I tried the beer. It was pretty damned good. I gave them the thumbs-up.
“I know your beer heart belongs to Canada,” Leon said, “but I’m glad you like it.”
“Hey,” I said, now that everyone was happy, “can I borrow you for a couple of questions?”
“Of course,” he said. “I can use some air.”
We went outside. If there had been a freighter coming through the locks, we could have gone up to the observation deck and watched it, but I wasn’t here to look at big boats. I was here to get his unique take on this thing that had been bothering me.
“Actually,” I said as we walked down Portage Avenue, “before I tell you the details, let me just ask you something on an abstract level.”
“This sounds interesting. Go ahead.”
“Let’s say you were arrested for murder. During the questioning, you ended up confessing to the crime. But for some reason, I have this gut feeling that you didn’t do it.”
“Okay…”
“The biggest question I would have to answer is, why did you confess if you were innocent?”
We walked a block while he thought about it. That was one of the good things about Leon. He wouldn’t give you his opinion until he worked out every angle.
“There are a few possible reasons why I might confess to a crime I didn’t commit,” he finally said. “One, because somebody else has some leverage over me and they’re making me confess.”
“What kind of leverage could they have? You’re talking about going away for murder. What else could they do to you?”
“Prison is better than them killing me. Or, say, killing someone in my family. I’d confess to anything if it meant saving one of my kids from harm.”
“Okay,” I said. “That makes sense.”
“Or maybe it was my wife who committed the murder,” he said. “In that case, nobody’s actually threatening anybody, but I know what will happen to her if they find out she’s guilty. So if I’m a good husband, I might confess to the crime to save her.”
I thought back to the stone-cold look on Darryl King’s face. The first scenario was possible, maybe, if somebody was threatening his family. He had a mother who loved him, a little sister, a little brother. As for the second scenario, taking the fall for someone else… I could rule out the mother and the sister. The little brother, from what I could recall, looked like he’d have trouble killing a mosquito.
Would he take the fall for a close friend? Someone he grew up with? That was always possible. But I kept coming back to that face. The way he looked at me from the other side of that fence. Was that the face of a man who would give up his freedom to save someone else?
“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.