Calloway conducted the 3rd interview. I was off duty that night and heard about it the next morning. He hadn’t been involved in the second interview. Bomb cases usually go federal, and that one supposedly being an accident didn’t raise too many hackles. In truth, my interview had only been procedure until I met her. The 3rd interview was another matter entirely. It was four years to the month after the first, and I swear she looked like she’d aged a dozen years or more. The smile lines at the corners of her mouth and eyes had deepened into crevices and the bags beneath the eyes bore the luggage of pain and suffering. He brought her into Interview 2, as he and I both had before. She wasn’t cuffed. There wasn’t evidence for that yet.
I cued up the tape on the laptop and then paused to take a sip of my coffee. It’d gone cold long ago, but the motion took my mind off of what I knew I was going to see–what I didn’t want to see. I steeled myself, lowered my trembling hand to the keyboard and pressed enter. The tape began as the others had.
He started with a few simple questions, asking her if she knew why she was brought in and if this was her first time here. She answered quickly, rolling her eyes and pretending to be bored at first. He changed tactics quickly.
He said, “Did you kill your boyfriend, Ms. Parker?”
She froze, unable to answer for a moment. She pursed her lips and closed her eyes and finally said, “I can’t believe you’d ask me that. I didn’t kill anyone.”
He pressed on, offering more questions, sprinkling in bits of speculation about the man who’d actively abused her all those years ago and this new boyfriend who’d disappeared two days prior. She was growing angrier, firing back answers at first and then, more reservedly answering–always that same hint of anger in her tone. Still, there was something off. You could see it faintly in the way her lips pursed before certain questions, as if she were trying to remember the answer. But how can you remember the answer to a question that hasn’t been asked?
Some Thoughts:
- I don’t know that I’ll do a part 4 but the secret is largely exposed here in part 3. I just have to explain the how if I do a 4… we shall see.