Beyond Recognition

She nodded.

“Listening?”

She nodded again.

“Can we talk-I mean, just you and me? None of that?”

“I can check.”

“Check it out,” he said. “I’ll talk to you, but in private. You know? Off the record.”

“Right,” she said. None of what was said in that room was ever off the record. It was written down in a notebook, or tape-recorded, or videoed. But the rule of the Box was to please the customer. “Let me check,” she said.

“I didn’t kill no woman!” he repeated, shouting at her. “Never been in that house before! You gotta believe me.”

She left the room, immediately greeted in the office area by Boldt and Lieutenant Shoswitz. “You’re a genius,” Boldt said.

“He’s coming around, I think.”

“You think? You’ve got him by the stones,” Boldt encouraged.

“I think he’ll give us that airport meet,” she said, “if we use the homicide charge to deal.”

“We’re holding Santori on that charge,” Shoswitz reminded her.

“He doesn’t know that,” Daphne countered, then asked Boldt, “What about the truck, the mobile home?”

“The lab has been through the truck. The dogs didn’t turn up anything.”

“Is that possible?”

“No hydrocarbons,” Boldt answered bluntly. “That’s all they’re trained for. That’s all it means.” Boldt left them a moment and stepped over to his desk, returning with photocopies of several lab reports. He handed them to Daphne and said, “Here’s your ammunition. You can hang him with these.”

She looked them over, switching back and forth between the top report and the memo, which was indicated to have been written only twenty minutes before. “Are we wrong about this?” she asked Boldt, bewildered.

“Some answers wouldn’t hurt any.”

“You mind if I work this?” she asked. “Or do you want it?”

Shoswitz advised, “Be careful about the way you two do this. We want all the ducks-”

“In a row. Message received,” she said.

Boldt told her, “They’re yours if you want them.”

She beamed. The lieutenant shook his head in disgust and walked away.

“He’s not thrilled about you having the boy at your place. He’s worried it’ll come back to haunt us.”

She felt her face heat up. “We’ve sequestered witnesses before. He’s Shoswitz; he worries about everything.” She indicated the interrogation room door. “Okay?”

Boldt answered encouragingly, “Go get him.”

“They’ll let us talk,” she told the suspect. The small room was hot and she felt uncomfortable. “They won’t eavesdrop without me knowing about it,” she said. It wasn’t a lie, though she used it to trick him. She did know about it, and they were listening in. Foremost in her mind was that she wanted Ben out of this as soon as possible. That required nothing short of a full signed confession. No matter how she worked and reworked it, she didn’t see that happening. She felt discouraged but not defeated. In the right hands, an interrogation was something fluid and changeable.

Failure was at the base of most of the personal problems that as a professional she attempted to treat. Failure to beat a legal system that seemed stacked against law enforcement. Failure to take the slime off the street. Failure to make a promotion or convince a superior of the importance of a case. Failure at home: to communicate, in bed, as a parent, as a partner. It worked its decay slowly, at first, and unnoticed. By the time the pain struck it was virtually too late to stop the damage. The only recourse was to attempt to plug the hole, fill the void left behind. It took various forms: tobacco, alcohol, cocaine and amphetamines, sex addiction, physical abuse. Early warning signs were reckless behavior, vehement disagreements over trivial matters, absenteeism.

Over the years she had come to learn that suspects were no different: plugging the pain with crime. Nor was she any different. The idea of failure hurt.

“I didn’t kill nobody,” Hall mumbled. “Never. You gotta know that. Believe that. Nobody. Not ever.”

“The hand,” she said, knowing this was the source of the pain. “Tell me about that hand.”

“No!”

“They stare at it, and they look away. They talk about it behind your back. They make you think about it at times when you’d forgotten all about it. But you can’t get away from it. It follows you around, stuck to the end of your arm like another person-someone you don’t understand.”

“We’re not talking about my hand.”

“I am.”

“We’re talking about these murder charges. I ain’t never-”

“I’m talking about your hand,” she interrupted. “What, you think I’m working against you here? Maybe we find out she was strangled with bare hands. That’s all you need, you know.”

“Is that true?” he asked.

“I said maybe. Now tell me about that hand. How long ago?”

“Three years, seven months,” he answered. His eyes grew glassy and distant.

“How?”

“An accident. I was in the service.”

She replied, “Air Force.”

“Yeah, so what?”

“How?”

“An explosive device. Phosphorus. It misfired. Detonator problem. Fired early.”

She stared at his bad hand a moment, long enough to know that he too was engrossed in it. Then she asked, “Why were you in that house?”

He looked away.

“Why not tell me?” she encouraged. “If it had nothing to do with the victim-”

His nostrils flared and his eyes grew wide. He said softly, “A kid stole some money from me.” Daphne felt ebullient. More, she pushed silently. “I got a tip it was in the house. I swear. You found it on me; that’s my money.”

She asked, “You know what they found when they found the body-the lab guys? Down in the crawl space, I’m talking about.” She toyed with the papers Boldt had handed her, shifting them around on the table.

“I’m telling you, I have no idea about no body.”

She toughened her demeanor and prepared herself for a more military attitude, one that Hall might understand. She took a deep breath of the room’s sour air and said, “Listen, mister, when I ask you a question I expect more than an answer, I expect the truth. If the truth is too much for you, then we have no business here, you and I. Do you hear me, Mr. Hall?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good. Now I will tell you what they found down in that crawl space other than a pile of bones. And in return for this favor you will tell me the truth-for a change-and maybe, just maybe, I can save your sorry ass from Sergeant Boldt, who would just as soon send you down to lockup and never see you again. You think that Sergeant Boldt cares about your side of the story?”

“No, ma’am.”

“That’s correct. He does not. His desk is covered in open murder investigations, and as far as he’s concerned this one is cleared. You’re just a number to him. As far as he’s concerned, the next stop for you is a court, a jury, and death row.” She tapped the papers violently, summoning an anger that she expressed as an unrelenting and penetrating stare. “Do we understand each other?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’m getting a better feeling about this, Nick. I believe we’re beginning to understand one another. Is that your assessment as well?”