“Let me go!” he yelled, the second Nate’s hands touched him. The shock clearly wore off fast, and by the time Laura got out of the car to help, he was writhing and flailing his arms around, shouting for Nate to stop. His words came out in such a rush of angry shouting that Laura had difficulty making them out: something about being innocent, and needing to watch, and everything being that man’s fault…
“Let’s get him in the back of the car,” Laura said, glancing nervously around the neighborhood. People were already coming out of their homes to watch, drawn by the noise. The last thing they needed was for this to escalate, for more people to get involved. The one good thing about being a uniformed cop was, well, the uniform. FBI agents didn’t exactly look like law enforcement at a glance.
Nate hauled Brady Seabrooke to his feet, reading him his rights as they went. So long as he was under caution, anything he said to them on the way back to the precinct could also be entered into evidence. And given the way he was still ranting and raving even as Nate put a hand on his head to help him inside the back seat, he was going to be saying a lot.
***
Laura sat back in her chair, eyeing Brady Seabrooke carefully. He was quiet now, almost docile. Laura had a suspicion that it wouldn’t last.
“Brady Seabrooke,” she said eventually. Nate was, apparently, letting her lead the investigation, saying nothing. The long silence had not done a great deal for Brady’s nerves. His head snapped up immediately, his eyes darting to her wide and panicked. “Can you explain to us what you were doing when we arrested you?”
“Running from you,” Brady said, his voice tremulous but still full of resistance.
Laura had to resist the urge to lose her patience with him. There were only a few kinds of suspects, when you got down to the interview room. There were those who were genuine and open. There were those who were genuine and open, except they were lying, because they were sociopaths. There were the nervous ones, the scared ones, and the angry ones.
And there were the ones who thought they were clever.
For personal preference, Laura would always rather not deal with the ones who thought they were clever.
“What were you doing before you saw us?” Nate asked, sounding like he was doing it through gritted teeth.
Brady looked down at his hands on the table, the cuffs between them. He seemed to be studying his fingernails, which were crusted with brown dirt. The same color as the soil outside the house where they’d found him.
“I was watching,” he said, after a long moment.
“Watching what?” Laura asked, wishing he would just make this easier for them and get to it. “Or who?”
Brady moved his head in an odd kind of way, like he wanted to shake his head or toss it but couldn’t. “The man who lives there.”
They were getting somewhere, but it was painfully slow. Laura needed him to say it. To tell them everything, all the gory details. To admit what he was doing in full. “Who lives there, Brady?”
He moved his head in that odd way again, seemingly unable to pull his eyes away from his hands at the same time. He had started to pick at his fingernails, the cuffs clinking lightly as he did so. “The driver.”
Laura suppressed a deep and heartfelt groan of frustration. “The driver of what?”
“Of the car.”
Nate shifted restlessly in his seat, grabbing a file folder that sat on the table between him and Laura. He pulled out a photograph which had been taken around the time of the car accident. It was a photograph of the man who was driving the car which collided with Brady and Davey. He tossed it across the table almost carelessly.
By luck or by design, it landed precisely in front of Brady, the right way round.
“Let’s get to the point, Brady,” he said. “Is this who you were watching?”
A spasm of something passed over Brady’s face as he looked at the photograph. Pain, maybe. “Yes.”
“And why were you watching him?”
Brady paused, small echoes of things running over his face. His mouth twitched with one word, but he never spoke it, changing direction instead to say something else. “I have to see him.”
“Why?” Laura pressed.
“To understand.”
It was like pulling teeth. “To understand what?” she asked, fighting so hard to keep her tone steady.
“Why he’s still here.”
Laura paused, assessing this answer. It was easy to follow the string that Brady was laying down, however disjointed his way of laying it was. The car accident had taken the life of his twin brother. It hadn’t taken the life of the other driver. He was obviously struggling with this fact, even so much time later.