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“Last night at the pier. I arrested you, remember?”
“Oh. Right. For destruction of property? I still don’t get that.”
I opened the folder full of photos and started laying them down on the table. The pict
ures were post-explosion: the fire licking the foundation of the museum, the emergency vehicles, the stretchers coming out of Sci-Tron, the double lines of body bags. And then there were shots, from different angles, of the museum’s metal framework looking like the skeleton of a large, prehistoric animal kneeling down on the pier.
“Oh, wow,” said Mr. Grant. “These are great pictures.”
“Aren’t they? If you like, I’ll get you copies.”
“Sure. Thanks a lot.”
I smiled at this wretched specimen of a human being.
“If you could help me by thinking back …,” I said to Grant, leaning in, crossing my arms on the table, doing my best to look nonthreatening, not like a cop at all.
I said, “Do you remember last night when I asked you if you knew what happened at Sci-Tron?”
I pushed one of the photos toward him. It was timestamped 7:23 p.m. Smoke was still coming off the rubble heap on the pier.
Grant said, “No. What did I say?”
“You said to me, ‘Did I see it? I created this …. This is my work.’”
Grant was shaking his head no throughout.
I kept my voice soft and pressed on.
“You know what really got to me, Mr. Grant?”
I tapped my chest somewhere near my heart. “When you told me you wanted to create beauty. You were so happy about the sunset-lit sky. Gave yourself bonus points for the color of the sky. Too bad we don’t have a picture of that, right?”
“Well, that’s just crazy,” said Grant with a laugh. “How could I take credit for a sunset?”
I was prepared for total denial even though he’d freely offered his confession in the immediate aftermath of the explosion, while glass was still falling from above. For a second I flashed on Joe. I saw him standing with me, covering Grant with his gun. Joe looked solid, intelligent, brave. This freak, the one with the smirk, had brought Joe down.
Grant said, “Oh, I get it now. You’re saying that I actually told you that I blew up Sci-Tron? That’s hilarious. You must have misunderstood me, Sergeant. Or the explosion affected your hearing. That’s possible, isn’t it?”
He kept talking.
“What I must have said was that I saw the explosion, but honest to everything, I had nothing to do with ‘bombing’ that place.”
He made awkward air quotes when he said “bombing.”
I nodded politely.
“I think I know that this wasn’t your doing, Mr. Grant. Not alone, anyway. You had help from a terror network. Maybe they instigated bombing the museum. Maybe they planned it all. Why should you take the heat yourself?”
He shook his head, said, “Nope. I know nothing about who bombed the museum. It wasn’t me.”
Had Grant played me then? Or was he playing us now? Was he GAR’s “devoted soldier”? Or here was an idea: Was he teeing up his insanity defense?
Brady tensed up beside me.
Fifteen minutes ago Brady had told me, “Be his friend. We just need him to say, ‘I did it.’”
What would it take to push that button?
