“Not necessarily,” I told him. “I’ve known a lot of kids in my life who dressed like they could play, but could barely dribble a ball down the court.”
“Ain’t that the damned truth,” he said, allowing himself a single laugh. “Did you play, Doctor—uh—say, I didn’t get your name…”
“Don’t bother with the ‘Doctor’ thing—most people call me L.T., why don’t you?”
“Yeah?” Latrell answered, now flashing a smile full of very healthy, very white teeth, one of which was framed in gold. “You mean ‘L.T.,’ like Lawrence Taylor was L.T.?”
“I do, exactly,” I said, taking out my pack of cigarettes and offering him one, which he took. “Although I try to keep people from making that connection anymore, out of respect. You see, I wasn’t named after him or anything. Just a coincidence of the initials that I liked, when I was a kid. He was kind of a hero of mine, but we can keep that between you and me.”
“Hey, man, who the fuck’m I gonna tell?” Latrell let out another short laugh, as he lit his cigarette off my lighter. By the glow of its flame, I could see his handsome features in more detail, along with the deep, plum-tinted brown of his skin. “So—you ever play ball, L.T.?” he asked, blowing out a large cloud of smoke. “Basketball, football, anything?”
“Only in my dreams, Latrell,” I answered; and to his puzzled look I added, “You need two legs for ball.” Then I tapped at my artificial left limb with my cane.
“Aw, shit, man,” he said, embarrassed and moving from one foot to the other quickly. “I—I’m fuckin’ sorry, man, I didn’t know—”
“Of course not,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“What, uh—what happened? If you don’t mind me asking.”
“No, I don’t mind. It was cancer. The leg was never right, but the doctors didn’t diagnose it correctly until I was twelve.” I failed to say that those doctors hadn’t had the chance to so diagnose it, because my father wouldn’t believe that, after producing three star athletes, his genes had handed down such a defect; and in his deliberate blindness he prevented any proper scans for over two years, during which time much more than more bone was eaten away…
“Shit, man, doctors,” Latrell said, wiping his nose and snorting some snot back hard. “I hate them motherfuckers. Growing up, I got hurt, I’d always let my moms take care of it.”
“Your mother sounds like she was a good woman,” I said carefully.
He looked off into the apartment to his left, where I could now see the small butt of a candle burning. In the absence of any other illumination, it seemed quite bright: bright enough, at least, to light the look of melancholy that came into Latrell’s face. “She was,” he said quietly; and then, turning to see my quizzical expression, he added, “Died. Three years ago last March. She had cancer, too—breast cancer. Fucking doctors didn’t get it in time.”
Pausing briefly, I replied, “I’m truly sorry, Latrell. I lost my own mother. A car accident.” He didn’t need to hear that whole ugly story of her drunkenly plowing into a tree after a fight with my father. “Long time ago, though—not that that helps. You don’t really get over it.”
“Truth, man. But ain’t that kinda what you people are supposed to do? Get people over shit?” To another puzzled look from me, he said, “You told that state cop that you study the criminal mind—so you’re a shrink, right? Like them criminal psychologists on TV?”
“I’m a shrink, and a doctor, too. But—not like the ones on TV.”
“But you’re here to figure out if I’m, like, fucked in the head, right? And if it was maybe me who killed Donnie, insteada him doin’ himself?”
I sidestepped the larger issue: “That was his name—Donnie?”
“Yeah,” Latrell said somberly. “I didn’t know him, much—didn’t even know his last name. He come from over in North Briarwood, went to school down at South Briarwood Combined. Played ball for them, point guard; was fuckin’ good, too. But that was before…”
“That was before his family disappeared on him?”
