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“You’ll feel better if you get it off your chest, Uri. We know you don’t want to keep doing these things. To keep hurting your mother.”
“Doing what things?”
Monck didn’t reply.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“We think you’re a good man, Uri. We know you studied with a rabbi. Tell us everything and we’ll do all we can to help you.”
“It’s a trick. You’re trying to trick me.” Pale eyes now hard and cold as ice.
Stribbe resumed rocking and licking his lips, body language suggesting extreme agitation.
“Why would we trick you, Uri?”
“You want me to confess to something I didn’t do.”
Monck returned to his side of the table. Resumed his seat, leaned back, and said nothing.
Ten seconds passed. Thirty.
I recognized another interview tactic. Stop talking. Uncomfortable with silence, the subject may feel compelled to fill it. A variation on the old tried and true. Give a guy enough rope, he may hang himself.
A full minute of blinking and swaying, then Stribbe took the bait.
“You’re trying to get me to say things that aren’t true.”
“What things?” Monck’s gaze remained level on Stribbe.
“You’re trying to get me to say I killed people. People I don’t even know.”
Monck’s eyes floated up to the window. Met mine. The left one winked.
Bingo.
“One last question, Uri.”
“What?” Spit with venom.
“Who said anything about people being killed?”
23
I emerged to an outside much drearier than the one I’d left. A wind had kicked up and rain was threatening. Overhead, palm fronds waved like pennants above a marching band.
I hardly noticed. Monck’s questions and Stribbe’s answers were cycling and recycling through my brain. Stribbe was a paradox, a seeming mama’s boy one second, hostile and aggressive the next. Could such a flip-switch wimp be a hand-hacking serial killer? Last night’s attacker at my condo?
Was Stribbe the nervous mess he appeared to be most of the time? A man simmering with repressed anger?
Or an Academy Award–level actor?
Either way, watching him stutter and squirm had left me troubled.
I was rolling east on the Leeward Highway when my phone let loose a round ofda da dums.
Recognizing the incoming number, I answered.
“Tempe Brennan.”
