by Blake Pierce
“Thank you,” Laura said, then held out her hand pointedly when the supervisor still didn’t make a move.
At last, she handed over both the journal and the address, biting her lip as she did so.
Laura turned to leave the moment she had both of them in her grasp. “I’ll let you know if we need anything further,” she said over her shoulder, walking right out to the parking lot. It felt like time was of the essence. There was every chance that nervous supervisor would call Earl and warn him that the FBI were coming. There was no telling what he would be able to hide or prepare if he was given enough of a chance.
But even so, as Laura stepped out into the parking lot, she stopped dead.
Nate was there, standing by the car.
She cleared her throat, trying to pretend that she hadn’t really come to a complete halt in surprise as she walked over to him. His hands were in his pockets, but he took them out and straightened as he saw her.
“I got your message,” he said, his voice kind of strangely shy, like he wasn’t sure how she would react to him being there.
“I’ve got a new lead,” Laura told him. “Address of a potential suspect. A dispatcher who is obsessed with time, and just happened to be the one dealing with all of the calls when each of our victims was reported as being in distress the first time.”
“Sounds good,” Nate said. He hesitated. “Laura, I’m not… I’m not saying I accept what you’ve been telling me. About your… about you. What I said earlier, I didn’t mean it. I don’t think you’re hiding things for attention. I know that’s not you.”
“Apology accepted,” Laura replied, though she couldn’t keep a little testiness from creeping into her voice. So, he knew he was wrong – but still wouldn’t admit she was right? Where did that even leave them?
“I don’t know about all the rest,” Nate continued, his voice back to the reasonable, logical, soothing Nate that she knew. He always had the right thing to say, even if they’d been fighting. He knew how to settle things down. “But you’re right about one thing. We need to solve this case.”
“Then let’s go arrest our suspect,” Laura suggested, extending an olive branch of her own, and she was relieved and gratified beyond measure when Nate turned around and got into the car to go with her.
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
The second the door opened, Laura was moving forward, holding out her badge and making sure to get her foot inside the doorframe. She wasn’t going to allow him the chance to slam it in their faces or try to run, especially not if he’d been forewarned.
“Earl Regis?” Laura said, waiting a bare second for his stunned nod before continuing. “You’re under arrest on suspicion of murder. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have a right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you.”
“Wh-what?” Earl said, his eyes as round as saucers behind round-rimmed glasses.
There was no treading lightly here. He was the absolute best match they had, and they wanted him off the streets. “We’re going to need you to come to the precinct with us,” Laura said, holding out a pair of handcuffs. “Please hold out your hands in front of you, wrists together.”
Whether he was too shocked to argue or just naturally meek, Earl complied immediately. Laura snapped the cuffs on his hands and then stepped aside to steer him down the short path back to the sidewalk and the car, where Nate was already waiting. He’d allowed Laura to take the lead on this one, but he was still in a ready stance, able to take off running after their suspect if he should decide to try and escape.
Laura assessed the man she was leading, his strength, his ability. He was old, yes. But he was still physically capable. She could feel it in him. He didn’t stumble on the walk. He didn’t shuffle like a more infirm man would. He had a good stride, an upright posture. Age, apparently, hadn’t slowed him down enough to make him an unviable suspect.
Nate made sure he didn’t hit his head as he helped Earl into the car, and then got into the driver’s seat with a glance at Laura. She nodded, walked around the car, and got inside – sitting next to Earl in the back.
As Nate started the engine, Laura brought out the journal and put it on her lap, placing it so that Earl couldn’t help but notice she had it. There wasn’t any time to lose, given that it was mid-afternoon already. If Earl had already taken a victim to another platform, like they suspected, then they needed to crack him sooner rather than later. They needed to get to that person before their timer stopped, and there was no telling when that might happen.
“Earl, I’d like you to talk to me about this,” Laura said, tapping the cover of the journal to show him what she meant. “We’ll have an attorney for you at the precinct, if you want.” This mention was intended to remind him of his rights – making sure she’d ticked off that box. If he didn’t ask for one now but continued to answer her questions, he was as good as ceding his right to any legal representation for the duration of the conversation. Or until he did ask for one, at least.
“M-my journal?” Earl said, looking at it with a look of complete confusion. “Why do you have my journal? Oh, my… my door, we didn’t lock…”
“Don’t worry about that,” Laura said. “We’ve got local detectives who’ll be along just in a minute to keep an eye on the place for you. I need you to focus on this right now. We’ve had a good look through this journal of yours, Earl, and it’s very interesting reading.”
“Do you think so?” he asked, frowning slightly. “I mean… why?”
“You don’t agree that it’s interesting?” Laura asked. This was a cat and mouse game, and she was more than willing to play. She could bet any amount of money that she’d come across tougher customers than this sixty-something-year-old man. Either he was weak-willed and nervous, or he was trying to play that part to avoid suspicion. Whichever was the truth, it wouldn’t be anything Laura hadn’t dealt with before. “You’re the one who wrote it all down.”
