Page 32 of The Piece You Stole

“You know what we like to say around here?” Detective Ferdinand yanks hard, and I get moving again.

A tiny part of me is relieved to leave the hum of the station's main room behind us, a space full of messy desks, burned coffee, and staring eyes. The long looks at my short dress and heels made it clear what the cops with busy mouths and lazy eyes were thinking. Whore.

We halt just outside a black wood door in the long, cold hallway. Two signs on the white-painted brick tell me everything I need to know. I scan the top one first: interview room number five. My gaze drifts down to the other which warns me I’m about to enter a room with audio and video recording devices.

My stomach tightens because nothing good is going to happen on the other side of that door, not with how eager Detective Bradley and Ferdinand seem to want to get me in there.

Detective Bradley closes a large hand around the doorknob and turns to peer down at me. “We like to say that it’s the guilty ones who request a phone call. The innocent ones tell us what we want to know, and we let them go.”

Does he honestly expect me to buy that?

“And if I told you I didn’t kill him? Would you let me go?” They won’t believe me. There’s no way they’d have spent hours, if not days, digging through my past if they believed for a second I was innocent.

Detective Bradley’s smile makes me shiver. If that was how he was looking at me in the hospital, I fully understand why Simon Trevor wouldn’t have wanted to leave them in a room with a seemingly unconscious girl. “Is that so?”

I nod.

“That the reason you were so eager to run from the hospital?” he adds.

They said they were arresting me for killing Simon, but that’s not why they did it. Or not only. I drove Felix’s car off a bridge, and then I ran from the hospital. Did that make me look more guilty? Probably.

A long moment stretches, and I hold my breath as I wait to see what he will say.

Detective Ferdinand barks out a laugh, the sound so sudden I jump in surprise. “Get the door, Bradley. Tonight promises to be an interesting one.”

Tonight might be interesting, but the room that Detective Ferdinand pulls me into is anything but. The only things in the too-small room are three chairs made of the same dark wood as a table with a small black machine on it. The recording device that the sign outside warned me about, I guess. Above two chairs is a round white clock. Eleven p.m. But it’s the mirror filling nearly an entire wall that draws most of my attention.

The door slams shut with finality behind me.

I jump again, my heart spiking with alarm. And at the thought of being trapped in here with two cops who I wouldn’t want to be in a crowded mall with, much less a quiet, enclosed room.

As Detective Ferdinand pulls me toward the desk, my attention goes right back to the mirror.

On TV shows, there’s always someone standing on the other side, some important person watching detectives break down a criminal they suspect of murder. Usually, it’s the cop’s boss. Sometimes it’s someone even more important. Like FBI.

These cops believed I killed a doctor. Is that worthy of a visit from the FBI?

Detective Ferdinand drags the single chair facing the two others out from under the table before he again shoves me down onto it with unnecessary force. This time he doesn’t even bother to tell me to sit. Just puts me where he wants me before he rounds the table to join Detective Bradley, who's already making himself comfortable across from me.

Out of the corner of my eye, something red blinks at me, and I turn.

A camera.

The sign outside the room warned me I’d be entering a recorded room, but seeing the small, round camera, with its red, staring light, makes it more real than any printed sign pasted to a white-brick wall.

When Kade would watch me, it would set something alight deep inside me. Something that hungered for him never to take his eyes off me.

This camera does not excite me. It fills me with horror because I know it’s only there to catch me in a lie. These cops think I killed Simon Trevor, and in this room, it’s their job to prove it.

Detective Bradley slaps a thin brown folder against the wood. Even though I watch him do it, I still jump. I must be more on edge than I’d thought. From the cop’s answering smiles, they know it, and they don’t mind it one little bit.

Detective Ferdinand sits back in his seat, folds his arms across his chest, and regards me through curious black orbs. “How did a girl like you get someone like Rylan Treveiler?”

He’s not the first person to look at me like that. Before Rylan spent hundreds of thousands of dollars kitting me out in designer clothes and makeup, I read the same look on everyone’s face.

Trash. That’s what they were thinking, even if they didn’t come right out and say it.

The fading bruises from sharing a life with a grieving alcoholic for a father didn’t help convince them otherwise.

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