"Only one thing," Boyle said, opening the battered manila folder. "Why'd you kill her?"
"Why?" Phelan repeated slowly. "Yeah, everybody asked me about the motive. Now 'motive' . . . that's a big word. A ten-dollar word, my father'd say. But 'Why.' That cuts right to the chase."
"And the answer is?"
"Why's it so important?"
It wasn't. Not legally. You only need to establish motive if the case is going to trial or if the confession is uncorroborated or unsupported by physical evidence. But it had been Phelan's fingerprints found at the crime scene and the DNA testing verified Phelan's skin was the tissue dug from beneath Anna Devereaux's perfect dusty-rose-polished fingernails. The judge accepted the confession without any state presentation of motive, though even he had suggested to the prisoner that he have the decency to explain why he'd committed this terrible crime. Phelan had remained silent and let the judge read him the guilty verdict.
"We just want to complete the report."
" 'Complete the report.' Well, if that ain't some bureaucratic crap, I don't know what is."
In fact Boyle wanted the answer for a personal, not professional, reason. So he could get some sleep. The mystery of why this drifter and petty criminal had killed the thirty-six-year-old wife and mother had been growing in his mind like a tumor. He sometimes woke up thinking about it. In the past week alone--when it looked like Phelan was going down to Katonah maximum security without ever agreeing to meet Boyle--the captain would wake up sweating, plagued by what he called Phelanmares. The dreams had nothing to do with Anna Devereaux's murder; they were a series of gut-wrenching scenes in which the prisoner was whispering something to Boyle, words that the detective was desperate to hear but could not.
"Makes no difference in the world to us or you at this point," Boyle said evenly. "But we just want to know."
" 'We'?" the prisoner asked coyly and Boyle felt he'd been caught at something. Phelan continued, "Suppose you folks have some theories."
"Not really."
"No?"
Phelan swung the chain against the table and kept looking over the captain with that odd gaze of his. Boyle was uncomfortable. Prisoners swore at him all the time. Occasionally they spit at him and some had even attacked him. But Phelan slipped that curious expression on his face--what the hell was it?--and adjusted his smile. He kept studying Boyle.
"That's a weird sound, ain't it, Captain? The chain. Hey, you like horror films?"
"Some. Not the gory ones."
Three ringing taps. Phelan laughed. "Good sound effect for a Stephen King movie, don'tcha think? Or Clive Barker. Chains at night."
"How 'bout if we go through the facts again? What happened. Might refresh your memory."
"You mean my confession? Why not? Haven't seen it since the trial."
"I don't have the video. How 'bout if I just read the transcript?"
"I'm all ears."
"On September 13 you were in the town of Granville. You were riding a stolen Honda Nighthawk motorcycle."
"That's right."
Boyle lowered his head and in his best jury-pleasing baritone read from the transcript, " 'I was riding around just, you know, seeing what was there. And I heard they had this fair or festival or something, and I kept hearing this music when I cut back the throttle. And I followed it to this park in the middle of town.
" 'There was pony rides and all kinds of food and crafts and stuff like that. Okay, so I park the bike and go looking at what they got. Only it was boring, so I walked off along this little river and before I went too far it went into this forest and I seen a flash of white or color or something I don't remember. And I went closer and there was this woman sitting on a log, looking at the river. I remember her from town. She worked in some charity store downtown. You know, where they donate stuff and sell it and the money goes to a hospital or something. I thought her name was Anne or Annie or Anna or something.' "
Anna Devereaux . . . .
" 'She was having a cigarette, like she'd snuck off to have one, like she'd promised everybody she wasn't going to but had to have one. The first thing she did when she heard me come up was drop the cigarette on the ground and crush it out. Without even looking at me first. Then she did and looked pretty freaked. I say, "Hey." She nodded and said something I couldn't hear and looked at her watch, like she had someplace she really had to be. Right. She started to walk away. And when she passed me I hit her hard in the neck and she fell down. Then I sat on her and grabbed this scarf she was wearing and pulled it real tight and I squeezed until she stopped moving, then I still kept squeezing. The cloth felt good on my wrists. I got off her, found the cigarette. It was still burning. She didn't crush it out. I finished it and walked back to the fair. I got a snow cone. It was cherry. And got on my bike and left.
