Chapter 398

The wait for the police was frustratingly boring, stuck in an empty office by myself. You could vaguely hear Gemma and Becks over in the conference room making sure everything was cleaned up, but felt like it would be bad form to call over to them even to make a joke. For yours and Sabrina’s stories to be taken credibly you would need to be as clean as possible on not collaborating or conspiring - really, you should have recorded the whole confrontation, but you’d been busy with the phone call with Garrison.

It took almost twenty-five minutes for a pair of cops, already wearing ‘So done with this’ expressions, to come up looking for you along with Garrison. He stuck his head in your office briefly, making eye contact with you and nodding silently, before he and the cops went and spoke with Gemma and Becks for a minute before going to interview Sabrina.

Curious, you stood up and paced in the office near the door, and saw that Garrison wasn’t actually in the interview but rather hovering in the doorway to the intern conference room talking with Gemma and Becks and having a couple bites of the leftover sushi. You almost choked on your own spit when you thought about if any of it had been lying on Becks’ naked body a half hour before, but that had all been eaten or cleaned up so it wasn’t possible. Garrison not being in the interview with Sabrina was concerning to you for a brief moment, but you realised that he’d probably given a statement downstairs when he arrived and, as a witness through the phone call, he couldn’t ‘represent’ you for the interviews.

Eventually, you went and sat back down when you could see that the two cops were starting to stand up in Sabrina’s office, and you heard them talking briefly out in the hall before they got to yours.

“John?” asked the first one through the door. He was older, maybe in his late fifties, and other than the tired expression on his face he had big bushy eyebrows and a pair of mutton chops that made you think he would have fit onto the set of Gangs of New York. The second cop was a heavyset woman, though it was hard to tell if she was overweight or just built bulky through her uniform, vest and light jacket.

“That’s me,” you said, taking a breath and leaving your hands flat on the empty desk between you.

“Great,” he said. “I’m Officer Collins, this is Officer Tantallino. We just need to take your version of the events of tonight. I understand from the other witnesses that there’s something of a history going on, but we’ll be leaving that to a detective to follow up on - we just need to know what happened earlier this evening.”

“Sure,” you nodded.

They both sat in the chairs opposite you and Tantallino took out a phone. “We’ll be taking notes, but mind if we record this? Easier to refer back to.”

You hesitated, knowing you would probably be within your rights not to want to be recorded unless they brought you back to the station, but you noticed they both had body cams on their chests. “Those aren’t working?” you asked, nodding to the cams.

“We were asked to turn them off since this is a law office with privileged information around,” Collins said. “We’ll only record audio.”

“Alright, that’s fine with me,” you agreed, Tantallino pressed record on an app and a green light came on as it started recording.