A Fountain Filled With Blood (23 page)

“Chief? What’s up? Where are you?”

“In the mill. First floor. I’ve got McKinley, but I could use some help moving him.”

“I sent Mark to get the keys from the town offices.” Russ knew the town kept copies of keys to all the abandoned mills, in case the police or the volunteer fire department needed them. “He just got here. We’ll be right in.”

“Bring Mark on in, too. We’ll need two people for McKinley here. And I”—he pushed the bridge of his glasses against his face—“I think I’m going to need a little help finding my gun.”

“He wants a lawyer.” Lyle MacAuley reached across a litter of mugs and crumpled napkins and grabbed the coffeepot.

“Of course he wants a lawyer. They all want lawyers. It comes from watching too much television.” Russ started to take a mug, winced, and shifted it to his left hand.

“You oughtta get that looked at.”

“I’m a little banged up, that’s all. I’ll look like an Oriental rug in a couple of days, but I’ll live. Who’s he called?”

The deputy chief grinned. “Geoffrey Burns.”

Russ choked on his coffee. “That asshole? Since when does he pick up work from a bottom-feeder like McKinley?”

“I guess there aren’t enough car wrecks in the summer to keep him busy.”

Russ put his mug on the dispatcher’s desk and painstakingly poured the coffee wrong-handed.

“Careful with that,” Lyle warned. “You leave a spill on Harlene’s desk and she’ll eat you for lunch.” Their senior dispatcher was taking two days off after working on the Fourth.

Russ scooped McKinley’s paperwork off the desk. “I’m going to talk to him.”

“Chief, he’s asked for his lawyer.”

“I’m not going to question him. I’m going to
talk
to him.” He grinned at Lyle’s expression. “Don’t worry. I won’t violate his rights any. I just want to give him an idea of what he’s facing.”

The Millers Kill police station had been built in the days when suspects were booked at the desk and interrogated—without much thought at all to constitutional rights—in the holding cells below. Now the old cell block held an evidence locker and munitions lockup, and suspects in custody were questioned in a spacious, if windowless, room that had been carved out of two interior offices. Russ buzzed himself in and nodded to Noble Entwhistle, who was propping up the wall while keeping an eye on Elliott McKinley.

McKinley was seated at a rectangular steel table. His hands had been uncuffed, but his ankles were in restraints attached to his chair. The table and its six chairs were bolted to the floor. McKinley looked up from a close examination of his knuckles. “Can I get a smoke?” he said.

“Maybe later,” Russ said, throwing the paperwork down and easing himself into one of the chairs. His knees were beginning to ache, a deep, throbbing pain that would only intensify as the day wore on.

“I heard there’s no smoking at the county jail no more.”

“That’s right. It’s a smoke-free zone. The county doesn’t want anybody contracting lung cancer on its watch.”

“Oh, man.” McKinley’s hands twitched. His face was lined and leathery, the prematurely old face of someone who had been hitting the booze and the cigarettes since he was a boy. Despite his full-tilt attempt to avoid capture, he didn’t look defiant. Merely resigned to another turn in what was probably a lifelong string of bad luck.

“So I hear you’ve asked for Geoff Burns,” Russ said. “How’d you get his name?”

“Friend of mine. Burns repped him for a drunk-driving charge. Got him off, and he took a payment plan from my buddy, too, ’cause he didn’t have all of his fee up front.” McKinley knit his brows. “How come you want to know?”

“I was just wondering. I know Geoff. He and his wife have what you might call a general practice. You know, divorces, sue somebody for a dog bite, an occasional DUI. I would have thought you’d want more of a criminal specialist. Facing a murder charge.” He didn’t feel at this point he had to let McKinley in on the fact that the state usually supplied a capital defender when prosecutors went for the death penalty.

McKinley’s face drained of all color. “What?” he squeaked. He looked wildly toward Noble, who was still stolidly planted against the wall. “They didn’t say nothing about murder! They said assault!”

Russ glanced down at the sheets of paper in front of him. “Oh, yeah, that, too. Two assaults. One of those’ll probably be a felony assault, since it was committed while you were robbing the video store.”

“We did not!”

