that anything you say can and will be held against you. You also have right to have a lawyer present.”
“I don’t need a lawyer. We’ve lived in this house for years,” Gayle said. “Those are just stains left by sloppy cleaning. If Glory did her job, they wouldn’t be there. You have nothing but despicable insinuations.”
“Blood doesn’t lie,” Wade said. “I’m sure we’ll also find traces in the boat, which you used to take her body downriver to King Steel. You scraped the side of the boat on a pylon, so we’ll find the paint too. You’ve left enough forensic evidence that the DA could have his dog try this case for him and still win.”
“Jesus, Gayle,” Ethan said, his voice altered by the pinched nose. “What have you done?”
“ Me?” she asked, pointing her finger at Ethan and then at her son. “This is on the two of you. You’re the ones who couldn’t keep your pants zipped. You’re the ones who had to get dirty with the help. I wasn’t going to let that slut and your stupidity ruin this family.”
Billy looked at Wade. “Maybe I’ll stick with days.”
“Secure the scene until the forensic unit gets here,” Wade said, taking out his handcuffs. “Then come back to the station.”
“Sure thing,” Billy said. “Think the crime lab guys will come this time?”
“Within minutes,” Wade said and stepped up behind Gayle Burdett. “Put your hands behind your back. You’re under arrest.”
Wade cuffed Gayle, then led her to the door past Seth, who leaned against a wall and cried, wiping the tears from his face with his arm and the Twenty?third Psalm.
He made a call as soon as he got Gayle stowed in the back of the squad car.
“I’ve arrested a suspect in Glory Littleton’s murder and I’m bringing her in,” he said. “You might want to spread the word.”
Wade drove slowly, taking his time and using surface streets. On the way, he contacted the dispatcher, ordered a forensic unit to the Burdett house, and notified her that he’d made an arrest. He was sure those bits of news would get the chief’s notice, if Ethan’s lawyers hadn’t contacted Reardon already.
Gayle didn’t say anything when they passed through Meston Heights. All she did was frown, one of the few expressions she was still capable of despite her face?lift and Botox injections.
It wasn’t until they drove through One King Plaza, passing the landmark city hall castle and heading down Division Street, that Gayle got an inkling that something was wrong.
“You’ve passed police headquarters,” she said.
“Yes, I have.”
“Where are you taking me?”
“To my station,” he said.
“Darwin Gardens?” She leaned forward, nearly pressing her face against the iron mesh that separated Wade from her. “You can’t. You have to take me to the station in Meston Heights. That’s the one closest to where I live.”
“But it’s not where you dumped Glory’s body,” he said.
“You can’t bring me there,” she said. “I’m not one of those people.”
He glanced up at her in the rearview mirror and met her gaze in the reflection. “I don’t see a difference.”
She sat back and kicked his seat again and again with both of her feet. “You can’t do this!”
He ignored her.
Gayle gave up her kicking as they crossed into Darwin Gardens and looked sullenly out the window at the people milling on the sidewalks, watching the car as they passed.
The crowd grew as the car reached the intersection of Division and Arness. Just about everyone that Wade had seen outside of the King Steel factory when Glory’s body was found was back on the streets again.
He made a U?turn in front of the Pancake Galaxy, where Mandy and her father stood with Ella Littleton, and pulled up in front of his station.
Gayle stared at the plywood?covered windows, which, in Wade’s absence, had been freshly decorated with a spray?painted mural of a dopey?faced, smiling cop on his hands and knees, his pants pulled down, getting gleefully screwed in the ass by another cop.
“No,” Gayle wailed. “I don’t belong here.”
Wade got out of the car, acting as if he were unaware of all the eyes on him, and walked purposefully to the sidewalk and opened the back door.
“Get out,” he said.
Gayle shook her head and retreated deeper into the car. “No. I’m not going out there.”
Wade reached in, grabbed her by the legs, and dragged her to the door, then yanked her up by her arms and hauled her out, kicking and twisting.
“No,” she screamed. “No!”
The people on the street all got a good look at her having her tantrum. It was as clear to them as it was to her that she didn’t belong there.
Wade kicked the car door shut behind him, wrapped his arms around Gayle Burdett’s waist, and practically carried her into the station.
The residents of Darwin Gardens saw a lot of ugly things in their everyday lives. Junkies smoking crack and jamming syringes into their sunken flesh. People getting beaten, raped, stabbed, and murdered. Hookers giving hand jobs and blow jobs in whatever shadows they could find. Corpses decomposing on the sidewalks and in alleys and crumbling parking lots.
But they had never seen anything like this.
Which was, of course, exactly why Tom Wade did it.
Chapter twenty four
Wade was asleep in his apartment on Sunday afternoon when he was awakened by someone pounding on his door. He lay there, trying to imagine the person who went along with that knock, though it was just an excuse not to move for another moment or two. The knock sounded strong, urgent, authoritative. It was a police knock.
Billy didn’t project that kind of authority, not yet, and he wouldn’t leave Gayle unattended to come up to Tom’s door. Charlotte had the authority, but she had no reason to be here early or to take that tone with him in her knock.
No, this was someone else.
ADA Lefcourt, perhaps? It was possible. But he didn’t think she had the knuckles for the knock he was hearing.
For a moment, he thought it might be the chief, but he doubted that Reardon would come down to Darwin Gardens for Gayle Burdett, no matter how much her husband contributed to politicians in town, not with something as toxic as a murder on her head.
Wade sat up, shirtless, grabbed his cell phone, and checked the time. It was almost 1:00 p.m.
“Hold on, I’m coming,” Wade said. “You don’t have to break it down.”
He found a pair of jogging shorts in a moving box, put them on, and went to the door, opening it to find a man standing there in a wrinkled off?the?rack suit, his hair colored an unnatural shade of brown, his thin body curled inward as if he’d taken a blow to the stomach that he’d never recovered from.
It was Detective Harry Shrake. It wasn’t someone he’d expected to see, but as Wade considered Reardon’s options, sending Harry down actually made a lot of sense. Harry was the perfect ambassador, someone who Wade knew well, and presumably trusted, but who was on nobody’s radar outside of the department and barely registered a political blip within it.
“Afternoon, Harry,” Wade said. “Come on in.”
Harry stepped in and surveyed the apartment as if it were a particularly unpleasant crime scene. His gaze flitted over the yellowed walls, the moving boxes, the mattress, the newspapers on the window, the bra on the floor.
