“I suppose you can guess what I’ve been doing,” he said.
“I probably can.”
“I found a couple more cases.”
“More stabbings?”
“Yes.”
“In the Midwest?”
“No, that’s the thing. See, if you look at the dates for those first three cases I found, they happen anywhere from May to September.”
“Okay…”
He opened the folder and took out the news stories.
“So I looked a little further,” he said. “Here are three more open cases. All three are women, all three were stabbed to death. Nobody arrested in any of them yet.”
“Janet told me they have an active profile,” I said. “She didn’t say there were this many.”
“Savannah, Georgia. Mobile, Alabama. Jacksonville, Florida. The years are mixed in with the others, the difference being that these three all occurred from November to March.”
“You’re telling me we’ve got a fair-weather murderer here. He goes south for the winter, and if he sees his opportunity down there…”
“That’s about the size of it, yes. So what are we going to do?”
“Well, the FBI already knows everything you’re telling me. It’s the Detroit angle that’s new. If that can be tied in, I mean, maybe it helps. Especially if it was earlier than the others.”
“Assuming they buy your idea that it was a false confession,” Leon said, shaking his head. “Assuming they can do anything with that case, even if they do believe it. All these years later.”
“I officially have never felt so useless,” I said. “How about you?”
“I’m with you, buddy.”
“Let me give her another call,” I said, taking the folder from him. “I’ll make up some excuse. But really I just want to find out if anything new has happened.”
“Let me know, okay?”
“I will. Thanks for doing this. Now you should probably try to put it out of your head before it makes you crazy.”
“I’ll do that as soon as you do.”
I had no comeback. I left him there to his beer brewing. I went back to Paradise.
My call to Janet went about as expected. She listened to me read off the other cases Leon had dug up. She already knew about all of them. Not only that, she had one more to add to the list.
“Indianapolis,” she said. “Two years after Milwaukee. So that’s seven unsolved murders, all multiple stabbings. All with the same kind of knife, by the way. I don’t know if I mentioned that before.”
“You didn’t, but what about the Detroit case?” I said. “Have you heard anything about how that might be connected?”
“You know I can’t say anything, but I also know you’re not going to sleep until I do. So here’s what I can tell you…”
“Go ahead.”
“It turns out they did look at that case. It was three or four murders in, when they were first trying to establish the pattern. They couldn’t help but notice the similarities to the murder in Detroit.”
“Okay…”
“So they checked it out. They called the detective who was in charge of that case.”
“That was Arnie Bateman.”
“I don’t know the name. Just some guy who was kind of a blowhard, I guess.”
“That’s him. So what happened?”
“Not much,” she said. “It was a sworn confession, with a man sitting in prison. If there was something more concrete to tie this murder to the others…”
“He gave you the stiff-arm. Isn’t that obvious? He didn’t want to reopen the case that made his career.”
“I asked the agent to look at it again, okay? What else can I do?”
“That sounds like all I can ask for,” I said. “Thanks for doing that.”
“If this takes him down a rat hole, it’s not going to make me look good. You realize that.”
“That’s impossible. You always look good.”
“Don’t even try that,” she said. “Unless you’ve thought some more about moving down here.”
I wasn’t about to lie to her. So we left it at that. I thanked her and let her go back to work. Then I tried to do the same, even though I had a whole new set of dead bodies to think about. I knew it would be a long night.
Maybe I’ll call the detective again, I thought. That would really make the day.
I didn’t, of course. I didn’t have to. All I had to do was wait until that night.
The phone rang just after nine o’clock. I picked up the receiver, thinking it would be Leon, or maybe Janet. I got neither.
“Alex, this is Arnie Bateman. I’m sorry to call so late.”
“Detective, what’s going on?”
“Don’t call me detective. I’m not sure I deserve the title right now.”
“I don’t understand. What are you talking about?”
“Darryl King got out today,” he said. “He’s out of prison.”
“Okay, I knew it was coming up pretty soon, but-”
“You want to know what I did to mark the occasion?”
“I’m guessing you didn’t go down and throw him a party.”
“I watched the tape, Alex. I watched the world-famous confession.”
“What, you have a copy of it?”
“No, no. I had to call down to the old precinct, the district now, find somebody who still remembered me. I asked if I could see it and they said sure, if we can even find it. It got moved over to the records building. Some old VHS tape in a dusty old box. They finally found it, and this sergeant calls me back, tells me he can’t let it leave the premises, but I could see it if I came down there.”
“So you did.”
“Yeah. I don’t drive much anymore on account of the leg. Hurts too much to sit that long. But I figured this was worth it.”
“Why did you think that? You sounded pretty sure when I called you that it was all a big-”
“Okay, just stop,” he said. “I’m sorry. All right? Will you accept my apology before we go any further? I was totally out of line.”
“Accepted,” I said. “Now tell me about the tape.”
“Well, I guess the surprising thing is that it went pretty much exactly how I remembered it. There wasn’t one thing he said that didn’t match my memory.”
“So you’re just calling me to confirm it was a good confession. That I was totally wrong to even question it. Is that what you’re saying?”
“No, Alex. I’m calling you to tell you he didn’t confess at all.”
He let that one hang for a moment, just the faraway buzzing of the telephone line as I tried to process the words.
“You’re going to have to explain,” I said. “I’m afraid you lost me.”
“I watched it three times. At no point does he ever say, ‘Yes, I killed that woman.’ He says, ‘I’m a man, and if there’s something I need to do, I do it.’ That’s what he says.”
“I remember you telling me that, yes. You said those were his exact words.”
“Yes.”
“But then you said he went on to explain exactly what happened. How he saw her up at the station, how he got her up to the balcony…”
“He didn’t do that, Alex. He didn’t explain it. It was me doing all the explaining at that point.”
“How do you mean?”
“It was just a classic dumb mistake in interviewing. Everything I had been trained to do, just right out the window. Because after I got what I thought was the initial confession, I should have made him describe everything in detail from the beginning. But instead I jumped right ahead and said, ‘Okay, so you saw her at the station, right? You thought she’d be an easy mark?’ And so on, right down the line. I led him into it, and all he had to do was keep agreeing with me.”
“Okay…”
“He never said he did it, Alex. Not in a real way. Not one goddamned time. But I was so anxious to solve the case. Hell, we all were. I just heard what I wanted to hear and I rammed the rest right down his throat.”