" 'Anyway, what it is, I killed her. I took that pretty blue scarf in my hands and killed her with it. And there's nothing else I have to say.' "
Boyle'd heard similar words hundreds of times. He now felt something he hadn't for years. An icy shiver down his spine.
"So that's about it, James?"
"Yeah. That's all true. Every word."
"I've been through the confession with a magnifying glass, I've been through your statements to the detectives, I watched that interview, you know, the one you did with that TV reporter . . ."
"She was a fox."
"But you never said a word about motive."
The ringing again. The waist chain, swinging like a pendulum against the metal table leg.
"Why'd you kill her, James?" Boyle whispered.
Phelan shook his head. "I don't exactly . . . . It's all muddy."
"You must've thought about it some."
Phelan laughed. "Hell, I thought about it tons. I spent days talking it over with that friend of mine."
"Who? Your biker buddy?"
Phelan shrugged. "Maybe."
"What was his name again?"
Phelan smiled.
It was known that while Phelan was generally a loner, he had several friends who ran with a tough crowd. In particular, witnesses reported seeing him in the company of a biker who'd hid Phelan after the Devereaux murder. The man's identity never came to light. Boyle wanted him on aiding and abetting but was too focused on collaring Phelan himself to spend time on an accessory.
Phelan continued, "Anyway, what it was, him and me, we'd pass a bottle around and spend days talking 'bout it. See, he's a tough son of a bitch. He's hurt people in his day. But it was always 'cause they crossed him. Or for money. Or something like that. He couldn't figure out why I'd just up and kill that lady."
"Well?"
"We didn't come up with no answers. I'm just telling you that it ain't like I didn't think about it."
"So you drink some, do you, James?"
"Yeah. But I wasn't drinking the day I killed her. Nothing but lemonade."
"How well did you know her? Anna Devereaux?"
"Know her? I didn't know her."
"I thought you said you did." Boyle looked down at the confession.
"I said I'd seen her. Same as I seen the pope on TV one time. And Julia Roberts in the movies and I've seen as much of Sheri Starr the porn queen as there is to see. But that don't mean I know 'em."
"She had a husband and a child."
"I heard."
The ringing again. It wasn't the chains. The sound came from outside. The bell he'd heard when he first entered the interrogation room corridor. Boyle frowned. When he looked back Phelan was watching him, a bemused smile on his face. "That's the coffee break cart, Captain. Comes around every morning and afternoon."
"It's new."
"Started about a month ago. When they closed the cafeteria."
Boyle nodded, looked down at his blank notebook. He said, "They'd talked about getting divorced. Anna and her husband."
"What's his name?" Phelan asked. "The husband? He that gray-haired guy sitting in the back of the courtroom?"
"He's g
ray-haired, yes. His name's Bob."
The victim's husband was known as Robert to everyone. Boyle hoped that Phelan would somehow stumble over the name difference and give something away.
"So you're thinking he hired me to kill her."
"Did he?"
Phelan grunted. "No, he didn't."
The cloth felt good on my wrists . . .
Robert Devereaux had seemed to the interrogating detectives to be the model of a grieving husband. He'd passed a voluntary lie detector test and it didn't seem likely that he'd had his wife murdered for a fifty-thousand-dollar insurance policy. This wasn't much of a motive but Boyle was determined to pursue any possibility.
Anna Devereaux. Thirty-six. Well liked in the town.
Wife and mother.
A woman losing the battle to quit smoking.
I took that pretty blue scarf in my hands and killed her with it. And there's nothing else I have to say.
An old scar on her neck--from a cut when she was seventeen; she often wore scarves to conceal it. The day she'd been killed, last September, the scarf she'd worn had been a silk Christian Dior and the shade of blue was described in the police report as aquamarine.
"She was a good-looking woman, wasn't she?" Boyle asked.
"I don't remember."
The most recent photos of Anna Devereaux that either of the two men had seen had been at trial. Her eyes were open, frosted with death, and her long-nailed hand was held outward in a plea for mercy. Even in those pictures you could see how beautiful she was.