Latrell looked up at me from his cigarette in wonder. “Now, how the fuck you know that?” he said; but before I could answer, he agitated again: “Aw, man, you ain’t supposed to know that, nobody’s supposed to know, you can’t tell the cops I told you that! He’s just some junkie kid OD’d, that’s all. Shit, where those motherfuckers at, anyway…” And with a sudden move, he pulled up his jersey and reached toward an object that was somehow secured beneath the band of his shorts: perhaps the gun that Weaver and the cops had thought him to have, although the possibility remained remote, to me. Still, his mental state was highly volatile, and it was necessary to get him back onto a safe subject quickly:
“Latrell?” I said; but he continued to fret about where they were. “Latrell,” I repeated. “Listen to me.” That seemed to break through: he let his jersey fall suddenly, and looked me in the eye. “I have to ask you, Latrell—you must know that we saw the dead baby downstairs.”
“Oh—yeah,” he said. “That’s why they wanted Donnie here, in the first place—they figured somebody’s going to find the baby, stinkin’ like it does. Nothing brings the law like dead babies. Then they’d find Donnie.”
“Do you know what happened? To the infant, I mean?”
Latrell shrugged. “Junkie hooker fucked up, maybe; maybe just some kid thought she could handle it, and couldn’t. Most can’t. It don’t matter, does it? Whoever it was just dumped the little guy in that fuckin’ toilet, man. But that ain’t got nothin’ to do with this.”
“Except that they were using the baby to make sure that Donnie would be found?”
“Yeah, like I said. See, after Donnie’s family cut out, he heard in school that there was people who could get him a new home, and he found ’em. They sent him off pretty quick, I don’t know where. But he came back, after a couple-few months. Didn’t like it, much, I guess. And they were gonna try to find him somewheres else, but—well, he got tired of the whole thing. OD’d over in their place, but they couldn’t let anybody find him there. So I got a call; it’s a shit thing to say, but I needed the dough, and somebody told ’em I knew Donnie…”
This statement was full of intriguing details, but I couldn’t press him on them; not in his current state. He seemed willing to relate the tale at his own pace, anyway, and so I merely replied, “All right, then. Why don’t we go into the apartment, so that I can confirm that Donnie did, in fact, kill himself. Then we can get you out of all this—how’s that sound?”
“Sound like you don’t know what the police get up to, when they come into North Fraser,” he answered. “That’s what it sound like. But okay, L.T.—let’s go…”
We passed through the front doorway of the apartment, Latrell leading the way and my cane seeming to make a very loud sound in the silent building. The boy Donnie was in the large room at the end of the small entryway, alone in a corner, propped up against some cushions that appeared to have been scavenged from other apartments. But a light blanket of deep blue wool had been draped over them and around the boy, I assumed by Latrell himself.
“Must seem stupid, putting him in a blanket in this kinda heat,” Latrell said quickly. “But it just didn’t seem right, leaving him around here, like just another piece of shit. I swear to you, I had nothin’ to do with him dying, I was just supposed to get him over here from their place in their big-ass capped truck, that’s all. But I just couldn’t leave him like that. I had the blanket at home; it’s soft, anyway, and…well. You’ll want to take a look at him, I guess.”
I had more questions about nearly every part of this statement; but it wasn’t going to do any good to start asking them too quickly. And so I walked over to the boy, near whom the small piece of thick candle burned on something that might, once, have been a brass candle base, before a great many people had used it for a drug cookstove and an ashtray. Leaning down, I pulled open one of the boy’s eyelids, and held the candle close to his face; after that, I moved dow
n to various parts of his chest, back, arms, legs, and feet, getting a sense of his lividity, and trying to determine if this had been the position in which he’d died, or if, like the other three victims, he had been in some significant way posed after death.
Soon enough I found the telltale mark. Less visible than the others, due to his skin tone, but there: encircling his thin neck and causing a large bruise at the back was the telltale sign of a narrow cord that had been used to hang him. Yet, so far as it was possible to tell from so cursory an examination, it seemed that little Donnie had also been quickly cut down and then spent a significant amount of time in a position not unlike that in which he now lay. His blood had pooled in his lower back and buttocks, and there were no signs of bruising that might have indicated he’d been restrained. In addition, the 28-gauge needle that still protruded from a spot very close to the cross branch of the median cubital vein of his left arm, and was attached to a good, clean hospital syringe (the packaging for which lay on the floor), had apparently entered the vessel neatly, giving no indication that it had been forced in. To all appearances, then, Donnie had died by hanging, and then someone had cut him down and used a needle and syringe—a brand-name medical model—to try to stage an overdose; and the toxicology report might show, I suspected, that they’d done it so soon after his death that the heroin could actually have entered his bloodstream.
