“I’m surprised you agreed to meet with me without your lawyer present. You were adamant that any communication with Mara go through your attorney.”
“I still am. She was treated disrespectfully by the police after she was attacked.”
“That wasn’t my department.”
“I don’t care who it was. It won’t happen again.”
“But you’re not concerned about being … disrespected.”
“I’m sure you know better than that.” I smile at Officer Hawks. He doesn’t smile back.
“Where were you the night of November second?” he abruptly asks.
“I have no idea. Do you remember where you were on random evenings weeks past?”
“Do you keep a calendar?”
“No.”
“Does your secretary?”
“No.”
This is true. I don’t allow Janice to keep any record of my appointments. Sonia memorizes my schedule—but she certainly wouldn’t recite it for Hawks.
“Do you know a woman named Maddie Walker?”
“No.”
Hawks takes a photograph out of the inside breast pocket of his sport coat. He slides it across the table toward me.
I look at the picture without touching it. It shows a dark-haired girl laying on a steel table, eyes closed, clearly dead. Her skin bluish-gray, mottled with bruises around the jaw. Shaw was rough when he wrenched her mouth open and stuffed a snake in it.
I recognize her from the top floor of the tenements, where Shaw had her strung up in his spiderweb.
I want to rip his fucking throat out, remembering how he lured me up there and trapped me, calling in a fleet of cops to catch me with the body.
It was a stupid mistake, one that still humiliates me. But I can’t let any hint of that emotion show on my face.
Hawks watches closely for a reaction. That’s why he gave me a photo of the corpse and not a picture of the girl taken when she was still alive. He’s looking for clues on my face.
Do I recognize her? Am I shocked by the image?
Or, most damning of all:
Am I man surveying my own work?
Am I satisfied?
Am I aroused …
Blandly, I say to Hawks, “I’ve never met her.”
“She was killed in the Mission District. Police saw a man fleeing the scene. He was tall and dark-haired.”
“That only applies to half the men in San Francisco.”
“It applies to you.”
“And thousands of others.”
Hawks takes the photograph back, tucking it into his pocket once more, right against his heart.
He takes this personally. It’s not only ambition for him.
And he is losing patience with my stonewalling. Slowly and surely.
“Have you injured yourself lately?” he demands.
I never visited a doctor when I sprained my ankle jumping from that roof. It’s possible someone saw me limping in the week afterward, when I wrapped my ankle in a Tensor bandage and swallowed handfuls of painkillers until the swelling went down.
“Nothing comes to mind,” I say vaguely.
“Don’t have much of a memory, do you?” Hawks sneers.
“I like to keep my mind occupied with more interesting things than the minutia of my schedule and the time people leave parties.”
“What’s interesting to you?” Hawks asks, his jaw rigid, his hand still resting against the breast pocket of his jacket.
“I’m curious why you’re talking to me, and not to Shaw.”
“You think he attacked Mara? And killed her roommate?”
“That’s what Mara says.”
“You believe her.”
“She’s very perceptive.”
So is this cop. She was right about that.
Hawks knows something is fucked up here. He can sense the links between our strange trio, but he can’t conceptualize what they mean.
He has no evidence—I didn’t leave so much as a fingerprint at the tenements. I’m sure Shaw was even more careful.
How infuriating, to have to work inside the bounds of the law. Your hands always tied by rules and regulations. Only one side playing fair.
I see the strain on Hawks’ face. His impotent anger.
He’s been around enough criminals to know that I’m no law-abiding citizen. But that’s true of most of the wealthy elite in this city. We all flout the rules for our benefit. He can’t decide if I’m just another rich prick, or the killer he seeks.
I’ve already satisfied myself that Hawks has nothing. No evidence against me, nothing but suspicion.
Hawks takes a breath, steadying himself. Getting ready for one last push.
He leans forward, his voice low and steady.
“Was Erin perceptive? Would she have warned Mara about you?”
I snort. “Nobody needs warning about me. It’s well known that I’m an asshole.”
“You’ve made enemies.”
“Only boring people are universally beloved.”
“Take Carl Danvers, for instance.”
Now a chill falls between us, which I have to pretend to ignore with every fiber of my being.
“Who?” I say.
“He was a critic for the Siren.”
“Oh, right,” I say dismissively.
“He disappeared thirteen weeks ago. All his belongings are still in his apartment. No message to anyone.”
“Your point?”
“He was no fan of yours. Wrote a scathing article about you the week he disappeared.”
“People write about me every day.”
“Did you speak to him at Oasis?”
This is a trick. Danvers was already dead the night of the show. His bones resided inside my sculpture, on display for all to see.
Hawks is testing to see if I’ll correct him, to judge how closely I followed the disappearance, and how well I know my own timeline.
“Jesus, who knows. I probably talked to fifty people that night.”
“But you don’t remember,” Hawks sneers, his disdainful expression showing exactly what he thinks about that.
Enough obfuscating. It’s time for Hawks to take a punch in return.
“This is pathetic,” I sneer. “If this is all you have … missing art critics, conversations that nobody heard and timelines that no one can pin down … the SFPD is grasping at straws. Mara will be disappointed. Sounds like you’ve got no fucking clue what happened to her roommate.”
Hawks snaps back, “Our profiler says the person who arranged that body fancies themself an artist and a genius. Sound familiar?”
“Oh, wow.” I roll my eyes. “Did they also guess it was a white male? Hope Captain Obvious isn’t getting a Christmas bonus.”