The Interrogation Read Online Free PDF Page A

know. Scottie. That little girl. Murdered. Terrible.”
    “Yes,” Burke said. He saw the moon-splashed waters of the pond, the people at that very moment strolling obliviously around its shadowy path. They had never seemed more vulnerable. All of them, in the end, were as helpless as Cathy Lake had been on her last day on earth, no more aware than she of what menace lay in wait. No more able than she had been to defend herself against it.
    “They have no idea what’s out there, Father,” Burke said. “The harm that can be done to them.”
    “And that’s God’s gift to them, Tom, the things they don’t question,” Father Paddock replied. “And the questioning of these same things, that’s the gift He’s given you.”
    6:57 P.M. , Office of the Chief of Detectives
    Pierce sat alone in Chief Burke’s office. While he waited, he recalled other interrogations he’d conducted, trying to find something within them that he might use during the one he was about to begin. Sometimes suspects would simply grow tired or too confusedto keep up their denials. Sometimes they would be overwhelmed by the sheer weight of the evidence against them. The only thing that never broke them was an unbearable guilt for what they’d done. If you looked into their eyes, all you saw was the regret of the caught for getting caught, nothing more.
    “Don’t get up, Detective Pierce,” Chief Burke said as he strode through the door. “Where’s Detective Cohen?”
    “He’s on his way, sir.”
    Burke sat down behind his desk. “The order has come down straight from the Commissioner himself. We have until six A.M. to get something solid. Or we have to let Smalls walk.”
    Before Pierce could protest, Norman Cohen knocked and came into the office.
    “I was just telling Detective Pierce that you have until six to get something on Albert Smalls,” Burke told Cohen. “He’s being brought here. The Commissioner thought a change of scenery might shake him up a little.” He nodded toward the open door. “As you can see, he’s just arriving.”
    Pierce and Cohen looked down the corridor to where Albert Jay Smalls, Municipal Jail Inmate 1407, shuffled toward Interrogation Room 3, hands cuffed, ankles shackled, a uniformed officer at his side. He seemed lost inside the striped prison uniform, but there was a sense that no clothes would have fit him any better. His body looked as if it had been made from separate parts of other bodies, his head a bit too weighty for the narrow shoulders, a bit too large for the stringy neck. His hands were small, delicate, and oddly feminine. Despite his slenderness, he seemed curiously fleshy, some residue of baby fat still clinging to his bones.
    “What a creep,” Pierce said.
    Cohen nodded. But it was not just his creepiness that set Smalls apart, he thought. There was also the deep melancholy he had observed over the last ten days, a lacerating inner suffering that separated Smalls from every other criminal he’d ever known, marked him as utterly alien, a creature dropped to earth from someplace that glimmered dimly in the far reaches of the firmament—dark, cold, profoundly inhospitable to life. The suspect never laughed and he never wept, allowed himself neither comfort nor release.
    “But being creepy isn’t a crime,” Burke told the two detectives authoritatively. “And if we can’t prove by six tomorrow morning that he murdered that girl, he must be released.”
    “But he knew Cathy, we know that much,” Pierce argued. “He admits it.”
    “He admits seeing her,” Burke corrected Pierce. “Recognizing her. But what does that prove? The fact is, we don’t have any evidence that he ever touched the murder weapon. We have a witness who saw him within a few yards of where Cathy’s body was found, but that was quite some time after she’d already been murdered, and even if Smalls had been seen in the area at the time of the murder, his presence could be purely circumstantial,