too pretty to die.”
I was left to explain to the aunt while the rest of the squad took Williams to the roundhouse. The old woman seemed confused and stunned and took the words from my mouth as something indecipherable.
Attack a woman? He could not. There was not a bully on the street, male or female, who couldn’t slap the boy to shame since he was ten years old.
Cut her with a knife? He wasn’t capable.
Weighing the situation, Fanny Holland let loose the family ghosts. And I listened.
Arthur had been a damaged child. A low I.Q., a momma’s boy. A boy who fell further when his father left. His mother endured “until it got to be too much.”
She’d committed suicide. Cut her wrists out in the garden. Her favorite place. Had carried the knife in her picking basket. She was dead when Arthur came home from school.
“You couldn’t put a butter knife on the table since,” the old woman said. “Cut a woman? Impossible.”
Arthur’s only habit was to leave his house early each day and find a green place. A garden of sorts. She herself went with him on weekends to the Longwood Garden’s indoor arboretum in winter. It was the only thing he clung to.
When I got back to the roundhouse the TV news trucks were already stacked in the lot. Inside the bureau a knot of detectives was gathering in the hall opposite the interview rooms. I singled out one of the senior investigators and told him I thought I had some relevant information from the aunt on Williams.
“Good, Freeman. Write it up and we’ll add it to the package. The guy already confessed.”
The detective in charge didn’t want to hear about I.Q.s and broken homes and mothers who cut their own wrists.
“The guy was stalking women on boathouse row. Gettin’ his jollies watching ’em bounce down the jogging path every morning. It gets to be too much for his pants to hold, he grabs one, she fights, he cuts her.
“His footprints are next to the body. Her shoe is by the parking spot where people saw him this morning. Only thing we’re missing is the knife, which is probably in the river and DNA, which we ain’t gonna get cause he never finished the rape.
“Whata ya mean it doesn’t make sense, Freeman? The guy confessed. He keeps sayin’, ‘She was too pretty to live. She was too pretty to live.’ What more do you want?”
Charges were filed despite my suggestion that we rethink the case. The lieutenant listened politely to me and said: “There’s a sense of urgency with a case like this, Freeman. Sometimes you have to put it together quickly and act. You can’t grind on every little aspect. That’s the way it works sometimes.”
I told him I thought we had the wrong man. Three weeks later he approved my transfer back to patrol. Arthur Williams went to prison. He may still be there.
I awoke with my finger on the dime-sized scar at my neck. I had been drifting most of the night between dreams and consciousness, caught between those two places and feeling like I didn’t belong in either.
I got out of bed, lit the stove and then stood at my eastern window. An early light filtered in through leaves still dripping from the night rain. I heard the low grunt of an anhinga and spotted the bird swimming along small patches of standing water with just its head and long flexible neck showing. I watched him awhile as he stabbed into the water at fish and then I turned to start coffee. Padding across the room I stopped to pull on a pair of faded shorts and heard, or maybe felt, a soft thunk of wood against wood. The single vibration had shivered up from the foundation stilts, or maybe the staircase. I stood, listening, and heard it again. Paranoia got the best of me and I went quietly to my duffel bag and slipped my hand to the bottom, finding the oilskin-wrapped package and drawing it out. The warrant servers had indeed been careful. My 9mm handgun had been re-wrapped. The sixteen-round clip folded into the cloth so the two metals wouldn’t scrape together. It was done carefully by men who knew weapons.
I undid the trigger lock and fed the clip up into the handle and held the gun in my right hand. I had not picked it up with purpose in over two years. I stared at the barrel. Despite the packing,