“No, you saw somebody else, didn’t you?” Laura said. Nate was pulling into the precinct parking lot, close to the entrance where newly arrested suspects could be led in and processed. “You saw someone who can’t tell us what you were up to, because he’s dead now. Hung.”
“Oh, God,” Earl groaned. “No, no, I didn’t, I swear to you!”
“Well, let’s take a break now,” Laura said, very aware that Nate was turning off the engine. “We’ll talk a bit more inside, when you’ve been processed. But think about what I said, Earl. The judge is going to like you a lot more if you confess everything without too much work. There’s still time.”
Nate came around to Earl’s door to get him out of the car, and Laura switched from interview mode to thinking about everything they needed to do to process him. This part could take a while. He hadn’t given her anything in the car, which was a real shame. They could be hours now, waiting for him to get an attorney he approved of, to get set up in the interview room. He might delay further by claiming he needed medical assistance, given his age.
Laura followed behind as Nate led him inside, handing him over to the duty staff for processing and booking. Taking his fingerprints and getting him entered into the system could take a while in itself, and they allowed the local team to handle it while they stepped off to one side.
“We should go and organize our materials,” Laura said quietly, so that only Nate could hear her. “Get ready to hit him hard. We need to do this fast, just in case someone is already out there waiting to be saved.”
“Alright,” Nate said. He cast a glance over at Earl, as though he was worried that the locals weren’t going to be able to look after him properly. “You go grab everything. I’ll watch him and get him to an interview room so we can move as fast as possible.”
Laura nodded, quickly departing and heading through the bullpen to the desk they had commandeered. They had left only a few small things there, but it was enough: files, records, and photographs, mostly. The kind of things they would need to have on hand in order to make their points in the room.
Laura opened the top file to start checking through it, ignoring the buzz of the bullpen around her, single-minded in her focus on finding the right materials. There were the coroner’s reports, the crime scene photographs… she remembered she still had the photograph of the clock in her pocket and pulled it out, almost recoiling as a stab of pain went through her forehead when she touched it.
She continued to draw it out of her pocket, ready to put it in the file –
She was focused on Veronica Rowse’s face, appearing in close-up. Her eyes were closed, her lips faintly tinged blue. She had a pale sheen to her skin. Almost bloodless. Like she’d been bleeding for a while, all of it drained from her face and gone somewhere else.
Her whole body was shaking, though Laura could only make out her head. And then, at some unheard or unseen command, her lips moved to take in a breath, her eyes opened…
Laura put the photograph back into the file, confused beyond measure. It was the same thing she had seen before. Why? It didn’t make any sense. She had already seen that, and she’d gone and made the arrest off the back of it. Why was she seeing it again? With nothing changed?
Unless…
Unless she hadn’t made the right arrest at all.
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE
Laura sank into the chair at the desk, her mind reeling. She had been so sure. All the signs added up. Earl Regis had access, knowledge, even a twisted kind of motive. He definitely had opportunity, and it wasn’t a hard stretch to think that a man of his age might know how to do a few DIY things. He fit.
But now, Laura saw, he didn’t fit at all.
She couldn’t be a hundred percent sure, even still. All she’d seen was a vision of the past. She didn’t even know why it was the past and not the future, like normal. For all she knew, they did have the right guy and her visions were just… broken.
But even as she thought it, she knew it wasn’t true. Earl Regis did fit, in all the ways except the ones where he didn’t. He was old. He was timid and nervous. He had a thing for numbers because he wanted to save lives. Turning around and ending them instead didn’t make sense.
It only looked like he was the right person. And it looked so convincingly like he was that Laura was going to have a hard time telling anyone at all, much less Nate, that he wasn’t their man.
Or, again, maybe he was, and she was just losing her grip on her visions and her sense of reality to the point that she couldn’t even tell what was going on anymore.
Laura stood a little unsteadily, gathering the files she’d come for even though she didn’t really believe that she needed them anymore. She walked back to the elevators and took them to the next floor up, where she knew Nate would be waiting outside the interview rooms.
She found him pacing the corridor, his arms folded across his chest, his black suit almost looking like it was going to split across the shoulders.
“Hi,” she said. “I have the files.”
“Great,” Nate said, but he tossed his head with an expression of disgust towards the closed doo
r of the interview room he was pacing outside. “He’s invoked his right to an attorney. Got someone from across town he wants to come. We could be here for a while.”
“That’s alright,” Laura said. “I…”
She hesitated. He was looking at her with this kind of annoyance on his face already. Like a caged animal who wanted nothing more to spring out and get back to the hunt. This was going to make him mad; she couldn’t help but think.
But she had to say it anyway.