The Interrogation Read Online Free PDF

particularly since he was living in a drainage pipe not far away.”
    Pierce leaned forward, still intent on making his argument. “But what about the drawings? Where we found them, doesn’t that prove—”
    Burke shook his head. “We need more. We need physical proof. Evidence. A confession. You have until six. That’s just eleven hours. Any questions?”
    There were none.
    “All right, you may go.”
    With that, Pierce and Cohen left the Chief’s office and headed down the corridor, walking shoulder to shoulder until Pierce stopped and turned toward Interrogation Room 3.
    “Maybe we should let him stew for a few minutes. Maybe the Commissioner’s right. Maybe a change of scenery could shake him up.”
    Cohen offered no objection, and so they entered the observation room that adjoined Interrogation Room 3, where, through its rectangular one-way mirror, they could see Inmate 1407 sitting stiffly at the room’s scarred wooden table.
    “How do you want to do it this time?” Cohen asked his partner.
    “Hit and run,” Pierce answered. “Throw out the time line. Keep him off-balance. Hope he’ll trip up somewhere and give us an idea of what he did with the locket, or some other little detail.”
    “Or maybe just an idea of where he came from.” Cohen kept his eyes on Smalls. “He has to have come from somewhere, Jack. That’s the one thing we can be sure of about this guy. Everybody has a past.”
    7:05 P.M. , Criminal Files Room
    “Good evening, sir.”
    Chief Burke nodded to the young officer who stood behind the counter. “Bring me the Catherine Lake file.”
    The officer vanished into a labyrinth of metal shelves so packed with bulging manila envelopes, they drooped beneath their weight.
    A metal table stood a few feet from the counter, four chairs placed neatly around it. Yellow pencils lay scattered across the table’s surface, along with notepads anda few ashtrays. How many hours had he sat at that table, Burke wondered, first as an eager young officer, then as a no less eager rookie detective, and finally as Chief of Detectives? To gain the gold badge had been his sole ambition. He recalled the long struggle he’d made to win the shield, at work when Scottie had been born, at work at all but two of his son’s birthdays, at work as Scottie’s mood darkened with adolescence and the raging quarrels began, at work on the day Scottie told his weeping mother he’d had enough of “this tyranny” and left home for good.
    “Here it is, Chief.”
    Burke faced the counter and saw himself in the guise of Officer Jimmy Day, the blue uniform impeccably pressed, every speck of lint scrupulously picked off, the polished silver badge winking in the naked bulb that hung above him. The abyss that separated his own experience and the young officer’s struck him as impossibly wide.
    “In my spare time I read the cold-case files,” Officer Day remarked as he handed Burke a manila envelope. “When I got this assignment, Sergeant Philips said I should read them, because when you had this job, you solved one of them, Chief. The Lorna Dolphin murder.”
    Burke had first seen her in crime-scene photographs he’d randomly pulled from the cold-case file his third day at the front desk. Lorna Dolphin, aka Sheila Kanowski, sprawled in one of Harbortown’s filthy alleys, her fleshy legs dangling over a ragged pile of fish nets and scrap metal, blood snaking down them to drip from her thick ankles and gather in a sticky pool beneath her feet. She’d been shot once in the chest, after which she’d lived long enough to scratch something in the oil-slick muck in which she’d died. One word: BLADE. Anodd word for her to have chosen, Burke had thought, for she’d been shot, not stabbed. This more than anything else had given Burke the sense that there were stones still unturned in this cold case.
    And so he began to look through the file more closely, and after that to explore beyond the file, using off-duty hours to make