Ridley Pearson - Beyond Recognition

“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?”

“No, ma’am.”

“That’s correct. He does not. His desk is covered in open murder investigations, and as far as he’s concerned this one is cleared. You’re just a number to him. As far as he’s concerned, the next stop for you is a court, a jury, and death row.” She tapped the papers violently, summoning an anger that she expressed as an unrelenting and penetrating stare. “Do we understand each other?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’m getting a better feeling about this, Nick. I believe we’re beginning to understand one another. Is that your assessment as well?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Look me in the eye, Nick. That’s better. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“They found your fingerprints in that crawl space, Nick. Where they found the dead woman.”

He wore a paralyzed expression, part shock, part realization.

She explained, “There is absolutely no question about this. Do you understand? That is what we call evidence. Proof. The stuff that puts you away for life.” He couldn’t get a word out. She watched as he relived some incident, his eyes suddenly blank.

He said hurriedly, “No, listen. You don’t understand.”

She told him, “No, I don’t. But Boldt thinks he does.”

“You got this wrong.”

“What I got ,” she said, “is you, on tape, telling me that you had never been to that residence prior to tonight. Never been in that house before. You gotta believe me ,” she said, reading her interrogation notes. “So I believed you. Now I don’t believe you, and neither does Sergeant Boldt.”

“No, I had been there.” He attempted to correct himself.

“I think we’re pretty clear on that, Nick.”

“Last week,” he said.

“You’re saying you just happened to be in the crawl space last week? Oh, well,” she said sarcastically, “ that explains it! Certainly fills in all the blanks for me.” She straightened her posture and ran her fingers through her hair. She felt bone tired and yet almost high at the same time. This was the stuff she lived for. “There’s no accurate way to date latent fingerprints. Did you know that? Last week, last year…. It’s all the same to the lab guys. All the same to a jury.” She fixed her eyes on to him and said, “Help me here. What the hell were you doing there, Nick? How do we explain this to Boldt? Did you kill that woman?”

“No, no, no,” the suspect said, shaking his head violently and gently slapping the table with that paw and its ungainly three fingernails.

“Talk to me.”

“I was at the airport,” he stated, breaking out of the dark and into the open ground of truth for the first time.

Confessions came piece by piece, by disassembling the fabricated truth and allowing the real truth to take its place. To her it felt like digging in wet sand as the waves came in-remove the sand, allow the water to fill the hole.

“You weren’t alone there,” she said.

He shook his head, the handcuff chains rattling on the tabletop.

“Help me out here, Nick.”

She stood, leaned onto her outstretched arms. “A person can’t dance alone. Boldt’s way of doing this?” she asked. “He’ll misplace you for a couple days. Place you ‘accidentally’ in the wrong lockup, in with the guys the screws call the soapies-the soap droppers. For you it’s a few days of sitting on the toilet and screaming, a few months of wondering if you’re carrying the disease or not.

“Who cares about capital punishment,” she continued, “when there’s the disease? It’s free. No one pushes a button. That’s Boldt’s way for justice,” she lied. “He’s of the old school. He’ll tell you he cares, but he doesn’t. He wants a good, solid clearance rate. That’s how his success is measured. You’re a number to him. They made the arrest, now they want to clear the case. Take a good long look, Nick. This is your life walking out the door.”

She stood and walked slowly toward the door, each step a lifetime: Dorothy Enwright, Melissa Heifitz, Connie Branslonovich. She reached for the doorknob deliberately, took her time in turning it. Pulled open the door. The air smelled better, felt cooler.

“It wasn’t drugs,” Hall admitted in a hushed voice.

Daphne turned, reentered the room, and pulled the door shut behind herself. Suddenly that dreary, claustrophobic room smelled a lot sweeter.

“I was doing some business, you know? Some punk kid ripped me for five bills. Stupid asshole drops his wallet in my truck. First time I went there, he hid from me in the crawl space.”

“You roughed up the stepfather.”

“We tangled. I wanted my fucking money! Second time-tonight-I took the money. And that’s the God’s truth.”

Daphne’s pulse quickened, she felt warm in the small of her back. She focused on his body language and his facial expressions, searching for the signs. She measured his eye movement, waited for him to begin licking his lips-a dry mouth tipped off lying-watched keenly for how much eye contact he sought-eye avoidance often indicated insincerity.

After a long silence she asked, “What kind of business?”

“A phone call now and then. The guy knew more about my base than I did. I swear that’s the truth.” He checked her again. He was made nervous by her silence, which was exactly what she wanted, so she didn’t change a thing. “I never met him.”

Her skin crawled. A second person. No one would want to hear this, she realized. He looked over at her with the vacant eyes of a man on death row. “I don’t know nothing about him.”

She caught herself gnawing at the inside of her right cheek. She was full of questions but as yet unwilling to voice them, hoping instead to pressure him with silence, the most effective of all interrogation tools.