Page 67 of Manner of Death
Now that she was off-guard, Sawyer pressed. “Ms. Glen, you already stated that you don’t have an alibi for last night.”
“I told you I was at home—”
“We know you weren’t at home,” Nan snapped before Tami could start lying to them again. “We got access to the Ring camera from—”
“You can’t do that!” Sawyer was a bit surprised by her sudden flare of temper. This was more like the Tami who’d snarked at him every time he entered the morgue, rather than the quiet, subdued version he’d seen so far today. “You can’t access the cameras in my home without a warrant!”
“If you’d let me finish,” Nan said through gritted teeth, “you’d know that we were given access to the Ring camera that belongs to your neighbor. She got clear footage of you leaving your home at ten p.m. last night and not returning until after two.”
Tami shivered but didn’t quite lose her newfound spine. “You’re lying. Cops are allowed to lie to get confessions, I know that. I’m not stupid though; I’m not going to fall for it. Ring cameras don’t record all the time.”
“They do if you’re security-conscious and pay for an upgraded policy,” Sawyer said, already pulling up the video from Tami’s neighbor. Getting this footage had been a lucky break; the neighbor had been more than willing to cooperate once they learned that Tami Glen was a person of interest in a case. Apparently, she never picked up after her dog.
Sawyer pushed play, and they all watched in silence as the camera showed Tami exiting her front door, heading down to the car on the street in a hurry, and driving off faster than was legal. “That’s you leaving.” He skipped ahead to where Nan had already keyed up the next part of the recording. “And here’s you coming home at two.” And she was staggering in this footage, either incredibly drunk or incredibly exhausted.
If she’d been hauling Kurt’s body around, the exhaustion would make a lot of sense.
Stop it. Sawyer couldn’t let himself focus on that part of things. If he thought in terms of what had been done to his partner, if he thought about the sheer terrible unfairness of his death and the breakdown it had caused in his wife, he wouldn’t be able to keep his temper in check. He shouldn’t have even been here. He shouldn’t have been involved in this at all. But this was his case, damn it, so he’d stay until someone physically dragged him away from it.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Tami said after a moment, but her fire was fading now. “So I went out for a drive. That’s not a crime.”
“It’s a crime when you’re driving the car of a police detective who’d just been murdered.” Nan crossed her arms over her chest. “That’s the assessment of your friend Dr. Ramin, isn’t it? Don’t you trust his judgment?”
Tami scowled. “Bashir has nothing to do with any of this.”
“I didn’t say he did,” Nan agreed, which—good, because Sawyer wasn’t happy with the direction she was taking things. “But unless you’re going to argue with his skills as an M.E., then the verdict stands—Detective McKay was murdered.”
“We’re not saying you killed him,” Sawyer said in a calm voice. It was important that one of them stay calm. “All we want to know is how you came to be in his car last night, Ms. Glen.” He leaned forward slightly, placing his elbows on the table. “Sometimes things happen that are outside our control,” he said, doing his best to project trustworthiness. Tami Glen didn’t like him…but Sawyer knew how to seem like someone that she could trust. “Sometimes life goes off the rails. I know you’re not a killer, Tami. I trust Bashir’s judgment, and I know that he likes you.”
That brought a sheen of tears to her eyes, which gave Sawyer a surge of satisfaction. There was a hook. Now he needed to pull.
“Bashir thinks you’re a good worker, a good person. He was stunned when we had to take you in earlier. I think he’s right about you, Tami. I think this is a case of you being forced to do something you clearly didn’t want to do.” He lowered his voice a bit. “Who made you take part in this? How did they get you to do it? Whatever they have on you, we can help you.” Confidence, assuredness, comfort. “We can make sure they leave you alone. Everything you’re afraid of, all the consequences of your actions—the things you had no choice in—all that can be mitigated. You can get through this with a clean conscience, Tami.”
“I—my conscience is fine.”
Oh, it wasn’t though. Sawyer knew the signs of someone who was on the verge of losing their shit, and Tami was getting there. If he could get her there before her lawyer showed up and she remembered not to talk…maybe it was time for another pivot.
“I called up Felix Daughtry this morning.” He waited to see if she would react, but she was looking down at the table, her hands passive in her lap. “He runs the Stab in the Light podcast. Do you ever listen to it?”
For a second he thought she was going to deny it, but then… “Yes.”
“Mm.” Sawyer nodded. “You know, that podcast has been a real puzzle to me. The things Felix knows about the murders, all the details that he’s been able to put in there—it’s stuff he shouldn’t have access to. I figure he’s got to have an accomplice, either on the police force or at the morgue, who’s been feeding him information.”
Tami raised her eyes defiantly. “I’ve never spoken with that man in my entire life. You’re fishing with bad bait, Detective Villeray, and I’m not going to bite.”
“We don’t need you to,” Nan said, venom in her voice as she grinned across the table. “See, that’s the thing about a conspiracy—it takes everyone being equally able to shut their damn mouths to make it work.”
Tami frowned. “What are you talking about? There’s no conspiracy, I’m not—I mean—”
“No, really, I want you to shut up for this part,” Nan said. “I listened to a lot of fucking podcast episodes and endured a phone conversation more aggravating than talking with my ex for this, so I’m gonna lay it out for you, okay? Over the past three months, Felix has made sure to thank a ‘special researcher’ on many of his episodes. In fact, he thanked this person on every episode that involved analysis of a body in some way. The sort of thing a medical examiner or one of their assistants might know about.”
Tami was going to twist her fingers into knots at this rate. “I—I’m serious, I’ve never talked with him. Ever.”
“Maybe you haven’t talked to him face-to-face,” Nan allowed. “But as soon as I told Felix that we had a member of the staff at the city morgue in custody, he was suddenly more than willing to share, of his own volition, a string of emails between himself and—well, I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this.” Nan brought up a new screen on the computer, with an email selected that bore a familiar, very formal byline. “You really shouldn’t have used your work account for breaking the law,” she said with faux-commiseration.
“I didn’t!” Tami’s eyes were wide with horror as she looked at the email. “I didn’t—I—it’s not me!”
“Then who is it?” Sawyer asked, coming back to the fore as Nan effortlessly read his cues and ceded control of the interview to him. The ease of it gave him a little secondhand guilt when he remembered how hard it could be to do interviews like this with Kurt. “Who’s making you do this, Tami? Who’s forcing your hand? I know this sort of thing isn’t like you. You’re not the kind of person who would break the rules at work like that.”