He nodded his head slowly. “Okay…”
“So that’s what I realized last night. I was asking that question when I should have been asking something else.”
He raised his eyebrows, waiting for it.
“Why throw away anything?” I said. “What good does it do?”
“It’s incriminating. It’s a natural reaction to throw it away. When you were chasing somebody with drugs, you must have seen-”
“Them throw away bags of crack. Yes, I saw that all the time. We’d go pick it up after the arrest, and inevitably they’d say, ‘Oh, no, Officer, that’s not mine. I don’t know where that came from.’”
“So it’s the same idea here,” he said. “The kid had the bracelet, so while you were chasing him he threw it away.”
“Exactly. Now you’ve got it.”
“Got what? We’re back where we started, aren’t we?”
“No,” I said. “Now we’re somewhere else. Look…”
I noticed that he had his cell phone clipped to his belt, so I reached over and grabbed it from him.
“I just took your cell phone,” I said. “It’s much nicer than mine, after all. It probably even works up here sometimes. So now I’m going to leave before I get caught, right?”
“Yeah?”
“But wait, here comes a cop, so I’m going to throw it away.”
I tossed it onto the table.
“It wasn’t me, Officer. I have no idea how that cell phone got on that table.”
He looked at the phone, then at me.
“Now let’s say I just killed you,” I said. “And I happened to take your cell phone while I was at it. Here comes that cop. What am I going to do? If I’m still carrying around the freaking murder weapon, do you think I’m even thinking about the stupid cell phone at that point?”
“No,” he said, grabbing his phone from the table. “No, you’re not.”
“Darryl King threw away that bracelet because he had just committed the crime of taking it, so when I was chasing him he naturally threw it away. He was disassociating himself from the crime. Which I realize sounds like something you would say. Maybe you’re rubbing off on me.”
“If you look at it as a simple robbery, you mean…”
“Then it all makes sense, yes. He does exactly what you’d expect him to do.”
“So he doesn’t throw away the knife…”
“Because he doesn’t have a knife.”
Leon sat back on the couch and thought about this. I could tell he was really working it over. He started to say something, stopped himself. Started again, then stopped.
“But it is possible…”
“If you make up that story in your head, you can make him throw away the bracelet and keep the knife, yes. I suppose in some cases, somewhere, it’s actually happened that way. People do things that don’t make any sense.”
“But in this case…”
“In this case, I think he found a dead body. She wasn’t dead for long, because we know from the forensics that she was killed right around that same time. But he goes up there and he sees the bracelet and he takes it. Because at that point, why not? Then he leaves, and I show up and start chasing him.”
“So he throws it away,” Leon said, still thinking it over. “‘Not me. I didn’t do it. I didn’t take this from that dead woman up there…’”
I just sat there and watched him as he seemed to reenact the whole scene in his head.
“Damn,” he finally said, “that feels right. It really does.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that.”
“It’s completely unprovable, of course. Just one of those things you know in your gut. But now you try to put that up against the fact that he confessed…”
“We go back to that, yeah. Why he would just roll over and give up.”
“Instead of swearing up and down that he didn’t kill her.”
“Well, he’s getting out soon,” I said. “Maybe I can ask him.”
Leon looked at me. “You’re really thinking of doing that?”
“I might. I don’t know. It’ll probably bug me forever if I don’t.”
“That’ll be one interesting conversation,” he said. “But wait a minute. Hold the phone…”
“What is it?”
“Alex, if this Darryl King of yours didn’t kill that woman…”
“Then someone else did,” I said. “I realize that.”
“I would think that would keep me up at night, just as much as the thought of sending the wrong man to prison.”
“Well, thanks. Tonight I’m sure it will.”
“Seriously, what are you going to do about this? Somebody killed her and just walked away.”
I didn’t have an answer for that. Leon didn’t have an answer, either. Not a real answer. I thanked him for listening to me. Then I let him get back to work.
When I was outside again, I found myself walking through the iron gate to Locks Park. Another freighter was coming through the locks. People were standing around watching it, but it barely registered for me. I was too busy thinking about that dead woman left on that balcony in that train station, and a murderer with no face and no name, who never paid the price for his crime.
My honeymooners were gone from the last cabin, so I spent a couple of hours closing that up. Vinnie came by for a few minutes, then left for his shift at the casino. The sun went down, and it started to get cold. The wind was blowing hard by the time I got to the Glasgow Inn. It was just me and Jackie and a few stragglers wandering in on their way up to the Shipwreck Museum. Jackie could tell something was bothering me. He put a cold Canadian on the table next to my chair and left me alone.
I knew Leon was right about not being able to sleep, no matter how tired I was. But when I got back to my cabin, I gave it a try anyway. It was midnight and I was just starting to doze off when I heard a loud knock on my door.
I got up and opened it. It was Leon.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I had to come over. This can’t wait.”
“Leon, what is it? What the hell’s going on?”
I invited him in. He sat down at my table. He had a folder of papers with him. As he opened it I saw notes and copies of news items.
“I kept thinking about what you told me today,” he said. “I’ve been on the Internet, looking up some stuff.”
“Like what?” I sat down next to him.
“I got thinking,” he said, shuffling through his papers, “that a murder like this is just so brutal… So extreme…”
“Yes?”
“Here’s one,” he said, holding up a printout from a newspaper Web site. “Just read it.”
I took it from him. From the Cleveland Plain Dealer, an interview with the chief of police. The man was talking about an unsolved murder in his city. A woman who had been stabbed seventeen times in a hotel stairwell.
I checked the date. Five years after the murder of Elana Paige.
“I know every murder doesn’t get solved, and stabbings aren’t that uncommon. But look at these, too.”
He handed me two more news items. One from the Chicago Sun-Times, another follow-up on a case that was still unsolved six months after it happened. A woman stabbed to death in a parking structure next to a mall, just outside Chicago. Then the other one, from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Yet another unsolved case. Yet another woman stabbed multiple times. This time left outside, in a park overlooking Lake Michigan.
So Cleveland five years after Elana Paige, then Chicago four years after that. Then Milwaukee three years later. Each one of these crimes represented by a single sheet of paper on my table, here in this small cabin hundreds of miles away from any of these crimes, and yet I knew all too well what lay behind the simple facts recited in the news stories. The terrible last moments of an innocent person’s life. Then families torn apart by grief.