A Billion Little Clues

by Westlake, Samantha

  Finally, off to one side, I spotted a set of two doors, one of which was labeled "Interrogation." Bingo. I headed for them. Weren't there always two doors - one for the prisoner, the other for the observation room?

  I went barging into the door on the left, picked blindly at random. "I have important information!" I cried out as I came in, holding up my purse like a treasured trophy.

  And then, inside the room, I froze as I stared around.

  Three sets of eyes stared back at me, each with a mix of various emotions.

  #

  I hadn't been expecting to find Roman in here, perhaps handcuffed to a metal table and looking sick with worry after spending the night in jail. Perhaps there would even be an officer in here, lounging against the wall and keeping his eyes on Roman in case the man made an attempt to escape.

  What I wasn't expecting, however, was to find another man sitting beside Roman - Eddie Zinner, Roman's lawyer! The lawyer had a briefcase on the table in front of him, and it appeared as if I had entered in the middle of an argument, cutting him off. He looked slightly peeved at being upstaged in such a way.

  And just to put the final cherry on this surprise, the same female detective who had arrested Roman was also sitting at the table, across from the billionaire and the lawyer! She had her own folder of papers and photographs sitting on the table in front of her as well. She didn't look exactly happy to see me, but she didn't look quite as angry as I might have expected, either. Perhaps she was happy that someone had come in and interrupted Zinn.

  Considering that the lawyer had his mouth open already when I'd come barging in, he was the first to recover enough to speak. "What are you doing here?" he sputtered, before getting a handle on himself. I literally watched as his eyes rolled over me, spending much less time on my face than on my other areas. I noticed that, despite my tee shirt and sweatpants, he still lingered on my tits and ass. Sleaze.

  I did my best to ignore this blatant examination. Instead, I turned my gaze to Roman. He looked cautious, but slightly optimistic. He certainly had the warmest expression of any of the people in the room. "Melinda, I think that we've got this under control," he began, in a much more gentle tone than Zinn had used.

  "No, you're missing something!" I broke out, holding my purse with the evidence against me as though afraid that someone might try and snatch it away. "I found the evidence!"

  "What evidence is that?" This was the first time that the female detective had spoken up, and I felt her gaze sweep over me as well. But while Zinn's glance had lechery at its heart, the detective's cool look instead seemed to be summing me up, and then distilling me down to my most basic parts. I felt uncomfortably stripped bare, as though she could read my mind and wasn't impressed by anything she saw there.

  I reached into my purse. "Evidence that Roman is innocent!" I replied. "I mean, I know that already. I was there and saw that he didn't do it."

  At this sentence, the detective shifted her chair sideways so that she was partly facing me. "Excuse me? Can you repeat that?" she requested.

  I opened my mouth to clarify, but this time Zinn cut in before I could start speaking. "Hold on, I really have to protest this!" he insisted. "This is not the way to admit evidence! If this woman has something to say that could impact the freedom or the story of my client, I want to hear it in private-"

  The detective narrowed her eyes at the lawyer. It was clear that she had already cultivated an intense dislike for the man. "Really?" she broke in. "You don't want this young lady-" she paused, glancing at me.

  "Melinda," I supplied. "Melinda Gaines. I'm, er, Mr. Wayland's personal assistant."

  "-Melinda, to share evidence that she insists proves your client's innocence?" the detective finished. "You are his defense lawyer, are you not?"

  The lawyer glanced back and forth between the detective and me, looking as though he wanted nothing more than to simply banish all of the women from the room. He opened his mouth, but Roman laid a hand on his arm before he could speak.

  "Zinn, hold on," Roman spoke up, cutting off his lawyer. "Let her say her piece." He then turned to me and gave me a smile that made me go weak at the knees. It was a very private, personal smile, which simultaneously communicated that he had total faith in me, and that he very clearly wanted to get me alone someplace so we could finally finish our date from the last night. I noticed at that point that he was still dressed in the dark navy suit and white shirt that he'd worn to our dinner. And he still looked amazing in it.

