Free The Dreams of Ada by Robert Mayer Page A

them?”
    He continued to hold up the picture.
    “She was a beautiful girl,” Dennis Smith said.
    “Yes, she is,” Tommy Ward replied.
    The questions continued.
    “If I thought I did something like that, I’d kill myself,” Ward said.
    “Were you on drugs that night?”
    “I was drinking some beer.”
    “Steve Haraway wishes she would come back,” Smith said. “He lays awake at night, wondering where she’s at. Her family lies awake at night, wondering where she’s at. They would like to give her a decent burial.”
    “Do you think she screamed?” Mike Baskin asked. “I bet whoever did it can still hear her screaming. What do you think?”
    “I didn’t do it,” Ward said.
    “Tommy, have you prayed about this?” Smith asked. “Are you a religious person? Do you believe in God?”
    “Yes, I do.”
    “Do you know that a person that asks for forgiveness and confesses their sins is forgiven?”
    “The Bible says in the Sixth Commandment, ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill,’” Ward replied.
    He crossed his legs occasionally; otherwise he remained almost motionless. So did Dennis Smith, leaning forward, holding up the picture of Denice Haraway.
    “That’s why God’s son Jesus was killed,” Mike Baskin said. “Remember what He said just before He died. God forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
    Tommy Ward waited.
    “You think it would take a person under the influence of drugs to do something like that?” Baskin asked.
    “They’d have to be crazy,” Ward said.
    Smith set the picture of Denice aside for a time. They asked Ward about the composite drawings.
    “Several people asked me if I did it,” Ward said. He said he never thought the picture looked like him. They asked if he had any mental problems. He said he didn’t. He said he had quit school, which he should not have done. Baskin agreed that that was not a mental problem.
    Smith held up the photograph again. He asked where Tommy would have buried her if he had done it. Ward said he hadn’t done it. Baskin asked what if he had accidentally killed her, but hadn’t meant to. “It would be an accident,” Tommy said.
    Baskin asked him what he would do if another person had committed a crime, and he knew about it.
    “I’d tell the police,” Ward said.
    “Can you imagine the burden they’re carrying around?” Smith asked.
    “I can imagine.”
    “If they don’t tell the police,” Baskin said, “they’re gonna file first-degree murder on ’em, which carries the death penalty.”
    “It’s terrible,” Ward said.
    “If they don’t come up with an explanation,” Baskin said again, “it’s gonna be first-degree murder, which carries the death penalty.”
    Baskin began to speak of the Haraway family’s suffering. “They need to find her so they can get on with their lives,” he said. “Knowing she’s laying out there somewhere, winter’s coming on, it’s fixing to get cold. Imagine how they feel, knowing she’s lying out there…All it would take to end their suffering is to tell where she’s at. She could be taken to a funeral home, be fixed up for a Christian burial.”
    “I feel sorry, you know, for the girl,” Tommy said; he would help the family if he could.
    “She was a pretty girl, wasn’t she?” Dennis Smith said.
    “Yes, she was,” Tommy replied.
    “Can’t you use your imagination?” Smith asked.
    Baskin said, “I wonder if she cried.”
    Smith still was holding the picture.
    “Tommy, did you kill this girl?”
    “No, I didn’t.”
    “Do you know who did?”
    “No, I don’t.”
    “Her body’s probably deteriorating out there…,” Smith said.
    The questioning continued. The detectives asked Ward if he would take a polygraph, a lie-detector test, in a few days, to prove he was telling the truth. Tommy said he would.
    The interview lasted for an hour and forty-five minutes, all of it taped. Ward maintained to the end that he knew nothing about the disappearance of Denice Haraway.
    The tape