Yet I knew that I could not trust the FIC techs that would gather the trace evidence to confirm this theory; and so, looking around to see that Latrell was not yet hovering over me, I picked up the syringe packaging from the floor and tucked it into my pocket. Such amounted to removing evidence from a crime scene, true; but I believed that Mike would be able to read the syringe’s significance far more ably than Nancy Grimes’ crew. Indeed, if I had thought I could take the needle from the boy’s arm without upsetting Latrell, I likely would have done so.
Pulling away a bit, I held the candle a little higher, and seemed to see the boy as a boy for the first time: a cute kid, he must have been in life, but one no less desperate to leave this world. And not necessarily a junkie, either: for there were no track marks on his body, save in the arm with the needle in it. All these details fit the pattern we had established for the other dead children, the key difference being that the person who had been ordered to create the illusion that Donnie had died in that drug den was not long gone, but rather was readily at hand: he was the amiable, very sensitive young man with whom I had been speaking—and it was time to test whether he could answer some more pointed questions than I had yet dared put to him.
“Latrell,” I said, returning the candle to the floor, “I need to ask you—is this the first time you’ve done this kind of thing?”
“What kind of thing?” he responded uneasily.
“Moved a body—for them,” I said.
“Fuck, yeah, man!” At that he was back to shifting from foot to foot nervously—and then he looked down at the object that was held in the band of his shorts. “Shit, you think I could do this twice? Where the fuck are they, why the fuck don’t they hit me back?”
It then became obvious what was around his waist: not a gun at all, but a cell phone on a nylon belt. And in that phone was likely all the information we would need to track the people who had given Latrell his orders. He would plainly not name them; indeed, such questions might so frighten him that he would bolt, taking the invaluable phone with him. I needed to persuade him instead to come outside with me, and to place himself in Mitch’s custody, before Frank Mangold got ahold of him, locked him into a BCI interrogation room, and subjected him to treatment that might, in his nervous state, cause a breakdown. Mitch and I had the right to ask for such: we had taken the risk, and we could legitimately demand that this young man be made our charge. There would be an argument, of course; but I believed that we would win it.
“I don’t know why they don’t, Latrell,” I finally replied, praying that his phone would remain silent. “But it doesn’t look like they’re going to—and that means you’re on your own.” He groaned tearfully, but I pressed on: “So you have to start thinking about yourself. You’ve done nothing terribly wrong—you can still walk away from this. But only if you give yourself up to the right group of cops. The man who was with me, Major McCarron, he’s the head of the State Police’s Troop G—he’s an honorable man, and if he and I can keep you away from the Fraser cops and the Bureau of Criminal Investigation, I think you’ll be okay.”
Latrell tried to get a grip on himself, sniffing back more tears and mumbling, “Yeah—yeah, I gotta get outta this. And the state cops are better than the Fraser assholes. But I ain’t no snitch, man, I ain’t giving anybody but myself up! You gotta know that.”
I nodded to reassure him. “I do, Latrell. But we need to get you somewhere safe.”
He paused for a moment, studying my face. “You ain’t bullshittin’ me, right, L.T.?” he finally said, not so much suspiciously as desperately. “I gotta trust somebody, here, man, they fuckin’ left me hangin’ on this—but I can trust you, right?”
“You can trust me,” I answered. “But let’s get down to Major McCarron. He’ll back up what I’ve said, I promise you that. We can leave Donnie here, they’ll take good care of him.”
