“The tapping. Stop it already.”
Kyung looks down. He didn’t notice he was tapping his foot on the floor. He has energy all of a sudden, too much to know what to do with. He crosses his arms and watches as the officer frees one of Perry’s wrists and cuffs it to the back of a chair. Perry sits down and opens the bag on the table. He unwraps a cheeseburger one-handed and scrapes the onions and ketchup off with a pickle, leaving them in a bloody-looking pile on a napkin. Then he leans over like a pig to a trough and alternates between his burger and fries, shoving them into his mouth in huge bites that Kyung wishes he’d choke on. The detective enters and sits down at the table to read him his rights, but Perry doesn’t seem to be listening. He eats his second burger exactly like the first, his eyes glassy, his hunger primal.
“I need a verbal response that you understand what I just told you and you’ve waived your rights to an attorney.”
Perry nods dumbly, his mouth still full.
“A verbal response.” Detective Smalley pushes the microphone and tape recorder toward him. “Do you hear what I’m saying?”
“Yes, sir. I understand.”
His accent is unexpected, as is his use of the word “sir,” but Kyung remembers the mug shots that Lentz showed him. Perry’s a Southerner, at least he used to be.
“You put up quite a fight today.”
He shrugs. “I get that way when I drink.”
“But you did more than just drink, didn’t you? There must have been a couple dozen bindles in that apartment. It looked like you had a party or something.”
“What’s a bindle?”
“The little envelopes you buy meth in.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about those. I was just staying there—with the girl. It’s her place … her stuff.”
“Right. The girl.” Detective Smalley removes the rubber band wrapped around his folder and pulls out a sheet of paper. “Sharon Julie Andrews.” He chuckles. “Her parents had a weird sense of humor, didn’t they? Julie Andrews?”
“Who?”
“The actress? The little blond one? You know—The Sound of Music?”
The reference doesn’t seem to register. “I’m not sure I follow.”
There’s a slow, syrupy quality to Perry’s responses that almost makes him seem harmless, but Kyung isn’t fooled. He knows what this man is capable of. The last time his mother saw him, he looked like a monster.
“So is Sharon your girlfriend?”
“No, not really. She’s just a friend.”
“She must be a pretty good friend to drive the car you stole all the way up to Vermont. You know that’s how we found you, right? She just left a brand-new Lincoln on the side of a road and hopped the bus back home. Didn’t even stop to think that maybe she should have found a better hiding place for it. I bet you told her to wipe the prints, right?”
He waits for an answer, but doesn’t get one.
“Lucky for us, meth heads aren’t too thorough. Sharon left a couple on the armrest.” He laughs again. “It took us a while, but we finally caught up with her this morning while she was out trolling the park with the other junkies. Didn’t have her in a holding cell for more than a few hours before she started telling us all about you. It doesn’t really look like you’re going to be friends anymore.”
Perry balls up the wrappers from his food and puts them in the bag. He doesn’t appear fazed by what he just heard, not at all. “Can you tell me where my brother’s buried?”
Detective Smalley seems thrown by the question. “How do you know he’s dead?”
“Because I saw him. In the bathroom of that couple’s house. He was dead when I left.”
“You’re admitting you were there?”
Perry looks at him, exhausted and unwilling to play. Then he turns to the window, as if to address everyone standing on the other side of it. “I think you all know I was there. I’m willing to cooperate. I’d just really like to know where my brother’s buried.”
Tim nudges Kyung in the ribs. “This one’s finished,” he says, smiling. “He’s not even smart enough to lie.”
The detective thumbs through the contents of his file until he finds what he’s looking for. “It says here that your brother’s in a potter’s field out in Westhaven.”
“Five generations of us, all buried in potter’s fields.” Perry shakes his head. “Seems like a fitting end, I guess.”
Kyung should be relieved—relieved to be spared a trial, to know that Perry will spend the rest of his days in prison and then be buried in an unmarked grave like his brother—but he can’t summon anything resembling relief. A prison cell is hardly enough punishment for all the lives this man ruined. He wants Perry to suffer. He wants him to feel more pain, more regret, more loss, more everything. Multiply it tenfold and it still wouldn’t be enough.