the hospital hadn’t summoned you. You were a per-diem employee, only on duty when you were called. But the hospital didn’t call you on the afternoon of July seventh, 2004. You showed up anyway and took it upon yourself to clean the morgue. Mopping the floor, wiping down stainless steel, and this is according to a security guard who’s still there and happens to be in a video clip we’re about to show you. Farrah died and you headed straight up to the tenth floor, to the ICU, to wheel her body down to the morgue. Sound familiar?”
He stared at the brushed steel tabletop and didn’t reply. She couldn’t read his affect. Maybe he was in shock. Maybe he was calculating what he was going to say next.
“Farrah Lacy’s body was transported by you down to the morgue,” Berger repeated. “It was captured on camera. Would you like to see it?”
“This is fucked up. It’s not what you’re saying.” He rubbed his face in his hands.
“We’re going to show you that clip right now.”
A click of the mouse, and then another click and the video began: Hap Judd in scrubs and a lab coat, wheeling a gurney into the hospital morgue, stopping at the shut stainless-steel refrigerator door. A security guard entering, opening the refrigerator door, looking at the tag on top of the shroud covering the body, and saying, “What are they posting her for? She was brain-dead and had the plug pulled.” Hap Judd saying, “Family wants it. Don’t ask me. She was fucking beautiful, a cheerleader. Like the dream girl you’d take to the prom.” Guard saying, “Oh, yeah?” Hap Judd pulling the sheet down, exposing the dead girl’s body, saying, “What a waste.” The guard shaking his head, saying, “Get her on in there, I got things to do.” Judd wheeling the gurney inside the refrigerator, his reply indistinguishable.
Hap Judd scraped back his chair and got up. “I want a lawyer,” he said.
“I can’t help you,” Berger said. “You haven’t been arrested. We don’t Mirandize people who haven’t been arrested. If you want a lawyer, up to you. No one is stopping you. Help yourself.”
“This is so you can arrest me. I assume you’re going to, which is why I’m here.” He looked uncertain, and he wouldn’t look at Lucy.
“Not now,” Berger said.
“Why am I here?”
“You’re not being arrested. Not now. Maybe you will be, maybe you won’t. I don’t know,” Berger said. “That’s not why I asked to talk to you three weeks ago.”
“Then what? What do you want?”
“Sit down,” Berger said.
He sat back down. “You can’t charge me with something like this. You understand? You can’t. You got a gun somewhere in here? Why don’t you just fucking shoot me.”
“Two separate issues,” Berger said. “First, we could keep investigating and maybe you’d be charged. Maybe you’d be indicted. What happens after that? You take your chances with a jury. Second, nobody’s going to shoot you.”
“I’m telling you, I didn’t do anything to that girl,” Judd said. “I didn’t hurt her.”
“What about the glove?” Lucy asked pointedly.
“Tell you what. I’m going to ask him about it,” Berger said to her.
She’d had enough. Lucy was going to stop it right now.
“I’m going to ask the questions,” Berger said, holding Lucy’s eyes until she was satisfied she was going to listen this time.
“The guard says he left the morgue, left you alone in there with Farrah Lacy’s body.” Berger continued her questioning, repeating information Marino had gathered, trying not to think about how unhappy she was with him right now. “He said he checked maybe twenty minutes later and you were just leaving. He asked you what you’d been doing in the morgue all that time and you didn’t have an answer. He remembered you had only one surgical glove on and seemed out of breath. Where was the other glove, Hap? In the video we just showed you, you had on two gloves. We can show you other video footage of you going inside the refrigerator and staying in it for almost fifteen minutes with the door open wide. What were you doing in there? Why’d you take off one of your gloves? Did you use it for something, maybe put it over some other part of your body? Maybe put it on your penis?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head.
“You want to tell it to a jury? You want a jury of your peers to hear all this?”
He stared down at the table, moving his finger