Rage (2 page)

Lance
said, “I dunno, but maybe they live close by.”

“Why
do you say that?” said Sue Kramer.

“Because
I seen ’em leaving and walking out to the parking lot and keep going onto the
street. No one picked ’em up in a car, y’know?”

“Leaving
at which exit?”

“The
one that goes out to the parking lot.”

Al
Nussbaum said, “Three exits go out to the parking lot, Lance.”

“The
one near the garbage,” said Lance.

Fernie
Reyes glanced at his partner and left.

* * *

No body
in the Dumpsters out back near the eastern exit.

Five
more hours of neighborhood canvass finally ID’d the two boys. Both of them
lived in a low-income housing project set like a scar across the scrubby park
that paralleled the rear of the mall. Two hundred shoddily built, federally
financed one-bedroom units distributed among a quartet of three-story
buildings, ringed by chain-link fencing in which dozens of holes had been cut.
A scruffy, prisonlike place well known by uniforms who patrolled the area— 415
City, they called it, after the penal code for disturbing the peace.

The
manager of Building 4 watched the video for a second and pointed to the smaller
boy. “Troy Turner. You guys been out here before on him. Last week, matter of
fact.”

“Really,”
said Sue Kramer.

“Yeah.
He smacked his mother with a dinner plate, busted up the side of her face.” The
manager massaged his own unshaved cheek. “Before that, he was scaring some of
the little kids.”

“Scaring
them how?”

“Grabbing
and shoving, waving a knife. You guys shoulda locked him up. So what’d he do?”

“Who’s
the bigger one?” said Reyes.

“Randolph
Duchay. Kind of a retard but he doesn’t cause problems. He done something, it’s
probably ’causea Troy.”

“How
old are they?” said Fernie Reyes.

“Lemme
see,” said the manager. “Troy’s twelve I think, maybe the other one’s
thirteen.”

T
he detectives found the boys in the park.

There
they were, sitting in the dark on some swings, smoking, the lighted ends of
their cigarettes orange fireflies. Sue Kramer could smell the beer from yards
away. As she and Reyes approached, Rand Duchay tossed his can of Bud onto the
grass, but the smaller one, Troy Turner, didn’t even try to hide it.

Taking
a deep swig as she came face-to-face with him. Staring right back at her with
the coldest fuck-you eyes she’d seen in a long time.

Ignore
the eyes and he was a surprisingly small, frail-looking kid with pipe-stem arms
and a pale triangular face under a mop of untrimmed dirty-blond hair. He’d
shaved his head clean at the sides, which made the top-growth look even bigger.
The manager had said he was twelve; he could’ve passed for younger.

Randolph
Duchay was good-sized and broad-shouldered, with wavy, short brown hair and a
puffy, thick-lipped face plagued by wet-looking zits. His arms had already
started to pop veins and show some definition. Him, Sue would’ve placed at
fifteen or sixteen.

Big
and
scared.
Sue’s flashlight picked up his fear right away, the sweat on
his brow and nose. A bead of moisture rolled off his pimply chin. Repeated
eyeblinks.

She
moved right in on him, pointed a finger in his face. “Where’s Kristal Malley?”

Randolph
Duchay shook his head. Started to cry.

“Where
is she?” she demanded.

The
kid’s shoulders rose and fell. He slammed his eyes shut and began rocking.

She
hauled him to his feet. Fernie was doing the same to Troy Turner, asking the
same question.

Turner
tolerated being frisked with passivity. His face was as blank as a sidewalk.

Sue
put pressure on Duchay’s arm. The kid’s biceps were rock hard; if he resisted
he’d be a challenge. Her gun was on her hip, holstered, out of reach. “Where
the hell
is
she, Randy.”

“Rand,”
said Troy Turner. “He ain’t no Randy.”

“Where’s
Kristal, Rand?”

No
response. She squeezed harder, dug her nails in. Duchay squawked and pointed to
the left. Past the swings and across the play area to a pair of cinder-block
public lavatories.

“She’s
in the bathroom?” said Fernie Reyes.

Rand
Duchay shook his head.

“Where
is
she?” Sue growled. “Tell me
now.
”

Duchay
pointed in the same direction.

But
he was looking somewhere else. To the right of the lavs. South side of the
cinder block, where a corner of dark metal stuck out.

Park
Dumpsters. Oh, Lord.

She
cuffed Duchay and put him in the back of the Crown Victoria. Ran over to look.
By the time she got back, Troy was cuffed, too. Sitting next to his bud, still
unruffled.

Fernie
waited outside the car. When he saw her he raised an inquisitive eyebrow.

Sue
shook her head.

He
called the coroner.

The
boys had made no attempt to conceal. Kristal’s body lay atop five days’ worth
of park refuse, fully clothed but with one shoe off. The white sock underneath
was grimy at the toe. The child’s neck was broken like that of a cast-off doll.
Delicate neck like that, Sue figured— hoped— she had died instantaneously.
Several days later the coroner verified her guess: several broken cervical
vertebrae, a ruptured windpipe, concomitant cranial bleeding. The body also
bore two dozen bruises and internal injuries that could have proved fatal. No
evidence of sexual assault.

