The Interrogation (17 page)

“Come in,” she said.

“We won’t stay long, Cindy,” Yearwood assured her. “Jack just has a few questions for you.”

“You can stay as long as you want, Sam,” she replied with a small, twisted smile. “I don’t get much company.”

Yearwood motioned Pierce into the trailer, then followed him inside.

It was cramped, as Pierce observed, with enough room for only a short sofa and two spindly wooden chairs. A radio perched on the narrow island that separated the living room from a second space, where a square table stood in one corner, stocked with bread, three cans of tuna, a jar of peanut butter, and an ancient hot plate. His future, he thought, and perhaps Anna’s, if they did not find a way to reach beyond their respective losses. He decided that he would call her at six o’clock sharp, tell her whatever news he had, either that Smalls was still in custody or on the streets again, maybe ask if they might have breakfast together. Then, if she said yes, they’d meet at a nearby diner and he would tell her that he knew, really knew, exactly how she felt, the unbearable pain of a murderer on the loose again, the very one who’d killed your child, and that he would never stop trying to find him, and that only when he did would he himself know peace.

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” Cindy asked.

Pierce shook his head. “No, thanks.”

Cindy dropped onto the sofa, then watched as Pierce and Yearwood sat down. “So Jimmy’s in trouble,” she said to Pierce. “Is it something real bad?”

“Yes, it is,” Pierce answered. “Murder.”

A short burst of air broke from Cindy’s red lips. “Oh, sweet Jesus.”

Her accent was southern, and Pierce imagined her as a young girl on some dirt farm, staring out over the field, yearning for the nomadic life she’d later found but which had not turned out the way she’d hoped, and so left her here, in Seaview, beached on northern shores, talking to a cop from the city about a son she could not save.

“He won’t tell us anything about himself,” Pierce added. “Family. Where he’s lived. But my partner got
the idea that he might have come from Seaview, so I drove out here to check it out.”

“Poor Jimmy,” Cindy muttered brokenly.

Pierce took out his notebook. “When was the last time you saw your son?”

“I ain’t seen him but one time since he left. That was a little over five years ago. Didn’t figure I’d ever see him again.”

“Why not?”

“’Cause he didn’t want me to see him no more. He didn’t want nobody to see him. Took to staying here in the trailer. Didn’t want to go out. Didn’t want to do nothing. Wouldn’t go to school. It was like everything was took out of him. Didn’t have no friends. Pushed everybody away that wanted to help him out. Like he couldn’t find no way to be happy.”

“When did this start, this pushing away?”

“First year of high school.”

“Do you know why he began to behave this way?”

“He’s just got strange, that’s all.” She grabbed a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of her dress, thumbed one out, lit it. “He never had nobody get close to him. Never had no job. Always jumpy. Something screwy up there.” She tapped the side of her head with a nicotine-stained finger. “Made him real … moody. That’s how I’d say it. Jimmy got real moody.” She took a quick draw on the cigarette. “Still lost, then?”

“Yes,” Pierce said.

“Is he out of his head? Raving? Is it like that?”

“No. It’s just that he won’t tell us anything about himself.”

She pointed to a picture on the wall. “That’s Jimmy. When he was eight.”

The photograph revealed a slender boy with large eyes and dark hair parted in the middle. He wore a
cowboy suit, complete with ornate holsters and two toy six-guns. There was joy in his face, and peering at it, comparing it to the timid features of Albert Jay Smalls, Pierce wondered where this joy had gone and why, as it fled, it had turned this boy into a murderer.

“Georgia,” Cindy said. “We was in Georgia when that was took.” A vague nostalgia touched her eyes. “Jimmy loved to draw. That’s what he done the most when he was off by hisself. He’d take a drawing book down to the beach or over to the park, and he’d set and draw things all day. Kids, mostly.”

“Kids?” Pierce asked.

“He loved kids,” Cindy said. “Drawing ’em.” She shook her head. “He was normal till he come up on thirteen, fourteen. That’s when he started acting strange. Not talking. Staying in his room. Then he took to wandering off. He’d go out on the pier and just set there, staring around, like he was listening to the clouds. He didn’t want to be with other kids. Just off by hisself.”

“Is he wanted for anything?” Pierce asked.

“Wanted?”

“Any outstanding warrants, for example,” Pierce explained. “We’re trying to find something we can hold him on. It could be anything. Shoplifting. It doesn’t matter as long as it’s enough for us to keep him in custody.”

“Because you figure he’s so dangerous?”

“Yes.”

“Poor thing.” Her face swam in and out behind weaving curls of smoke. “He was just a kid when it come over him. I guess it got worse and worse, whatever was going on in Jimmy’s mind, but he never once told me what it was.”

“Did he ever do anything violent?”

“No.” She started to say more, then stopped, as if
considering a question she feared to ask. “Who did Jimmy kill?”

