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“No, I’m fine. I guess I’m more nervous than I thought. It’s weird how I can eat in the middle of an ER rush but not right now, sitting here doing nothing. I even ate during surgery once, isn’t that crazy? I don’t know. I guess this is worse.” She blew out a shaky breath. “Sorry.” She laughed nervously.
I smiled at her and prompted her to look at me. Staring into the watery gray globes of her eyes almost made me dizzy. “That’s okay. I just wish I could make you relax.”
She giggled. “That won’t happen.” She shrugged. I flicked my finger over her nose and her smile widened, her shoulders loosening up just a bit. I wrapped my arm around her shoulders and focused back on our suspect.
His name was Owen. If that was even his real name. When we ran his prints in booking we got nothing and he screamed criminal record. It must have been overseas, back in Ireland or where ever he was before he came here.
“I don’t know what you’re on about, so why don’t you just take me back to my cell.” He didn’t look at them as he spoke and that told me he had something to hide. He knew he wasn’t a good enough liar to let them see his eyes.
“Not happening,” Alex said first. He was now leaned against the wall behind him, trying to make him uncomfortable, remind him that he didn’t have any control of the situation. He must have a pretty rough past or some hard training to not have folded already.
“Look, we know you aren’t working alone. And you definitely aren’t the brains of the operation,” Max said. He had gotten up, and was leaning in a corner where we couldn’t see him, but could hear him.
“Fuck off,” the suspect laughed. He crossed and uncrossed his arms. I took it to mean he was finally getting uncomfortable.
“Someone has to be paying you. You don’t look like the kind of guy who beats people up for free. So, who do you work for?” Alex spoke that time.
“I don’t work for anyone. But I did like beating you up though.” He smirked, and Alex did well to ignore him. At least we knew who jumped him, finally.
“But you are working?” Max pried. The suspect’s face fell just an inch, and he caught himself before giving anything else away.
“Whatever.”
“You’ll get tired of lying soon,” Alex said.
“I’m not lying. I don’t work for anyone. I don’t know that man I attacked.”
“We never said you attacked anyone,” Max jumped in.
The suspect glared, and his nostrils flared at his mistake. Alex chuckled and came around the side, looming over him like a dark shadow. I could feel it in the air. The moment when the interrogation takes a turn, and it becomes a confession. You could almost smell it, when you work in the job for long enough. It becomes a feeling that is as real as fear and it was in the air.
I felt Rose look at me and I squeezed her shoulders.
“This is the part where you tell us everything,” Max said after a while, after giving the suspect time to really stew.
He just shook his head and twisted up his mouth. I had a feeling he knew it wasn’t worth it. That, or he decided he would get out of this easy enough as well.
“Those men were dirty, money hungry. That’s why it was so easy to get them.”
“Okay. Get them to do what?” Alex leaned on the table in front of him, crossing his arms like he wanted to keep from hitting him. Next to me, Rose sat up and leaned in.
“For years they were our way in. The back-door trade deals, that’s how we make our money. They help us, they get a cut from the goods.”
“What goods?” Alex pried.
Rose looked at me and I nodded to reassure her.
“Guns. We sell guns. First, we buy them to flood the market. And then we sell them again. They get a cut, we take most of it. But they start stealing from us, so we teach them a lesson.”
“Okay. You teach them a lesson about stealing, I get it. Who are they stealing from?” Max asked.
The suspect smiled and laughed like we should already know, which we do. “You know all about us. We run this city.”
“Oh sorry, thought that was the mafia,” Alex said.
The suspect glared at him and shook his head. “We sometimes have an alliance.”
“That’s great, now what did you do to the victims in question?” Max opened the folder and laid out the crime scene photos from the last three murders, and the attack from earlier that day.
