crankymama
Synopsis
Excerpt
“I’d like to confess to a murder.”
It was the third time I’d said it, but the words still felt strange in my mouth. The first time, to the man at the front desk, had resulted in a startled look and some hasty deliberation with another officer. The second time was with a woman who wore a badge and gripped my elbow very tightly as she escorted me down a long hall to a small room, which would have reminded me of a doctor’s exam room if it hadn’t smelled vaguely of smoke and contained only two chairs and a small table. I sat at one of the chairs, hands in my lap, until the detective came in.
If I were watching the scene from the outside, from the point of view of the detective on the other side of the table or the perspective of six months on the run, I’d have noticed that my hands wouldn’t stop moving in my lap, that my eyes wouldn’t quite fix on the detective’s eyes. His name was Boyle. He hadn’t offered a first name, and I’d been too distracted to ask. Detective Boyle. It sounded like something out of a crime novel.
At the time my mind was alive with questions: how would a guilty person look right now? Was it important for me to look guilty? I tried to remember, but the detective cleared his throat and leaned forward to look at me.
“I’m going to need more than that, Miss.”
Yes. Yes, of course. My fingers found the sleeve of my sweater, the frayed edge that kept catching on my notebook. The notebook that would later be entered into evidence, proof that I’d not only planned this but that I’d acted alone. At the time, sitting in the claustrophobic interview room, I struggled to remember what I’d scrawled down in the stream of consciousness that had led me to believe I could pull this off. “Um. Well, I - I murdered someone. And I’d like to, you know. Confess.”
The detective sighed. His eyes were sunken, ringed with dark circles, and he massaged his temples like his head was beginning to hurt. He had some gray hairs, which radiated out from the spots he was rubbing as though he’d massaged all the color right out. “Who’d you kill, huh? Boyfriend?”
“What? No!” I started, then caught myself. “I mean, no. It was - it was a friend. An acquaintance. Someone I barely knew.” I took a deep breath. I was improvising now, and improvising was against the rules. Stay on track. “I don’t know who it was.”
“Why’d you kill ‘em, then?” He sounded vaguely distracted, and I got the distinct impression that he was imagining what my chair would look like without me in it.
“I don’t know.”
He wasn’t buying it. Of course he wasn’t buying it. I sat up a little straighter, forcing my hands to lay flat on my lap.
“Man or a woman?”
“I - I don’t know.”
The detective sighed again, but he picked up his pen. “So you killed someone, but you don’t know who.” He was writing now, scribbling distractedly on a yellow legal pad, and my breath caught, just a little. I was really doing this.
“Right.”
“And you’re confessing,” Detective Boyle said.
“Yes.”
“Why’s that, then?”
I blinked at him. “Because - because it’s wrong. To kill people. And I feel bad about it. Guilty. I feel guilty, because I am guilty. Of the killing.”
“How’d you do it?”
“I -“ For a second, my mind went blank. I said the first thing that occurred to me: “Decapitation. I cut off the head.”
Later I would wonder why I had used those particular words. Why decapitation? A girl like me - small, not particularly strong or handy with cutting implements - wasn’t exactly the decapitating sort. I’d never even seen a headless body. Not then, anyway.
The detective’s pen stopped moving. He looked at me closely. “Look here, Miss -“
“Dean,” I told him. It tumbled out by accident and I winced. It should have occurred to me to use a false name. “Alice Dean.”
“Miss Dean,” he said, and the tired look was back. He set down his pen, very carefully, in a way that suggested he was restraining himself. I made a note of the time: 2:21pm. Exactly nineteen minutes since I had walked through the doors of the police station. “You seem like a nice girl, so I’m going to be straight with you.”
“Okay.”
“We don’t take kindly to false confessions,” he said, and his voice was hard. “Makes the day seem really long, if you know what I mean.”
“I don’t -“ I said, but Detective Boyle raised a hand to cut me off.
“I don’t know what you’re trying to prove, if you just want attention, whatever. Maybe you had a little bet with your friends, mess with a cop, see if you can waste some more of the taxpayers’ money. That’s not my problem. My problem is that I have a job to do, and every minute you spend telling me stories about hacking the heads off random strangers is a minute I’m not doing my job.”
I bit my lip. “How did you know?” I asked in a small voice.
The detective was already putting away his notebook. “You been in the business as long as I have, you get a feeling about people. You’re a college girl, right?”
No point in lying about it now. “Yes. Freshman.”
“Lovely. You aren’t the decapitating type.”
“But how do you know?”
He leaned forward. “You ever cut the head off of something, Miss Dean?”
My lip trembled, but I knew better than to say anything.
“It takes muscle,” the detective continued. “Muscle, to get through all that connective tissue and cartilage and bone. Muscle you haven’t got. Let me guess, you’ve never even cut up a chicken, have you? Don’t know where to put the knife to get through the joints.” He leaned back. “Now, if you’d said it was drugs, a little bit of an OD-“
I felt woozy, suddenly, like I might be sick. “B-but my uncle, he’s - he was a butcher, maybe -“
“Enough.” Detective Boyle looked away. “Just go home, Miss Dean. Tell your friends you didn’t pull of the prank. I’ve got things to do.”
I reached for my book bag, but of course I didn’t have anything with me that might give me away. “Thank you for your time,” I started to say, but the detective was already on his cell phone, dealing with one of his real cases, no doubt.
I didn’t know then that they’d recorded the whole thing. Cross-referenced my name and image with the student registration databases for all the colleges within a hundred-mile radius. It didn’t matter that I’d spent the day on a Greyhound bus to get to a police station in a town I’d never visited. Even if I hadn’t used my real name, they would have known who I was and where to find me by the end of the afternoon. That’s how, later, they were able to get to me so quickly: I was in the system.
At the time, all I could think about as I made my way out the main doors was that I’d failed. Great job, Alice, I thought, blinking a little in the afternoon sunlight. Nineteen minutes. Charlotte Van Ness will have no problem beating that time.
I didn’t know then that Charlotte Van Ness was already dead, and that I’d just spent nineteen minutes confessing to her murder.
