(Start with Part One)
She coughed most of the way to the station. Kept sweating like she had a fever.When we questioned her about the kids, she insisted she had no idea what we were talking about. Lacey leaned on her hard, shoving pictures of each kid in front of Mary, yelling at her to talk about why she took those children.
That only made her cry, though. Eventually she threw up, all over the interrogation room’s floor. We moved her to a holding cell while we cleaned up the mess.
Lacey came to see me after, sat on the edge of my desk. She looked frustrated.
“Get any on you, Lacey?”
She checked her shoes, shook her head. “No, thank God.” She sighed. “If she’s faking being sick, she’s missing out on an acting career.”
I nodded. “Yeah. Funny, none of the kids have gotten sick. You’d think she’d have given it to ‘em.”
She shrugged. “Could have just gotten it herself.”
“True,” I agreed. “Think it’s messed with her memory, too?”
Lacey chuckled. “Now that, she’s faking,” she said, sliding off my desk. “Forensics is going over her place now, and the bike. There’s going to be plenty of evidence to help her remember.”
I nodded. “She hasn’t asked for a lawyer yet, has she?”
Lacey shook her head.
“Good. Let’s go ahead and get a preliminary psych eval, then. While we’ve got her here.”
Lacey raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t it the DA’s job to worry about the insanity plea?”
I grinned. “Humor me.”
“All right. Go check if they’ve finished pulling all those photos off the stalker wall for me, will you?”
“Sure thing.”
She went back to her desk, and I headed downstairs to Evidence.
Something was seriously wrong with this case. Everything pointed to us having the right woman in custody - the photos in the closet, the bike, the needles we’d found in the apartment.
But the perp wasn’t reacting right. She didn’t have Dahmer’s inhuman stare, or Manson’s crazy one. She didn’t even act like she was hiding something. It was like we’d picked up some soccer mom and accused her of plotting to kill the President. She acted like she’d never even thought about doing what the evidence told me she’d done.
I hoped the shrink would be able to make sense of it.
