Well, it wasn't her best joke, but she didn't think it was as bad as his reaction implied. Then again, the man was sitting in a police interrogation room being questioned about his involvement in a brutal murder, so perhaps she was expecting too much.
One of the reasons Charlie, her dead husband, had gotten so mad at An was that he didn't quite get her sense of humor. He would admonish her for her smart mouth, accuse her of lording her education over him (as if a bachelor's degree in art history was anything to write home about). He would start off low, like one of those sirens you crank by hand, and the more things would spin out of control, the louder he would get, until he was on top of her, screaming, his fists pounding into her body – but never her face.
It was embarrassing, really, to be a 23-year-old woman who put on a uniform and gun every day to keep the peace, only to have the pulp beaten out of her almost every night. She never fought back, though surely Charlie deserved it. What was it about An's nature that made her seem like a victim? She saw domestic violence so much at work that it seemed almost commonplace. Those early years on the force, half of her calls were because some man had gotten drunk and taken it out on a woman. Her eyes would glaze over at their stories of love, the excuses they made. And then she would go home and Charlie would beat her.
Really, it was luck that he'd slipped in the bathtub and hit his head. When An had found him there, the only question in her mind was whether to leave the water running or not while he slowly bled to death. She was the child of Dutch parents, and knew better than to waste water. She had turned off the shower, then gone in to watch
This was back when you had to buy merchandise with your winnings. An could still remember the woman who had won that night. The camera panned over all the exotic, expensive items while a second camera showed the winner's excited face as she called out her purchases. 'I'll take the dinette set for fiveninety- nine, and the matching sideboard for three-fifty.' There was always a couple of hundred dollars left over, and invariably the winner would have to choose the white, ceramic greyhounds. An had always wanted one of those greyhounds. She'd yet to find one at a store. It was the kind of thoughtful gift Jill would've found for her if she'd had the strength to get out of bed (not that they had a lot of money; Jill's disability pay from the hospital barely helped with her part of the mortgage).
Bruce knocked on the door as he entered the interrogation room. He held a folder in his hand; the crime- scene photos. He put the folder on the table and slid it toward An as a twelve-year-old boy in a suit walked in behind him.
Well, the public defender couldn't have actually been twelve, but he looked it. When he walked across the room, his shoes squeaked. She noticed that his hair was wet at the crown where he'd combed down a cowlick. The sleeve of his suit still had the manufacturer's label sewn on to the cuff.
'I'm Max Jergens,' he said, and An nearly laughed, thinking the name would be more fitting for a well- endowed porn star. She couldn't help it, her eyes went directly to his crotch. Jergens noticed, of course. His lip curled up in a smile.
An tried to sound professional, and to not look at his crotch, when she told him, 'I'm Detective An Albada. We have some questions for your client in connection with the death of one of his co-workers, Sandra Burke.'
He put his briefcase on the table, opened the locks, took out a legal pad, closed the briefcase, put it on the floor, sat down at the table, took a pen out of his breast pocket, took the cap off the pen and put it on the opposite end, then wrote down the word, 'Anabada.'
Martin said helpfully, 'I made the same mistake myself,' as he took the pen from his lawyer, crossed through the word and wrote in a flourishing script much like a teenage girl's, 'Detective Anther Albada.' He even put a circle instead of a dot over the 'i'.
Bruce chuckled behind An. She didn't have to turn around to know that he had his arms crossed over his chest and was staring down his nose at Martin.
Jergens asked, 'What evidence do you have against my client?'
Martin began, 'It's silly, really-' but An cut him off with a 'Was he talking to you?' look.
She said, 'We found blood on Mr Reed's car, his own mixed with that of the victim. We have conclusive evidence that it was Mr Reed's car that ran over Ms. Burke.'
Martin's face turned a whiter shade of pale. 'I cut my hands,' he explained. 'The bumper was hanging off the front of my car. My hands got cut.' He held up his palms and she saw the criss-cross of razor-thin lines. They had taken photographs of the wounds when they were booking him, and An had thought then as she thought now that had Sandra Burke been felled by a mortal paper cut, this would have been an open and shut case.
Jergens asked, 'Where was her body found?'
'Less than half a mile from Mr Reed's place of employment – the same route he takes home every day.'
Jergens seemed surprised. 'Is that so?'
'We believe he took his mother home, then went in search of the woman who had humiliated him two days before.' An watched Martin as she laid out the scenario. He didn't look like someone who would fester with hatred, but then again, she was a grown woman who had carried on an eight-year relationship with an imaginary friend, so who could tell?
Jergens asked, 'Does he have an alibi?'
'No.'
'Ouch!' Jergens chortled. He looked down at his legal pad where he was tracing An's name with his pen. When he saw her watching, he gave her a wink and turned one of the circles into a heart.
'Are you narcoleptic?' Martin asked his lawyer.
Jergens shook his head sadly. 'Don't I wish.'
An opened the folder Bruce had given her, keeping it tilted so that Martin and his boy lawyer could not see the contents. The pictures were stark, violent. Sandy had not just been hit by a car. Her body showed extensive bruising where she had been beaten repeatedly with a blunt object. On the scene, the coroner had guessed maybe a piece of wood or something with a square end. When An had opened the trunk of Martin's Camry and seen the crushed corner of his briefcase, she had added the case to the list of possible murder weapons.
The coroner easily read the scene: the car had been used to knock down the victim. The subsequent beating was what had killed the woman. Then, the killer had gotten back into his car and ran over her head. Then her torso. Then her head again.
An had to admit, if only to herself, that she was having trouble feeling sympathy for the victim. Sandra Burke had two children who were being raised by the State. She had a history of drug and alcohol abuse. She had been arrested once for intimidating one of her elderly neighbors into giving her ten dollars for cigarettes.
All of this together was nothing spectacularly bad in the scheme of things – this was certainly not the first case An had seen where an alcoholic, bad mother had been brutally murdered – but there was one particular thing about Sandra Burke that really grated An's nerves: she was a hideous housekeeper. She'd left plates in the sink so long that the food had started to growmold. How hard was it to put them in the dishwasher? And would it have killed the woman to occasionally vacuum the rug in the front hall? For the love of God, the vacuum was right there in the hall closet.
'Excuse me?' Martin said.
An realized she had gone silent too long. She cleared her throat, trying to block out the image of the dirty dishes, to think of Sandra Burke as a human being instead of a grossly untidy person. 'Mr Reed, have you ever hit a woman?'
He bristled. 'Of course not. Men are stronger than women. It's an unfair advantage.'
Bruce chuckled. 'Have to be alone with them before you can hit them, right, Marty? Was that what it was all about?' He slammed his hands on the table, raising his voice. 'Tell us what happened, Martin! Tell us the truth!' He leaned closer. 'You came on to Susan and she told you to go fuck yourself! Isn't that right?'
Martin and An exchanged a look. His voice was mild when he corrected, 'It's Sandy, actually.'
Jergens scratched through the word 'Susan' on his pad and wrote 'Sandee'.
An felt a headache working its way up from the back of her neck and into the base of her brain. She asked, 'Mr Reed, where did you go last night after you dropped off your mother?'
'I just drove around,' he mumbled.
'Speak up,' Bruce chided.
'I said I just drove around,' Martin insisted. 'This is really crazy. Honestly, why would I hurt Sandy?'
An kicked Bruce's foot with her own, indicating that he should go back to glowering with his back against the
