have in mind, right?”
“You’ve confessed, James. Why would I want to interrogate you?”
“Dunno. Why’d you put in, let’s see, was it something like a dozen phone calls to my lawyer over the past coupla months wanting to ‘meet’ with me?”
“Just some loose ends on the case. Nothing important.”
In fact Boyle kept his excitement under wraps. He’d despaired of ever having a chance to talk to Phelan face to face; the longer the captain’s requests had gone unanswered the more he brooded that he’d never learn what he was desperate to know. It was Saturday and only an hour ago he’d been packing up turkey sandwiches for a picnic with the family when the call from Phelan’s lawyer came. He’d sent Judith and the kids on ahead and sped to the county lockup at 90 m.p.h.
“I didn’t want to see you ’fore this,” Phelan said slowly, “’cause I was thinking maybe you just wanted to, you know, gloat.”
Boyle shook his head good-naturedly. But he also admitted to himself that he certainly had something to gloat about. When there was no arrest immediately following the murder, the case turned sour and it turned personal. Chief of Homicide Boyle versus the elusive, unknown killer.
The contest between the two adversaries had raged in the tabloids and in the police department and — more importantly — in Boyle’s mind. Still taped up behind Boyle’s desk was the front page of the
Boyle remembered the press conference held six months to the day after the murder in which he promised the people of the town of Granville that though the investigation had bogged down they weren’t giving up hope and that the killer would be caught. Boyle had concluded, “That man is
There was a time when Boyle would have taken the high ground and sneered down the suggestion that he was gloating over a fallen enemy. But now he wondered. Phelan had for no apparent reason killed a defenseless woman and had eluded the police for almost a year. It had been the hardest case Boyle had ever run, and he’d despaired many times of ever finding the perp. But, by God, he’d won. So, maybe there
“I just have a few questions to ask you,” Boyle said. “Do you mind?”
“Talking about it? Guess not. It’s kinda boring. Ain’t that the truth about the past? Boring.”
“Sometimes.”
“That’s not much of an answer. The past. Is. Boring. You ever shot anybody?”
Boyle had. Twice. And killed them both. “We’re here to talk about you.”
“I’m here ’cause I got caught.
Phelan slouched in the chair. The chains clinked softly. It reminded him of the bell he’d heard when he entered the interrogation room corridor.
He looked down at the open file.
“So what do you want to know?” Phelan asked.
“Only one thing,” Boyle said, opening the battered manila folder. “Why’d you kill her?”
“Why?” Phelan repeated slowly. “Yeah, everybody asked me about the motive. Now ‘motive’… that’s a big word. A ten-dollar word, my father’d say. But ‘Why.’ That cuts right to the chase.”
“And the answer is?”
“Why’s it so important?”
It wasn’t. Not legally. You only need to establish motive if the case is going to trial or if the confession is uncorroborated or unsupported by physical evidence. But it had been Phelan’s fingerprints found at the crime scene and the DNA testing verified Phelan’s skin was the tissue dug from beneath Anna Devereaux’s perfect dusty-rose — polished fingernails. The judge accepted the confession without any state presentation of motive, though even he had suggested to the prisoner that he have the decency to explain why he’d committed this terrible crime. Phelan had remained silent and let the judge read him the guilty verdict.
“We just want to complete the report.”
“‘Complete the report.’ Well, if that ain’t some bureaucratic crap, I don’t know what is.”
In fact Boyle wanted the answer for a personal, not professional, reason. So he could get some sleep. The mystery of why this drifter and petty criminal had killed the thirty-six-year-old wife and mother had been growing in his mind like a tumor. He sometimes woke up thinking about it. In the past week alone — when it looked like Phelan was going down to Katonah maximum security without ever agreeing to meet Boyle — the captain would wake up sweating, plagued by what he called Phelan-mares. The dreams had nothing to do with Anna Devereaux’s murder; they were a series of gut-wrenching scenes in which the prisoner was whispering something to Boyle, words that the detective was desperate to hear but could not.
“Makes no difference in the world to us or you at this point,” Boyle said evenly. “But we just want to know.”
“‘We’?” the prisoner asked coyly and Boyle felt he’d been caught at something. Phelan continued, “Suppose you folks have some theories.”
“Not really.”
“No?”
Phelan swung the chain against the table and kept looking over the captain with that odd gaze of his. Boyle was uncomfortable. Prisoners swore at him all the time. Occasionally they spit at him and some had even attacked him. But Phelan slipped that curious expression on his face — what the hell was it? — and adjusted his smile. He kept studying Boyle.
“That’s a weird sound, ain’t it, Captain? The chain. Hey, you like horror films?”
“Some. Not the gory ones.”
Three ringing taps. Phelan laughed. “Good sound effect for a Stephen King movie, don’tcha think? Or Clive Barker. Chains at night.”
“How ’bout if we go through the facts again? What happened. Might refresh your memory.”
“You mean my confession? Why not? Haven’t seen it since the trial.”
“I don’t have the video. How ’bout if I just read the transcript?”
“I’m all ears.”
“On September 13 you were in the town of Granville. You were riding a stolen Honda Nighthawk motorcycle.”
“That’s right.”
Boyle lowered his head and in his best jury-pleasing baritone read from the transcript, “‘I was riding around just, you know, seeing what was there. And I heard they had this fair or festival or something, and I kept hearing this music when I cut back the throttle. And I followed it to this park in the middle of town.
“‘There was pony rides and all kinds of food and crafts and stuff like that. Okay, so I park the bike and go looking at what they got. Only it was boring, so I walked off along this little river and before I went too far it went into this forest and I seen a flash of white or color or something I don’t remember. And I went closer and there was this woman sitting on a log, looking at the river. I remember her from town. She worked in some charity store downtown. You know, where they donate stuff and sell it and the money goes to a hospital or something. I thought her name was Anne or Annie or Anna or something.’”
Anna Devereaux….
“‘She was having a cigarette, like she’d snuck off to have one, like she’d promised everybody she wasn’t going to but had to have one. The first thing she did when she heard me come up was drop the cigarette on the
