Chapter Twelve #2
“You better not,” Katherine said, handing me my phone.
“I’ll need Raúl’s contact information. It’s good we have a witness to this.
You get attacked in an elevator and then go home to a trashed apartment?
That would look bad even to a blind cop.
The fact that Brad covered it up works in our favor. It shows conspiracy to commit a crime.”
The more she talked, the more I understood why Liam Larson kept her on his payroll. She was intelligent, competent, and seemingly unshakable. We spoke for several more minutes before saying goodbye to Jakob and walking into the building.
The front door spat us out into a small rectangular room.
There were more doors to our left and right.
Neither of them had handles. Dead ahead, a uniformed policewoman manned a front desk on the other side of a Plexiglas barrier that was thick enough to be bulletproof.
Katherine introduced us. Afterward, the policewoman asked us to fill out some paperwork and then buzzed us in.
One of the side doors clicked open. Another cop met us at it and led us down a linoleum-lined hallway, deeper into the building.
I looked around as we walked. It had been a while since I’d been inside a police station.
The last time was in high school when I got called in to answer some questions about the possible whereabouts of my parents.
This station was bigger than the one back home.
We passed a records department, a waiting room, several interrogation rooms, a lounge, and a large briefing room before being led through a door in the back.
It opened into a wide office space crammed full of desks.
Half of them were unoccupied. The others were manned by police officers in uniform and detectives in plain clothes.
Civilians sat in uncomfortable-looking chairs facing some of the desks.
One or two of them wore handcuffs while others looked to be filing complaints or answering questions.
My gaze wandered to the far corner of the room, where I caught a semifamiliar face through the crowd. I frowned, struggling to place the man, and suddenly it clicked. It was the guy Jakob had stared down at Magnolia Hills, the one who passed through the entrance hall while we waited to check in.
He must have felt me staring because he turned a little in his chair, and his dark eyes met mine across the room.
I nearly missed a step. There was an intensity there, and even though his expression was damn near unreadable, his eyes told me more than I needed to know.
I’d met enough bad men and women in my life to see the signs.
Hell, I was a killer myself, but despite how fucked up I was, my eyes still had life in them.
His were the eyes of a dead man, a walking husk whose soul had been shredded a long time ago.
My reptilian brain recognized it right away.
The second I locked eyes with him, it started hissing at me to put more space between us, and not even the fact that we were in a room full of cops with thirty feet between us was enough to shut her up.
I’d always had an expressive face, and he must have read something of my thoughts on it because he smiled. I jerked my gaze away and concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. That was the kind of smile you gave someone right before you killed them.
Guess I knew who was filing the complaints against me.
I didn’t like this coincidence. Jakob homed in on this guy like he knew him, and now here he was, trying to get Jakob’s “old lady” charged with assaulting a fake guard.
I’d thought he could be a doctor at first, but Officer Sanders said it was management making the complaint.
If he was management, there was no way he didn’t know that guard was fake.
Had I just laid eyes on the mastermind behind the whole operation?
The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that I had.
Everything fit. Who else but management could have inserted fake guards into Magnolia?
Who else had the power to cover up what was happening there?
Who else would be so angry at me for busting up their little drug operation that they looked like they wanted to murder me?
Katherine noticed my distraction. She leaned in as we walked. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said.
There were too many sets of ears around us, and I didn’t feel safe saying anything about my suspicions. We fell quiet again and followed the cop to a desk pressed right up against the back wall.
Officer Sanders rose from the chair behind it.
He was a tall white man in his midforties with sandy-brown hair and bright blue eyes.
He had the kind of build that was well suited to his profession: trim but muscular.
If someone tried to take off on him during an arrest, I had no doubt that he could run them into the ground.
He looked me over, wincing when his gaze fell to my leg, but at least he managed to greet me without any pity in his voice. “Officer Sanders,” he said, offering his hand.
I limped forward and placed mine in his. The handshake was firm and professional.
He let me go and turned to Katherine, and his face shifted into a sort of resigned, weary expression. “Let’s get this over with,” he said, leading us from the room.
I glanced at the guy from Magnolia as we left. He was still staring at me. I didn’t spook easily, but this guy made my fucking guts roil.
I stared straight ahead from that point forward, following Officer Sanders and Katherine back through the rabbit warren that was the police station.
The three of us crowded around a small table in an interrogation room, and from that moment on, Katherine dominated the interview.
It turned out there weren’t cameras in the elevators.
The entire case would be hearsay after all.
That revelation terrified me for a few minutes—what would happen to Gran if I was convicted?
—but my fear soon evaporated. For every accusation lobbed against me, Katherine had a rebuttal.
Every quote Sanders read aloud, Katherine refuted with the kind of steadfast doggedness that would wear down even the most fanatical cop.
She never raised her voice. She was never rude.
She simply sat there, speaking in a calm, logical tone that somehow made the entire case against me look absolutely ludicrous.
I almost felt bad for Sanders toward the end.
He hadn’t done anything to deserve being made to look like a fool; he was just trying to do his job.
It was simply bad luck that my case landed on his desk.
I sat there throughout it all and kept my happy mouth shut. Whatever Liam Larson was paying Katherine, it wasn’t enough.
Once she’d finished destroying the criminal case against me—it turned out the guard did want to press criminal charges—she slid my phone across the desk and showed Sanders the wreckage of my apartment. He perked up as he thumbed through the photos.
“Can we get copies of these?” he asked.
“I’ll email them to you,” Katherine said.
His gaze rose to mine. “How long were you gone?”
“Five hours,” Katherine answered in my stead.
This was how the entire interview had gone. Sanders, bless him, kept addressing all his questions to me, either because that was protocol or he hoped I might break rank and actually open my mouth. I wasn’t stupid. Katherine told me to keep it shut, so I kept it shut.
“Isn’t it interesting,” she said, “that on the same day my client went to Magnolia Hills with the intent to expose what she believes is prescription drug fraud with one of the doctors there, that that doctor never comes back from her lunch break, my client is attacked in an elevator by a guard she’s never seen before, and then afterward she arrives home to find her apartment vandalized? ”
“Interesting isn’t the word I’d use,” Sanders said. “We’ll look into it.” He handed my phone back to me. “Where are you staying now?”
“With the family of a close friend,” Katherine answered.
He held my gaze. “I’d advise you not to leave the local area.”
Katherine rested her elbows on the table and leaned forward. “And why is that? She hasn’t done anything to warrant that order.”
Sanders’s composure slipped a little as he turned to face her, his brow furrowing in frustration. “It’s not an order. It’s advice. We’ll probably need her to come back in and answer more questions after we open an investigation into her apartment.”
“I think my client has been beyond helpful already,” Katherine said, her tone as calm and placating as it had been throughout the entire interview.
“She was gracious enough to come down here of her own volition to address these patently false accusations against her. Any other questions you have, you can direct toward me. She’s been through enough already. ”
Officer Sanders sighed, a long-suffering look on his face. “Fine.”
“If that’s all?” Katherine asked, rising from her seat.
Sanders leaned back in his chair and nodded. “That’s all.”
She smiled at him with the same warmth she’d shown me earlier. “We’ll see ourselves out. It’s been a pleasure, as always, Officer Sanders.”
He snorted and waved a hand in dismissal. “Sure it has.”
I rose from my chair and followed her into the hallway. “I really want to high-five you right now,” I whispered.
A small, victorious smile spread over her face. “Wait until we get outside.”