More Twisted

contest between the two adversaries had raged in the tabloids and in the police department and—more importantly—in Boyle’s mind. Still taped up behind Boyle’s desk was the front page of the Post, which showed a picture of dark-haired, swarthy Boyle glaring at the camera from the right-hand side of the paper and the police artist’s composite of Anna Devereaux’s killer from the left. The two pieces of art were separated by a bold, black VS., and the detective’s was by far the scariest shot.
    Boyle remembered the press conference held six months to the day after the murder in which he promised the people of the town of Granville that though the investigation had bogged down they weren’t giving up hope and that the killer would be caught. Boyle had concluded, “That man is not getting away. There’s only one way this’s going to end. Not in a draw. In a checkmate.” The comment—which a few months later became an embarrassing reminder of his failure—had, at last, been validated. The headline of every story about Phelan’s arrest read, of course, CHECKMATE !
    There was a time when Boyle would have taken the high ground and sneered down the suggestion that he was gloating over a fallen enemy. But now he wondered. Phelan had for no apparent reason killed a defenseless woman and had eluded the police for almost a year. It had been the hardest case Boyle had ever run, and he’d despaired many times of ever finding the perp. But, by God, he’d won. So, maybe there was a part of him that had come to look over his trophy.
     . . . I killed her . . . . And there’s nothing else I have to say.
    “I just have a few questions to ask you,” Boyle said. “Do you mind?”
    “Talking about it? Guess not. It’s kinda boring. Ain’t that the truth about the past? Boring.”
    “Sometimes.”
    “That’s not much of an answer. The past. Is. Boring. You ever shot anybody?”
    Boyle had. Twice. And killed them both. “We’re here to talk about you.”
    “I’m here ’cause I got caught. You’re here to talk about me.”
    Phelan slouched in the chair. The chains clinked softly. It reminded him of the bell he’d heard when he entered the interrogation room corridor.
    He looked down at the open file.
    “So what do you want to know?” Phelan asked.
    “Only one thing,” Boyle said, opening the battered manila folder. “Why’d you kill her?”

    “Why?” Phelan repeated slowly. “Yeah, everybody asked me about the motive. Now ‘motive’ . . . that’s a big word. A ten-dollar word, my father’d say. But ‘Why.’ That cuts right to the chase.”
    “And the answer is?”
    “Why’s it so important?”
    It wasn’t. Not legally. You only need to establish motive if the case is going to trial or if the confession is uncorroborated or unsupported by physical evidence. But it had been Phelan’s fingerprints found at the crime scene and the DNA testing verified Phelan’s skin was the tissue dug from beneath Anna Devereaux’s perfect dusty-rose–polished fingernails. The judge accepted the confession without any state presentation of motive, though even he had suggested to the prisoner that he have the decency to explain why he’d committed this terrible crime. Phelan had remained silent and let the judge read him the guilty verdict.
    “We just want to complete the report.”
    “ ‘Complete the report.’ Well, if that ain’t some bureaucratic crap, I don’t know what is.”
    In fact Boyle wanted the answer for a personal, not professional, reason. So he could get some sleep. The mystery of why this drifter and petty criminal had killed the thirty-six-year-old wife and mother had been growing in his mind like a tumor. He sometimes woke up thinking about it. In the past week alone—when it looked like Phelan was going down to Katonah maximum security without ever agreeing to meet Boyle—the captain would wake up sweating, plagued by what he called Phelanmares. The dreams had nothing to do with Anna Devereaux’s murder; they were a series of gut-wrenching scenes in which the prisoner was whispering something to Boyle, words that the detective was desperate to hear but could not.
    “Makes no difference in the world to us or you at this point,” Boyle said evenly. “But we just want to know.”
    “ ‘We’?” the prisoner asked coyly and Boyle felt he’d been caught at something. Phelan continued, “Suppose you folks have some theories.”
    “Not