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Jalbert says, “Four.”

“Pardon me?”

“Nothing. Just thinking out loud. We’ll get him, Ella. That confidence of his… the arrogance… will bring him down.”

“How serious were you about the polygraph?”

Jalbert gives a humorless laugh. “He’s either a sociopath or an outright psychopath. Did you feel that?”

She considers, then says, “Actually I’m not sure I did.”

“I am sure. Seen his kind before. And nine times out of ten they can beat the poly. Which would make it pointless.”

They leave the room and walk down the hall. The young cop who brought Coughlin in asks them how it went.

“Turning the screws,” Davis says. Jalbert likes that and gives her a pat on the arm.

When they’re outside, Davis digs her cigarettes out of her bag and offers them to Jalbert, who shakes his head but tells her to go ahead, the smoking lamp is lit. She flicks her Bic and takes a deep drag. “The lawyer was right. We don’t have much, do we?”

Jalbert looks out over Main Street where not much is happening—par for the course in Manitou. “We will, Ella. Count on it. All else aside, he really does want to confess. You almost had him. He was wavering.”

Davis doesn’t think he was wavering at all, but doesn’t say so. Jalbert has been doing this for a long time and she trusts his instincts over her own.

“Two things continue to bother me,” she says.

“What?”

“How relieved he looked when you told him you had DNA from the doer and how he smiled when I told him we had her fingerprints on the dashboard of his truck. He knew I was lying.”

Jalbert runs a hand through what remains of his red and gray hair. “He knew you were bluffing.”

“But the DNA thing, it was just so…”

“So what?”

“So immediate. Like he thought he was off the hook.”

He turns to her. “Think about the dream, Ella. Did you believe that for even a single second?”

She answers without hesitation. “No. He was lying. There was no dream.”

He nods. “Keep that centered in your thoughts, and you’ll be fine.”

24

Jalbert has a five-room bachelor ranchette in Lawrence, almost within shouting distance of the home office in Kansas City, but he won’t be going back there until Coughlin has been arrested, indicted, and bound over for trial. His boxy two-bedroom suite in Lyons is close to both Manitou and Great Bend. Well… in Kansas terms they’re close. It’s a big state, the thirteenth largest. Jalbert likes to keep track of such things.

He stands at the window on Saturday evening, watching dusk turn to dark and thinking about the interrogation of Coughlin that morning. Ella did a fine job, Jalbert couldn’t have done better himself, but it was unsatisfying just the same. He didn’t expect Coughlin to lawyer up; he expected him to confess.

Next time, he thinks. Just have to keep grinding.

He’s good at grinding, but tonight he has nothing to grind on. Nothing to do. He doesn’t watch TV and he’s run the chairs twice. He got a couple of Hot Pockets at the convenience store across the street and zapped them in the microwave. Three minutes, 180 seconds, 1 to 18 added inclusively with 9 left over. Jalbert doesn’t like leftover numbers, but sometimes you have to live with them. The Hot Pockets aren’t particularly tasty, and Jalbert has an expense account, but he never even considers ordering from room service. What would be the point? Food is just body gasoline.

He’s never been married, he has no friends (he likes Davis, but she is and always will be an associate), he has no pets. Once, as a child, he had a parakeet but it died. He has no vices unless masturbation counts, which he does once a week. The problem of Coughlin nags at him. He’s like a fly that keeps avoiding the rolled-up newspaper.

Jalbert decides to go to bed. He’ll be up at four, but that’s all right. He likes the early hours, and he may wake with more clarity on the Coughlin problem. He undresses slowly, counting to 11 each time he takes off an item of clothing. Two shoes, two socks, pants, underpants, shirt, undershirt. That makes 88. Not a good number; it’s one favored by neo-Fascists. He takes his suitcase out from under the bed, removes the gym shorts he sleeps in, and puts them on. That takes him up to 99. He sits in the desk chair to add one more, which takes him to a hundred. A good number, one you can depend on. He goes into the bathroom. There’s no scale. He’ll ask for one tomorrow. He brushes his teeth counting strokes down from 17. He urinates, washes his hands, and kneels at the foot of his bed. He asks God to help him get justice for poor Miss Yvonne. Then he lies in the dark with his hands clasped on his narrow chest, waiting for sleep.

We don’t have much, Ella said, and she was right. They know he did it, but the truck was clean, the trailer was clean, and he showed up with a lawyer. Not a very good one, but a lawyer is a lawyer. The phone may give them something, but given the way Coughlin handed it over…