Wooster believed in preventive policing. People ended up in his cells only when they’d done something seriously wrong, or when every other attempt to persuade them to follow the path of righteous and decent behavior had failed. He knew the people in his charge, and he made sure that his men knew them, too. The boy and his family had not once required his attention during the first nine years that he had been chief, not until Deber appeared and wormed his way into the affections of the boy’s mother, if that was truly what he had done. There had been nothing in Deber to suggest that he was capable of arousing the affections of anyone, and the chief suspected that threats and fear had been more responsible for the gestation of the relationship than any depth of feeling on the part of either party.
Then the mother had been killed, her battered body found lying in an alleyway behind a liquor store. There had been reports that Deber had been seen in that same liquor store less than an hour before the discovery of the body, and someone told of hearing a male voice and a female voice raised in argument at about that time. Deber, though, was like the boy now seated in the interrogation room: he hadn’t broken, and the killing of the boy’s mother remained unsolved. Deber had returned to the house full of women and taken up with the boy’s aunt, or so local gossip had it. The women were frightened of him, and had good cause to be, but he should have been frightened of them, too. They were strong and clever, and nobody thought it likely that they would tolerate the presence of Deber in their house for much longer.
And then, not long after the commencement of that particular relationship, someone had taken the metal whistle that Deber used to summon his work crews, separated its two halves, and replaced the pea with a wad of homemade explosive. When Deber had blown the whistle, the charge had torn most of his face off. He’d lived for a couple of days afterward, blinded and in agony, despite the efforts of the doctors to keep him medicated, then had passed away. The chief was pretty sure that, wherever Deber now was, his agonies were continuing and were likely to do so for all eternity. Deber was no loss to the world, but that didn’t change the fact that a man had been killed, and the person responsible had to be found. It wasn’t good to have people wandering around freely creating booby traps out of household items, didn’t matter if they were targeting blacks or whites. Guns and knives were one thing. They were commonplace, just like the people who used them. There was nothing particularly unnerving, beyond the occasional brutality of the act itself, about a man who’d carve up another man because he crossed him on a bad day, or one who’d put a bullet in the head of the guy next to him in an argument over a woman, or a debt, or a pair of shoes. As chief, Wooster knew where he stood with men, and women, of that stripe. They were neither strange nor startling. On the other hand, someone who could kill a man with his own whistle represented a whole new way of thinking with regard to ending lives, and one that Chief Wooster was in no hurry to encourage or embrace.
Wooster had obtained a warrant for the boy’s arrest on the day Deber had died. The state cops had laughed down the phone at him when he’d informed them of what he’d done. Deber, they told him, had so many enemies that their suspect list resembled a phone book. He had been killed by a miniature explosive device, cunningly constructed and designed to ensure that only its intended target would be affected, and that the target would not survive. It had involved a degree of planning not usually associated with fifteen-year-old Negroes living in a shack by a swamp. Wooster had pointed out that the Negro in question was attending a high school that, thanks to a charitable donation from a southern trust fund, had a reasonably well-equipped science lab, and one that could easily have provided the iodine crystals and ammonium that an examination of the remains of the whistle had revealed as the constituent components of the explosive used to kill Deber. In fact, Wooster continued, they were precisely the components that a bright kid, not some expert assassin, might use to create an explosive, although, according to the report on the whistle, it was a miracle that it hadn’t blown up long before it reached Deber’s mouth, as nitrogen tri-iodide was a notoriously unstable compound that was supersensitive to friction. The technician who had examined the whistle suggested that the compound, even the reconstructed item itself, had probably been kept soaked in water for as long as possible by the killer, so that it had only just begun to dry out by the time the victim had raised it to his mouth for the final time. It was this information about the nature of the explosive used, and the absence of any other leads, that had convinced the state police to send, however reluctantly, two detectives to interview the boy.
Now one of those detectives stood and left the interrogation room. A moment later, the door to the chief’s little observation cell opened and the same detective entered, a cold soda in his hand.
“We’re not getting anywhere with this kid,” he said.
“You need to keep trying,” said Wooster.
“Looks like you did some trying of your own.”
“He fell over on the way to the men’s room.”
“Yeah? How many times?”
“He bounced. I didn’t keep count.”
“You sure you read him his rights?”
“Someone did. Not me.”
“He ask for a lawyer?”
“If he did, I didn’t hear him.”
The detective took a long draught of the soda. Some of it dribbled down his chin, like tobacco spit.
“He didn’t do this. It was too slick.”
Wooster wiped his brow with his sodden handkerchief.
“Too slick?” he said. “I knew Deber. I knew the people he ran with. They’re not the slick kind. If someone in his own circle, or someone he’d crossed, wanted him dead, they’d have shot him or stabbed him, maybe cut his balls off first just to send a message. They wouldn’t have wasted their time separating and then soldering a whistle so they could pack it with just enough explosive to tear his face off and turn his brain to sludge. They’re not that smart. That kid, though-” He stood and pointed at the glass. “-that kid is smart: smart enough to break into his school and smart enough to put together a little homemade blasting powder. Plus he had motive: Deber killed his mother and was fucking his aunt, and Deber wasn’t the gentle kind in the sack.”
“There’s no proof that Deber killed his mother.”
“Proof.” Wooster almost spat the word. “I don’t need proof. Some things I just know.”
“Yeah, well, the courts look at things differently. I’m friends with the men who interviewed Deber. They did everything short of hooking him up to a battery and frying him to make him talk. He didn’t break. No evidence. No witnesses. No confession. No case.”
In the interrogation room beyond, the boy’s head moved slightly, as though the men’s voices had carried to him, even through the thick walls. Wooster thought he might even have seen the ghost of a smile.
“You know what else I think?” said Wooster. His voice was softer now.
“Go on, Sherlock. I’m listening.”
Sherlock, thought Wooster. You patronizing piece of shit. I knew your daddy, and he wasn’t much better than you are. He was a nobody, couldn’t find his shoes in the morning if someone didn’t hand them to him, and you’re still less of a cop than he was.
“I think,” said Wooster, “that if that kid hadn’t killed Deber, then Deber would have killed him. I don’t think either of them had a choice. If it wasn’t the boy sitting in there, it would be Deber.”