Slipping Into Darkness (44 page)

 

“So once we figured that out, it was a whole other ballgame.” Francis moved his chair closer. “It opened up the possibility that we might be looking for a man. Just like we thought in the first place.”

 

Tom lifted a finger to his forehead and leaned away, starting to understand exactly where this was going.

 

“Sounds like there’ve been a lot of mistakes in this case,” he said.

 

“True,” Francis admitted. “But things are starting to come together.”

 

Tom started rubbing the space between his eyebrows. Probably trying to calculate the downside of asking for a lawyer at this point. Go slow, Francis reminded himself. Ease back on the throttle a little. Give him a way out. Nothing good comes from a man knowing he’s cornered too soon.

 

“I need you to help me out here.” Francis scraped his chair legs across the floor, deliberately disrupting his train of thought. “It appears we have blood under your sister’s nails that comes from a male relative.”

 

“I thought you also had stains in her apartment from Julian Vega.”

 

“Absolutely. But right now, I’m trying to understand how this relative’s blood got on her.”

 

“Well, you know I broke a glass that day,” Tom said agreeably, not missing a beat.

 

“When was this?”

 

“In her kitchen, just after dinner. I stopped by with some papers I needed her to sign, to do with our grandmother’s estate. I broke a wineglass and she bandaged me up.”

 

Nice.
Francis almost smiled in admiration. You’d normally have to go to a Washington press conference or a corporate shareholders’ meeting to hear this accomplished a liar.

 

“I told you about it at the time,” Tom said, anticipating the next line of attack.

 

“That’s strange, I don’t remember seeing it in my notes.” In fact, he now had a clear recollection of Tom wearing his collar buttoned and his sleeves rolled all the way down back then, long before it was fashionable; no conspicuous defensive scratches would’ve been visible on his forearm.

 

“Well, I have no idea what you did or didn’t write down,” Tom said, looking injured. “But I distinctly recall showing it to you. I’m amazed you don’t remember that.”

 

He’s good.
Francis had to give it to the man. In the confines of this small room, the story could be taken apart and revealed for what it was: a frail little lie barely on life support. But in a courtroom, it would have a chance to breathe and grow stronger. It would rise to the occasion and fight. Tom would get on the stand, with his open farm-boy face and his voice shaking with just enough emotion, and he would sound far more credible to a jury than a ruddy old cop with devilish eyebrows and failing eyes.

 

“I see.” Francis nodded. “So that’s why we would’ve found your blood under your sister’s nails?”

 

“If that’s what you found,” said Tom, making sure to give nothing away for free.

 

“Well, that’s great. Clears everything up. It leaves me with only one problem.”

 

“What’s that?”

 

“Why we found an exact match for that DNA under Christine Rogers’s nails.”

 

Tom’s face seemed to slowly dissolve into static, like an image on an old TV with a broken antenna.

 

His lips moved without making noise, his features became blurry, his eyes lost focus. He took a few seconds to readjust and sharpen his attention again on Francis sitting just a couple of inches away, leaving no way to the door except straight through him.

 

“Wait a second,” Tom said. “How do you know that’s
my
DNA? I don’t remember giving anybody a specimen.”

 

“Yeah, there is that.” Francis scratched the back of his ear. “You know, your family’s been through so much already, there was an argument against getting a subpoena invading anybody’s privacy and forcing them to give a sample against their will. So we just used what’s available to the general public.”

 

“What are you talking about?”

 

“Thursday night’s garbage night in your neighborhood, right? Sidewalk is public property.”

 

The little pools of skin under Tom’s eyes turned just the faintest shade of blue, as if a pair of thumbs were pressing into them.

 

“You went through
my garbage?
”

 

“Hey, I was against it,” Francis fibbed, playing good cop for the moment. “I said, ‘You guys are crazy. You’re gonna make asses out of yourselves and see Tom had nothing to do with it.’ But the department lawyers said go ahead. It’s been done before. Garbage bags are like Disneyland for DNA. The Magic Kingdom, where dreams come true. And it just so happens this time a condom turned up.”

