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Before he could try probing the layers of my subconscious any further, I rose to my feet and inclined my head towards the door at the back of the room. The employee-only basement stairs. It was time to get this show on the road. “Let’s go see that ex-boyfriend of mine, shall we?”
“We won’t need to go downstairs for that.”
My question came in the form of an arched brow and a puzzled expression.
Tyler answered me with a simple direction. “Interrogation room four.”
There are a lot of women who would love to square off against an ex-boyfriend across an interrogation-room table, under the unforgiving fluorescent lights and with a one-way mirror bearing mute witness.
I was not one of those women.
The tiny room made me feel ill at ease and put me on the defensive before I’d even taken my seat. I didn’t like locked boxes with only one method of escape. I also didn’t like knowing I was being watched by people I couldn’t see. In spite of knowing better, the whole setup reeked of a trap. The two things keeping me from fighting against my instincts were the knowledge I was here to do a job and that the police weren’t interested in killing me.
The metal chair squealed against the tile floor, and for a long while the echo of its protestation was the only sound in the room. Gabriel smiled at me pleasantly, his cuffed hands folded in a look-how-innocent-I-am manner on the scarred wooden table. There was a lingering aroma of sweat and the stink of cigarette smoke in the room. In spite of a smoking ban in municipal facilities, I would stake money the cops here still garnered witness favor by offering them a smoke.
I’d seen enough police procedurals to know that a seasoned cop would play this two ways. Either the straight-up investigator who just wanted answers, or the good-cop, bad-cop routine. I’d played the bad cop in my own life, and the idea of it was more than a little appealing given who I was dealing with, but I decided to try a different approach to see what Gabriel knew.
“How are they treating you?”
Gabriel shrugged. “My lawyer asked me the same thing. Fine, I guess. It’s not the Ritz or anything. Remember that ghastly little motel we stayed at one summer when Keats made you go to Albany?”
My poker face needed some work because I flinched. It was the same trip that first introduced me to Marcus Sullivan, the former Alpha of Albany, and the man who had turned my whole goddamn life into a shitstorm last year. I was still dealing with the fallout of killing him. How Gabriel had picked that memory out of all the others available to him was enough to make me want to reach out and deck him.
Instead I focused on the other tidbit of information his sentence gave me.
“You have a lawyer, and yet you’re here talking to me alone.”
“Do I need a lawyer present to talk to an old lover?” The familiarity of his tone made my stomach churn. This conversation would do nothing to convince the detectives on the other side of the glass that Gabriel was innocent. If anything, it made him look more like a creepy, leering sociopath.
“I want to help you, but you need to give me more to go on.”
“L
ike what?” He held his hands out, palms up, and shrugged. “I didn’t kill the girl, Secret. If anyone should believe me, I would hope it would be you.”
“Why? Why should I believe you? You bailed on our life together with no notice. Why should I think you’re somehow exempt from being a murderer?”
“I didn’t leave without my reasons. After everything…after what happened… I wanted to believe you and I could have a life together, but I couldn’t pretend, not after that.” He didn’t need to elaborate. The allusion to what had gone on between us was enough to make me feel as though guilt and loss and emptiness were stabbing me in the heart. I’d tried hard to forget what I lost at nineteen, and so had he if he still wasn’t able to talk about it.
“I’m not here to talk about us.”
“Okay.” He nodded, looking somewhat relieved.
“I’m here to talk about Misty Fitzpatrick.”
That got his attention. “What did Misty tell you?”
I sat back in the chair and said nothing.
“Look, that whole thing was a mess. She didn’t start talking about grades until after I slept with her, and I told her in no uncertain terms I wasn’t an express ticket to an A.”
“Oh, Jesus, Gabriel. Is there anyone in Mayhew’s class you haven’t fucked? What about Angie Ferris?”
“Once.”
“Gabriel.”
“Okay, two or three times, but she was a lousy lay and started introducing me as her boyfriend, and that’s not how I do things.”
