CHAPTER ELEVEN
Laura stared through the window of the interview room, watching Toby Martins. The man was sitting there stony-faced and silent, his arms clasped in front of him where the cuffs didn’t allow him to fold them over his chest, staring into nothing. He couldn’t see Laura through the double-sided glass.
“What are we waiting for?” Agent Won asked. He had been tapping his finger on the table beside the window for at least five minutes, as if Laura didn’t know already that he was feeling impatient.
“I told you,” she said. “There’s no point barging in there and trying to get him to talk all over again. We have to play this carefully and trick him into talking.”
“Why can’t we just do that now?” Agent Won complained. “I learned this technique in the Academy, where you -”
“Trust me, Agent Won,” Laura said through gritted teeth. “They haven’t invented any new techniques since I was at the Academy myself. Whatever they taught you, I know it too.”
Agent Won slumped a little, then dropped down into the seat by the window. There was only the basics of investigation at the little precinct: a single interview room, with a single control room beside it, where another officer could watch through the window and monitor the recording equipment. It was a little cramped, to say the least.
Laura stayed standing, watching Martins. He hadn’t shown much sign of discomfort since they’d brought him in. It was as though none of this was touching him – but through observation, Laura was starting to notice small signs that that wasn’t quite the case. When he did reach for the plastic cup of water they’d provided for him – which was not often – his hands were shaking slightly. He took quick, sharp sips, as if afraid to show any vulnerability in his thirst.
“When are we going to go back in there?” Agent Won asked. “If we’re waiting, then fine. But when do we stop?”
Laura sighed, turning to face him. When I say so was the tempting answer that wanted to roll off her tongue. But even though she didn’t much feel like being anyone’s mentor, she could at least explain to Won what she was doing and why. Then he would stop asking her every five minutes, and she could get some peace, at least for the day.
She didn’t want to think about the fact that they might remain partnered up for longer, but if they did, she definitely wanted him on the same page as her with this kind of thing.
“What’s the one thing he’s said over and over again since we brought him in?” Laura asked.
“No comment,” Agent Won readily supplied.
“When we asked him why he ran?”
“No comment.”
“When we asked him if he wanted a lawyer?”
“No comment.”
“When we asked him to confirm his own name?”
“No comment.”
“Right.” Laura looked at Agent Won evenly. “If you go back in there and try to talk to him again without changing anything, what do you think he’s going to say?”
Agent Won looked annoyed to have to say it, but he did: “No comment.”
“That’s not going to get us anywhere,” Laura said, turning back to the window. “I’m not just standing here staring at him, you know. I’m watching. Assessing his mental state.”
“What are you looking for?” Agent Won asked.
“Signs that he’s beginning to crumble,” Laura said. “Look at him right now. He’s solid, at least on the outside. On the inside, all kinds of things are going through his head. He’s wondering if we have any evidence. Trying to tell himself that we don’t. Wondering how long he’s been here, how long we’re going to keep him. Maybe thinking about getting home, the things he was supposed to be doing tonight. Making dinner. And then he’ll go back around – how long am I going to be here for? And all these worries are going to circle around and around in his head until it starts to break him, because there’s nothing there to distract him from them.”
“What if it doesn’t?” Agent Won asked.
“It will,” Laura said. She nodded to the window again just as Martins reached out for another jerky, quick sip of his drink. “Look. He’s already so nervous he’s practically afraid to move. And if it doesn’t, well, there’s always the backup plan.”
“What’s the backup plan?”
Laura almost smiled at how easily Agent Won fell into her ‘trap’ and asked the right question. “The locals,” she said. “We asked Detective Waters to go and raid his place, right? The warrant came through, and they’ll be there by now. All we have to do is wait. If there’s something of evidential value there, we’ll have it soon enough. And we can take that into the room to batter down his defenses instead.”
“What if that doesn’t work?” Agent Won asked.
“Then we try another technique,” Laura said. “But believe me, of all the things you learned in your training, the most important is this: people like to fill silences. Right now, he’s filling that silence with a dialogue inside his own head, trying to convince himself to stay calm but getting worse and worse at doing so. And once we go in there, he’ll already be so nervous that when we leave more silences in the conversation, he’ll fill them with stupid things. Things he shouldn’t say. That’s how we’ll get him.”
Agent Won said nothing to that, apparently contemplating it in the privacy of his own mind. Laura resumed her own silent vigil, concentrating on Martins. Of course, there were two edges to every sword, and she was doing a pretty good job of filling her own silence with her own thoughts.
Like the statistics that were bugging her: that most killers who took more than one victim in a ritualistic or specific manner like this tended to be on the younger side, before the age of thirty. But Toby Martins was in his fifties. There was also the fact that he didn’t look very fit or healthy, yet the person they were looking for had carried the body of an adult and laid it down and then gotten away quickly enough that no one saw them do it.
None of which meant he couldn’t be the killer at all. There were always exceptions to the rule, and maybe he was just stronger than he looked. Laura didn’t have any connection between him and the victims yet, either, but then again, he hadn’t given them any information at all. It might all still come together.
So why did she have the nagging feeling that it wasn’t going to?
Toby Martins reached out for his cup of water again, whip-fast, and only succeeded in knocking it over. It spilled immediately, the rest of the water pooling on the table and dripping to the floor as the cup spun away. He went white in the face at the moment it happened, visibly swallowing, then again – his throat was clearly so dry he needed to do it twice.
Laura smiled to herself.
“Alright,” she said. “You go and get another cup of water. Join me in a couple of seconds.” She paused to pull a few tissues from a box that was sitting on the table beside the recording equipment and walked briskly into the interview room. She trusted that Agent Won would at least do as he was told without any problems, putting her game face back on as she returned to Toby Martins’s direct line of view.
“Having a clumsy moment, Mr. Martins?” she said, as cheerfully as if she were a nurse doing the rounds with elderly patients. She stooped to pick up the cup, making sure to underline the fact that she was able to reach and move to get it while he was not, and then dumped the tissues on top of the water on the table. “Never mind. You can mop it up; there you go.”
It was a power move in two directions: first, to make him clean up his own mess instead of doing it for him, and second, to remind him that he was being watched at all times. He didn’t have any privacy here. That should help to keep him on edge, to increase his feelings of powerlessness and make him second guess everything.
All of which was going to help immensely with getting him to talk, even if he knew he shouldn’t.