  "Okay," I replied, suddenly feeling a little hesitant now that all of the room's attention was focused on me. "Well, first off, Roman's innocent. I know that he couldn't have done it, because just before we heard Silvers scream, he was-"

  I took one last deep breath. It was now or never. Time to go public.

  "-he was with me," I finished. "We were out on the balcony of his house, and he was telling me about his gardens and pointing out some of the constellations. And then we ducked back inside, which is when we heard Silvers yell out. He went running off to see what had happened, but he couldn't have murdered the man before that."

  Roman nodded, looking satisfied and not embarrassed in the slightest, but I still felt my cheeks color slightly. And that blush tripled when the detective asked her next question.

  "And what were the two of you doing when you heard the scream?" she asked. Her tone was neutral, noncommittal, but I think that she already half-knew the answer.

  Once again, I glanced at Roman before answering, but he just gave me a reassuring nod. "We were looking for someplace private," I finally managed to get out, feeling my cheeks heating up. They had to be beet red by now! "We were kissing out on the balcony, and we wanted to find a place inside where we could... continue doing that." I couldn't quite bring myself to say that we were looking for a place where this handsome, influential man could bang my brains out.

  Zinn was already sputtering, and I caught phrases like "previously unknown information," "total dismissal," and "polygraph." But the detective smoothly cut in before the lawyer could condense any of these phrases into a coherent statement.

  "Unfortunately, Miss Gaines," she said, one eyebrow slightly raised, "this suggests that you may be somewhat of a biased witness. You clearly don't want to see Mr. Wayland sent to jail, and that could cast doubts on your credibility."

  She didn't have to say the real message behind her words. It was abundantly clear to her that I wanted nothing more than to jump over this table and rip off this man's pants, and I could potentially lie in order to protect him. And if it came down to it, I might even have done so.

  But I had something better than lies. I had the truth. I had a shocking revelation, in fact, just waiting to be unleashed. And I felt that now was the time.

  "I understand that," I allowed, directing my comment towards the detective. She nodded, her expression showing that she didn't mean to slight me with this implication. She was merely stating the facts. Well, I had one for her. "But that's okay, because I have new evidence for this case."

  I allowed a slight pause before uttering the next sentence. I would never admit to anyone that it was for dramatic effect, that I had any sort of theatre in me, but that's why I did it. I wanted to, for once in my life, be dramatic.

  "I know who the real murderer is."

  "And furthermore," I added on the heels of this revelation, before anyone else could speak, "he's in this room."

  ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼

  Of course, this announcement might have been more dramatic if there were more than two men in the interrogation room.

  Still, it was pretty satisfying to watch both Roman and the detective, with identical looks of slight disbelief, turn to stare at Eddie Zinner, the lawyer.

  All of a sudden, the lawyer found himself in the spotlight at an unexpected time. "What?" he spat out. "Me, the murderer? That's utterly ridiculous."

  "Is it, though?" I countered.

  "Yes! Yes it is!"

  Okay, I hadn't
been expecting him to fire right back at me like that. Wasn't I supposed to get a chance to deliver a big monologue now, to reveal what I had discovered, how I could build a complete and perfect case against him? And then, with the detective and Roman both watching, the man would have no choice but to break down and confess to his crime. But I hadn't been prepared for him to immediately begin arguing back.

  Fortunately, however, the detective knew how things were actually supposed to go. Either that, I suppose, or she decided to take pity on me. "Hold on," she said, holding up one palm to the lawyer as he glared daggers at me across the table. "Let's hear the reasoning behind this, at least."

  I nodded to her, but it was Roman's look that really helped me calm down enough to take a cleansing breath. He was surprised, to be sure - I hadn't revealed any of this to him - but he wasn't disbelieving. He was merely waiting to hear what I had to say. And there wasn't a speck of doubt on his face.

  Seeing the man's expression bolstered me, gave me strength to push on. Even though what I was saying probably sounded crazy, Roman believed in me. That meant a lot. So I took a deep breath, and plunged onward.

