"Yes." His voice was barely audible.
"You've said here and in other venues with Detective Woods that your girlfriend, Cassie Malone, was never at the Tyler Harbor Fishing Cooperative. Yet we now have evidence that not only was she in the building, but that her body was processed through the disposal system. Combine that with the witness that Detective Woods has, ready to put you and Cassie Malone at the fishing cooperative building just over two weeks ago... well, I believe there are some outstanding questions that need to be answered."
Samuel murmured something.
"I'm sorry. None of us heard what you just said, Mister Kosten. Would you care to repeat it?"
He looked up at us, face still pale, eyes wide open. "I said... I said, I think I want a lawyer. That's what I want. A lawyer."
I turned to Diane. "Detective Woods, I believe you have something to say to that."
"Yes, I do," she said crisply. "Mister Kosten, waiting in my office is an Assistant Attorney General from the New Hampshire Attorney General's office. She is prepared to make a deal. The deal is that when she comes in here, you give a full and complete confession to the murder of Cassie Malone, and the dismemberment and disposal of her body. In exchange for that deal, the death penalty will not be considered during your sentencing. You have thirty seconds to accept this deal. After the thirty seconds are over, the window closes, and you may get an attorney, for however much you can afford, or one that the state will provide for you, and take your chance in front of a jury, where the death penalty most assuredly will be considered in your sentencing. And if you think you can sway a jury with some nonsense story about self-defense or an accident, think of what will happen when the prosecutor goes into details of how you disposed of your girlfriend's body. Mister Kosten, the clock is now ticking."
He didn't use all of his thirty seconds.
In a voice just above a whisper, he said, "I'll take the deal."
Later Diane took me to dinner in what she said was the best restaurant in Tyler, and which I didn't think would make the top twenty list in my previous hometown, and after a second glass of wine, she said, "I can't thank you enough."
"Then don't bother yourself," I said. "We worked well together, and I'm just glad that Mister Kosten will now be a guest of your state prison system for the rest of his life."
"Oh, that he will, though I'm sure that his eventual defense attorney will scream like a stuck pig when he sees the videotape and reads the transcript of how the interview was conducted."
I took a sip from my own wineglass. "Courts have said, again and again, that it's permissible for police to fib while interrogating a suspect. You and I and that thoughtful State Police detective may have approached the line, but we never crossed it."
She sighed and looked at the wine bottle. A nice Bordeaux, it tasted fine after the day I had just gone through. She said, "We're lucky that poor Cassie never explained the in's and out's of radiation to Samuel. If she had, he would have known that entire demonstration with the Geiger counter was just so much bullshit. That nothing she was ever exposed to would turn up in an examination like that, and that her exposure would just measure one thing. One thing only. Amount of exposure. Nothing like a DNA analysis. There was so much bullshit being flung in that room from us it's amazing any of us could breathe. If Cassie ever told him anything... he would have walked out of there laughing."
I said, "Perhaps Cassie did tell him about it. And he promptly forgot. He seems to be that type of person."
"True... we were very, very lucky."
"How's that?"
"What you said earlier. He came that close to committing the perfect crime, without leaving any evidence behind. And I hate to contradict you, but you said earlier that there's always trace evidence left behind at a crime scene. Always. Well, not this time."
"But there was," I gently reminded her.
"The blood traces? Not usable and you know it. Nope, Samuel got out of there the night he killed her, clean as a whistle."
I said, "I wasn't thinking of the blood traces. No, he left something there, before he left. Something that is going to put him away for life."
"And what's that?"
I picked up the wine bottle, poured us each a fresh glass. "He left a trace of a trace. His guilt. Something that will never go away."
She laughed. "Okay. I stand corrected."
I put the bottle down, picked up my glass for a toast.
"To justice," I said, clinking my glass to hers.
She smiled, returned the gesture. "To guilt."
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Brendan DuBois of New Hampshire is the award-winning author of sixteen novels and more than 135 short stories. He is also a one-time “Jeopardy!” game show champion. “Fatal Harbor,” his latest novel, was published in May 2014.
His short fiction has appeared in Playboy, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and numerous other magazines and anthologies including “The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century,” published in 2000 by Houghton-Mifflin. Another one of his short stories appeared in "The Year's Best Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection" (St. Martin's Griffin, 2005) edited by Gardner Dozois
His short stories have twice won him the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, and have also earned him three Edgar Allan Poe Award nominations from the Mystery Writers of America. Visit his website at
www.BrendanDuBois.com
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