I released Horner’s hand and he placed his arm around his torso again, but not as tightly. I’d made a start on untying his body knots.
When I’d entered the interrogation room, I’d placed my chair on the side of the table where Horner was sitting. I was close enough to Horner to reach out and touch him with a minimum of effort. I never sat on the opposite side of the table. It gave the suspect something to hide behind, an unnecessary physical barrier for me to overcome before I could start on emotional barriers.
Leaning against the hard slats of the chair back, I kept my body open, facing toward Horner.
“How old are you, Michael?”
“Twenty-two.”
“And how long have you worked at Barnes and Noble?”
“Two years.”
I didn’t give a rat’s tail how old Horner was, or how long he’d worked at the bookstore. I already knew. I simply wanted to get him into the habit of answering my questions.
I didn’t do much investigating anymore. I had evolved as a police detective to a position in which Iasked questions, day after day, suspect after suspect, question after question until truth flowed like a river. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been up against a dam I couldn’t tear down. I didn’t always get a confession, but I got to the truth.
I worked all over the city, sometimes even the state, and once or twice the nation. If it was a hot case and a suspect had to be broken fast, the call went out for The Ferryman. Why me? Who knows? Who cares? I just have a knack — an ability to instinctively recognize when people aren’t telling the truth, or the truth as they perceive it.
When my son was ten, his teacher asked him what kind of work I did. My son said I was a human lie detector. The claim resulted in an uncomfortable parent/teacher conference — especially when I caught his teacher in a lie.
But I was tired of The Ferryman’s mantle. So tired of the sordidness. So tired of being a human lie detector — of always knowing the truth. I didn’t want to hear any more confessions. I wanted this done.
I’d decided to break this kid and then not do this anymore. I’d done my time. Somebody else could be The Ferryman. He or she would be called something else, but they could do the job. I was almost done. Just this one to go. One last egg to crack.
Horner fidgeted in his chair. It wobbled on an uneven leg that I had shortened myself. Everything that went on in an interrogation room I planned and controlled.
Ten minutes had passed in innocuous chitchat. Horner’s legs were still crossed, but he had unfolded his arms and was running his nails along the edge of the table in front of him, smoothing the jagged edges. I sensed it was a comfortable habit. He was loosening up. Time to move slowly on.
“Who are your friends at the bookstore?” I asked.
“Don’t have no friends. Who’d be friends with me?”
Good question. Horner might be twenty-two, but he was clearly socially inept. He wasn’t retarded, just a very dim bulb — a goofball, with a skinny, pimply, awkward body, and greasy hair falling into his eyes. He wore baggy jeans held up by a too-long belt, the buckle engraved with a marijuana leaf. He was one of life’s losers, and I knew he was guilty as hell.
“How about Alexis Walker?”
I was rewarded by seeing Horner’s pupils dilate slightly. Guilty, guilty, guilty.
“She’s nice. Talks to me sometimes.”
“Talk to you last night?”
“No.” The answer was immediate. Too immediate. He had anticipated the question, prepared his lie, letting it burst from his lips in an exploding mist of spittle.
I sat very still and quiet. Waiting. I spend a lot of time waiting.
Horner’s chair skittered back and forth as he fidgeted. “She said hi when I took out the trash.”
“You take out the trash from the cafe area? I thought your job was to shelve books?”
“I take the trash out, too.”
“Do you only take out the trash when Alexis works the coffee counter?”
“No.”
I sighed aloud. “Michael, we were doing so well, but now you’re lying to me. Don’t do that, Michael. It upsets me when you belittle yourself that way.” With somebody like Horner, you keep using their first name, personalizing the conversation, working on emotions of friendship they don’t know how to control or understand. “You’re not a liar, are you, Michael?”
“No.”
Liar.
Alexis Walker’s father had reported her missing when she didn’t return home after her shift ended at eleven the night before. She was eighteen. Her father was told he could make a missing-persons report after twenty-four hours.
Two hours later, however, officers refereeing a dispute between two homeless men collecting aluminum cans had noticed her strangled body behind the bookstore dumpster. Her bra had been taken — a souvenir.
Homicide detectives quickly cleared the homeless men, and just as quickly established that Horner, the store’s weirdo employee, had been seen skulking around Alexis’s car after closing.
The detectives were understandably upset when their captain told them to call me in. They could crack an egg like Horner as easily as I could, but their captain wanted the clearance on his record and didn’t want to take any chances. The Ferryman didn’t miss. Get The Ferryman.
Detectives door-knocked Horner’s house and got him to agree to come to the station voluntarily. The second he was out of sight in a patrol car, the detectives produced a warrant to search the residence where Horner lived with his father.
At the station, Horner had been placed in an interrogation room with the hidden audiotape running. Left alone, suspects have been known to talk aloud to themselves — “Don’t tell them you killed her. Don’t tell them.” It makes for interesting reactions on the jury.
Rule of thumb: An innocent man placed alone in an interrogation room will remain alert, interested in what is going to happen next. A guilty man will put his head down on the table and go to sleep. Horner had immediately gone to sleep. Guilty, guilty, guilty.
Horner had no chance. He’d never faced a nightmare like me. I’d done literally thousands of interrogations, broken thousands of suspects.
It was time for a shift of focus. Horner had been picked up by the police once before. Getting him to talk about it could give me an angle when I brought the subject back to Alexis again.
I leaned forward casually and shuffled through some papers on the table. It was all for show. “Tell me about the time you were arrested.”
“It was stupid,” Horner said.
I picked up one of the papers and scrutinized it. “You think being arrested for burglary is stupid?”
“It was kicked down to trespass.”
So it had been. “Tell me about it.”
“What do you want to know? They made me mad.”
“Who? The people you burglarized?”
“Yeah. They was always messing up the store.”
I looked at Horner. Waiting.
He glanced at me, read nothing on my face, uncrossed his legs at the ankles. I could feel the urge to justify himself bubbling up inside him.
“The guy was always coming in the bookstore, taking out books, reading them in the chairs, and then not putting them back. It wasn’t just one or two books. It was ten, fifteen, twenty books, every day. I had to follow around behind him all the time putting the books back. He didn’t care.”