He sighs. “Do I have to sign something?”
“All you have to do is say you consent to the search.”
“I consent to the search. Do whatever. But when you come back, can you bring me some water or something? All this talking is doing my voice in.”
He expects me to get up and leave, but I ignore him and keep on writing. After a moment, Bascombe walks in and puts a couple of bottled waters on the table.
“Here you go, sport.”
Once he’s gone, I can feel Young’s eyes on me.
“Somebody’s watching all this,” he says.
I nod. “There are a couple of questions I still have to ask. Starting with what happened to your face.”
“This?” He touches the wound on his jaw. “It’s nothing.”
“I’m going to need a little more than that. Like: who did it, what did they hit you with, and when?”
“It was. . a couple of days ago. Monday, actually.”
“No, Jason,” I say, raising my pen. “That’s fresh. Trust me, I can tell.”
“It was Monday. I was in back at the Luggage Outlet, trying to get to a box on top of the shelves, and one of them fell and caught me in the face.”
“Were you hanging upside down?”
“What? No. I wasn’t hanging upside down.”
“Then you’re making this up, Jason, because the blow that made those marks came from underneath, swinging like this.” I pantomime the arc, clocking his jaw with an imaginary weapon. “Lying like that just makes you look guilty. You’re better off leveling with me.”
“It has nothing to do with this,” he says. “And anyway, I told you what happened. If you don’t believe me, I can’t help that.”
“Let’s go over what happened yesterday, then. That’s when I think you had your little accident.”
“Wrong,” he says.
“That’s fine. Just walk me through what really happened.”
“I went to work, like I said. Reverend Blunt came in sometime in the morning. He wanted to check on me because I hadn’t been in earlier.”
“Did he ask about your injury?”
“No.”
“That’s strange, don’t you think?” I let it slide, but the inference is clear: he didn’t ask because on Saturday morning it wasn’t there. “What did the reverend ask about, then?”
“Orders,” he says. “Work stuff.”
“And then he left? How long were you at the warehouse after that?”
“Until seven.”
“That’s a long time. Do you punch a card or something?”
“I keep track of my hours.”
“Okay. So you left at seven and went where?”
“Home.”
“Straight home? And then what?”
“Then nothing,” he says, his voice sharp. “I watched TV, went to bed, then got up in the morning for church.”
“Where we found you. And from the time you got home to the time you left this morning, you never went out?”
“No.”
“Not at all?”
He meets my gaze, probably sensing this is important. But he doesn’t change his story: “Not at all.”
I dig through my paperwork for Aguilar’s notes from this morning, taking my time, letting him sweat a little.
“Mr. Young,” I say. “When you arrived at your residence this morning at 8:32 a.m., where were you coming from?”
“That’s not right. I left around then.”
“You left sixteen minutes later at 8:48 a.m.”
He stares at me. “What?”
“You just said you were home all night, but in fact you didn’t come home at all last night, did you? We already know your movements, Mr. Young. Why are you lying to me?”
“Why are you asking me this? It has nothing to do with what happened.”
“Tell me where you were last night.”
“You already know.”
“I need you to tell me.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t understand what’s going on here.”
“Mr. Young-”
“No, listen. I’ve tried to cooperate. I’ve told you everything I can about what really happened with Simone. You can search my apartment, fine. But I’m not going to talk about anything else. Whatever happened yesterday, it’s nobody’s business. You can tell her I said that, too. If you want the truth, I already gave it to you, but if you’re just out to crucify me, then forget about it.”
“If you’ll just answer a few more-”
“I’m not answering anything,” he says.
I can see what’s coming, too. He’s going to lawyer up. Before he gets there, I stand abruptly and start filling my briefcase. “No, you’re right, Mr. Young. You’ve bent over backward to be helpful. There’s a limit to what you can reasonably be expected to share. Just sit tight for a little while and we can wrap things up.”
“How long? I’ve been here for hours.”
“Not much longer,” I say, heading for the door.
Aguilar is alone in the monitoring room, telling me Bascombe grabbed some help and went to the apartment on Dunlap the moment Young gave his consent. He stifles a yawn. I drop into an empty chair and yawn myself. My limbs are heavy as lead. I close my eyes and melt into the seat cushions.
“He’s on the hook now,” Aguilar says. “He can’t account for himself after the reverend left-I checked on that, by the way. According to Blunt, they saw each other around eleven in the morning and he has no idea what happened after that. He said he would go to the warehouse, see what got done yesterday, and call back. I gave him your number.”
“Young’s lying about last night, obviously. We know that.”
“You don’t sound excited.”
“There’s one part that doesn’t fit for me. When I showed him the book, he didn’t flinch. Of everything I had in there, that should’ve cut him the deepest. That should’ve surprised him. But it didn’t even register.”
“Maybe you’re wrong about that part.”
According to my watch, it’s half past twelve. My internal clock’s so far off that my stomach hasn’t rumbled. “I’d better get in on the tail end of that search. You mind baby-sitting for me?”
“If he gets antsy, I got your permission to arrest him? We’ve got enough, don’t you think?”
“I guess so. How are the other cases coming along?”
“The drowning is down,” he says. “They’re still looking for the shooter on the other one.”
“We’re still in the running, then.”
“But the clock’s ticking.”
The sleep deprivation starts catching up to me on the road. I stave it off with some drive-thru coffee, pulling up behind the lieutenant’s car in record time. Inside the apartment, he’s sitting on the couch with a laptop opened in front of him, scrolling through emails with a tap of the finger.
“Anything?” I ask.
“His fantasy football team’s doing all right. Apart from that, nothing here.”
Walking through the six-hundred-square-foot apartment doesn’t take long. Young keeps it tidy, everything squared away. The furniture looks cheap but newly purchased, and the colors go together. It’s not an unpleasant place, just a spartan one. The contrast with his dead wife’s room full of consumer goods couldn’t be more pronounced. Only one photo on the wall, a framed wedding shot. Apart from the fridge, the kitchen seems to be mainly for storage, what you’d expect in a bachelor pad, assuming your bachelor’s meticulously neat. I look in vain for a block of kitchen knives with a telltale empty slot.
Mack Ordway is in the bedroom opening dresser drawers. Mack’s the graybeard on our shift, always on the verge of retirement and at the same time always up for a jolt of overtime. I’m not surprised to see him working on Sunday. Sometimes I think he lives in the office.
“What’s the story in here?”
“Bed’s still made, probably hasn’t been slept in. There’s an old shotgun in the closet, but I didn’t see any shells. If you look in that valet thing on the nightstand, there’s a Tanto Folder with a serrated edge. Could be your weapon, but it looks clean to me.”
“Let’s bag it anyway and make sure,” I say.
“Then there’s this.”
He bends down to open the dresser’s bottom drawer. It’s empty apart from glass shards and a half dozen busted picture frames, all of them facedown. Ordway uses a handkerchief from his pocket to pick one up by the edge. It’s a photo of Simone Walker in a powder blue halter top and a floppy straw hat, her smile huge, her eyes hidden behind round sunglasses. He turns over another, showing Simone and Jason arm in arm in front of a Galveston crab joint. The next one is Simone by herself again, looking up from a glossy magazine, her hair spread out on the back of a flower-print couch.