Above the cross-tab charts on the bulletin board, Pellegrini has fixed a blue line zoning map of the Reservoir Hill area, with between eighty and one hundred structures highlighted in yellow-each noting the location of a fire call within the past five years. The Fish Man’s store on Whitelock Street, however, is marked in darker orange. The map is in every real sense a lie-a deception that Pellegrini can use without any fear of discovery. In truth, he has been unable to eliminate the vast majority of those yellow marks on the map; any one of them can theoretically have been the site at which the little girl’s pants had been smudged. And yet, for the purpose of this interrogation, nothing like that can possibly be true. For this interrogation, Pellegrini will tell the Fish Man that the chemical analysis has left no doubt: The black smudges on the dead girl’s pants came from the darker orange square at the elbow of Whitelock Street.
The chemical analysis-the linchpin of this interrogation-gave them real leverage, but it also gave them the Out. Maybe you didn’t kill her, Foster can tell him. Maybe you didn’t touch her and violate her and then choke the life from her. Maybe you weren’t the one who took a kitchen knife to her afterward, emptying her until you were sure she was dead. But, Foster can say, you know who did do it. You know because she was killed on that Tuesday night and then left in your burned-out fish store all day Wednesday. She was left there to wait for the rainy darkness of early Thursday morning. She was in that store and the soot and burned wood on her pants proves it. If you didn’t kill her, maybe someone else-someone you know, or someone whose name you don’t remember-hid the little girl inside your store.
Beyond the snare of the chemical analysis, Pellegrini has little else: the failed polygraph, the acknowledged prior relationship with the dead girl, the absence of any verifiable alibi. The case is motive, opportunity and apparent deception, coupled with one lonely piece of physical evidence. A final trump card to be played at a key moment lies deep in Pellegrini’s jacket pocket, where he carries one last photograph. But that old picture can’t be called evidence; it is, the detective knows, no better than a hunch.
Foster meanders through the opening monologue. After spending half an hour establishing his own expertise, the veteran interrogator proceeds to lionize Pellegrini as well. Foster acknowledges that the Fish Man and his principal pursuer have met in the past, but, he explains, Pellegrini did not give up on this case after those earlier confrontations. No, Foster says, he continued to work on you. He continued to gather evidence.
The Fish Man remains impassive.
“What’s going to happen here today is different from what happened when you talked to Detective Pellegrini before,” says Foster.
The store owner nods slightly. A strange gesture, thinks Pellegrini.
“You’ve been here before, but you didn’t tell the truth,” says Foster, turning the corner and launching into the first confrontation. “We know that.”
The Fish Man shakes his head.
“I’m telling you we know that.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“Yes,” says Foster quietly. “You do.”
Very slowly and very deliberately, Foster begins to explain the chemical comparison of the dead girl’s pants and the samples from the Whitelock Street store. At the appropriate moment, Pellegrini reaches down and pulls the soiled pants from a brown evidence bag, then lays the garment on the table, pointing to the black smudges near the knees.
The Fish Man doesn’t react.
Foster presses on, pointing to a photograph of the dead girl behind Newington Avenue, showing the store owner that the black smudges were there on the pants when they found her.
“Now look at this,” he says, pointing to the ATF report. “These lines here show what these stains are made of, and these over here, they show what it is that Detective Pellegrini took from your store.”
Nothing. No reaction.
“See this map,” says Pellegrini, pointing to the bulletin board. “We checked every building in Reservoir Hill where there has ever been a fire and none of them match these stains.”
“None of them except yours,” adds Foster.
The Fish Man shakes his head. He is not angry. He is not even defensive. To Pellegrini, his lack of response is unnerving.
“She was in your store and she got that stuff on her pants,” says Foster. “Either just before or just after she was killed, she got that stuff on her pants in your store.”
“I don’t know nothing about that,” says the Fish Man.
“Yes, you do,” says Foster.
The Fish Man shakes his head.
“Well, then what is this stuff from your store doing on her pants?”
“It can’t be. I don’t know how that can be.”
Somehow they’re not getting through. The interrogators return to their visual aids, covering the same ground a second time. Foster leads the store owner through it slowly enough so that there can be no mistaking the logic.
“Look at these lines here,” says Foster, pointing to the ATF report. “It’s exactly the same. How do you explain that?”
“I can’t… I don’t know.”
“You do know,” says Foster. “Don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not lying.”
“Well then how do you explain it?”
The Fish Man shrugs.
“Maybe,” suggests Foster, “maybe you didn’t kill her. But maybe you know who did. Maybe you let someone else hide her in your store. Is that what you’re hiding?”
The Fish Man looks up from the floor.
“Maybe someone else asked to put something in your store and you didn’t even know what it was,” says Foster, probing. “There’s got to be some explanation because Latonya was in your store.”
The Fish Man shakes his head, a little at first, then firmly. He backs up in his chair, folding his arms. He isn’t buying. “She couldn’t be in my store.”
“But she was. Did someone else put her there?”
The Fish Man hesitates.
“What’s his name?”
“No. No one put her there.”
“Well, she was there. This report says that.”
“No,” says the Fish Man.
A dead end. Instinctively, Foster veers away from the confrontation and the two detectives begin leading their suspect through a complete statement. Pellegrini, in particular, probes for even the faintest suggestion of an alibi and asks all the requisite background questions once again. Slowly, painfully, the same answers-about his relationship with Latonya, his vague alibi, his feeling about women-come back across the table, and for the first time in ten months the Fish Man begins to show some impatience. And his answer to one question changes.
“When did you last see Latonya?” asks Pellegrini for perhaps the tenth time.
“When did I last see her?”
“Before she was killed.”
“On Sunday. She came by the store.”
“Sunday?” asks Pellegrini, startled.
The Fish Man nods.
“The Sunday before she disappeared?”
The Fish Man nods again.
It is a crack in the wall. In the earlier interrogations, the store owner swore that he hadn’t seen the little girl for two weeks before the murder and Pellegrini had found no witness who could refute the claim definitively. Now, on his own, the Fish Man is putting the little girl in his store two days before the murder and only days after the fire that gutted the Whitelock Street shop.