by Paul Bishop
“Pagan,” I said. “Flare guns only hold one round.”
“He could have reloaded.”
I desperately needed Benny to say something. I needed to see the color of his words. I didn’t need another calamity on my record. I didn’t want anyone else to die.
“What’s he feeling?” I asked Pagan, trying to cool him down.
“Fear.” Pagan paused for a beat and then added, “Anger.”
The barrel of the flare gun wavered back and forth again.
Neither Pagan nor I moved.
“I’ll kill you,” Benny said, his voice high. And there they were, the purple streamers of lies.
“Easy,” I said to Pagan. “Easy. He’s lying.”
“I’m not lying,” Benny said. “I’ll kill you both.” The gun swung toward me sweeping through smoke and purple streamers.
“No you won’t,” I said, stepping forward.
“Randall…” Pagan said off to my side.
“I got this,” I said. “Shooting him will be the mistake you wanted me around to save you from.”
“I’ll kill you!” Benny screamed. Purple, purple, purple.
“Randall…” Pagan said again as I took another step forward.
“Remember Michael Horner,” I said. “Don’t make another mistake here.” I didn’t know who I was more concerned about – Pagan or Benny.
As I took another step forward, I let my cane slip through my hand until I was grasping the ferrule tip – the heavy crown on the top pointed down.
I was close enough now to see Benny was vibrating. His whole body trembling.
“Put it down, Benny,” I said softly.
“Kill me,” he screamed, stamping his feet up and down like a child throwing a tantrum. “Just kill me!”
“Not that easy, Benny,” I said.
“Benny is dead,” he screamed. “Conner is dead. I am Changeling!” As he said the words, I saw the color of his words change from purple to blue.
There was a moment I felt I might have misjudged everything. I saw the huge barrel of the flare gun in infinite detail as it swung toward me. I could hear nothing. My mouth had gone dry. The autonomic systems in my body were shutting down one by one to concentrate on the threat.
I began to raise my gun, but then Benny moved the flare gun to point at the right side of his head.
Instead of firing my gun, I swung my cane one-handed in desperation. The crown tip hit Benny’s right elbow just as he pulled the flare gun trigger, the flare bursting skyward instead of into his head. Fire from the ignition of the flare exploded from the barrel and caught Benny’s shirt on fire.
I was off balance and fell sideways, but Pagan barreled past me. He knocked Benny to the ground, then rolled him over and over until the flames were out.
Then he wrapped him in his arms.
My hearing came back. I heard sirens. I’d ordered the back-up Code 2 – meaning get here as fast as you can without using your siren – but some cops just love to make noise.
I picked myself up using my cane and made my way over to Pagan.
He looked up at me from where he was sitting on the ground holding Benny.
“Thank you, Jane,” he said.
Chapter 32
“You can’t find the truth,
you just pick the lie you like the best.”
- Marilyn Manson
Waiting for the dust to settle can take a while and try your patience, but eventually the path is clear to move forward.
Paramedics had been called to the scene and treated Benny for superficial burns. He was silent during the entire procedure. In fact, he hadn’t said a word since I’d stopped him from blowing his brains out.
Dante Castano along with Ken Dodd arrived only minutes before Livia Nelson and Johnny Hawkins. After checking in, Castano and Dodd went to search the crypt Benny used for a bolt hole on the off chance Gerrard would be there. All they found was Benny’s keyboard, guitar, and computer. The tools he had used to communicate his pain to the world via Internet music videos. They also took the flare gun to book it into evidence.
Nobody knew yet what was evidence and what wasn’t, so the rule was book everything. There could be DNA or other microscopic scientific evidence the wizards at SID could use to tell us something.
Livia and Johnny started the arduous process of paperwork documentation and taking statements from the three Krugers after transferring them to Van Nuys station.
There was some talk and speculation about charging Isaac and Abi, but attempting to file harboring or criminal conspiracy against either of them seemed over the top. They were treated as gently as possible, but the process was still harsh and taxing. Right now, they would be feeling like their world was falling apart.
Myron, however, was a different story. He hadn’t called a lawyer, but was still hiding behind the legal mumbo jumbo of Benny being his client. He refused to talk further about the trust he had established for Benny or how it pertained to Gerrard.
Specifically, he refused to tell us where Gerrard was being kept. And that was the kicker. Despite everything, we still had a missing child to find. The longer Myron refused to tell us what he knew, the more likely he’d be facing charges of conspiracy and obstruction.
He eventually agreed to tell us everything if Benny would agree to let him. The problem was, Benny still hadn’t uttered a word.
Peter Simmons, the district attorney who had prosecuted the Arthur Howell murder case, came to the station at Pagan’s request. We wanted him getting in on the case earlier than a DA normally would in order to provide a deeper legal take on what charges we might file and what evidence we would need to establish their validity.
It was a smart move on Pagan’s part as it gave Simmons a stake in the outcome of the case. He was more likely to file charges if he was brought in as early as possible.
“The circumstantial evidence for the kidnappings is strong, but we’re on much weaker ground when it comes to the hit and run murders. Can you get Benny to sing?” Simmons asked.
