Chapter 8
Author's Note: Hi all! Thank you for the reviews! They encourage me to go on! Though honestly, I would anyway, but they make me all warm and fuzzy inside and make me smile outside! So thanks!
Also, a Goren interrogation is a lot harder to write than I had anticipated. I'm aware that I'm likely speaking the obvious for you veteran fanfic-er's, but just a head's up that it might be out of character. Let me know what you think of it.
29th Precinct Interrogation Room
Thursday, April 5, 2007
7:51PM
Bobby Goren watched his prey through the one way glass, observing him while turning courses of action over in his mind. They were on a time crunch. It was already going on eight o'clock. If they were going to get anything out of this hump, they were going to need to get it quickly.
Joshua Barnes struck Goren as a somewhat jumpy man. That should make him easy to shake up. If Nicole followed her past pattern, he'd be easy to manipulate. Unfortunately, Nicole would have already done a lot of manipulating in her favor, which would make it take longer to flip him.
Goren looked down at his binder and flipped it open to Joshua Barnes' file. He didn't have much criminal history. He had no history of violence. Goren looked back up into the interrogation room. Barnes was bouncing his leg and drumming his fingers on the tabletop. Anxiety, nervousness; he was ready.
"I want my lawyer."
Goren had barely set one foot in the room when Joshua greeted him with the outburst. Goren closed the door behind him and tossed his binder on the table, shaking his head.
"Maybe you don't understand the gravity of the situation," he said, shaking a long index finger at Joshua. "There's an officer missing. And you—" He pointed the finger at Joshua's face. "You're going to help us find him."
"I don't know nothing about no missing cop," Joshua said, crossing his arms over chest. "I want my lawyer."
Goren sat in the chair opposite Joshua and opened his binder and flipped through some pages. "You see that, what you did with your arms?" he asked, without looking up. "That's a defensive posture. It suggests that you do know something about this… missing cop." Goren folded his hands together and looked at Joshua, who had pointlessly dropped his arms to his sides.
"There's no record of violence in your jacket," he continued. "Why would you suddenly want to change that by letting this young cop—"
"By letting him what? Nicole wouldn't hurt him. Nicole wouldn't hurt anyone!"
"Really." Goren pulled a photo out of his binder and dropped it in front of Joshua. "This is Ella. She and Nicole were lovers a few years back. Until Nicole killed her."
Joshua looked down at the 8x10 glossy of Ella lying in the morgue and shook his head. "Ella committed suicide," he said. "She was unstable. When—"
"This is Mark Bailey," Goren interrupted. "Nicole poisoned his nicotine gum when he was about to flip on her."
"This isn't her!" Joshua burst out again. "She wouldn't do these things! You don't know her like I do!"
"Yeah? And how's that?"
"She's a caring person," Joshua said. "When we were up at my cabin, a deer limped up to the front porch. It had a broken leg. Nicole, she… That deer wouldn't have had a chance without her!"
"Would a caring person try to have a police officer killed?"
"That was my idea, I did it myself!"
Goren nodded. "She killed Jamie Solomon."
"Nicole didn't kill her, I did!"
Silence echoed throughout the room.
"You killed Jamie Solomon."
"Yes! Don't you see? Nicole would never have done anything like that. I did it! On my own!"
Goren nodded again. "Your cabin. Where is that?"
"Up near Syracuse."
Goren slid his notepad and a pen across the table. "The address."
Joshua looked from Goren to the notepad, and back to Goren. He crossed his arms again.
"Well, if Nicole really is the great person you say she is, we won't find anything, right?"
Joshua looked down at the notepad again. And picked up the pen.
"Syracuse?" Eames was leaning back against the desk in the Sergeants' office, exchanging information with Goren. "But if she's in Syracuse, it's almost ten o'clock. How is she getting back here to meet Emmie by the deadline?"
"She might not be there now, maybe… Maybe she's planning on taking Emmie there," Goren hypothesized. "What did you find at the apartment?"
Eames sighed. "A whole lot of nothing. If we hadn't had surveillance on her, I would say Nicole was never even there."
"She cleared out," Goren said. "She has no intention of going back there. She left her partner to hang."
"She didn't kill this one, for a change."
Goren half-shrugged. "She thought he didn't know anything worth killing him to keep quiet." He looked around. "Where's Emmie?"
"She went to the locker room," Eames said. "You ready to set something up?"
Goren nodded absently, now leafing through his binder.
"I'll go get her."
"Emmie?" Eames called into the women's locker room. Hearing no response, she stepped in. "Emmie, are you in here?" Still only silence echoed back at her.
Eames walked through the room, looking at each locker. Finally, she came to the one marked 'Handsen #4013.' A quick glance through the cage-type door revealed a uniform and gun belt neatly hung on the hooks, holster empty and civilian clothes gone.
"Damn it," Eames muttered, running back out to the bullpen where Goren was waiting.
So what did we think of chapter 8? Ended in suspense? Or not really? Loved it? Hated it? Let me know!