Then again, she sang “Glitter in The Air” to him so she’d already said it.
“Best man I’ve ever met,” she whispered, rolled up on her toes, pressed her lips hard against his and rolled back.
She then walked swiftly in her high-heeled boots down the sidewalk cleared of the snow they got yesterday.
“He’s mute, due to a medical condition or a trauma, I don’t know. He’ll have to be examined,” the psychologist told Hix and Donna outside the interrogation room. “He’s also suffering a variety of other conditions, none of which I can accurately diagnosis, considering he’s mute, he’s big, and he scares the beejeezus out of me.”
“Doc—” Hix began but stopped speaking when the psychologist lifted her hands and shook them.
“He needs a full medical evaluation and a full psychiatric evaluation. However, the one thing he’s given me, his attorney and your deputy is that he killed Nathan Calloway. He jerks up his chin every time it’s mentioned. He jerks up his chin when he’s asked if he understands the meaning of that. He jerks up his chin every time he’s asked if he understands why he’s been arrested. I’ve asked him to write down what he wants to say if he has anything to say and he’s refused. For whatever reason, physical, psychological or some of both, that man is deeply disturbed. However, in my professional opinion, he understands completely that he’s done wrong. He saw that picture of himself and knew you knew who he was and you were looking for him. But my sense is, he’s not here because he thought you’d find him. If that man doesn’t want to be found, he could get lost forever. He’s here to atone for it.”
This was not news to them, except the last. They’d watched it all in the observation room, with Hix watching from inside the room while Larry asked the questions.
Hix turned to Donna. “Set up a supervised physical. The psych eval can happen here.”
“On it,” Donna muttered and took off.
He looked back to the psychologist. “Your professional opinion, we ever gonna know why he did what he did?”
She shrugged. It wasn’t casual. She was taking this seriously. She simply didn’t know.
“I honestly can’t say. He doesn’t trust me to open up to me, which isn’t a surprise, I haven’t had enough time with him and I’ve never done this. I did my best but the man frightens me and I’m afraid I couldn’t completely hide it in a way he surely read it. It may be you’ll need to do the psych eval somewhere else so he doesn’t feel trapped or cornered and he might open up. But he may never open up. He might not even know how. Again, I can’t say for certain.”
“He’s arrested, an unknown who’s committed a violent act and a flight risk,” Hix pointed out. “Not feelin’ good about takin’ him to a doctor so I’m not feelin’ good about doublin’ up on that to take him to see a shrink.”
“Yes. But this man is not one who spends much time surrounded by four walls. Just being inside, my hunch, is costing him. It being a sheriff’s department isn’t helping matters.”
“He essentially turned himself in.”
“That’s the atonement I told you about. This isn’t easy for him. But he’s doing it. If someone can get him to a place he’ll find some way to communicate in the presence of someone he can trust,” she shook her head, “I just don’t know.”
“I can’t let you be alone with that man even observed and even with his attorney present and even as he is now, chained to a table. When I say that, not you or anyone,” Hix told her. “We have some idea of what he’s capable of. His size, I’m not testing that.”
“I know. And I appreciate that. And I don’t know even if he was lounging unencumbered out under the sky if he’d share. My suggestion is, the hospital will have psychiatrists on staff. Get one, another suggestion, a male one, to do the eval there. One visit, double duty. But every indication he’s giving is that you’re correct. He turned himself in for the crime of murdering Nathan Calloway and he’s here to let justice take its course.” She got closer. “You might never have answers, Sheriff, but you have your man.”
Without her able to give him much more, he nodded.
“You want me to hang around or—?” she began.
“You can go but I’d like to be open to give you a call if we need to,” he told her.
“Anytime.”
“Obliged,” he muttered.
She gave him a close look, a small, forlorn smile then she turned and walked out.
Hix turned to the window to interrogation, one of two one-way windows that looked inside, and saw the man staring at his hands cuffed to the steel ring in the middle of the table.
He’d allowed them also to shackle his legs.
The defense attorney was leaning toward him, speaking.
Larry was against the wall, giving them space but watching.
Hal and Bets were in the observation room monitoring with the recording equipment on.
Nat’s killer was right there.
Right in his interrogation room chained to a table.
The man with the answers.
The end of it.
And studying him, Hix didn’t feel the relief he thought he’d feel.
Mostly because all he could think about when his mind had opportunity to let anything else in was that tear sliding down his craggy cheek.
On that thought, he pushed through the door.
Larry and the attorney looked at him.
So did their guy.
Hix took the chair the psychologist had been sitting in across the table from their perp.
He looked him in his eyes and saw right down to an empty soul.
He then put his hands on the table, but other than that, didn’t move in his direction at all.
“In order to do right by you and by Nat’s wife, we need to be thorough, sir,” he said quietly. “This means my deputies are going to have to take you to a medical doctor to be examined.”
That got him nothing.
“A psychiatrist will either be coming to this department to speak with you or you’ll be seeing one at the hospital,” he continued.
More nothing.
“Do you understand these things?’ Hix asked.
Finally, he got a chin jerk.
“Good,” Hix muttered and held his gaze before he whispered, “There’s a woman who’s now raising two kids alone who needs answers. You can find it in you to—”
The guy thumped the side of his fist lightly on the table, the chains rattled, and Hix grew tense, as did the room. But he looked down at the man’s hands and saw one long finger pointed at the legal-sized pad of paper there.
Hix shoved it his way.
The man put his opened hand on top of the pad then turned it palm up, and since they didn’t leave a pen that could be used as a weapon lying close to him, Hix looked to his attorney.
“I think we should get this gentleman’s evals out of the way before—” the attorney tried.
The man thumped his fist on the table, harder this time, then opened his hand.
The attorney sighed then leaned in and put a pen in his hand.
Hix didn’t look to the attorney, to Larry, to the observation window.
He looked right at the pad of paper.
The guy wrote on it, set the pen down, then flipped it around to Hix.