Slater rose from his chair and reached for his shoulder holster. "Hell yes."
Jack smiled and the twisting of his lips felt feral. "If we threaten him, he'll cave like a piece of wet cardboard."
Less than thirty minutes after Jack and Slater decided to re-interview Ted Burrows, he entered the interrogation room dressed in an orange jumpsuit and flanked by two deputies. He shuffled into the room like a broken puppet, uncertainty supplanting his former cockiness. Jack almost felt sorry for him. Until he recalled the calloused way he'd used half a dozen women, filming them in their most vulnerable positions and likely getting off on watching those tapes over and over.
He pulled out a chair and eyed Burrows with disgust. "Have a seat, Ted." Jack turned on the recorder and took the chair opposite him while Slater stood behind him. They agreed that Jack would spearhead the interrogation.
"For the record, Ted, we reiterate that you have waived your right to have an attorney present during this interview." Jack paused. "Is that correct?"
"Asshole wasn't doing me any good," Ted mumbled.
Jack decided to play good cop, at least initially. "Would you please speak up?" He turned the recorder in Ted's direction. "Is that an affirmative response?"
"Yeah."
"Please state your name for the record," Jack went on, "and make a statement to the fact that you've waived the right to counsel for the duration of this questioning unless you stipulate otherwise."
After Burrows made the requisite acknowledgments into the recorder, Jack began. "We're here to help you, Ted."
"Sure you are." Burrows slouched lower in the chair, likely trying to summon sarcasm but instead sounding pathetic.
"There's a problem, though," Jack continued as if Ted hadn't spoken. "We're pretty sure you know something about the person who killed Keisha Johnson."
He checked for a reaction, but Ted slumped forward against the table, all fight gone out of him. "Do you understand what I'm saying?"
"Yeah."
Jack tossed a look at Slater, now leaning against the south wall and shaking his head in disgust. Jack tried again. "Keisha was your girlfriend, isn't that correct?"
Surprise flitted across Ted's face. "How'd you know that?" Under Jack's steely stare, he lowered his eyes and mumbled. "Yeah, all right. So what?"
"Did you ever film her while you were having sex?"
Ted shook his head.
"Answer verbally please."
"No," he muttered. Then, understanding that more was required of him, he added, "Keisha wasn't into that kind of stuff. She was a straight-up prude."
"All right then, let's talk about the Latin notes."
Burrows squirmed in his chair, crossed one leg over the other, and jiggled it back and forth. The fingers of one hand tapped a staccato beat on the table. "I don't know what you're talking about."
Jack contradicted him. "Sure you do. We know you wrote the notes, Ted." He reached across the table and clamped down hard on the hand Burrows rested on the table.
The movement stopped.
"We have concrete evidence to that fact," Jack continued. "We just don't know who you wrote them for."
Burrows looked up, a flash of fear crossing his face. Was he afraid of whoever he wrote the notes for?
"We can give you police protection, if that's what you're worried about," Slater said.
"Are you worried about Diego Vargas?" Jack asked, taking a stab in the dark.
"I don't know who the hell you're talking about." Ted began shaking his head, back and forth, until Jack thought it'd jerk right off his neck.
With an impatient slap, Slater stepped away from the wall, squatted down beside Burrows, and placed a hand on his shoulder. "Snap out of it. We know you wrote the notes." His voice had taken on the bad-cop tone. "If you're afraid of Vargas, you can get protective custody."
"If you don't give up the name of your accomplice, we'll charge you with the murders," Jack warned, "and you'll take the rap for the whole thing."
Ted jumped up from the chair and backed into the corner, his eyes wild with shock, his face twitching like a cornered rat. "Murder?" he shouted, spittle forming at the edges of his mouth. "Murder? What the fuck are you talking about?" His eyes darted about the room like a trapped animal as he sank to the floor.
Slater took one arm and Jack the other and manhandled Ted. Tired of the subtle approach, Jack shoved him down hard into the chair. As far as he was concerned, Ted was as guilty as the actual killer. "Three people have been murdered in my jurisdiction." He spat out the words. "Either you give us the name of the person who asked you to write the Latin notes or… "
Jack pounded his fist on the table and watched Ted flinch. "Or we'll charge you for all three murders. You'll do federal time, Teddy, and it'll be straight time." He circled the prisoner, leaning over him so his voice was close to Burrows' ear. "We feds don't do early parole or time off for good behavior. You'll do every single year of twenty to life on three separate counts. That's sixty years minimum."
Burrows' eyes blinked rapidly and he worked his mouth like an old man gumming his food.
Jack continued circling the chair, letting his size threaten as much as his words. "I'll see to it that you serve your time in the hardest federal penitentiary we have." He paused and brought his face nose to nose with Ted. "Do you think I'm talking out my ass?"
"N- no, man, no." Ted sputtered.
Jack hissed through his teeth. "Then who the hell is the fucker you wrote the goddamn notes for?"
Burrows crossed his arms in front of his face as if afraid Jack would punch him. "It was Randy!"
"Randy?" Jack and Slater spoke simultaneously, and Jack heard the surprise in Slater's voice echo his own.
"Who's Randy?" Jack asked.
"Randolph, Dr. Howard Randolph." Now that Ted had begun, the words tumbled out of his mouth unchecked. "I'm his T.A. I grade his papers and teach a few classes for him. He asked me to write some sentences in Latin for him. I didn't think anything about it, it was no big deal, I swear, he's not so good with Latin grammar, he's more the culture and history expert, so I figured why not?"
He stopped suddenly in a great whoosh as if he'd run out of breath.
From the guilty look on Ted's face, Jack figured there had to be something else between him and the professor. "What else did you and Dr. Randolph do together?"
Burrows' eyes darted around the room, lighting everywhere but on his interrogators. "We – he – sometimes he'd watch when… " Ted's voice trailed off.
Icy fingers ran down Jack's spine as he realized what the relationship between the two men was. Understood the purpose of the room adjacent to Ted's bedroom, the room with the peephole in the wall.
"Son of a bitch," Slater said.
"You sick excuse for a man," Jack snarled. "You drugged women, lured them to your apartment, and Randolph watched while you had sex with them."
While blood roared in Jack's ears, hot and heavy, Slater's deep baritone sounded calm. "Just who is this Dr. Randolph? Where can we find him?"
"I don't know where he lives, somewhere south of here. He's a hella rich dude, lives in a big mansion or something." Then, as if the thought had just occurred to him, Burrows dropped the other shoe.
"Maybe Dr. Gant knows. Randy shares an office at the university with her."
Chapter Twenty-six
For a moment Howard Randolph forgot where he was. Forgot about the blowsy blonde who lay beside him on the stained sheets of a two-bit motel in a run-down section of West Sacramento.
He stared at the thick, dark fluid on his hands. Splattered on his naked torso. He raised his eyes to the mirror across the room and the face that looked back was speckled with drops of gore and something else. Bits of flesh? He dropped his eyes to his fists, scraped and bloody.
The woman from the bar had bedeviled him, spun a spell around his civilized brain that unleashed the basest part of him. He could think of no other explanation.