“You sound like you’re ready to make a statement,” she said, breaking the silence.
Carolyn raised her eyes and locked onto the other woman. At length, she nodded. “Okay,” she said. She leaned forward, resting the weight of her torso as best she could on her single mobile forearm. “Okay, Agent Rivers, I’ll give you a statement. Why don’t we start with Newark, Arkansas, back in 1983.”
“That works for me,” Irene agreed. She nodded to the camera to her right, in the corner near the ceiling, as if to remind George Sparks that a one-on-one interrogation had been her idea.
Carolyn told the story her own way, at her own pace, refusing to be drawn onto the occasional side routes presented from time to time by Irene’s questions. She spoke for nearly a half hour, with barely a break, starting with that first day amid the smoke and the fire and the bodies and ending with Travis’s injury that afternoon. She carefully avoided any specifics on their aliases over the years and mentioned nothing of anyone’s participation outside of their little nuclear family.
Of all the points she made, however, she emphasized one over all the others: that Travis had never known a thing; that he was purely a passive participant.
Her story was the most outlandish thing Irene had ever heard. “You do know that we found the note you left at the crime scene?” she asked.
“We never wrote a note,” Carolyn responded easily. “Just as we never hurt anybody. If you have a note, then somebody planted it there.”
Irene laughed out loud at the absurdity of it. “That’s it? That’s your story? You want people to believe that someone planned all of this? That someone went to all that effort merely to frame Mr. and Mrs. Ordinary Citizen for some wild murder cover-up? Come on, Carolyn, you can do better than that.”
The prisoner stared some more, her eyes burning holes through her captor on the strength of hatred alone. “Why bother to ask questions if you’re so convinced you already know the answers?”
Irene had heard this same question posed by dozens of prisoners in the past. “Because I’d like to hear you say it, Carolyn. I’d like you to give me some indication I should trust you. That you’re going to be cooperative.”
Now it was Carolyn’s turn to laugh. “Trust? Cooperation? You’ve got to be kidding. You people have made our lives a living hell for the past fourteen years!” Her voice raised in pitch and volume, and she tried to stand, but the chair that restrained her arm was bolted securely to the floor. “How dare you talk to me about trust! If you people had done your jobs at the very beginning, none of this would have happened! My boy… he wouldn’t be-” Her voice stopped working.
The interview was approaching the moment Irene had been waiting for: the point at which the prisoner’s emotions swamped the protective walls she’d built around the truth. As she’d been trained, Irene slipped easily into the mother confessor mode: “We did our job, Carolyn,” she said softly, soothingly. “We went in the direction that the preponderance of evidence took us. Please understand that there are no hard feelings here. You did your job, too. You ran, just as anyone who feared punishment would run.”
“We ran because we had no choice!” Carolyn wailed. “We knew-” All at once, she realized what Irene was up to. She understood the game, and she brought her emotions under control. She remembered now what Lanny Skiles had told them so long ago, when he was indoctrinating them in the rules of the street. The police saw people as pawns, as things to be manipulated. They’d lie, they’d seduce, they’d do whatever it took to get you to string incriminating words together in a sentence. Once transcribed, those words would serve as a confession, devoid of any emotion, and carefully edited for the greatest possible damage.
Suddenly, she felt horribly, horribly tired. She couldn’t remember all she’d said thus far, but she knew it was too much. Anger, fear, and hatred were all-too-natural emotions, and she could afford none of them. This game was for keeps, and it was time to change strategies.
She froze there for a moment, straining against her tether as she took a deep breath, held it for a couple of seconds, then let it go. Control flooded back. Breaking eye contact just long enough to soften her expression, she lowered herself back into her chair. “What time is it?” she asked.
Irene eyed her curiously, having trouble disguising her disappointment in losing the moment. “You have someplace important to go, do you?”
Carolyn rolled her eyes and chuckled. “You people really are bullies, aren’t you?” The chuckle turned to a laugh. “This is one big power trip for you!” The laugh got louder, and even more genuine. Tears came to her eyes, and she wiped them away with her free hand.
“Okay, Agent Rivers,” she snickered through her lingering smile. “If it makes you feel big, you just hide the time from me, okay? You’re in control, by God, and I must say you wear it well.”
Irene’s jaw set as Carolyn derided her, and she found herself suddenly self-conscious of the people on the other side of the camera. Withholding the time was probably a petty move, but she certainly couldn’t cave in now.
“Anyway,” Carolyn concluded, “it’s getting late, and I’m getting tired. Just let me ask you one question.”
“If you must.” Like there was a choice.
“You’re not going to let yourself even consider the possibility of a conspiracy. You’ve made that plainly obvious, and in so doing, you’ve answered your own question about why we ran. Now, I’d like to ask you this: Why would we return to Newark, Arkansas, if not to collect the evidence I spoke of? You know from firsthand experience that we’re adept at staying underground. Why didn’t we stay there? Why did we expose ourselves?”
Irene played her hand with a flawless poker face. It was a damned good question. One that just might be worth pursuing. But this was time for the good guys to be interviewing the bad, not the other way around. One of the most basic rules of any interrogation was for the interrogator to remain in control at all times, and that meant never answering a substantive question from a suspect. Instead, she countered with a fresh one of her own.
“Your uncle, Harry Sinclair, is mixed up with this, too, isn’t he?”
That one came out of nowhere and hit Carolyn like a slap. She tried to show no reaction.
“Like I said,” she concluded, after dropping a beat, “I’m getting very tired. I think I’ll stop talking now.”
But Irene was only just beginning. Or so she thought. After a half hour of needling, prodding, insulting, and shouting, and not getting so much as a moment of eye contact in response, Agent Rivers finally gave up, and told Flaherty to take Carolyn back to her cell.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Jake was shocked that Nick’s plan had worked so well. In all the confusion back at the Rescue Squad, his friend had transferred the orange body bag and the two money bags from the trunk of the Cadillac to the back of Bob and Barbara’s Toyota pickup truck, which was parked, keys inside, just off the back ramp. No one seemed to notice as they turned off the tiny access road and back onto the highway, passing within thirty feet of the ambulance as it sat there on the front ramp, swaying ever so slightly from the frantic efforts to save Travis’s life.
They traveled in silence. Nick didn’t know what to say, and Jake, in a move to preserve some semblance of composure, simply allowed himself to become mesmerized by the yellow hash marks in the road. They flashed by endlessly, brilliant yellow dashes in the wash of the headlights, stretching forever, in a trajectory so straight that he wondered how a driver could stay awake.