Unexpectedly, Daniel smiled at her, a real smile, warm and amused. “They are being ridiculous. Yes, let’s leave them to it; an hour or two stuck in a car together might be exactly what they need.”
“Maybe,” Abby said, sounding unconvinced. “That or they’ll just kill each other.” She pulled a folding hairbrush out of her bag and attacked her hair. In front of us, Justin got his car off to a jerky, irritable start and peeled off down the drive, way too fast.
Daniel put his hand back over his shoulder, palm up, towards Abby. He wasn’t looking at her, or at me; he was gazing out the windscreen, unseeing, at the cherry trees. Abby lowered her brush and laid her hand in his, squeezed his fingers. She didn’t let go until Daniel sighed and detached his hand from hers, gently, and started the car.
Frank, the utter fuckbucket, dumped me in an interview room (“We’ll have someone with you in a minute, Miss Madison”) and left me there for two hours. It wasn’t even one of the good interview rooms, with a watercooler and comfy chairs; it was the crap little one that’s two steps up from a holding cell, the one we use to make people nervous. It worked: I got edgier every minute. Frank could be doing anything out there, blowing my cover, telling the others about the baby, that we knew about Ned, anything. I knew I was reacting exactly the way he wanted me to, exactly like a suspect, but instead of snapping me out of it this just made me madder. I couldn’t even tell the camera what I thought about this situation, since for all I knew he had one of the others watching and was banking on me doing exactly that.
I swapped the chairs around-Frank had of course given me the one with the cap taken off the end of one leg, the one meant to make suspects uncomfortable. I felt like yelling at the camera, I used to work here, dickhead, this is my turf, don’t try that shit on me. Instead I found a pen in my jacket pocket and kept myself amused by writing LEXIE WAS HERE on the wall, in fancy letters. This didn’t get anyone’s attention, but then I hadn’t expected it to: the walls were already scattered with years’ worth of tags and drawings and anatomically difficult suggestions. I recognized a couple of the names.
I hated this. I had been in this room so many times, me and Rob working suspects with the flawless, telepathic coordination of two hunters circling their moment; being there without him made me feel like someone had scooped out all my organs and I was about to cave in on myself, too hollow to stand. Eventually I dug my pen into the wall so hard that the point snapped off. I threw the rest of it across the room at the camera and got it with a crack, but even that didn’t make me feel any better.
By the time Frank decided to make his big entrance, I was seething in about seven different ways. “Well well well,” he said, reaching up and switching off the camera. “Fancy meeting you here. Have a seat.”
I stayed standing. “What the fuck are you playing at?”
His eyebrows went up. “I’m interviewing suspects. What, I need your permission now?”
“You need to bloody well talk to me before you throw a curveball straight at my head. I’m not just having a laugh out there, Frank, I’m working, and this could wreck everything I’m trying to do.”
“Working? Is that what the kids are calling it these days?”
“That’s what you called it. I’m doing exactly what you sent me in there to do, I’m finally getting somewhere, why the hell are you shoving a spoke in my wheels?”
Frank leaned back against the wall and folded his arms. “If you want to play dirty, Cass, I can play too. Not as much fun when you’re on the receiving end, is it?”
The thing was that I knew he wasn’t playing dirty, not really. Making me sit in the naughty corner and think about what I’d done was one thing: he was furious enough-and with good reason-that he probably wanted to punch me in the eye, and I knew well that unless I pulled off a spectacular last-minute save I was going to be in big trouble when I came in the next day. But he would never, no matter how angry he was, do anything that might jeopardize the case. And I knew, cool as snow under all the spitting mad, that I could use that.
“OK,” I said, taking a breath and running my hands over my hair, “OK. Fair enough. I deserved that.”
He laughed, a short, tight bark. “You don’t want to get me started on what you deserve, babe. Trust me on that one.”
“I know, Frank,” I said. “And when we’ve got the time, I’ll let you give me hell for as long as you want, but not now. How’re you doing with the others?”
He shrugged. “As well as could be expected.”
“In other words, you’ve got nowhere.”
“You think?”
“Yeah, I do. I know those four. You can keep going at them till you have to retire, and you’ll still get nowhere.”
“It’s possible,” Frank said blandly. “We’ll have to wait and see, won’t we? I’ve got a few years left in me.”
