“I want a lawyer,” he said. In the show, that had been the line of dialogue that changed everything. Once you asked for a lawyer, all the questioning had to stop.
Peggy laughed. “Gonna lawyer up, are you?” she mocked. “That’s cute. You think you’re in charge. That’s extra cute. Here’s the deal, Graham, and I need you to wrap your head all the way around it. You are not in control. You don’t even have a control to reach for. I control everything that happens to you from this point forward. You need to understand that. You also need to understand that pissing me off is a bad platform to start from. Now, I’m going to ask you again, but I’m only going to ask you once. What happened last night?”
“Probably something a lot like what you think it was,” Graham said. While he had no clue what was happening, he had the sense that Peggy was more bluster than action. How much could she do, after all, in a place that was teeming with cops? That was another thing: He didn’t believe that she was a cop. He didn’t know what she was, but she didn’t have the swagger of a cop.
Whether that was good news or bad news was a different discussion.
Peggy glared. Graham saw real anger behind her eyes. He glanced up at the camera in the corner near the ceiling. He pointed to it. “People are watching,” he said. “You gonna hit me?”
Peggy seemed to grow larger, as if there were a big balloon inside of her that someone had pumped with air.
“I need you to tell me what happened last night,” she repeated.
“Why?” he asked. “Why do you think that anything at all happened?”
Peggy turned red.
“Want to know what I think?” Graham taunted. “I think you think that you already know, and you just want me to confirm.”
“There was shooting,” Peggy said. “At your house. People were killed.”
Graham said nothing. He realized what Jolaine had been trying to tell him in the moments before they’d been taken into custody. People don’t really know anything until someone confirms it for them.
“Your parents were involved in the shootings,” Peggy went on. “Your father was killed.”
Those words landed hard, like a slap. He understood that she’d said it to knock him off balance, and as much as he wanted it not to be so, he realized that she’d succeeded. He felt tears press from behind his eyes. “Does this make you feel big?” he asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Does it make you feel big to bully a kid who can’t defend himself? Does it make you feel all-powerful and shit to tell me that my father was killed? What kind of father did you have if you could talk to me that way?”
“Watch your mouth, Graham.”
Graham heard movement on the far side of the door, and then the distinctive sound of a key sliding into the lock. It turned, and the door opened, revealing the brown-uniformed cop who had earlier taken him to the bathroom.
“That’s it,” the cop said. “This interview is over.”
Peggy looked at him like he was a cockroach. “No, it’s not,” she said.
“Yes, it is,” the cop said. “As of right now.”
“Who the hell are you?” Peggy demanded.
“I am Deputy Milford Price,” the cop said. Unremarkable in every regard except for the mole under his right eye, his face was redder than the last time Graham had seen it. “And you are Peggy Darnell, who happens to have no profile in any record I accessed.”
“That fact alone should tell you something,” Peggy said. “Don’t interfere with what I’m doing.”
Deputy Price crossed the threshold and walked to Graham’s side of the table. “He had it right, you know,” he said. “You’re a bully and you prey on kids. It doesn’t get a lot lower than that.”
“I have business to attend to, Deputy.” She said the word deputy as if it smelled bad.
Price smiled. He beckoned Graham with two fingers. “Come with me, son.”
Graham stood. He wasn’t sure what was going down, but he sensed that he was destined to come out on the positive end of it. He felt a sense of peace when Deputy Price placed a hand on his shoulder.
“I’m sure yours is a complicated job,” Price said. “That’s the impression I got from the word that came down not to interfere with you.”
“It’s a good idea to follow orders,” Peggy said.
“Except for the immoral ones,” Price countered. “That was a hard-learned lesson for my father, and he made sure that I learned it, too. He was in the Army, back during Vietnam, when all the lines got blurry. Back when I was a boy—”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, must we really—”
“Yes, we must really,” Price said. “He was never right after that war. He was never able to justify the choices he was forced to make, and he never even confided in me what those choices were. But I knew for damn sure what the lessons were. He drove them into me just as surely as a nail is driven into wood.”
“Oh, good God, I cannot wait to hear.” Backed into a corner, Peggy became 100 percent bitch.
“When my daddy found out that I was going into law enforcement, he told me to pay attention to one thing above all others. And that one thing was the morality of what I was doing. Not all laws are just, he told me, and not all criminals are bad. Sometimes, people do bad things for good reasons. As an officer of the law, my job is to know the difference.”
“This is truly moving,” Peggy mocked. “I’m sure there’s a point here somewhere.”
“I’m sure there is, too,” Price said. “Just as all criminals are not bad, not all folks with badges are good. In fact, some folks should never be given badges in a million years because they don’t respect the power that comes with it.”
Graham watched the discussion like a tennis match, his head pivoting from point to point.
“And you think I’m one of those people,” Peggy said. Her body language said that she was bored and angry.
“I know that you’re one of those people,” Deputy Price said. “What kind of monster does an adult have to be to speak to a child the way you were speaking to this young man?”
“I believe I made it clear to your superiors that I am here on a matter of national security.”
“That’s no excuse for the way you’ve been speaking to Graham.”
“And how do you know what I’ve been saying to Graham?” Peggy said. She stood. “I left specific orders that this discussion was to be off the record.”
Deputy Price gave the kind of mocking smile that told Graham that he was definitely on his side. “Well, you know how it goes sometimes. Word doesn’t always leak down.”
Peggy glared.
“This isn’t your station house, Agent Whatever-your-real-name-is. This is my station house, and we’re in the United States of America, not in some secret CIA prison. The boy asks for a lawyer, you stop asking questions. You start taunting him about the loss of a parent, and I step in. You’re done.”
“You have no idea what you’re messing with,” Peggy said.
“You have no idea how little I care,” Deputy Price replied. “I sleep well at night, and when my journey on this spaceship is over, I expect to have a pleasant eternity in Heaven.” He paused for effect. “I have every confidence that we won’t run into each other there.”
Using gentle pressure on the base of Graham’s neck, he urged the boy toward the door. “Come on,” Price said. “We’ll get you settled down someplace more comfortable.”
This time, there were no handcuffs.
The walls of the hallway were made of the same yellow-brown brick as the interior of the meeting room. The floor tiles were the same brown-flecked white, too, only out here, the floors had a sparkle. Graham suspected that had something to do with people caring enough to clean them from time to time.