“An eight-year-old girl,” Pierce told her.

“Poor little thing,” Cindy whispered. “Eight years old.” Her gaze settled upon the photograph of Jimmy Eagar in his cowboy suit. “Poor little thing,” she repeated. “My son.”

Then the story unfolded, Cindy talking quietly in the dim light while Pierce listened intently, taking notes as she sketched the grim decline of her lost boy.

12:45
A.M.
, Interrogation Room 3

Critical as time was, Cohen decided that he would give Smalls another ten minutes to wallow in his own self-lacerating anguish in the distant hope that if it weren’t an act, then it might actually urge Smalls toward confession.

And so, with no word of explanation, Cohen rose and left the interrogation room, locking the door behind him. Once in the corridor, he considered heading to the lounge but feared Blunt might still be there, playing solitaire in a cloud of rancid smoke. And so he turned to the left instead and walked down the hallway to the detective bull pen.

The desks were empty now, the phones silent, with nothing moving but the sweep of the second hand on the large clock that hung between the room’s two arched windows.

Cohen walked to the water cooler, took a long drink, crushed the cup, and tossed it into the nearest can. He looked at the clock. Eight more minutes. How is it, he wondered, thinking of his forty-one years on earth, how is it that each minute can be so long and life so short?

He sat at his desk, toyed with a pencil, a paper clip, the pencil again. His eyes lit on the phone, and he thought of Ruth Green. How would she react if the phone suddenly rang in the middle of the night and it was his voice on the other end? Would she think him crazy, or would she say
Why don’t you come here when you get off? I’ll make a pot of coffee.
But what would happen after that? he wondered. What did he really have to offer a young woman who’d not seen the things he’d seen, and so had no way of knowing how he felt, his sense that the wheel never turned in favor of the good.

“Detective Cohen?”

Officer Day stood at the entrance of the bull pen.

“The Chief asked me to tell you that he didn’t find anything in the park,” Day said. “He and some other officers went along the path all the way from the gate to the pond. They found some ground that looked as if it might have been disturbed, so they dug all around it, but they didn’t find anything.”

Cohen nodded. “Okay, thanks.”

Officer Day remained in place. “Chief Burke wants to know if anything new has come from the interrogation since he spoke to you?”

“No,” Cohen answered. “Except that Smalls seems to hate himself. Really hate himself. Calls himself slime. It may be an act, of course. Or it may be a sting of actual remorse. I can’t tell.”

“I’ll let the Chief know,” Day said, then turned and exited the room.

So there was no praying beggar clawing at the ground, Cohen concluded as he sat back in his chair. No buried silver locket that might ultimately have guided them to the truth. Instead, it had all been a lie, a way
for Smalls to buy time, knowing, as he probably did, that time was all he needed now, that this was the last interrogation, that at the end of it he would be set free.

He shook his head. What he needed now was a miracle. A voice from the burning bush proclaiming with incontrovertible proof,
This is the man who strangled Cathy Lake.
He looked toward the window, the empty blackness beyond it, saw no flame, heard no voice, felt only the unfeeling void.

And so it was up to him and Pierce, he told himself, himself and Pierce and others like them to go on, unaided in their quests. He glanced at the clock, felt the whirl of its hands like spinning blades. Five minutes, he thought, still resolved to let Smalls stew a little longer, five minutes that will feel like forever.

12:52
A.M.
, Criminal Files Room

Seated at the room’s wooden table, Burke studied a photograph of Albert Jay Smalls, hoping to get a fix on what lay in the mind behind the man’s mournful eyes. Cohen’s latest remarks concerning Smalls came into Burke’s mind, the ones Officer Day had reported minutes before, the fact that the suspect had referred to himself as slime.

He opened the file and once again began to read the previous interrogations, beginning with the September first interview.

And it
was
an interview, not an interrogation. Smalls was merely one of four men taken from the park the night of the murder, brought to headquarters, questioned briefly, then released. Little had been known about either Smalls or Cathy Lake’s murder at that
point. Smalls’ two drawings had not been found, nor anything else that had connected him to the girl’s killing, save the purely circumstantial fact that he’d frightened a woman near the duck pond. Thus, at the time of the interview, Smalls had not been considered a suspect. The detectives’ questions had been little more than an effort to ascertain who he was and where he’d been at the time of the murder.

And yet one exchange stood out.

Burke considered the section of the transcript he’d just read. In the initial interview, Smalls had given almost no sense of himself, his life, how or why he’d ended up in the park. He’d said only that he had to be on guard against other men who came to the park. But why? Had he been robbed? Assaulted?

No.

Then what was Smalls afraid of? Burke wondered. If these other men had never harmed him, why was he on guard against them? And if he felt he had to be on guard against these men, why would he choose to live in their midst?