Free Silent Witness by Richard North Patterson Page B

the Taylors’ driveway. A young cop came running, followed by the stocky chief of police, calling out, ‘What’s happened, John?’
    Slowly, John Taylor turned. In a toneless voice, he said, ‘This boy killed Alison –’
    â€˜ No ,’ Tony cried out. ‘I found her. . . .’
    Breathing heavily, the chief stopped, looking from John Taylor to the body at his feet. He bent to Alison, hand covering her mouth and nose, then murmured, ‘There’s an ambulance coming.’
    A hush surrounded him. Tony felt himself swallow. The chief gazed at him, his blue eyes astonished yet unspeakably sad. ‘I saw that game tonight . . .’
    On the porch, Alison’s sister began keening, thin cries of sympathetic fear. The chief looked up at Alison’s father, then at his gun. ‘We have him now, John. You don’t need to worry.’
    Stiffly, Alison’s mother stood leaning against her husband. With a jerk of the head, the chief summoned the young patrolman to the Taylors’ side. ‘It’s better,’ the chief said to Alison’s father, ‘if you step away a little.’
    Mumbling his consolation, the young policeman guided them away, Katherine Taylor gazing back at Alison.
    Two more police officers stood behind Tony. The chief’s mouth set. ‘Get him out of here.’ Standing, Tony found himself staring at Alison as if, dreamlike, she might rise with him.
    Gently, the cops shepherded Tony across the lawn. It became the darkened landscape of a nightmare – the uniformed police, the dead girl he loved, her sister crying into her hands, hair black like Alison’s.
    They shoved him in the back seat of a squad car and started the motor. At the foot of the drive, Tony saw Alison’s parents – her father staring fixedly at the car, her mother’s head against his shoulder – through the blur of his own tears.
    â€˜It wasn’t me,’ Tony repeated. ‘It wasn’t me.’

Chapter 7
    After that, no one spoke.
    Tony stared out the window at the quiet streets, half suburban, half small town – the white frame houses of the twenties, the red-brick bungalows and postage-stamp lawns of the fifties, the spired city hall with its iron clock face and, next to that, the incongruous severity of the tan brick police station, completed the previous year amidst much controversy. Lake City seemed at once familiar and strange, a place he had half forgotten. He ached for Alison to be with him.
    They got to the station.
    The two officers led him to the basement. He accepted this without question – it was part of the logic of his nightmare – just as he obeyed the request by a third cop, given with the politeness of a doctor performing a physical, to strip. The man took blood from his arm; slid a needle beneath his fingernails; snipped a sample of pubic hair; swabbed the tip of his penis; snapped photographs of the welt on his cheek, which Tony supposed the branch had left. For however long this took, Tony asked nothing. All that he could think about was Alison.
    They gave back his clothes and put him in a cubicle with yellow cinder-block walls. The room was claustrophobic, hardly larger than a closet, with a bare table and chairs beneath a bright fluorescent light. Tony slumped at the table, exhausted.
    She had died for him, in a state of mortal sin. He could think of nothing else. It felt like the aftershock of a blow to the head, his memory a void, pain the only fact that he could grasp. His skull pounded.
    Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. . . .
    He did not know how long he was alone. He did not care: his parents, his friends, were nothing to him. Only Alison.
    Two detectives entered the room. Dully, Tony recognized the young one, greyhound sleek, his brown hair slicked back – Sergeant Dana, the police liaison to Lake City High, whose job it was to sniff out drugs and theft. The older