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He nodded patronizingly as he dropped his load of files on the table. “I’ve heard that before, Miss Baker. And I suppose you’re going to tell me that you’re—”
“Innocent. Damned straight.”
He looked up, startled, I presume, by my lack of remorse for the crime he clearly thought I’d committed. “Innocent,” he repeated, clearly speculating on the credibility of my reply, adding doubtfully, “Okay.”
“What’s your name?”
“Terrence Murray.”
“Don’t be an asshole, Mr. Murray. I’ve already got one, and I don’t need another.”
His eyes rounded and he pursed his wet lips. “Look here, Miss Baker, you’re lucky to have me. This is a busy place, as you may have noticed. Most people have to wait days for a chance to meet with a public defender.”
“Lucky me.”
He shook his head and opened the top file, muttering, “You’re awfully confident for someone who has caught the interest of Q.E.D.”
“What do you mean?”
He looked up from his papers. “Q.E.D. is the police department’s latest effort to reestablish law and order and polish its tarnished image. If the members of this elite force were willing to go under the knife just to increase their odds of nailing criminals, they won’t back down easily in a case involving a CRS. You’re the competition.”
“But I’m innocent.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Why are you here?”
“To represent you during your interrogation with Lieutenant Townsend.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to talk to that inhuman son of a bitch. I’m going to face the Diva.”
Murray’s nondescript, pale features formed into a nebulous look of confusion. “Are you crazy? You’re better off with Townsend than with the Diva. If she finds fault with your story, you’ll be facing the maximum charges with no chance of a plea bargain. You’ll be stuck in the system for years.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
“Let me put it to you another way, Miss Baker. I know of serial killers who are walking the streets because there was no DNA evidence to keep them locked up for more than two years, in spite of solid convictions. If they’d faced the Diva when they were first brought up on charges, she would have detected their guilt. With no chance of bail, they would have spent longer in jail just waiting for a trial than the time they ended up serving for murder.”
I just looked at him for a long moment. “That’s pathetic.”
“That’s the system. That’s why you can’t face the Diva.”
“I know you think you know what’s best for me, but I have a little girl waiting for me at home. If I don’t go back to her soon, she’ll think…” Why was I telling him this? He wouldn’t understand. “I have to go home. When I tell the Diva I’m innocent, they’ll let me go.”
The lawyer’s agitation turned to disdain. “Very well, Miss Baker, but he’s not going to like this one bit.”
“Who?”
He looked down at me with a superior smirk. “Detective Marco. Why he’d bother with someone as ungrateful as you, I have no clue.”
“So he sent you to me?”
“How else do you think you were lucky enough to see an attorney so quickly? Didn’t you see the gallery of rogues rotting away in glass booths waiting for a chance at representation? And people like you have the audacity to be ungrateful.”
The thought of Marco throwing me this bone was too much to bear. “Did Detective Marco, by any chance, tell you that he and I are involved?”
“Not in so many words. But I assumed so. Why else would he bother to call in a marker for this?” He looked at me smugly. “Do you think your relationship with Detective Marco will matter? It will buy you no mercy, Miss Baker.”
“Doesn’t it strike you as a conflict of interest that one of the arresting detectives has been my lover?”
“Yes. But it won’t matter to the judge if he’s low on convictions this month. But, of course, that’s why we have an appeals system.”
“And that lame response is why we have retribution specialists,” I snapped, standing up. “This system is so fucked up it’s beyond repair.”
“That’s why you need a lawyer.”
I shook my head. “No. I want to see the Diva. The truth has to count for something in this shithole.”
He shrugged. “Have it your way.”
As he headed for the door, I suddenly remembered something Roy had said. “Before Roy Leibman died,” I called out, “he said ‘they’ had left. Someone was at the crime scene before I got there.”
“Tell it to the Diva,” he said flippantly, adding with some modicum of sincerity, “Good luck, Miss Baker. You’re going to need it. But, as they say, it ain’t over until the fat lady sings.”
After he shut the door, I muttered, “Let’s hope she’s got laryngitis tonight.”
The Diva is a nickname for the Detection and Interrogation Visual Application System. Big words for a simple and beautifully administered lie detector test.
The suspect sits strapped in a dentist-style chair and talks to a hologram. Behind the hologram projection there’s a camera that records the dilations and retractions of the suspect’s corneas. Based on eye movements, D.I.V.A.S. analysts, watching the interrogation and programming the Divas’s questions from behind a two-way mirror, claim they can distinguish between fact and fiction.
