Nick grinned. "We'll make absolutely sure the two of you get all the credit for arresting the mayor's grandson," he said.
Grévy's eyes narrowed and she took a step closer to him. "Is this all just a game to you?" she asked.
"Certainly not," Nick said, his face a perfect mask of sincerity that didn't fool Judy for a second.
From the way that Grévy took another step closer to Nick and leaned down to look him in the eye, it was clear she saw the insincerity as well. "Justice is supposed to be blind, fox," she said, her muzzle inches away from his.
Nick didn't flinch as she continued, "It shouldn't matter who you know."
Judy got the feeling that Grévy meant "you" in the specific case of Nick rather than in the general sense, and it went a long way towards explaining the zebra's dislike for her partner. She apparently thought that Nick had escaped punishment for his own misdeeds simply on the strength of his connection to Judy.
Before Grévy could continue or Nick could fire back with a cutting remark of his own, Judy put herself between the two mammals. "Hey!" she said, "We're all on the same side here."
The zebra snorted. "Mammals don't change," she said, giving Nick a hard look.
Judy tensed, wondering if Grévy was about to do something more, but the zebra turned and started pointedly walking away. "Keep an eye on your partner, Hopps," she called over her shoulder, "If you're not careful, you'll go down with him, celebrity or not."
"Always a pleasure talking to her, isn't it?" Nick asked brightly, "Such a ray of sunshine."
"She can't talk to you like that," Judy protested, and started off after the zebra.
Before she could finish taking a single step, Nick grabbed the back of her collar. "It's not worth it," he said, his face serious.
"But—"
"But nothing," he said firmly, "Grévy's got a few years of service on us, but she's never going to get promoted because she won't play the game. And every time she gets passed over because she's rigid and unpleasant and cares more about the letter of the law than the spirit, she'll blame everyone but herself. That's enough for me."
Judy considered Nick's take on Grévy. She didn't particularly care to think of office politicking as a game, but he had a point. Judy wondered how her own career would be going if she had never gotten involved in the missing mammals case. Would she have eventually turned out like Grévy, blaming others and refusing to consider how her own attitude affected the way her fellow officers treated her?
"It's still not right for her to talk to you like that," Judy said softly.
Nick shrugged. "I don't really care what she thinks."
He said it lightly, but it looked like he meant it. "Why don't you call the mayor, and I'll go see what I can get out of his grandson before he figures out how to get him off the hook?" Nick asked.
Judy sighed. "Sure, take the easy job."
Judy reluctantly dialed the mayor's office, not looking forward to the conversation. The rings of the phone were agonizing, but eventually her call was answered by a chirpy female voice. "Mayor Escurel's office, how may I direct your call?"
Judy forced herself not to sigh. Of course he wouldn't directly answer his calls. "This is Officer Judy Hopps," she said, "Can you tell the mayor it's urgent? I need to talk to him now."
"Just a minute, please," the mammal on the other side of the phone said in that same unnaturally cheery tone.
Judy tried distracting herself as she waited on hold by trying to guess what song the muzak was butchering. She thought it might be something from R.A.M. or the Naked Bear Ladies, but her musings were interrupted when the hold music ended and Escurel answered. "What is it, Officer Hopps?"
Judy had done her best to plan out her end of the conversation ahead of time, and it was apparently time to find out how the mayor would take the news. "Your grandson's been arrested for the attempted sale of prescription drugs, resisting arrest, and assaulting an officer."
"I see," said the mayor, and while he spoke softly Judy could practically hear the undercurrent of raw anger in his voice, "I'm very disappointed to hear that."
"Those are the only charges currently against him," she continued, "But he is being held until his bail gets set."
"You are a mammal of your word, aren't you?" the mayor asked, his voice tinged with bitterness, "I appreciate the call."
With that, he hung up. Judy stared at the phone for a moment. Technically, she hadn't violated the agreement that she had made with the mayor; Roberto had been arrested on charges totally unrelated to the assault on Holly Leaves. Still, she wouldn't put it past the mayor to find some kind of way of getting back at her for his grandson's arrest and what would likely be a media circus. The call had been much shorter than she had anticipated, which meant that Nick was probably still interrogating Roberto. She sighed as she leaped to her feet and headed towards the interrogation rooms. She just hoped that Nick was having some luck.
The interrogation room actually looked a lot like the ones that showed up in movies and TV shows. One wall was a large one-way mirror and the furniture was limited to a few chairs and a single table. When Nick entered, Roberto was already sitting, and the squirrel pointedly ignored him.
"Hi Roberto," Nick said, "I'd like to ask you a few questions."
"I'm not saying anything without my lawyer here," Roberto said defiantly.
"OK," Nick replied easily, "What's your lawyer's number?"
Roberto shifted uncomfortably in his seat and didn't reply.
"What's your lawyer's name? We can look them up," Nick continued.
When Roberto made no response, Nick shot him a disarming smile. "You don't have a lawyer, do you?"
Roberto's silence continued a moment longer, before he sighed and collapsed in his chair. "No."
