’t you.’ He gives me a look, doesn’t say anything. I say, ‘Some people might look at you and say you’re nothing but a little punk gangbanger, not even seventeen years old yet. Think you’re so bad and everything.’ Notice I’m not saying that I think that. I’m just saying some people. That was the important part. Make it all indirect, you know?”

  I nodded, even though I wasn’t quite sure what he was getting at.

  “I say, ‘I’ll tell you what a real man does. A real man stands up and admits when he’s done something wrong. A real man tells the truth, no matter what. While a little punk gangbanger, on the other hand, you know what he does? He runs away crying like a little girl.’ Which started to get his attention, I could tell. And then I say, ‘So how come you ran away like a little girl, Darryl?’ I don’t even give him time to answer. I just say, ‘You’re not even that fast, you know that? That cop who was chasing you, that old white guy? He used to play baseball. He was a catcher. You know how slow catchers are, right? That’s who was chasing you, and he almost caught you.’”

  He stopped and put his hand up to me.

  “No disrespect, Alex. It was all part of the story I was building.”

  “I got it. Go on.”

  “I say to him, I say, ‘Look, we’ve got you on this, Darryl. We’ve got a cop who’ll take the stand and testify that he saw you on the scene. Not just some Joe Schmoe from Hamtramck, Darryl. A cop who’ll sit there in his shiny uniform and tell everybody how it went down. If that’s not enough, we’ve got your fingerprints on the bracelet. You understand what that means, don’t you? We could take this whole thing to trial right now, and I’m pretty sure we could get anything we want.’ Which was a bit of a stretch, I realize. But you know how it works. Then I say, ‘Here’s your chance, Darryl. To stand up like a man and to make this a whole lot easier for everybody. If you do that, I’ll make sure it gets taken into account.’ This kid’s just sitting there. His mother’s telling him not to say anything, but I can tell he’s thinking it over. Me, I keep ignoring her, so maybe he’ll ignore her, you see what I mean? And I just ask him flat out, I say, ‘Come on, Darryl. Are you a man or not?’”

  He paused for effect. Then he took another sip of his beer.

  “That was the first time he spoke,” he said. “He sits up in his chair and he says, ‘I’m a man. Don’t forget it.’ So at this point, some guys would think they’ve got him on the hook, right? Yeah, you’re a man, that means you’re gonna tell me the truth now. Let’s have it. And then they get a big lie. So instead of that, I just had this gut instinct that I should keep pushing it. You wanna know why? It was something you said to me.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, when you were telling me how you were chasing him down those tracks, and he finally got under that fence, and he’s standing there on the other side. You said that as soon as he knew he had you beat, he just stood there and looked at you. Ice cold, you said. Like he was daring you to shoot him. Knowing that you wouldn’t. You remember that?”

  “I do.”

  “That’s all I needed to know about this kid. He ran, but he didn’t want to run. The second he didn’t have to run anymore, it was like he was pretending he never ran at all. So I say to him, ‘I don’t believe you, Darryl. I don’t believe you’re a real man. Because you ran down those tracks like a little girl, and you even threw that diamond bracelet away. You probably left a trail of piss all the way down the tracks, too. I don’t know, because we didn’t actually test for that. We didn’t run the forensics test for a little girl running away and pissing herself.’ I could tell I was getting to him. It honestly felt like he wanted to get out of his chair and start something. Which I would have been ready for, believe me. But instead he just says, ‘I’m a man, and if there’s something I need to do, I do it.’ Those were his exact words.”

  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 h
ave 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.”