Betrayal

few days before Nolan himself was killed. I have the memory that he was trying to implicate Nolan in those murders somehow, which was ridiculous, and I told him so.'

'Do you remember specifically any questions that he asked?'

'No. I couldn't really give him answers to the questions. This was a long time ago, and it didn't seem very important.'

'When was the last time you saw him?'

'I don't know. Sometime last summer.'

'And when was the last time you spoke to him on the phone?'

'I don't remember.'

'Do you know that Mr. Bowen disappeared last summer?'

'Yes, I believe I did hear something about that just recently. Certainly I stopped hearing from him.'

'Were you aware that his records indicate that he called you on the morning that he disappeared?'

Loy decided he had heard enough. Holding up a palm, he said, 'Just a minute, Jack. What's your point here, Inspector?'

'Mr. Allstrong was apparently contacted by Mr. Bowen on the day he disappeared. I was wondering if he remembers any of the substance of that last phone call.'

Allstrong reached out his own hand. 'That's all right, Ryan.' Then, to Bracco, 'I don't remember any last phone call at all. I didn't know until just now that this last phone call was on the day he was supposed to have disappeared. As far as I know, Mr. Bowen might have just called the office on a routine housekeeping matter. I wouldn't know that. In any event, I don't remember talking to him. And while we're on this, Inspector, why didn't anybody ask these questions last summer when they might have been a little fresher in my mind?'

'The Bowen case has been reopened as a possible homicide, and we're going into more detail than when it was a missing person.'

Loy sat up straighter, as if prodded. 'If Mr. Allstrong is a suspect in a homicide, Inspector, I'm going to advise him to stop talking to you right now.'

'Mr. Allstrong can stop speaking to me anytime he wants. And I never said he was a suspect. But he does appear to be someone who might have had contact with Mr. Bowen on the day he disappeared.' Bracco talked straight at Allstrong. 'But this leads to my next question, about Mr. Bowen's wife. Did you ever meet her or speak to her on the phone?'

'No.'

'Are you quite certain?'

'Yes.'

'Well, it appears she made a number of phone calls to your number. Do you have any explanation for that?'

'Again,' Loy said, 'he already told you he doesn't remember speaking to her. Mr. Allstrong gets a hundred calls a day, Inspector. He doesn't have time to speak to most of those people.'

'Mr. Loy. Your client indicated he wanted to cooperate in this investigation. I have a number of questions I want to ask him.' Bracco nodded. 'He doesn't have to answer any questions, but what I need are his answers and not your suggestions as to what might or might not have happened. So again, Mr. Allstrong, do you have any explanation for phone calls that Mrs. Bowen made to your phone?'

'Well, of course, Mr. Loy is right. I get lots of phone calls.'

'I can appreciate that. But the last call Hanna Bowen made in her life was to here. And it was the day before her death. I think you can understand why we are curious about two people who call Allstrong Security, one of whom disappears and the other dies immediately after the contact. It does appear an unlikely coincidence.' It also wasn't true, but Loy and Allstrong didn't have to know that. Hardy's plan was simply to have Bracco show up and make it clear that the cops, too, were now part of the picture.

'Well, okay,' Loy said. 'You've asked your questions. Mr. Allstrong has told you what he knows. If you don't have anything further, I think it's time to end the interview.'

But Bracco ignored Loy again. 'Mr. Allstrong,' he said, 'if you didn't receive these calls, to whom in your company might Mrs. Bowen have spoken?'

Allstrong shrugged. 'I could ask Marilou, our receptionist. She's the first line of defense. If Mrs. Bowen was hysterical or nonspecific about what she wanted or who she wanted to talk to, her calls would have stopped at the front desk. But as Ryan here says, we can always ask and make sure.'

Bracco finally reached for his coffee and took a sip. It had gone tepid and he made a face.

'Is something wrong, Inspector?' Allstrong asked.

Bracco reached over and turned off his tape recorder. He decided he'd give the shit one last stir. 'This doesn't seem to be going anywhere, gentlemen. I came here under the impression that you'd like to cooperate in these homicide investigations, but I'm not picking up much of a spirit of cooperation. In fact, frankly, you both seem pretty darn defensive for people who've got nothing to hide.'

'That's ridiculous,' Loy said. 'We've answered every question you've asked. The plain fact is that Mr. Allstrong doesn't know anything about the Bowens other than what he's told you. He runs a huge corporation with branches all over the world. He doesn't have time to get involved in these small parochial matters. Look, Inspector, we're sorry Mr. Bowen disappeared, and about whatever happened to his wife. But to imply that there's any real connection between Allstrong Security and these events is just an absurd flight of fancy.'

'Amen to that,' Allstrong intoned.

'Well, then'-Bracco pushed his chair back-'thank you for your time.'

AT THREE-FIFTEEN, Glitsky was standing in front of a video monitor in the tiny electronics room between the two similarly minuscule interrogation rooms that fed off a narrow hallway that, in turn, was separated from the homicide detail by a glass wall. 'I give up,' he said to Debra Schiff, 'what is it?'

'That, sir, is the top of your head.'

Glitsky looked again. He wore his graying hair short and close to his skull. Leaning over, he squinted into the seven-inch monitor. 'Could be,' he said. 'I couldn't prove it isn't.'

'You see any identifiable part of your face?'

'No.' He turned to her. 'This is all the camera got in there?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Lord.' Glitsky walked out of the electronics room, took one step to his left, and reentered the interrogation room he'd left a minute before.

The room was four feet by five feet, so it was really more like a closet. It had no windows. Suspects in homicide investigations were often brought in for questioning and placed in these rooms, where they could be left alone and theoretically observed as they fidgeted or talked to themselves or otherwise did things that might be both incriminating and admissible in court. The problem was that the camera that was supposed to record all of this activity was cleverly hidden within the ceiling and the room was so small that the only image captured on tape, ever, was the top of the head of the suspect. As Schiff had just demonstrated to Glitsky.

'It's hopeless,' Schiff told him. 'We can't do business like this. We need a new room.'

'I thought this was the new room.' Glitsky was right. The entire homicide department had transferred to the fifth floor from the fourth only a little over a year before. Newly designed and supposedly state of the art. 'But you're right, it's a little small too. Who approved the plans for this thing?'

'Well, nobody, which is kind of the problem. There's a couple of guys in robbery who moonlight doing construction here in the building.'

'We didn't bid this out?'

Schiff laughed. 'Are you kidding me? We have employees that do the maintenance in the building. We try to bid this out, the union's going to have a fit. We'd be taking their jobs.'

'Well, then, why didn't we have the people in maintenance do it?'

'Because they said there's a three-year backlog on maintenance, and they'd need to charge us seventy-five thousand dollars from our budget. So we got the two guys from robbery to do it.'

'Perfect,' Glitsky said. 'So where do you propose we put it, this new room?'

'I don't know, Abe. Anyplace else. Maybe out where the lockers are. Or take part of the computer room,