 

Tom listened impassively. His light-colored brows no longer looked childlike, they made him look like something slightly inhuman, without expression or moral compunction. This was the scary part. He could lawyer up at any moment. Francis tapped a pen on the table. They were close here, but not that close. He couldn’t let Tom leave without making a statement of some kind. There was no room for doubt this time. He needed to get a confession.

 

“I’m not sure if what you did here is legal,” Tom said. “Maybe I should call my lawyer.”

 

Francis gently put the pen aside. “Well, I have no problem with you bringing a lawyer in, Tom. Only then we’re not going to be able to tell you what else we have.”

 

He saw that register, bringing Tom’s chin up and making his eyes jitter for a half-second; just long enough for him to figure out that it probably was in his interest to hear all the evidence they had.

 

“Listen, we’ve known each other a long time,” Francis said. “I’m sure you can explain why things look this way.”

 

“Yeah, you screwed up.”

 

Francis nodded. Yeah, that’s right. You’re smarter than me. You don’t need a lawyer. I’m just a dumb half-blind donkey who put some poor kid in prison for twenty years for something he didn’t do. But that’s all right. I’m not mad. It’s not weighing on me. It’s not eating me up inside. It’s not making me physically sick. It’s not killing me. Go on. I can take the stain on my soul. It was dirty anyway. It’s okay. Do it. You can get over on me again.

 

“Well, it’s possible the samples got mixed up at the lab. There’s always room for human error.”

 

“I’ll say.”

 

“So you never met this other woman, Christine. Right?”

 

“Who?”

 

“Christine Rogers. Lady doctor who was killed a couple of weeks ago. You know.”

 

“I meet a lot of people,” Tom said in a flat voice. “I’m in and out of hospitals all the time, making sales calls and telling staff about our products. That’s my job.”

 

“But you don’t remember this woman specifically, do you?”

 

The lightness of his eyebrows made him seem eerily unmoved by the question. “Sometimes I’ll come in to give a demonstration on how a piece of equipment works and there’ll be a lot of doctors in the room. I’m not always good with names.”

 

“I’d think that’d be a handicap in sales.”

 

Tom looked at the clock, trying to figure out how long he’d been here.

 

“See, I’ll tell you something that wasn’t in the papers.” Francis leaned over, slipping the hook in deftly before the subject of a lawyer could come up again. “This girl—
woman
—when we searched her apartment, turned out she had a bunch of news clippings about your sister’s case hidden away.”

 

Tom began to fiddle with the button on his shirt again even as his expression remained unchanged.

 

“Seems she had kind of an obsession about it,” Francis continued. “Even told a few of her friends she thought Julian Vega got a raw deal.”

 

He saw Tom turning the button this way and that, as if he were about to twist it off. But his face remained the same: remote, innocent-looking, perhaps mildly curious. It was as if he had no idea what his hands were up to.

 

“It’s odd, but I don’t see what it has to do with me,” he said. “Probably she knew Julian from around the neighborhood, and he sold her that whole sorry line about how he went to jail when he was innocent. Then he turned around and did the same thing to her that he did to my sister. That’s what he does. He gets close to these girls, and then when they don’t give him what he wants, he murders them.”

 

“Yeah, that’s what I thought too. People have a way of repeating certain patterns in their lives, over and over, until they get things to come out right.”

 

Francis allowed himself a brief knowing smile.

 

“So anyway after we got this witness coming forward and the DNA hit, we began looking in other places and seeing these details we didn’t know about before. Like that your mother came into the ER at St. Luke’s one night when this Christine was on duty.”

 

“Meaning what?” The lines in Tom’s throat deepened ever so slightly. “What’s the connection?”

 

“We compared signatures and figured out you were the one who signed in for her that night at Admissions. We’re thinking maybe that’s when you met Christine.”

 

“Come on, that’s ridiculous, Francis.” Tom waved his hand. “That’s a huge emergency room with a lot of doctors and nurses. I’ve been in and out of there a hundred times, making calls. I certainly don’t remember meeting that woman.”

 

“Right, we kind of thought you’d say that,” Francis said, nodding agreeably. “But then yesterday we turned up a security guard at the hospital who recognized your picture and said he’d seen you two having coffee in the cafeteria a few months ago.”

