Let It Burn (19 page)

I knew Leon was right about not being able to sleep, no matter how tired I was. But when I got back to my cabin, I gave it a try anyway. It was midnight and I was just starting to doze off when I heard a loud knock on my door.

I got up and opened it. It was Leon.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I had to come over. This can’t wait.”

“Leon, what is it? What the hell’s going on?”

I invited him in. He sat down at my table. He had a folder of papers with him. As he opened it I saw notes and copies of news items.

“I kept thinking about what you told me today,” he said. “I’ve been on the Internet, looking up some stuff.”

“Like what?” I sat down next to him.

“I got thinking,” he said, shuffling through his papers, “that a murder like this is just so brutal … So extreme…”

“Yes?”

“Here’s one,” he said, holding up a printout from a newspaper Web site. “Just read it.”

I took it from him. From the
Cleveland Plain Dealer,
an interview with the chief of police. The man was talking about an unsolved murder in his city. A woman who had been stabbed seventeen times in a hotel stairwell.

I checked the date. Five years after the murder of Elana Paige.

“I know every murder doesn’t get solved, and stabbings aren’t that uncommon. But look at these, too.”

He handed me two more news items. One from the
Chicago Sun-Times
, another follow-up on a case that was still unsolved six months after it happened. A woman stabbed to death in a parking structure next to a mall, just outside Chicago. Then the other one, from the
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
. Yet another unsolved case. Yet another woman stabbed multiple times. This time left outside, in a park overlooking Lake Michigan.

So Cleveland five years after Elana Paige, then Chicago four years after that. Then Milwaukee three years later. Each one of these crimes represented by a single sheet of paper on my table, here in this small cabin hundreds of miles away from any of these crimes, and yet I knew all too well what lay behind the simple facts recited in the news stories. The terrible last moments of an innocent person’s life. Then families torn apart by grief.

“It’s possible there are more,” Leon said. “These are just the obvious ones I found in five minutes.”

“This doesn’t have to be the same person,” I said, spreading the pages back out on the table. “Or if it was for
these
murders, it doesn’t necessarily have to include Elana Paige.”

“It doesn’t have to, no. But what does your gut tell you right now?”

“I’m tired of my gut telling me things,” I said. “It’s not always right, you know.”

“Sure, maybe it’s wrong this time. Maybe there’s no connection. Hell, if Darryl King really did kill Elana Paige, then you
know
there’s no connection. Because he was in prison when these other murders were committed.”

“That’s right,” I said, honestly trying to convince myself. Outside, I could hear the cold wind still blowing, driving the last day of summer into oblivion.

“So what are you going to do?” he said.

“I’m going to try to sleep a few hours,” I said, knowing it probably wouldn’t happen. I was already starting to feel sick to my stomach. “Then first thing tomorrow morning, I’m going to call the one person who might have some answers.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I put the car in park. I sat there watching the woman hanging up the shirts and pants and dresses on the clothesline. It was a good day for letting the late-afternoon sun dry your clothes.

“How do we play this?” Franklin said. “Should I call it in?”

“In a minute,” I said. “Let’s just make sure we’ve got something here.”

I turned the car off and got out. Franklin followed me as I walked over to the woman by the laundry basket. She was an attractive woman, maybe pushing forty but obviously not letting it slow her down. She moved with a brisk economy, like a woman who worked hard every day. She probably didn’t have much choice, not with a house and a family that needed food and clean clothes.

She stopped hanging another shirt when she spotted us walking across her yard. It was mostly weeds and crabgrass, but somebody was obviously keeping it all mowed.

“Can I help you?” she said.

“Sorry to bother you, ma’am. We’re just taking one more trip through this neighborhood. I’m sure someone else was here before?”

“Looking for someone who killed that white woman.” Here’s where she could have added her own comment about how black men get shot down every single day and nobody canvasses her neighborhood for them, but she didn’t.

