Detective Resner is Lonnie’s contact, so she drives, she and Jay making up the rules of this partnership as they go along, slipping into an easy give-and-take that reminds him of those weeks and months when they met fifteen years ago while nosing around Cole Oil and its illegal business practices, finally coming together to compare notes. He couldn’t have brought that case to court without Lonnie’s help. She was an uncommonly good reporter, if a little preachy on the page, a ninety-five-pound engine fueled by nicotine and the heat of her own fanaticism when it comes to virtue, her unshakable dislike of liars and scoundrels of all stripes. It depresses him to think of her wasting her time and talent trying to sell a bunch of bullshit stories to second-rate magazines, or to think that she’s having trouble with her rent.
The Northeast Police Station is a one-story brick building, as flat and wide as a prison block, its image a forewarning for those led in handcuffs through its doors. Lonnie parks her hatchback in the front parking lot, pulling up the emergency brake just as she sees Gregg Bartolomo pacing in front of the building, in one hand a slim notebook and in the other a bulky Model T cellular phone, an ancient-looking thing probably doled out by his employer. Lonnie had one just like it when she was at the Post. “He’s calling something in,” she says, reading it in his gait, the way he pitches forward on the balls of his feet. “He’s got something,” she adds, reaching for the door handle.
Bartolomo sees them coming and practically runs. He’s Jay’s height, maybe a little smaller, with an olive complexion that’s settled into a deep butternut color with the onset of middle age. He presses a button on the phone, turning it off, and hops into the front seat of a red Ford Fiesta. He rolls up the window as Lon approaches, shouting through the glass, “Is it the girl?”
“I should never have given you anything,” he says, locking the doors.
“They make a break in the case?”
He guns the engine, drowning out the sound of her voice, the equivalent of sticking his fingers in her ears. “Asshole,” Lonnie mumbles.
Jay ignores them both and heads for the front doors of the station. Inside, there’s a uniformed cop behind the front desk, an ancient white man with a case of rosacea and thinning hair and a phone receiver cradled against his ear. There are other phones ringing in the station, and Jay hears the clang of typewriters in the distance. He can see the tops of balding heads above the divider behind the front desk, where senior officers are working, but the reception room is otherwise empty, save for a light-skinned black man sitting on a bench near the door. It’s Frankie, Sam Hathorne’s driver. He stands when he sees Jay, a look of recognition and also relief shooting across his face.
“Something’s wrong,” he says right away. “He’s been in there too long. Sam is on his way. He’s got Axel calling around now.”
“Who’s in there?”
“Neal.”
Frankie tells him he was instructed to drop Neal at the station house. The cops had a few more questions, they’d said, about the girl working for Hathorne.
“Neal thought it could wait,” he says. “They got the debate tonight and everything. But Sam said it might look bad, you know, not cooperating when the girl is still missing. I was supposed to run him out here and back to the hotel. But they took him back in one of them little rooms and he ain’t been out since.”
“An interrogation room?”
“They won’t let me in there.”
“I can get in there,” Jay says. The words tumble out, like beads let loose from a string, a surprise to him as much as anyone.
Lonnie enters the station behind him.
She nods at the desk officer and gives her name, an old routine from her reporter days. “They still think she was working for Hathorne,” Jay says.
“I’ll talk to Mike,” she says, as the desk cop waves her forward.
“She was working for Acton or Wolcott, tell him.”
Lonnie nods as she steps through the opening of a low swinging gate that’s the same faux-wood finish as the divider separating the desk from the rest of reception. The cop has allowed her past the threshold, opening a path to the desks and detectives behind the room divider. Jay waits for the cop to take another call, his head bent over some form, and then he turns and asks Frankie where they took Neal. Frankie points down a brightly lit tiled hall to the left of the station’s front desk. Jay moves purposefully, portraying for all the world a man who knows where he’s going and what he’s getting himself into. INTERROGATION ROOM 1 and INTERROGATION ROOM 2 sit directly across the hall from each other. The door to room 2 is closed tight. But unlocked, Jay finds, when he walks in unannounced. The detective sitting across a table from Neal Hathorne doesn’t turn at the sound, sure in the assumption that the only folks roaming free back here are other cops. It’s Neal who looks up in surprise. In a light blue shirt rolled to his elbows and black slacks, he’s seated at the table, facing the door. He has one foot propped on the knee of his other leg. It falls to the floor when he sees Jay. It’s this thudding sound that gets the cop’s attention. He glances over his shoulder, and then literally does a double take.
“Detective Moore?” Jay says, taking a guess.
The cop stands. “Who are you?”
“I’m his lawyer.”
“What?” Neal says.
He looks back and forth between Jay, a man he’s met only twice, and the cop who’s had him in this little room for hours. A pinch of anxiety shows on his face, in the crinkle of his brow. The detective, a black man old enough to have served in the Northeast when Axel was still stationed here, holds out two hands, blocking Jay from coming any closer. He’s wearing a woven sports coat that doesn’t match his pants. “He didn’t ask for a lawyer.”
Jay looks at Neal. “You want a lawyer?”
“He’s not under arrest.”