Let It Burn Read online

“Detective Bateman,” he said. “Officer McKnight, was it?”

  I nodded.

  “You’ll have to excuse me. It’s been a rough couple of days. I haven’t slept at all since … I mean, if I do I just have these nightmares where she’s…”

  “It’s okay,” Bateman said. “We understand.”

  “I assume you have news,” he said, putting the mug down. “Have you caught him yet?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Bateman said. “But we were down the road at the Graysons’. So I thought we’d stop by.”

  “I don’t understand. Why come out here if there’s nothing to tell us?”

  “Your father-in-law asked us to come out. He’s going to put together a reward for any information leading to an arrest.”

  “Is that going to make any difference?”

  “It usually does, yes. A large sum of money tends to make people get over their reluctance to call the police.”

  “Okay,” Mr. Paige said, nodding slowly. “Okay. So that’s good. That should do it, right?”

  “We hope so.”

  “Detective Bateman,” he said. “That first night … I think you promised us that you’d catch this guy. Didn’t you?”

  “I’m sure I promised you that I’d do everything I can to catch him, yes.”

  “No, no. You said, ‘I promise you, we’ll catch this guy.’ Or words to that effect. But that was the message. We’ll catch him.”

  “I don’t remember exactly what my words were,” Bateman said, hesitating. “You understand, we can only do what we can do. Some things are out of our control.”

  “All right, so if you said that and you don’t really mean it, then promise me something else.”

  Bateman looked over at me.

  “What is it you want us to promise you?” I said.

  “Promise me that if you catch this guy, you won’t take him right to the station.”

  “I don’t understand. Where else would we—”

  “Bring him here,” Mr. Paige said, grabbing my arm. “That’s all I ask. Bring him here for one hour. So I can have him first.”

  Bateman dropped his head and rubbed his forehead. Mr. Paige kept his eye contact with me, his grip still tight on my arm.

  “You have to promise me,” he said. “I’m not letting you go until you do.”

  “Mr. Paige,” I said. “You know we can’t bring him here. That’s not how it works.”

  He kept squeezing my arm, with surprising force for a man who probably hadn’t eaten a real meal in three days. Then he let go.

  “God, listen to me,” he said. “I’m so sorry, guys. I’m just…”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I’d probably be thinking the same thing, believe me.”

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “What thing do I do next?”

  “Maybe we can send somebody over to talk to you,” Bateman said. “I’ll give you a call tomorrow, too. And the day after that. Okay? We’re not going to let you face this alone.”

  “I appreciate that,” he said. “But at the end of the day, I’m the one who has to try to sleep in that empty bed.”

  “You should get out of this place,” I said. “Go somewhere else for a while.”

  He nodded.

  “It’s a great idea,” Bateman said. “Is there someplace you can go?”

  “I’ll find a place. You’re right. I’ll just go crazy here.”

  He stood up then. He went into the bathroom and slapped some water on his face, tried to do something with his hair. When he came back out, he looked like he remembered how to be a human being, at least.

  “I appreciate you guys coming over,” he said. “I guess I needed somebody to knock some sense back into me.”

  We left him with a promise to get back to work and to let him know the second we had a break. The detective and I walked back to the car in silence. We got in, he started it, and we headed back to the freeway. Back to work.

  “Grief’s a bitch,” Bateman finally said.

  I nodded my head once and watched the other cars as we blew by them.

  “So that reward…” I said, a few miles later.

  “Yeah, I hope you’re ready,” he said. “We’ll get a thousand calls by the end of the night.”

  *

  We got the calls. Maybe not a literal thousand, but our phone did not stop ringing for more than a few minutes at a time. Most of them were fishing expeditions. A young man down the street who always acted suspicious. He kind of looked like that portrait in the newspaper.

  Some of the calls were more specific. This young man next door, he came running home that same evening as the murder. I haven’t even seen him since then, which is weird because he’s always hanging around front with his no-good friends. Now it’s like he disappeared off the face of the earth.

  Those were the calls we followed up on, right away. A drive out to the house in question, a knock on the door. A quick census of everyone who lived there. Your older son, ma’am, where might he be? Oh, there he is right now. Okay, that’s not who we were looking for. Sorry to disturb you. Have a good night.

  Then back to the car, trying not to let the disappointment build when it was one dead end after another. We worked every lead we could that night. We picked up more leads in the morning. The photograph I had in my mind was still right there. I knew I’d recognize him the second I saw him. That was the frustrating part. All those doors opening, all those young faces looking up at me. Not one of them was the face I was looking for.

  Other murders kept occurring in the city. They weren’t going to stop just because we had one particular case we wanted to solve. They weren’t even going to slow down. It was a hot summer, and there were wars going on over the crack business. The casualties would get rolled into the hospitals every night. Literally every night without fail that summer. You didn’t say it loud, that one drug dealer shooting another was not something that was going to make you lose any sleep. An innocent bystander was another matter altogether. Someone just standing there on the street when a car comes by and the bullets start flying as randomly as raindrops.

