“Don’t worry about that,” Laura said. “We’ve got local detectives who’ll be along just in a minute to keep an eye on the place for you. I need you to focus on this right now. We’ve had a good look through this journal of yours, Earl, and it’s very interesting reading.”
“Do you think so?” he asked, frowning slightly. “I mean… why?”
“You don’t agree that it’s interesting?” Laura asked. This was a cat and mouse game, and she was more than willing to play. She could bet any amount of money that she’d come across tougher customers than this sixty-something-year-old man. Either he was weak-willed and nervous, or he was trying to play that part to avoid suspicion. Whichever was the truth, it wouldn’t be anything Laura hadn’t dealt with before. “You’re the one who wrote it all down.”
“I do, but… no one else ever does,” Earl said. His eyes only ever left the notebook to wander around the car as if in search of something, before returning straight back.
“What do you find so interesting about all these numbers?” Laura asked. She flipped to a page – seemingly at random, though in truth she had preprepared it. “Like these, for example – you have the dispatch call time, the minutes and seconds it took the ambulance to respond, how long the patient was dead for before revival…”
Earl swallowed visibly. “I like to make sure we’re being as efficient as possible,” he said. “Brain death can occur from as little as three minutes after the heart stops. A delay of even a second can make a difference in those critical cases.”
Laura nodded thoughtfully as though she was taking this in. “And it’s your job to make sure that they get there as fast as possible, is it?”
“Well… no,” Earl admitted. “I just decide what services are needed and send them out and give the caller advice over the phone to help them have the best chance of survival until our guys arrive.”
“So, then,” Laura said, looking right into his eyes. His nervous, flitting eyes, which quickly returned to the journal again. “Why do you take it upon yourself to record this information?”
“Because it’s important,” he said, his voice almost pleading. “Someone has to do something about it. If there are failures in the system, then…”
“How does it make you feel, when there are failures in the system?” Laura asked. She glanced up, just a momentary glance while she was sure Earl was staring at the journal, towards the central console. There was a red light showing on the device she’d set up there, confirming it was working. A voice recorder. She wasn’t going to have anyone say that the evidence they heard on this car ride didn’t count. She’d read him his rights, done everything by the book.
“I don’t like to think about people dying,” he said. His voice was almost a pleading
whine. “Not when we could have got there and saved them.”
“You don’t?” Laura said. She kept her voice deliberately curious, so that the impact of her next words would be all the stronger. “So, then, why are you killing off the ones that did make it?”
Earl opened his mouth to reply, but then paled, his eyes going to hers. “E-excuse me?” he asked.
“Our theory so far has been that you don’t think they deserved the extra time,” Laura said. “That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it, Earl? Time?”
“N-no,” he stammered, staring at the book again. “Well, yes, but – I didn’t…”
“You tell us, then, if we’ve got it wrong,” Laura said, leaning back casually in her seat. “If it’s not about deserving more time, then what is it? Are you trying to raise awareness, trying to show people how important time can be? Are you trying to improve the system?”
“Yes!” Earl said, but then his brow lowered again in confusion. “I mean, that’s why I keep the journal, not… not why I… I mean, I don’t kill anyone. I haven’t killed anyone!”
“Are you sure about that?” Laura asked, conversationally. “I have to tell you; judges are usually inclined to be rather more lenient with those who confess readily. And I myself have spoken to a number of people in the past who say that it’s like a weight off their shoulders to have it all out in the open. Don’t you think it’s better to just get it over with and admit everything now?”
“No!” Earl said, bringing his hands up to his face only to remember that they were cuffed together. “I… I mean… I…”
“Alright, Earl,” Laura said. They were only a block away from the precinct now, but the mid-afternoon traffic was heavy enough in this area to slow them down. “Let’s try something easier. Where were you, yesterday?”
“W-when?” he asked.
“All day, if you can.”
Earl’s mouth moved soundlessly, before the information he held readily inside his head seemed to take over for him. “I was alone in the morning,” he said. “My wife passed a few years ago, so it’s only me, but I like to rise early and get things done around the house. Then I had lunch, and I got ready for the late shift at work.”
“And what time did that start?” Laura asked.
“Four o’clock, sharp,” he said.
Laura didn’t need to run the numbers to know that he would have had plenty of time to set up Lincoln Ware on the platform in that abandoned barn and then return home, clean up, probably eat something, and get ready before heading out to work. He had no witness to say that he wasn’t doing that, no alibi. He was starting to look better and better.
“Aren’t you leaving something out of your day, Earl?” Laura asked. “You did something else, didn’t you?”
Earl looked at her with a kind of puzzled fear. “N-no,” he said. “That was all.”