“Are you planning on a search of her home?”
He had to give it to Burns, he knew how to stick you like a butterfly on a pin with his questions. “If necessary.” He was saved from further disclosures by the sound of footsteps echoing up the marble stairs in front of them. Noble Entwhistle and Debba Clow appeared, the latter with an angry pink flush high on her cheeks and her kinky hair flying every which way. It was not shaping up to be a promising questioning.
“Deb, thanks for showing up,” Russ said. “Let’s all go back to the interview room.” Aka the interrogation room, but that didn’t sound so friendly. He gestured down the hallway with his head. The department’s small briefing room was where they usually interviewed friendly witnesses or victims. It had windows, tissue boxes, a plug-in coffeemaker. The interrogation room had audio-and videotaping feeds. He knew which one he wanted when talking with Debba Clow. “Noble,” he said as they reached the interrogation room, “will you see if Ms. Clow or her attorney needs anything? Coffee, water…”
“Let’s get down to business,” Burns said. “First order is, I need a minute in which to confer privately with my client.” He cast a glance at the interrogation room’s reinforced door. “Not there.”
Russ smiled, a bit less pleasantly. “We don’t eavesdrop on attorney-client discussions, Mr. Burns.” Burns simply stared at him. Russ breathed in on a slow three-count and turned his head toward Noble. “Officer Entwhistle, will you please escort Mr. Burns and Ms. Clow to my office? You can wait outside to make sure they don’t get lost on their way back.” He bared his teeth at Burns, who bared his in return.
“Thank you. That will do nicely.”
Russ crutched up to the squad room as Burns and Debba Clow disappeared into his office. “Lyle?” he said.
Lyle rounded the corner from the other end of the room. “Sorry. I was in the can.”
“You got anything on that warrant?”
“Amy Nguyen from the DA’s office is in with Judge Ryswick right now. As soon as she’s got it signed, she’ll hand it off to Kevin and me and we’ll split for Clow’s house.”
“Remember, Clow lives with her mother and she has two little kids. One of ’em autistic. So use your good manners and play nice.”
“I always play nice. I’m like the real-life version of that Jerry Orbach guy on Law & Order.” Lyle stroked his bushy gray eyebrows.
“Except that Jerry Orbach is a lot better looking than you.” Russ stumped back down the hall to the interrogation room. Balancing on one crutch, he unlatched the door and pushed it open. He wanted to be sitting when Debba Clow and Burns came in. He figured the sight of him balancing precariously as he lowered himself into a chair wouldn’t do much good for his image as the Guy in Charge.
He had just stowed his crutches under his chair when Noble escorted Debba and Burns in. Russ watched her as she took in the room’s windowless, institutional green walls and the steel case furniture bolted to the floor. Her eyes widened and she turned to Burns. That’s right, honey, this is the real deal, Russ thought. Scary, isn’t it?
Burns looked at him coolly. “Don’t be intimidated, Debba. You’re here doing them a favor.” He took the chair across the table from Russ. Debba checked the seat beside Burns before settling in it, as if there might be something waiting to bite her.
“Just to avoid misunderstandings, we like to run tape when we’re asking questions.” Russ smiled in what he hoped was an easy, nonthreatening way. “It’s easy to forget who says what, and this way there’s a record for us all to refer to. So, Debba. Do we have your permission to tape you?”
She looked at Burns, who nodded. “Okay,” she said.
“And we will want a copy within twenty-four hours,” Burns added.
Russ nodded at Noble, who had taken up his position by the door. Entwhistle pressed the recording button set in the wall. “Okay, then,” Russ said. “For the record, this is Russ Van Alstyne, and I’m interviewing Deborah Clow-”
“I prefer Debba,” she said.
“We need your legal name on the record,” he said.
“Deborah Clow. Today is Monday, March twenty-seventh, and it’s”-he glanced at his watch-“nine-forty A.M. Deb, we have your consent to tape this, right?”
“Yeah. Yes, you do.”
“Deborah Clow is accompanied by her attorney, Geoffrey Burns.” Prick. “Debba, I want you to think back two weeks ago to Sunday night, March nineteenth. You met with Dr. Allan Rouse. Did he call you, or did you call him?”
She looked at Burns, who nodded. “Dr. Rouse called me,” she said.
“Were you surprised? Since you two had a run-in just a week before?”
She looked at Burns, who nodded. “Yeah. I was. Surprised.”
“What was the subject of his phone call?”
“Pardon?”
“What did Dr. Rouse want to talk about?”
She looked at Burns. Christ, this was going to take forever if she had to get his okay for every word out of her mouth. “Mr. Burns, you’re pretty quick on the up-take,” Russ said. “Maybe you could tell your client that you’ll interrupt if there’s anything you don’t think she should answer. Otherwise, I’m afraid we’ll be here for a very long time.”
Burns nodded to Debba. “It’s okay. Rest assured, I’ll jump in if he goes over the line.”
Sentence by sentence, Russ led her through the events of that evening. Her language was stilted, the way some people got when they knew they were being recorded, but her account was substantially the same as the one she had given him that Friday in Clare’s living room. She had agreed to meet him because he had kept insisting he was going to show her the truth about vaccines, and she thought anything he said to justify himself might be ammunition in her custody fight. No, she didn’t think her lawyer for the custody dispute would approve. No, she didn’t know where the directions he gave her would lead to. No, she didn’t see him until she arrived at the spot along the county road. Yes, they were each alone. Dr. Rouse had led the way through the trail to the tiny cemetery. He had a flash-light. She didn’t. No, she hadn’t been afraid of him. “I’m at least as big as he is,” she said. “I figured if he got weird on me, I could take care of myself.”
“Were you contemplating having to use force to defend yourself?” Burns asked before Russ could get his next question in.
“No,” Debba said. “I believe in nonviolent resolutions. Discussion, not disruption.”
Russ thought he remembered seeing the same sentiment on a bumper sticker on her car. It hadn’t impressed him then, either. “How does that jibe with your breaking into Dr. Rouse’s clinic and trashing one of his examining rooms two weeks ago?”
Burns’s arm shot in front of Debba like a parent holding a kid back at a stop-light. “That’s irrelevant to Dr. Rouse’s whereabouts,” he said. “You don’t need to address that, Debba.”
Russ waited a beat, and when it became apparent she was going to follow counsel’s advice, he went on. “What did Dr. Rouse say to you when you reached the graves?”
She looked at Burns. He nodded. “It’s hard to remember,” she said. “It was cold and dark, and I was thinking that I had made a major mistake, because obviously, he wasn’t going to tell me anything about the vaccines he had been using on the children of Millers Kill.” She caught a strand of her long, curly hair and wrapped it around one finger. “He told me to look at the dates on the headstones. He wanted me to understand how deadly and contagious some of the epidemic diseases were. Please. Like I hadn’t already spent two years reading up on them.”
Burns laid his hand on her arm. “Just stick to the question.”
“Oh. Okay. He had this idea that the epidemic wasn’t just the disease, but the effects of the disease. He said the parents of those four children died when their kids did.”