The Diva looked like an oversized opera singer. The program’s designer thought it would be clever if “the Diva” looked liked Brunhilde. So she wore a winged Visigoth helmet and fully loaded breast plates. She was a “fat” lady, as the public defender had put it. I use the word advisedly because it’s against the law to call anyone fat. According to the Self Esteem Act of 2010, I should call her full-bodied, but I didn’t plan on discussing her weight. I was in enough trouble as it was.
I felt confident that a session with the Diva would exonerate me. I began to have second thoughts, however, when I entered the interrogation chamber and caught a glimpse of Lieutenant Townsend behind the two-way mirror. He saw me and turned out the light in the observation booth, leaving me to stare at my own reflection.
“It’s just you and me, kid,” I whispered to myself, as I had so many times before. Lord knows I’d gotten myself out of worse scrapes with nothing more than moxie and determination. And now I had the added advantage of my recently discovered psychic abilities. But I hadn’t yet learned to use them on cue. At least, not in a tense situation like this.
The lights slowly dimmed, except for a white beam that encircled my chair. As I climbed into the hot seat, I silently reassured myself I’d made the right decision. Suspects who volunteer for a session with the Diva are generally given credit for believing in their own innocence, and that sits well with judges. However, if a D.I.V.A.S. session goes badly, the suspect is immediately charged for the crime in question, and no amount of fancy footwork by an attorney can get the charges dismissed after the fact. The case has to work its way through the courts.
Suddenly the Diva appeared. Her long blond hair hung in braids. Red lipstick brightened a smile so welcoming that I found myself resisting the urge to smile back. I suspected the program had been designed to relax and disarm. That was doubtless another reason the programmer had used the image of a woman. I would have to stay on my guard.
“Hello, Angel,” she said in a rich, melodic voice.
“Hello.” I tightened my grip on the arms of the cushioned metal chair.
“I want you to get comfortable,” she said, and my chair tilted back a few inches via a remote-controlled hydraulic system. “Straps will hold you in place, but they shouldn’t be too tight. Are you comfy?”
“I guess so.”
“Good. The constraints are simply there to keep you in the correct position. Now, Angel, what were you doing at the Cloisters?”
I squinted to see through the hologram and briefly spotted the camera lens recording my eye movements. The Diva seemed to notice. She moved her head and focused her large, heavily lined eyes more intently on me. The distraction worked. I forgot about the lens and did my best to make my case.
“I was there to help my colleague, Roy Leibman.”
The Diva smiled sympathetically. “Did you know him well?”
I tried to nod, forgetting that my head was strapped in place. “Yes. He was my mentor.” A surge of emotion clogged my throat and I let out a deep, pained breath. “He…he taught me everything I know.”
“Then why did you kill him?” Rather than being accusatory, she seemed genuinely curious.
Trying to mimic her calm, logical attitude, I said, “I didn’t kill him. When I arrived, I found Roy already wounded. Victor Alvarez was already dead.”
“You know Victor?”
“Yes.”
The Diva frowned, and I sensed her sympathy slipping away. This was a very sophisticated program. The interrogators who were running the show behind the mirror had the power to supply the Diva not only questions, but emotional reactions as well. I waited, but she remained silent. Why? What was the big deal about me knowing Victor? Then it hit me.
“Oh, come on. Are you implying that my association with Victor makes me more suspicious than anyone else in this building? You think this was somehow premeditated on my part? I’m just being honest. I could have said I knew who the victim was because everyone at the crime scene was talking about him, which they were, or because he’s frequently seen on television, but I told you the truth. I have nothing to hide.”
“You call it a crime scene,” she replied. “So you admit a crime was committed.”
“Yes. Obviously. But not by me. Roy called me and said he needed help. I think he’d already been shot when he called, but I didn’t realize that until I got there.”
“He called you?”
“Yes.” When she raised a brow in doubt, I added stridently, “Check the phone records. Go ahead. I have nothing to hide.”
“If you didn’t kill them, Angel, then who did?”
I paused just long enough to feel a trickle of perspiration itching its way down my right temple. I wished like hell I could scratch it. “I don’t know. Perhaps it was a random execution by drug dealers. Wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time kind of thing.”
“So your gun just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time as well?”
“My gun?” I repeated blankly. When she nodded, I said, “That’s impossible. My gun is locked up in a bank. I’m…semiretired.”
