Beyond Recognition

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Look me in the eye, Nick. That’s better. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“They found your fingerprints in that crawl space, Nick. Where they found the dead woman.”

He wore a paralyzed expression, part shock, part realization.

She explained, “There is absolutely no question about this. Do you understand? That is what we call evidence. Proof. The stuff that puts you away for life.” He couldn’t get a word out. She watched as he relived some incident, his eyes suddenly blank.

He said hurriedly, “No, listen. You don’t understand.”

She told him, “No, I don’t. But Boldt thinks he does.”

“You got this wrong.”

“What I got,” she said, “is you, on tape, telling me that you had never been to that residence prior to tonight. Never been in that house before. You gotta believe me,” she said, reading her interrogation notes. “So I believed you. Now I don’t believe you, and neither does Sergeant Boldt.”

“No, I had been there.” He attempted to correct himself.

“I think we’re pretty clear on that, Nick.”

“Last week,” he said.

“You’re saying you just happened to be in the crawl space last week? Oh, well,” she said sarcastically, “that explains it! Certainly fills in all the blanks for me.” She straightened her posture and ran her fingers through her hair. She felt bone tired and yet almost high at the same time. This was the stuff she lived for. “There’s no accurate way to date latent fingerprints. Did you know that? Last week, last year…. It’s all the same to the lab guys. All the same to a jury.” She fixed her eyes on to him and said, “Help me here. What the hell were you doing there, Nick? How do we explain this to Boldt? Did you kill that woman?”

“No, no, no,” the suspect said, shaking his head violently and gently slapping the table with that paw and its ungainly three fingernails.

“Talk to me.”

“I was at the airport,” he stated, breaking out of the dark and into the open ground of truth for the first time.

Confessions came piece by piece, by disassembling the fabricated truth and allowing the real truth to take its place. To her it felt like digging in wet sand as the waves came in-remove the sand, allow the water to fill the hole.

“You weren’t alone there,” she said.

He shook his head, the handcuff chains rattling on the tabletop.

“Help me out here, Nick.”

She stood, leaned onto her outstretched arms. “A person can’t dance alone. Boldt’s way of doing this?” she asked. “He’ll misplace you for a couple days. Place you ‘accidentally’ in the wrong lockup, in with the guys the screws call the soapies-the soap droppers. For you it’s a few days of sitting on the toilet and screaming, a few months of wondering if you’re carrying the disease or not.

“Who cares about capital punishment,” she continued, “when there’s the disease? It’s free. No one pushes a button. That’s Boldt’s way for justice,” she lied. “He’s of the old school. He’ll tell you he cares, but he doesn’t. He wants a good, solid clearance rate. That’s how his success is measured. You’re a number to him. They made the arrest, now they want to clear the case. Take a good long look, Nick. This is your life walking out the door.”

She stood and walked slowly toward the door, each step a lifetime: Dorothy Enwright, Melissa Heifitz, Connie Branslonovich. She reached for the doorknob deliberately, took her time in turning it. Pulled open the door. The air smelled better, felt cooler.

“It wasn’t drugs,” Hall admitted in a hushed voice.

Daphne turned, reentered the room, and pulled the door shut behind herself. Suddenly that dreary, claustrophobic room smelled a lot sweeter.

“I was doing some business, you know? Some punk kid ripped me for five bills. Stupid asshole drops his wallet in my truck. First time I went there, he hid from me in the crawl space.”

“You roughed up the stepfather.”

“We tangled. I wanted my fucking money! Second time-tonight-I took the money. And that’s the God’s truth.”

Daphne’s pulse quickened, she felt warm in the small of her back. She focused on his body language and his facial expressions, searching for the signs. She measured his eye movement, waited for him to begin licking his lips-a dry mouth tipped off lying-watched keenly for how much eye contact he sought-eye avoidance often indicated insincerity.

After a long silence she asked, “What kind of business?”

“A phone call now and then. The guy knew more about my base than I did. I swear that’s the truth.” He checked her again. He was made nervous by her silence, which was exactly what she wanted, so she didn’t change a thing. “I never met him.”

Her skin crawled. A second person. No one would want to hear this, she realized. He looked over at her with the vacant eyes of a man on death row. “I don’t know nothing about him.”

She caught herself gnawing at the inside of her right cheek. She was full of questions but as yet unwilling to voice them, hoping instead to pressure him with silence, the most effective of all interrogation tools.

“I don’t know his name,” he declared solemnly. “I don’t know what he looks like.” He squinted and placed his pink paddle onto the table instead of hiding it below the lip as he had been. “A buck twenty a month. That’s the disability pay our fine country sees fit to give me for this: a hundred and twenty a month. And what kind of job am I supposed to get? Tell me that. A typist?” He twisted his wet lips into a grin that caused her to shiver and made him feel dangerous. Was he looking to vent his rage? she wondered. She sat straight up and met his eyes, and silently told him not to try anything with her.

“It wasn’t drugs,” he repeated.

“Something available on the base,” she replied.

He nodded. His mandible muscle locked up as big and firm as a chestnut. His eyes went wide. He was terrified. Of the military or the man with whom he had dealt? she wondered.

“What was it you sold, secrets?”

“Hell, no, I ain’t no traitor!”

“What then?”

He answered, “I had access that he didn’t have. Let’s just leave it at that.”

Her voice rose to a shout. “Leave it? I don’t think so. Have you been listening, Nick? We’re trying to build a credible story here. I don’t know what you were selling, but it’s not going to bring you death row. The murder charge will!”

His eyes hardened. His mandible muscle knotted again. “I want me a lawyer.”

“We’ll arrange one, of course, if you insist, but I should warn you that you’ll regret it. You like me,” she said. “We understand each other, you and I. But Boldt and the prosecutor? You think they care?”

“I’m not answering any more questions.”

“Then I won’t ask any more questions,” she informed him. “Just tell me what was going on in that parking garage at Sea-Tac. Try the truth, in a way I can believe, and you may walk out that door with the charges dropped.”

“Bullshit.”

She stood. “You don’t want the murder charges dropped? What am I doing trying to help you? You think I have time for this?” she complained. “You think I have nothing better to do than sit in this stinky little room listening to you bitch and whine? You want Boldt, you got him. You want the soapies, you got ’em. You want death row, it’s all yours.”

Her second false exit was less successful. She was mad at herself for trying it too soon. His chains rattled, but he did not speak up. No matter how many times she heard that sound, it gave her chills.

She could not be seen to give in. The temptation was to turn around and give him another chance, rather