“I do, but… no one else ever does,” Earl said. His eyes only ever left the notebook to wander around the car as if in search of something, before returning straight back.
“What do you find so interesting about all these numbers?” Laura asked. She flipped to a page – seemingly at random, though in truth she had preprepared it. “Like these, for example – you have the dispatch call time, the minutes and seconds it took the ambulance to respond, how long the patient was dead for before revival…”
Earl swallowed visibly. “I like to make sure we’re being as efficient as possible,” he said. “Brain death can occur from as little as three minutes after the heart stops. A delay of even a second can make a difference in those critical cases.”
Laura nodded thoughtfully as though she was taking this in. “And it’s your job to make sure that they get there as fast as possible, is it?”
“Well… no,” Earl admitted. “I just decide what services are needed and send them out and give the caller advice over the phone to help them have the best chance of survival until our guys arrive.”
“So, then,” Laura said, looking right into his eyes. His nervous, flitting eyes, which quickly returned to the journal again. “Why do you take it upon yourself to record this information?”
“Because it’s important,” he said, his voice almost pleading. “Someone has to do something about it. If there are failures in the system, then…”
“How does it make you feel, when there are failures in the system?” Laura asked. She glanced up, just a momentary glance while she was sure Earl was staring at the journal, towards the central console. There was a red light showing on the device she’d set up there, confirming it was working. A voice recorder. She wasn’t going to have anyone say that the evidence they heard on this car ride didn’t count. She’d read him his rights, done everything by the book.
“I don’t like to think about people dying,” he said. His voice was almost a pleading
whine. “Not when we could have got there and saved them.”
“You don’t?” Laura said. She kept her voice deliberately curious, so that the impact of her next words would be all the stronger. “So, then, why are you killing off the ones that did make it?”
Earl opened his mouth to reply, but then paled, his eyes going to hers. “E-excuse me?” he asked.
“Our theory so far has been that you don’t think they deserved the extra time,” Laura said. “That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it, Earl? Time?”
“N-no,” he stammered, staring at the book again. “Well, yes, but – I didn’t…”
“You tell us, then, if we’ve got it wrong,” Laura said, leaning back casually in her seat. “If it’s not about deserving more time, then what is it? Are you trying to raise awareness, trying to show people how important time can be? Are you trying to improve the system?”
“Yes!” Earl said, but then his brow lowered again in confusion. “I mean, that’s why I keep the journal, not… not why I… I mean, I don’t kill anyone. I haven’t killed anyone!”
“Are you sure about that?” Laura asked, conversationally. “I have to tell you; judges are usually inclined to be rather more lenient with those who confess readily. And I myself have spoken to a number of people in the past who say that it’s like a weight off their shoulders to have it all out in the open. Don’t you think it’s better to just get it over with and admit everything now?”
“No!” Earl said, bringing his hands up to his face only to remember that they were cuffed together. “I… I mean… I…”
“Alright, Earl,” Laura said. They were only a block away from the precinct now, but the mid-afternoon traffic was heavy enough in this area to slow them down. “Let’s try something easier. Where were you, yesterday?”
“W-when?” he asked.
“All day, if you can.”
Earl’s mouth moved soundlessly, before the information he held readily inside his head seemed to take over for him. “I was alone in the morning,” he said. “My wife passed a few years ago, so it’s only me, but I like to rise early and get things done around the house. Then I had lunch, and I got ready for the late shift at work.”
“And what time did that start?” Laura asked.
“Four o’clock, sharp,” he said.
Laura didn’t need to run the numbers to know that he would have had plenty of time to set up Lincoln Ware on the platform in that abandoned barn and then return home, clean up, probably eat something, and get ready before heading out to work. He had no witness to say that he wasn’t doing that, no alibi. He was starting to look better and better.
“Aren’t you leaving something out of your day, Earl?” Laura asked. “You did something else, didn’t you?”
Earl looked at her with a kind of puzzled fear. “N-no,” he said. “That was all.”
“No, you saw somebody else, didn’t you?” Laura said. Nate was pulling into the precinct parking lot, close to the entrance where newly arrested suspects could be led in and processed. “You saw someone who can’t tell us what you were up to, because he’s dead now. Hung.”
“Oh, God,” Earl groaned. “No, no, I didn’t, I swear to you!”
“Well, let’s take a break now,” Laura said, very aware that Nate was turning off the engine. “We’ll talk a bit more inside, when you’ve been processed. But think about what I said, Earl. The judge is going to like you a lot more if you confess everything without too much work. There’s still time.”
Nate came around to Earl’s door to get him out of the car, and Laura switched from interview mode to thinking about everything they needed to do to process him. This part could take a while. He hadn’t given her anything in the car, which was a real shame. They could be hours now, waiting for him to get an attorney he approved of, to get set up in the interview room. He might delay further by claiming he needed medical assistance, given his age.
