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

said.
    “Do that,” said Wooster. “He killed him. I know he killed him.”
    He didn’t look at the detective as he left the room. Instead, his eyes remained fixed on the young black man in the room, and the young black man stared back at him.

    Two hours later, Wooster was at his desk, drinking water and swatting at flies. The two detectives had taken a break from the questioning and the stifling heat of the interrogation room. They were sitting outside the station house in their shirtsleeves, smoking, the remains of hamburgers and fries on the steps beside them. Wooster knew that the interrogation was almost at an end. They had nothing. After almost two full days of questioning, the boy had uttered only two sentences. The second was his judgment of Wooster. The first was to tell them his name.
    “My name is Louis.”
    Louis, the way Wooster’s brother-in-law, who lived down in Louisiana, might have pronounced it. The French way. Not Lewis, but Lou-ee.
    He watched the two detectives speaking softly to each other. One of them came back inside.
    “We’re going to get a beer,” he said.
    Wooster nodded. They were done. If they came back at all, it would only be to get their car, assuming they could remember where they’d left it.
    In the waiting area outside, across from the main desk, a black woman was sitting, clutching her handbag. She was the boy’s grandmother, but she could have been his mother, her face was so youthful. Ever since the boy’s arrest, one or another of the women in the boy’s family had kept silent vigil on the same cold, hard chair. They all had a dignified air about them, a sense that they were almost doing the room a service by sitting in it. This one, though, the eldest of them, made Wooster uneasy. There were stories told about her. People went to her to have their fortunes read, to find out the sex of their unborn infant, or to have their minds put at rest about missing relatives or the souls of dead children. Wooster didn’t believe in any of that stuff, but he still treated the woman with respect. She didn’t demand it. She didn’t have to. Only a fool would fail to recognize that it was her due.
    Seeing her there now, waiting patiently, certain in the knowledge that the boy would soon be released into her charge, Wooster could spot the similarities between the woman and her grandson. It wasn’t merely physical, although both carried themselves with the same slim grace. No, something of her own disconcerting calm had transferred itself to him. For some reason, Wooster thought of dark, still waters, of sinking into their depths, going deeper and deeper, down, down until suddenly pink jaws opened amid pale luminescence and the nature of the thing itself, the creature that hid in those unknown reaches, was finally and fatally revealed. Wooster figured his day couldn’t get a whole lot worse, although as far as he was concerned this business wasn’t done with, no sir, not by a long shot. The boy could go home to his aunts and his grandmother and whoever else shared their little coven in the woods, but Wooster would be watching him. Wherever that boy walked, Wooster would be stepping on his shadow. He’d break that boy yet.
    And there was still the fag card left to play. Wooster had his suspicions about the boy. He’d heard stories. The only women with whom Louis spent time were those in his own household, and over at the Negro school he’d had to fight his corner a couple of times. Wooster knew that kids were often wrong about these things: any sign of sensitivity, of weakness, of femininity in a man and they would be on it like flies to a cut. Most of the time they were wrong, but sometimes they got it right. There were sodomy laws in this state, and Wooster had no difficulty in enforcing them. If he could get the kid on a sodomy beef, then that could be used as leverage on the Deber killing. Spending time in the pen on a queer charge was pretty much a guarantee of pain and misery