Bennett ran her tongue over her teeth behind her scabbed, still-swollen lip.
“You think I’m going to sell out Night Shift for a nicer smile?” she asked.
“Fair enough,” Cade said. He gave Bennett a toothy, empty grin. “I don’t suppose you’d get much use out of that.”
Beth kicked him under the table. The toe of her expensive shoe—Cade wasn’t that interested in women’s fashion, but he could recognize money—clipped his ankle. He managed not to grimace at the unexpected pain and held his tongue as Beth underlined something on the page and looked up.
“I think we’ve gotten off track.” She tugged her sleeve back to look at the slim leather-banded watch on her wrist. “And your time with Mr. Deacon is running out, I’m afraid. So, to recap? Your theory is that Officer Marlow, a veteran Night Shift officer with numerous commendations on record, turned to murder because of overtime?”
“I didn’t realize we were on the clock,” Bennett said.
“Oh, don’t you hate it when that happens?” Beth asked. “When people have different expectations of something and don’t realize it? It’s how so many Tinder dates end. So no one ends up blue-balled, let’s clear up the ground rules now. Mr. Deacon’s time is valuable, I’m here to safeguard that, and you have exactly ten more minutes before I get snarky and ask if he is free to leave. You’ll have to say yes, since you have absolutely no cause to hold him, and then we’ll be done here. So, now we’re all on the same page. Yes?”
Bennett raised her eyebrows. “You’llgetsnarky?”
“You have no idea,” Beth said. She tapped the pen on the table. “So again, your theory is that one of the SDPD’s best and brightest went off the deep end because he didn’t get overtime. Too bad and so sad, but how does that involve my client? It’s nine minutes now, so… be succinct.”
Nine minutes. By Cade’s count, Bennett wasted a good five seconds of them in a staring match with Beth. Then she gave a thin twitch of a smile and looked down to flick through the file in front of her.
“You see, I don’t know,” Bennett said. “Maybe he was just sick of being the clean-up crew. Or he saw this Clemons guy being harassed month after month, with nothing we could do to help him, and just… made the wrong call. At the end of the day, though, I don’t know why Marlow, who was a good cop, did this. I don’t know what pushed him to it or what pressure finally made him snap. He wasn’t talking to me. He wasn’t talking to any of us, anyone in the department, not really. The only person he talked to was Mr. Deacon, here. We have phone calls, messages, secret meetings—”
Cade shifted his weight and brought the front legs of the chair down with a thud.
“We were going to fuck,” he said. “Sometimes I like to talk first.”
“I’m sure you talk during, as well,” Bennett said. She held up her hand in front of Beth’s face to stop whatever comment she’d been about to make. “I know. Seven minutes. Did you have any idea that Marlow planned to do something like this?”
“No,” Cade said.
“At any point did he talk to you about Victor Clemons's problem with Barney Lyons? Did he express sympathy for Clemons’s situation or seem frustrated at Lyons?”
“No.”
“Did he seem upset about anything when you last spoke? Angry? Depressed? Conflicted?”
Cade hesitated for a second before he answered. He glanced at the one-way mirror that took up one wall of the interrogation room and wondered who was on the other side. O’Hara? One of Piper’s one-time goons? If Cade put his cards on the table right now, would it make the situation worse or put some reasonable doubt in people’s minds?
It was hard to tell, but if he spat out something like that without running it past his legal counsel, Beth would kill him.
He flicked his attention back to Bennett. “He seemed fine,” he said.
Bennett licked her split lip and pulled a report out of her file. She glanced briefly—performatively—at it and set it down in the middle of the table.
“And the last time you saw him?” she said as she tapped the paper with a bruised finger. “That would be at the strip club where you were involved in a shootout, and a stripper ended up in hospital?”
Beth cleared her throat and reached out to grab the sheet. She ran her gaze down it quickly.
“Okay,” she said as she held up one finger to stall the conversation.
“That wasn’t the last time I saw him,” Cade said. “The last time I saw him was later that night, when he had his hand around my—”
“Time’s up,” Beth interrupted him, one hand on his forearm to remind him why she was there. “My client’s free to leave? Isn’t that where we left it?”
“By my clock,” Bennett said. “I’ve another five minutes.”
Beth gave her a thin smile as she stood up. “Your clock is wrong, Officer Bennett,” she said as she gathered her stuff up. “We’re leaving. Unless you intend to detain my client, in which case I can schedule in an extra few hours to bring the SDPD’s roof down around your collective ears.”
For a second, it looked like Bennett, the muscles in her jaw clenched so hard her teeth had to ache, would try and call Beth’s bluff. Then she grimaced sourly and stood up.
