“I can have a hearing before a judge set within the hour.”
“Go ahead. I’ll go take a nap while you set it up. It’s been a long week.”
“Are you seriously willing to risk your career over this?”
She shifted, stood hip-shot, hooked her thumbs in her front pockets. “Is that a threat, Counselor?”
“It’s a question, Lieutenant.”
“I’ll tell you what I’m not willing to risk. Your client stepping out of that room unless it’s into a cage before I’ve interviewed him. I’m not willing to risk him going poof because he has the money and means to do so. In or out. You know very well I can hold him until Monday, so let’s stop wasting each other’s time. I talk to him now, or I go home.”
“Have it your way.”
Eve used her wrist unit. “Detective Peabody, report to Interview. Frosty, huh?” she said when she noted Sorenson studying her unit. She opened the door, stepped in.
Dudley sported a bruised and swolle
n jaw and eyes red and puffy from weeping. He’d had enough time to come down from his high, she noted, and that could be useful. Flanking him were two other lawyer types. Young, female, attractive. One of them actually held his hand.
“Record on. Dallas, Lieutenant Eve, in interview with Dudley, Winston—the Fourth.” She dropped a thick file on her side of the table. “Also present is Mr. Dudley’s attorney of record, Sorenson, Bentley, and two other representatives. Would each of you state your name for the record?”
As they did, she simply delegated them to Blonde and Redhead. “Peabody, Detective Delia, entering Interview. So, the gang’s all here. How’s the face, Winnie?”
“You struck me. I saved your life and you struck me and dragged me in here like a criminal.”
“Saved my life? Gosh, my recollection, and my recording, which was—as is proper procedure—engaged throughout our meeting, have a different take. As do the recordings and statements of the officers in Our Lady of Shadows Church.”
“And those recordings and statements will be questioned,” Sorenson put in, “as we can document your vendetta against my client.”
“Yeah, you do that little thing, see where it gets you. So let’s start from there. You contacted me at just past twenty hundred hours.”
“She was drunk,” he said to Sorenson. “But I was desperate. She could barely speak coherently, and when she arrived, she could hardly stand up she was so inebriated.”
Eve opened the file, pulled out a hard copy, tossed it on the table. “My tox screens, taken at hour intervals from nineteen hundred hours to twenty-one hundred hours. Clear and clean.”
“Falsified, just like the rest! You were already drunk when you accosted me and Sly at Lionel’s. A dozen witnesses would corroborate that, and your abusive attitude. Your own husband was disgusted with you.”
“Roarke says hi, by the way. You might not have noticed him in the church.” She smiled as fury reddened Dudley’s face.
“You entrapped my client,” Sorenson began.
“Bullshit. Your client contacted me, which is verified by both our ’link logs. I met him, as he requested. My backup was not only within procedure, but recommended by departmental policy. You confessed, Winnie, during our meeting—when your pal had a stunner to my throat—that the two of you had engaged in a competition that involved killing selected targets.”
She drew photos out of her file, lined them up.
“You misinterpreted my words. I was doing whatever I could to stall Sly.” Tears, and she thought them sincere, sprang to his eyes even as he lied his murdering ass off. “I betrayed and killed my dearest friend for you.”
She sent him a look, the same kind she’d seen him send Roarke in Lionel’s. Civilized contempt. “You sure roll on your dearest friend quick and easy.”
“I’m doing my duty. And God knows it can’t harm him. He’s dead. I killed him to save you.”
“Oh, don’t worry, you didn’t kill him. He’s actually doing pretty well.”
“You’re a liar. I saw him.”
“You didn’t see much of anything being souped up on Hype cut with a little prime Zeus. Your client’s tox screen.” Eve tossed it out of the file.
“I was frightened. Maybe I was weak, but I was frightened, so I took something. You can charge me with using, but—”