Let It Burn

by Steve Hamilton

“Or maybe I confess because I’m being tortured,” Leon said. “That’s actually quite common, I’m sure.”

  “You’re just being questioned by a homicide detective,” I said. “You’re not being tortured.”

  “There’s more than one type of torture, Alex. You lock me up in a room for twelve hours, you make it boiling hot in the room, you don’t give me anything to drink, then you start yelling at me … I’m sure you could turn that into a real hell. I might break and confess just to make that all stop.”

  “I know what you’re saying,” I said, thinking back to Bateman’s account of the interrogation. “I think we can rule that out in this case.”

  “Well, then, there’s just one more reason,” he said. “I might confess because I honestly don’t think it matters one way or another.”

  I stopped on the sidewalk. We had walked all the way down to the power canal that cut through the heart of the city, and now we were standing just before the two-lane bridge that ran across it.

  “Say that again,” I said.

  “I confess because I know it doesn’t matter what I say. So I might as well get it over with.”

  “Because you’re a black kid in Detroit, and the victim was a white woman from the suburbs. You know they’re going to pin it on somebody, because that’s how you think the whole system works. Besides, you’re one bad man and you can handle it. You can handle prison standing on your head.”

  “Now we’re getting specific,” he said. “Someone you know?”

  “Someone I helped put away.”

  “Now you’re thinking you should try to get him out?”

  “I don’t have to. He’s getting released in a few days.”

  Leon shook his head and smiled. “Tell me the whole story.”

  We turned around and started walking back to the brewery. I laid it all out for him, from the day I chased Darryl King down the railroad tracks to the day we got our break and finally caught him. Then I told him about the confession, as related to me that very day by the retired detective. He stopped me in the same places where I had stopped Bateman. Why had he thrown away the bracelet? Why did he wait until later to throw away the knife?

  “This guy sounds like a badass and a half,” Leon said when I was done. “Even if he was only sixteen.”

  “That’s why I’m thinking your last scenario makes the most sense. He knew he was going away, no matter what. If he did it or if he didn’t do it.”

  “He was an angry young man going in,” Leon said. “Now all these years later, what ends up coming out? Is he older and wiser? Or is he a ticking time bomb?”

  “I guess we’re about to find out.”

  *

  I thanked Leon and let him get back to work. Then I drove home to Paradise. I was exhausted by the time I went to bed, after all of the miles. I still had this feeling that there was something I was missing. One little piece of the puzzle that, if I found it, would make everything else fit together.

  I fell asleep listening to a barn owl sounding its otherworldly complaints. I think I dreamed about diamonds at some point. Floating in the sky, falling in slow motion.

  Then I woke up. It was after three in the morning. I opened my eyes, sat up in my bed, and suddenly I knew something. I knew something for a fact that I had only suspected before. Simple as that, just like Mrs. King had told me. This was the bone truth.

  Darryl King went to prison for a crime he didn’t commit.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  On the third day after the murder, I got to the station early again, expecting to do more legwork with the detective. More time on the street, more knocking on doors, more running down anonymous tips, hoping for that one lead that isn’t a dead end.

  But no, Detective Bateman had another plan. Or rather someone else had plans for both of us.

  He asked me to ride along in his car. He wasn’t saying anything else yet. I could see the tension in his arms and in his face as we left the station and drove west for a few blocks. Then we got on the freeway and headed northwest, out of the city.

  “At some point,” I said, “you’re going to tell us where we’re going.”

  “Elana Paige’s parents want to have a word with us. Both of us.”

  “Detective, you have this habit of not telling me what’s going to happen until we’re already in the middle of it. A heads-up now and then is all I ask.”

  “I apologize,” he said. “This trip has me a little worked up.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, for one, it’s taking us away from what we really need to be doing. And two…”

  I waited for him to continue. He was doing eighty miles an hour in the far left lane, his eyes dead ahead.

  “And two,” he said, “I don’t like not having any news for them. We’re honestly no closer to catching this guy today than we were that first night.”

  “So what are you going to say to them?”

  “I was hoping you’d figure something out by the time we got there.”

  We crossed under Eight Mile Road, and just like that we were out of the city. All of a sudden you had a mall, and a golf course, and nicely manicured lawns. Grocery stores and restaurants instead of a cheap fast-food wasteland.

  The Graysons lived just off of Twelve Mile Road. Exactly four miles from the city line, it might as well have been a different country. There were houses packed in tight on every street, this being one of the original suburbs, where space was at a premium, but the Graysons had one of the larger lots on the northern edge of Southfield, with a long tree-lined driveway.

  Detective Bateman parked the car and sat there for a moment, working his hands together. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go talk to these poor people.”

  We walked up to a big brick house with tall white columns on either side of the door. The detective rang the bell. We waited for a while. Then a Hispanic woman opened the door. She wasn’t wearing a maid’s uniform, but we saw the dynamic immediately. This woman probably lived down the road in the Mexicantown section of Detroit, came up here every day to take care of the white people’s big house. She probably thought it was a great job. All things considered, it probably was.

