Charlie needed a minute, too. She was missing something big. Why had Huck been interviewed for four hours? The average interrogation lasted somewhere between half an hour and two hours. Charlie’s had topped out at around forty-five minutes. The entirety of her and Huck’s involvement with the crime had been less than ten minutes. Why had Delia Wofford brought in the FBI to play good cop/bad cop with Huck? He was hardly a hostile witness. He had been shot in the arm. But he’d said he was interrogated before he went to the hospital. Delia Wofford wasn’t the kind of cop who didn’t follow procedure. The FBI sure as shit didn’t mess around.
So why had they kept their star witness at the police station for four hours? That wasn’t how you treated a witness. That was how you treated a suspect who wasn’t playing ball.
“Okay, I’m back,” Huck said. “Kelly’s—what are they calling it now? Remedial? Intellectually handicapped? She’s in basic classes. She can’t retain concepts.”
“The law would call it diminished capacity, as in she’s too incapable to form the mental state required for a crime, but that’s a very hard argument to make,” Charlie told him. “There are very different priorities between a government-run school system and a government-run murder prosecution. One is trying to help her and the other is trying to kill her.”
He was so quiet that all she could hear was his breathing.
Charlie asked, “Did the two agents, Wofford and Avery, talk to you for four hours straight, or was there time in between?”
“What?” He seemed thrown by the question. “Yeah, one of them was always in the room. And your husband sometimes. And that guy, what’s his name? He wears those shiny suits?”
“Ken Coin. He’s the district attorney.” Charlie shifted tactics. “Was Kelly bullied?”
“Not in my classroom.” He added, “Off-campus, social media, we can’t regulate that.”
“So you’re saying she was bullied?”
“I’m saying she was different, and that’s never a good thing when you’re a kid.”
“You were Kelly’s teacher. Why didn’t you know that she was held back a grade?”
“I’ve got over a hundred twenty kids a year every year. I don’t look back at their files unless they give me a reason.”
“Being slow isn’t a reason?”
“A lot of my kids are slow. She was a solid C student. She never got in trouble.” Charlie could hear a tapping noise, a pen hitting the edge of a table. Huck said, “Look, Kelly’s a good kid. Not smart, but sweet. She follows whatever is in front of her. She doesn’t do things like today. That’s not her.”
“Were you intimate with her?”
“What the hell does—”
“Screwing. Fucking. You know what I mean.”
“Of course not.” He sounded disgusted. “She was one of my kids. Christ.”
“Was anyone else having sex with her?”
“No. I would’ve reported it.”
“Mr. Pinkman?”
“Don’t even—”
“Another student at school?”
“How should I—”
“What happened to the revolver?”
If she hadn’t been listening for it, she would’ve missed the slight catch in his breath.
And then he said, “What revolver?”
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