The Interrogation (14 page)

“Sanctum Sanctorum,” the old man announced. He drew a large ring of keys from his back pocket and jangled through them until he found the one he sought, inserted it with a surprisingly steady hand, and turned it. “My whole life’s in here,” he muttered as he flipped the switch just inside the door.

A single line of fluorescent lamps sputtered to life, revealing eight wooden desks, all covered with the same green felt under glass. Brass lamps with green glass shades stood at the corner of each desk, along with a scattering of pencils and notepads. Small trays contained rubber bands and paper clips. The smell of ink pervaded the air.

Yearwood motioned Pierce to follow him. They scissored among the desks to where a row of metal filing cabinets stood at the back of the room. A line of books ran across the top of the cabinets, a year embossed on the side of each, running from 1849 to the present. The
old man went directly to one marked 1947. “It has to have been in the fall when the boy disappeared,” he said. “That’s when the fair comes to town.”

He led Pierce to a nearby table, placed the book on top of it, leaned forward, and blew a cloud of dust from its surface. “Sit,” he told Pierce. “This could take a few minutes.”

Pierce slid into the chair next to the old man and watched as he turned the yellow, crumbling pages, pausing from time to time to consider a photograph or a headline. Page by page Seaview’s tragedies and disasters marched in procession beneath the sickly light, the history of a little seaside town accumulating story by story until Pierce felt something quake within him, got up quickly, walked to the front of the room, and stood, facing the window.

Down the street, the lights of the Driftwood Bar glowed out of the darkness. He thought of the people inside it and knew that whatever their stories, they could share them, something he no longer did with anyone. He’d stopped joining the other cops after a tour, stopped playing pool with them, throwing darts, listening to the game. This was what Anna had first noticed about him, he knew, the isolation in which he lived. She’d made that clear the second afternoon he’d come to visit her.

“You don’t go out with the men anymore, do you?” she’d said, then sat down to hear what he’d come to tell her.

“No.”

“My brother-in-law’s a cop in Pittsburgh, and the cops always go out when the shift’s over. You’re at the end of your shift, aren’t you? Right now?”

“Yes.”

“So where do they get together in this city, cops after work?”

“Place called Luke’s.”

“Let me guess. A pool table in the back. Jukebox too. Usually playing Sinatra. Calendars with girls in striped swimsuits. The sign outside doesn’t say No Women Allowed, but it might as well. Am I close?”

“On the money.”

“Did you go to college?” There was a wondrous frankness in her gaze.

“No.”

“I wanted to go to college, but my father said, ‘Why bother, you’re just going to get married.’ I got even by giving him an illegitimate granddaughter.” She shrugged. “But he did me one better. He loved Cathy. My father loved her and I haven’t told him yet that she’s dead.” She glanced toward the closed door of her daughter’s room, then back to Pierce. “So give me the benefit of your experience, Detective Pierce. Tomorrow, how do I tell my dying father that someone murdered his only granddaughter?”

“Take his hand,” Pierce told her. “Take his hand before you tell him anything.”

“Did you do that with your wife when you told her about Debra?”

“No, I didn’t. That’s how I know I should have.” He recalled the look on Jenny’s face as the blow fell, the way she’d retreated into silence. “She finally said that she couldn’t feel anything anymore. And, you know, that sounded good to me. Just to feel nothing at all.”

“Why?”

“Because all I felt was hatred. For Costa.” He drew in a deep breath. “I even started following him. When he moved to the city, I moved here too. And I followed
him. At night. When I was off duty. I did it until he died.”

Anna seemed to peer into the dark well of Pierce’s long sorrow. “It’s a poison, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Pierce replied. “When Costa died, I thought I’d get rid of it. But I didn’t.”

It was the tenderness he’d seen in her eyes at that moment that Pierce concentrated upon now, a tenderness he could still feel, as he stared through the dusty window of the Seaview Registry, remaining by that window until he heard Yearwood call to him, then wave him back to the book, where, it appeared from the urgent look on the old man’s face, the lost boy had been found.

