While the City Slept by Eli Sanders

and downtown professionals who normally ride the route. As he exited, his odor caused Gayden to recall working night-owl shifts. “I picked up a lot of homeless people,” he said. “And it’s just a certain smell you get from people who haven’t bathed in a while.” The man didn’t pay, telling Gayden, “I don’t have any bus fare.”
    —
    The police swarmed the area. Officer Leon Towne, who happened to be inside Magnuson Park when the call went out, spotted Isaiah first. “I stepped out of my car,” Towne said. “I stayed right next to it, and as hegets close enough, I address him. I advised him to secure his dog to a fence—a post that he was next to at that point—and he did. He continued to approach the car. He came right up to the front of the hood.” At that point, Towne’s backup arrived.
    Towne asked Isaiah for identification. Isaiah said he didn’t have any. Towne put Isaiah in the back of his patrol car and took him straight downtown, to Detectives Duffy and Duty, and as he drove, he, too, noticed the odor. “Like he had been living on the streets for a while,” Towne said. As he sat in the interview room, Detective Duffy watched Isaiah on closed-circuit video. He appeared calm, though at one point he bit his nails, which she interpreted as a sign of anxiety. “I got him some water,” she said. “I think he said, ‘Thank you.’ Very respectful.” He asked her, “Hey, can I take my socks off?” He said, “Sorry I smell.”
    —
    Detective Duffy has a dead-level gaze, a slight rasp to her voice, and a confidence honed in interviews with suspects of all kinds over the years. She also has what she calls “the gift of gab,” and she led with this. Sensing that Isaiah had a soft spot for his pit bull, she started talking to him about her Rottweiler, Tug, who’d just passed away. Isaiah didn’t take the bait. “He just point-blank said, ‘I’m not into this conversation.’” He asked for a lawyer.
    They made him change into a jail uniform, took pictures of his clothes, noticed bloodstains on them, and also noticed he wasn’t wearing any underwear. This provoked in Detective Duffy a euphoric feeling of things clicking into place. A pair of men’s boxers had been found at the red house, and she’d thought them an important enough lead to get in touch with Jennifer, even though she was in St. Louis for the funeral. “I hated to interrupt,” Detective Duffy said, “but this was so important.” She’d sent a picture over e-mail, and Jennifer had confirmed: the boxers weren’t theirs. The man who attacked them must have worn them and then left without them.
    “We knew we had the guy,” Detective Duffy said. Isaiah looked like the man in the video from the old Auburn case, and he matched Jennifer’s description of the man who attacked them. There would be fingerprint and footprint evidence to explore further. With Detective Duty, she took Isaiah to Harborview for a court-ordered blood draw so that his DNA could be definitively connected to the crime scene, and then they took him to jail. In transit, they asked him what he liked to do for fun. He replied that he liked to read, particularly chemistry and physicsbooks.

19
    T he line to view Teresa’s coffin stretched down the block, some people waiting quietly for over three hours, many of them never seen by the Butz family before. Strangers had been calling the family home, too. People who’d lost children of their own. People who knew Teresa and wanted to connect. People who simply wanted to offer condolences.
    Later, at the funeral service, the ten remaining Butz siblings stood and sang Amy Grant for their sister, all of them back at St. Stephen Protomartyr Catholic Church, the place where Teresa first met Jean and Rachel, both friends now there as well, to say good-bye. Norbert senior and Dolly sat in the pews, and Jennifer sat in the pews, too, held and supported but not spoken of in prayers and eulogies as the woman Teresa