ground and crush it out. Without even looking at me first. Then she did and looked pretty freaked. I say, “Hey.” She nodded and said something I couldn’t hear and looked at her watch, like she had someplace she really had to be. Right. She started to walk away. And when she passed me I hit her hard in the neck and she fell down. Then I sat on her and grabbed this scarf she was wearing and pulled it real tight and I squeezed until she stopped moving, then I still kept squeezing. The cloth felt good on my wrists. I got off her, found the cigarette. It was still burning. She didn’t crush it out. I finished it and walked back to the fair. I got a snow cone. It was cherry. And got on my bike and left.
“‘Anyway, what it is, I killed her. I took that pretty blue scarf in my hands and killed her with it. And there’s nothing else I have to say.’”
Boyle’d heard similar words hundreds of times. He now felt something he hadn’t for years. An icy shiver down his spine.
“So that’s about it, James?”
“Yeah. That’s all true. Every word.”
“I’ve been through the confession with a magnifying glass, I’ve been through your statements to the detectives, I watched that interview, you know, the one you did with that TV reporter…”
“She was a fox.”
“But you never said a word about motive.”
The ringing again. The waist chain, swinging like a pendulum against the metal table leg.
“Why’d you kill her, James?” Boyle whispered.
Phelan shook his head. “I don’t exactly…. It’s all muddy.”
“You must’ve thought about it some.”
Phelan laughed. “Hell, I thought about it tons. I spent days talking it over with that friend of mine.”
“Who? Your biker buddy?”
Phelan shrugged. “Maybe.”
“What was his name again?”
Phelan smiled.
It was known that while Phelan was generally a loner, he had several friends who ran with a tough crowd. In particular, witnesses reported seeing him in the company of a biker who’d hid Phelan after the Devereaux murder. The man’s identity never came to light. Boyle wanted him on aiding and abetting but was too focused on collaring Phelan himself to spend time on an accessory.
Phelan continued, “Anyway, what it was, him and me, we’d pass a bottle around and spend days talking ’bout it. See, he’s a tough son of a bitch. He’s hurt people in his day. But it was always ’cause they crossed him. Or for money. Or something like that. He couldn’t figure out why I’d just up and kill that lady.”
“Well?”
“We didn’t come up with no answers. I’m just telling you that it ain’t like I didn’t think about it.”
“So you drink some, do you, James?”
“Yeah. But I wasn’t drinking the day I killed her. Nothing but lemonade.”
“How well did you know her? Anna Devereaux?”
“Know her? I didn’t know her.”
“I thought you said you did.” Boyle looked down at the confession.
“I said I’d seen her. Same as I seen the pope on TV one time. And Julia Roberts in the movies and I’ve seen as much of Sheri Starr the porn queen as there is to see. But that don’t mean I
“She had a husband and a child.”
“I heard.”
The ringing again. It wasn’t the chains. The sound came from outside. The bell he’d heard when he first entered the interrogation room corridor. Boyle frowned. When he looked back Phelan was watching him, a bemused smile on his face. “That’s the coffee break cart, Captain. Comes around every morning and afternoon.”
“It’s new.”
“Started about a month ago. When they closed the cafeteria.”
Boyle nodded, looked down at his blank notebook. He said, “They’d talked about getting divorced. Anna and her husband.”
“What’s his name?” Phelan asked. “The husband? He that gray-haired guy sitting in the back of the courtroom?”
“He’s gray-haired, yes. His name’s Bob.”
The victim’s husband was known as Robert to everyone. Boyle hoped that Phelan would somehow stumble over the name difference and give something away.
“So you’re thinking he hired me to kill her.”
“Did he?”
Phelan grunted. “No, he didn’t.”
Robert Devereaux had seemed to the interrogating detectives to be the model of a grieving husband. He’d passed a voluntary lie detector test and it didn’t seem likely that he’d had his wife murdered for a fifty-thousand- dollar insurance policy. This wasn’t much of a motive but Boyle was determined to pursue any possibility.
Anna Devereaux. Thirty-six. Well liked in the town.
Wife and mother.
A woman losing the battle to quit smoking.
An old scar on her neck — from a cut when she was seventeen; she often wore scarves to conceal it. The day she’d been killed, last September, the scarf she’d worn had been a silk Christian Dior and the shade of blue was described in the police report as aquamarine.
“She was a good-looking woman, wasn’t she?” Boyle asked.
“I don’t remember.”
The most recent photos of Anna Devereaux that either of the two men had seen had been at trial. Her eyes were open, frosted with death, and her long-nailed hand was held outward in a plea for mercy. Even in those pictures you could see how beautiful she was.
“I didn’t fool around with her, if that’s what you’re getting at. Or even want to.”
The profiling came back negative for lust-driven killing. Phelan had had normal heterosexual responses to the Rorschach and free association tests.
“I’m just thinking out loud, James. You were walking through the forest?”
“That day I killed her? I got bored with the fair and just started walking. I ended up in the forest.”
“And there she was, just sitting there, smoking.”
“Uh-huh,” Phelan responded patiently.
“What did she say to you?”
“I said, ‘Hey.’ And she said something I couldn’t hear.”
“What else happened?”
“Nothing. That was it.”
“Maybe you were mad ’cause you didn’t like her muttering at you.”
“I didn’t care. Why’d I care about that?”
“I’ve heard you say a couple times the thing you hate most is being bored.”
Phelan looked at the cinderblock. He seemed to be counting. “Yeah. I don’t like to be bored.”
“How much,” Boyle asked, “do you hate it?” He gave a laugh. “On a scale of one to—”
“But people don’t kill ’causa hate. Oh, they
“She had some jewelry on her.”
“That’s a question?”