  "Okay, look," I began, trying to organize my jumbled thoughts into a semi-coherent narrative. "This goes back a lot further than just the last couple of days. In fact, it all starts just over a year ago, back when the whole chain of events was set into motion."

  This felt like a good start so far. The detective was watching me with frank appraisal on her face, Roman looked like a student listening attentively to a lecture, and Zinn appeared to be silently fuming, occasionally raising his eyes enough to shoot daggers at me. At least he hadn't run away yet, I thought - although then at least there wouldn't be as much hatred suffusing the air in the room.

  "A year ago," I continued, "is when Eddie Zinner was hired."

  We all glanced at the lawyer, and after a second, he gave an angry nod. "So what?" he countered. "That has no bearing on anything. I've been a loyal employee for a year now, and there's no reason why I'd suddenly snap and attack one of my colleagues, who I hold in very high regard!"

  I laughed at this. "You hold him in high regard, but you'll still steal from him?" I shot back.

  "Hold on." Roman raised a hand. "Theft? Melinda, what are you talking about?"

  I set my purse down on the table, reaching into it and hauling out the bundle of papers I had assembled at the office before heading over. "I'm talking about this!" I replied, pulling off the clip holding the papers together and spreading them out across the table. "Just shortly after Zinn was hired on, some discrepancies started appearing in the budgets. Differences in between the reports that Silvers was getting, and the actual budgets being sent out to the different departments."

  "You can't be suggesting-" the lawyer began hotly, but this time it was the detective who cut him off mid-sentence.

  "Quiet!" she snapped, not wasting any words. "If you keep on interrupting, I'll have an officer come in and put you in cuffs while she finishes the rest of her story."

  The lawyer briefly looked murderous, but he closed his mouth with an audible snap of his teeth.

  "At first, the discrepancies were very small," I kept on going, after the room had lapsed into silence once again. "Just a couple hundred dollars, usually hidden in miscellaneous expenses or in vague descriptions of cutbacks. But these miscellaneous things didn't appear on the reports that went to Silvers - he thought that everything was normal." I pointed down at two similar - but not identical - reports, on which I'd drawn lines over the offending items with a highlighter I stole out of Eleanor's desk. Sure enough, these listed items appeared on one set of reports, but not on the other.

  "And because these changes were small, there wasn't much comment on them," I went on. "Zinn often took a more active role as the liaison between the department heads and the top executives, so he was able to reassure them that these were minor cutbacks, and nothing to complain about. So Silvers never got wind of what was happening."

  "But where was the money going?" the detective asked.

  I pointed at Zinn. "He was pocketing it," I replied. "He's got an expensive, flashy lifestyle - Roman can speak to that! And he needed more money to stay afloat.

  "In fact, he needed even more than he was stealing from the budgets," I continued, not daring to make direct eye contact with Zinn. "So he kept on increasing the amounts that he was taking through this scam. And eventually, someone did notice."

  I glanced at Roman, to see if he had made the connection. He had. "Carrie," he said, less of a question than a simple statement of fact.

  I nodded. "Yep. Carrie Matthew, the head of IT. She's not a very sociable person, but she does read all of her reports - and she caught that the numbers on her budgets were decreasing as she lost more and more to this theft."

  "But why didn't she say something about it?" Roman asked.

  "Oh, she did!" I told him. "To Silvers. Repeatedly, in fact. And she just got more and more mad, because he would assure her that there were no budget cuts to her department, and then she'd get her next budget statement and it would show that even more was being taken. So she kept on marching up to Sivlers' office and shouting about this.

  "And Silvers, although he probably didn't want to do anything but send her away, eventually started looking into it himself," I kept going, shifting my voice back to address the whole room again. "I took a look in his office, and I found some of the doctored budgets in there - next to the ones that he knew were real. He was figuring it out, working out that someone was stealing from the company!"

