Chapter 7 - The Interrogation Room
In the basement holding facility of the federal courthouse downtown, Luca sat behind a heavy steel table bolted to the concrete floor. Through the one-way observation glass, Detective Hall and Agent Wright stood watching him alongside an assistant United States Attorney. Thanks to a closed-circuit video feed piped directly to a secure tablet in my hospital room, I was permitted to observe the proceedings under the supervision of a victim-advocate specialist.
Luca looked shockingly ordinary without his studio ring light and tailored wardrobe. He wore an orange federal detention jumpsuit that hung loosely on his narrow frame. His dark hair was messy, and the sharp fluorescent lighting exposed the shallow lines around his eyes and mouth. Yet there was no fear in his demeanor. He sat with his hands cuffed in front of him, leaning back with an expression of calm, detached amusement.
His attorney, Vance Sterling, sat to his left, tapping his gold pen against a leather-bound legal pad.
The door opened, and federal interrogator Special Agent Sarah Chen entered the room. She dropped a thick manila folder onto the steel table with a sharp, echoing slap.
“Luca Cross,” Chen began, pulling out a chair and sitting opposite him. “You’ve waived your right to remain silent for this initial proffer session. Let's see if you can explain why eighty grams of purified potassium hydroxide and twenty vials of restricted agricultural organophosphates were found inside the venting system of your home office.”
Luca smiled faintly. It was that same soft, patronizing smile he had given me every morning while adjusting my contaminated bandages.
“Agent Chen, I’ve already explained this to the county detectives,” Luca said, his voice smooth, modulated, and entirely devoid of stress. “I am an independent digital hardware designer and custom electronics fabricator. Many of the specialized components I modify for high-end computing systems require precise chemical etching, flux stripping, and thermal conductive compounds. DMSO is widely used in high-efficiency industrial thermal transfer applications. If any of those substances contaminated Jessi’s wound dressing, it was a tragic, accidental cross-contamination resulting from my own carelessness in using the same utility saucer to hold first-aid supplies.”
“Carelessness?” Chen leaned forward, her voice dropping into a dangerous whisper. “You accidentally mixed a caustic alkali and an organophosphate into DMSO at a precise eighty-to-twenty ratio? An exact ratio that chemical warfare literature identifies as the optimal vehicle for rapid dermal transdermal absorption without causing instantaneous fatal systemic shock?”
Luca tilted his head, his smile never wavering. “I read widely, Agent Chen. Science has always been a passionate hobby of mine. If I subconsciously recalled a formula while attempting to formulate a powerful antiseptic wash for my wife’s wound, that speaks to my panicked state of mind, not malice. I was trying to save her from an aggressive necrotizing infection. I am guilty of amateur medical hubris, perhaps. But hubris is not murder.”
“What about the scheduled videos, Luca?” Chen asked, sliding three photographic printouts across the steel table. “What about the pre-recorded video where you weep over her death, uploaded to your private server five days before she arrived at the trauma center?”
For the first time, Luca’s eyes flickered. A microscopic fracture appeared in his polished veneer, his pupils contracting slightly as he looked at the images of his own face on the paper.
Sterling immediately placed a hand on Luca’s forearm. “My client was engaging in creative catharsis. As a public digital creator, it is customary to storyboard and prepare narrative content for various potential outcomes to manage the intense emotional stress of a domestic crisis.”
Luca gently pushed his attorney’s hand away. He leaned forward across the table, his eyes locking onto Agent Chen’s face with chilling intensity.
“You don't understand the digital economy, do you, Agent Chen?” Luca said, his tone shifting from clinical innocence to cold, arrogant condescension. “You think people care about a mediocre watercolor painter who spends her days staring out a window while I earn forty thousand dollars a month keeping thousands of lonely people entertained? Jessi had nothing to say to the world. She was empty. She was an anchor around my neck, draining my creative energy while I paid for the roof over her head, the food on her plate, and the very clothes on her back.”
Through the tablet speaker in my hospital room, his voice sounded so clear, so familiar, and so utterly monstrous that my breath stopped in my throat.
“I didn't want her to die in pain,” Luca continued, his voice dropping into a conversational murmur that made the skin on the back of my neck crawl. “The organophosphates were supposed to dull the central nervous system within twenty-four hours. She was supposed to drift to sleep peacefully while her respiration slowed down. But she kept fighting. Her stubborn, miserable body just kept burning through the doses. If she had just listened to me... if she had just stayed in that bed until tomorrow morning like I told her to... it would have been over. It would have been clean. It would have been beautiful.”
Sterling slammed his legal pad onto the table. “Luca, shut up! We are terminating this interview immediately!”
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Luca ignored him. He looked directly at the two-way mirror on the wall—directly at the camera lens that he knew was broadcasting his face to wherever I was lying.
“You were always weak, Jessi,” he said softly, speaking straight to me through the glass. “You couldn't even die when you were supposed to.”
