Chapter 33
The Saranac police station is located in a former Army National Guard armory.
It has to be at least twenty thousand square feet, and most of the building appears unused and pitch-black.
The floors have recently been mopped in the lobby, and I stare at my small muddy footprints next to Henry’s Bigfoot ones while a baby-faced administrator tells the officers that interrogation rooms two and three are open, and so are four and five, and so are—
“We got it,” Officer Kline says, cutting him off.
When we first arrived, he had explained that this was temporary housing for the force while their new headquarters are being constructed just outside of town.
I asked him all kinds of questions about that and acted as invested as one can be about the challenges of moving vending machines containing opioid reversal spray bottles, because I want him to like me and I need him to believe every lie that comes out of my mouth.
“This way,” he says to us with a tilt of his head. Before the administrator buzzes us through to the back, he says over his shoulder, “Talley, can you grab some waters and put them in two and three?”
Invisible bias had me convinced that all three officers outside the cabin door were men.
But when someone finally got the key off Corrine and set us free, it was a woman in her mid-twenties named Officer Talley who escorted me down the dock with her purple fingernails at my back.
She has not stopped staring at me since.
Henry and I follow Officer Kline a few steps into a corridor lined on one side with doors and on the other with a series of windows showing the armory’s strip of muddy lawn and beyond it a homely stretch of state road.
Officer Kline taps his hip to the keypad for room number two and tells me to go in and sit down and someone will be in to take my statement soon.
Stepping away from Henry and into that room feels like a surgical separation.
I am aware of every stroke of the bone saw as the door swings shut on Henry, standing solemnly in the melancholic morning light, looking at me like he needs a squeeze of morphine too.
The room has flat gray carpeting, mismatched dining room chairs around a small wooden table.
Mounted black cameras train their beady red eyes on me.
On the table is a Dixie cup with a collection of blue and black pens.
I stare at those pens and I wonder if it is some kind of psychological test. If they already know that five days ago I incapacitated Campbell with a lowly BIC and then I murdered him with hardly any effort at all.
Officer Talley comes in with some water and a chewy bagel, cream cheese in a ketchup packet.
She stares at me more while I eat. The only time she speaks is to ask me if I would like any coffee and when I say I am okay because I can only imagine what armory coffee tastes like, she teases that maybe later someone will make a Starbucks run.
I can’t tell if she hates me or if she’s buttering me up to ask for an autograph.
Officer Kline comes back into the room with a crumb in his facial scrub. He asks me to move to a different chair, indicating the cameras, saying something about the angle, and we ring-around-the-rosy until he tells me to sit.
“Okay,” he says, a little bit short of breath. He’s a skinny man with a blond goatee and a small gut. “I’m going to read you your Miranda rights now. You’re not under arrest, but you are being questioned in police custody, so that’s why I have to do it. Do you understand the difference?”
I nod, thinking, Now there’s an authentic detail.
“You need to verbalize your answer, ma’am.”
And there is another. “Yes.”
He goes through the whole thing, weird not to hear it in the Law & Order voice, punctuated with the Law & Order gavel bang, and I nod and I nod, even at the part where he talks about my right to have an attorney.
I do not want to ask for counsel, because it will make me look guilty, and because I am guilty and any counsel in their right mind will advise me against moving ahead with this.
“Do you understand these rights as I have read them to you?” Officer Kline asks.
“I do.”
He fixes me with a long look, no doubt waiting for me to say that I’d like to place a call to a lawyer in some high-rise in some swanky part of some wicked city. Instead I ask him about Emma.
“Emma?”
“Emma King. The young woman I told you was in danger. Is she okay?”
“I don’t have an update for you at the moment,” Officer Kline says cryptically.
I stare at the pens on the table. They would not let me around the pens if they thought I was the bad guy, I think, and then we begin.
By the time I need my first bathroom break, we are not even halfway through my statement.
They bring in lunch, more water. I keep talking, take another bathroom break.
Then I am left alone for a long time with the pens.
A plainclothes officer comes into the room, holding a Starbucks cup, and identifies himself as a homicide detective from Albany, and the other officers bow their heads and leave the room as though the pope has arrived.
I tell the story again to the pope. Then he leaves, and I’m left alone for some time, and when the door opens again, it’s Officer Talley asking me if I’d like to make any phone calls. My husband, I tell her somberly.
Next to the vending machine with the opioid reversal spray, Officer Talley feeds two quarters into the pay phone’s coin slot, and I punch in my husband’s cell.
He does not answer, likely because he does not recognize the number, so I leave a message and tell him it’s me, that I’m going to wait a few minutes and try him back, and he needs to pick up this time because it is an emergency. “I’m not hurt,” I add before I hang up.
When I call him back, he answers on the first ring. I tell him an abbreviated version of the story I’ve been telling all day. When I finish, my husband doesn’t say anything for a long time. Then, “Do you need a lawyer?”
“No,” I say. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“Fuck you, Faye.” He hangs up.