  She led us through the living room and the dining room. It was all a bit too stuffy for my taste, with too many glass cabinets filled with little figurines and crystal goblets, but I couldn’t argue with how immaculate everything was. This woman obviously did her job well. There was a sunroom in the back of the house. That’s where Mr. and Mrs. Grayson were waiting for us.

  It had been three days since their daughter had been murdered. They both looked like they had aged ten years. Mr. Grayson stood up and shook our hands, his eyes red, his grip weak. Mrs. Grayson stayed put in her chair. She was wearing sunglasses.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Grayson,” Bateman said, “I’m so sorry to see you again under these circumstances.”

  Coffee was offered and declined. We were finally all seated. Mrs. Grayson looked down at her hands. Even with the sunglasses, I could tell she was crying. Mr. Grayson slid over a box of tissues on the glass table. I wondered how many boxes they’d already gone through.

  “We asked you to come here,” Mr. Grayson said, “so you could share any progress you might have made at this point.”

  “You know you can call me at any time,” Bateman said. “Day or night.”

  “I wanted to hear it in person. I wanted you to see how important this is to us.”

  The detective started to say something, then stopped himself.

  “We’ve thought of nothing else since it happened,” I said. “Literally nothing else, night and day. I know we can’t even imagine what you’re going through…”

  “No,” Mr. Grayson said. “I don’t think you can.”

  “Granted,” I said. “But you have to know, this is our only mission in life right now. Both of us.”

  Bateman looked over at me and gave me a quick nod. “Officer McKnight speaks the truth,” he said. “Every waking hour, it’s all we’re doi
ng.”

  “Okay, fair enough,” Mr. Grayson said. “So how far have you gotten?”

  “We’ve been running down many leads,” Bateman said. “We still don’t have anything solid. But I’m confident we will.”

  “As I understand it, the first forty-eight hours are crucial in an investigation like this. When someone is…”

  He paused, took a breath, gathered himself, and continued.

  “When something like this happens,” he said. “The trail gets cold very fast after that. Am I correct?”

  “In most cases, you want to develop your information quickly, yes. That’s always going to be the best way to go. But we’re confident that if we keep doing what we’re doing…”

  “You seem to have a lot of confidence,” Mr. Grayson said. “You had confidence that first night, too. Just how long is that going to last?”

  “Until we find out who’s responsible,” Bateman said. “That’s how long.”

  “I understand that a reward can be helpful in a case like this. Has that been your experience?”

  “It’s often helpful, yes. Were you considering—”

  “A hundred thousand dollars,” Mr. Grayson said. “To whoever provides information leading to the apprehension of the animal who took away our Elana.”

  Mrs. Grayson stood up at that point, knocking her shin on the coffee table. Without saying a word, she left the room.

  “She’ll be okay,” her husband said. “I’ll go see her in a moment. I just want to know what else I need to do to make the reward happen.”

  “That’s a lot of money,” Bateman said. “You probably don’t need to—”

  “It’s nothing, Detective. Now that our daughter is gone … it’s literally nothing to us.”

  “Well, I’ll get right to our PIO. Sorry, that’s the public information officer. He’ll make the arrangements, and we’ll make sure it’s publicized.”

  “Today?”

  “Yes, today. We can make sure it’s on the news this evening.”

  “Okay, good. Let’s make that happen. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go see how my wife is doing.”

  He left us there. The maid reappeared and showed us out the front door.

  “I don’t know how Mister and Missus are going to survive this,” she said to us. Her eyes were red, too. “Elana meant everything to them.”

  “I understand,” Bateman said. There wasn’t much else to say.

  “You’re going to find out who did this, right?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, we are.”

  “Okay, thank you.”

  Then she closed the door. The detective closed his eyes and let out a long breath.

  “That’s a big reward,” I said. “It has to help, right?”

  “Yes and no. It’ll get us more calls, but if we get a thousand of them all at once…”

  His thought was interrupted by a car coming up the driveway. It was a silver Jaguar. The driver pulled up alongside the detective’s car. The door opened and out stepped Ryan Grayson. Elana Paige’s brother.

  “Sorry, we were just leaving,” Bateman said to him.

  “You came with news?” The man was a bit of a mess. More red eyes. I’d pulled over enough DUIs to recognize the loose way he was walking and talking.

  “No, we came to talk to your parents about a reward.”

  “As opposed to just doing your job and catching this guy. It’s been what, four days now?’

  “Hey, let’s not get on the wrong track here,” Bateman said. “We all want the same thing, as soon as possible.”

  “Yeah, sure,” the man said. He came up to the front door, took a wrong step, and launched himself right into me. Fortunately, I caught him.

  “Easy,” I said. “Come on, you know you shouldn’t be driving that vehicle if you’re impaired. You get in an accident, that’s not going to help anybody.”

  “So arrest me.” His face was close to mine, and his breath took away any reasonable doubt.

  “I’m not going to do that,” I said. “I’m going to let you go inside and sleep it off.”

