The boy shrugged. “He was fine when we left his apartment,” he said. Then his lips quirked, as if he were holding back amusement. “Maybe he fell out of the wheelchair and hit his head on something. Maybe he had some kind of seizure, like those people do.” Jerod raised his arm, with the hand flopped over, and banged it against his chest in imitation of a spastic.
I leaned forward. “Listen, you little prick,” I said, “do you think that you’re safe because Minnesota doesn’t have a death penalty?” I couldn’t stop myself. “That’s no cause for joy. Runts like you don’t have girlfriends in prison, they are girlfriends. By the time you get released as an old man, that jumped-up clitoris between your legs won’t have gotten any action for fifty years.”
Jerod’s eyes first widened, then heated, and his jaw set. Behind me, Hadley said smoothly, “You gotta admit, that’s something to think about, Jerod. Why don’t we give you some time to mull that over.” He stood, and I followed him out. I knew what was coming.
Out in the hallway, Hadley rubbed his forehead and said, “Okay, there was a lot of engine noise in the car and maybe I misheard, but I thought we were clear that I was going to be the heavy, and you were going to be nice and give him someone to confess to.” He didn’t sound as upset as I knew he was. He had the control over his emotions that you need in the interrogation room.
“I know,” I said, ashamed. “He pissed me off.”
“Well, now we have to regroup,” Hadley said. He watched as a file clerk rolled a cart past us down the hall. “All right, I’m just going to cut to the chase in there. Then you get impatient and give up, and I’ll agree. We’ll see if that works.”
Jerod looked mutinous as we came back in, but he didn’t actually sneer, and he didn’t say anything. Maybe he would crack.
“Okay, let me lay it out for you.” Hadley pulled out a chair and turned it backward, straddling it. “This is how it’s going to work. We need to bring in your partner. That’s our main concern. If you assist us with that, it’s going to help you a lot, in the eyes of a judge.”
I leaned against the wall as if bored with the whole process.
“Right now, we don’t know whose idea it was to go to Ruiz’s apartment. We don’t know who actually killed him. We don’t know if that was supposed to happen or not. All that’s up in the air.” Hadley held up a cautioning hand, as if Jerod had been about to speak, although there’d been no sign of it. “Now, I’m not telling you to say anything that isn’t true, Jerod. I’m just saying that we don’t know any of these things, and with Mr. Ruiz dead-”
Dr. Ruiz, I corrected Hadley mentally.
“- we’ve only got two people who were in that apartment who can tell us,” Hadley said. “Now, your buddy, back in the drugstore, he ran out while you got arrested. That doesn’t suggest to me a real trustworthy person. I’m just wondering, when we catch that guy, what kind of regard for the truth he’s going to have. I wonder what he’s going to tell us about who did what in that apartment.”
I was trying not to look involved, but I couldn’t help but notice that Jerod was beginning to look a little nervous, the muscles of his face slackening.
“This is what we want,” Hadley said. “We want your friend’s name, his address, all the information you have that’ll help us bring him in. If we get that, maybe we can help you some. But if you wait too long, and he commits another crime, maybe someone else gets hurt”- Hadley leaned back as if withdrawing his interest in Jerod’s welfare-“then that’s gonna be on you. Because you could have prevented it, and you didn’t.”
Jerod said nothing.
“What about it, Jerod?” Hadley pressed.
Jerod looked at the floor. It was time for me to enter the action.
“Forget it,” I said to Hadley.
Hadley looked at me irritably, as if we were partners who really didn’t get along, even outside the interrogation room. He said, “Do you think you could give me more than five minutes to-”
“No, I can’t,” I said, my voice rising. “Because we’ll catch that other kid. He’ll do something stupid, because he’s got all the impulse control of a goddamn leaf in the wind, and we’ll catch him and then we’ll have both of them.”
Hadley lifted his hands and let them fall. “When you’re right, you’re right,” he said simply. “Okay, let’s call and have a corrections officer take him over to the jail.” He stood up and we headed for the door.
“Wait,” Jerod said.
Perfect.
“It was Marc,” he said. “It was Marc’s idea to go see this guy, and it was Marc who hit him with the weight, afterward. Like, four times. I said, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ but he didn’t listen to me.”
Whether it was true or not, who could tell? It didn’t matter anymore to Cicero, and not much more to me.
Hadley set the notepad down in front of Jerod. “Give us Marc’s full name and other information first,” he said. “Then I’m going to have you write down a statement about what happened in Mr. Ruiz’s apartment.”
“Dr. Ruiz,” I said.
“What?” Hadley looked at me blankly.
“Dr. Ruiz. He was a doctor,” I said.
Jerod was writing. When he finished, and Hadley had torn off the top sheet with Marc’s information, we were technically ready to go, to put the information out on the radio. Hadley turned to the door, but I didn’t. I was following the train of thought Hadley had interrupted at the crime scene.
There were only three people in the world who’d known that Cicero had a prescription pad in his apartment. One of them was dead, and one of them was me. That left only one other person.
I sat on my heels next to Jerod’s chair. It was an intimate, rapport-building position. “Jerod,” I said, in a quieter voice from the one I’d been using, “how’d you know to target Dr. Ruiz?”
“I told you, it was Marc’s idea,” Jerod said.
“How did Marc know?”
“He hangs out with this girl, they’re from the same town in Michigan,” he said. “She said she knew where there was a guy who had cash and a prescription pad in his apartment.”
I tried to keep my voice level. “Marc’s from Dearborn, is that it?”
Jerod blinked, surprised. “Yeah, how’d you know?”
“Do you know the girl’s name?” I asked, ignoring his question.
Jerod thought. “Something French, kind of like Charmaine, but that’s not it. She thinks she’s his girlfriend, but she’s not. Marc’s just letting her wax his stick.”
“Thanks, Jerod,” I said, unsmiling. “Put all of that in your statement.”
Out in the hall, Hadley said, “What was that about?”
My hands were shaking with anger. I laced them behind my back where Hadley couldn’t see. “Marc’s girlfriend is a sometime informant named Ghislaine Morris,” I said. “She might know something about where’d he’d go in a situation like this.”
“Right,” Hadley said. He was walking down the hall, and I was following. “But why’d you tell Jerod to put all that in his statement?”
“She set these events in motion,” I said.
“So she ran her mouth,” Hadley said. “That’s not against the law. We can’t charge her with anything.”
“No, we can’t,” I said. “But I’m going to check out a motor-pool car and go talk to her.”
We stopped in front of the coffee machine, and Hadley filled a paper cup to the rim. He looked at me and raised an eyebrow in invitation. I shook my head, No, thanks.
“Good idea,” Hadley said. “But why a motor-pool car?”
“My Nova is back at the building Ruiz lived in,” I explained. “I rode over here with you.”