Floating Staircase(89)

If the body were burned in this furnace, I thought, it would have to have been chopped up into smaller pieces to fit through the hole. If the body were burned in this furnace, there’s probably nothing left inside.

Or was there?

By the time the early stirrings of sunlight had crept into the sky, I had shoveled out what amounted to several handfuls of gummy soot from the unit. It sat on a mat of newspapers, reeking like oil and resembling the evacuated matter of a fevered horse. Once I started scooping the gunk out of the furnace, a part of me had hoped to find bits of bone or something in the drippy, fetid mass. But once I’d laid everything out on the sections of newspaper, I knew all the movies I’d seen and books I’d read had been wrong: there was nothing left except carbon detritus and wet ash.

Exhausted and dejected, I went upstairs where the bedroom alarm clock read 6:09 a.m. Crawling into bed, I curled up beside Jodie and hoped that the sound of her breathing would carry me back to sleep.

It didn’t.





CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

At noon the telephone rang. “We need your help,” Adam said, nearly breathless.

“What is it?”

“Dentman said he’d give us a statement on one condition.” He paused, possibly for dramatic effect. “He said he wants to talk to you first.”

“I’ll be there in ten,” I said and hung up the phone.



“This,” exclaimed Paul Strohman, “is complete bullshit.”

We were in his cramped little office, Strohman behind his desk, Adam seated beside me in one of the two chairs facing the chief of police. Strohman’s big feet were propped on the desk, creating a slight but obvious bend in the desktop.

“There’s no harm in it,” Adam said.

“Other than this entire department looking like a school bus full of stooges.”

“He requested Travis by name. After that, he promised to give us a statement.”

“Oh, I guess if he promised.” Had Strohman not sighed and run his hands through his hair at that moment, his sarcasm might have struck me a bit harder. Addressing me, he said, “Before you go in there, I need to lay down the ground rules. For starters, we’ve made no promises to him. If he talks, it’s of his own accord. I don’t want to give this fool immunity only to have him confess to chopping the kid into kindling and burying him out in the woods.”

“Then don’t,” I said. “Only promise him immunity for the charges he’s currently facing—conspiracy, obstruction, whatever.”

“I hate the idea of giving him a reduction while we go balls-to-the-wall with his retarded f*cking sister.”

“Do you want his statement or not?” I said. “And besides, she’s not retarded.”

Strohman thumbed the dimple in his chin. “If I sound callous, it’s because this whole thing’s one steaming pile of shit, and I got it all over my shoes. It doesn’t help that you’ve got your nose in everything.”

“I’m not planning to tell anyone.”

“Yeah, well, you’re just a swell guy, I guess.” Strohman stood up, all six and a half feet of him. “You go in there and listen to what he has to say. You make him no promises. You tell him nothing he doesn’t already confess to knowing.”

“Check,” I said, also standing. “Where is he?”

“In one of the holding cells.”



Slump-shouldered and withdrawn, David Dentman looked like an overgrown child in the single holding cell. As I approached, Adam shutting the door behind me, he didn’t even bother to look up. Wan midday light spilled in from a number of recessed windows high in the wall. The whole place smelled of camphor and gym socks.

I sat down in the folding chair in front of the cell and did not speak.

Sitting on the edge of his cot, Dentman seemed content to stare at his big feet. The shoelaces had been removed from his boots, and his hands, clasped between his legs, looked about the size of hubcaps. With his head bowed, I noticed the whirl of hair that faded to baldness at the topmost portion of his scalp. When he finally looked at me, his face was hard as stone and almost expressionless. This surprised me; I had thought he’d been crying.

“What else do you know?” he said, his voice just barely above a whisper.

I spread my hands out on my knees, palms up. “Nothing.”

“Don’t lie to me. It’s over now.”

“What makes you think I know something more?”

“You’ve figured everything else out, haven’t you?”

“I don’t know anything else. This is where we are.”

“Goddamn you.”

“Tell me what happened.”

He hung his head again.

“They need a statement from you.”

“Why? So they can put my sister in prison?”

“Veronica won’t go to prison. But if you cooperate, you might be able to avoid going yourself.”

“What good does that do me?”

“Maybe it doesn’t matter to you,” I said. “But maybe it matters to Veronica. Maybe if you cooperate and get your sentence reduced—if you tell them all you know about what actually happened that day—then you’ll still be free to help her. If she goes away to a hospital someplace, she’s going to need you to check in on her and take care of her. You can’t do that from prison.”