The Squad Room (21 page)

“Of course,” Medveded said, moving swiftly to the door to call for a bottle of water. He knew this moment was critical—he needed to keep Anderson talking, and give him as little time as possible to think about what was happening. “Water’s on the way, Brian—can you remember what happened next? I know sometimes it’s hard to remember—”

“No, I remember fine,” Anderson said. Medveded noted just the subtlest hint of braggadocio in his voice. “She started to calm down—I guess she figured she couldn’t fight her way out with both of us holding her down. Adam had this look in his eyes—he didn’t say much, but I’ve seen that look before, and it always ended badly. It was never this bad before, though. He took the underwear out of her mouth, and started asking her questions about where she kept her money and jewelry in her house. She said she had a safe in the basement, and we could take everything she had. She starting telling us her husband would be home at any minute, but looking around the house it didn’t seem like anyone else lived with her. She was crying, totally scared. I went to check the closets and there were no men’s clothes anywhere. Adam called her a
lying bitch—
First you bite me, and then you lie to me,
he says—and that’s when he really went crazy. He had me hold her, and he went into the kitchen. He ripped out all the drawers, and came back with a plastic supermarket bag. He put the bag over her head and took off his belt, and started to choke her with the bag over her head. He kept tightening and releasing his belt, to kind of control her breathing.”

“Did you ever try to stop him, or leave the house without him?”

“No,” Anderson said. “He’s my best friend, even though he was acting crazy. And I couldn’t leave him alone.”

“I understand,” Medveded said, betraying no emotion. The son of a bitch had just locked himself in as a willing accomplice.

One of the Boston detectives came in and handed Medveded two bottles of water. The interruption came at a good time; the flow of the interrogation was undisturbed. Medveded handed Anderson one of the bottles, and cracked the other open.

“Cheers,” he said, raising his bottle with a slight smile.

“Cheers,” Anderson replied, returning the smile.

No remorse there,
Medveded thought. No one who felt any compunction for having done something like this could smile, much less return a toast, during their confession. It was as surefire a tell as the so-called “sleep of the guilty,” when suspects fell fast asleep on the hard wooden benches in their cells almost as soon as their cell door had been shut.

“Right—so go on, what happened next?” Medveded asked.

“Well, we dragged her into the basement with the bag on her head. She looked terrified, but in a weird way I think she liked it. You know, one of those freaky chicks.”

“And how many times did you have sex with her?”

“None. I mean, I guess I did, technically. But I didn’t even want to do it at first—I even tried to take the bag off her head. Adam told her to blow me, and pushed her face at my crotch. I was afraid that she might bite me, but Adam had the belt around her neck and told her if she bit me, he’d kill her. Like a dog on a leash. They tend to do as they’re told—it was kind of cool. She was good. I came down her throat and
all over her hair. She was a freaky bitch—I’m telling you, she kind of liked it. I got a bit scared, because of all the CSI shows talking about DNA, but Adam said not to worry, because we didn’t have any on file.”

“And did he have sex with her too?”

Anderson gave a short, scoffing kind of laugh. “He tried, but he was having a little problem,” he said. “Probably because he’d drank too much.”

“So he couldn’t get an erection,” Medveded said.

Anderson laughed out loud.

“What’s so funny?” Medveded asked, smiling along with him. “Oh, just the word
erection
,” Anderson said. “I just don’t hear it much, and it makes me laugh. But yeah, he couldn’t get an erection.”

“Did that make him more angry?”

“Yeah, a lot more. He told me he wanted to get some jumper cables, and went into another room in the basement to try to find some.”

“What did you do while he was gone?”