11:33
P.M.
, Interrogation Room 3

Cohen scratched his cheek, felt the beginning of his nightly stubble. “All right,” he sighed. “Let’s go over it again, Jay.” He jerked at his tie, pulled down the knot. “Jay, you with me?”

Smalls’ gaze was dull. “Yes.”

Cohen turned the page. “Remember this?”

The photograph showed the drawing Smalls had made in the alley he’d stumbled out of only minutes before Cathy Lake’s murder.

“Let’s talk about this drawing.” Cohen tapped the figure of the little girl in the white robe. “The girl in this drawing, she’s dead, isn’t she? I mean, look at the way you’ve drawn her. Hands folded. Like a little girl in a coffin. Why did you draw her that way?”

Smalls slumped forward as if shoved there.

“Sit up,” Cohen barked. “You think you’re tired? I’m tired too. But we’re not through yet.”

Smalls straightened himself.

Cohen tapped the photo of the drawing. “Did you know this girl?”

Smalls looked away.

“You don’t want to think about her, do you?”

Smalls drew his hands to the edge of the table.

“Because you know what you did to her.”

“I didn’t do anything to her.”

“Prove it.”

“How?”

“By telling me about yourself. Where you’re from. Where you grew up.”

Smalls’ eyes cut over to Cohen. “None of that matters.” The words dropped from him like rotten morsels.

“Then why won’t you tell me about any of it?”

“Because I—”

The door opened.

Chief Burke stood in the doorway.

“May I see you a moment, Detective?” Burke asked.

Cohen joined Burke in the corridor, closing the door gently behind him.

“Have you heard anything from Pierce?” Burke asked him.

“Not yet.”

“And what about from your end? Is Smalls saying anything?”

“Nothing new except some guy he claims to have seen in the park a little while after the murder. Says the guy was on the path that goes from the tunnel to the playground. He didn’t talk to the guy, but he swears he heard him say ‘Bury me, bury me.’ The guy was digging in the ground when he was saying this.”

“Digging,” Burke said thoughtfully. “It’s worth checking out. If Smalls really did see this guy, and he was burying the locket, something like that, we wouldn’t want to miss it.”

“That would be a long shot, wouldn’t it?” Cohen asked bleakly.

Burke stared at him. “But at this point, long shots are all we have.”

11:44
P.M.
, Seaview, Registry Office

Pierce studied the photograph Yearwood indicated. It showed a teenage boy standing at the end of a long, narrow pier, not a killer yet, as for years Costa had not been a killer, but the horrible urge already growing in him like a tumor.

“It’s him,” Pierce said. “It’s Smalls.” The promise he’d made to Anna Lake resounded in his mind. “I have to find something, Sam.”

Yearwood returned his eyes to the photograph. “His name is Eagar. James Eagar. Everybody called him Jimmy.” He stroked the white gristle on his chin as he continued to stare down at the old photograph. “Messed up from the beginning. Never had a chance.”

The fire blazed in Pierce’s mind. “Neither did Cathy Lake,” he said.

11:49
P.M.
, Office of the Chief of Detectives

As Burke stood in the elevator, he recalled the last five hours, how he’d worked in the old way, meticulously going over each minute detail of Case 90631. But for all his effort, the piercing light that had time and time again peeled back the curtain and revealed the truth had failed him utterly. Page by page, he’d felt the heat
diminish, the light dim. A mind that had once burned so fiercely and with such fine result now seemed turned exclusively upon its own unlighted depths. What remained was his professional expertise. He had experience, long and deep. It was the one thing that remained that he could offer to the men who looked to him for guidance and support.

The elevator doors opened in the lobby. Burke strode to the front desk and picked up the phone. “Get hold of Officers Zarella and Sanford,” he said when the dispatcher answered. “Tell them to meet me at the entrance to the park on Clairmont. I want them there in twenty minutes.”

“Yes, Chief.”

“They should bring a shovel and a couple of spades.”

“Anything else, sir?”

“No,” Burke answered. “That’s all I have.”

