“Someplace I can have my lawyer present,” she said.
“That’s fine with me. I can hold you for questioning for seventy-two hours. You and me and your lawyer can have several conversations in seventy-two hours.”
She stared out the windshield.
DeMarco said, “I know you were with Thomas Huston that night. The Thursday night he missed coming here.”
“Yeah, right, I went to a literary reading. Probably my favorite thing to do.”
“Last time we talked you had no idea where Huston was that night.”
She was sitting hunched forward now, silent and still. Half a minute passed. She said, “I swear to God I didn’t do anything.”
“I know you didn’t. Why would you? You liked Thomas Huston; he liked you. You spent a lot of time together talking, didn’t you?”
“Who told you that?”
“So where did the two of you go on that Thursday?” he asked. “I know you were together. I know you spent the night together and it wasn’t at a literary event in Cincinnati. So you can either tell me where you were, or within twenty-four hours, I’ll find out for myself and be back here to arrest you and shut you down.”
“This is illegal, what you’re doing.”
“I’m questioning a witness, Bonnie. There’s nothing illegal about that. So far I have no reason to arrest you. But if I know that you’re withholding evidence, I do. And I will. So the choice is yours.”
He allowed her a few seconds to mull things over, then added, “Bear in mind that this is a homicide investigation. Not a trivial matter. Four people are dead. Three of them children.”
With every minute in the car, she had leaned slightly more forward in the seat, and now sat with her forehead nearly touching the dashboard, fists pressed tight to her stomach. He waited for her to sort out her options. A full minute passed. The thump of music from Whispers no longer bothered him. He was feeling calmer now.
“He took me to get an abortion,” she said.
Now it was DeMarco’s turn to flinch. “Thomas Huston did?”
“That’s who we’re talking about, isn’t it?”
“Took you where?”
“Cleveland. I had it done Thursday afternoon. We spent the night at the Super 8 out by the interstate. Then came home in the morning.”
“You know I can check all this out,” he told her.
“Do it,” she said. “It was the Cleveland Women’s Center on Water Street. I gave my name as Bonnie Jean Burns. He came up with the name. Apparently it’s from some old poem by somebody.”
“Why Huston?” DeMarco asked. “Why was he the one to take you there?”
Now she turned her head his way, looked at him through the darkness. “Why do you think?”
“You’re telling me that it was his baby?”
She sounded exhausted when she answered. “That’s what I’m telling you.”
“He was cheating on his wife with you?”
“Do you find that so hard to believe? Or you just don’t want to believe it?”
He had no answer, none he wanted to give. “Did the two of you ever talk about being together? Permanently, I mean.”
“Christ no,” she said.
“You never talked about what might happen if maybe his wife and family weren’t in the picture?”
“It was a fucking fling, DeMarco, okay? He knew it and so did I. I sucked his dick three times and fucked him twice. You want to know what positions we used? Is that relevant to your investigation too?”
“Neither one of you was smart enough to use protection?”
“I wear a diaphragm. Apparently they aren’t foolproof.”
DeMarco leaned back in his seat and stared at the steering wheel. The exhaustion he heard in Bonnie’s voice seemed to have spread to him now. The calmness was gone, replaced suddenly by a heaviness in his body, a dull numbness of the limbs. For the first time in a long time, he felt that if he closed his eyes, he would almost certainly fall asleep.
The light that flared abruptly from Whispers startled him. In the rectangle of yellow light, a large man stood, broad, bald, heavily muscled. In his right hand he held a baseball bat. He shoved the door open the whole way so that the spring hinge locked, then he came forward a few steps, paused, and squinted at the vehicles. Within seconds, he spotted the silhouettes in DeMarco’s car and strode toward them.
DeMarco threw open his car door. “You need to go back inside, pardner.”
But instead of halting, the bouncer increased his pace. Now DeMarco climbed out, turned on his flashlight, and aimed it at the man’s eyes. “This is state police business. And I am telling you to go back inside. Now.”
The big man stood in place for a moment. Then he took a step and a half backward, then turned and retreated into the building and pulled the door shut behind him. DeMarco slid back behind the steering wheel and eased his door shut.
“Tell me about Tex,” he said.
“His name is Tex,” she answered.
“Anything else?”
“He’s the bouncer.”
“Last name?”
“I think he said it was Doyle.”
“You think?”