Aftershock by Tanya Chris

Author:Tanya Chris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tanya Chris
Published: 2019-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11 Dashiell

Dashiell ushered Casey into the interrogation room, an unfriendly space, cramped and stark and ugly, big enough to hold a table but not big enough for anyone to walk around it. Sally McBride waited for them there and next to her sat a woman she introduced as Detective Yao.

Detective Yao activated her recorder and made a standard disclosure on the record, which he formally acknowledged. They were there so Casey could give details about what had happened the night of the Gonzalez incident. He’d already heard the details himself and was confident enough that Casey would be giving Sally what she needed that he had approached her earlier about a better plea deal.

“Trust me, you want this testimony.”

“Give me something good and I’ll drop the hate charge. But it’d better be good.”

“It’s good. And for what it’s worth, I don’t think you can prove the hate charge against my client. He’s not his brother.”

“He was by his brother’s side the night they jumped Glen Gonzalez.”

Dashiell had let that go, because facts were facts, but now that he’d heard Casey’s side of the story he’d regained some sympathy for his shy man-child of a client. Casey was guilty of having a homophobic asshole for a brother and for coming to his aid instead of turning him in, but he hadn’t intended to hurt anyone.

Detective Yao started the questioning. “On a previous occasion, you confirmed your brother’s assertion that you were in O’Connor’s prior to the incident with Glen Gonzalez. Is that true?”

Casey shook his head. Dashiell prodded him in the side with his elbow and Casey cleared his throat and said, “No, it’s not true.”

“Where were you?”

“Outside of Big Mike’s. It’s a bar down the street from O’Connor’s.”

“A gay bar,” Detective Yao prompted.

“Yeah, that’s why we were there.”

“Because you wanted to go to a gay bar?”

“Because MJ wanted to beat up someone gay.”

Sally raised her eyebrows at him and he raised his back. He’d known it was good. The fight hadn’t started with words exchanged in a bar. It’d been a deliberate set up.

“How do you know MJ was particularly interested in beating up someone gay?” Sally asked.

“Because he said so. He said let’s go find a—” Casey looked over at him and he nodded. The language wasn’t pretty, but it was important to get on record. “Let’s go find a fag and show him a good time.”

“And by ‘show him a good time,’ you understood that to mean beat him up?”

“Yeah.”

“And what did you say?” Detective Yao asked.

“I wanted to go home. We’d been working all day and MJ was in a shit mood ’cause the job was behind schedule which meant our dad would be pissed, and I just wanted to go home.”

“So how did you find yourself outside Big Mike’s if you just wanted to go home?”

“I don’t know. That’s just how it was with us.”

Dashiell rubbed Casey’s shoulder encouragingly. Casey might be playing him, but the more the two of them talked, the more he realized how under MJ’s sway Casey was.

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