Yes.
Russ felt an electric pulse surge through his body. He forced his hands and face to remain relaxed, his eyes on the paper in front of him. “Resisting arrest, assaulting an officer of the law, breaking and entering—that would be the mill. There’s a warrant out on you for failure to report to your parole officer. You’ve also got three unpaid speeding tickets, you owe back child support to DHS in the amount of fifteen thousand dollars”—he titch-titched at this—“and we’re charging you with capital murder in the death of Bill Ingraham.” He looked up at McKinley, his voice calm and matter-of-fact. “And if you’ve been working under the table to avoid that child support, you may be in trouble with the IRS.”

McKinley tried to stand up but could only manage to list drunkenly across the table because of the leg restraints. “I didn’t have nothing to do with no murder! I never laid a hand on Bill Ingraham!”

Russ leaned back in his chair. “I really can’t discuss it with you, Elliott. Seeing as how you’ve got a call in to your lawyer.” He took off his glasses and polished them on the front of his shirt. “Geoffrey Burns. I think he did a breaking and entering once. That guy who was stealing drugs from the local pharmacies. You remember that case, Officer Entwhistle?”

“Fuck the lawyer!” McKinley’s color had come back now. His face was blotched with red and purple. “I didn’t kill Bill Ingraham! I never went near him!”

Russ glanced up at him. “Well, that’s what I had figured originally. ’Cause when we picked you up in the Chhouk case, we only wanted you for a witness. To tell the truth, I never figured you for the kind of guy who would do the deed himself. Just that you had some rowdy friends.”

“That’s right! That’s exactly right!”

“But when we come to pick you up to ask you about these assaults, you take off. Then you try to kill me by dropping that chain on me. And when we finally get you in to talk, first thing you do is call a lawyer.”

“Chris said to! Chris said if anything happened, I should call a lawyer and let him handle it.”

Even Noble shifted at that. Russ carefully replaced his glasses, not looking at McKinley. “Yeah? Well, Chris’s not here, is he? You are. And you’re the one sitting in the hot seat. So to speak.” He glanced at Noble.

“Actually, it’s a gurney now, Chief,” Noble said. “Lethal injection.”

“That’s right.” Russ turned to McKinley, who had collapsed back onto his chair. “You’re a good friend, Elliott. I knew that when you wouldn’t give up any information on the Chhouk case. But it takes one hell of a friend to be willing to go to the death house in Clinton.”

“It’s called the UCP now, Chief. The Unit for Condemned Prisoners.”

“Thanks, Officer Entwhistle. I guess my head’s still stuck in the sixties, when they used to send ’em to Sing Sing to fry.”

McKinley made a sound deep in his throat.

“Hmm? I’m sorry, did you say something, Elliott?”

“You guys,” he whispered, then coughed and spoke more loudly. “You guys are just messing with my head. To get me to talk.”

“You’ve already expressed to Officer Entwhistle and Deputy Chief MacAuley that you decline to make a statement without representation. Isn’t that right? I don’t want you to talk with us. That might be violating your rights, Elliott. I’m sure Geoff Burns will be able to give you real good advice. I think he got the pharmacy burglar off.”

“Two years, plus two probation,” Noble said.

“Thank you, Officer Entwhistle.”

McKinley leaned forward. “Chris Dessaint,” he said hoarsely.

Russ leaned forward as well, opening his hands over the papers on the table. “Elliott,” he said, his voice very quiet, “if you want to tell us your side of the story, it’s got to be on the record. ’Cause I’m not going to waste my time chasing down another suspect if your statement is useless when it comes time to go to court. Now, if you’re willing to put it on tape after being readvised of your right to have attorney’s counsel, I sure would like to hear what you have to say.”

Elliott peered into his face. “I still get to talk with my lawyer?”

“Yes, you do.”

“Okay, then.”

Russ rose, unlocked the door, and strode down the hall to grab a tape recorder from the squad room. He spotted Lyle. “Run the name Chris Dessaint. Anything we’ve got.”

“What’s up?”

“Elliott’s giving us a statement.”

Lyle’s response was lost as Russ reentered the interrogation room. He turned on the machine, read McKinley his rights again, and had him state he understood and was voluntarily making his statement without the presence of his lawyer.

“Okay, Elliott, I don’t want to put any words in your mouth. Why don’t you tell me how you and Chris got into whomping on gay guys. Start at the beginning.”

