Beyond Recognition (38 page)

He stepped toward the suspect. There was enough ambient light to see shapes but not details.

She didn't want any surprises. “Let's wait for backup, shall we?”

Boldt never broke his concentration. He nodded. Then he called out to the man lying on the ground, “Nicholas Hall, you are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent ....”

He glanced over at her—only for an instant—and their eyes met. His were full of joy.

She cherished the moment. She tucked it away and saved it. Safe from harm. Hers always.

They took turns with him, as if working a punching bag. Nicholas Hall had been processed like a side of beef: his fingerprints inked, his possessions stored in lockup in a brown paper bag bearing his name and record number, his clothes replaced with the humiliating orange jumpsuit with CITY JAIL stenciled in huge white letters across the back. Boldt had requested “full jewelry”—handcuffs and ankle manacles. He wanted Hall to think about it.

The prisoner had not yet requested a court-appointed attorney, a privilege that had been offered him during three separate readings of the Miranda. They were taking no chances with Nicholas Hall. The lack of an attorney meant that Hall spent three consecutive two-hour shifts in Homicide's eight-by-eight interrogation room A, the Box. He was given a twenty-minute break between sessions, escorted to the toilet, and offered food and water. Boldt took the first hour and the role of the heavy. Daphne took hour number two and played the friend. Boldt took hour three. By the fourth hour, Daphne had begun to loosen him up by pitting Boldt against her and telling him how the old guard, the hard-liners like Boldt, didn't like a woman doing their job, didn't like the suspects forming any kind of relationship with her.

“I put up with a lot of shit around here,” she informed him. Hall had rough hair and soft brown eyes. The left side of his lower neck was discolored—beet purple—a birthmark, not a burn. That hand hid in his lap, shackled to its partner. “They think of me in terms of my sex,” she said. “I'm all tits and ass to most of them, that's all. I'm different,” she said, attempting to appeal to that hand of his, “so they don't trust me.”

“I know all about that.”

In the three hours and twenty minutes they had worked on him, this was the fourth full sentence that Hall had spoken. Daphne felt a tingle of excitement in her belly. “The hand,” she said.

He nodded.

“People think you're a freak.”

“You got that right.”

“Me,” she said, “I'm a freak around here because I don't pee standing up.” She wanted to place as many images in his head about her as possible, hoping to mislead him into seeing her strictly as a woman, not as a cop but as opposing the cops, the same way Nicholas Hall felt at that moment.

He smiled.

She could tell a lot about him from that smile: considerate, kind, thoughtful. Not that she trusted it. “Do you have brothers or sisters?” she asked, knowing the answer.

“Yeah. Kid sister.”

“Parents?”

“Dead. My dad on the highway. My mom … she kind of drank herself to death, you know? After my dad and all.”

“My parents too,” she lied. “It trashed me at the time. Tough stuff.”

“My dad was driving pigs, Des Moines to Lincoln. Can you imagine? They say he caught a wheel on the shoulder. The pigs all swung at the same time and carried the trailer over. Trailer took the cab. Rolled down into that middle part. I was fourteen.”

She nodded sympathetically. She reached up and scratched the back of her neck, giving Boldt the signal.

The sergeant came charging into the interrogation room, red faced and angry. “It's my turn,” he announced. “You're out of here.”

“No way,” Daphne complained. “He doesn't want to talk to you.”

“What the hell do I care what he wants?” Boldt asked. “He killed a woman and left her in a crawl space—”

Sitting forward, his handcuffs dragging on the table, Hall said, “That's bullshit.”

“You're interrupting me, Sergeant.” She glanced at her watch. “Nick and I aren't through,” she said, using his abbreviated name. Until that moment she had only called him Nicholas. The idea was for her to develop a rapport and isolate Boldt as far as possible. “You mind if I call you Nick?” she added, checking with the suspect, who looked confused and afraid. To Boldt she said, “If Nick wants to speak with you instead—” She left it hanging there.

“No!” objected the suspect.

“There you have it,” she informed Boldt. “You'll have to wait your turn.”

“You're not going to get anything out of him,” Boldt complained. “Let me have him. I sense
Nick
and I are on the verge of some real progress here.”

“I don't think so,” she countered. “The door is that way.” She added, “If your head isn't too big to fit through it.” She glanced at Hall. The suspect grinned. Just right, she thought. He's all mine. “Out!” she told Boldt.

The sergeant glared at them and left the tiny room.

“These charges are bullshit,” Hall stated. “I didn't kill no woman.”

“You know, it's better if you don't play dumb,” she informed him. Quietly, she said, “If they think you're cooperating with me, we can keep you up here. Otherwise it's down to lockup. And once they arraign you, you can spend weeks there—months in County. The backlog in the courts is awful right now.”

“I am not playing dumb,” he protested. “I don't know nothing about no dead woman.”

“Listen, the thing is, they can place you in the house. What were you doing there, if not trying to cover up your knowing her?”

“I don't know her.”

“Didn't,” she corrected. “I'm telling you, these guys are not real long on brains.” Raising her voice, she said, “They're just about as dumb as they look.”

“Are they watching us?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Listening?”

She nodded again.

“Can we talk—I mean, just you and me? None of that?”

“I can check.”

“Check it out,” he said. “I'll talk to you, but in private. You know? Off the record.”

