SURVIVAL INSTINCT

CHAPTER: 4

The fifteen minutes trip to the town passed in absolute silence. Ryan and Sarah sat on opposite sides of the police car without uttering a word to each other, and Officer Turner still looked a little green. Officer Shawn was whistling while he was driving, but he was out of tune.

Kansas City, Missouri, police headquarters were located in a modern eight-story building, with a fenced, fiercely guarded parking lot in the back. Had she been visiting the place for routine work, she would have found a parking space somewhere on the street and would have entered the building from the main entrance. Shawn drove through the chained fence into the parking lot and parked the car in a marked slot.

"I will walk them in," Shawn said to Turner, "You stay out here and get some air."

He then guided Ryan and Sarah through the steel door in the back and into a corridor. Another uniformed officer was sitting behind a desk just inside the door. Shawn made them stop there, he went in and gave the officer, Ryan and Sarah's name and business. Sarah wondered if Ryan felt as guilty and uncomfortable as she did. If so, she couldn't tell by his outward appearance.

After facing the indignity of the fingerprinting, she ended up in an interrogation room like a criminal, which Sarah had only ever seen on TV. The room had a big window on one wall, and a table with a couple of uncomfortable chairs around it, in the center of the room, and otherwise the room was empty. And there Sarah sat, with nothing to do but fidget with her ink-stained thumbs and picture Diana Walter's dead body in her mind, for about thirty minutes. She did not know what the detectives were doing during that time. Were they grilling Ryan? Or were they just watching her sweat through the glass door? But whatever it was, it had her in a complete fix by the time the door opened and a woman came in.

She gave a curt nod to Sarah. "Good morning. I am Detective Tanya Hudson."

"I am Sarah Miller," Sarah said in a faint voice. Detective Hudson sat down on the other side of the table.

"Can I get you anything? A soda? Coffee? or some water?" Detective Hudson asked Sarah.

"A diet coke would be good." Maybe it would help Sarah's stomach to settle down. She nodded but didn't ask someone to get it.

"Tell me what happened earlier," she said instead. Sarah started going over the story again and had only reached the time of  Ryan's early morning phone call when the door opened and Officer Turner came in carrying an ice-cold can of Diet Coke. Sarah guessed maybe he or Shawn was outside the two-way glass door, looking in. She thanked him, opened the can, and took a sip. "I got to the property at 102 South Massachusetts Avenue about 9:20 am. Ryan was waiting out front."

Detective Hudson consulted a folder she kept in front of her. "Had you been working with him before this morning, Sarah?" 

Sarah shook her head. "How did you come to be calling him by his first name?" the detective asked her. The look she sent Sarah held a hint of triumph as if she imagined she had caught her doing something she shouldn't have done. Sarah's mother would undoubtedly have agreed with her.

"I have met him before," Sarah said, telling herself she had no reason to feel defensive but was feeling defensive anyway. "We grew up together. Or rather, we grew up in the same town. A small place in St-Louis, Missouri."

"You were not friends?" the Detective asked her.

Sarah shook her head. "He is three years older than me and hung out with a very different crowd."

"When was the last time you saw him?" Detective Hudson asked her.

"Before today, you mean? The day he graduated from high school. It was about twelve years ago." It was the only time she had spoken to Ryan, and although she had not thought about it for twelve years, she could still remember every detail. "My girlfriend Zeenia and I had gone to the movies with my brother Daniel and his best friend Tony. The movie theatre was downtown, fifteen or twenty minutes from St-Louis. When the movie was over and we were walking back to Tony's car, we saw Ryan."

Detective Hudson was silent. Sarah waited, but when she did not order her to stop, Sarah continued. "He was sitting on the curb. I think he was drunk, but it looked like someone had beaten him up, very badly. There was blood on his shirt, and he had a black eye." Sarah had felt very sorry for him then, and when her friend Tony had grabbed her arm and had tried to hurry past him. She had put her foot down, and insisted that they stop. She told Tony that, It is the duty of every well-bred person to help those less fortunate, and Ryan was clearly less fortunate. He was also a schoolmate. Although calling Ryan a mate was like stretching a point. Still, she felt they owed it to him to make sure he was all right. Daniel and Zeenia had been too preoccupied with one another to notice anything less than an earthquake, and Tony had been reluctant, to say the least, to get mixed up in anything. So she had gathered what courage she possessed and had walked over to Ryan to offer him a ride back to St-Louis.

"Did he accept help?" Detective Hudson asked her. She sounded intrigued despite herself. 

Sarah nodded. "I doubt he would have, otherwise. He is not the type to accept charity. But it was very obvious that Tony did not want him to, so he said yes. He sat next to Tony the whole way home, bleeding on the leather seat of the new car Tony had bought for his sixteenth birthday and kept Tony on the edge of his seat in case Ryan decided to throw up on the dashboard. At that point, the situation was very funny, just like a television sitcom." At that point, it crossed Sarah's mind, and she wondered whether Ryan still remembered that incident? Or if he was quite drunk or in too much pain to even realize who she was?

"Interesting." Detective Hudson said. "But if that was the last time you saw him, I guess you cannot tell me anything about his present life? Where he lives? What he does for a living?" 

Sarah shook her head. "I don't know anything about him at all anymore. Why don't you ask him? He is around here somewhere, isn't he?" Sarah glanced around the gray concrete walls of the interrogation room.

"He is not forthcoming." Detective Hudson made another note in her folder. "Let's get back to what happened this morning. Mr. Ryan Johnson called your office and you drove to 102 South Massachusetts Avenue, to meet him. Then what happened?"

Sarah recapped her talk with Ryan and their trip through the house, doing her best to remember the details. She remembered, "And, Yes, the front door had been unlocked," Sarah informed.