“I’m sorry about all this, but we had no other way of finding you,” I said.
Barnes made a flick of his fingers, replied, “I debated coming forward days ago. But I kept thinking maybe it wasn’t necessary.”
He fell silent and then gazed at me intently. “I want you to know that I wasn’t like Francones. Sex is not an addiction for me. Nor an obsession.”
“Okay.”
The attorney moved uncomfortably. “The truth is that my wife is more interested in her status than in sex. Or at least since she turned fifty and—”
“No offense, Mr. Barnes,” I said. “I’m not particularly interested in the motivations that led you to the Superior Spa.”
He knitted his brows, said, “Oh.”
“Just to confirm: You did actually go into the spa?”
Barnes blinked, thought like a lawyer, and said, “So you don’t actually have me on tape entering or leaving?”
“Does it matter?”
“It would in court.”
“If you were on trial here, and you’re not. But if you don’t talk and it turns out we can gather evidence that places you in that massage parlor before the murders, I can and will arrest you on obstruction charges, Counselor.”
Barnes rolled his lips back from his teeth, thinking, but then sighed and said, “Okay. I was there.”
Once the attorney started talking, he did not hold back. He described parking well up Connecticut Avenue and then walking to the Superior Spa, corroborating the timeline we’d established from the closed-circuit tapes. He said he spent time with An Lu, the young Korean woman in the robe we’d found dead in the lobby. As Barnes was leaving, he saw Mad Man Francones going down the hallway with Cam Nguyen to the squalid little room where he lost his life.
“I was surprised, you know?” Barnes said. “Guy like that.”
I wanted to say, “Guy like you,” but didn’t.
“He see you? Francones?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“And then?”
“I got out of there, out the front door.”
“See anyone?”
Barnes paused. “You mean inside or outside?”
“Outside on the sidewalk.”
The patent attorney was about to shake his head but then cocked it left as if he was confronting a memory. “A guy in a red hoodie.”
“Where? Standing there? Coming from what direction?”
He thought about that and replied, “Coming from the north.”
I felt my pulse quicken. It matched what we’d deduced from the tapes.
“So he went by you?”
“More like we went by each other.”
“You see him go into the Superior Spa?”