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Danny’s had enough of this. He takes it out of his pocket and slides it across the table. Jalbert steps forward and pounces on it, as if afraid Danny will change his mind.
“The passcode is 7813. And I’ll have my IT guy check it when I get it back, just to make sure you haven’t added anything.” This is pure bluff. Danny doesn’t have an IT guy.
“We don’t roll that way,” Davis says.
“Uh-huh, and you don’t lie about fingerprints, either.” He pauses. “Or DNA from semen.”
For a moment Davis looks off her game. Then she leans forward again and gives him her you can tell me anything smile. “Let’s talk about your dream, okay?”
Danny says nothing.
“Do you have these fantasies often?”
Ball says, “Come on, now. It wasn’t a fantasy if the woman’s body actually turned out to be there.”
Another snort from Jalbert.
“Well, you have to admit it’s awfully convenient,” Davis says.
“Not for me,” Danny says. “Look where I am, woman.”
“Do you mind telling us about this… dream again, Danny?”
He tells them the dream. It’s easy because it hasn’t faded a bit, and although his trip out there was similar, there’s no cross-contamination between the dream and the reality. The dream is its own thing, as real as the KICK A BUCK sign above the pastries. As real as Jalbert’s peculiar wooly widow’s peak and avid yet lusterless eyes.
When he’s finished, Davis asks—for the official record, Danny assumes, since it’s been asked before—if he’s had previous psychic flashes. Danny says he has not.
Jalbert sits down next to his partner. He drops Danny’s phone in the pocket of his black coat. “Would you be willing to take a polygraph?”
“I guess so. I’d have to go to Great Bend for that, wouldn’t I? So it would have to be after I finish work. And I’d have to get my truck back, of course.”
“Right now cleaning windows and sweeping floors is the least of your worries,” Jalbert says.
“Are we done here?” Ball says. “I believe Mr. Coughlin has answered all your questions, and more politely than I would have done in his position. And he’ll need his phone back ASAP.”
“Just a few more,” Davis says. “We can check on your trip to Colorado and your trip to Wichita, Danny, but that leaves a lot of time between the first and the twenty-third. Doesn’t it?”
Danny says, “Look at the locations on my phone. When I’m not home, it’s usually in the glove compartment of my truck. The two boys I work with at the high school can tell you I was there every day from seven-thirty to four. That’s a good amount of the time you want to know about.”
Edgar Ball isn’t a criminal lawyer, but he’s not stupid. To Jalbert he says, “Oh my. You don’t know when she was killed, do you? Or even when she was grabbed.”
Jalbert gives him a stony look. Color creeps into Ella’s cheeks. She says, “That’s not relevant to what we’re discussing. We are trying to eliminate Danny as a suspect.”
“No, you’re not,” Ball says. “You’re trying to nail him, but you don’t have a whole lot, do you? Not without a time of death.”
Jalbert wanders back to the poster of O.J. and Johnnie Cochran. Davis asks for the names of the boys Danny works with.
“Pat Grady and Jesse Jackson. Like the political guy from the seventies.”
Davis scribbles in her notebook. “Maybe your girlfriend can help us to nail down some of the times when—”
“She’s my friend, not my girlfriend.” At least she was. “And stay away from DJ. She’s just a kid.”
Jalbert chuckles. “You’re in no position to give us orders.”
“Danny, listen to me,” Davis says.
He points at her. “You know what, I’m starting to hate the sound of my first name coming out of your mouth. We’re not friends, Ella.”