  The Uzi was big that summer. A compact little machine pistol from Israel, not much louder than a sewing machine. It was the perfect weapon for making a point about who owned a particular corner, and making it dramatically.

  Five days after the murder of Elana Paige, we had another high-profile case in our precinct, this time an eighteen-year-old kid from Allen Park who was shot dead over a ticket-scalping dispute outside the Masonic Temple. He’d come down to attend a rock concert, ended up bleeding out on the sidewalk. His assailant had disappeared into the crowd, this time with no police officer around to serve as an eyewitness. Another news story, another grieving family. Another case to eat up some of Bateman’s workday, because there were only so many homicide detectives to go around.

  At the end of the week, Sergeant Grimaldi called me aside and told me that the approved overtime for my double shifts could not last forever, and that I’d end up killing myself if I didn’t go back to a normal schedule anyway.

  By the start of the next week, it was official. The case wasn’t closed, of course. It would remain open until it was solved, whenever that might be. But there were other crimes to solve, too, and resources had to be put back into balance. Priorities adjusted for maximum effectiveness. Or some words like that. Whatever they were, I didn’t really hear them. Because to me they meant we were all but giving up on ever putting away the man who killed Elana Paige.

  I was back on patrol, but I still checked in with Detective Bateman every day. He was usually sitting at his desk, a pile of paperwork in front of him. Often on the phone. Never a smile on his face. Not his usual flashy self at all. Not that month.

  “I had to call the family today,” he said one morning. “The Graysons first, then the husband. Naturally, they all wanted to know what the hell was going on. All these days gone by, still nothing.”

  He stopped to beat the edge of his desk with
a pen.

  “I’m not a good liar,” he said. “I’m sure they could hear it in my voice. Everything I was saying was just so useless.”

  Later that same morning, he received what he thought might be a solid lead. He called me in from the beat, and we went out together to chase it down. Once again, it turned into nothing. Once again, we were no closer to breaking the case.

  So aside from those occasional futile morning trips with the detective, it was back to the squad car for me. Back with my partner, Franklin. He took it easy on me for a while. He could tell I was still wearing the case around my neck.

  I kept watching as we drove, of course. Every young black man on the street, that could have been the man I was looking for. One day, I was driving through a neighborhood when I suddenly stopped dead, sending Franklin’s coffee onto his shoes.

  “What the hell!” he said.

  I was looking at a woman hanging up her laundry in her backyard.

  “That’s what made you stop?” Franklin said. “Because all I see is a woman putting out her family’s clothes to dry. Probably doesn’t have a working dryer in the house.”

  Out of all of her laundry, the shirts, the pants, the dresses, the towels, it was the one combination that had caught my eye.

  “Wait, is it because she’s got some blue jeans on the line?” Franklin said. “Along with that gray shirt? Because I hate to break it to you, but those aren’t exactly exotic items of clothing. I’m pretty sure we could both go home and find that particular outfit for ourselves right now.”

  I got out of the squad car and went to talk to her. A minute later, I came back and got behind the wheel. Franklin was still looking around for something in the car to wipe his shoes with.

  “Those clothes are hers,” I said. “There are no men in the house.”

  “You’re going to drive yourself crazy. You’re going to ruin all of my shoes, too.”

  He was right, of course. At night, after a full shift of driving around with my eyes wide open, I’d always make a point of taking the long way home. North from the precinct, through those same neighborhoods in Detective Bateman’s “horseshoe.” Or even east or west, because there was no guarantee that we were one hundred percent right in our initial assumptions about where he was running to. In fact, I was becoming more and more convinced that I didn’t see him running up Trumbull at all. Or if I did, that he took a last-second turn and didn’t cross that bridge over the freeway. He could have doubled back and gone toward one of the neighborhoods next to Mexicantown. So that’s where I drove, down one street after another. Then I’d finally go home to Jeannie.

  I wasn’t talking to her enough that month. With everything else that was going on, I should have reached out to her. But I have to admit, I just didn’t do it. I had no idea what to say. I kept it all inside me, and the next day I’d get up and do it all over again.

  *

  Two more weeks passed. The kids were all out of school, running around on the streets. I was still on the day shift until the end of June. The days were hot, and the nights seemed even hotter. For the first time, Sergeant Grimaldi did not so much as mention the Elana Paige case during roll call.

  I was out in the car with Franklin. I was driving that day. There’s a place called Covenant House, up on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. They take care of young people who have nowhere else to go, and this wasn’t the first time we’d taken some kid up there with the vague hope it would be the right place for him or her. If it’s that or prison for some girl who’s shoplifting food from the 7-Eleven, we’d rather give the House a try first.

  When we had dropped her off, I was driving back east on the boulevard. I was looking at every young face on the sidewalk, something I’d probably never stop doing for the rest of my life, especially when I was in this part of town.

  “How hard did you hit this street?” Franklin said. “This was still in the target area, wasn’t it?”

  “We drew a line here, actually. This is about as far north as we thought our man would come.”

  “All these apartment complexes,” he said, looking out the window as we rolled past them. “That’s a lot of doors to knock on.”

