A knock on the door. Neither of us speaks. The knock is repeated. “Will you talk?”
He shakes his head.
A third knock, this time louder, more insistent. I hear keys jingling. They’re about to come in, to take him away, and after this it is done. He will be on his way to jail. I will have sent him there.
A key slides into the lock.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
The handle turns. The door opens.
“I know,” Ed Gradduk tells me, and then he is gone, back in handcuffs and out through a steel door that clangs shut behind him and leaves me alone in a little interrogation room with my head in my hands.
CHAPTER 10
Live in an apartment along a busy city street long enough and you learn to tune out traffic noise. In the time I’d been in my current building, the roaring motors, squealing brakes, and harsh horns of the busy avenue below had gradually become just background noise.
When I woke the next morning, however, the sounds penetrated into my brain in a way they would usually not. I was lying half-awake in bed when a car out on the avenue slammed on its brakes. There was a brief shriek of tires skidding on pavement, but no subsequent crash as I’ve heard on other mornings. The tires were enough, though. I opened my eyes wide, fully awake, then closed them again as I recalled Ed in the street, the Crown Victoria blasting into him.
The image sickened me. I lay with my palms pressed over my closed eyes, as if the added pressure could drive the memory from my mind. I thought of the way his body had snapped, his shoulders and legs moving in toward the car even as his waist headed in the opposite direction. That was the last position I’d seen him in, for all of a fraction of a second, before his body was sucked beneath the still-moving car and disappeared.
And the sounds. I would never forget the sounds. A muffled whomp of impact after the scream of tires and squeal of brakes. A wet popping as the tires passed over his body, like a champagne bottle opened underwater. And then the same sound, but duller, the champagne gone flat this time, as they’d passed over him again.
I pushed out of bed and went to the window. It was just past seven, traffic building to its rush-hour peak. I watched the cars move and I thought of Ed Gradduk and the blood that had been hosed off the pavement on Clark Avenue, how quickly it had dried. A thousand cars must have passed over the spot already. More than that. I wondered if any had slowed.
The light up the street changed and the cars beneath me moved again, the procession passing through the intersection by our office a few blocks west. They moved quickly during the green-light cycle, then backed up again when it went red, came to a stop under my window, impatient drivers craning their necks and looking ahead to count the cars, try to figure out if they’d make it through the light in the next cycle, if they’d get to the office before the bagels were gone and the first pot of coffee cold.
I left the bedroom, left the apartment, walked down the steps, and out into the parking lot. The gravel was cold and sharp against my bare feet. I wore nothing but a pair of gym shorts, but I walked around the building to the front sidewalk, stood there, and stared at the street as curious motorists gazed back at me.
You can see something happen right before your eyes, something profound and important and consuming, and yet you can somehow miss really seeing it. I knew this from years of taking eyewitness testimony. The eyes bring information in and the brain processes it. Simple enough. Except that when the eyes tell the brain that they have just seen something go wrong, badly wrong, the brain doesn’t want to process it that way. If at all possible, it rationalizes, offers a sense of perspective or understanding that the eyes don’t have. The brain, you see, exists to explain. You can’t discourage it from doing that.
But then there’s memory, that obnoxious little bastard of the subconscious. Memory holds the scene, holds what the eyes have shown. And, down beneath the conscious layer, memory holds it accurately. Holds the picture without the perspective. When I was a cop, that’s what we tried to get to. It takes a trigger, generally, something that affects the senses in such a way that it provokes the subconscious into action. Something like the squeal of tires I’d heard this morning.
Joe was at the office when I arrived, a cup of coffee from the corner doughnut shop in his hand. His computer was humming through its preliminary motions, and he looked at me with surprise as I stepped inside. Joe usually beats me to the office by at least half an hour.
“You run the Jeep plate number yet?” I said.
He sipped his coffee and shook his head. “Just got here.”
“It’s going to belong to Jack Padgett or Larry Rabold.”
“Because they’re working on Gradduk’s case, so interest in Corbett wouldn’t be unreasonable?”
“No,” I said. “Because they killed Ed Gradduk.”
“Right. But that was an accident . . .” He stopped when I began to shake my head.
“I’m not so sure it was.”
He watched me with narrowed eyes and took a few swallows of his coffee. “That’s a hell of an allegation, LP. And I don’t understand where it’s coming from. Gradduk ran in front of their car. You saw it happen.”
“I know. They backed up over him, Joe. After they’d already hit him. And at the time I assumed they were just trying to clear away from the body.”
“Probably they were.”
I shook my head again. “They’d rolled the front tires right over him. I heard the sound it made; they had to feel the rise of the tires. They knew they’d run him over, but they backed up anyhow and went over him again. I think it was to make sure he was dead.”
Joe took a long, slow breath. “Come on, LP. Think about how fast that happened. Imagine if you’d been the driver. Hell, he was probably more horrified by what he’d done than you were standing there watching it. His first impulse was going to be to move away from Gradduk. To try to take it back, in effect.”
“They didn’t slow until after he fell. He went down and they kept going for a second or two, then hit the brakes. By then they were way too close to stop without hitting him.”
“They were going fast because they saw he was running across the street.”
“They were going fast because they didn’t want him to make it across the street.”
He shook his head. “If you’d come to me with this theory the night it happened, maybe I would have bought it. But not now. You’ve had too much time to consider it, restructure what you saw until it gave you something to work with.”
“Wrong. When I saw it happen, I assumed it was an accident because that’s the way my brain was trained to think. You don’t expect cops to intentionally run a man down, so you assume that they didn’t. But they did.”
“No, Lincoln. They didn’t.”
“Answer me this, then: Why did Padgett and Rabold go to Ed’s house to make the arrest in the first place?”
“Richards said they got the tip from the liquor store owner.”
I nodded. “Exactly. They got a tip even though it wasn’t their case. And rather than follow police protocol, which they both know from years on the force, and pass the tip along to the detective on the case, they went down alone. And Ed fought them and ran. Why? If he was innocent, why’d he run?”
“Maybe he wasn’t—,” Joe began, but my look shut him down and he looked away and nodded. “Right. We’re assuming he was.”