The Caller

Thirty-Four

Sitting inside interview room number two at Rampart Police Station on West Sixth Street, Dr. Gwen Barnes had the last of her stale coffee. As she swallowed the bitter liquid down, it made her stomach churn inside her.

‘This is it,’ she whispered, placing the now empty paper cup back on the large metal table in front of her and readily pushing it away. Even if it had been the most amazing gourmet coffee in the world, after five cups, there was no way she could stomach another one. What she really needed was a large glass of wine. No, scrap that. A whole bottle was a lot more like it.

‘C’mon, this is way past ridiculous now,’ she said, turning to look at the large, window-like mirror to her right. This wasn’t the first time Dr. Barnes had been inside a police interrogation room. She knew very well that what she was looking at was in fact a two-way mirror, but this wasn’t an interrogation. No one would be at the other side of it, observing her, though she wished someone were. Maybe someone was listening in.

‘This has got to be a joke,’ she said, loud enough for her voice to be picked up by the multidirectional microphone at the center of the table. ‘A detective must’ve come back by now. C’mon.’

As she finished her sentence, she turned, looked at the heavy door a few feet behind her and waited, urging it to be pushed open.

Ten.

Twenty.

Thirty seconds went by.

No luck.

Dr. Barnes took a deep breath and sat back in the uncomfortable metal chair.

Laid out on the table in front of her she had her cellphone, her car keys, the envelope that had been left stuck to the windshield of her Toyota Camry, and the note she had found inside it. Every time she looked at it, her heart skipped a beat inside her chest.

After reading the note down at the underground parking lot of the building where she had her psychotherapy practice, Dr. Barnes had laughed out loud, quickly discarding it as a ‘ridiculous, humorless joke’. But then she found what had been left inside the envelope for her, something that gave everything a lot more meaning, and the laughter immediately turned into desperate panic. Twenty-five minutes later, she had stormed into the police station on Venice Boulevard.

An officer had spoken to her and taken down all her details, but Dr. Barnes had demanded to speak with a detective. She didn’t want this brushed under a carpet.

The officer had explained that no detectives were available at that time and that she had two options. One: She was more than welcome to wait for one if she really felt the need to. Two: She could go home and a detective would either call her or drop by at a more convenient time.

The last thing Dr. Barnes wanted at that particular moment was to go home alone, so wait she did, for a very long time, but still, no detective came to meet her. After almost two hours, four horrible cups of coffee, and five increasingly angry trips to the reception window, the officer finally told her that he had managed to talk to one of their detectives over the phone, and he was on his way back. The officer, who could clearly understand Dr. Barnes’ frustration, had asked her if she wouldn’t prefer to wait in one of their interrogation rooms, away from the noise and the mess of the station’s reception lobby. Dr. Barnes happily accepted it. She was getting a little freaked out by the looks she was getting from the tattoo-covered, burly man, sitting across the hall from her.

That had been almost an hour ago.