Read Online Deadline by Craig McLay - Free Book Online Page B

Doesn’t matter, really, because I recorded all three versions on my own digital recorder. Which is, remarkably, still working despite its dip in the pool. I’m sure you have recording equipment running in these cosy little rooms, too. If you want to hear it again, I suggest you back it up and give it a listen.”
    “I didn’t get anything wrong,” Betts grunted.
    “I tagged the spots,” Colin said, pulling the recorder out. “Would you like to go through them in chronological order?”
    Giordino decided to take a different tack. “You say you went in there because you heard a noise and somebody attacked you, but you didn’t get a look at this person.”
    “That’s correct,” Colin said. “I was under a row of lockers the first time and underwater the second. By the time I pulled myself out, whoever it was had gone.”
    “I understand that you had just left the campus bar where, according to this copy of your receipt, you ordered five beers in just over three hours?” Giordino pulled the page out of the file in front of her and slid it across the desk. Colin glanced at it to make sure it was the one he had paid.
    “Looks like it,” Colin said.
    “Then you stopped in the receiving area to urinate where you just happened to hear a sound that caused you to enter the building where you picked up a sledgehammer and found a person or persons unknown stuffing the remains of Terrence Devane in a locker?”
    “Once again, correct. I don’t make a point of urinating in public, but I was, for want of a better expression, caught extremely short.”
    “You didn’t like Devane, did you?”
    Colin smiled. “Are you suggesting that I somehow chopped him up with a sledgehammer, tossed myself in the pool for good measure and then called you? Is that your working hypothesis?”
    “No,” Giordino said. “Not with a sledgehammer, maybe. All I’m suggesting is that you didn’t like him very much.”
    “I never met him,” Colin said. “Unless you count tonight, of course. I wasn’t able to get any good quotes out of him, however. He was a tad decapitated.”
    “There’s almost a 40-minute gap between when you left the bar and when you called us,” Giordino said.
    “As I’m sure you’ve surmised, the cell phone reception in that building is not the best. I had to walk all the way out to the access road before I could get a working signal.”
    “Doesn’t matter,” Betts said from his spot next to the door. “Once we get the security footage from the cameras in there, we’ll know what really happened.”
    Colin looked over at the big policeman, who smiled back under hooded lids. “Does that work?”
    Betts frowned. “What?”
    “Lying,” Colin said. “I’ve never found that works terribly well as an interview technique. There are subtle differences between an interview and an interrogation, of course.”
    Betts clenched his beefy fists and took a step forward. “Fuck you talking about?”
    “There are security cameras set up in that building, yes,” Colin said. “But they’re not connected to anything. The company that installed them is the same one that did some of the re-wiring when they renovated the tech wing. Only they didn’t do such a good job and ended up frying $200,000 worth of industrial robotics. The college is suing them for incompetence; they’re counter-suing the college for non-payment. You know how it goes. The upshot is, they’re obviously not going to finish the camera job in the rec centre until the whole thing gets settled, which will probably happen sometime after everyone involved dies of old age. And the college is too cheap to pay anyone else to finish the job in the meantime.”
    Betts looked at Giordino. “How the hell you know all that?”
    “I wrote a story on it,” Colin said. “It is sort of what I do, being a reporter.”
    “Well that’s kind of convenient, don’t you think, Mr. Mitchell?” Giordino asked.
    “How so?” Colin asked.
    “The fact that you