He said, “I’m leaving.”
She nodded. “You want to wait here for a minute?” He nodded in understanding, taking a step outside the room, and she looked at the kid. “Do you want a coffee?”
“If there is Coke, I’ll take that,” he replied. “I didn’t even get dinner.”
“Hopefully we can get you home real fast,” she told him.
With that, she disappeared and got him a can of Coke from the vending machine and poured herself a coffee. She should have brought one for Simon. As she walked back to the interrogation room, she held it out to him, and he looked at her in disgust. “Right, plain old coffee is not exactly your style, is it?”
He shrugged. “Let’s just say I’m not desperate enough.”
“Same diff.” She smirked, as she returned to the interview room, shutting the door behind her. She gave the kid his Coke, put down her coffee cup, then dug into her pocket for her pad of paper and a pen and dropped both on the table. She set her phone on Record and got his permission to tape this exchange. “Okay, let’s go, from the top.”
Rick looked at her in surprise. “Top of what?”
“The top of this nightmare,” she stated, “way back to the day that your sister was killed. Where were you a couple days in advance of that?”
He looked at her in shock. “I can’t remember way back then.”
“Your sister was held in your house for more than twenty-four hours.”
He slumped in his chair. “Seriously?”
She looked at him. “You didn’t know she was tortured?”
“Sure, I know she was tortured. My parents were away. They took a week’s holiday and went over to the island to visit with friends. It was their one chance to get away, and I don’t remember how many anniversaries it was, but they almost never went away.”
“And you two were supposed to look after each other, I suppose.”
He nodded. “Yes, exactly.”
“And you took off with your friends into your world of drug deals?”
He took a long slow deep breath. “Yes,” he admitted, “and the trouble is, I was under the influence for so much of that time that I don’t have answers for you.”
She nodded. “Which is why the cops couldn’t get anywhere because the one person who was supposed to be there with answers wasn’t there mentally.”
“No,” he agreed, “and that’s also, as you know, why I confessed.”
“So, when you got home that day, it was the first time you’d been home in how long?”
“Several days, but, no, I don’t know how many.”
“Two, maybe three?” she asked, making circles on her pad of paper. “You didn’t hear anything when you first got home?”
“Remember that whole ‘under the influence of drugs’ thing?”
“I get it,” she noted. “I’m trying to figure out if the killer was actually in the house at the time.”
“I don’t know,” Rick replied, “and, to be honest, I’ve thought about it a lot. I just don’t have any answers.”
She nodded. “Okay, so from the top, let’s just go. You tell me what happened, and I’ll take a fresh statement.”
“And what, compare it to the last one to see if I lied?”
“Sometimes, after the passage of time, that distance jogs memories, or sometimes it clouds it,” she noted. “Remember. I’m not here looking to pin this current murder on you. I’m trying to figure out why and how somebody would choose to set you up for it.”
“And I don’t fucking know either,” he cried out, reaching up to scrub his face as he took a deep breath. Taking a few deep breaths, he continued. “Okay, let’s go. Our parents left for a week on a Friday night. They were supposed to be coming back Friday or Saturday of the following week. My sister and I had a big fight that first Friday night, and I took off. She didn’t want to be home alone.” His voice hitched for a moment. Then he took a deep breath and kept going.