“Yes, ma’am.” Just as I was thinking about what to say next, the back door opened. A young man stepped out of the house. The hair, the high cheekbones. For one tenth of a second my brain was already sending a signal to my right hand, to reach for my service revolver. But then the spell was broken as I put everything else together. This kid was a couple of years younger. Twenty pounds lighter. He didn’t have the muscular swagger of the kid I chased down the railroad tracks. Not even close. This was the kid who got his lunch money taken at recess, not the kid doing the taking.

“What’s going on, Mom?” the kid asked.

“It’s nothing, Tremont. These police officers are just making the rounds again. Like they did the other day.”

The kid named Tremont gave me a shy look and a quick nod of his head.

“How are you?” Franklin said. “You like being out of school for the summer?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t know a kid who doesn’t,” the woman said.

How to ask this next question, I thought, without giving myself away …

“Looks like a lot of mowing you gotta do here,” I said to her, nodding at her backyard. It wasn’t real grass, but every square foot was mowed down to something that looked neat and trim anyway. “You got anybody else living here who can help you out?”

“It’s just me and my two kids these past few years now. Please don’t even ask about their daddy, because I try not to use profanity if I don’t have to.”

“Oh, two kids?” I tried to keep my voice even. No big deal, just passing time here. You’ve got two kids, do tell.

That’s when the back door opened again. A little girl came out. She was ten years old, maybe eleven.

“That’s Naima,” the woman said. “Why they need to spend half the day inside watching television, on a nice day like this…”

The girl came over and started picking through the clothes in the basket. She didn’t so much as look in my direction.

“Well,” I said, already feeling deflated, “okay, a boy and a girl. It looks like you’ve got your hands full here.”

“No complaints, Officer. We’re doing just fine. God provides and we are thankful.”

I looked around at what she was thankful for. The house seemed to be in decent shape, but I could see water damage around the top-floor windows. It needed new siding, too. I spotted the lawn mower beneath the one large tree at the back of the property. There was no shed to store it in, so it was rusted out and I couldn’t even imagine it starting, let alone cutting through all of these weeds. Next to that was a weight bench that had probably once belonged to the father, before he ran off. On the other side of the tree a swing hung haphazardly from a thick branch. Not a tire, but a plank of wood tilting a few degrees past level. Tremont jumped up onto it and began to swing back and forth slowly.

Something. There was something in that scene.

Wait a minute. Wait one goddamned minute …

“All right,” I said. “Again, sorry to bother you. We’ll let you finish up with your laundry.”

“No bother at all,” she said. “You gentlemen have a good rest of the day.”

“Thank you,” Franklin said. “It was very nice to meet all of you.”

We went back to the patrol car.

“That obviously wasn’t the kid you were looking for,” Franklin said as he sat down beside me. “I’m glad we didn’t call it in. Get everybody out here, make us look like fools.”

I picked up the radio and hit the transmitter. “This is Unit Forty-one. Is Detective Bateman still in the precinct?”

A few seconds of radio silence, with my partner looking at me, waiting for an explanation.

“Affirmative, Forty-one. Detective Bateman is at his desk.”

“Ask him to wait for me,” I said. “We’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“Okay,” Franklin said when I put the transmitter back, “are you planning on telling me what the hell is going on at some point?”

“That woman was lying. I’m trying not to take it personally, because I’m sure she thinks she’s doing the right thing.”

“How do you know she’s lying?”

“You saw that weight bench in the backyard?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think our little friend Tremont pumps a lot of iron?”

“I’m guessing it would kill him if he tried.”

“So who uses those weights?”

“The father,” he said. “He didn’t take it all with him. So—”

“So yeah, that’s what I thought, too. Then I noticed something.”

“What?”

“There were weight plates stacked on the ground.”

“Yeah? You got a weight bench, you’re gonna have plates.”

“Did you also notice how well-mowed that backyard was?”

“I did,” he said. “Are you approaching the point here, or are we gonna keep playing ‘I Spy’?”

