Betrayal

"I can appreciate that. But the last call Hanna Bowen made in her life was to here. And it was the day before her death. I think you can understand why we are curious about two people who call Allstrong Security, one of whom disappears and the other dies immediately after the contact. It does appear an unlikely coincidence." It also wasn't true, but Loy and Allstrong didn't have to know that. Hardy's plan was simply to have Bracco show up and make it clear that the cops, too, were now part of the picture.

"Well, okay," Loy said. "You've asked your questions. Mr. Allstrong has told you what he knows. If you don't have anything further, I think it's time to end the interview."

But Bracco ignored Loy again. "Mr. Allstrong," he said, "if you didn't receive these calls, to whom in your company might Mrs. Bowen have spoken?"

Allstrong shrugged. "I could ask Marilou, our receptionist. She's the first line of defense. If Mrs. Bowen was hysterical or nonspecific about what she wanted or who she wanted to talk to, her calls would have stopped at the front desk. But as Ryan here says, we can always ask and make sure."

Bracco finally reached for his coffee and took a sip. It had gone tepid and he made a face.

"Is something wrong, Inspector?" Allstrong asked.

Bracco reached over and turned off his tape recorder. He decided he'd give the shit one last stir. "This doesn't seem to be going anywhere, gentlemen. I came here under the impression that you'd like to cooperate in these homicide investigations, but I'm not picking up much of a spirit of cooperation. In fact, frankly, you both seem pretty darn defensive for people who've got nothing to hide."

"That's ridiculous," Loy said. "We've answered every question you've asked. The plain fact is that Mr. Allstrong doesn't know anything about the Bowens other than what he's told you. He runs a huge corporation with branches all over the world. He doesn't have time to get involved in these small parochial matters. Look, Inspector, we're sorry Mr. Bowen disappeared, and about whatever happened to his wife. But to imply that there's any real connection between Allstrong Security and these events is just an absurd flight of fancy."

"Amen to that," Allstrong intoned.

"Well, then"-Bracco pushed his chair back-"thank you for your time."

***

AT THREE-FIFTEEN, Glitsky was standing in front of a video monitor in the tiny electronics room between the two similarly minuscule interrogation rooms that fed off a narrow hallway that, in turn, was separated from the homicide detail by a glass wall. "I give up," he said to Debra Schiff, "what is it?"

"That, sir, is the top of your head."

Glitsky looked again. He wore his graying hair short and close to his skull. Leaning over, he squinted into the seven-inch monitor. "Could be," he said. "I couldn't prove it isn't."

"You see any identifiable part of your face?"

"No." He turned to her. "This is all the camera got in there?"

"Yes, sir."

"Lord." Glitsky walked out of the electronics room, took one step to his left, and reentered the interrogation room he'd left a minute before.

The room was four feet by five feet, so it was really more like a closet. It had no windows. Suspects in homicide investigations were often brought in for questioning and placed in these rooms, where they could be left alone and theoretically observed as they fidgeted or talked to themselves or otherwise did things that might be both incriminating and admissible in court. The problem was that the camera that was supposed to record all of this activity was cleverly hidden within the ceiling and the room was so small that the only image captured on tape, ever, was the top of the head of the suspect. As Schiff had just demonstrated to Glitsky.

"It's hopeless," Schiff told him. "We can't do business like this. We need a new room."

"I thought this was the new room." Glitsky was right. The entire homicide department had transferred to the fifth floor from the fourth only a little over a year before. Newly designed and supposedly state of the art. "But you're right, it's a little small too. Who approved the plans for this thing?"

"Well, nobody, which is kind of the problem. There's a couple of guys in robbery who moonlight doing construction here in the building."

"We didn't bid this out?"

Schiff laughed. "Are you kidding me? We have employees that do the maintenance in the building. We try to bid this out, the union's going to have a fit. We'd be taking their jobs."

"Well, then, why didn't we have the people in maintenance do it?"

"Because they said there's a three-year backlog on maintenance, and they'd need to charge us seventy-five thousand dollars from our budget. So we got the two guys from robbery to do it."

"Perfect," Glitsky said. "So where do you propose we put it, this new room?"

"I don't know, Abe. Anyplace else. Maybe out where the lockers are. Or take part of the computer room, which is way too big anyway. But this thing is just crazy."