The Interrogation (12 page)

“How do you know that?”

Smalls gave no answer, so Cohen supplied one of his own. They got away because there was no method of capturing them save the flawed and desperate one he and others like him used to find the guilty and put them
away. They got away because at the critical moment a witness had heard a glass break, turned toward that sound, and missed the figure in the brush. They got away because knives and guns were washed clean by the indifferent rain. They got away because time ate memory and maggots ate flesh, and nothing worked to preserve the footprint in the melting snow or the telltale drop of blood. They got away because nothing in the spinning void gave the slightest assistance to those who sought to bring them down. The war had brought him to this grim conclusion, Cohen knew, but how, he wondered, had Smalls arrived at this same unloving place?

Is there some news?

10:37
P.M.
, Seaview

The lights of Seaview blinked from the enveloping darkness, and as he closed in upon the town, Pierce could smell the musty brine of the sea. He’d grown up in Englishtown, a riverfront village nearly fifty miles away, but as a young man he’d often come to Seaview, and he recalled now the long, lazy summer afternoons he’d spent strolling its crowded boardwalk. He’d met Jenny on one of those afternoons, and as he entered the outskirts of town, he thought of that first encounter, her quietness, how shy she’d been. At first he considered it a flirtatious pose. But later he understood that instead, it was the outward demonstration of her inner fragility. More than anything, that was the difference between Jenny and Anna Lake, he realized. In the latter, he’d
felt something solid at the core. What more could he want in a woman, he wondered, than this firm ground, someone the wind could not tear, nor the tide sweep away, someone who’d fallen into the same abyss and with whom he could claw his way out again?

And so now, as he proceeded on, he recalled that firmness, the direct look in Anna’s eyes when he’d shown up at her apartment three days after her daughter’s murder, standing alone in the bleak hallway, not at all sure why he’d come, save that in this grieving woman he’d sensed someone with a steely capacity to endure whatever life offered. He’d seen all of that at the moment she opened the door, both the depth of her wound and her will to heal it.

5:30
P.M.
, September 4, 545 Obermeyer Street

The door opened and she stood, facing him, her gaze unflinching. She wore a plain green dress with narrow sleeves, and she’d pulled her long hair back and wound it into a bun. She drew her arms around her as she waited for him to speak.

“I’m Detective—”

“I remember you,” she interrupted. “Is there some news?”

“No,” Pierce replied. “I just wanted you to know that we still have him in custody. The man we arrested two days ago.”

“Has he said anything?”

“No. They never say much at first. But in the end, we’ll get it out of him.”

He wanted to add something, a word of consolation, but what would that word be? How could he help her find peace when he had not found it himself? When he
could not so much as imagine some future moment when Debra’s murder no longer tore at his soul, releasing the unquenchable rage that drove him now.

“Thank you,” Anna Lake said. “For coming by.”

He felt he should leave, put on his hat, turn, and leave. He didn’t. Instead, he remained, facing her, his hat in his hand, wanting to probe the curious serenity he saw in her eyes, needing to know if it might be something she could help him find.

“Would you like to come in?” she asked unexpectedly.

“I know you’re … I mean, I wouldn’t want to … bother you.”

“You’re not bothering me. I just got home from work. My first day back.”

He followed her into the apartment, noticed that the door to what had once been Cathy’s room was closed. He’d searched that room the day following the murder, Anna silently watching as he and Cohen went through her daughter’s few possessions. They’d not really expected to find anything but had followed the established rules of investigation anyway. Even little girls had enemies, the rule book said, so they’d looked for letters, diaries, a name doodled somewhere. In pursuit of this phantom clue, they’d pawed through Cathy’s desk, leafed through her school notebooks. Outside, a small brown dog had scurried along the sidewalk, raced behind a tree, spun heedlessly in the autumn air, things that Cathy Lake would never do again.

