Ridley Pearson - No Witnesses

The bus pulled off into a vacant lot.

Cornelia Uli screamed for help and glanced over her shoulder, only to be faced with the sight of a half-dozen handguns trained onto her. Some of the agents were shielded by the seats, some standing and fully exposed. A set of handcuffs clicked onto her wrist. “You fuckhead!” she shouted at LaMoia, wiggling to break free.

“The purse!” Boldt shouted.

An agent dropped to her knees and scouted under the seat.

“The purse,” Boldt repeated, worried now. The evidence: the money, the cash card. He saw LaMoia, still holding the suspect, looking everywhere for the all-important purse. Two others now searched the floor of the bus. One came up slowly, met eyes with Boldt, and hoisted it in the air. The purse.

A cheer went up spontaneously.

Boldt shouted out loudly, “Drive this thing downtown.”

LaMoia added, “And watch the goddamn brakes!”

Deputy prosecuting attorney Penny Smyth was on her third cup of coffee. She winced every time she sipped the police brew, but took it as medicine against the hour of 2:00 A.M. On the other side of the one-way glass, a handcuffed Cornelia Uli sat at the Box’s cigarette-marred table between the NO SMOKING sign and the ashtray. The suspect looked restless and agitated. Looking at her, Daphne said, “She’s going to talk, this one.”

“You both know the rules,” Smyth said. “I don’t have to tell you the rules, and I’m sure as hell not coming in there with you, or you might have to observe them.” The one area in which police were allowed a significant amount of latitude was in the interrogation of suspects. The interrogating officer could blatantly lie and make as many false promises as he or she wished, so long as the suspect kept talking. Silence and time were a suspect’s only real defense in the opening twenty-four hours of confinement. A suspect could demand a court-appointed attorney, but the officer did not have to deliver that attorney for as long as the suspect continued to communicate. This being an arresting officer’s only clear opportunity to quickly clear a case, many detectives had perfected the interrogation, promoting it to an art form. As a team, Daphne Matthews and Lou Boldt were among the best, and they were known on the fifth floor as “Sweet and Sour.”

Smyth explained, “She has a long pink sheet, which at twenty-one speaks volumes. Convictions on gang activity, drugs, check kiting. Arrests, but no charges, on a handful of others, including second-degree murder. She has seen a lot of us. I’d keep that in mind. We’ve got her cold on this extortion, and with the connection to the threats and the murders, maybe on an accessory charge. If she doesn’t talk, she may be going away forever. That’s your carrot and whip.”

The Box smelled of human fear. They could wash it, even repaint it, but within a week it smelled the same. Like an old worn-down railroad terminal, it was the end of the line, the last stop. For many who entered these walls, this was their last time in civilian clothes for years to come. The more experienced-the guilty-knew this. No matter his anger at what crime a suspect had committed, Boldt rarely entered this place without pity lurking somewhere in his heart. He had to wonder what events in people’s lives had combined to deposit them here in this cheerless, vapid, dreary space, where a bulldog of an overworked public servant went to work on them like a butcher with a sharp knife.

She might have been pretty once, he thought. But the streets had aged her prematurely, drying her skin and creasing her eyes and placing torment and fear inside so that it bubbled out in a twitchy nervousness that kept Boldt on edge.

Daphne pulled up a chair. Boldt remained standing. Sweet and Sour got down to business. Daphne stared at the young woman. Boldt paced the tight room, in long, heavy strides, hands clasped behind his back. Neither spoke. They waited out their suspect, who finally said, “I want an attorney.”

“An attorney?” he asked. To Daphne he said, “She wants an attorney.”

“I’ll make a note of that.”

“Now.”

“You want your attorney now ?” Boldt asked.

“I just said so.”

“Are you sure that’s what you want? Because I was about to give you a chance to skate this whole mess you’re in. And if you insist that I get you an attorney, well then, hey! that’s all she wrote. An attorney is yours, and I’ll see you in court. On the other hand, if you keep you wits about you, Ms. Cornelia Uli, I might turn out to be your knight in shining armor.”

“Fat chance.”

“She called me fat.”

“You look all right to me,” Daphne said.

“What? You’re a comedy team? I want an attorney.”

“And we will assign you one , Cornelia. It’s taken care of.” To Daphne, Boldt said, “You wrote it down, right?”

“It’s right here,” she informed him, pointing to her stenographer’s pad.

“It’s right there,” Boldt told the suspect. “It’s taken care of.”

“Bullshit.”

He slapped the table with an incredible force. Uli jumped back. Daphne did not flinch. “Listen to me!” he bellowed. “I am your last chance .” Effecting a noticeable calm, he said, “You play or you pay. It’s that simple. You know what we’ve got you on? Do you know what we intend to charge you with?” To Daphne he said, “Go ahead, tell her.” Boldt checked his watch. Two-thirty. He could not remember ever feeling this tired. Any minute LaMoia should have the preliminary results of the search of Uli’s loft apartment. Boldt had been present when a SWAT team had kicked the place-hoping for Caulfield-but he had left the detail work for the ID unit and LaMoia.

Daphne read an incredible list of charges, including extortion and concluding with first-degree murder.

When this final charge was read, Uli’s eyes flashed darkly between them and she said, “That’s bullshit.”

“She doesn’t know,” Boldt told Daphne. “We’re supposed to believe that this woman is some innocent runner, some accomplice, when in fact we know it was her all along.” To Uli he said, “The account number is listed in one of the threats, young lady. That is a direct connection to you and these threats, to you and the poisoning deaths of ten individuals. Ten. And believe me, if you’re thinking you will somehow get life instead of lethal injection, you have not been paying attention to what’s been going on out at Walla Walla. This state is in the killing mood, Ms. Uli. And crimes like this are exactly the cases that I’m talking about.”

“On the other hand,” Daphne said, before Uli could issue the prerequisite string of denials, “if you have something to tell us, your cooperation might keep you off death row.”

“It might let you walk out of here,” Boldt said.

“She’s not that smart,” Daphne told him. “Girls like this always think they know better than us,” and to Uli, “which is bizarre to me, since we spend all of our time putting people like you away. And people like you spend all of their time behind bars. Isn’t that strange?”

“I want an attorney.”

Daphne said to Boldt, “I told you she’s not that smart. She can’t even remember that I already made a note of that.”

Boldt said seriously, “You can probably sell sex to the guards for cigarettes. I hear that oral sex is worth a pack. The real thing, a carton. At least for a couple of years you can. You have a nice body. You’re young. But others come along younger than you. And then it gets tough in there, because the guards are through with you. We try to police that, you know. We don’t like it. But it’s the prisoners who keep it going. They get a little desperate in there. Women liking other women. Are you into that stuff?”