“Nothing, really. I just held the belt and made her crawl around on all fours like a dog, you know, just trying to keep her scared. He came back in and said he couldn’t find any cables, but that these would do, and he held up a pair of pliers and a box cutter. She started screaming again, and he stuffed her panties back in her mouth. He tried to get it up and fuck her again, but it just wasn’t happening, so he starts telling her it’s her fault, because she’s such an ugly whore, and starts biting her all over. He told me that if I wanted to be even with him I better do the same, and I didn’t want to, but I did. He had the gag in her mouth and watched her face while he pulled at her pussy with the pliers. It was brutal, man; I couldn’t really stand it. He really started biting her, really frantic, and I wanted to go. He tried to fuck her one more time and he just couldn’t, and he lost it and cut off her lips. She passed out and I got some water and threw it on her and tried to revive her. We moved her to the couch; she was bleeding real bad. Then he put the bag over her head and made it so she stopped breathing. I didn’t do that—he did that.”

“That was our understanding of it, too,” Medveded said evenly. “What’d you do while he was killing her?”

“I went upstairs to look for money, to make it look like a robbery. We got about four hundred dollars.”

“Four hundred and forty, by the receipts we pulled up,” Medveded said, making up a number.

Anderson shrugged. “I don’t know; could have been,” he said dismissively. “Anyway, when he was done Adam put the box cutter in her hand and wiped it off with a paper towel, and we got out of there. We got a room at some shitty little motel, cleaned up, and got out of California.”

“Right, well, that makes sense with what we knew about the La Jolla incident,” Medveded said, making sure his voice was edged with just the right tone of impatience. “The others are a bit more complicated, I expect.”

“Not much,” Anderson said with a slight yawn.

“Well, let’s talk about that next,” Medveded said calmly. Inside, it felt as though he was exploding. Not only had he just taken a confession on a crime none of them had been aware of, but he could sense Anderson’s prideful detachment from the crimes he’d committed, and behind the impenetrable front of Medveded’s empathy, he hated the young murderer. It was inexpressibly difficult, this part of the job—sitting in a room for hours with a person so reprehensible, they made you sick; listening to them recount horrific acts with cold indifference, all the while acting as though what they were saying was the most normal thing in the world to you. But Medveded had mastered it.

Anderson sat quietly a moment. Before he could get too into his thoughts, Medveded leaned in.

“You know, Brian,” he went on, “we’ve seen a lot in this line of work, and in the grand scheme of things, what you did there? It wasn’t so bad. Obviously, it was mainly Adam’s doing, this whole thing, and your part in it was completely secondary—but besides that, you know, I get it.” He dropped his voice to a confidential whisper, looking toward
the door. “I mean, I know what it’s like to grow up wealthy; I grew up in Lake Success, over in Long Island. Always had money in my pocket. And did
I
get respect from women? No. And why? Because deep down, they’re all bitches, my friend.” Anderson smiled slightly, nodding his head in agreement. Medveded continued. “Far as I’m concerned, they
all
deserve a little of that. You can’t take it as far as your friend Adam did, but that wasn’t you. And you said she enjoyed it—didn’t you say that?”

“Yeah, I think she did,” Anderson smirked.

“And the others?”

“Harder to say, but yeah, I think so.”

“Well, I’ve got news for you, Brian,” Medveded said, nodding. “They almost
all
do. It’s not talked about, but it’s true. Trust me, I’ve seen a lot of these types of cases, and I’m sure that if
you
thought they were enjoying it, it’s because they were. But I’m getting off-topic,” he said, allowing himself to appear the slightest bit flustered. “What happened when you guys got back to Boston?”

“Well, Adam got obsessed with what had happened in San Diego. I mean
obsessed
. He even went online and was researching murder and sex crimes from the past.”

“So was that when you guys planned the New York murders?”

Anderson held up a finger.
“I
didn’t. That was all Adam—he just kept telling me about all this stuff he was reading about, and what a rush it had been back in California. I didn’t like how it had ended, but he said it’d be different. He kept saying the next woman would be better, prettier, sexier—he said we’d make sure she was someone who’d excite him.”

“So tell me about the first,” Medveded said.

“The one in Queens,” Anderson said thoughtfully, to Medveded’s secret gratification. So the Queens woman
had
been the first, as he’d suspected. “That was really similar to the San Diego one, actually; at least in how it started. We’d gone to see the tree in Rock Center that day. When we were leaving, driving down Fifth Avenue, this cute blonde cuts us off. Adam beeps at her, and she flips him the bird”—Anderson raised
his middle finger demonstratively—“and suddenly it’s like déjà vu all over again. Here we are, following this broad all the way to Queens. I know the area okay; I’ve got a few relatives in Jamaica Estates.

