“I don’t think the lieutenant here has anything else useful to say to me. He’s got his facts without asking a single question. Let’s go, Officer.” Unfortunately I didn’t feel sorry enough to keep my mouth shut.
I opened the door to the interrogation room and headed down the hall, not waiting to see what Officer Neely would do. She caught up with me on the stairs. I wanted to say something helpful and sisterly to her in support of her law-enforcement career, but I was too badly rattled to think of anything very chipper. She was looking rigidly ahead, making it impossible to know if she was embarrassed, disgusted, or just not very responsive. On the third floor we silently crossed the Violent Crimes area to Bobby’s tiny office along the far wall. Officer Neely knocked and opened the door.
“Miss Warshawski, sir. Did you want me to take notes?”
Bobby was on the phone. He shook his head and motioned me to a chair. Officer Neely shut the door behind her with a sharp snap.
Bobby’s desk and walls were crammed with photographs—pictures of yellow birds in flight, gap-toothed children grinning as they sported his dress uniform cap, Eileen hand in hand with her eldest daughter as a bride. He liked to shift them around every so often so he could see them with a fresh eye. Ordinarily I hunt for the shots of Tony or Gabriella—or even the one of me at five sitting on Tony’s lap. Today I didn’t really care. I sat gripping my hands on the side of the metal chair, waiting for him to finish his conversation. Next to Montgomery, Bobby was the last person I wanted to see today.
“Okay, Vicki, tell me what’s going on and make it fast. I had a call from your lawyer, which is how I knew you were down here, but it doesn’t make me happy to run interference for you with another man on the force.”
I took a deep breath and came out with a tolerably coherent version of the day’s events. Bobby grunted and asked a few questions, like how come I knew it was a bomb and how long it had taken Monty to get there after Jerry called in the report on his car radio.
When I got to the end Bobby made a face. “You’re in an awkward spot, Vicki. I keep telling you not to play around in police business and this just proves my point. You came to me to get you out of hot water you boiled up yourself—”
“What do you mean?” I was so furious, my head seemed to rise a foot from my body. “I did not, repeat not, put that bomb in my car engine. Someone did, but instead of trying to get a description of the men who did it—who may have done it—from a pretty good witness, the police are trying to charge me with attempted suicide.”
“I’m not saying you planted that device, Vicki. I know you well enough to realize you’re not that unbalanced. But if you hadn’t been playing around with arson and a whole lot of things I told you to stay out of, you wouldn’t be in this mess at all.”
He looked at me sternly, daddy to naughty child. “Now I’m going to use a few chips on your behalf, Vicki, with a guy who’s not too easy to work with. In return I want you to promise me that you are not going to touch this business any further. Let alone the trouble you’ve got yourself into, since you started in on that fire three weeks ago you’ve got my whole unit stirred up. You were in last night with some damned piece of jewelry that has the boys in an uproar now. I just can’t have it. Do you understand?”
I pressed my lips together. “I brought in a man’s bracelet I found under my couch because I though Finchley might have dropped it when he and Montgomery were in last week. McGonnigal flipped out when he saw it because he knew it was Furey’s and thought I was flaunting it at him. It was only late last night that I realized it belonged to Furey and came to see what it was doing in my apartment.
“He’d given it to Elena, Bobby, to Elena and the dead junkie you went to see at the Rapelec site two weeks ago. It was just a little extortion, something to keep them from reporting that they’d seen him—”
Bobby slammed his palm hard on the desk. One of the pictures teetered and fell over the side. “I’ve had enough out of you!” he roared. “That’s a loathsome suggestion. You’ve been treated too easy for too long, that’s your problem, so when things don’t go your way you manufacture conspiracy theories. You ought to know better than that, than to come in here and try to lay that kind of sh—something like that on me. Now get out and go home. I told you two weeks ago to stop stirring up my department and I meant it. This had better be the last time I see you around here.”