all their own.
Nearing the office, I fished the room key out of my jacket pocket and popped it through the mail slot, barely stopping as I did so. Turning, I started on an angle across the lot toward my car.
I had only made it a few steps when the authoritative voice hit my ears.
“FREEZE! POLICE! LEMME SEE YA’ HANDS, RIGHT NOW!”
CHAPTER 7:
My arms were starting to go numb.
Of course, since my hands were still cuffed behind my back, I don’t suppose I should have been surprised by that fact. I shifted slightly forward in the metal chair then rotated my shoulders as much as I could manage in an attempt to jumpstart the circulation. While I was leaning, I extended two fingers on my right hand, grasped them with my left, and held tight. It was a trick Ben had taught me long ago to relieve the pressure of the cuffs on my wrists. At the time, I hadn’t really understood why he assumed I would need such knowledge. It wasn’t like I had a tendency to get myself arrested. However, I was grateful for the arcane tip now since it afforded at least a small amount of relief from the biting restraints.
I glanced around at the blue-green walls in search of a clock. I was guessing that I had been warming this chair for better than an hour, but my sense of time was so screwed at the moment it might have been no more than fifteen minutes. By that same token, it could easily have been half a day. I simply didn’t know. Twisting slightly in my seat, I looked back over my shoulder to inspect the wall behind me and found nothing but another sea of nauseating blue-green. I’d already engaged in this futile exercise more times than I could count, so why I was bothering again I had no idea. There was nothing for me to see, other than the sickening color and the one-way mirror across the room in front of me. For all I knew, someone was on the opposite side of it watching me. In fact, I would bet hard money on it.
Settling back in, I hung my head and spent some time staring at the worn, grey carpet. It was patterned with more than its share of stains, the origins of which I didn’t even want to speculate over. But, when you have little else to do, your brain will tend to entertain itself however it wants, so it set about trying to identify the oddly shaped splotches of its own accord, regardless of my feelings on the subject.
As I sat staring at what I had decided was most likely the fossilized remains of a coffee spill, I could hear one of the ballasts on the fluorescent light fixture above me humming toward extinction. It wasn’t terribly loud just yet, but I suspected it would be in the not too distant future. Hopefully, I would be out of here by then and wouldn’t be around to hear it when it finally died. Of course, given my current predicament, there were probably worse places I could be.
The officer who had brought me here referred to the building as The Bureau. I hadn’t seen much of it, but judging from what I had glimpsed, I assumed this was where the detectives were based as opposed to the uniformed officers. That wasn’t much of a surprise either. Given that I had cajoled my way into a sealed crime scene, it stood to reason that I had raised more than a few eyebrows in all the wrong places. I’m sure I had probably managed to make myself a suspect of some sort.
My sleep-deprived brain mulled that over for a moment before forcing me to let out an involuntary harrumph. So far, Felicity had been accused of the murders, new evidence pointed to the real killer being a half-sister she never knew she had, and now I was up to my neck in the wrong side of the investigation. I suppose there was nothing quite like keeping it all in the family.
I had just set my sights on identifying a different stain a foot or so over from the first when the relative silence of the interview room was broken by the sound of the door swinging open. I looked up in the direction of the noise and saw a disheveled looking man enter then push the door closed behind him. He appeared to be somewhere around my own age, maybe a few years older, and from the looks of him, I would have guessed he was running on nearly the same amount of sleep as me.
He didn’t say anything initially. Instead he simply took the few steps over to the metal table that was positioned in front of me and stood there silently reading something in a manila folder. After several languid moments, he shut the folder and tossed it onto the surface of the table.
“Get up and face the back wall,” he grunted.
I slowly rocked forward in the chair and stood, then made the quarter turn in place, finding myself once again staring at a panorama of putrid blue-green. It was a good thing my stomach wasn’t bothering me at the moment, or I might have added another stain to the carpet.
I heard the rattling of metal against metal and felt the pressure encircling my left wrist ease up, then the strain on my shoulders as well. After another rattle, I could feel the bracelet being removed from my right.
“Thanks,” I muttered, not sure if I should say anything or simply remain quiet.
He didn’t acknowledge my gratitude. Instead he simply said, “Sit down and keep your hands on the table in front of you where I can see ‘em.”
I complied and waited.
The detective pulled out the somewhat matching chair on the other side of the table and took a seat. He remained mute as he shuffled the file folder over in front of himself then settled in against the backrest. After a long pause he reached into his pocket, withdrew something, splayed it open and tossed it on the table in front of me. It was my wallet, complete with the toy badge pinned inside.
“Care to explain that, Mister Gant?” he asked.
“It’s a long story,” I offered, knowing the comment was stupid the moment it exited my mouth.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he replied. “Neither are you.”
Keeping with my established pattern of inane answers, I said, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“You’d be surprised,” he grunted. “I’ve heard it all.”
“I doubt you’ve heard this one.”
“Try me.”
At this point I figured I had little to lose, so I sighed and answered with a tired drone in my voice. “I’m trying to stop a killer.”
“Really? I thought that was a job for cops,” he harrumphed then nudged the fake badge. “But, wait, you’re a cop, right?”
“Obviously you know I’m not,” I replied.
“You’re not?”
“Look, Detective…?”
“Fairbanks.”
“Detective Fairbanks. Do you think you can dispense with the sarcasm?”
“Why? Does it annoy you?”
“Honestly, yes.”
“I guess we all have something that gets under our skin,” he offered. “Personally, sarcasm really doesn’t bother me much. What really gets to me is people who pretend to be something they’re not.”
“Let me guess. Especially when they pretend to be a cop.”
He leaned back in his chair, regarding me with a cold stare, then nodded and said, “Yeah. That’ll do it.”
“In my defense,” I explained, “I never actually said I was a police officer.”
“No, you didn’t,” he replied as he leaned forward and flipped the file folder open. Peering through the glasses resting on the end of his nose, he read aloud, “Special investigations consultant with the Saint Louis Major Case Squad is what you said.”
He looked back up at me and waited.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Something like that.”
“Uh-huh. See, the problem is this,” he nudged my wallet again, “You flashed a fake badge in order to gain entry to a crime scene, and that shows intent. So, no matter what you said, you were impersonating a cop. It’s kind of one of those actions speak louder than words things.”
I knew my argument had been lame when I made it, but I was too tired to think of anything else. Besides, lying is what had landed me here in the first place, so making up a new fabrication probably wasn’t my best course
