“I don’t need to tell you jack shit.”
“We can take you downtown to the drunk tank and let you sober up there for a while, until you’re ready to talk to us,” she stated. “I’m good with that too, and the city is always happy to have guests in the jail.”
His frown deepened. “I didn’t do nothing wrong, so you got no reason to take me anywhere.”
“Well, you beat up your girlfriend pretty badly,” she reminded him, “so that’s one thing we would love to have a serious talk with you about. But, more than that, she’s missing, and we want to know where the hell you have her.”
He stared, and it’s almost as if she could see the moment when it registered that he was actually in deep shit. He started to sputter. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I didn’t do anything. I might have just tossed her around a little bit. But, I mean, nothing more than she deserved.”
“Deserved?” Kate snapped.
He looked at her and nodded. “Yeah, she deserved it. I didn’t do anything.” And damn if he didn’t start to sob.
She stared at him in horror, as she looked over at Rodney, who was leaning against the front door. “You don’t need to cry now. It’s well past time for that.”
“I loved her,” he mumbled.
“Was that before or after you beat the crap out of her?”
“I didn’t mean to,” he whispered. “I never mean to.”
“Did you ever hear about anger management?” she asked, with a note of sarcasm.
He glared at her, coming out of his tears almost too quickly for comfort, making her wonder if they were fake. And yet they had seemed pretty real at the time. She’d seen many a drunk with mercurial mood swings, and this was definitely another example.
“I really loved her.”
“What I don’t like,” Kate noted, “is that you’re using past tense.”
He stared at her. “Are you telling me that she’s not dead?”
“I have no idea. Are you telling me that she is?”
He started to shake his head. “I didn’t kill her.”
“Maybe not, but you’re not making me feel any more confident about that statement than I was when I first walked in here.”
He stared bleary-eyed at the door. “Did I let you in?”
“Yes, you did,” she replied, aiming for patience and failing.
He sighed, then curled up into the couch again. “Well then, you can just go and leave again. Because I’ll just sit here and finish my bottle.”
“Bury yourself in self-pity while a woman out there is suffering?”
“She shouldn’t have left me then,” he replied callously.
Kate wanted to beat him up herself. What an ass. But she also knew that wouldn’t give her the answers she needed. “Do you know where she would be?”
“At her friend’s,” he said, “at least I would assume so.”
“And which friend is that?”
“The one you already talked to,” he spat, with a sneer.
“How do you know I talked to her?”
“Because she only had the one friend, so that’s the only one friend who you would have gone and talked to,” he explained. “Jesus, you guys are so stupid.”