“… I know all about you…”
Foster is good, all right, but he’s only one weapon in the arsenal. Looking around the conference room, Pellegrini can take additional satisfaction, knowing that for this last interrogation, he is firing every gun.
As with the second interrogation of the Fish Man-the February encounter staged in the captain’s office-this confrontation has also been choreographed. Once again, photographs of the dead girl have been placed directly in front of the suspect. This time, however, Pellegrini is using everything in the case file-not only the color photographs from the crime scene but also the larger black-and-white shots from the overhead camera at Penn Street. Every last insult to Latonya Wallace-the ligature across the neck; the thin, deep puncture wounds; the long, jagged tear of the final evisceration-is arrayed in front of the man that Pellegrini believes to be the killer. The photographs have been selected for maximum effect, yet Pellegrini knows that such a brutal psychological ploy can itself damage any confession.
It is a risk that every detective runs when he gives up too much of his case in the interrogation room, and in the case at hand, the risk is doubled. Not only could a defense attorney later claim that the Fish Man had confessed only after being shocked and awed by the horror of the photographs, but that same lawyer could argue that the confession itself included no independent corroboration. After all, even those facts that the detectives kept secret back in February-the ligature strangulation, the vaginal tearing-are now tacked to the conference room wall. Even if the Fish Man does break down and recount his murder of the child, no one can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that such a confession is genuine-unless the Fish Man’s statement contains some additional details that can be independently corroborated.
Pellegrini knows all that; still, the photographs have been tacked to the bulletin boards, one glossy obscenity after another, each staring back at the store owner, each a terrifying appeal to conscience. There will be no interrogation after this one, the detective reasons, no other opportunity for which the last secrets of the murder need be preserved.
At the center of one bulletin board, Pellegrini has placed his trump cards. First there is the chemical analysis of the burned tar and wood chips from both the little girl’s pants and the Fish Man’s store. Each sample is represented by a long bar graph and the two graphs are remarkably similar. Prepared by the trace laboratory of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the analysis of the samples was an exacting piece of work, and the lab added a veteran analyst to its report. If Pellegrini needs some instant expertise, the man is outside the room now, ready and willing. So, too, are Jay Landsman and Tim Doory, the lead prosecutor in the Violent Crimes Unit, who would evaluate the results of the interrogation and make the ultimate decision of whether to charge the murder.
Above the cross-tab charts on the bulletin board, Pellegrini has fixed a blue line zoning map of the Reservoir Hill area, with between eighty and one hundred structures highlighted in yellow-each noting the location of a fire call within the past five years. The Fish Man’s store on Whitelock Street, however, is marked in darker orange. The map is in every real sense a lie-a deception that Pellegrini can use without any fear of discovery. In truth, he has been unable to eliminate the vast majority of those yellow marks on the map; any one of them can theoretically have been the site at which the little girl’s pants had been smudged. And yet, for the purpose of this interrogation, nothing like that can possibly be true. For this interrogation, Pellegrini will tell the Fish Man that the chemical analysis has left no doubt: The black smudges on the dead girl’s pants came from the darker orange square at the elbow of Whitelock Street.
The chemical analysis-the linchpin of this interrogation-gave them real leverage, but it also gave them the Out. Maybe you didn’t kill her, Foster can tell him. Maybe you didn’t touch her and violate her and then choke the life from her. Maybe you weren’t the one who took a kitchen knife to her afterward, emptying her until you were sure she was dead. But, Foster can say, you know who did do it. You know because she was killed on that Tuesday night and then left in your burned-out fish store all day Wednesday. She was left there to wait for the rainy darkness of early Thursday morning. She was in that store and the soot and burned wood on her pants proves it. If you didn’t kill her, maybe someone else-someone you know, or someone whose name you don’t remember-hid the little girl inside your store.
Beyond the snare of the chemical analysis, Pellegrini has little else: the failed polygraph, the acknowledged prior relationship with the dead girl, the absence of any verifiable alibi. The case is motive, opportunity and apparent deception, coupled with one lonely piece of physical evidence. A final trump card to be played at a key moment lies deep in Pellegrini’s jacket pocket, where he carries one last photograph. But that old picture can’t be called evidence; it is, the detective knows, no better than a hunch.
Foster meanders through the opening monologue. After spending half an hour establishing his own expertise, the veteran interrogator proceeds to lionize Pellegrini as well. Foster acknowledges that the Fish Man and his principal pursuer have met in the past, but, he explains, Pellegrini did not give up on this case after those earlier confrontations. No, Foster says, he continued to work on you. He continued to gather evidence.
The Fish Man remains impassive.
“What’s going to happen here today is different from what happened when you talked to Detective Pellegrini before,” says Foster.
The store owner nods slightly. A strange gesture, thinks Pellegrini.
“You’ve been here before, but you didn’t tell the truth,” says Foster, turning the corner and launching into the first confrontation. “We know that.”
The Fish Man shakes his head.
“I’m telling you we know that.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“Yes,” says Foster quietly. “You do.”
Very slowly and very deliberately, Foster begins to explain the chemical comparison of the dead girl’s pants and the samples from the Whitelock Street store. At the appropriate moment, Pellegrini reaches down and pulls the soiled pants from a brown evidence bag, then lays the garment on the table, pointing to the black smudges near the knees.
The Fish Man doesn’t react.
Foster presses on, pointing to a photograph of the dead girl behind Newington Avenue, showing the store owner that the black smudges were there on the pants when they found her.
“Now look at this,” he says, pointing to the ATF report. “These lines here show what these stains are made of, and these over here, they show what it is that Detective Pellegrini took from your store.”
Nothing. No reaction.
“See this map,” says Pellegrini, pointing to the bulletin board. “We checked every building in Reservoir Hill where there has ever been a fire and none of them match these stains.”
“None of them except yours,” adds Foster.
The Fish Man shakes his head. He is not angry. He is not even defensive. To Pellegrini, his lack of response is unnerving.
“She was in your store and she got that stuff on her pants,” says Foster. “Either just before or just after she was killed, she got that stuff on her pants in your store.”
“I don’t know nothing about that,” says the Fish Man.
“Yes, you do,” says Foster.
The Fish Man shakes his head.
“Well, then what is this stuff from your store doing on her pants?”
“It can’t be. I don’t know how that can be.”
Somehow they’re not getting through. The interrogators return to their visual aids, covering the same ground a second time. Foster leads the store owner through it slowly enough so that there can be no mistaking the logic.