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“Nothing. I just… nothing.”
He goes to the two in the living room and claps them shut. He goes into the bedroom and comes back with two more. He leans them against the wall beside the TV. “I have to take those back to the business center. Been meaning to. Want a soft drink? There’s plenty in the minibar.”
“No, thank you.”
“Is it Coughlin? Did he let something slip?”
“I didn’t talk to him.”
Jalbert frowns. “I specifically asked you to re-interview him, Ella.” Then the frown lightens. “Was it Becky? The girlfriend? Or the daughter! Did she—”
“Listen, Frank. There’s no easy way to say this. You have to step away from the case. That’s for starters.”
He’s giving her a quizzical little smile. He has no idea what she’s talking about.
“Then it’s time for you to retire. You’ve got your twenty years. Twenty and more.”
“I don’t—”
“And get some professional help.”
The little smile is still there. “You’re talking nonsense, Ella. I’m not going to retire. Not even thinking about it. What I’m going to do—what we’re going to do—is collar Danny Coughlin and put him behind bars for the rest of his life.”
She’s surprised by fury, but later she’ll think it was there all along. “What you’re doing is risking any chance we have of making a case against him! You outed him to Plains Truth, Frank!”
The smile is fading. “What gave you that crazy idea?”
“It’s not crazy, it’s a fact. You outed him and you outed yourself with your counting thing. At the end of the message you left, you said fifteen. It had nothing to do with anything… except when you add the number of choices on the menu together, one to five, you get fifteen.”
Now the smile is gone. “On the basis of one number you jump to the conclusion that I—”
“Sometimes a random number pops out of your mouth—half the time you don’t even know you’re doing it. That’s what happened on the recording Peter Andersson played for me. I heard it. You can hear it, too, if you want to. I’ve got it on my phone.”
His lips part in a grin, showing those eroded teeth. He grinds them, she thinks. Of course he does.
“I wouldn’t want to report you for these false accusations, Ella. You’ve been a good partner, couldn’t ask for a better one. But if you persist, I’ll have to. There’s no way you could have recognized the voice that made that call—that anybody could recognize it—because it was disguised by some gadget.”
“Yes. It was. But how do you know that?”
He blinks and there’s the briefest of hesitations. Then he says, “Because I asked him. Andersson. I interviewed him.”
“Not at any time when I was with you.”
“No, from here. On the phone.”
“Will he confirm that?”
“I’m confirming it to you right now.”
“Nevertheless, I’ll ask him. If I have to. And we both know what he’ll say, don’t we?”
Jalbert doesn’t reply. He’s looking at her as if she were a stranger. And probably right now that’s just how he feels.
She points to the chairs. “Do you count those? Or maybe set them up and count the steps between them?”
“I think you better leave.”
“I see your lips moving sometimes when you’re counting. There’s even a name for it. Arithmomania.”