"Would you like us to call your grandfather?"
Roberto crossed his arms. "No. And I'm not saying anything else."
Nick shrugged, making a careful mental note about the squirrel's reaction to the mention of his grandfather. "That's your prerogative," he said, "But I still have to ask the questions, even if you don't answer. Bureaucracy, you know how it is."
The squirrel remained silent, but he was fidgeting in his seat and tapping one foot against the leg of his chair. "Could I get you something?" Nick asked, "Something to drink, maybe some ice for your face?"
Roberto's right eye had swollen completely shut, an apparent memento from Grévy arresting him. Nick wondered if she had tackled him; considering how much bigger the zebra was, he must have hit the ground pretty hard. "I'd like some ice," Roberto said grudgingly.
"Alright," Nick said, and then hit the intercom button, "Could we get an ice pack in here?"
Nick waited patiently, perfectly willing to allow Roberto to stay silent. When an officer entered the room with a bag of ice wrapped in a paper towel, Nick gestured towards Roberto and the officer handed it over. Roberto winced and quietly hissed in pain as he put the ice pack to his black eye. Once he had it in place, the squirrel relaxed marginally.
"Bobby—do you mind if I call you Bobby?—things aren't looking so great for you right now," Nick said.
The squirrel made a noncommittal noise that Nick took as an invitation to continue. "I can help you if you can help me," he continued, "We spoke to Mammal Resources at the studio. They said you were caught trying to steal Holly Leaves's underwear and—"
"That's a lie!" the squirrel interjected heatedly, "I was leaving her a letter. They just wanted to get rid of me!"
"OK," Nick said, "But they also said that you made threats when you were fired. Something about making everyone regret it?"
Roberto's ears drooped and he slumped further down in his chair. "I got carried away," he admitted, "But I'd never hurt Holly. Never."
Nick considered the squirrel carefully. "That's an interesting choice of words," he said, "Since the only one who got hurt was Holly's boyfriend."
"I didn't do it!" Roberto said, dropping his ice pack and pounding the table with clenched fists.
Nick didn't react to the squirrel's display of emotion. "I didn't say that you did," Nick replied, "But you can see how it looks, can't you?"
"I didn't do it," Roberto repeated, somewhat more quietly, as he picked his ice pack back up and reapplied it to his eye.
"Then help me," Nick urged, leaning over the table, "Do you have any idea who might have done it?"
Roberto hesitated. He opened and closed his mouth several times, apparently struggling with whether or not to say something. Nick did his best to maintain his cool outward appearance while he resisted the urge to try pressuring the squirrel. One of the lessons that he had learned hustling—and one of the lessons that was surprisingly applicable to life as a cop—was that most mammals would eventually talk just to fill the silence. "Well," Roberto eventually started, "I guess—"
He was cut off when the door to the interview room slammed open and a middle aged badger in an expensive suit stormed in, trailed by the same officer that had delivered the ice pack. "My client isn't going to answer any more questions," the badger said icily as he took up a position by Roberto, "Particularly questions unrelated to the charges that he was arrested for."
Nick held up his paws in a gesture of acquiescence, while inwardly he wished that the lawyer hadn't shown up for another minute. Roberto had been difficult for Nick to read, but the squirrel had clearly been extremely nervous. That wasn't unexpected for a mammal who stood facing some pretty serious charges, so Nick wasn't sure whether or not he was lying. It made Nick wish that Grévy and LaMerk hadn't caught Roberto committing a crime; it would have made it easier if the squirrel didn't have two different crimes he could have been worrying about.
When Nick left the room, Judy joined him, coming from the small adjoining room on the other side of the one way mirror. "His grandfather arrange the lawyer?" Nick asked.
"Probably," Judy replied.
"So what now?" Nick asked.
"LaMerk got Roberto's real address. Why don't we check it out?"
Nick smiled. One of the things he appreciated most about his partner was her seemingly boundless determination. "Can I drive?"
Judy laughed, already off down the corridor like a shot. "No, we're in a hurry here!" she called back.
Nick opened the door to Roberto's apartment and instantly recoiled. A second later Judy caught the stench and understood his reaction. It was terrible, a combination of unwashed mammal and rotting food. "I don't think he'll be getting his security deposit back," Nick said after he took a moment to recover.
That was something of an understatement. The apartment was even smaller than Judy's, with a ceiling low enough that Nick couldn't quite stand up straight. Aside from the arc that the door swung through, the floor was covered with crumpled clothes, half-empty takeout containers, and assorted other garbage. The small bed was covered with a mound of dirty laundry that Roberto evidently slept in if the depression in the center was any indicator. There was a small table with a laptop and a stack of empty bottles, fast food wrappers, and junk mail on it, along with a battered office chair that was the only piece of furniture not covered by the mess. The walls themselves looked greasy and were splattered here and there with mysterious stains and mold. Once they were inside, Judy carefully looked around, her nose wrinkled, gingerly standing on the bare spot of the floor by the door.
