“What was?”
“Her picture was in the Wednesday paper. The article quoted her as saying she’d seen John talking with a stranger from Texas, she seemed to think we should let Sawyer go because of that. Two days later, she was missing.”
For a long time, Al did not answer. Kate took her eyes off the road for a moment to see if he had fallen asleep, but he was staring ahead through the windshield.
“You don’t agree?”
“We don’t know anything about the woman. It’s a little early for jumping to conclusions.”
Silence descended on the car. Kate had been tired earlier but now, boosted by two cups of stale coffee from the doughnut shop Hawkin had spotted just before the freeway entrance, she felt merely stupid. She followed the road up and out of the hills and into San Jose, where the freeways were always busy.
Nearing Palo Alto, she spoke again. “I’ll drop you at Jani’s, then?”
“No, go on to the City. I changed my mind; I want to be in on your group meeting this morning with Sawyer.”
“I was thinking we’d probably cancel it,” said Kate, surprised.
“This is all the more reason not to.”
♦
TWENTY-SIX
♦
… Something happened to him that must remain
greatly dark to most of us, who are ordinary and
selfish men whom God has not broken to
make anew.
The interrogation had been scheduled to begin at ten o’clock. Kate and Hawkin were back in the city by then, but they did not join David Sawyer in the interview room at ten. At eleven o’clock, he was still by himself in the room, his hands in his lap, his lips moving continuously in a low recitation. Twice he had glanced at the door, and on the third time he caught himself and made a visible effort to relax. Since then he had appeared to be in meditation, his long body at ease and his eyes open but not focused on any object.
At 11:20, the door opened. Hawkin came in first, followed by Kate. Both of them looked clean and damp, though their bodies and eyes betrayed a sleepless night.
There were three vacant chairs in the room, but neither detective sat. The man in the jail garb blinked gently at them and waited, and then the third figure came through the door and he instantly got to his feet, his face shut-down and hard, and made as if to sidle past his old friend to the door, looking accusingly not at her but at Kate.
Hawkin put out a hand to stop him. “Please, Dr. Sawyer,” he said quietly. “Sit down.”
Sawyer’s head came around and the two men gazed at each other while the old man, alerted by some nuance of tone, tried to gauge what lay behind the words. He studied Hawkins’ stance and eyes and looked down warily at the manila envelope Hawkin held in his hand before he accepted the detective’s unspoken message: Before, we were acting out a game. Before, we had time to play with animosity. The game is over now.
The message that said: Bad news coming, David.
“Please,” Hawkin repeated quietly.
After a long minute, without breaking their locked gaze, Sawyer moved back to the table and lowered himself into his chair. Only then did he look at Kate, sitting poised to take notes, and then at Eve Whitlaw, and when he took his eyes from her and turned back to Al Hawkin, on the other side of the table from him now, he drew breath and opened his mouth.
“No,” interrupted Hawkin, one hand raised to stop Sawyer from speaking. “Don’t say anything yet. Listen to me before you commit yourself to speech. I’ve been told you’re very good at listening.” Hawkin waited until the older man had slowly subsided into the plastic chair. He then leaned forward and, choosing his words carefully, began to speak.
“Five and a half weeks ago, a man was killed in Golden Gate Park. A number of your friends decided to cremate the body, in imitation of a similar cremation you had supervised three weeks earlier, that of a small dog. The attempted cremation confused matters a great deal, but eventually it proved to have no direct connection with the man’s death.
“You, however, attracted our suspicions from the very beginning. You would not answer our questions, you had no alibi for the time of death, and you seemed to have something you were hiding. On the nineteenth of February, you fled from Inspector Martinelli and a woman who could identify you. And then when a person who lives near the park told us that you were in the vicinity at the general time the man was killed, and in a state of agitation, the case against you seemed fairly tight. It appeared that you had been blackmailed by the man John and finally hit him in the head in anger. No, much as I would like to hear what you could come up with by way of a response, I’d really prefer if you would just listen.”
Hawkin slouched down in the chair, playing with the clasp on the envelope that lay on the table between them.
“However, I don’t think you killed him. I know you could have. I know you have a short temper, for all your years of saintly behavior, and you could easily have lost it and swung at him with that stick of yours. But I don’t think you would have been capable of standing by and waiting for him to die. And I don’t believe you could have broken the skull of his dog three weeks before that. And I know damn well that you were in custody eight days ago and that therefore you could not have committed the murder of your friend Beatrice Jankowski.”
It took a moment for the information to lodge in his mind, but when it did, the effect was all Hawkin had aimed for: Shock, profound and complete, froze David Sawyer’s hands on the edge of the table, kept him from moving, stopped the breath in his body.
“Yes. I’m very sorry,” said Hawkin, sounding it. “Beatrice died last week. Inspector Martinelli and I just identified her body a few hours ago.” He pushed back the flap on the envelope and slid the photograph out onto the table, pushed it across in front of Sawyer, and withdrew his hand. The old man stared uncomprehending at the black-and-white photograph of Beatrice Jankowski’s face that had been taken on the autopsy table just before she was cut open. She lay there calmly, her eyes closed, but was very obviously dead.
Sawyer closed his own eyes and his hands came up to his face, pressing hard against his mouth and cheeks as if to hold in his reaction—vomit, perhaps, or words—but he could not hold back the tears that squeezed from beneath his closed eyelids, tears utterly unlike the simple, generous, childlike stream he had cried so freely on the first occasion Kate had seen him. These were a man’s tears, begrudged and painful, and he clawed at them with his long fingers as if they scalded his skin.
They all waited a long time for him to take possession of himself again. Even Professor Whitlaw waited, as she had been instructed, though she palpably yearned to go and comfort him. They waited, and eventually he raised a bleary red-eyed face from his hands and accepted the tissue that Al Hawkin held out to him.
Hawkin then sat forward until his arms were on the table and his face was only inches from the stricken features of the prisoner.
“Dr. Sawyer, you had nothing to do with the deaths of your son and the wife and children of that madman Kyle Roberts. You believe you did, because grief has to go somewhere, but the truth of the matter is, you were in no way responsible.
“Beatrice Jankowski’s death is a different matter. You know who the dead man was, and you know who killed him. You may even know why. You wouldn’t tell us because of this vow of yours. You figured the man was such a miserable shit-filled excuse for a human being, his death was hardly a reason to break your vow. You played God, David, and because you wouldn’t answer our questions a month ago, because you distracted us and slowed down the investigation, he came back. He heard a rumor that Beatrice had seen him, he probably read the interview in the newspaper where she hinted that she could identify him, so he came back for her. He killed her, David. He broke her skull and he cut those distinctive rings from her fingers and then he stripped her naked and dumped her body down in the mountains, because you had made up your mind to be noble in prison rather than answer our questions.”