“Right,” she said. None of what was said in that room was ever off the record. It was written down in a notebook, or tape-recorded, or videoed. But the rule of the Box was to please the customer. “Let me check,” she said.

“I didn't kill no woman!” he repeated, shouting at her. “Never been in that house before! You gotta believe me.”

She left the room, immediately greeted in the office area by Boldt and Lieutenant Shoswitz. “You're a genius,” Boldt said.

“He's coming around, I think.”

“You think? You've got him by the stones,” Boldt encouraged.

“I think he'll give us that airport meet,” she said, “if we use the homicide charge to deal.”

“We're holding Santori on that charge,” Shoswitz reminded her.

“He doesn't know that,” Daphne countered, then asked Boldt, “What about the truck, the mobile home?”

“The lab has been through the truck. The dogs didn't turn up anything.”

“Is that possible?”

“No hydrocarbons,” Boldt answered bluntly. “That's all they're trained for. That's all it means.” Boldt left them a moment and stepped over to his desk, returning with photocopies of several lab reports. He handed them to Daphne and said, “Here's your ammunition. You can hang him with these.”

She looked them over, switching back and forth between the top report and the memo, which was indicated to have been written only twenty minutes before. “Are we wrong about this?” she asked Boldt, bewildered.

“Some answers wouldn't hurt any.”

“You mind if I work this?” she asked. “Or do you want it?”

Shoswitz advised, “Be careful about the way you two do this. We want all the ducks—”

“In a row. Message received,” she said.

Boldt told her, “They're yours if you want them.”

She beamed. The lieutenant shook his head in disgust and walked away.

“He's not thrilled about you having the boy at your place. He's worried it'll come back to haunt us.”

She felt her face heat up. “We've sequestered witnesses before. He's Shoswitz; he worries about everything.” She indicated the interrogation room door. “Okay?”

Boldt answered encouragingly, “Go get him.”

“They'll let us talk,” she told the suspect. The small room was hot and she felt uncomfortable. “They won't eavesdrop without me knowing about it,” she said. It wasn't a lie, though she used it to trick him. She
did
know about it, and they
were
listening in. Foremost in her mind was that she wanted Ben out of this as soon as possible. That required nothing short of a full signed confession. No matter how she worked and reworked it, she didn't see that happening. She felt discouraged but not defeated. In the right hands, an interrogation was something fluid and changeable.

Failure was at the base of most of the personal problems that as a professional she attempted to treat. Failure to beat a legal system that seemed stacked against law enforcement. Failure to take the slime off the street. Failure to make a promotion or convince a superior of the importance of a case. Failure at home: to communicate, in bed, as a parent, as a partner. It worked its decay slowly, at first, and unnoticed. By the time the pain struck it was virtually too late to stop the damage. The only recourse was to attempt to plug the hole, fill the void left behind. It took various forms: tobacco, alcohol, cocaine and amphetamines, sex addiction, physical abuse. Early warning signs were reckless behavior, vehement disagreements over trivial matters, absenteeism.

Over the years she had come to learn that suspects were no different: plugging the pain with crime. Nor was she any different. The idea of failure hurt.

“I didn't kill nobody,” Hall mumbled. “Never. You gotta know that. Believe that. Nobody. Not ever.”

“The hand,” she said, knowing this was the source of the pain. “Tell me about that hand.”

“No!”

“They stare at it, and they look away. They talk about it behind your back. They make you think about it at times when you'd forgotten all about it. But you can't get away from it. It follows you around, stuck to the end of your arm like another person—someone you don't understand.”

“We're not talking about my hand.”

“I am.”

“We're talking about these murder charges. I ain't never—”

“I'm talking about your hand,” she interrupted. “What, you think I'm working against you here? Maybe we find out she was strangled
with bare hands
. That's all you need, you know.”

“Is that true?” he asked.

“I said maybe. Now tell me about that hand. How long ago?”

“Three years, seven months,” he answered. His eyes grew glassy and distant.

“How?”

“An accident. I was in the service.”

She replied, “Air Force.”

“Yeah, so what?”

“How?”

“An explosive device. Phosphorus. It misfired. Detonator problem. Fired early.”

She stared at his bad hand a moment, long enough to know that he too was engrossed in it. Then she asked, “Why were you in that house?”

He looked away.

“Why not tell me?” she encouraged. “If it had nothing to do with the victim—”

His nostrils flared and his eyes grew wide. He said softly, “A kid stole some money from me.” Daphne felt ebullient.
More
, she pushed silently. “I got a tip it was in the house. I swear. You found it on me; that's
my
money.”

She asked, “You know what they found when they found the body—the lab guys? Down in the crawl space, I'm talking about.” She toyed with the papers Boldt had handed her, shifting them around on the table.

“I'm telling you, I have no idea about no body.”

She toughened her demeanor and prepared herself for a more military attitude, one that Hall might understand. She took a deep breath of the room's sour air and said, “Listen, mister, when I ask you a question I expect more than an answer, I expect the
truth
. If the truth is too much for you, then we have no business here, you and I. Do you hear me, Mr. Hall?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Good. Now I will tell you what they found down in that crawl space other than a pile of bones. And in return for this favor you will tell me the truth—for a change—and maybe, just maybe, I can save your sorry ass from Sergeant Boldt, who would just as soon send you down to lockup and never see you again. You think that Sergeant Boldt cares about your side of the story?”