Thin Air Page 0,55

breath and felt tears sting my eyes. "Then can you help me?" I sounded pathetic. I felt pretty pathetic, too. He seemed genuinely saddened by that.

"No. I can't." He stared at me for another dark second before he said, "This isn't my case, Baldwin. They don't let detectives who have personal connections work murder cases, so whether I believe you or not, it really doesn't matter."

"But you could tell them-"

"I already did," he interrupted. "I'm sorry. It probably won't do any good, whatever I say about you. So I'd advise you to start thinking about confessing, if you want a lighter sentence. Make this easy on yourself."

"I'm not going to confess to a murder I didn't even commit!"

"I thought you said you didn't know," he said. "Didn't remember."

"I don't," I said. "If I had a clue, I'd tell you. All I know is that I woke up a couple of days ago freezing to death in the forest, and things went downhill from there. Believe me, as bad as this is, I don't think going to prison is exactly the worst of my problems."

He gave me a strange smile. "I see. Then it's more or less the usual for you."

"Is it? Great. My life sucks."

He chuckled. I drank coffee. He silently joined me, sipping from his own ceramic mug embossed with PROPERTY OF LVPD. "So what are you doing here?" I asked him. "Minding the store while they decide how to crack me?"

"Somebody's got to. Watch you, I mean."

"And they picked you."

"I volunteered. Look, don't you want to call anyone? Your friends? What about your sister?"

I'd love to have called Lewis, but I had zero idea how to go about it. I had no idea where my sister was, or if I wanted to have anything to do with her. Though jail was certainly making me feel a lot more familial. "I'd call my sister if I had a number for her." I left it open-ended, hoping that maybe he'd have more resources than I could think of. Well, of course he did; he was a detective. Finding people was more or less his job description.

He shrugged. "I'll see what I can do. The way your sister lived, she shouldn't be hard to track down." Someone knocked at the one-way glass, and he nodded toward it. "Looks like our time is up. Nice to see you, Joanne."

"Same here," I said faintly. He got up slowly, favoring his side, and I saw the lines of pain groove deeper into his face as he took a shallow, careful breath. "Detective? You going to be all right?"

"Yeah. Better every day. You hang in there."

I watched him head for the door. As he opened it, I said, "You believed me awful fast about the amnesia." Not that it was going to help me one way or another, but I found that curious. Cops weren't the most credulous of people, and he had reasons to distrust me, obviously. "Why?"

Rodriguez raised his eyebrows just a bit. "Maybe I like you, Ms. Baldwin. Maybe I think you're the real thing."

"The real thing."

"Innocent."

"Oh," I said softly. "I doubt that. I really do. Come on, tell me. Why do you believe me?"

"Quinn," he said. "I know how you felt about him, and there's no way you could say his name like that if you remembered him at all, especially after what he did to you. You're good. Nobody's that good."

Rodriguez didn't go into detail, and I didn't ask. I was almost certain that was yet another memory I was better off not having in the total-recall file. He nodded once to me, a kind of comrade's salute if not actual friendship, and stepped outside. There was a murmur of conversation in the hall, and then the door opened again and the first two detectives came back inside and shut the door. They took up seats on the other side of the table, facing me.

"Detective Rodriguez," I said. "Mind if I ask what happened to him?"

"Stabbed," Tweedledee said. "Dumped in a ditch, left to die. He's a tough bastard, though. Wouldn't want to be the guy who shivved him in the long run." He studied me closely. "You seemed chummy, considering."

"Considering what?"

"Considering he was partners with the guy you killed. Thomas Quinn."

My lawyer arrived, some recent law school graduate with the ink still wet on her diploma. We chatted. I explained patiently about the memory thing. She didn't seem optimistic. Well, she probably didn't have reason to be, and she