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Dan leaned close to the Plexiglas divider. “Tell me what happened, Ossie. And don’t leave anything out. Even if you think it’s of no importance. I’ll decide what’s important.”
“There’s nothing to tell. Cops showed up at my foster home to arrest me. I got scared and ran. Who wouldn’t?”
“That’s all it was? You panicked?”
“For years I was trapped in that cabin with Joe. I finally get free and someone wants to lock me up again? Seriously?”
“You freaked.”
“Exactly. If that means what I think it means.”
He made a note. This kid didn’t go to school with everyone else. He apparently had access to lots of books, but he didn’t watch television. Some slang might be foreign to him. “Did you kill your uncle?”
“Of course not.”
“Look at me this time when you answer the question. Did you kill your uncle?” He had years of experience evaluating witnesses, and had trained in the science of micro-expressions and how to read them. His accuracy rate for reading out liars was excellent.
“No. I did not kill him. Why would I?”
“Look at me when you say that.”
“I did not kill my uncle. I barely know him.”
Slight twitch behind the right eye. Instead of averting his eyes, he forced eye contact to an unnatural degree.
“He’s your uncle. Assuming you are Ossie Coleman.”
“Oh great. Now you don’t believe I am who I am.”
“The police doubt it. They booked you as John Doe.”
“They’re trying to screw me out of my inheritance. This whole thing is about screwing me out of my inheritance.”
A distinct possibility. But the fact that the kid said it didn’t make it true. “Why would someone else kill Harrison?”
“Uh, because there’s about a billion dollars at stake?”
“Plenty for everyone.” When Ossie finally broke his deadlock eye contact, his eyes went up and to the right, which neurologists would say was a sign that he was creating. Inventing.
Ossie seemed earnest, and most of his twitches could be attributed to the stress of being tackled by cops and thrown in jail. No one would be at their best after an experience like that.
Or he could be a lying murderer....
“There was no logical reason for you to run. You have an attorney. You knew I’d represent you.”
“Let’s see how logical you are when the Gestapo knocks on your door.”
“That’s no reason—”
“Maybe not to your lily-white skin, but believe me, when someone my shade sees the cops coming, you know your life is in danger.”
“You’re making a gross—”
“I talk to people, back at the house. I read. I know what’s going on in this world today. How many black kids have been killed by cops?”
He fell silent. He didn’t have a total at the tip of his tongue—but he knew it was significant. “Sometimes people put themselves in dangerous situations,”
“Yeah, and sometimes it’s an innocent man in his backyard with a cellphone.”
He wouldn’t bother arguing. Some cops did behave differently when they encountered people of color. “Are you saying that you’ve been targeted because of your race? Because if I may remind you, everyone in your family is of the same race.”
“I don’t know what motivates these cops. I know they’re bigots, some of them. And I know the only thing they hate more than a black kid is a rich black kid.”
Couldn’t deny that one, either. “Look, I know the detective in charge, Jake Kakazu, who by the way is mixed-race Asian, educated at Oxford. He didn’t come to your house because you’re black. He came because he found evidence linking you to the murder. Including, apparently, your name written on a bathroom mirror.”
“I don’t know anything about that. I didn’t put it there.”
“No one thinks you did. They think the victim did—to identify his murderer.”
“How was Harrison killed?”
“They don’t know. The body was completely dissolved in the bathtub.”
“And they think I did that?”
It did seem unlikely. “Why would anyone want to frame you?”
“So the money goes to someone else.”
“Any particular suspects?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think the old man trusts me. And what about Benny, the one married to that nightmare woman? Couldn’t stand to look at me. What will this murder rap do to our lawsuit?”
“Nothing good. I’ll file a motion, try to delay things, but that won’t last forever. Judge Fernandez appears to be in a hurry. I can try to exclude evidence relating to the murder charge, but it’s already all over town. The judge will know, the jury will know, and no one will let a suspected murderer inherit. We need to get this charge dismissed. Or we need to go to trial as quickly as possible.”
“I need that money for college.”
“Look, Ossie, beating the murder rap is about a trillion times more important than that money. If you’re convicted, you could spend the rest of your life in jail. You could even get the death penalty. Let’s save your ass first and worry about tuition later.”
“I did not kill my uncle. Or anyone else.”
“Were you there? At the theater?”
“No. Never been there in my life.”
“Do you know what happened to Harrison?”
“No idea. I’m innocent.” His voice rose “I did not kill this man. Someone is trying to set me up!”
Something about the tone of Ossie’s voice made the short hairs on the back of his neck rise. He peered deeply into Ossie’s eyes.
He was definitely picking up on something, but it was more than the usual micro-expressions, twitches and tics and eye movements. Of course he saw anger and fear, but that was to be expected—innocent or guilty.
He was picking up on...a sense of injustice.
Exactly what he had dedicated his life to preventing.
You could hide and dodge and play the best poker face in the world, but there was still one distinctive look he had learned to perceive with certainty—the look of the innocent man. This kid had the look of someone who has been falsely accused.
The same look his father had. Every time he went to the prison to visit. All those years. Till his dad died, still locked up for a crime he did not commit.
That look was seared into his soul. That look he would never forget.
“I will do everything I can for you, Ossie. But if I find out you lied to me, I’ll be gone faster than a heartbeat. Understand?”
“Got it.”
He hoped so. And he hoped he hadn’t just made a horrible mistake.