“That’s right.”
Obviously, I couldn’t ask him if he felt anyone staring at him in the bedroom. One thing I’ve learned—both from my time on the force and from watching our field team interview potential psychs—is that you can’t bias your subject. Even asking if he’d noticed “anything” would make Sledge think there was something there worth noticing. “So…how’d you like the place?”
His eyes narrowed ever so slightly. “It was close to work.”
“Okay.”
“Parking wasn’t bad.”
“Right.” I had the impression, based on pretty much nothing, that he was deliberately sidestepping the question. “But the apartment itself? Inside.”
“What can I say? Four walls and a roof. It was an apartment.”
“You lived here alone?”
“Just me.”
“And you slept in the bedroom?”
“Where else would I sleep?”
“Just ticking off all the boxes,” I said blandly as I took in Sledge’s overall demeanor. He wasn’t doing anything particularly challenging, but I still suspected he was getting his jollies by not answering. Overly muscled d-bags liked nothing more than to flout authority. Either that, or he simply hadn’t noticed anything.
Or maybe there was nothing there to notice. According to Sledge, the rent wasn’t bad, the neighbors were forgettable, and all of the appliances worked.
I was about to bring the useless interview to a close when Jacob asked, “So why did you leave?”
Sledge’s inscrutable eyes slid to Jacob, sizing him up. “Moved in with my girlfriend.”
I almost asked for her contact info, just to underscore to Sledge who the authority figure was here. But this wasn’t a murder investigation. Besides. No doubt the Records department could get me a big manilla file on her, if I truly needed it.
Sledge accepted my card with a shadow of a smirk, and Jacob and I headed back to the car. “Did you expect him to see anything?” Jacob ventured.
“No,” I admitted.
But I hadn’t thought he’d be so damn smug about it.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
WE HEADED BACK to the office. All the way there, I ruminated about the interview. I hadn’t actually thought Zachary Sledge would give me anything…yet I was peeved that he didn’t. At least I had Jacob to help write up the paperwork. No doubt he’d even manage to phrase my big, fat “nothing” in a way that made me look half-competent. At any rate, he’d take more pains than Carl would have taken to paint me in a decent light.
I was fully expecting Jacob to point out that psychic mediums are exceedingly rare, and the majority of my interviews are a bust, and if a van full of pee wasn’t a sign we were dealing with garden-variety paranoia here, nothing was. But instead, what I got was, “You can handle the report without me, right?”
I blinked. “Yeah.”
“Great. I’ll just head to the yoga room and see how Evelyn’s doing.”
Damn it. We’d talked about this…as much as we could, all things considered. “Don’t go trying to borrow herreading glasses,” I warned him. “It’s not worth anything getting bent out of shape.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
Sure. And I was in line for interviewer of the year.
I fired up my laptop, pulled up the report, and started typing. But when I got to Sledge’s response to my asking if he slept in the bedroom—where else would I sleep?—a half dozen good replies sprang to mind. They always do, well after the fact. Who’s to say he didn’t have a home gym in there? Or an office? Or a freaking petting zoo, for all anyone knew?
Not that I thought it was likely. Most single people in a one-bedroom apartment would rather not sleep in the living room….
Unless something in that one bedroom was staring at them all night long.