The image of the Diva faded to black and in her place I discovered a 3-D projection of a crime scene photo. A hand gingerly held a dangling semiautomatic weapon emblazoned with a lapis lazuli dragon imbedded in a pearl handle. There was no question that it was my gun.
“Where was this photo taken?” I demanded. “It could be anywhere.”
“True enough,” the Diva’s voice replied from the ether. “How’s this?”
Another photo appeared, a wider shot of the same pose. It was Marco holding the gun for the camera. Behind him you could see Victor Alvarez’s body.
I closed my eyes, wishing they could stay that way. Forever. What could I say to refute this photo? my mind frantically wondered. Deeper inside, I thought, Why didn’t Marco just cut my heart out with a knife? It would have been less painful than this. Clearly, he wanted me out of his life. Putting me behind bars was certainly one way to do that. Had he planted my gun at the crime scene?
“I don’t know how my gun got there,” I forced myself to say, though I felt like a dead woman walking, or rather sitting. “Contact my bank. Someone broke into my deposit box and stole it.”
The Diva threw her head back and laughed, her double chins shaking as her voice ran the musical scale from top to bottom. She finally settled on me with twinkling eyes. “Come now, Angel, you don’t expect me to believe that.”
“You seem like an intelligent woman, Diva,” I replied, daring a bit of reverse psychology with my computerized interrogator. “Surely you’ve figured out by now that sometimes people are set up for crimes they didn’t commit. Do you really think I would be stupid enough to risk an interrogation with you if I’d used my gun at that crime scene?”
“Someone used that gun.”
“But not me.”
The Diva looked back over her shoulder and appeared to be talking to someone, though no one else was projected in the hologram. She turned back to me with a look of grave doubt.
“Angel, Lieutenant Townsend informs me that his men have already run a computer check of your lapel phone records. There was no call from Roy Leibman.”
“That’s a lie!” I shouted.
Her expressive eyes couldn’t quite conceal a gleam of triumph. “Take a look for yourself.”
The Diva faded to black and an image of my phone records flashed in front of me. I squinted to make out the numbers that had come in over the last twenty-four hours. Not only was Roy’s call absent, there was no evidence of any incoming calls after 10:30 p.m. The only registered conversation was the one I had made when I called for emergency help at the Cloisters.
“This isn’t right!” I called out. I tried to look at the two-way mirror, but the padded clamp around my forehead stopped me cold. I moved to yank it off, but the straps around my wrists merely tightened. “There’s a mistake in those records.”
The Diva reappeared, fading in on a bubble like Glenda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz, though her change in demeanor reminded me more of Glenda’s evil sister from the east.
“What do you have to say for yourself, Angel?”
“I talked to Roy,” I said as calmly as I could. I had to remember that I wasn’t trying to convince the Diva. She didn’t exist. I was trying to prove to the camera lens hidden behind her image that I was telling the truth. “Roy asked me to come.”
“Is that so?” the Diva replied, all frowns and pinched lips. “Did Roy Leibman ever ask for your help before?”
I paused. “No. And I’m sure that in Lieutenant Townsend’s little logical manual on law enforcement that means it’s unlikely Roy would have called on me now. Am I right?”
“I’ll ask the questions, missy,” the Diva hissed. “Isn’t it true that you came to the Cloisters because you were jealous that Victor Alvarez had chosen Roy Leibman as a Certified Retribution Specialist instead of you?”
“What? No!”
“You wanted to be among the most prominent in your profession. That’s why you rescued those twelve Chinese orphans last month. Not because anyone was paying you to do that job, but because you wanted the publicity.”
“I wanted to help the girls,” I shot back.
“You were jealous and angry that when Victor needed a retribution job done, he didn’t turn to you like his father had.”
I frowned slowly. “Wait a minute. How did you know about—”
“You didn’t want Roy to horn in on your domain as CRS for the mayor’s family.”
“That’s absurd.”
“So when you found out that Roy was meeting Victor at the Cloisters, you came to express your anger. You were the only one with a gun. Before the night was through, you used it. You killed Roy Leibman and Victor Alvarez.”
I shut my eyes. I shouldn’t have. It would probably be construed as a sign of guilt. But suddenly my eyelids were too heavy to bear. I could take no more. It had become abundantly clear the Diva wasn’t going to cut me any more slack than Lieutenant Townsend had. No surprise there, since he was doubtless programming her with the questions.
The lights came on suddenly. I opened my eyes and found the Diva had disappeared. My chair righted itself and the restraints retreated with a slight hum. Townsend came out of a door near the three-way mirror.
