“I’M NOT going anywhere,” I tell Antoine. “You know what she was doing better than I do. She was looking at alternative suspects for Nathan Stofer’s murder.”
“No,” he says, but he doesn’t mean I’m wrong.
“The sex-trafficking ring,” I say. “You know she was looking at that, right?”
He turns his head away.
“The Ukrainian general’s business, KB Investors Group. The one Nathan Stofer was trying to keep from joining the Stratton Tower project. C’mon, Antoine, you know all this! You know more than I do about—”
“Man, I can’t.” He slams down his fists, the shackles clanging on the table. His words come out as a plea through a choked throat, tears coming now, his turn to cry. “You’re already putting my family at risk, just being here.”
“They threatened you,” I say. What I figured. He pleads guilty four days after Valerie’s death. Someone got to him.
He leans forward, pauses, looks over at the prison guard through the glass door, leans farther forward still, his chin only inches from the table. His words spill out in a harsh whisper. “You think I like sitting in this shithole for something I didn’t do? It’s keeping my family alive.”
“Your fiancée, Cassietta. Your mother and sister. They threatened them.”
He looks at me, defiant, but something else, too. Sympathetic. Apologetic. “How do I know, just being here, you didn’t get them killed?”
“Nobody knows I’m here,” I say.
He laughs. Shakes his head as if he pities my ignorance. Then turns stone cold. “They can kill a cop’s wife and make it look like suicide,” he whispers. “They can waltz into County all official and dressed up, like it’s nothing, and lay it out for me. Cassie’s home address, where she works, how they’re gonna take turns on her before they slit her throat. How they’re gonna dump gasoline on my sister and light a match while my mama watches. Then the motherfucker walks back out like nothing? They got people everywhere, man.”
“It didn’t come from you,” I say. “I’d never give you up.”
“You probably already did, just coming here.”
“I’m gonna take them down, Antoine. Every one of them. They won’t be able to hurt you or your family.”
He pauses. Thinks about it. That thing he’s been suppressing, that has secretly plagued him since the first day they locked him up—hope.
“Don’t you want out of here, Antoine? Don’t you wanna be free? Marry Cassie? See your mother and sister? Have your life back?”
He wags a finger at me, cocks his head. “Don’t do that, man.”
“I can make that happen, Antoine. All I need—”
“Go on now!” he says, slamming back from the table, the shackles sliding off the table as he bounces to his feet. “I got nothin’ to say to you, cracker po-lice! I took my twenty cuz I shot that damn fool. I didn’t like the look on his smug-ass face, know what I’m sayin’?”
“Just a name, Antoine,” I say. “Just a location.”
He bangs on the glass window. “Man, I got nothin’ to say to this guy!” he calls out. “Let me the fuck outta here!”
I drop my head. It’s over.
Two corrections officers enter the room. “Sorry, Detective. If he doesn’t want to talk to you…”
…then he doesn’t have to. I know.
“What a waste of a morning,” I say, loud enough for the guards in the room, and probably the ones outside, to hear. “I come all this way, and this kid doesn’t tell me squat.”
Antoine, back to his cocky prison-yard attitude, catches my eye. He knows my last comment was for him.
But in fact, Antoine did tell me a couple of things.
One: those dreams of mine are wrong. Valerie didn’t kill herself. I wasn’t there when she did. They killed her. They did this.
And two: the person who delivered the threat to Antoine? The man who waltzed into county lockup in a fancy suit, as he said?
Only a lawyer could have done that.