“Sure.” Once again, he placed his badge in the tray. Then he removed his weapon from his shoulder holster and set it in the tray as well.

The officer tore off a ticket and sent it back to him. The locks on the door across the room snicked open.

“Here we go.” McCaskill took him through it and motioned Tomasetti into a small interview room. “You need audio? Escort?”

Tomasetti shook his head. “Just Kinnamon.”

“I’ll get him for you.”

The room was like a hundred other interview rooms Tomasetti had been in over the years. Twelve feet square. Gray walls. Windowless. Not even an observation window. Institutional tile floor. Air temp hovering somewhere around sixty-two degrees. Discomfort helped to thwart stonewalling. The table was four feet long and a couple of feet wide with an off-white Formica surface that was etched with scratches from lawyer’s briefcases. A single Fuck You was carved into the corner. Three cheap blue sled chairs covered with stain-resistant fabric that wasn’t that stain resistant surrounded the table.

There was a camera mounted in the corner, just below ceiling level. No glowing eye, but that didn’t mean someone didn’t have video running. But there was no intercom. No phone. No visible wires. None of those things guaranteed the conversation he was about to have with Vince Kinnamon was private or wouldn’t be secretly recorded. Tomasetti wasn’t exactly the trusting type, but there was no way around the risk.

McCaskill didn’t keep him waiting. Tomasetti had barely settled in when the door opened and the corrections officer produced Kinnamon. “Step inside,” he said.

Tomasetti took the other man’s measure as he shuffled in. Orange prison jumpsuit. Off-brand sneakers. No chains or restraints. Tomasetti had met him a couple of times over the years, but if it hadn’t been for the name tag embroidered into the fabric, he would have been hard-pressed to recognize him. The inmate shuffling into the interview room looked nothing like the man who’d once owned a five-thousand-square-foot house in Edgewater. Three months in jail had taken a heavy toll. He’d dropped sixty pounds. His once-tanned face had the telltale prison pallor. The only thing that was the same were his eyes. They were black as tar and radiated a cunning that could raise the hairs on the necks of even the most seasoned cops. Today, those eyes revealed nothing of what he was thinking as they latched on to Tomasetti.