Fourteen-year-old Jacob had been terrified. Not that he admitted it to anyone back then, not even himself. He supposed the officer who lied to his dad had picked up on it, under the snark and the smart mouth.
At least this time….
No, this was still worse. Jacob had onlythoughthis life was over at fourteen. Now it actually might be. He didn’t want to go to jail. He wanted to go to Bali.
The door opened, and the wiry, fair-haired officer who’d arrested him walked in, trailed by a soft-looking woman with hard eyes.
“Mr. Archer,” the man said as he sat down. “I’m Detective Barnes. This is Detective Morena.”
“I asked for my lawyer,” Jacob said.
“She’s on her way. This isn’t an interview. We’re just making sure you understand your situation, Mr. Archer. It’s not a good one.”
So Barnes was going to be the good cop. That left Morena with bad cop or—Jacob mentally weighed up the options he’d have run with in this situation—flirty cop, maybe. The fact Jacob was queer didn’t really matter there. It wasn’t about sex. It was about making the mark feel powerful.
“My lawyer advised me not to say anything until she arrived.”
“You don’t need to, Mr. Archer. Just listen,” Morena said flatly. “Or do you need your lawyer’s permission to do that too?”
Bad cop, then. It wouldn’t have been Jacob’s choice, but it wasn’t his con. He rested his elbows on the edge of the table and waited. After a second, Barnes picked up the folder he’d brought in with him and dealt a selection of photos onto the table.
Grainy black-and-white CCTV shots of the street outside the Starbucks where Jacob had met with Clayton. They showed both of them arriving and both of them leaving—cutting them in half toward the edge of the deck as they left the surveilled area—but none of them together.
“That,” Barnes said as he poked a finger at Clayton’s nervous face in one image, “is Harry Clayton, a very rich and—as of this morning—very dead man. And this other man?” His finger tapped the glossy image. “That’s you, isn’t it, Mr. Archer?”
It was in profile and fuzzy. Jacob supposed it could have been another blond man of his height, in his clothes, but he wouldn’t want to try to convince a jury of it. He sighed. “I’d rather wait until my lawyer gets here.”
Morena smirked at him. “Good,” she said. “I like it when perps are stupid.”
“You see, the thing is that it might not be in your best interests to hold your tongue,” Barnes said. He pulled another sheet of paper out of the file. It was covered in small-type dense coding. Clayton’s code. Or that’s what Jacob assumed. It could have been a page from an Intro to Computer Science text, for all he could tell. It didn’t matter. The page represented that they knew about Clayton and his code. Barnes smiled, and wrinkles creased around his eyes. “This here—this was what Harry Clayton died for. Wasn’t it, Mr. Archer?”
He was overdoing the name repetition. It made the attempted manipulation obvious.
“Can’t say anything until my lawyer gets here.” Jacob shrugged helplessly.
“That’s all right. We don’tneedyour confirmation. We already know.” Barnes put the sheet back into the folder and set it in the middle of the table in front of Jacob. “You were hired to prove that Devon Porter had stolen this piece of computer code from Harry Clayton. And you did. Impressive work. A real coup to add to your resume.”
Jacob bit the inside of his cheek and sat back in the chair. He folded his arms across his chest. It wasn’t so much the need to defend himself that he had to fight, it was the need to snark. Luckily Morena did it for him.
“Or it would have been,” she said as she sat back and folded her arms in mirror imagery of Jacob. “Except you fucked up, didn’t you? Got yourself caught and then….” She pursed her lips and shrugged.
“What did happen?” Barnes picked up the thread of the conversation. “Did Devon Porter buy you off? Pay you to tell Clayton that you’d found no evidence? That was what you were at the coffee shop to do, wasn’t it? Except it went wrong.”
“Do you think my lawyer will be here soon?”
“We don’t know exactly what happened yet. Maybe Clayton didn’t believe you. Maybe you tried to extort more money out of him. But what we do know is that Clayton ended up dead in the river near where you used to live, as it turns out, and you ended up in the company of Syntech’s head of security. That’s interesting.”
Jacob smiled at him and shrugged. “Couldn’t say.”
“Think about that,” Barnes said. “We have Porter. We have your computer. One of them is going to give you up sooner rather than later, so a smart man would get in first. If you tell us what happened, how Syntech is involved, maybe we can work out a deal. Your problem is Syntech’s lawyers are already here, and the deal’s on the table for them too. So… up to you.”
“I’ll ask my lawyer when she gets here,” Jacob said. And really,Law and Orderwas on infinite syndication. Did anyone actually fall for the “only one deal on the table” gambit anymore?
“I told you,” Morena said impatiently. “Ramsey is the one we should be talking to.”
Barnes made a helpless, graceful gesture with his hands and pushed himself up from the table. “Let us know if you change your mind about holding your tongue, Mr. Archer,” he said. “Just remember the clock’s ticking.”
They left the room and closed the door behind them with the sort of click that involved an automatic lock. On the scratched white table, the beige folder they’d left behind lay like a temptation. Jacob ignored it, sat back, and took a deep breath that stitched through his sides.