He strode out into the night, back toward Saint Vincent’s, determined now to perform the last duties of his fatherhood. As he walked the deserted street, he could feel terrible stirrings within him, ghostly recriminations, fingers pointed directly toward the damage he had done. One of the scribblings he’d found wadded up in Scottie’s smelly jacket moved like a blade across his mind.
I am the evil Evil made.
Why had he thought that line so weak and self-pitying when he’d first read it, and now so profoundly true?

11:54
P.M.
, Interrogation Room 3

Watching him from across the table, Cohen decided that what he desperately needed was a question Smalls couldn’t anticipate. Something bold, something that
firmly suggested he was closing in. He thought of the Ferris wheel, the possibility that Smalls might have lived in Seaview, and decided to take a chance. “Tell me about when you were in Seaview.”

Smalls glanced away, as if from some hateful image he could not bear to glimpse.

“You did something there, didn’t you, Jay?” Cohen pressed.

Smalls gave no answer.

Cohen studied the self-loathing on Smalls’ face and knew that he’d hit a mark. “Something horrible.”

Midnight, Seaview, Main Street

Pierce looked over to where Yearwood sat on the passenger side of the car. “I didn’t remember the fairgrounds being this far from Seaview.”

“It’s not much farther,” Yearwood assured him. “Used to be quite a lively place, our fairgrounds. Lights. Noise. Nothing left but the Ferris wheel these days, and that just sits, rusting away.”

Pierce glanced at his Timex, pressed down upon the accelerator. “When was the last time you spoke to Smalls’ mother?”

“About five years ago, right after the boy disappeared,” Yearwood answered. “She had that look, you know, the one people get when they can’t stop chewing at the bitter root.”

Pierce thought he must have once had such a look, and thinking that, the foggy night returned to him, the blurred chug of the harbor boats, Costa sitting in the misty front window of the Flying Dutchman Bar, downing one whiskey after another while he joked and laughed and bought another round, the whole gang
clustered around him, slapping him on the back, knowing nothing of the archive he maintained, his macabre gallery of dead children.

“She wasn’t sure what had happened to him,” Yearwood added. “That made it worse.”

Did not knowing really make it worse? Pierce wondered. Was it really better not to know where Costa had hidden Debra’s red velvet bracelet than to imagine that each night he’d drawn it from its hiding place, slid it through his fingers, or put it to some even more obscene use?

“The fairgrounds are coming up,” Yearwood said.

Pierce looked to the left, where he saw the gigantic frame of the Ferris wheel just as a blast of wind abruptly rocked its rusty cars ever so slightly backward. The end of the line. If nothing comes of this, then Smalls will go free. He thought of Anna, of the moment when he would have to tell her that Smalls had been released. Would the strange composure she had so far maintained vanish at that moment, he wondered, and in that instant would she be transformed, as he had been, consumed by fury, beyond all hope of peace? To save her from that fate was his mission now, to find something on Albert Smalls that would break through his stony denial. To save Anna, he thought as he drew his eyes from the darkened Ferris wheel, this was now his one true aim for the interrogation.

P
ART
III

Is there something else?

12:33
A.M.
, September 12, Saint Vincent’s Hospital, Room 704

Burke sat at his son’s bedside, Scottie’s face a blur behind the plastic curtain. Even so, he was more recognizable than the withered man Burke had found in the emergency ward six days before, a deranged, shivering figure madly clawing at the bedsheet.

But in the last few hours, this thrashing had ended. There was no more ripping and tearing at the sheet or his hospital gown. Scottie’s eyes were closed, lips clinched together, so that the only sign of life Burke could detect in him was the subtle heave of his chest and the saliva that bubbled briefly from the right corner of his lips, then burst.

The door opened. Burke expected to see a doctor or
a nurse on rounds, but the man in the doorway was clearly neither.

“Is this Scott Burke’s room?”

“Yes, it is,” Burke answered.

The man took a hesitant step forward and let the door swing shut behind him. “I wasn’t sure I had the right room.”

He was dressed in baggy flannel pants, a plaid wool shirt, and a rumpled parka with frayed sleeves. His hair was black and greasy and parted in the middle, with a curl that dangled just to the left and which, Burke supposed, the man believed gave him a raffish quality, when, in fact, it only added to his seediness.