I didn’t know if he was trying to be inappropriately funny or simply trying to sound cool and failing by using old fashioned jargon. The color of his words showed no malice, but he went down a notch in my estimation.
“Possibly,” Pagan said, then asked me, “What do you think?”
I sighed. “The issue isn’t just getting him to talk. The bigger issue is even if we can get him to talk to us, how we prove he is competent to waive Miranda.”
Despite regulations, we had not put handcuffs on Benny at the cemetery. He was so docile and frail, it seemed like a cruelty. He was twenty, but still appeared closer to the ten year-old he had been when he fled the Martin residence. Pagan sat with him in back of the Escalade when we drove to the station.
Currently, Benny was sitting quietly in an interrogation room. The irony of it being the same interrogation room where Michael Horner had killed himself wasn’t lost on either Pagan or me.
“He needs an advocate,” I said.
“If you bring in anyone from the Public Defender’s Office, they are going to shut you down before you get a word out of him,” Simmons said.
There was no arguing with that logic.
“An advocate from the rape treatment center?” I suggested.
“You’d have a better chance with a public defender,” Simmons said. “At least most of them don’t have a private agenda.”
“He has a lawyer,” Pagan said thoughtfully. “Myron Kruger.”
“He’s a civil lawyer, not a criminal lawyer,” Simmons said.
“When detectives questioned O.J. the first time, he had a civil lawyer with him who let him waive his rights,” I said, not wanting to think how that disaster had played out.
“Myron Kruger is a co-suspect,” Simmons said.
“Not if you don’t charge him,” Pagan said. “Do you really think anything you filed against him would stick? Isn’t finding Gerrard and getting a statement about the hit and runs far more importan
t?”
I could see Simmons weighing the options in his mind. Like any DA, he’d prefer a slam dunk, high-profile conviction in hand as opposed to two weaker cases in the bush.
“Okay,” he said finally.
Pagan smiled at me, “I’ll get him.”
I looked at him suspiciously.
“No parlor tricks,” he said, his hands palms-up and open. He knew I would see purple word streamers if he was lying. His words were true blue.
I went to the women’s locker room to use the bathroom – first rule of detective work, go when you can, not when you have to. When I was done, I washed my hands and splashed water on my face. I thought about taking a pain pill, but decided my leg was doing okay.
I looked at myself in the mirror. I took the scrunchie off my pony tail and let my hair fall forward. I had a small folding brush in the pocket of my jacket. As I was using it, a muscular black woman in workout gear came into the bathroom. She had a patrol uniform in a dry cleaning bag, which she hung from a stall door. She stepped up to the sinks where she peeled off a padded pair of fingerless weightlifting gloves and began washing her hands. She caught me looking at her in the mirror.
“Tough day?” she asked.
“They’re all tough,” I said.
“Preach it, sister,” she said, smiling.
As she dried her hands, she took in my cane. “Are you the detective who got shot taking down that human trafficking ring? The one they call Calamity Jane.”
“Yes,” I said flatly, angry someone I didn’t know would use that moniker. What right did she have?
“Well, ain’t you something?” she said. “Tough as they come, I hear,” she said, then gave me a genuine smile taking any sarcasm out of the words. “You make all us sisters in blue proud. It’s an honor to meet you.” She reached out to shake my hand.
I swallowed, feeling deep emotion. It was not just what she said, but the sincerity in the colors attached to her words. I took her hand in mine. “Thank you,” I said.
The boost had come at just the right time. I felt invigorated. I knew I wanted the ball. I wanted this interrogation.
For the first time being known as Calamity Jane seemed like a good thing.
Chapter 33
“People think a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies.”
-Ayn Rand
I sat close to Benny, on the edge on my chair, my feet flat on the floor, knees together, hands open and on my thighs. There was no more than two inches of space between my knees and Benny’s.
There was no table in the interrogation room. I had placed Myron in a chair behind Benny and off to one side.
When I had come back into the squad room, Pagan looked up at me and I saw the expression on his face change – moving from introspection to observation. I knew he was reading me. It was second nature to him.
He handed me a bottle of water and a power bar. A half-eaten duplicate of his offering was on a desk next to him. I took the bottle of water, cracked the top, and drank down half of it in one long swallow.
I ripped the packaging off the power bar with my teeth and took a bite of the goo inside.
Hydrate. Balance blood sugar. Get game face on. Standard procedure.
“I’m going in the box,” I said to Pagan.
His pleasant expression didn’t change. “It’s all yours.”
“Just like that? No argument?”
“At the cemetery you said, ‘I got this.’ And you still do. The box is yours.”
He saw me watching the color of his words.
Quietly, he asked, “Are you learning what all the colors mean?”
It was my turn to give a rueful smile. “Yes. I’ve started paying acute attention. It is a gift not a curse.”
“A gift that has consequences.”
“I think I’m finally ready to accept them.”
For the next half-hour, we discussed and planned, deciding the specific point of the interrogation would be to find Gerrard. I’d have to adjust to things on the fly, but Gerrard first, then nail down the hit and runs.
