Thirteen
Angela Wood wasn’t exactly what psychiatrists would call ‘textbook suicidal’, at least not anymore, but there was a time when the idea of ending her life was all she could think of. And she had tried – more than once – taking herself as close to death as anyone could possibly come without finally crossing over. That time had started around five years ago, when she was only sixteen years old.
At that young age, and for a whole year, Angela had struggled desperately with depression, every day isolating herself more and more from everyone and anyone around her, while allowing sadness, emptiness, guilt and a never-ending feeling of worthlessness to suffocate her from the inside. Self-harming became a common, albeit well-hidden occurrence and drugs, prescription or otherwise, became the gospel that she lived by . . . but Angela hadn’t always been that way.
Throughout her entire childhood and part of her teenage years, Angela had been a smiling, positive girl, full of life. The problems and arguments she’d had with her parents while young weren’t that dissimilar from the problems and arguments most kids faced while growing up. In school, she got along well enough with her teachers, had excellent grades, and her friends considered her to be a fun, easy-going person. The change came just a week after her sixteenth birthday, the consequence of a terrible tragedy – the death of her younger brother, Shawn.
Shawn’s passing sent Angela into a dark and soul-crushing downward spiral, which very quickly swirled out of her control. Truth be told, if Angela hadn’t left her family and the city of Pocatello when she had, chances were that her parents would’ve lost a second child by now.
As crazy and as improbable as it may sound, it had been the move into the City of Angels that had somehow rescued Angela from what could easily be considered ‘the mouth of the abyss’. But the war hadn’t been won yet.
The sadness, emptiness and the feeling of worthlessness hadn’t completely dissipated. Not a day would go by that she didn’t desperately miss her younger brother, and she wouldn’t argue that some days were undoubtedly a lot harder than others. But somehow, a little light had finally found its way into the darkness that had lived inside her for so many years, and little by little Angela had begun to climb back out. She didn’t self-harm as much, drugs had practically become a thing of the past and she hadn’t thought about joining her brother in over three years.
The leap from her window to the ground below hadn’t been a throwback to those dark days. It had been a planned escape. She had practiced the move countless times, but this had been the first time that she’d had to do it for real.
Actually, the leap wasn’t really from her window to the ground below, but from her window to the reinforced rainwater drainpipe that ran almost all the way from the building’s roof down to the ground. By pure chance, the drainpipe was affixed to the building’s exterior wall, just about a foot and a half from Angela’s window. It being reinforced meant that it could easily hold Angela’s weight, which had never gone beyond 135lb, together with the light contents of a small backpack.
As Hunter’s attention was diverted from her to her neighbor, who was standing in the corridor directly behind him, Angela used the heels of her feet to push against the wall just beneath her window ledge, throwing herself to her left, in the direction of the drainpipe. It was an easy leap.
Angela grabbed the pipe with both hands, also clamping it with her thighs. Her knees scraped against the building wall, but it was nothing that she couldn’t handle.
The easiest way to get down to the ground below was to slide down the pipe, but it had to be done in three quick stages, as the thick metal rings that had been used to fix the pipe to the wall wouldn’t allow a smooth, firefighter-like slide. But Angela had practiced it enough times to know exactly how to do it. Less than four seconds after leaping from her window, her feet were touching the ground down below. With a proud smile on her lips, she looked up at her open window before quickly turning on her heels to start her run . . . but that didn’t go half as well as she would have expected.
As Angela began turning, her movement was interrupted by Garcia, who was standing right behind her.
‘That was cute,’ he said, slapping his handcuffs around Angela’s right wrist before she could even blink. ‘Do you take bookings for birthday parties?’
Angela looked back at the detective in total surprise. ‘How the hell did you get down here so fast?’
Garcia smiled. ‘What, do you think you’re the only one with tricks?’ In a lightning-fast movement, he rotated his body to position himself just behind Angela. As he did, he reached for her left wrist and quickly cuffed it to her right one. ‘Ta-da,’ he said in a fanfare voice.
‘Let me go, you jerk.’ Angela tugged at the handcuffs. ‘I haven’t done anything.’
‘Is she all right?’ The question came from Hunter, whose entire torso now hung out of Angela’s apartment window above them.
‘We’re good here,’ Garcia replied, giving Hunter a thumbs up.
Hunter nodded. ‘Great. I think I’ll use the stairs, though.’
As Garcia escorted Angela toward the front of the building, the look in her eyes was cold fury, pure and simple.
Fourteen
In the basement of the Police Administration Building, Angela had been sitting alone inside one of the interrogation rooms for almost half an hour. Her hands were cuffed together by a foot-long chain that ran through a loop at the center of the metal table in front of her. The table and the chair she was sitting on were both bolted to the floor.
Leaving a suspect waiting in an interrogation room, typically in cuffs, was a very well-known psychological technique used by the police. The advantage of it was two-fold:
One – the waiting tended to heighten the suspect’s apprehension. It unnerved them. A nervous and anxious suspect was much more prone to make mistakes and contradict themselves, if they were lying during the interrogation. Leaving the suspect cuffed restricted their movements, but most importantly, it put forward the idea that the police already considered that person to be guilty of something, which also served to amplify the suspect’s anxiety.
Advantage number two was that, despite the suspect having been left alone, the police would, without a doubt, have eyes and ears in that interrogation room. Someone, either through a two-way mirror or via CCTV cameras, would be studying the suspect’s movements, reactions and facial expressions. That someone would usually be the interrogating detective or a trained psychologist. The microphones inside the room would also have been turned on. Sometimes the cops got lucky and the suspect, when left alone for any significant amount of time, would say something to himself. Guilty and nervous suspects tended to rehearse what to say.
The interrogation room that Angela was in did have a two-way mirror – a very large one to the right of where she was sitting. At the other side of it, Hunter and Garcia had been attentively observing Angela from the start and they were both impressed by how calm she had been.
As soon as Angela was left by herself, she slouched on her chair as best as she could, taking into account that her hands were cuffed to the tabletop, rested her head against the chair’s backrest, closed her eyes and practically went to sleep. No angry jerking of the cuffs. No swearing at the police officer. No neck or shoulder movement to relax her muscles. No looking around the room anxiously. No impatient shaking of the legs. Nothing. No signs of being nervous whatsoever. In fact, Angela looked like she was about to doze off when Hunter and Garcia finally opened the door and stepped inside.