“So anyway, she pulls into her driveway. Her house is completely dark—no sign of life. Adam parked around the corner, near a house under construction, and we walked back to her house. We’re waiting out front, kind of talking about what’s going on—I just wanted to make sure it didn’t go as far as the last one, but Adam was really getting excited—and she opens the front door. I think she was throwing something out. She was pretty startled; I mean, we were standing
right
in front of her door. She tried to slam it on us, but Adam was really fast, and I helped him, and together we were too strong.” Anderson got a strange look. “We’ve always been a team, him and me. I mean, he was in charge of all this,” he was quick to add, “but it’s hard to stop helping someone when you’re so used to it, you know?”

“Of course I know,” Medveded said. “How do you think these police-brutality things happen, where there’s more than one cop involved? You get one bad guy, doing one bad thing—how does anyone else go along with it? It’s the camaraderie. You work, or live, or go to school with someone long enough, you can’t just turn on them when things get complicated; it’s just human nature. But please,” he said, forcing another friendly smile, “go on.”

After two and a half more hours of interviewing, Brian Anderson had confessed to four murders. One more to go, and Alex Medveded would have done his job to the absolute best of his ability. Not that he hadn’t already; looking on from the next room, a number of detectives were all but taking notes on the techniques he’d been using. The man was an absolute artist—he’d been so convincing in the course of the interview, some of his own colleagues had caught themselves wondering whether he didn’t have a side of himself he’d been hiding from them all along.

“So, Brian,” Medveded was saying, as patiently and deliberately as in the beginning, “we have the woman in La Jolla, one in Jamaica
Estates, one on Sutton Place, and one on 63
^rd
Street in Manhattan. I really appreciate your cooperation in telling me all this; it’s going to be crucial in the case against Adam, and in helping you however we can. Now we just have one more to talk about: the woman from Twenty-First and Park Avenue South.”

Anderson looked at Medveded like he’d suddenly sprouted a second head.

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

It was the closest Medveded came to betraying surprise in the whole interview, but he kept his composure. “Come on, Brian,” he insisted. “We’ve really had an open communication between us over the last several hours. I feel like we understand each other really well. Don’t tell me you’re not going to tell me about this one, after all that?”

“I swear, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Anderson said, shaking his head vehemently. “We only did the ones I told you about—nothing else.”

Now came the second real surprise for Detective Medveded: he felt instinctively that Brian was telling him the truth. Perhaps Adam had done this one on his own—? He decided to take Anderson’s word, and feel out that possibility.

“Don’t you think Adam could have done it without you? I mean, from what you told me, he was never able to perform while you were there anyway; you even said you’d started calling him Dead Dick, after the one in Queens.”

Anderson laughed. “Yeah, that’s right—he was a dead dick mother-fucker, all right. But I don’t think he’d have done it on his own; I mean, I’m sure he
could
have,” he caught himself, “but I just don’t know when he would have done it without my knowing. I can’t remember the last time we weren’t together. When’d it happen, anyway?”

“Three days ago,” Medveded said immediately, knowing the rapport he’d built with Anderson was worth infinitely more than the “
you
don’t ask the questions,
I
ask the questions” stance a lot of cops would take.

“No way,” Anderson said. “We haven’t left Boston for a week.”

“All right, I believe you,” Medveded said, meaning it. His mind was racing. “Listen, Brian, can I get you something to eat? I know we’ve been at it a long time.”

“Sure—I’m pretty hungry,” Anderson agreed. “Something good.”

“Sure—whatever you want,” Medveded said. After everything Anderson had just given up, he’d buy him a goddamn steak dinner if he asked for it. “I’m going to grab someone to order for you; think about what you want in the meantime. And Brian,” he said on his way to the door, “I think you appreciate that I’ve said some stuff in here that I would rather not have spread around. You know I’m here to help you; can I have your word that you won’t repeat what I’ve said to you?”