“Okay,” Latrell said at length. “Okay, it’s my only play. I gotta trust you.”
“Good,” I said. “You’re doing the right thing, Latrell. So let’s go, now…”
We left Donnie behind, and left him the candle, too, because Latrell believed that he owed it to the kid to keep him, not only wrapped in his blanket, but with some kind of shield against the lonely darkness, as well. This seemed further proof that Latrell’s denial of having kept Weaver a hostage was genuine: I had little trouble believing that the ME had become so disoriented by fear, not only of the young man, but also and likely even more of what he knew to be the various police forces’ capacity to shoot the wrong person, especially amid such general confusion, that he’d gladly surrendered himself without Latrell demanding it, until he could be rescued from his own terrors—when all his “captor” was really requesting was understanding.
But there are, of course, two sides to every story, truthful or false though they may be; and the false side of this one was about to cause an unexpected crisis. I was surprised, when we reached the top of the stairs, to see that Mitch was not waiting below; but I was not overly concerned, as I had only a vague recollection of his last instructions, and determined that he would be just outside the house, not wanting to scare Latrell off with his Glock. So, in the renewed darkness, I did my best to sound encouraging, and urged the young man on below.
“Let’s just get outside,” I said, “and then Major McCarron can get us over to the State Police cruisers before anybody knows what’s up.”
Latrell nodded, silently and nervously, and we descended into the open night air. The few working streetlights outside were almost blinding, in comparison to what I’d grown accustomed to within; and I could see that Latrell was similarly affected. Yet as I held up my right hand to shield my eyes, I gradually determined that it was not the streetlights that were causing the problem: the lights of the fleet of squad cars and cruisers, along with the searchlights, were back on. And Mitch was still nowhere to be seen.
“Hang out here a second, Latrell,” I said, when we got a few yards from the building’s front door. The young man’s anxiety was mounting fast; but he’d come to genuinely trust me, and he held his ground. I took a few steps farther down toward the cars: the first real mistake I’d made. With my hand still above my eyes, I called out, “Mitch? What the hell’s going on with those lights?” But no answer came. “Mitch, where are you, he’s coming out freely, there’s no problem!” Still nothing; so I turned back to Latrell, with my hand still up, and shrugged: my second error. I hadn’t realized that, in such a position, my jacket would be pulled up just enough to reveal my shoulder holster, onto which I’d pinned Pete’s badge: and the sight of that gleaming ob
ject, along with the butt of my Colt, pushed poor Latrell right over the edge.
“Aw, fuck!” He made a move to bolt. “You a fucking cop, man, you fucking lied to me!” Stepping back toward the building, he also grabbed his cell phone from his waist. I was sure he simply meant to see if the people who had hired him had finally called; whatever his intent, it was a fatal mistake. “This was supposed to be easy!” he declared one last time—
And, knowing what would happen next, I called out, “Latrell! No!” just before one of the cops shouted those words that have become too familiar to so many Americans:
“Suspect has a gun!”
I was going to declare the truth to the officers when the wind was knocked out of me by Mitch, who flew out of nowhere and into my chest, knocking me to the ground. “Get down, Trajan!” he shouted as he did—and then the rest of them opened up.
I would learn only later just how many shots had been fired. Some two dozen bullets slammed into Latrell’s head and body, at various points, and at least three hit the hand that held the fatal cell phone, causing it to whip backward. But these were all gratuitous injuries: the first was the only one that mattered. It caught Latrell right in the center of the forehead, paralyzing his nerve reflexes and freezing his movements—all save his fall backward, that is. A Savage 10FP scoped rifle had fired the mortal .308 Winchester round, I would soon learn: the work of one of Mangold’s snipers. Latrell struck the pavement just as he’d been standing, despite the impact of his other wounds. I saw all this, even though Mitch was preventing me from getting back up until the cease-fire had been called.
“God damn it!” I then shouted, grabbing my cane and struggling to my feet. “What the fuck is the matter with you, Mitch, the kid was unarmed!”