“Then someone jumps you in an airport bathroom, threatens you, orders you to stop poking your nose around, but for some reason doesn’t kill you-another miraculous survival.”

Yeah, that one doesn’t make sense to me yet. They could have killed me but didn’t want to-

“And then an associate of Diana Hotchkiss, this highfalutin Chinese lobbyist Jonathan Liu, is found dead in his house from a gunshot wound. You had nothing to do with that, either.” She leans into me. “I have all that right?”

Basically.

“And this is all the work of some grand government conspiracy like the ones you see on the History channel? Reaching all the way to the White House itself?”

Close enough.

“Wow.” She scratches her head. “Sounds like you’ve really stumbled onto something big here.”

Her dead eyes and sarcastic tone tell me that I haven’t sold her yet. I guess I can’t really blame her. It’s pretty hard even for me to believe.

“You know what, Benjamin? Four hours ago, I wouldn’t have given a flying fuck about Diana Hotchkiss or Jonathan Liu because they’re the feds’ problem. But now all the shit you’re in has gotten one of our detectives killed. Someone I’ve known for over fifteen years. Someone with two daughters at Cornell. So now, Benjamin, now I do give a shit. I give a shit very, very much.”

She swears a lot. My father always said that swearing was a sign of laziness. Of course, he was a shit-eating fucking asshole.

Holly Hunter in Copycat nailed the female cop role, in my opinion. She didn’t try to be something she wasn’t. She was courteous and pleasant, but tough when necessary. Anyone who thinks Harry Connick Jr. is just a singer needs to see that flick.

“So now that I give a shit, I want to figure this thing out. You know what we cops do, Ben? When we’re trying to figure something out?”

Consult a Ouija board? Flip a coin?

“We start with the easy explanation,” she says, answering her own question. “So in that spirit, let me ask you a couple of questions that might make this whole thing a little simpler. Is that okay with you, Ben? I mean, since we’re on the same team here and all.”

Angie Dickinson was pretty hot in that old TV show Police Woman. Even more so playing the role of the sex-starved wife in that Brian De Palma flick Dressed to Kill and that TV mini-series Pearl. She was good at playing sex-starved. If she were married to me, she wouldn’t be sex-starved.

Calm down and focus, you idiot. This cop is trying to corner you.

“The first question, Ben: Were you in Diana Hotchkiss’s apartment around the time she was murdered?”

That one stops me. I show a sudden interest in my fingernails.

“Ah, cat’s got your tongue on that one. Okay, Ben, then question number two: Were you in Jonathan Liu’s town house in the last forty-eight hours?”

I look away. I can almost feel the walls closing in on me.

“See, I’ve got a different theory, Benjamin Casper. And it doesn’t involve cover-ups and dark alleys and conspiracies. Wanna hear my theory, Ben?”

I need a lawyer. This is exactly what I was afraid of the moment I saw Jonathan Liu dead in his bedroom.

“I’m all ears,” I say.

Chapter 50

One of my favorite interrogation scenes in a movie is in L.A. Confidential, when that detective had two different suspects in different rooms and he could play the audio from one room into the next with the flip of a switch, so whenever one of them said something incriminating, the other would hear it. The best one is The Usual Suspects, which was one gigantic interrogation scene. Those are two of my favorite Kevin Spacey flicks, but you have to include American Beauty and Seven in any serious discussion of his work.

“You seem nervous, Ben,” says Larkin. “Like you got a lot of thoughts rolling around in your head.”

You don’t know the half of it.

“I can’t blame you,” she says. “I mean, you have Diana Hotchkiss, a death that looks like a suicide. Then Jonathan Liu, a death that looks like a suicide. And then…”

I look away while she delivers the punch line.

“Then we have your own mother,” Larkin says. “A murder that looked like a suicide. You learned that trick at a young age, didn’t you? That’s what we call a modus operandi, Benjamin. You skated on a murder charge as a boy, but you never forgot that little trick, did you? You saved it up in case you needed it again-”

“You don’t know anything about my life,” I say.

“Oh, I know all about your life.” She picks up a file from the table. “Your father was some distinguished history scholar at American U who specialized in American presidents. You apparently have come to learn quite a bit of presidential trivia yourself, which I guess is your way of, what, bonding with Daddy?”

“Don’t talk about my father.”