Russ expected to hear about Emil Dvorak, so he was surprised when McKinley said, “We went up to Lake George to party. Me and Chris and our friend Nathan. Then we decided to go barhopping. Anyway, we were outside some place—I think maybe it was the Blue Lagoon, or the Blue Parrot, something like that—and we went out back to smoke a joint. This guy comes out. You know, perfect teeth, nice clothes. He starts talking, and right away I know he’s a fag.” He frowned. “The guy starts hitting on us, wanting to know if we want to party with some of his buddies, bragging that they got some good stuff. Man, it was like, you know, all day long I gotta take orders from some rich fag, and now here I am on my own time, having to listen to the same bullshit. And Chris, he’s a real good-looking dude, always has girls falling all over him, and I’m thinking, This queer’s hitting on Chris! Anyway, I can see Chris is thinking just the same as I am. So we tell this guy off and punch him around.”

“Nathan, too?”

“Naw, he just kept bleating about getting out of there. Like the fag’s buddies were going to come out and take us on. Anyway, it felt good. You know, like we were standing up for our right not to have all that fag stuff shoved in our faces. We didn’t really talk about it until almost a week later, when Chris asked me if I’d like to do it again.”

“Find someone to rumble with?”

“Yeah. ‘Go on a queer-hunt’ was how he said it. Then he said there might even be a few bucks in it for us.”

Russ blinked. “How so? You were going to find someone loaded and roll him first?”

“No, Chris had a friend. Someone who felt like we did, about the fags getting way too pushy and out of control. His friend couldn’t get out and do anything about it, but he wanted to bankroll us. To make a statement.”

Russ felt as if he had gotten on the Northway to Albany and had suddenly looked around and seen Kansas instead. He inhaled and exhaled slowly. “Chris’s friend—you ever meet him?”

“Nope. Just Chris did. He lived up to his word, though. We got the money, and some bonuses, too.”

The way he said the word
bonuses
was a tip-off. “Drugs?” Russ asked.

“Yeah. Chris handed it out—ecstasy, meth.”

“Did Chris work with you? Had he ever met your boss?”

“Nah. He works at the Shape warehouse, doing inventory. You know, punching in the numbers on a handheld.”

“How do you know him?”

“We went to school together.”

Russ nodded. “Okay. So Chris said you could get paid for finding a gay guy and beating him up. Then what?”

“Chris said we needed to find someone else to help us. That we needed three all together.”

“Your friend Nathan was out, I take it.”

“Oh yeah. Anyway, I knew this guy Jason Colvin, from when I hung around with Arnie Rider. I thought Jason might be game. So I talked with him, and he was down with it, so we were ready to go.”

“What happened next?”

“Chris told us about the fags running the inn on Route One thirty-one, down a ways from where I work. He thought that would be a good place to find somebody. He told us he would let us know when. We made a couple drive-bys on nights when we had been partying, just jerking them a little. And then Chris gave me a call that Wednesday and told me we were on for that night.”

“He picked that night particularly?”

“Yeah, which I thought was kinda weird, since we all had to be at work the next day.”

“What did you do?”

“We got together in the woods first, partied a little. Chris passed out some meth, so Jase and I were feeling pretty pumped. Then we drove by, and we saw a bunch of guys out in front. One of ’em was getting into this Chrysler convertible—you know, your typical rich old dude car. So we went down to Route One twenty-one and pulled off to the side, figuring he had to come that way and we’d be able to see him in time. I was at the wheel, ’cause it was my truck, and Jase and Chris were keeping watch. We all were smoking a little more. My idea was to force the guy off the road, but Jason yelled that the lights were coming and it was too late to get all the way back on the road. I was backing up, so he wound up hitting my truck, which really burned me. I put a lot of money and time into that truck.”

Russ’s throat tightened. He nodded for McKinley to go on.

“So we did him. It felt kind of righteous.” He stopped. “Man, can I have a cigarette?”

“Officer Entwhistle, bring Elliott a pack and an ashtray.” Noble unlocked the interrogation room and disappeared around the corner.

“You know,” McKinley said in a confiding tone, “I probably wouldn’t have done all this stuff if I hadn’t been high while I was doing it. Chris was handing out shit like it was candy. He was calling the shots. I was, like, just along for the ride.”

“Yeah.”

Noble reappeared and handed Russ a pack of Marlboros and a disposable aluminum ashtray. Russ slid them across the table to McKinley and fished in his pocket for his dad’s Zippo, circa 1945 and still working great.