1INTERROGATORY
“I used to wonder why anyone would confess to a crime they didn’t commit,” I said to the woman across from me, Special Agent Langan, young, pale, and blond, her whole body taut from the strain of not beating me bloody. “Now I almost get it. My life’s basically over now no matter what, isn’t it? If I confess at least you two will feel better. Doesn’t matter I’m innocent.”
Her partner, Special Agent Diaz, middle-aged and mustached, laughed harshly. “Oh, here comes the defense. Conspiracy, right? Someone broke into your work computer, and your home computer, and planted … that … on them both? Why? Who would do that? What makes you such a target?”
“I have no idea,” I admitted.
“Because it didn’t happen.” His right hand clenched into a fist atop the steel table to which I was handcuffed. “Because you are guilty as sin.”
Their barely constrained fury was horrible, but revelatory. I still didn’t know exactly what they had found, what had been planted, but it had to be something truly vile for these hardened federal agents to treat me like some kind of human-shaped demon.
“I don’t expect you to believe me,” I said. “I’m not an idiot. But those two guys who arrested me? They didn’t act like I was some monster. They acted like they were getting away with something. Do you know them? Do you have any reason to think they might be up to something?”
For a brief moment something like uncertainty flickered on both of their faces.
“Up to what?” Agent Langan demanded.
“I don’t know. Maybe you should ask them.”
The interrogation room was just as depicted by movies and TV, all white but for the steel furniture bolted to the floor and a mirrored wall. It smelled strongly of cleaning products and faintly of vomit. Before handcuffing me to the table they had given me a Clif bar to eat and coffee to drink, but fear and adrenaline had wrung my gut so tight that eating was unthinkable, and my shaking hands had spilled half the coffee.
I reminded myself again to breathe. I was vaguely grateful I sounded even remotely coherent. I felt delirious. Hours earlier, I didn’t know how many exactly, Amara and I had woken to a SWAT battering ram smashing open our front door. I felt like a trapdoor had opened beneath me in that moment, and I had been falling since, would fall forever.
Amara.
“Tell us who you got it from,” Agent Langan said. “You know what happens to men like you in prison? Worse than you imagine. Worse than you can. The only way to make things better for yourself now is to name names and testify.”
“You’re not a monster. You didn’t make any of it. You never actually hurt anyone. Right?” Agent Diaz tried to play good cop. His smile was that of an animal baring its fangs. “You were curious. That’s all. Someone showed it to you. Who? Where?”
I considered telling them the other thing I knew. That as I had been pulled away in handcuffs, desperately pleading my confusion and innocence, just before the door was slammed shut behind me, I had looked back at Amara one final time. That in that moment, the cold, wide-eyed expression she had maintained during the dawn raid—which she had donned, in retrospect, even in its first panic, with no interim of shock or surprise—had finally cracked.
Amara, my friend for twenty years, newly my lover and fiancée, had stood in our living room, her arms wrapped tightly around thirteen-year-old Grace and eleven-year-old Alex, their faces slack with shock … and she had mouthed to me, as the FBI dragged me out the door, as her mask fell and her face turned haggard: I’m sorry.
Special Agent Diaz was right. My defense was beyond ludicrous. The idea that the FBI had plotted against me was crazy enough. The notion of them conspiring with Amara, who had devoted her whole life to fighting government oppression, was somewhere way past insane.
But as far as I could tell, that was exactly what had happened.
I said, “I want a lawyer.”
Copyright © 2023 by Jon Evans
