I drove to the station in Misery. The Jeep. And possibly a little of the emotion.
Parker had already cleared me to interview Lyle the Boyfriend, and though the detective on the case was a little surprised, he didn’t argue. He simply led me back to an interview room where a very distraught, very devastated Lyle Fiske sat waiting.
And, not to my complete surprise, the man was as innocent as a freshly driven snowplow. He may have been a bit dirty underneath the hood—did snowplows have hoods?—but he’d been driven hard. Without regular oil changes.
He sat cuffed to the table in the interview room. I wondered if they’d had to subdue him again.
When he looked up at me, his pale caramel eyes didn’t quite seem to comprehend the situation. He was somewhere else. His dark auburn hair hadn’t been slept on, and from what Parker had told me, they’d arrested him the night before. He’d probably paced the entire time, a sure sign of innocence. Only the guilty slept after being arrested.
“Mr. Fiske,” I said, holding a hand out. “I’m Charley Davidson, a private investigator and consultant for APD. I’ve been hired to look into your case.”
He didn’t take my hand at first. He stared at it instead for a solid thirty seconds before he finally took it into his.
“You were hired?” he asked, trying to wrap his head around everything that had happened to him in the last week.
I stopped to take inventory myself. His girlfriend had been murdered in her car sometime between 6 and 11 P.M. just under a week ago. According to the report Parker gave me, Lyle was going to propose to Emery Adams the night she was killed. He miraculously found her car in the middle of nowhere and had called the cops himself. His fingerprints were found all over the car, and Emery’s blood was all over him. Oh, and just to add insult to injury, the couple had been spotted arguing the day before.
This was not going to be easy.
“Yes, the people who hired me”—the same ones who didn’t want Lyle, or anyone else for that matter, to know they’d hired me—“believe quite strongly that you are innocent of the charges against you.”
He laughed softly, the sound containing no humor whatsoever. “Like that makes any difference.”
I hadn’t figured him for a cynic when I walked in. Something had happened to him. Something had set him against the universe.
“Can you tell me what happened that night?”
“My girlfriend was murdered, and they think I did it. Isn’t that why you’re here?”
“But you didn’t?” I asked, just to gauge his reaction for the record.
Instead of answering, he leveled those hauntingly pale eyes on me and asked, “Does it really matter?”
His cynicism sparked a burning curiosity. I needed to look deeper into his background, much deeper, to try to understand his animosity. I got the feeling he was a good guy. Then again, he’d been friends with Nick Parker. Maybe my feelers were wrong this time.
“Mr. Fiske,” I said, trying to get him to trust me if only a little, “try to think of me as your best friend. I am here for you, and if anyone can prove you didn’t do this, it’s me.”
“I already have a lawyer. I heard he’s the best public defender taxpayer money can buy.”
“Christianson. He’s good,” I assured him. “He’ll give us some leeway as far as asking for more time and what have you.”
“More time?”
I folded my arms on the table. “Before it goes to trial.”
“So, you want me to sit in here longer than I would anyway? It’s not like they granted me bail. It’s not like I’m twiddling my thumbs in the comfort of my own home, so what does it matter?”
“I just don’t want the state to rush this.” Now I was worrying about Parker’s career. If this did go to trial, he would be risking everything for his friend. “I’m hoping to thwart their case long before it comes to that, so let’s hope for the best.”
He scoffed. “You people are all the same. Relying on hope. Believing that just because someone is innocent doesn’t mean they won’t spend their life in prison.”
Okay. No more talk of hope. He wanted straightforward, he’d get it. “The state is going to offer you a deal. You plea no contest, and they’ll probably take the death penalty off the table. Or some such. Then they’ll give you a certain amount of time to respond. Yada yada. Standard operating procedure. If we have to, we can get them to hold off on even offering the first deal until I can get this sorted out.”
“You’re going to sort this out?” he asked, as skeptical as I was the time a group of boys from the playground told me they’d caught a turtle in the trees. It was a trick to get me to follow them in, and I knew it. He thought he was being duped as well, and I wasn’t sure how to convince him otherwise. I’d just have to get the charges dropped. Maybe he’d trust me then.
“I’m just saying, don’t sign anything until you hear from me.”
“If you believe I didn’t kill Emery, why would you think I’d take their deal in the first place?”
“Once they make that offer, they probably won’t offer again, and this will all go to trial. You could be facing the death penalty. Taking that off the table is a good incentive to take the money and run. Just don’t be tempted.”
“I’ll try to keep my enthusiasm at bay.”
“Okay, first question: How did you find Emery’s car?”
“I told them already, I have an app on my phone. That’s how I found her.”
“So, her phone was at the crime scene?”
“Yes. Plugged in to the charger. And hers is the kind that continues to charge even when the car is off. I found it the same night she disappeared.”
I shuffled through the papers. “Right. So you have the Find a Friend app. The one that lets you know where she is at all times.” When I glanced up from underneath my lashes, his anger soared.
“It was her idea. She wanted me to put it on my phone. Thought it would be fun or something, I don’t know. I didn’t fucking ask.”
Geesh, he was touchy. “Did she have one for you on her phone as well?”
“Yeah, I guess. I don’t know.”
“But you can see how that looks.”
His gaze snapped back to me. “I don’t give a fuck how it looks. I was not stalking her. It was her fucking idea.”