Whitstone spoke up. “What happened to her?”
“She was killed. Officer Rice said something about a homeless man.”
The cops looked at each other. Then Hutchison said, “The body in the park.” Sula didn’t know if he was asking her a question or not. She waited.
Whitstone put it together. “So the woman whose office you took something from is the same woman who was found dead on the bike path?”
“Her name is Diane Warner, and I didn’t take anything from her office.” Sula silently apologized to her counselor for lying. She sincerely believed Diane Warner would want her to have the disk and to take it to the FDA.
“Your boss says he saw you leave the office with papers in your hand.”
“I’m a public relations person. I always have papers in my hand. Notes, press releases, memos. It’s my job.”
“He says you ran when he saw you.”
“He scares me. And I’d had a bad day. I had to identify Diane’s body in the morgue, and I was feeling a little skittish.”
The cops gave each other a quick look. Sula didn’t think they bought her story, but she would stick with it.
“He says you disappeared after that.” Whitstone’s voice was monotone.
“It was after four o’clock. I went home.”
Whitstone leaned forward. “Why would your boss accuse you of theft?”
“I don’t know. People say he’s vindictive.”
“What were you doing in Warner’s office?” Hutchison asked abruptly.
“I wasn’t in her office.”
“Rudker says he saw you coming out.”
“Not true. I was passing by. Perhaps he’s reacting to Diane’s death in an odd way too.”
They were all silent for a moment. Hutchison stood and Whitstone followed suit. “We have to book you into the jail,” he said with a trace of regret. “You’ll probably be arraigned and released in the morning.”
Sula bit her lip to keep from swearing. This was insane. Rudker must be throwing his clout around. Dread filled her stomach. She told herself one night in jail wouldn’t kill her. She had survived much worse.
As she followed the officers out, anger replaced the dread. Rudker had made it personal. If he wanted a fight, he would get one. She would send a copy of the disk with Warner’s files to the FDA. She would hire a lawyer and sue the company to get her job back. By having her arrested, he’d shown his hand. He obviously had something to hide and she intended to shine a light on it.
The red brick building on 5th Avenue had always looked more like a huge public library than a jail. Today Sula noticed its lack of windows for the first time. The cop car drove up to an annex next to the main building and waited. Twin steel doors opened and Officer Whitstone drove in. She parked the car in front of a small steel door to the left. Another set of wide steel doors was set into the opposite wall. It was a drive through, only no one ran up to change the oil or rotate the tires.
Whitstone got out, removed her weapon, and locked it in the trunk of the squad car. She opened the car door for Sula and helped her out. Her hands were cuffed and she was glad for the assistance. In the next room, three desks with computers and chairs were the only items in the small, windowless space. Whitstone sat down at one station and motioned for Sula to sit as well. For a few minutes the cop said nothing as she filled out paperwork and entered information into the computer.
She abruptly asked, “Do you feel ill or do have any medical conditions, such as diabetes, that we should know about?”
Sula wondered if she should mention the occasional post traumatic stress, but said, “No.”
“Do you feel like you might want to commit suicide?”
“No.”
“Are you going to become sick from withdrawals during the next twenty-four hours?”
“No.” She was glad to know they asked such questions. Many of the people arrested on a daily basis were homeless, addicted, and/or mentally ill.
Whitstone picked up the phone and called for a female deputy. Moments later, a slender middle-aged woman with a buzz cut and a pretty face entered the small room. Whitstone handed the deputy a plastic bag containing Sula’s purse, then uncuffed Sula and turned to face her. “Good luck,” she said softly, then moved toward the exterior door.
As the jail deputy escorted Sula out of the room, she felt like a piece of property that had just been transferred to a new and unknown owner. The steel door slammed behind her. Sula shuddered. She was a prisoner.
They moved down a short hall into a similar-sized room and sat on opposite sides of a desk. The deputy asked her the same set of questions Whitstone had: “Are you going to try to commit suicide? Are you sick? Will you experience withdrawals?”
Then the woman, whose name tag said Deputy Crouse, asked her to remove her shoes, her belt, and her sweater. Those were added to the plastic bag. Then Crouse read a list of the items, starting with her purse, followed by all of its contents, including the seven dollars and fifty-six cents in her wallet. Sula signed the document, in essence agreeing with the inventory of her possessions.
Deputy Crouse pulled a blanket from a shelf and handed it to her. They went back into the hall, down another twenty feet, then entered yet another windowless room. This area was larger, about forty-by-forty, and housed a dozen unhappy women, most in their twenties and thirties, plus a few older street hags. Scattered around the perimeter of the room on wooden benches, some sitting, others reclining, the women formed a colorful and tragic collection of human lives gone inexplicably wrong. As they looked up at Sula in her black skirt and pink silk blouse, it was clear they had no empathy. She did not belong here.
“There’s a pay phone over there,” Crouse said pointing as if she were showing a home for sale. “You can make collect calls only. There’s a toilet and sink behind that short wall. You might as well get comfortable. You’ll be here until you’re arraigned at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. If you were a guy, you’d probably be released before midnight because of overcrowding. But unless a whole sorority house gets arrested this evening for drunk and disorderly, you’re in for an overnighter.”
Sula wanted to ask, Where do I sleep? But it was clear this room was her reality for a while. She looked at her watch: 3:10 p.m. Seventeen hours and twenty minutes to go.
She looked around the room and spotted a place along the wall near the phone. Hugging her blanket like a timid child, she walked across the cold concrete and sat on the bench.
“Welcome to the fishbowl,” said a skinny young woman. She had the abused hair and skin of a meth addict.
“Thanks.”
Sula closed her eyes as if that would make it all go away. She meditated for about ten minutes, then heard her named called out. She looked up to see the deputy waving her over to the door. A flash of hope surged through her. Maybe she was being released. As she got near, Crouse said, “Time for prints and pictures.” Sula’s hope plummeted.
She followed the deputy into yet another room, where another deputy took her fingerprints, entering her forever into the system of suspects. It wasn’t until she stood next to the wall for a mug shot that she felt like a criminal. In that moment, she couldn’t get enough air into her lungs.
Sula thought about her father, who’d been arrested so many times. He had treated the arrests like notches in his belt. To him, people who never landed in jail were “slaves to the system.” Mindless sheep with no passion. As a child, she had resented his incarcerations and the stigma attached to them. Now, his rebellion gave her a sense of strength.
It was worth it, she told herself. She had the disk with Warner’s discovery. The FDA would see it and stop Nexapra’s clinical trials. Lives would be saved. She could only hope hers would not be lost in the process.
