The Old Blue Line: A Joanna Brady Novella (Joanna Brady Mysteries)

“Okay,” she said reluctantly. “Will do.”

 

 

I’d never been booked into anything before. It was a humiliating process. Before long I was printed and changed into my orange jumpsuit. Then they wrapped me in a sort of gray blanket for my mug shot. The whole time, I tried to keep Harold’s reassuring words in mind, but that didn’t work too well, especially when they put me in a holding cell and locked the doors. The rattle of those jailhouse doors clanging shut and closing me inside sent chills down my spine. And that’s when it hit me. Faith had taken everything from me once, and now, even stone cold dead, she was doing it again.

 

I sank down on the narrow bench that probably served as a cot overnight. I leaned back against the gray-green cinder-block wall, closed my eyes, and gave in to what was nothing less than a fit of total despair.

 

They had taken my watch, which I had forgotten to remove, so there was no way to tell how much time passed. An hour? Two? Who knows? I was glad I’d made a restroom stop before all this happened. There was a stainless steel toilet bolted to the floor of the cell, but I resisted the urge to use it. Using it would have made the whole thing more real somehow, and this was already far too real to begin with.

 

At last a jailer came by—another of the Roundhouse’s occasional customers—and opened the door. “Right this way, Mr. Dixon,” he said respectfully. “We’re going to an interview room just down the hall.”

 

Said interview room would have been crowded with three people in it. With six—the two Peoria detectives, the two guys from Vegas, Harold, and finally me—it was a zoo. Harold seemed to have been transformed into a pint-sized tower of strength, and the local cops deferred to him in a way that made the out-of-towners wince. They, on the other hand, couldn’t have been more dismissive.

 

I found out much later that while all this was happening, on the far side of Peoria a new library building was then under construction, one scheduled to be called the H.M. Meeks Branch. In the hours I’d been cooling my heels in the holding cell, someone inside city government had evidently put the local cops in the know.

 

“All right, gentlemen,” Harold said, as if calling a business meeting to order. “Perhaps you’d like to tell us what this is all about.”

 

I now know that’s an old interrogation trick. You only ask questions to which you already know the answers, and Harold knew exactly what this was about. He already had it down in black and white . . . well, yellow and blue, if you want the exact truth.

 

Once again the story I’d been forced to tell over and over the previous day came back to me through the mouths of strangers, hinted at more than specified by the questions they asked, which on the advice of my attorney I mostly didn’t answer. I could see that was part of Harold’s game. He let me answer some of their inquiries—the innocuous ones—here and there, enough to keep the cops interested and enough to keep them asking more questions. All the while, I could tell by the notes Harold made, in that peculiarly indecipherable script of his, that he was gradually gleaning far more about their case than they realized.

 

An hour or so into the interview, Harold called a halt. Claiming he had a bad prostate, he told them he needed to use the john and suggested that I most likely needed to relieve myself as well. It was more than a need right then. It was straight out desperation, but the Peoria cops assented and allowed as how I’d be able to go to the restroom as long as a deputy accompanied me in and out. The cop stayed back by the door, while Harold and I did our duty at the urinals.

 

“You’re doing great,” he told me in a whisper covered by somebody else flushing a toilet in one of the stalls. “Not to worry.”

 

That was far easier said than done. Back in the interview room, a tray of sandwiches had suddenly appeared, ordered in by Harold. Subway sandwiches have never been my first choice for lunchtime cuisine, but hunger is the best sauce, and I was starved. With all the people marching through my life, it had been more than twenty-four hours since I’d last eaten. Although one of the Peoria guys dissected my twelve-inch tuna/pepper-jack sub before allowing me to eat it, he found no contraband inside, and no escape-enabling metal file, either.

 

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