  “We knocked on every one. Probably twice.”

  When I got to Wabash Street, I turned right and headed south.

  “Where are we going? Oh, don’t tell me…”

  It was late in the day, time to get back to the precinct. But there was no rule about taking the most direct route.

  “You must have covered all of these neighborhoods,” he said. “This was right in the middle of the detective’s golden triangle, or whatever he called it.”

  “The horseshoe. Between the freeways.”

  “The horseshoe, that’s right. You must know every house by now.”

  “Pretty sure I do.”

  “And yet here we are.”

  I came up to the first intersection. Ash Street. I slowed down, thinking to myself, the man is right, we worked the hell out of each one of these streets. This is just a waste of time.

  I turned anyway.

  We passed Fourteenth Street and the little corner store. Three young men were hanging around out front. I looked them over and then kept going.

  We passed Fifteenth Street and then Sixteenth Street. The elementary school was closed up tight for the summer. Some more kids were hanging out on the playground equipment, violating a minor rule but nothing I was going to stop for. I looked them over and kept going.

  I came to Seventeenth Street and was about to make the turn. There was only a block more, with just a few houses. Then the street dead-ended at a locked gate, with a parking lot on the other side.

  I kept going straight.

  “Oh, come on,” Franklin said. “You’re driving yourself crazy. You’re also going to make me late for dinner.”

  He was right. I had no argument. But I kept going down that last block, already figuring I’d loop back and then head down to Butternut Street, maybe check those houses on the way because what the hell, as long as I’m there, and why did I even bother because I don’t see a soul on this street now anyway, except for that one woman hanging out the laundry.

  I was two houses past before I even realized what I’d seen. I stopped the car.

  “What is it?” Franklin said.

  “Probably nothing,” I said, swinging the car around. “At least I didn’t ruin your shoes this time.”

  I rolled back down the road slowly, the house on our left now, out my driver’s side window. It was a white two-story house with a little porch on the front. A woman was out in the side yard, hanging clothes from a line she had strung from the side of the house.

  “Oh, come on,” Franklin said. “Not this game again.”

  I watched her take out another pair of jeans and hang it on the line. Next to the other jeans, and the gray shirt.

  “I told you,” he said. “You’re going to drive yourself crazy.”

  I looked more closely at the shirt. Plain gray. Yes. But the sleeves …

  No. There was no tear. Both short sleeves were perfectly intact.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “I guess I’ll never look at a gray shirt again without doing a double take. I’ll go my whole life just waiting to see that one torn sleeve.”

  I took my foot off the brake and aimed the car dead ahead. To the precinct, to civilian clothes, to dinner.

  “Alex, hold up!”

  I stopped the car again and looked out the window, just as the woman was pinning another gray shirt to the line. A gray shirt with one ragged short sleeve.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I went back to the Soo the next day. I needed to try out this idea, to say it out loud, hear myself saying it, see someone else’s reaction to it. Someone I could trust.

  I parked on Portage Avenue, a busy street on this day, one of the last days of the tourist season. The freighters would keep running until the weather closed them down for the winter, but today was one last chance to
walk through the Locks Park without a warm coat. I knew people came from all over to see these seven-hundred-footers go through the locks. I don’t totally understand the attraction, but then I live just up the bay, so I see these boats all the time.

  I walked into the Soo Brewing Company. The air was heavy and the front window was steamed up, but enough light came through to make the furniture in the seating area look even further past its prime. Although I suppose the lingering aroma of the hops more than made up for it.

  Leon appeared from the back room, dragging a large metal trash can. “Alex,” he said when he saw me, “two visits in two days. I knew this beer would win you over.”

  “You need help with that?”

  “I got it. But I bet you can’t guess where it’s going.”

  I looked into the trash can and saw nothing but a soggy mass of grain. “I’m guessing the Dumpster out back?”

  “Hell no. This is from the mash tun. It’s going to the buffalo ranch so they can feed it to the herd.”

  “The buffalo ranch.”

  “Down toward Pickford, yeah. You’ve seen them.”

  “If you say so,” I said. Then I saw his coffee on the counter and realized I desperately needed one myself.

  “I’ve got a pot going,” he said, before I could even ask. “I’ll get you a cup.”

  A couple of minutes later, we were sitting in the front room on the beat-up couch. The cushions were shot, and I knew it would be a battle to get back on my feet, but for now I was comfortable. I took a sip of coffee.

  “You don’t look like you slept a whole lot,” he said to me.

  I shook my head.

  “I imagine the story you told me last night has something to do with that.”

  “I’m not exactly sure how I know this,” I said. “Or why I didn’t know it until now. All these years later. But I believe we put away an innocent man.”

  “You believe this based on what?”

  “Well, based at least partly on something I thought of in the middle of the night. You’re the one I always come to when I need help seeing something clearly, right?”

  “I try.”

  “You do more than try. You have a gift for it. You cut through all the clutter that gets in the way and you go right to the one thing that makes it all fit together. I’ve seen you do it over and over again.”