  “Do you have any idea…” Then he trailed off. He would have sagged to the ground if I hadn’t been holding him up.

  “We’re doing everything we can,” I said. “I promise.”

  “You want to know what happened to my sister?”

  I looked over at the detective.

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “I’ll tell you what happened to her. She married the wrong guy. Kinda guy who would let her walk around by herself in goddamned downtown Detroit. He’s out playing golf while she’s being…”

  That’s the same line he had the first time I met him, I thought. He’d probably take it with him for the rest of his life, never letting his brother-in-law off the hook.

  “I was going to be a fireman, you know that? You know why I’m not?”

  “No, why?” I said, wondering just where this drunken conversation might go next.

  “Because I’m white. Because I took the test and aced it and had to wait in line so they could hire a bunch of black guys and fill their quota.”

  This is going downhill fast, I thought. I really don’t need to hear this, no matter how broken up he is.

  But before he could take it any further, his eyes rolled back in his head and then he threw up all over the front porch. I dodged most of it. When he was done doing that, he started crying. We opened the door and walked him back inside. The maid took him into the kitchen to clean him up. We could still hear him sobbing as we left.

  When we were back in the car, I found some takeout napkins in the detective’s center console. I used those to wipe off my pant leg.

  “Thanks for your help,” he said. “You handled all of that pretty well.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “You know how to talk to people. It’s something they can’t teach at the academy.”

  “There was a lot of anger in him. Not that I can blame him for most of it.”

  “I’d stay away from him if I were the husband. At least for a while.”

  “I wasn’t about to tell him my wife’s going to Wayne State, too. Which I guess would make me just as bad.”

  Bateman shook his head. “You can’t blame the whole city. It’s a good school.”

  “Yeah, tell that to him.”

  He pulled out onto Twelve Mile Road, heading west. Away from the freeway that would take us back to the precinct.

  “Where are we going now?” I said.

  “I’ll give you one guess.”

  *

  All we had to do was cut down Orchard Lake Road to Eleven Mile and we were at the town house owned by Tanner Paige and the late Elana Paige. It was nothing near as impressive as the Grayson house, but what the hell, they were still relatively young, only married a few years, no kids yet. A little town house in Farmington Hills was all they needed.

  “I actually tried to call him,” Bateman said as we pulled into the lot. “Yesterday. Then today. I haven’t gotten an answer yet.”

  We went to the front door and rang the bell. It was one those places with four separate town houses in one building. Then another building next to it, looking exactly the same. Then another and another.

  Nobody answered the door. Bateman rang the bell again. After a few seconds passed, we both looked at each other, and I could tell the same thought was hitting us at the same time.

  “You don’t suppose…” he said.

  “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  He stepped back and looked up at the second-story windows. “I think the lights are on up there. It’s hard to tell in the daylight.”

  I was picturing our grieving husband either hanging in the closet or else lying face up on the bed, an empty pill bottle on the floor beside him. I was wondering if that was a suspicion I should be calling in to the station immediately, so we could get someone out here to open the door. Or better yet, at least find out what kind of vehicle he was drivi
ng, so we could check the parking lot before doing anything else.

  Then the front door opened.

  Tanner Paige stood there in the doorway. We’d already seen some red eyes that morning. Tanner’s set a new standard. He was wearing a robe, sweatpants, and slippers. He obviously hadn’t shaved, showered, or done anything else for himself since that first evening we saw him. You couldn’t have drawn a better portrait of a man who’d given up on everything.

  “Mr. Paige,” Bateman said. “We’re sorry to bother you. Are you okay?”

  He just looked at us like he’d forgotten the English language.

  “Mr. Paige, can we do anything for you? Come on, let’s go inside.”

  He pushed the man backward, into the town house. Mr. Paige didn’t offer any resistance. He let himself be led to the couch in the living room. He let himself be lowered into a sitting position.

  “Have you been eating?” Bateman said. “What can we get you?”

  He gave me a quick nod, and I went into the kitchen. The whole town house was just as much a wreck as the owner. He didn’t have a maid to keep things in order, like his in-laws.

  “Mr. Paige,” I heard Bateman say, “you need to have someone here to help you. Is there somebody you can call?”

  “My wife,” the man said, finally speaking. “You can call my wife.”

  A warm half gallon of milk was sitting on the counter. I opened it and poured it right down the sink. Then I heated up some water and found some tea bags. I wasn’t sure what else to do.

  The in-laws all have each other, I thought. I didn’t know why this man was left alone like this. It was clearly driving him insane.

  When the tea was ready, I brought it into the living room and put it on the table in front of the couch. Mr. Paige looked at it like he wasn’t quite sure what it was.

  “Here, drink this,” Bateman said, picking up the mug. “This might help you feel better.”

  Mr. Paige took the mug. He gave it an experimental sip. Then he closed his eyes and began to drink. I knew it was a little too hot to drink this fast, but I wasn’t about to stop him.

  When he was done, he took a few deep breaths. Then he opened his eyes and looked back and forth between us.