More Twisted: Collected Stories, Vol. II

Phelan looked up at the ceiling and seemed to be counting acoustical tiles. “Hell, I don’t even know why I’m bringing all this up. It just kinda… was there. What was going through my mind.” He began to say something else but fell silent and Boyle didn’t dare interrupt his train of thought. When the prisoner spoke again he was more cheerful. “You do things with your family, Captain? That’s something I think was the hardest of all. We never did a single damn thing together. Never took a vacation, never went to a ball game.”

“If I wasn’t talking to you here right now, I’d be with them all on a picnic.”

“Yeah?”

Boyle worried for a moment that Phelan would be jealous of Boyle’s family life. But the prisoner’s eyes lit up. “That’s nice, Captain. I always pictured us — my mama and my father, when he wasn’t drinking, and the twins. We’d be out, doing just what you’re talking about. Having a picnic in some town square, a park, sitting in front of the bandshell, you know.”

I kept hearing this music when I cut back the throttle. And I followed it to this park in the middle of town.

“That what you and your family were going to do?”

“Well, we’re the unsocial types,” Boyle said, laughing. “We stay away from crowds. My parents’ve got a little place upstate.”

“A family house?” Phelan asked slowly, maybe picturing it.

“On Taconic Lake. We go up there usually.”

The prisoner fell silent for some moments then finally said, “You know, Captain, I’ve got this weird idea.” His eyes counted cinderblocks. “We have all this knowledge in our heads. Everything people ever knew. Or’ll know in the future. Like how to kill a mastodon or how to make a nuclear spaceship or how to talk in a different language. It’s all there in everybody’s mind. Only they have to find it.”

What’s he saying? Boyle wondered. That I know why he did it?

“And how you find all this stuff is you sit real quiet and then the thought comes into your head. Just bang, there it is. Does that ever happen to you?”

Boyle didn’t know what to say. But Phelan didn’t seem to expect an answer.

Outside, in the corridor, footsteps approached then receded.

Anyway, what it is, I killed her. I took that pretty blue scarf in my hands….

Phelan sighed. “It’s not that I was trying to keep anything from you all. I just can’t really give you the kinda answer you want.”

Boyle closed the notebook. “That’s all right, James. You’ve told me plenty. I appreciate it.”

I took that pretty blue scarf in my hands and killed her with it. And there’s nothing else I have to say.

* * *

“Got it,” Boyle announced into the pay phone. He stood in the dim corridor outside the cafeteria in the courthouse, where he’d just had a celebratory lunch with some of the other cops on the Phelan team.

“All right!” the district attorney’s enthusiastic voice came through the phone. Most of the senior prosecutors had known that Boyle was going to conduct the final interrogation of James Phelan and were waiting anxiously to find out why he’d killed Anna Devereaux. It had become the question in the county prosecutor’s department. Boyle had even heard rumors that some guys were running a macabre pool, laying serious money on the answer.

“It’s complicated,” Boyle continued. “I think what happened was we didn’t do enough psychological testing. It’s got to do with his mother’s death.”

“Phelan’s mother?”

“Yeah. He’s got a thing about families. He’s mad because his mother abandoned him by dying when he was ten and he had to raise his sisters.”

“What?”

“I know, it sounds like psychobabble. But it all fits. Call Dr. Hirschorn. Have him—”

“Boyle, Phelan’s parents are still alive. Both of ’em.”

Silence.

“Boyle? You there?”

After a moment: “Keep going.”

“And he was an only child. He didn’t have any sisters.”

Boyle absently pressed his thumb on the chrome number plate of the phone, leaving a pattern of fat fingerprints on the cold metal.

“And his parents… they ran up big debts getting him doctors and counselors to try to help ’im. They were saints…. Captain? You there?”

Why would Phelan lie? Was this all just a big joke? He replayed the events in his mind. I ask a dozen times to see him. He refuses until just before he’s sentenced. He finally agrees. But why?

Why?…

Boyle bolted upright, his solid shoulder slamming into the side of the phone kiosk.

In despair he lifted his left hand to his face and closed his eyes. He realized he’d just given Phelan the name of every member of his family. Where Judith worked, where the kids went to school.

Hell, he’d told them where they were right now! Alone, at Taconic Lake.

The captain stared at his distorted reflection in the phone’s chrome number pad, realizing the enormity of what he’d done. Phelan had been planning this for months. It was why he’d held out saying anything about the motive: to draw Boyle in close, to make the captain himself desperate to talk, to get information out of him, and to deliver the message that his family was in danger.

Wait, calm down. He’s locked up. He can’t do anything to anybody. He’s not getting out—

Oh, no…

Boyle’s gut ran cold.

Phelan’s friend, the biker! Assuming he lived nearby, he could be at Taconic Lake in thirty minutes.

“Hey, Boyle, what the hell’s going on?”

The answer to the query about James Phelan’s motive for killing Anna Devereaux meant nothing. The question itself was the murderer’s last weapon — and he was using it on the cop who’d become obsessed with bringing him down.

Why, why, why…

Boyle dropped the phone and raced up the hall to the prisoner lockup. “Where’s Phelan?” he screamed.

The guard blinked at the frantic detective. “He’s right there. In the lockup, Captain. You can see him.”

Boyle glanced through the double glass at the prisoner sitting calmly on a bench.

“What’s he been doing since I left?”

“Reading. That’s all. Oh, and he made a few phone calls.”

Boyle lunged across the desk and grabbed the guard’s phone.

“Hey!”

He punched in the number of the lake house. It began to ring. Three times, four…

It was then that Phelan looked at Boyle and smiled. He mouthed something. The captain couldn’t hear through the bulletproof glass, of course, but he knew without a doubt that the man had just uttered the word “Checkmate.”

Boyle lowered his head to the receiver and, like a prayer, whispered, “Answer, please answer,” as the phone rang again and again and again.

AFRAID

“Where are we going?” the woman asked as the black Audi sped away from Florence’s Piazza della Stazione, where her train had just arrived from Milan.

Antonio shifted gears smoothly and replied, “It’s a surprise.”

Marissa clicked on her seat belt as the car plunged down the narrow, winding streets. She was soon