Best Laid Plans(40)

Lucy flipped open her notebook and held up the photo of the unidentified girl in the hallway outside room 606. “Would you be able to give us the name of your girlfriend? Maybe she has additional information for us.”

James Everett couldn’t hide his shock. He stared at the picture, his face pale, an involuntary twitch making his head jerk almost imperceptibly. “I have nothing more to say,” he said quietly.

“Are you sure?” Barry asked.

“I asked for my attorney.”

“We haven’t placed you under arrest.”

“I don’t have to talk to you without an attorney.”

“Would you like to call him? We can wait. Or, I can arrest you for obstruction of justice, bring you in front of a judge, then once all the preliminary paperwork is done, interview you formally.”

His eyes widened. “You can’t arrest me! I haven’t done anything.”

Lucy said, “Obstruction of justice is when someone who may or may not have committed a crime impedes the investigation into a crime, whether or not said individual is a suspect.”

“I’m not impeding anything! You haven’t even told me what this is about.”

Barry said, “We did, twice. Harper Worthington’s phone was found in your hotel room. This girl is wanted for questioning as a potential witness. She was seen in the area where Mr. Worthington was found dead, and she was seen an hour later going into your hotel room. Feel free to call your attorney. We’ll wait.”

Everett cleared his throat and shook his head. “No. Absolutely not. I’ll contact my attorney and then arrange a meeting later this week. I’m not going to be bullied by a couple of feds.”

Barry tensed beside Lucy. Barry was a serious, even-tempered agent. The fact that he was getting angry showed just how much Everett was getting to him. But his voice was calm when he said, “If Agent Kincaid and I walk out of this office without the information that we want, I will require you to submit to questioning by five P.M. today at FBI headquarters, or I will get an arrest warrant for obstruction of justice and compel you to speak under oath in a public court of law.”

Everett’s face reddened. “You can’t do that.” But he wasn’t looking at them.

Barry didn’t say another word. The longer Barry remained silent, the more Everett squirmed.

Finally, Everett said, “I need five minutes.”

“We’ll wait here.”

Everett couldn’t get out of his office fast enough.

Lucy was impressed. “I just had the best lesson in field interrogations ever.”

“He pissed me off.” He glanced at her. “You kept your cool. It’s easy to get rattled with people like him.”

“The only sign that you were angry was that your lower jaw shifted forward and your neck muscles tightened.”

“You can see that?”

“One of my psych classes dealt solely with physical reactions to emotional stress. It’s easy with a guy like Everett who uses his bravado and pomp to steamroll over people, harder when someone is calm and even tempered like you.”

“Can you tell when people are lying?”

“Usually. Some people are really good at it, though. They tell half truths and use emotion to work for them rather than against them. The best liars are those who are telling mostly the truth, or who have a sociopathy where they believe their own lies to the point that they themselves can’t distinguish between truth and fiction. They’re harder to pinpoint unless I have solid evidence I can use to rattle them.”

“People probably don’t like playing poker with you.”

She laughed, then covered her mouth. “Actually, I’m a really bad liar.”

“Our goal here is to find out who that girl is,” Barry said. “She’s the one who took the phone from Worthington and left it in Everett’s room. Do you think he knew about the phone?”

“No,” Lucy said. “I don’t even think that he cared about the hotel, until you mentioned when the phone was left there. That’s when he started to worry about why we were here.”

Everett returned ten minutes later, along with his attorney—a tall, lean brunette named Miriam Shaw.

“I’m Mr. Everett’s corporate attorney,” Shaw said, “and if I feel that this conversation is treading too far into criminal law, I’ll halt the interview and we’ll make arrangements for Mr. Everett to meet with you once he retains another lawyer.”

“This should have been simple,” Barry said. “Mr. Everett is the one who made it complicated.”

“And you’re the one who threatened him with arrest.”

“Only if he breaks the law,” Barry said. He nodded to Lucy.

She pulled a photo of their Jane Doe from her folder. “We need to find this girl. We know she was in your hotel room Friday night. We need her name and phone number.”

Everett stared at the picture, lips in a tight line.

“Mr. Everett,” Lucy prompted.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“You don’t know what?” Lucy asked.

Shaw said, “My client has just said he didn’t know this girl.”

“Then what was she doing in his hotel room from twelve thirty A.M. until four forty-five A.M. Saturday morning?” Lucy asked.