said in her honey-soft drawl, “you aren’t going to do your client much good if you take everything so personally. Right now, you ought to be cozying up to Agent Yu, here. She’s your new best friend, seein’ that whatever screws up my case helps you.”
Oh, yeah, plenty of history between these two. Normally a DA didn’t give a wobbly young PD advice—not good advice, anyway. Lily wanted to know what the deal was with these two, but not now. She looked at Deacon. “Where’s that interview room?”
The jail wasn’t much different from a dozen others Lily had seen. Newer than some, which meant it ought to seem cleaner, but it didn’t. The usual tang of disinfectant hovered over other scents, nothing her human nose could decipher precisely. Nothing pleasant, though. She was glad she lacked Rule’s sense of smell, and even gladder she was wholly numb to whatever psychic effluvia clung to the place. How could even a blocked empath stand working directly over it?
Must be a damned good block, she decided.
The interview room was beige all over. It held one table, two chairs, two guards, and a man in an orange jumpsuit, handcuffs, and no shoes.
Lily knew from the file that Roy Don Meacham was five-six, one seventy, Caucasian, brown and brown, and had turned thirty-nine last December. The brown hair was thinning, the brown irises were surrounded by pink whites, and the 170 pounds was mostly muscle and mostly in the upper half of his body. His shoulders were disproportionately wide, his torso long and husky, his hips skinny, and his legs short.
He looked like a balding gorilla with really bad allergies.
The DA hadn’t come in with them, electing to watch from behind the one-way mirror on the wall to the right of the door. Deacon had. He claimed that Meacham was unstable, subject to fits of violence, and he wasn’t taking any chances. With two young, brawny guards—one Hispanic, the other as dark an African American as Lily had ever seen—the sheriff’s caution seemed overdone, but understandable. It would be embarrassing as hell if a prisoner in his charge hurt a fed.
Kessenblaum amazed Lily by speaking gently. “Hey, Roy Don. They treating you okay?”
“Hey.” Meacham’s gaze jumped around before settling on Kessenblaum. He had a deep voice, appropriate for the barrel-shaped chest. It reminded her of Rule’s father, Isen. “What the hell is it now? You finally convince these assholes to let me go home? I hope you brought me some cigarettes this time. A man needs a goddamned smoke in this place.”
What he said was normal. The way he said it wasn’t. The words skittered into each other abruptly or dragged in odd places, as if he’d forgotten the normal rhythms of human speech.
Kessenblaum shook her head. “Not getting out today, I’m afraid. This is Agent Yu of the FBI. She wants to talk to you.”
The pink-and-brown eyes lighted on Lily, blinking fast, as if sending secret semaphores of distress. “FBI. Crap. I don’t want to talk to no FBI . . . Why you here? You’re too damned little. Don’t look like no FBI agent.”
Lily moved forward. “Are your eyes bothering you, Mr. Meacham?”
“My eyes?” He seemed puzzled. “You oughta arrest these assholes for locking me up. Got no reason. I need to go home. Becky’s bound to be worried about me, gone so long.” He frowned, still blinking. “How long I been gone, anyway?”
“Four days.” Lily pulled out the only other chair in the room and sat across the table from Meacham. He’d been hand-cuffed with his hands in front, as she’d asked. Those hands rested on the table, the fingers restlessly twining and untwining. “Seems longer, I bet.”
“Longer. Yeah.” Blink, blink, blink. “Becky’s good with the kids, but they need a man around. Got to get home, take care of them.”
He’d been told. More than once, he’d been told that his wife and children were dead, that he was under arrest for killing them. Lily didn’t think