CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It didn’t matter what side of the table she was on, interrogation rooms always gave Ella an uneasy feeling. She sat beside her partner, Bret Styles opposite. He rested his forearms on the table, his head buried among them like a bored schoolkid. Ella knew he was about to make this much harder than it had to be, but she and Paige had a lot of ammunition at their disposal. Refusal to talk only worked if the evidence was on the suspect’s side.
She wanted to start small. “Tell us about yourself, Bret,” Ella said.
“Uhhh,” he grunted, keeping his head down. “I like poetry and long walks in the park.”
Yup. He was going to be a brick wall. “What kind of poetry?”
“I dunno. The type that rhymes.”
“Funny. Do you write your own poetry?” Ella asked.
“Sure.”
“Is there a word that rhymes with chainsaw?”
Bret shot up straight in his chair and started laughing. “Well done. You got me.”
“Mind telling us what that whole thing’s all about?” asked Ella.
“Not really.”
“We insist. The more you tell us, the easier we’ll go on you.”
Bret shrugged his shoulders. “Sounds like you know everything already.”
“We know what you did, but we want to know why you did it.”
“That scumbag. Mr. Anderson. He had it coming.”
Ella was talking about the murders, but this avenue worked too. It was a natural progression.
“Why? He claimed to never have seen you before,” she said.
“He would, wouldn’t he? He’s the one who rejected my application. I saw his name right there on the letter. K. Anderson. So I found him.”
“You applied to medical school? You?” asked Paige.
“Yeah.”
“Did you even get your high school diploma, let alone a degree?”
“No!” Bret shouted, suddenly beginning to shiver. “But why does that matter? I can learn.”
Ella eyeballed her partner, whose face looked like it was made of stone. Get used to these kinds of people, Ella thought.
“So you attacked this man because he rejected you. Why a chainsaw? Why a man with one leg?”
“’Cause I owned a chainsaw,” Bret said, as though the answer was obvious. In a way, it was. “I don’t know nothing about a man’s leg.”
Bret was starting to find his voice now, and by Ella’s judgment, he was telling the truth. Bret definitely inhabited some strange fantasy land where he was the central character of the world’s endless story, but he had just enough of a grip on reality to be calculatingly dangerous.
Ella leaned back in her chair, lining up her shoulders with the suspect’s. It was a rapport-building tactic that suggested you and the other person were on the same level. We’re all friends here, it said.
“Cassie Sullivan,” Ella said. “Teri Harper. Kate Sutton.”
Bret looked unaffected. “That a question? ‘Cause it don’t sound like a question.”