“Your mother ever remarry?”
“She took up with Selbit a few years ago but she never married him. You collared him yet?”
“No. He’s around here somewhere but he’s gone to ground.”
Beth Anne gave a nod toward the phone. “Mother tried to grab the phone when I came in tonight. She might’ve been trying to get a message to him. I’d check out the phone records. That might lead you to him.”
“Good idea, Detective. I’ll get a warrant tonight.”
Beth Anne stared through the rain, toward where the squad car bearing her mother had vanished some minutes ago. “The weird part was that she believed she was doing the right thing for me, trying to get me into the business. Being a crook was her nature; she thought it was my nature too. She and Dad were born bad. They couldn’t figure out why I was born good and wouldn’t change.”
“You have a family?” Heath asked.
“My husband’s a sergeant in Juvenile.” Then Beth Anne smiled. “And we’re expecting. Our first.”
“Hey, very cool.”
“I’m on the job until June. Then I’m taking a LOA for a couple of years to be a mom.” She felt an urge to add “Because children come first before anything.” But, under the circumstances, she didn’t think she needed to elaborate.
“Crime Scene’s going to seal the place,” Heath said. “But if you want to take a look around, that’d be okay. Maybe there’s some pictures or something you want. Nobody’d care if you took some personal effects.”
Beth Anne tapped her head. “I got more mementos up here than I need.”
“Got it.”
She zipped up her windbreaker, pulled the hood up. Another hollow laugh.
Heath lifted an eyebrow.
“You know my earliest memory?” she asked.
“What’s that?”
“In the kitchen of my parents’ first house outside of Detroit. I was sitting at the table. I must’ve been three. My mother was singing to me.”
“Singing? Just like a real mother.”
Beth Anne mused, “I don’t know what song it was. I just remember her singing to keep me distracted. So I wouldn’t play with what she was working on at the table.”
“What was she doing, sewing?” Heath nodded toward the room containing a sewing machine and racks of stolen dresses.
“Nope,” the woman answered. “She was reloading ammunition.”
“You serious?”
A nod. “I figured out when I was older what she was doing. My folks didn’t have much money then and they’d buy empty brass cartridges at gun shows and reload them. All I remember is the bullets were shiny and I wanted to play with them. She said if I didn’t touch them she’d sing to me.”
This story brought the conversation to a halt. The two officers listened to the rain falling on the roof.
“All right,” Beth Anne finally said, “I’m going home.”
Heath walked her outside and they said their good-byes. Beth Anne started the rental car and drove up the muddy, winding road toward the state highway.
Suddenly, from somewhere in the folds of her memory, a melody came into her head. She hummed a few bars out loud but couldn’t place the tune. It left her vaguely unsettled. So Beth Anne flicked the radio on and found Jammin’ 95.5, filling your night with solid-gold hits, party on, Portland…. She turned the volume up high and, thumping the steering wheel in time to the music, headed north toward the airport.
INTERROGATION
“He’s in the last room.”
The man nodded to the sergeant and continued down the long corridor, grit underfoot. The walls were yellow cinderblock but the hallway reminded him of an old English prison, bricky and soot-washed.
As he approached the room he heard a bell somewhere nearby, a delicate ringing. He used to come here regularly but hadn’t been in this portion of the building for months. The sound wasn’t familiar and, despite the cheerful jingling, it was oddly unsettling.
He was halfway down the hallway when the sergeant called, “Captain?”
He turned.
“That was a good job you guys did. Getting him, I mean.”
Boyle, a thick file under his arm, nodded and continued down the windowless corridor to room I-7.
What he saw through the square window: a benign-looking man of about forty, not big, not small, thick hair shot with gray. His amused eyes were on the wall, also cinderblock. His slippered feet were chained, his hands too, the silvery links looped through a waist bracelet.
Boyle unlocked and opened the door. The man grinned, looked the detective over.
“Hello, James,” Boyle said.
“So you’re him.”
Boyle’d been tracking down and putting away murderers for nineteen years. He saw in James Kit Phelan’s face what he always saw in such men and women at times like this. Insolence, anger, pride, fear.
The lean face, with a one- or two-days’ growth of salt-and-pepper beard, the eyes blue as Dutch china.
But something was missing, Boyle decided. What? Yes, that was it, he concluded. Behind the eyes of most prisoners was a pool of bewilderment. In James Phelan this was absent.
The cop dropped the file on the table. Flipped through it quickly.
“You’re the one,” Phelan muttered.
“Oh, I don’t deserve all the credit, James. We had a lotta folks out looking for you.”
“But the word is they wouldn’t’ve kept going if you hadn’t been riding their tails. No sleep for your boys and girls’s what I heard.”
Boyle, a captain and the head of Homicide, had overseen the Granville Park murder task force of five men and women working full-time — and dozens of others working part-time (though everyone seemed to have logged at least ten, twelve hours a day). Still, Boyle had not testified in court, had never had a conversation with Phelan before today, never seen him up close. He expected to find the man looking very ordinary. Boyle was surprised to see another quality in the blue eyes. Something indescribable. There’d been no trace of this in the interrogation videos. What was it?
But James Phelan’s eyes grew enigmatic once again as he studied Boyle’s sports clothes. Jeans, Nikes, a purple Izod shirt. Phelan wore an orange jumpsuit.
“That’s a one-way mirror, ain’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Who’s behind there?” He peered at the dim mirror, never once, Boyle noticed, glancing at his own reflection.
“We sometimes bring witnesses in to check out suspects. But there’s nobody there now. Don’t need ’em, do we?” Phelan sat back in the blue fiberglass chair. Boyle opened his notebook, took out a Bic pen. Boyle outweighed the prisoner by forty pounds, most of it muscle. Still, he set the pen far out of the man’s reach.
“I’ve been asking to see you for almost a month,” Boyle said amiably. “You haven’t agreed to a meeting until now.”
Sentencing was on Monday and after the judge pronounced one of the two sentences he was deciding upon at this very moment — life imprisonment or death by lethal injection — James Kit Phelan would be permanently giving up the county’s hospitality for the state’s.
“‘Meeting,’” Phelan repeated. He seemed amused. “Wouldn’t ‘interrogation’ be more like it? That’s what you