“Does
it really matter?” said the pathologist who’d done the post. A usually tough
guy named Banerjee. When he reported to Sue and Fernie he looked defeated and
old.

* * *

Placed
in a holding cell at the station, Rand-not-Randy Duchay hunched, immobile and
silent. He had stopped crying and his eyes were glassy and trancelike. His cell
stank. Sue had smelled that feral reek plenty of times. Fear, guilt, hormones,
whatever.

Troy
Turner’s cell smelled faintly of beer. The cans the detectives had found
indicated each boy had downed three Buds. With Troy’s body weight, not an
insignificant amount, but there was nothing spacey about him. Dry-eyed, calm.
He spent the ride to the station glancing out the window of the unmarked as it
passed through dark Valley streets. As if this were a field trip.

When
Sue asked him if there was anything he wanted to say, he gave a strange little
grunting noise.

A
grumpy old man’s sound— annoyed. Like they’d messed up his plans.

“What’s
that, Troy?”

His
eyes became slits. Sue had two kids, including a twelve-year-old son. Turner
freaked her out. She forced herself to outstare him and he finally looked away
and gave another grunt.

“Something
on your mind, Troy?”

“Yeah.”

“What?”

“Can
I have a smoke?”

Both
boys, as it turned out, were thirteen, and Troy was the older one, a month from
fourteen. Neither had known Kristal Malley. As the papers reported it, the pair
had run out of change; as they left the video arcade they spied the little girl
wandering around the mall looking lost. Deciding it would be “cool” to “fool
around,” they gave Kristal some stale candy from Rand’s gritty jeans pocket and
she accompanied them willingly.

Despite
evidence to the contrary, implications of sexual assault laced the local
coverage. The story was picked up by the national press and the wire services,
tilting toward the lurid, feeding sensation to their international clients.

That
brought the usual swarm of talking heads, public intellectuals, and other
misery pimps sounding off. Op-ed editors found themselves in a buyer’s market.

The
obvious
root cause of such an outrage was: poverty; rampant societal breakdown;
media violence; junk food and poor nutrition; the erosion of family values;
godlessness; the failure of organized religion to meet the needs of the
underclass; the absence of moral training in school; truancy; insufficient
government funding for social programs; too much government control over the
lives of the citizenry.

One
genius, a pundit funded by the Ford Foundation, attempted to connect the crime
to the post-Christmas sale season— pernicious materialism had led to
frustration had led to murder. “Acquisitional rage,” he called it. The same
thing happens all the time in the favelas of Brazil.

“Shop
till you drop it on someone,” Milo had remarked at the time. “What an asshole.”
We hadn’t discussed the case much and I’d done most of the talking. He has
solved hundreds of homicides but this one bothered him.

The
media noise lasted awhile. Over at the Hall of Justice, the legal process
kicked in, stealthy and gray. The boys were placed in the High Power ward at
the county jail. With both of them too young to qualify for a 707 hearing to
determine if they could be tried as adults, most experts felt the disposition
would end up in Juvenile Court.

Citing
the brutality of the crime, the District Attorney’s Office made a special
request to kick the case up to Superior Court. Troy Turner and Randolph
Duchay’s court appointed P.D.s filed papers in strong opposition. A couple more
days of editorial columns were devoted to that matter. Then another lull, as
briefs were written and a hearing judge was appointed.

Juvey
judge Thomas A. Laskin III— a former D.A. with experience prosecuting gang
members— had a rep as a hard case. Courtroom whispers said it was going to get
interesting.

I got
the call three weeks after the murder.

“Dr.
Alex Delaware? Tom Laskin. We’ve never met but Judge Bonnaccio said you’re the
man for the job.”

Peter
Bonnaccio had been presiding judge of Superior Court, Family Division for a
couple of years, and I’d testified before him. I hadn’t liked him much at
first, thinking him hasty and superficial when making custody decisions. I’d
been wrong. He talked fast, cracked jokes, was sometimes inappropriate. But
plenty of thought went into his decisions and he was right more often than not.

I
said, “What job is that, Judge?”

“Tom.
I’m the lucky guy who got handed the Kristal Malley murder and I need the
defendants evaluated psychologically. The main issue, obviously, is, was there enough
mature forethought and mental capacity prior to and during the commission of
the crime to qualify the defendants for full, adult psychological capacity. The
D.A.’s broken new ground, but from what I’ve seen the sixteen-year minimum for
a 707 isn’t inviolate. Issue Two— and this is as much personal as official— I’d
like to know what makes them tick. I have three kids of my own and this one
makes no sense to me.”

“It’s
a tough one,” I agreed. “Unfortunately, I can’t help you.”

“Pardon?”

“I’m
not the man for the job.”

“Why
not?”

“Psychological
tests can reveal how someone’s functioning intellectually and emotionally in
the present, but they say nothing about past state of mind. On top of that,
they were developed to measure things like learning disabilities and
giftedness, not homicidal behavior. In terms of what made these boys tick, my
training’s even less helpful. We’re good at creating rules about human behavior
but lousy at understanding exceptions.”