Empty Promises

detectives about it.
    Once there, Phelan pulled out a photograph of the bowie knife where it lay in the underbrush near the crime site.
    “That look like yours?”
    Phelan and Hume watched the suspect’s face as he stared at the photo. “It looks like that knife I had,” he said finally.
    Gary Grant was wearing tennis shoes. Jim Phelan tried to appear casual as Grant rested one foot on his knee and the sole came into view. It had a circular pattern that was very similar to the prints found surrounding Brad’s and Scott’s bodies.
    The configuration was close enough for Phelan to ask Gary Grant to take his shoes off so they could be compared to the moulages locked in the evidence room.
    Wally Hume advised the quiet teenager of his constitutional rights and asked Grant if he recalled April 20. Grant said he remembered it because it was a school holiday. Odd that he would recall that, since he was no longer in school himself. He said he worked that morning at his part-time job at a Renton golf course. “After that,” he said, “I stopped in to see one of my girlfriends.”
    “After that?”
    “I went looking to buy some shoes. I must have been to about three stores. Didn’t find what I wanted.”
    From there Grant said he walked along the Cedar River. Wally Hume studied Grant. He was kind of an ungainly kid, slow-talking and average-looking except that he slicked down his dark hair with water or hair cream and combed it straight back from his forehead without parting it.
    Grant said he also remembered that day in April well because he had a close call. “I was standing close to the river to watch the salmon, but it was really muddy on the bank and I slipped and fell in. I floated down the river for about forty feet until I could get my footing and climb on shore. I was soaking wet and I stopped at the grocery store and called home. I wanted a ride, but my mom said my dad was taking a nap and told me I had to walk home. So I did.”
    Wally Hume was a thirteen-year veteran of the Renton Police Department. Amiable and soft-spoken, he was a deceptively low-pressure interrogator. He talked to Gary Grant about why they were interested in his lost knife, quietly moving closer and closer to the vital questions. Approaching the subject from varying angles, Hume asked Gary Grant four or five times if he knew anything about the deaths of the two boys.
    Gary Grant was adamant that he did not. He insisted that he was very fond of children and would never hurt them. He didn’t even know Brad and Scott and he seemed shocked that anyone would think he would kill two little boys.
    They were at an impasse. Hume asked Gary if he would be willing to take a lie detector test, and he said he would.
    Dewey Gillespie was respected as one of the most accurate polygraphers on the West Coast. Called at his Seattle Police Department office, he told Hume that he would give Gary a polygraph examination if they would bring him into the city. Wally Hume, Jim Phelan, and Gary left at once for Seattle, but when they got there, Gillespie sent word that he would be tied up in an emergency session for some time.
    The Renton detectives felt they were at a breakthrough point with Gary Grant and they certainly didn’t want to turn him loose now, so Hume and Phelan headed for a restaurant, where they ordered hamburgers for all three of them. Gary ate heartily. Spinning out the time, they drove out to the University of Washington and through the Arboretum. They might have been three friends out for a pleasant drive. Neither detective brought up the subject of the double homicide. Instead, they spoke of innocuous things—the weather, sports. The next questions should come from Dewey Gillespie.
    By the time they returned to the waiting area outside Gillespie’s office, the two detectives could see that Gary was nervous and apprehensive. Several times he murmured half aloud, as if arguing with himself: “I couldn’t have done something like that.”
    Hume and Phelan were thinking only of the murders of two little boys. Even though Antoine Bertrand was already under arrest for the killings, there was something about Gary Grant and his missing knife that made them wonder if they had arrested the wrong man. If Gary was holding something back, Gillespie would know. The polygraph machine was a formidable device for anyone to face. To the uninformed, it looked as if it could zap its subject with a jolt of electricity if it detected a lie. Leads would