Flat Lake in Winter Read Online Free Page B

that the victims were in no condition to tell Stanton anything. But then again, maybe nothing was transparent to Jonathan.
    When Jonathan said nothing, Stanton repeated himself. “Tell me why you did it,” he said.
    Both McClure and Stanton would later agree that those were the investigator’s words: “ Tell me why you did it. ” It was their recollections of Jonathan’s response that would differ. McClure would recall that Jonathan replied, “I don’t know what happened.” Stanton would write in his report that all Jonathan said was, “I don’t know.”
    The two men would also disagree on precisely what happened next. According to Stanton’s report, the investigator asked Jonathan if he’d be willing to take a ride with him down to his office to answer a few questions, and Jonathan said he would. As McClure would remember it, Stanton simply took Jonathan by the upper arm, led him down the pathway to the cruiser, and placed him in the backseat. Both men would agree that Jonathan was not handcuffed at that point.
    It is unclear exactly what Stanton had in mind next. He’d closed the back door of the cruiser and walked around to the driver’s-side door. It appeared to McClure that the investigator was about to get behind the wheel and drive off with Jonathan, leaving Trooper Carlson behind to safeguard the crime scene. But doing so - driving off alone with an unhandcuffed suspect - would have been in direct violation of state police regulations, notwithstanding the fact that the cruiser was outfitted with a wire partition that divided the front seat from the back. And Stanton certainly considered Jonathan to be a suspect, or more precisely the suspect, particularly given his later version of Jonathan’s statement to the effect that he didn’t know why he’d killed his grandparents.
    But before Stanton could do whatever it was he was about to do, the relative silence was broken by the sound of sirens approaching in the distance. Within a minute or so, an entourage of four vehicles pulled up the driveway, two with roof lights flashing, one with the wail of its siren winding down. The first three were state police cruisers: two of them similar in appearance to the one in which Stanton and Carlson had arrived, the third one unmarked. The fourth vehicle was a sport-utility model of some sort, either a Ford Explorer or a Toyota 4-Runner.
    A beefy, red-faced man in civilian clothes stepped out of the lead car and looked around. After a moment, he spotted Deke Stanton and ambled over to him. McClure could hear Stanton greet him as “Captain” before they huddled; he couldn’t pick up their conversation. After a few minutes, they stepped apart, and it became apparent to McClure that the captain (who was most certainly Roger Duquesne, although later reports referred to him only as “the responding supervising officer”) had drawn up a plan of sorts. He would lead the way in his cruiser, with Stanton, Carlson, and the prisoner (McClure distinctly heard him refer to Jonathan Hamilton as “the prisoner”) following him in a second car. But rather than driving south back to the Troop J barracks, they would head over to Northeast Regional Headquarters in Saranac Lake, where the facilities were larger, and where the interrogation room was fitted with a recording device and a two-way mirror. The four other investigators, who had arrived in the remaining two cruisers, would stay behind and complete the crime-scene investigation.
    As for the remaining car, the sport-utility vehicle, it turned out that it belonged to a newspaper reporter. She’d picked up the radio traffic on her police scanner and had been heading to the scene when the convoy of cruisers had sped past. She fell in line, matching their speed, figuring correctly that, under the circumstances, they had better things to do than pull her over and ticket her. The name of the reporter was Stefanie Grovesner, and she worked for the Daily Record, up in