That stopped me dead. “Why wouldn’t I want to testify?”
“I seem to recall, you had more important things to worry about. Like not dying from your gunshot wounds.”
I wiped my forehead with the back of my sleeve. There was no breeze, and it was getting too hot out there in the middle of the lake.
“All right,” I said. “Thank you for telling me all that.”
He sat there looking at me for a moment. “Alex,” he said. “It was a clean confession. I saw a few before that, saw a hell of a lot after that. This one was Grade A kosher.”
“Okay. I got it.”
He turned his chair and started up the engine. “Let’s get you back to shore,” he said. “It’s hotter than hell out here.”
We made our way back to his dock, taking a direct line now so it only took half of forever. When we had the boat tied off and I had carried the cooler up to the cabin, he shook my hand.
“Before you go,” he said, “I have to say one more thing to you.”
“What’s that?”
“I should have let you make the arrest. It’s bothered me ever since.”
“Detective, you can stop thinking about it right now. Because I did a long time ago. It was a pleasure working with you back then. And it was a pleasure seeing you again today.”
“Thanks,” he said. “That means a lot to me.”
As I turned to my truck, he called after me.
“We got our man, eh? That’s the important part.”
I didn’t answer him one way or another. I just gave him a wave and then I left. As I drove back to the freeway, I knew the whole thing should have been resolved in my mind. Every question was answered, I said to myself. You can let it go now.
So how come I still couldn’t?
CHAPTER TEN
I got up early the next morning. I didn’t wake Jeannie. I let her sleep as I left the house in the pale light of dawn. I drove to the station on Woodward Avenue, not sure if I was ready for everything that would happen that day.
Detective Bateman was already there. He was shaved, showered, caffeinated, smartly dressed, and ready to roll. He said good morning to me, and then two minutes later we were in his unmarked Plymouth Gran Fury, driving to Corktown.
“We’ve got two sets of prints back on the clasp of the bracelet,” he said as he drove. He didn’t have lights or a siren, but he still drove like he owned the road. “One was Mrs. Paige herself. The other was presumably our suspect, although we didn’t get a hit on it. So he’s not in the system.”
“That would explain my big swing and miss on the mug shots.”
“I still can’t believe he’s been under the radar his whole life,” Bateman said, shaking his head. “I don’t care how young he is. If he’s capable of doing something like this…”
“I’m out here every day,” I said. “Sometimes it feels like we only catch the dumbest ten percent, and everybody else is just doing whatever they want.”
“I’d hate to think that’s true.”
He took us right to the train station. There was still crime scene tape along the back side of the station. A pair of night-shifters in their last hour of duty were standing guard.
“They’ll keep working the crime scene,” Bateman said, “now that the sun is up. But really, I think it’s all going to come down to hustle. As usual.”
“So why are we here at the train station?”
He stopped the car in the lot. Then he got out and looked up at those mostly empty eighteen floors. I did the same.
“When in doubt,” he said, “start at the beginning. Now show me again exactly where he ran.”
We got back in the car. I directed him over to Bagley Street, to the bridge over the tracks where our man had scrambled up from the fence. From there, we went up Rosa Parks Boulevard, where I had thought I had spotted him when I went after him in my car. We cut over to Trumbull, up to the stadium. Then across the freeway where I was sure I had him trapped. We stopped at that same intersection where I had stood looking off into the distance. West, north, or east, all of the streets he could have taken at that point. It was hardly more than twelve hours ago, and yet it felt like he could be anywhere in the world by now.
“There aren’t many houses until you get up past Temple Street,” he said. “And you’d have to cut all the way over past the high school if you lived east of here.”
He moved his finger in the air like he was drawing a map.
“The freeways sort of isolate this one part of the city,” he said. “Like a big horseshoe. West, east, and south. So pretend you’re him for a minute. You’re running away and trying to get back home. Would you risk coming up Trumbull and getting yourself trapped in this horseshoe if you didn’t live here?”
“Probably not. Not if I was thinking straight.”
“You said you usually only catch the dumb ones. Hell, he led you right through the stadium traffic, didn’t he? A great way to lose you. So let’s assume he knew exactly what he was doing.”
“Okay, so he’s in this horseshoe,” I said. “That’s still a lot of real estate.”
“Get back in the car. We’ve got some ground to cover.”
We spent the next hour driving, first up Trumbull to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, then cutting west through the apartment complexes. We agreed, this felt like about as far north as he’d reasonably live, assuming he had to start his day here, then walk down to the train station looking for trouble.
“This is good,” he said. “See, I wanted to get the lay of the land before we started sending out the troops. Now that we’ve got it narrowed down, we can get officers out here knocking on doors. Get some handbills up on every telephone pole, too, asking for anybody with information to contact us.”
“That would work a little better if people in this city thought we were on their side.”
He looked over at me. “We’re not asking them to snitch on a drug dealer. This is a psychotic murderer. I’m sure they don’t want him living next door.”
I raised both hands in surrender, but I wasn’t convinced. I knew many people in this city saw us as the enemy. It’s something I dealt with every day. On the other hand, it would only take one neighbor to drop a dime on this guy. Just one mindful neighbor. That’s all it would take.
He checked his watch. “Come on, it’s time for roll call.”
A few minutes later, we were back at the precinct. The day-shifters were all sitting there in the room, listening to Sergeant Grimaldi run down the assignments. There was no joking today. The whole building felt different.
Detective Bateman took over for a few minutes, giving everyone the details about our case. Or at least the few details we knew at that point. He wasn’t trying to act like a big shot today. He wasn’t the basketball coach or the clotheshorse or the man with the big smile. He was a homicide detective, and he knew he wouldn’t break this case without help.
“Somebody saw this young man,” he said to the assembled officers. “It would be impossible for that not to have happened. We need to get out there on the streets and we need to find that witness. Officer McKnight and I have identified a likely target area. Now it’s time to start knocking on doors.”
Everyone had the description of our suspect. Everyone had the sketch, as inadequate as it might be. Everyone knew the stakes. This was not your regular murder case.
“The target area overlaps with the Third Precinct,” Bateman said, “so expect to see them. Obviously, we need to respond to every other call, as usual. But the sergeant will be sending extra units to the area throughout the day. So please just be extra observant today. I’d like to tell the family of this woman that we have this man in custody, ideally by the end of the day.”
He thanked them. The sergeant dismissed them.
Franklin came up to me then and put one of those big hands on my shoulder and squeezed. He asked me how I was doing. I told him I was thinking about finding this guy and not much else. He went off to do his thing with his new temporary partner.