"I didn't fool around with her, if that's what you're getting at. Or even want to."
The profiling came back negative for lust-driven killing. Phelan had had normal heterosexual responses to the Rorschach and free association tests.
"I'm just thinking out loud, James. You were walking through the forest?"
"That day I killed her? I got bored with the fair and just started walking. I ended up in the forest."
"And there she was, just sitting there, smoking."
"Uh-huh," Phelan responded patiently.
"What did she say to you?"
"I said, 'Hey.' And she said something I couldn't hear."
"What else happened?"
"Nothing. That was it."
"Maybe you were mad 'cause you didn't like her muttering at you."
"I didn't care. Why'd I care about that?"
"I've heard you say a couple times the thing you hate most is being bored."
Phelan looked at the cinderblock. He seemed to be counting. "Yeah. I don't like to be bored."
"How much," Boyle asked, "do you hate it?" He gave a laugh. "On a scale of one to--"
"But people don't kill 'causa hate. Oh, they think about killing who they hate, they talk about it. But they really only kill two kindsa people--folk they're scared of and folk they're mad at. What exactly do you hate, Detective? Ponder it for a minute. Lotta things, I'll bet. But you wouldn't kill anyone 'causa that. Would you?"
"She had some jewelry on her."
"That's a question?"
"Did you rob her? And kill her when she wouldn't give you her wedding and engagement rings?"
"If she was getting divorced why wouldn't she give me her rings?"
Phelan meant this only rhetorically. To point out the flaw in Boyle's logic.
Homicide had discounted robbery as a motive immediately. Anna Devereaux's purse, eight feet from her body, had contained eleven credit cards and $180 cash.
Boyle picked up the manila folder, read some more, dropped it on the tabletop.
Why? . . . .
It seemed appropriate that the operative word when it came to James Kit Phelan's life would be a question. Why had he killed Anna Devereaux? Why had he committed the other crimes he'd been arrested for? Many of them gratuitous. Never murder, but dozens of assaults. Drunk and disorderlies. A kidnapping that got knocked down to an aggravated assault. And who exactly was James Kit Phelan? He'd never talked much about his past. Even the Current Affair story had managed to track down only two former cellmates of Phelan for on-camera interviews. No relatives, no friends, no ex-wives, no high school teacher or bosses.
Boyle asked, "James, what I hear you saying is, you yourself don't have the faintest idea why you killed her."
Phelan pressed his wrists together and swung the chain so that it rang against the table again. "Maybe it's something in my mind," he said after some reflection.
They'd given him the standard battery of tests and found nothing particularly illuminating and the department shrinks concluded that "the prisoner presents with a fairly strong tendency to act out what are classic antisocial proclivities"--a diagnosis Boyle had responded to by saying, "Thanks, Doc, his rap sheet says the same thing. Only in English."
"You know," Phelan continued slowly, "I sometimes feel something gets outta control in me." His pale lids closed over the blue eyes and Boyle imagined for a moment that the crescents of flesh were translucent and that the eyes continued to peer out into the small room.
"How do you mean, James?" The captain felt his heart rate increase. Wondered: Are we really closing in on the key to the county's perp of the decade?
"Some of it might have to do with my family. There was a lotta crap when I was growing up."
"How bad?"
"Really bad. My father did time. Theft, domestics, drunk and disorderlies. Things like that. He'd beat me a lot. He and my mother were supposedly this great couple at first. Really in love. That's what I heard but that's not what it looked like to me. You married, Captain?" Phelan glanced at his left hand. There was no band. He never wore one; as a rule Boyle tried to keep his personal life separate from the office. "I am, yes."
"How long?"
"Twenty years."
"Man," Phelan laughed. "Long time."
"I met Judith when I was in the academy."
"You been a cop all your life. I read that profile of you." He laughed. "In that newspaper issue with the headline, after you caught me. 'Checkmate.' That was funny." Then the smile faded. "See, after my mother was gone, my father never had anybody in his life for more'n a year. Part of it was he couldn't never keep a job. We moved all the time. I mean, we lived in twenty states, easy. The article said you'd lived 'round here most of your life."
