“I know I don’t have to tell you this,” Franklin said to me, “but keep your eyes open today, huh? I know you want this guy more than anyone.”
I found the detective at his desk a few minutes later. All of the homicide detectives sat together in a random assortment of desks on the second floor. He was reading something. It took a moment for him to even notice me standing there. He asked me to sit down.
“This is the initial coroner’s report,” he said. “I’m not sure how much of this I should share with the family.”
“What does it say?”
“She was stabbed twenty-three times. There were many defensive wounds on her hands. Meaning she fought back. Also meaning it probably took a while for her to lose consciousness.”
I took my hat off and held it in my hands.
“She was not sexually violated prior to the stabbing,” he said. “But several of the stab wounds were, um… let’s just say, in that area.”
He didn’t say any more. He didn’t have to. He sat there looking down at that sheet of paper. At that string of words that could never really capture what she went through.
“We’re going to find him today,” he said, finally looking up at me, “if I have to personally take you to every house in the city.”
Of course it wasn’t that easy. It never is. By the end of that workday, we had a few dozen leads that went nowhere. The case was once again the lead story on Channels 2, 4, and 7, only now they had a sketch to show and a plea to call the Detroit police with any information. That led to a number of phone calls, none of which panned out. I had been out in the car with Detective Bateman all day. I was still at the station when the calls came in. It was another double-shift day for me.
By the time I went home, it was dark. Elana Paige had been dead for thirty hours.
We went through the same process the next day, although this time there was a backlog of leads for us to follow up on. Information developed by officers on patrol, or tips called in to the station. Toward the end of that day, the detective asked me to accompany him on one more trip. It was starting to get dark now. We were no closer to finding our suspect. The detective was starting to wear his frustration as visibly as one of his tailored sports jackets. God help you if you happened to be standing in his way while he was walking down the hall, or making any noise while he was on the phone.
“Where are we going?” I said. We were heading south, away from our so-called target horseshoe.
“To the train station.”
I thought maybe we were going to start at the beginning again, like we had done the previous morning. But no, he had something different in mind.
He slowed down on Michigan Avenue as we got close to Roosevelt Park. He was looking carefully at the people walking on the sidewalk. There were plenty of men out enjoying the warm summer night. A few women. The female prostitutes couldn’t have been more obvious, but that’s not what the detective was looking for.
When we passed Sixteenth Street, he did a quick U-turn and came up slowly on the opposite side of the street. We were in his unmarked car, so he wasn’t turning any heads yet. The detective let the car roll to a stop. There was a young man leaning against an iron fence. He took a quick look up and down the street. Then he came closer. He stopped when he saw my uniform, but by then the detective had already put the car in park and thrown open his door.
“Stop right there!” he said. It was a voice that carried across the entire park, I’m sure. The kid started to run, but the detective caught up to him easily and pushed him from behind. It’s the perfect move when someone is running away from you. One good shove and your man is eating dirt.
I was just getting out of the car myself at that point. I was thinking how nice it would have been for the detective to share his plan with me before executing it.
“Open the back door,” Bateman said to me. I opened the door, and Bateman threw the kid into the backseat. I wasn’t positive that this car had the one-way locks standard on squad cars, but from the look on this kid’s face, it didn’t matter. He was not about to try anything stupid.
“All right,” Bateman said as he got back behind the wheel, “it looks like we’ve got our murder suspect.”
“What?” the kid said, his eyes wide. “Are you crazy?”
I looked over the front seat at him. He was about the right age, but the similarity ended right there. This kid was at least twenty pounds thinner. His eyes were more wide set, the nose was bigger, the hair was shorter. This was certainly not our suspect.
“What do you think, Officer?” he asked me. “Is this our man?”
“I think he might be,” I said, wondering how I was supposed to play along. “I guess close enough, right?”
“Damn straight,” Bateman said, putting the car in gear. “We just need somebody to go down for it.”
“I wasn’t even around here that night,” the kid said. “You totally got the wrong guy.”
“Ah, so you do know something,” Bateman said, slamming the car back into park.
“No! I don’t know nothing!”
“You just referred to the night of the murder. Because you didn’t ask which murder, I’m assuming you know exactly what we’re talking about.”
“That woman. In the train station.”
“For someone who claims to know nothing,” Bateman said, “you sure have a basic working knowledge of the pertinent facts.”
“The what? No, man, I just know that some woman got killed in the station two nights ago. That’s all I know!”
“You work this park,” Bateman said. “You must have some idea who did it.”
“I don’t work anything,” the kid said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Bateman put the car in gear again. “Look, I don’t care what you do here. Drugs, hustling… Right now, I don’t give one little goddamn about any of that. I’m not going to take you down for anything, as long as you start telling me the truth. But if you don’t, we’ll go right down to the station.”
The kid just sat there, not saying a word. Bateman put his foot on the gas and we started to move.
“All right!” the kid said. “I’ll be straight with you, okay? I’ll tell you everything I know. Which is pretty much nothing.”
The car stopped. “Pretty much nothing? What does that mean?”
“It means I don’t know anything. I swear. I didn’t kill her, and nobody I know killed her. Everybody’s freaked out about it. It’s been so strange around here the last couple of days.”
“Strange how?”
“Just strange. Nobody’s doing any business. It’s like everybody knows the place is being watched now.”
The detective looked over at me. He shook his head and took a long breath.
“Okay, here’s the deal,” he said to the kid. “You get out of the car and you go find everybody who hangs out here. You hear me? Every single one. You tell them that if they have any information about this crime, they need to contact me immediately. My name is Detective Bateman. You got that?”
“Yes.”
“What’s my name?”
“Detective Bateman.”
“No other questions asked. Just like I told you, whatever else they’re doing, I don’t care. I just want to find the killer, and I will personally make sure this place is closed down for you guys until I find him. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay, then. Get out and spread the word.”
The kid got out of the car. Turns out the doors weren’t one-way locked. He stood there watching us as we pulled away.
Bateman’s hands were tight on the wheel as he drove back up Woodward Avenue.
“How many years do you have in?” he finally said.