That had been the moment, Pierce recalled now, the exact instant when Cathy Lake had risen from the crowded shore of doomed children to become the singular and irreplaceable little girl she had surely been. He glanced toward her closet, the dark space where her spare wardrobe hung, clothes to play in and go to
church in, clothes for all the changing seasons she would never know, clothes which, in their lifeless droop, could only suggest other clothes she would never wear, a graduation gown, a wedding dress. All of that was gone, as she was gone, this child who would never feel rain, sunlight, a warm summer breeze, this little girl whose smile would never lift anyone’s spirits or change an ordinary day into something infinitely blessed. She would never toot on the little plastic trumpet she’d placed beside her bed, nor tap on the toy typewriter on her desk, nor rearrange the furniture in the doll house on the floor. She would never whisper “I love you” to her mother, or to a husband, or to the child she might have borne. Every sound, every touch, every motion of this once living little girl was now locked in stillness and silence, destined only for decay.

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” Anna asked him now.

“No. Thank you.”

She sat down on a dark blue sofa beside the window. Pierce took the chair opposite her. He noted the plain dress, the ordinary shoes, the bobby pins that held back her hair, and in all of these things saw the humble nature of her life. Her deepest hope, her greatest ambition, he thought, had been nothing more than to keep and protect her daughter. When you had wished for so little, and lost even that, what was left but rage? And yet he saw nothing of his own smoldering resentment in this woman’s eyes.

“I haven’t gone out,” she told him. Her smile was thin as rain. “For anything. I don’t have anything to offer you. Cookies. Nothing.”

Pierce glanced around the apartment. He knew how bare and lifeless it now seemed to her. For it was gone,
all of it, abruptly and forever gone, the love and delight once added by a child. His eyes fell upon a white uniform that hung by a wire hanger from one of the doors.

“I’m a waitress,” Anna told him. “I used to bring Cathy a piece of coconut pie when I came home from work. Coconut custard. That was her favorite.” She glanced toward her daughter’s room. “I’m giving all Cathy’s things away.”

Pierce saw Cathy Lake’s face materialize beneath the delicate features of her mother. So it was with murdered children. They didn’t elbow their way into your stranded consciousness—they bled into your entire helpless being. They never stopped reaching for you, crying for you. They crawled back into the safety of your sheltering arms and lay curled there, dead.

“Except for a few little … reminders,” Anna continued. “You know, her first drawing. That sort of thing. The rest I thought someone else might use, so I’m going to take it down to the Salvation Army. That’s where I bought most of it anyway, so it seems the right place to take it back.”

So quickly, Pierce thought. So different from the way Jenny had clung tenaciously to the last thread of the last sweater their daughter had ever worn. She had kept Debra’s room a shrine, so that in the end Debra’s murder had consumed each memory of the child, spotted every photograph and stained every garment with her spilled blood, a need to hold on to everything Debra had ever touched that had finally become so obsessive, it lashed at him with a relentless cruelty.
Find that bracelet, goddammit, Jack. What kind of cop are you? Can’t you at least do that?

Pierce drove this from his mind and asked Anna Lake, “I was wondering about Cathy’s father.”

“Why?” Her eyes met his steadily.

“We need to check on everyone who was close to the … to your daughter. Not that he would have … It’s routine.”

“I don’t know where he is,” Anna replied. “But if you found him and asked him about Cathy, he wouldn’t know who you were talking about.” She answered the question he didn’t ask. “Soldier. It was the uniform, I suppose. Anyway, I never looked him up after that … one night.” She looked at Pierce closely. “Are you from the city?”

“I lived there before the war,” Pierce answered. “Then I moved to Englishtown.” It came out before he could stop it. “My daughter was murdered too. That’s why I came over. To let you know that I know what you’re … what it’s like.”

He had come to listen to her story but told his own instead, told Anna Lake how Debra had gone to a playground with friends for a Fourth of July cookout. At some point she’d left the group. No one knew exactly when or why. She’d not been seen again until her body was found in a culvert a hundred yards away.

“The guy who killed Debra lived in our neighborhood,” Pierce said. “His name was Costa. Nicolas Costa. He had a long record of … being interested in children.”

A local car mechanic, Pierce went on, who’d lived in the neighborhood for years, an ordinary man whom no one would have thought capable of murder. He stopped there, left out the macabre museum that had been found in Costa’s basement, photographs of dead children, hundreds of children, in bloated files and taped to his basement walls.

