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would have “chewed his ass up,” the grandson assured Sweet.
    The presence of a protective dog indicated that the killer was likely to be a member of the family or someone else well-known to the animal. So based on what the grandsons said, as well as what Johnson told the 911 operator, the detectives interviewed several of the woman’s nephews; but they were all decent, law-abiding men, and all of them had alibis. The partners even interviewed two great-grandsons, 17 and15 years old; Sweet talked to the older one and McDonald to the younger, but neither seemed to be a likely suspect.
    Making the lack of progress more frustrating, the detectives believed that Smiley Johnson wasn’t the killer’s only victim. A week after Johnson’s murder, a young black woman was also attacked during the early morning hours in her home just a few blocks from Johnson’s house. The assailant stabbed her more than a dozen times, but she’d survived. The timing, location, and nature of the attack, which could only be described as a frenzied bloodbath, suggested a connection to Johnson’s murder. However, the victim in the second case described her attacker as an older black man.
    The scenario of two different assailants committing such a similar crime, in such a similar way, in the same general neighborhood, didn’t add up for Sweet and McDonald. What made sense was that there was a single killer on the loose. What’s more, a bloodhound brought in to track the black woman’s assailant followed him back to Johnson’s house, but there the trail grew cold. So did the case.
    Then about a year after Johnson’s murder, Sweet got a telephone call from the great-grandson he’d interviewed. He said his younger cousin, Michael Giles, the then-15-year-old whom McDonald had questioned, had just told him that he’d murdered their great-grandmother; in fact, he said, Michael seemed proud of it.
    The next day and at Sweet’s urging, the older cousin agreed to wear a wire and speak to the younger boy and get him to talk about the murder again. As Sweet listened in on the conversation, Michael Giles not only admitted attacking his great-grandmother, he bragged about stabbing the young black woman as well.
    When Sweet arrested the young man, Michael was living in Johnson’s house and sleeping in the bedroom where she’d been attacked. It was the first clue that his interrogation of the teen at the Garland police station was going to be bizarre.
    Sweet had to work the case on his own; after the original interviews with the teens, McDonald had been killed in a plane crash. So he sat the teen down in a sparsely furnished interview room containing within its stark white walls two chairs on opposite sides of a steel table. Taking a seat across from Giles, he studied the short, slight teenager, who favored the “Goth” look, with stringy, dyed-black hair and pale skin. He confronted him, flat-out accusing Giles of being the killer.
    To Sweet’s surprise, Giles didn’t try to deny it. In fact, he shrugged and calmly began talking about his despicable acts like someone else might describe a day at the beach. Although revolted, Sweet went with it and let Giles prattle on. Except for the topic, they could have been two guys discussing a ball game over a beer; as he warmed up to the detective, the teenager spoke and acted like they were old friends and that Sweet was someone who really understood him. He seemed to enjoy recalling the lurid details.
    Sweet knew from studying the case files that everything Giles said was corroborated by the evidence. For instance, during the initial investigation, crime scene technicians used luminol, a chemical that reacts with iron in blood, to be able to see bloodstains in the red carpeting. They could clearly follow the bloody footprints of the killer as he went from the bedroom to the bathroom, where he washed his hands, and then out the back door. All of that matched Giles’ description of his actions, as he