Laura followed behind as Nate led him inside, handing him over to the duty staff for processing and booking. Taking his fingerprints and getting him entered into the system could take a while in itself, and they allowed the local team to handle it while they stepped off to one side.
“We should go and organize our materials,” Laura said quietly, so that only Nate could hear her. “Get ready to hit him hard. We need to do this fast, just in case someone is already out there waiting to be saved.”
“Alright,” Nate said. He cast a glance over at Earl, as though he was worried that the locals weren’t going to be able to look after him properly. “You go grab everything. I’ll watch him and get him to an interview room so we can move as fast as possible.”
Laura nodded, quickly departing and heading through the bullpen to the desk they had commandeered. They had left only a few small things there, but it was enough: files, records, and photographs, mostly. The kind of things they would need to have on hand in order to make their points in the room.
Laura opened the top file to start checking through it, ignoring the buzz of the bullpen around her, single-minded in her focus on finding the right materials. There were the coroner’s reports, the crime scene photographs… she remembered she still had the photograph of the clock in her pocket and pulled it out, almost recoiling as a stab of pain went through her forehead when she touched it.
She continued to draw it out of her pocket, ready to put it in the file –
She was focused on Veronica Rowse’s face, appearing in close-up. Her eyes were closed, her lips faintly tinged blue. She had a pale sheen to her skin. Almost bloodless. Like she’d been bleeding for a while, all of it drained from her face and gone somewhere else.
Her whole body was shaking, though Laura could only make out her head. And then, at some unheard or unseen command, her lips moved to take in a breath, her eyes opened…
Laura put the photograph back into the file, confused beyond measure. It was the same thing she had seen before. Why? It didn’t make any sense. She had already seen that, and she’d gone and made the arrest off the back of it. Why was she seeing it again? With nothing changed?
Unless…
Unless she hadn’t made the right arrest at all.
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE
Laura sank into the chair at the desk, her mind reeling. She had been so sure. All the signs added up. Earl Regis had access, knowledge, even a twisted kind of motive. He definitely had opportunity, and it wasn’t a hard stretch to think that a man of his age might know how to do a few DIY things. He fit.
But now, Laura saw, he didn’t fit at all.
She couldn’t be a hundred percent sure, even still. All she’d seen was a vision of the past. She didn’t even know why it was the past and not the future, like normal. For all she knew, they did have the right guy and her visions were just… broken.
But even as she thought it, she knew it wasn’t true. Earl Regis did fit, in all the ways except the ones where he didn’t. He was old. He was timid and nervous. He had a thing for numbers because he wanted to save lives. Turning around and ending them instead didn’t make sense.
It only looked like he was the right person. And it looked so convincingly like he was that Laura was going to have a hard time telling anyone at all, much less Nate, that he wasn’t their man.
Or, again, maybe he was, and she was just losing her grip on her visions and her sense of reality to the point that she couldn’t even tell what was going on anymore.
Laura stood a little unsteadily, gathering the files she’d come for even though she didn’t really believe that she needed them anymore. She walked back to the elevators and took them to the next floor up, where she knew Nate would be waiting outside the interview rooms.
She found him pacing the corridor, his arms folded across his chest, his black suit almost looking like it was going to split across the shoulders.
“Hi,” she said. “I have the files.”
“Great,” Nate said, but he tossed his head with an expression of disgust towards the closed doo
r of the interview room he was pacing outside. “He’s invoked his right to an attorney. Got someone from across town he wants to come. We could be here for a while.”
“That’s alright,” Laura said. “I…”
She hesitated. He was looking at her with this kind of annoyance on his face already. Like a caged animal who wanted nothing more to spring out and get back to the hunt. This was going to make him mad; she couldn’t help but think.
But she had to say it anyway.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said, giving herself the soft introduction that she needed for the topic.
Nate groaned immediately.
“No, Laura,” he said. “I don’t like it when you think. Not about things like this. What’s going on now?”
“I don’t think it’s him,” Laura admitted, letting it pour out of her in a rush. “I think we have the wrong guy. Which means someone is still out there, and while we can’t question him anyway, I think we ought to be looking for them.”
Nate stared at her, shaking his head minutely from side to side, his wide eyes seemingly fixed in place. “I don’t believe this,” he said. “You’re the one who was so sure he was the right guy in the first place!”
“I know, I know,” Laura said, putting a hand to her head. “I get why you might think I’m messing around, or just following a whim. But I was working on the evidence I had when I went after him. On paper, he looks great.”
“Right,” Nate said. “He does. So, what evidence do you have now that contradicts that? All you did was go pick up the files!”
“It’s…” Laura hesitated. She could barely meet Nate’s eyes, but she had to. What good was getting it all out in the open between them if she still couldn’t use her ability to tell him what she knew? “It’s not evidence, exactly.”
Nate’s head rolled to the side, looking at her from a tilted angle, his stare going harder. “You’re not going to tell me this right now,” he said, warningly.