 

“He’s wrong.”

 

“He’s
wrong?
” Francis gave him a smashed-mouth smile.

 

“Yes, I read about witnesses making false identifications all the time.”

 

“So the guy who worked in your sister’s building is wrong about seeing you the night she was killed
and
the hospital security guard is wrong about seeing you with Christine. Is that what you’re telling me?”

 

“I don’t know who these people are or what their agenda is. It could be that they just saw my picture in the newspaper and got confused. It happens.”

 

“Then what about the cell phone?”

 

“What cell phone?”

 

“She was making two, three calls a week to a phone registered to your outfit.”

 

“How should I know?” Tom asked. “Maybe she was friends with somebody else at the company.”

 

“Tom,
come on.
” Francis touched his knee lightly. “You were seeing her. The longer you deny it, the worse it’s going to look.”

 

“Okay,” Tom said abruptly. “I don’t think I want to say anything else.”

 

Francis exerted just the slightest bit of extra pressure on Tom’s knee before he took his hand away.
No, you’re not going anywhere this time.
Jerry Cronin and the rest of them were on the other side of the glass, silently begging for him to wrap it up, thinking they probably had enough to make an arrest here. But he needed
more.
He needed actual words, he needed to have the bones and viscera of this crime spilled out across the table so that everyone would see, so there’d be no doubt or second-guessing, no sending the wrong man away this time.

 

“Help me understand this.” He turned his chair around and straddled it, going nose to nose with Tom. “I’m sure it wasn’t your fault. You and your mother met this girl at this hospital. And then I guess your mother got to be friends with her there, because we can see they called each other a couple of times afterward. Mother looking for her daughter, daughter looking for her mother. That kind of thing . . .”

 

He could see from the way Tom turned his head that he was on the right track here.

 

“So I’m thinking maybe the three of you socialized a bit, had dinner, you sort of saying thanks for looking after my mom. And you maybe got a little involved with her.
Okay.
It happens. Nobody’s making any judgments here. I mean, cops and marriage . . .
whew
. . . You’re not going to get
me
to cast the first stone. . . .”

 

Tom was tapping his forehead, no doubt trying to remember his lawyer’s number.
I can do this,
Francis told himself.
I can get anybody to give it up. Natural talent. Like Mantle hitting a baseball or Pavarotti singing opera.

 

“But this girl . . .” He shook his head, pressing his case. “She was one of those types, can never let anything go. She’s seeing this guy, nice guy, treats her really well. Takes her out to dinner. Buys her nice jewelry. . . .” He lowered his chin and looked up at Tom, not needing to spell out that they’d pulled his Amex records and had the charges. “But she keeps bugging him, asking him questions about his family. Shit that happened a long time ago, that’s none of anybody’s business . . .”

 

Come on, man. Give it to me. I’m your friend. You can trust me.
All his life, he’d found ways to bond with people who’d committed savage, brutal, and sometimes unforgivable crimes. He’d treated them as equals, compared unhappy childhoods with them, minimized the seriousness of their crimes.
You robbed a bank? So what? It’s not like you killed somebody. Oh, you did kill somebody? Hey, it was an accident. It’s not like you went and deliberately robbed a bank.

 

“I mean, she starts sneaking around behind his back, talking to people, collecting newspaper articles after this other guy gets out. It’s sick, really. She’s trying to stir shit up just when his family’s most vulnerable.”

 

Tom turned his head almost ninety degrees, keeping one eye trained on Francis, as if he were afraid to look away.

 

“So then she starts drawing conclusions,” Francis said. “Talking about things she doesn’t know about.”

 

A certain restiveness was growing between them, a sense he’d been making his circles too wide. It was time to get in close and risk getting gored.

 

“So then she starts throwing accusations around, about him and his sister.”

 

The room filled with the deepest silence Francis had ever heard in his life. He could hear filaments buzzing in the fluorescent lights, the hydraulics of Tom’s digestive system, glue loosening its grip on the floor tiles, as if the whole room were coming apart, molecule by molecule.