So that was the connection between the two, although it still raised the question of why Mr. Liston had chosen to get involved in the first place.
“What was it about Zane’s case that got you involved, Mr. Liston?” Paige asked.
The lawyer raised an eyebrow at that. “I believe, in general, that questions go towards the suspect rather than their lawyers. But in this case I’ll go along with it. I chose to represent Zane because my firm takes an interest in miscarriages of justice and police corruption. We are currently in the process of suing the Las Vegas PD in connection with a number of cases where officers leapt to conclusions and then pushed through convictions that saw people locked away for far too long.”
He made that into a threat, the implication clear that the FBI could be added to the suit all too easily. Paige had no wish to find herself sued on her first case as a full FBI agent, but she had even less wish to be bullied into letting a criminal walk free if he was guilty.
“Your case on behalf of your client doesn’t make our case go away,” Christopher said, obviously thinking the same thing. “We’re looking for someone who has been killing someone using the methods of magic tricks, and props that come from the company that your client works for.”
It was no more than a restatement of evidence that the lawyer had already tried to dismiss, but maybe that was the point. Maybe it was a way of telling him that this wasn’t going away just because he wanted it to.
“Did you work on airtight safes, Zane?” Paige asked. “What about prop bullets for the bullet catch trick?”
Zane glared at her, looking over to his lawyer. The lawyer nodded to him, indicating that it was ok for him to answer.
“Sometimes. We all work on whatever’s needed.”
“And do you have access to the warehouse when you want it?” Christopher asked.
“You’re asking my client if he has a key?” Mr. Liston asked.
“I’m asking if he was in a position to take those props out of there, move them over to the locations of two murders, and then use them to kill two women,” Christopher shot back. He obviously wasn’t in a mood to let the lawyer dance around the questions on behalf of his client.
“This is just like fifteen years ago!” Zane said. “Asking me questions! Making insinuations! I didn’t kill Bethan. I never laid a finger on her!”
“Bethan is the woman you were convicted of killing?” Paige asked. This might not be the murder they needed to talk about, but if they were able to get Zane talking about this, then maybe he would also be willing to talk about what was happening now. Maybe once he started talking, he wouldn’t be able to stop.
“Don’t pretend like you don’t know all about it!” Zane snapped at her. “I know what you’re all like. You learn every little thing about someone, and then you pretend like you don’t know anything.”
This was one rare case where Paige didn’t know. She had read the file on Zane closely enough to know that he had a record, and to know that he’d been put away for manslaughter, but after that, she’d been caught up in the possibility that she might have found the killer. There had been no time to look deeper into him before they brought him here.
“Why don’t you talk us through it?” Paige said. She wanted to find a way to bring things back to the most recent murders, but she suspected that the only way to get Zane talking was to talk about the killing he was willing to discuss.
“My client has already been through all of this with the appeals courts, and the probation board,” his lawyer said. “We’re continuing to go through it in litigation with the Las Vegas PD. I don’t see what going through it all now achieves.”
Zane seemed to be willing to talk though, at least about that aspect of the past, as if the sheer sense of indignation he had about it all made the whole thing come bubbling up out of him.
“People think I killed her because she died in the middle of a trick. It was an accident. Just an accident. I didn’t even know that she was going to get in that box to run through her part.”
“But you had just argued with her the night before,” Christopher said. He’d obviously read deeper into Zane than Paige had while she’d been driving over to collect him.
“That doesn’t mean anything!” Zane said. “And my prints were all over it because it was my prop. I never wanted her dead. I would give anything to go back there and save her in time.”
He sounded as if he meant it, but that might just mean that it was a story that he’d embedded so deeply into his psyche over the preceding fifteen years that he’d come to believe it.
“And then they put me away for fifteen years. Fifteen years, when I could have been making it big,” Zane said, as if that were the main point of all of this. Not the fact that a woman was dead, or that he’d been in prison, but that his magic career hadn’t been what he’d hoped it would be. Was he really that obsessed by magic? “The Las Vegas PD should compensate me for every day of that.”
“We’re not the police,” Paige said, wanting to create whatever distinction she could between them and the people he thought had wronged him. “We’re the FBI.”
“You think that makes things better?” Zane asked.
“Tell us about the safes that you worked on,” Paige said. “Did you finish one recently? Did you deliver it to someone?”
Zane shrugged. “We sell those all the time. There are plenty of escapologists in Las Vegas.”
“What about prop bullets?” Paige asked.
“If you want details of who we sell to, you need to ask at the store for our client lists. Not that they’ll give them to you. It’s confidential.”