Page 54 of Save Her Life

Except he wasn’t confident enough to face me…“Okay. There are some things you need to ask.” She ran through them fast and then said, “Let’s go.” She brushed her arm through the air in a sweeping motion, hoping it would encourage him to get moving.

He quickly caught up and kept his strides even with hers. She entered the observation room and found Elwood standing near the one-way mirror looking in on Duane Novak and a portly fellow with a bad combover.

“That’s Otto Richardson, Novak’s attorney,” Brice told her.

“Thanks, but I figured as much. By that, I mean, his lawyer. I didn’t know his name,” she added.

Brice smiled at her. “I understood. Okay, so do I know everything?”

“You do.”

Brice left them and showed up on the other side of the glass a few seconds later. Both Richardson and Novak sat straighter when Brice knocked and then turned the door handle. Richardson touched his client’s shoulder briefly. Brice entered the room and no sooner sat down than the lawyer spoke.

“You might as well dismiss my client right now. You have had no right to hold him and have violated the law.”

Sandra could feel Elwood staring at her profile, but she refused to acknowledge him.

“What did you do?” he said quietly.

“Please, shh.”

“Shh? I’m your boss and you shush me?”

She looked over at him now. “I didn’t mean any disrespect. I’m just… frustrated, disheartened. The hours are flying by, and I’m no closer to finding Olivia. But that man in there”—she jabbed a pointed finger toward Novak—“knows where she is.”He has to!

“And if he doesn’t?”

She pinched her pendant. “Let’s not even discuss that possibility right now.”

Back in the interview room, the conversation had carried on with Brice and the lawyer. Brice must have rebuttedwith something, and Richardson was red-cheeked and on the defense.

“My client says that he requested a lawyerthree timesbefore the questioning stopped.”

“Is that true?” Elwood’s entire body was facing her now, and she turned to him.

“It’s not true.” Technically the first time the wordlawyerwas framed by a question about whether he should get one. Not a request. “It was once.”

“My God, Sandra.” Elwood looked up at the ceiling.

“I just need to know where he has Olivia.”

“By breaking the law. If this guy took her, he might never go away for it.”

“I told you before my priority is Olivia.” She’d deal with Novak in her own way if it came down to it, or at least she liked to think she could take the law into her own hands. Her dead father might come back and haunt her from the grave though. He was a good cop. She’d strived to be that all her career. So what the hell…? This situation with Olivia was knocking her off balance.

“We were just talking with your client,” Brice said in response to the lawyer’s accusation, drawing her and Elwood’s attention back to the room.

“It doesn’t look like ‘just talking’ when we’re both sitting here across from a fed, my client suspected of kidnapping a teenage girl. And all the while you’re harassing my client, he told me that he made it clear he has no idea who the girl even is.”

Brice set out a photograph of Olivia and pushed it across the table in front of Novak.

He shook his head and looked at his lawyer, who shoved the picture back.

“He doesn’t know her. What proof do you have against him?”

Brice took out a photo plucked from the coffee shop’s video. “He followed her out of DiversaBlend on M Street NW.”

“I told you I never went to that one,” Novak said.

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