  Roman was shaking his head again. "He never said anything about this to me." The man's expression darkened. "And if he had, I would have taken immediate action," he went on, his voice carrying the weight of a thunderstorm. "Nobody steals from my company like this without facing very harsh consequences."

  "But he was going to tell you!" I burst out. "At the party you were throwing! At least, he was going to if Zinn didn't come clean."

  I kept on speaking, hoping that my voice continued to carry the same level of confidence. At this point, I knew that I was straying beyond what I could prove with the papers. I knew that ZInn had been stealing, I knew it! But I didn't know exactly why he had killed Silvers. I had been forced to piece things together with what I found in the man's planner, and from how his former employees described him. Even when I had met him, he had seemed like an honorable, if somewhat puffed-up and pretentious, man.

  He would have wanted to give Zinn one last chance.

  "He confronted Zinn at the party, tugging him aside into one of the upstairs rooms where they could speak quietly without being interrupted," I said. "He told Zinn that if he didn't come clean that very night about his theft, about all of the money he had stolen, then Silvers was going to tell Roman himself."

  "But Zinn didn't want to give this up. So probably in the heat of the moment, desperate to keep Silvers quiet, he hit him on the back of the head."

  "Zinn killed him."

  #

  For a moment, there was total silence in the interrogation room. The only sound I could hear was the thumping of my heart in my chest, beating as fast as a jackrabbit. No one was saying anything. Why was no one saying anything?

  Maybe they thought that this sounded crazy, that these spreadsheets weren't enough to prove that my story was right! I felt myself starting to sweat, and was actually momentarily grateful that I wasn't wearing any nice clothing that could be ruined by the little beads of moisture now appearing on my back. What if they threw me out of the interrogation room? Or, even worse, what if they ended up locking me up as well, for being disrespectful, or intruding without permission, or some other charge like that?

  Finally, Zinn was the first to break the silence. "It's utterly ridiculous," he said, with a voice that smacked of finality. "There's no way that I could do any of this. And even if such a thing was feasible, there's no way that someone like this woman could figure it out!" He accompanied this with another searing glare at
me.

  I flinched away a little, but Roman was already opening his mouth. "Hey, don't you say that about her!" he shot back. His voice wasn't raised, but it literally dripped with white-hot fury. "She is exceedingly smart, and if she believes this, I have no reason to doubt her."

  I basked in the glow of that compliment. It gave me so much lift, I swore that, for a second, my feet literally left the ground as I was buoyed upwards. But Zinn was already scoffing back at Roman.

  "And you don't have faith in me?" he called out. "I've been your lawyer for all that time, Roman! Have I ever led you wrong?"

  "No," Roman admitted, shaking his head. "But she did nail you on the high spending. I've seen your lifestyle, and wondered how you kept it up. Siphoning funds from the company - from my company - would be a reasonable explanation."

  The lawyer was already sputtering with a comeback, but once again, the detective spoke up and cut him off. "Mr. Zinner," she cut in. "This matter is, fortunately, not yours to decide. It is up to the police, and we will do our own investigation." She leveled a glare across the table at him. "And rest assured, we will be as thorough as is possible. Have no doubt about that."

  Somehow, the lawyer didn't appear to be calmed by this.

  Instead, as he gazed back at the rest of us, his gaze shifting back and forth from Roman, who had bent forward to turn some of the papers I'd brought as evidence around to peruse them, to the detective, currently glaring across at both of the men, to me, he started to shake. It was quite odd. I could literally see the lawyer, usually so suave and confident, quivering back and forth on the metal chair at the table.

  Roman shook his head as he looked at the forms I had brought in. "And Silvers was sitting on these?" he asked out loud to no one in particular. "Oh, Geoffrey. Why didn't you just come to me with these right away, as soon as you figured it out?"

  A minute or two later, I began to feel distinctly uncomfortable. I had said my piece. This was the point where I imagined that the detective would nod and accept my story as fact, would get up and release Roman promptly into my care while Zinn was hauled off, protesting, to his new home in a jail cell. But instead, everyone seemed to be sitting, lost in their own thoughts.