The Interrogation by Thomas H. Cook Read Free Book Online

by the knowledge of what he’d done.
    “You do know what that sounds like, don’t you, Smalls?” Pierce insisted.
    Smalls glanced at Cohen as if pleading with him to pull Pierce off.
    It was the usual reaction to the Good Cop/Bad Cop routine that Pierce and Cohen had established from the first interrogation, but this time Cohen thought he caught something else in Smalls’ eyes, a hint of panic, and in that panic a desperate search for a way out.
    “What’s the matter, Jay?” Cohen asked. He pulled up a chair and leaned his elbow on the table. “What are you afraid of?”
    “Everything,” Smalls murmured. He looked like a bewildered animal with his leg in a trap, thrashing about desperately even as the cruel reality of its capture settled in.
    “Tell me what happened in the park, Jay,” Cohen said.
    Smalls glanced toward the window, the dark city beyond it. “You want me to confess. You want me to tell you that I did it.”
    Cohen felt the anguish in Smalls’ eyes. “Jay, wouldn’t it be better to tell us?”
    “It doesn’t matter what I say. You’re not going to believe me. So it doesn’t matter what I tell you.”
    Cohen glimpsed a drowning man’s acceptance of a watery death. “Yes, Jay, of course it—”
    Pierce broke in. “Okay, let’s go back to when the cops found you in the pipe. The woman screamed, then one of the cops left. The other one stayed with you. And later, the one who stayed with you brought you up to the trail. After a while there were lots of cops around. Flashing lights. You remember all that, Smalls?”
    Smalls faced Pierce. “Yes.”
    “By then we’d found Cathy Lake by the pond and so there were lots of cops around. We brought you up to the pond. You saw her body. You remember all this, right?”
    “Yes.”
    “What else do you remember?”
    “That I was in trouble.”
    “Why did you think that? You hadn’t been arrested yet.”
    “I knew I was in trouble by the way the man was talking,” Smalls said. His eye shifted to Cohen. “By the way he said my name.”
    8:54 P.M. , September 1, City Park, Duck Pond
    “Smalls,” Chief Burke said. “Albert Jay Smalls.”
    “That’s right.” Blunt chomped down on a thick cigar. “Only name we found. Written in some of them old books he’s got.”
    “Has he acknowledged that this is his name?” Burke asked Blunt.
    “Nope. We found crayons too. Other junk. Nothing to ID the guy though.”
    Burke glanced toward Smalls, noted that his head was slumped forward. He looked like a captured prisoner, helpless and defeated.
    “Anything else, Chief?” Blunt asked.
    “Just one thing. Find Pierce and Cohen. Tell them I want to see them.”
    “Okay,” Blunt said.
    Burke watched as Blunt lumbered away, a huge figure in his rumpled green raincoat, one of Dolan’s men, kept on by Francis after he became Commissioner. Given Blunt’s rank incompetence, Burke could think of no reason other than pity over the fact that Blunt’s wife, Millie, had been bedridden for years, his daughter Suzy retarded, and that if he were fired from the department, it would be nearly impossible for him to find other employment. Even so, Blunt gave off such a sense of animal stupidity that it was hard to imagine a pity strong enough to keep him on the job.
    Pierce and Cohen arrived six minutes later.
    Burke glanced at the notes he’d taken from his earlier conversation with the medical examiner. “At this point, it doesn’t appear that the child was sexually assaulted. She was strangled. That much is obvious. We also found a length of wire on the path that leads down toward the playground. The girl’s body is just down that bank there. Off the trail. Behind a hedge.” Floodlights had been strung all around, and in their hard white glare he could make out a small patch of pale flesh. “With that rainstorm a lot of important evidence could have been washed away.” Burke looked up into the wet trees, then down the sodden path that led to where the