The Reapers: A Thriller-CP-7 by John Connolly

trying of your own.”
    “He fell over on the way to the men’s room.”
    “Yeah? How many times?”
    “He bounced. I didn’t keep count.”
    “You sure you read him his rights?”
    “Someone did. Not me.”
    “He ask for a lawyer?”
    “If he did, I didn’t hear him.”
    The detective took a long draught of the soda. Some of it dribbled down his chin, like tobacco spit.
    “He didn’t do this. It was too slick.”
    Wooster wiped his brow with his sodden handkerchief.
    “Too slick?” he said. “I knew Deber. I knew the people he ran with. They’re not the slick kind. If someone in his own circle, or someone he’d crossed, wanted him dead, they’d have shot him or stabbed him, maybe cut his balls off first just to send a message. They wouldn’t have wasted their time separating and then soldering a whistle so they could pack it with just enough explosive to tear his face off and turn his brain to sludge. They’re not that smart. That kid, though—” He stood and pointed at the glass. “—that kid is smart: smart enough to break into his school and smart enough to put together a little homemade blasting powder. Plus he had motive: Deber killed his mother and was fucking his aunt, and Deber wasn’t the gentle kind in the sack.”
    “There’s no proof that Deber killed his mother.”
    “Proof.” Wooster almost spat the word. “I don’t need proof. Some things I just know.”
    “Yeah, well, the courts look at things differently. I’m friends with the men who interviewed Deber. They did everything short of hooking him up to a battery and frying him to make him talk. He didn’t break. No evidence. No witnesses. No confession. No case.”
    In the interrogation room beyond, the boy’s head moved slightly, as though the men’s voices had carried to him, even through the thick walls. Wooster thought he might even have seen the ghost of a smile.
    “You know what else I think?” said Wooster. His voice was softer now.
    “Go on, Sherlock. I’m listening.”
    Sherlock, thought Wooster. You patronizing piece of shit. I knew your daddy, and he wasn’t much better than you are. He was a nobody, couldn’t find his shoes in the morning if someone didn’t hand them to him, and you’re still less of a cop than he was.
    “I think,” said Wooster, “that if that kid hadn’t killed Deber, then Deber would have killed him. I don’t think either of them had a choice. If it wasn’t the boy sitting in there, it would be Deber.”
    The detective gulped down the remains of his soda. Something in the evenness of Wooster’s tone suggested to him that he had overstepped the mark seconds earlier. He tried to make amends.
    “Look, Chief, you may be right. There’s something about that kid, I’ll give you that, but there’s only so much longer we can keep going with this before we have to decide whether to shit or get off the pot.”
    “Just a few more hours. You talk to him about the women, about maybe using a threat against them to loosen him up some?”
    “Not yet. Did you?”
    “Tried. It was the only time he spoke.”
    “What did he say?”
    “He told me that I wasn’t the kind of man who’d hurt women.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Was he right?”
    The chief sighed. “I guess so.”
    “Shit. There are other ways, though. Informal ways.”
    The two men looked at each other. Eventually, the chief shook his head.
    “I don’t think you’re that kind of man either.”
    “No, I don’t believe that I am.” The detective crushed the soda can and aimed it, inexpertly, at a trash basket. It bounced off the edge and landed in the corner of the room.
    “I hope you shoot better than that,” said Wooster.
    “Why, you figure I’m going to have to shoot somebody?”
    “If only things were so easy.”
    The detective patted Wooster on the shouder, then instantly regretted it as his hand was soaked with the chief’s sweat. He wiped it surreptitiously on his trouser leg.
    “We’ll try again,” he