He shrugged, embarrassed. “My wife couldn’t stand living in our house anymore, our neighborhood. So she
moved back to the Midwest. The little town she came from. That’s when I came back to the city.” He saw his small apartment, furnished with nondescript furniture, no pictures on the walls, a boxy radio endlessly droning. “I guess I wanted to keep busy.”

“And the man? What happened to him?”

“He went free,” Pierce answered. “There wasn’t enough evidence to … stop him.”

A silence fell between them until Anna said, “I usually take a walk before dinner.”

On the street, they strolled through the chill air, an unmistakable intimacy gathering around them as though, for all the crowds and the bustle, the city had emptied suddenly, and they now walked its streets alone.

“What was she like?” Anna asked. “Your Debra.”

Pierce realized that he had not actually spoken of Debra in years. “She was brave,” he answered. “She had polio. Wore a metal brace on her right leg. But she took it really well. Gutsy. Smart. She’d won the spelling bee in her class. We wanted to get her something. She’d mentioned this little bracelet. Red velvet. With a piece of purple glass in the middle. So we got it for her, an award. She was wearing it the day she was murdered. Costa took it for a souvenir.” Costa’s face appeared in Pierce’s mind, his eyes peering ratlike out of the shadows, not a man really, but a predator who’d felt no more for Debra than a fetishist feels for a high-heeled shoe, something to be used, then tossed aside. “I can’t stop hating him,” he blurted. “I can’t stop … hating.”

They walked on through narrow streets until they reached the harbor where, in the distance, Pierce could see the wharf from which Nicolas Costa had tumbled drunkenly into the water.

“He’s not going to get away with it,” Pierce had assured her, renewing with added determination his earlier pledge. “The man who killed Cathy. I promise you he won’t.”

But now, eight days later, as Pierce closed in upon Seaview, he was no longer sure that he could keep his promise. For days he’d tried to find some fragment of physical evidence that would nail Smalls, or, barring that, some way to break him. But neither effort had brought fruit, and now one effort seemed no less doomed to failure than the other. So what will I tell her? Pierce asked himself as he pulled into the parking lot of Seaview Police Headquarters a few minutes later.
What do I tell her if Albert Smalls goes free?

10:42
P.M.
, September 12, Police Headquarters, Sixth Floor Lounge

Ralph Blunt’s great bulk appeared wreathed in smoke as Cohen entered the lounge.

“Christ, Ralph,” Cohen said, batting a billowing cloud away.

Blunt shifted the cigar over to the left corner of his mouth and dropped another card on the solitaire tableau he’d spread across the scarred table. “You break that bastard yet?”

Cohen poured himself a mug of coffee and slumped down opposite Blunt. “No. Sometimes I think he’s about to crack, then he clams up.”

“Fucking pervert,” Blunt sneered. His small eyes squeezed together. “Give me five minutes with the fucking bastard and he’ll tell you the whole goddamn story.”

Cohen had no doubt that this was true. He’d seen Blunt in action, the brutal gleam in his eye when he threw a punch.

“Five minutes,” Blunt boasted. “That’s all I’d need.”

It was the tough-cop swagger Cohen had always detested. But it was also the style that seemed most natural to men like Blunt, and so the only way to talk to them at all was to change the subject.

“It’s sort of late for you to be hanging around headquarters, isn’t it?” Cohen asked.

“Commish asked me to stick around.”

“The Commissioner. Why?”

Blunt shrugged. “Didn’t say.” He slapped another card onto the table. “So how come you stopped drilling the bastard?”

Cohen sipped the coffee. “I’m letting him take a breather. Or maybe I’m just taking one for myself.”

“Fucking freak, that guy. Is he a faggot?”

“I don’t know.”

“Looks like a faggot.”

“Tough as nails in some ways though,” Cohen said. “You ever grill a guy like that, Ralph? A guy you just couldn’t get to?”

“Had a retard once. Couldn’t get shit out of him.”

“This is different.”

“So I hear.”

“Sometimes I think he wants to confess but just doesn’t know how. Like it’s buried so deep he can’t dig it up himself.”