It hadn't been visible when she was standing outside the room, but the wall that the door was in was a shrine to Roberto's obsession. He had covered the wall with pictures and articles about Holly Leaves. The somewhat haphazard and uneven arrangement of items made it like a creepy reflection of Hyacinth Leaves's own shrine to her daughter. Judy recognized some of the photos from the packet that Clawhauser had put together, including one that had been of Holly and Jacques walking paw in paw. The picture on Roberto's wall, however, had been trimmed to remove Jacques entirely. In addition to the photos, there were articles that had been printed off the Internet or cut out of magazines, most of which had lines highlighted. The common thread seemed to be that Roberto had highlighted personal information about Holly, like her favorite foods, hobbies, and seasons, but one stood out as particularly ominous. She recognized the article as being from the same issue of TV Weekly that Hyacinth had framed in her living room. Roberto had highlighted and underlined part of the interview in which Holly had said that she wished she could meet her personal heroine, Judy Hopps. It was also the only article on the entire wall that had something underlined as well as highlighted.
Judy frowned as she considered the facts of the case. The only mammal injured in the attack had been Holly's boyfriend Jacques, who had been removed from every photo of the couple that Roberto had on his wall. Had Jacques been the real target of the attack? Had Roberto been attempting to take Holly's boyfriend out of the picture in reality while simultaneously trying to grant her wish of meeting Judy? It made a twisted sort of sense, and Roberto's apartment didn't strike her as being the product of a balanced mind.
She continued looking around the room, carefully making her way to the table with the laptop. She cursorily flipped it open, fully expecting the computer to be locked but still willing to check. As she expected, it was locked, so she started going through the rest of the mess on the table. Most of it was literal garbage, and Roberto's stack of mail didn't seem to have anything worthwhile in it, just letters from creditors demanding payment and the same sort of junk solicitations that made up the bulk of her own mail. Judy was ready to move on to help Nick go through the mess on the floor when the image on the laptop's screen caught her eye. While she had been going through the items on the table, the computer's screen had switched from showing the lock screen asking for the password to a screen saver of images Roberto had apparently saved to its hard drive. Most of them looked like they had simply come off his cell phone, including pictures of menus and a shot of a park partially obscured by his thumb over the lens. But one of the images that came up was of a group of mammals on a stage holding a sign that read "Team Dramatically Personal." There were about two dozen mammals, most of them around the same size as Roberto; she hadn't immediately spotted him in the image because his fur was its natural red rather than the black that he had dyed it to. Judy thought she had spotted another recognizable face in the team, but she had spent enough time looking for Roberto that the picture changed before she could confirm it. The next image that came up, however, made it much easier. Roberto was hoisting a trophy that read "1st Place - Drama" while the same mammals from the prior image celebrated around him. One of the mammals, frozen in time clapping Roberto on the back, was a bunny with white fur with brown splotches.
"Hy!" Judy said.
Nick looked up from where he had been digging through the mess on the floor, and then out the open door where there was no one standing, and back at her. "Hi, Carrots," he said with a wave.
"What?" she asked, before realizing his confusion on the homophone, "No, I'm not saying 'Hi.' Hyperion! Look!"
She pointed at the laptop's screen. The image had changed again, but the current picture looked like it had been taken right around the same time as the previous one, and Hyperion Leaps was still plainly visible standing next to Roberto. Nick's eyes widened in understanding. "Wait a minute," he said excitedly, "Bobby said that he was trying to give a letter to Holly, but he never said that it was from him."
Judy hadn't been present for all of Nick's interrogation of the squirrel, but she had watched part of it through the one-way mirror and Nick had given her the highlights of what she had missed on their drive over to the apartment. Her own eyes widened as she realized the connection that Nick was making. "Hyperion said that he wrote a letter to Holly, but how would he have sent it to her? He didn't have her address and it wasn't one of the pieces of mail her agency received but—"
"Maybe he got his friend from the community theater group to deliver it for him," Nick finished, clearly pleased that she had caught on so quickly.
"But Holly never mentioned that letter," Judy said with a frown.
"The studio might have gotten rid of it so that Holly wouldn't know that someone was poking through her underwear drawer," Nick pointed out, "I got the feeling that Brenda wasn't telling me something. But Roberto and Hyperion clearly know each other, and that's what's important."
Judy mulled it over. It didn't quite make sense that both Roberto and Hyperion would mention the letter that connected them if they were trying to avoid getting charged, but not every criminal was exactly a mastermind. She turned her thoughts to some of the other details of the case. "Hyperion's store had the same kind of bouquet wrap as the one that the bolt cutters were hidden in," Judy said, her foot starting to tap in excitement as the pieces came together, "Do you think that they did it together? Or was Roberto just Hyperion's patsy?"
"I don't know," Nick said, "But I'm thinking that Roberto was the one at the door."
He pulled something off the floor and shook it out with a theatrical flourish. In one gloved paw Nick was holding up a yellow raincoat that looked exactly like the one that the perpetrator had been wearing in the video footage. "I think it's time we pay Hyperion another visit," Judy said.