Now, sitting across from me in the box, Benny stared at me with dull eyes. What we do as detectives can be hard. Personally, I thought Benny had been through enough. I didn’t see what prosecuting him and locking him up would achieve. He was a victim as much as he was a suspect, but we are objective enforcers of the law. This had to be done. And if it had to be done, I wanted to be the one to do it with as little damage as possible.
Myron had been briefed that he would be acting as Benny’s advocate. I knew Pagan had told him privately to only to refer to the money we were assuming Benny had given him for the trust as royalties from Smack Records, and not to say how much it was. We were hedging our bets a bit, trying to adjust one possible outcome.
I could tell Myron really wanted to tell us about the trust – to tell us where Gerrard was – and we could probably find a legal way to force him to do so. However, I didn’t want to break him if there was another way. I just hoped I didn’t break Benny.
With Myron in the room acting as Benny’s lawyer, Miranda became a moot point and did not need to be administered. Some DAs would freak out if you didn’t read an in-custody suspect the Miranda Admonition, but Peter Simmons was up on his current law and agreed we didn’t need it.
I still wanted Benny to answer some simple questions to establish competency. These would be low anxiety questions, nothing accusatory, just establishing a baseline behavior.
“Benny,” I said. “My name is Jane.”
I saw a flash of contempt in Benny’s eyes and a minute twitch of his upper lip. He turned his head away from me and crossed his arms. I knew from experience it was something I’d said that caused him to barrier up. But what had I said? I’d just told him my name.
I sat in silence thinking before proceeding. What did I know about Benny? The only face to face experience I had was the encounter in the cemetery. I tried to clear my head and remember what was said, how he had acted.
Pagan had said Benny was feeling fear. Then he’d added anger.
This was anger I was seeing from Benny in the interrogation room. Everything is emphasized in the box, becomes larger, more apparent.
Anger.
At the cemetery, Benny had spoken in anger. He’d said, “Benny is dead. Conner is dead.”
Then he declared, “I am Changeling!”
Maybe the only way left for Benny to interact with the world was through the character of Changeling.
“Changeling,” I said. “My name is Jane.”
Benny turned his head to face me. His arms unfolded. His fingers started tapping out a beat on his knees.
“Changeling,” I said again, confirming I’d got the message. “Can you tell me in your own words why we are talking today?”
Tap, tap, with his fingers. Silence.
I knew this behavior in most suspects would be a sign of bleeding off anxiety. In a standard interrogation, I would shut the behavior down. But this interrogation was far from normal.
“How do you feel about being here?”
Benny remained silent, but his face took on deeper lines, his eyes almost pleading. The tap, tap of his fingers stopped and suddenly, he was playing air guitar – strumming with one hand, fingering invisible frets with the other.
He rocked forward, locking his eyes on mine, and strummed another invisible riff.
Before language, man communicated strictly through gestures. Even now, the majority of our communication still happens via gestures.
Benny was silent, but Changeling was communicating.
I reached out and touched his knee. “I understand,” I said. “I’ll be back.”
I left the interrogation room, closing the door behind me. Pagan came out of the observation/video room. He was replaced by Dante Castano. We were not leaving Benny unobserved.
“I need his guitar,” I
said. No doubt Pagan was picking up on the urgency in my voice. “Castano and Dodd brought it in to book as evidence.”
Pagan nodded and headed into the detective squad room where the evidence had been sequestered prior to actually being booked into the secure property room on the first floor.
He was back in under a minute and handed me the guitar. I took it with me back into the interrogation room. I sat down across from Benny, knees touching now.
I extended the guitar toward him.
Benny smiled, his face looking like the sun coming out after a storm. He took the guitar gently, put the strap over his head, and strummed it once. He fiddled with the turning keys and strummed it again.
Apparently satisfied the guitar was in tune, he looked directly into my eyes. There was a hardness to his face, but no guile.
“Changeling, in your own words can you tell me why we’re talking today?”
Benny strummed his instrument gently and began to softly sing his words. He was like a person who had a heavy stutter while talking, yet can sing without a hitch. Changeling communicated through his music.
“Because I had to protect them. Had to protect them. Had to protect…them,” He sang, drawing the last two words out with a Gaelic lilt. “I am the Changeling. Conner was taken to the land of the fairies, Bennie too.”
“How do you feel about talking to me?”
Bennie plucked the strings of his guitar, his hands moving on the frets.
“You’re pretty and sweet and quite complete,” he sang, with a laugh. Then his face closed down, darkening, and the sounds on the guitar became a haunting refrain. “Unicorn, Unicorn, where does she go? Back to the monster? No, no, no, no!”
It sounded as if he was singing a Dr. Seuss book, but his agitation was clear in his body, and anger was in the color of his words.
He had given me a type of mercy question, something a suspect will ask in preparation to admitting culpability. It comes in the form of a concern the suspect wants addressed: How much time am I going to get? What’s going to happen to my family? Am I going to get fired?
A mercy question meant I was making progress in the interrogation, even if it didn’t seem like much at first.