He's opening up, Boyle thought excitedly. Keep him going.
"Lived three miles from here, in Marymount, going on twenty-one years."
"I've been through there. Pretty place. I lived in plenty of small towns. It was tough. School was the worst. New kid in class. I always got the crap beat out of me. Hey, that'd be one advantage, having a cop for a dad. Nobody'd pick on you."
Boyle said, "That may be true but there's another problem. I've got my share of enemies, you can imagine. So we keep moving the kids from one school to another. Try to keep 'em out of public schools."
"You send 'em to private?"
"We're Catholic. They're in a parochial school."
"That one in Granville? That place looks like a college campus. Must set you back some. Man."
"No, they're up in Edgemont. It's smaller but it still costs a bundle. You ever have kids?"
Phelan put on a tough face. They were getting close to something, Boyle could sense.
"In a way."
Encourage him. Gentle, gentle.
"How's that?"
"My mama died when I was ten."
"I'm sorry, James."
"I had two little sisters. Twins. They were four years younger'n me. I pretty much had to take care of them. My father, he ran around a lot, like I was saying. I sorta learned what it was like to be a father by the time I was twelve."
Boyle nodded. He'd been thirty-six when Jon was born. He still wasn't sure he knew what it was like to be a father. When he told Phelan this the prisoner laughed. "How old're your kids?"
"Jonathon, he's ten. Alice is nine." Boyle resisted a ridiculous urge to flash his wallet pictures.
Phelan suddenly grew somber. The chains clinked
.
"See, the twins were always wanting something from me. Toys, my time, my attention, help 'em read this, what does this mean? . . . Jesus."
Boyle noted the anger on the face. Keep going, he urged silently. He didn't write any notes, afraid that he might break the stream of thought. That could lead to the magic why.
"Man, it damn near drove me nuts. And I had to do it all by myself. My father was always on a date--well, he called 'em dates--or was passed out drunk." He looked up quickly. "Hell, you don't know what I'm talking about, do you?"
Boyle was stung by the sudden coldness in the prisoner's voice.
"I sure do," the captain said sincerely. "Judith works. A lotta times I end up with the kids. I love them and everything--just like you loved your sisters, I'm sure--but, man, it takes a lot out of you."
Phelan drifted away for a moment. Eyes as glazed as Anna Devereaux's. "Your wife works, does she? My mama wanted to work too. My father wouldn't let her."
He calls his mother "Mama," but his father by the more formal name. What do I make of that?
"They fought about it all the time. Once, he broke her jaw when he found her looking through the want ads."
And when she passed me I hit her hard in the neck and she fell down.
"What's your wife do?" Phelan asked.
"She's a nurse. At St. Mary's."
"That's a good job," Phelan said. "My mother liked people, liked to help them. She'da been a good nurse." His face grew dark again. "I think about all those times my father hit her . . . . That's what started her taking pills and stuff. And she never stopped taking 'em. Until she died." He leaned forward and whispered, "But you know the terrible thing." Avoiding Boyle's eyes.
"What, James? Tell me."
"See, sometimes I get this feeling . . . I sorta blame it all on my mother. If she hadn't whined so much about getting a job, if she'd just been happy staying home . . . . Stayed home with me and the girls, then Dad wouldn't've had to hit her."
Then I sat on her and grabbed this scarf she was wearing and pulled it real tight and I squeezed until she stopped moving, then I still kept squeezing.
"And she wouldn't've started drinking and taking those pills and she'd still be here." He choked. "I sometimes feel good thinking about him hitting her."
The cloth felt good on my wrists.
He blew a long stream of air from his lungs. "Ain't a pretty thing to say, is it?"
"Life ain't pretty sometimes, James."
Phelan looked up at the ceiling and seemed to be counting acoustical tiles. "Hell, I don't even know why I'm bringing all this up. It just kinda . . . was there. What was going through my mind." He began to say something else but fell silent and Boyle didn't dare interrupt his train of thought. When the prisoner spoke again he was more cheerful. "You do things with your family, Captain? That's something I think was the hardest of all. We never did a single damn thing together. Never took a vacation, never went to a ball game."