More Twisted

good job you guys did. Getting him, I mean.”
    Boyle, a thick file under his arm, nodded and continued down the windowless corridor to room I-7.
    What he saw through the square window: a benign-looking man of about forty, not big, not small, thick hair shot with gray. His amused eyes were on the wall, also cinderblock. His slippered feet were chained, his hands too, the silvery links looped through a waist bracelet.
    Boyle unlocked and opened the door. The man grinned, looked the detective over.
    “Hello, James,” Boyle said.
    “So you’re him.”
    Boyle’d been tracking down and putting away murderers for nineteen years. He saw in James Kit Phelan’s face what he always saw in such men and women at times like this. Insolence, anger, pride, fear.
    The lean face, with a one- or two-days’ growth of salt-and-pepper beard, the eyes blue as Dutch china.
    But something was missing, Boyle decided. What? Yes, that was it, he concluded. Behind the eyes of most prisoners was a pool of bewilderment. In James Phelan this was absent.
    The cop dropped the file on the table. Flipped through it quickly.
    “You’re the one,” Phelan muttered.
    “Oh, I don’t deserve all the credit, James. We had a lotta folks out looking for you.”
    “But the word is they wouldn’t’ve kept going if you hadn’t been riding their tails. No sleep for your boys and girls’s what I heard.”
    Boyle, a captain and the head of Homicide, had overseen the Granville Park murder task force of five men and women working full-time—and dozens of others working part-time (though everyone seemed to have logged at least ten, twelve hours a day). Still, Boyle had not testified in court, had never had a conversation with Phelan before today, never seen him up close. He expected to find the man looking very ordinary. Boyle was surprised to see another quality in the blue eyes. Somethingindescribable. There’d been no trace of this in the interrogation videos. What was it?
    But James Phelan’s eyes grew enigmatic once again as he studied Boyle’s sports clothes. Jeans, Nikes, a purple Izod shirt. Phelan wore an orange jumpsuit.
    Anyway, what it was, I killed her.
    “That’s a one-way mirror, ain’t it?”
    “Yes.”
    “Who’s behind there?” He peered at the dim mirror, never once, Boyle noticed, glancing at his own reflection.
    “We sometimes bring witnesses in to check out suspects. But there’s nobody there now. Don’t need ’em, do we?” Phelan sat back in the blue fiberglass chair. Boyle opened his notebook, took out a Bic pen. Boyle outweighed the prisoner by forty pounds, most of it muscle. Still, he set the pen far out of the man’s reach.
    Anyway, what it was  . . .
    “I’ve been asking to see you for almost a month,” Boyle said amiably. “You haven’t agreed to a meeting until now.”
    Sentencing was on Monday and after the judge pronounced one of the two sentences he was deciding upon at this very moment—life imprisonment or death by lethal injection—James Kit Phelan would be permanently giving up the county’s hospitality for the state’s.
    “ ‘Meeting,’ ” Phelan repeated. He seemed amused. “Wouldn’t ‘interrogation’ be more like it? That’s what you have in mind, right?”
    “You’ve confessed, James. Why would I want to interrogate you?”
    “Dunno. Why’d you put in, let’s see, was it somethinglike a dozen phone calls to my lawyer over the past coupla months wanting to ‘meet’ with me?”
    “Just some loose ends on the case. Nothing important.”
    In fact Boyle kept his excitement under wraps. He’d despaired of ever having a chance to talk to Phelan face to face; the longer the captain’s requests had gone unanswered the more he brooded that he’d never learn what he was desperate to know. It was Saturday and only an hour ago he’d been packing up turkey sandwiches for a picnic with the family when the call from Phelan’s lawyer came. He’d sent Judith and the kids on ahead and sped to the county lockup at 90 m.p.h.
    Nothing important  . . .
    “I didn’t want to see you ’fore this,” Phelan said slowly, “ ’cause I was thinking maybe you just wanted to, you know, gloat.”
    Boyle shook his head good-naturedly. But he also admitted to himself that he certainly had something to gloat about. When there was no arrest immediately following the murder, the case turned sour and it turned personal. Chief of Homicide Boyle versus the elusive, unknown killer.
    The