“If the weightlifter in your family left, would you still keep picking up the plates, mowing under them, and then putting them back on the ground? Every time you mowed? For
years
?”

He thought about it for a moment.

“Of course not,” he said. “I’d leave them stacked on the bench.”

“There you go. Meaning that there’s someone else living at that house. Somebody who keeps himself in shape.”

He sat there looking at me as I drove back to the precinct.

“Hot damn, Alex,” he finally said. “Just when I thought you took too many foul balls off your mask.”

*   *   *

The mother’s name was Jamilah King. The son named Tremont was in the public school system. So was the daughter, Naima.

So was the other son, at least until recently. He was two years older than Tremont. His name was Darryl. He hadn’t been in school since turning sixteen. He didn’t have a driver’s license. There was no employment record for Darryl King, or any other public record at all, but then that wasn’t unusual for a young black male in Detroit, where it’s so easy to just disappear into the streets.

Detective Bateman looked at the name on the high school transcript, the last official documentation of his existence before he dropped out.

“Darryl King,” he said. “Pleased to meet you, young man. I’d like to introduce you to our SWAT team.”

“I don’t think that’s the right play,” I said. “It’s possible that this kid is inside that house right now, but it’s just as possible he’s somewhere else. If there’s a record for him at that address, it wouldn’t be smart to be there.”

“Look at this transcript and tell me this kid is smart.”

“You know there’s more than one brand of smart, Detective. He’s done a great job of staying off the radar, and obviously he has his mother working hard to keep it that way. You try to flush him out now and he might disappear for good.”

“So what do we do? Watch the house? Wait him out?”

“That’s how I’d approach it, yes.”

“Yeah, okay,” he said. “That’s the way we do it. Did you see a good spot to park a van?”

“The street comes to a dead end, just a block away. Actually, there’s a locked gate there. On the other side is the back of the parking lot for one of those apartment complexes on MLK.”

“Perfect,” he said. “We put our van in that lot. Use the plumbing and heating sign. Or the cable sign, either one. Have that gate unlocked so we can move through it quickly.”

He picked up the phone to make the arrangements. At one point while he was on hold, he looked up at me with a smile on his face.

“What is it?” I said.

“It’s my new mission in life. Once we catch this guy.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“Get you your gold shield. You said you’re taking the test, right?”

“Eventually.”

“Next test, you’re taking it. You’ll do great, of course. The rest is politics. That’s where I come in.”

“Tell you what,” I said. “Let’s just catch this guy. Then we can talk about gold shields.”

*   *   *

They rolled the van over that very evening. They parked it in the back of the parking lot, with a direct sight line to the house. We were lucky to have a streetlight on the corner as well, so there was no problem watching for people going in or out.

I was immediately approved for overtime duty again. I spent the evening shift in the van with Detective Bateman. We didn’t see anything happening at the house.

We turned it over to a single night-shift officer while we went home to sleep. Nothing happened. The detective and I were back in the van the next morning, holding large cups of coffee. We’d arranged with the apartment complex to use one of the empty units for bathroom breaks.

It was the first time I’d ever done several consecutive hours of surveillance. My first experience with such a new level of how to do absolutely nothing, with a single thread of anxiousness running through it so that you’re never completely comfortable in your boredom.

The day shift passed. The woman had come and gone, with the daughter, Naima. The son Tremont had come and gone. That was it.

It was evening now. I was going on fourteen straight hours of this, wondering if my sanity would hold if I had to come right back here the next day. They could have done this without me, theoretically. Just wait for a stranger to show his face and then call out the dogs, drag him in and bring me down to identify him. But I was the one person who could pick out this kid before blowing our cover. That was an advantage nobody else could bring to the van.

“I’m gonna be pissed if that kid’s been inside the house this whole time,” Bateman said. “He could be eating pizza and watching television.”

“I admit,” I said, “I’m starting to rethink my original idea. Even if he’s not there, the mother would have to give him up eventually, wouldn’t she?”