father’s tie and was made of a large piece of turquoise and some coral set in silver. In New Mexico, a bolo tie was considered as formal as a necktie; it was even the state’s official neckwear.

Joe, who had been watching Gil, said, “What’s the deal?”

“We have to get ready for the interrogation,” Gil said, taking his paddle holster off and putting it in his desk drawer.

“Wait, you said, ‘We have to get ready.’ That implies that we’re both doing the interrogation. Not just that you’re doing the interrogation.”

“That’s right,” Gil said.

Joe nodded to himself, looking pleased. “You think if you look all professional this guy is going to be more convinced to talk? Is that what all your books tell you?”

“Pretty much.”

“Cool.” Joe stood up, tucked his T-shirt into his pants, and locked his gun in his desk drawer. “I guess I need to start leaving a tie and dress shirt here, huh? This T-shirt just makes me look like your schlubby sidekick.”

Gil ignored the comment and asked, “So what should we think about before we get started with the interrogation?”

“That we are cool as shit?”

“Besides that,” Gil said. “Remember to always look for the good qualities in the person. Everyone has something decent in them.”

“So you find that decent thing and then exploit it?”

“Pretty much.”

“Anything to get a confession, huh, Gil?”

“Almost anything,” Gil said, thinking back to his interrogation of Rudy Rodriguez. The decent thing he had exploited in Rodriguez was his love of Ashley, even though it was love that was twisted beyond recognition. He sighed and then tried to get his head back into teaching mode. He wanted Joe to be able to get some experience out of all this mess. “So what should we take into account before we go in there?”

“The guy’s got no real experience with the system, which gives us a much better chance.”

“Why?” Gil asked.

“Because he won’t know our games,” Joe said. “He won’t know what to expect. If he’s had a lot of priors and been interrogated about other crimes, he’d know exactly what to say and not say.”

“Exactly,” Gil said.

“However, I do want to point out that Fisher interviewed the guy a dozen times,” Joe said.

“That could definitely impact this interrogation,” Gil said. “Do you have a baseline on him? I’ve only met him twice, and I wasn’t really concentrating on gauging his responses.” Gil kicked himself for that now. Maybe if he had been paying more attention yesterday during Alex Stevens’s ID of David Geisler, he might have caught something. Getting a baseline was really one of the fundamental rules of interrogation. The idea was to just talk to suspects about inconsequential things and see how they respond. Judge their eye movements and posture. Then, when you are interrogating them later and they deviate from their baseline, you know that you just asked a question that was not inconsequential to them.

Joe thought for a second before shaking his head. “Nah. Fisher handled all that kind of stuff the first time around. Plus, I wasn’t thinking like a detective back then.”

“Okay,” Gil said. “So we need to get a baseline. How should we go about doing that?” He was purposely asking straightforward questions to get Joe’s head into the right mindset. Make him think like an interrogator.

“Umm . . . I could take in an interview form and just ask him basic questions like his name and address and see how he responds,” Joe said.

Gil smiled. “That is exactly why the interview form was created. Just to make it easy for the interrogator to get the baseline.” The side door to the station opened, and Alex Stevens was escorted in by an officer.

“So, Joe,” Gil said quietly, “grab the interrogation form, and why don’t you get started? I’ll watch from the other side of the mirror and then come in when it’s time to move to the next part.”

Joe smiled but looked nervous. “Let’s rock and roll.”

A blast of noise from the pager woke Lucy up from a dead sleep for the second time in three days, but this time she was alone in bed, having had the good sense to let Nathan only drop her off and not sex her up.

She listened to the dispatcher call out an MVA with injuries on the interstate as she jumped out of bed. She ran naked around the room trying to find some clothes. She found two socks that actually were crunchy with foot sweat and no underwear. She suddenly remembered