Gingerbread Man

Every one of those chairs was empty. Small speakers were mounted on either side for talking back and forth. There was no privacy. Guards stood on either end of the room, their eyes sharp and alert.
    Holly closed her hand tighter around Vince's as they stood there, waiting for Hubey Welles to appear on the other side of the glass. Her hand was cold. Her grip firm, but shaking. She was reliving her worst nightmare, he knew that.
    With a buzz and the sound of locks clanging open, a sturdily built man with crew cut gray hair, and a boxer's face was led to the window on the other side. He looked at Holly with a sneer, then shifted his gaze to Vince, but only briefly. He focused on Holly again, ignoring Vince as if he weren't there.
    "They told me I had a visitor. A cop and a lady, they said. I take it you're not the cop."
    The way he licked his lips and stared at Holly just to intimidate her made Vince want to smash through the glass and grab the bastard by his throat. He thought he kept the fact concealed. When he spoke he sounded cool, he thought. Official. "I'm Detective Vince O'Mally. This is Holly Newman. She has some questions and I want you to answer them."
    Welles shrugged. "I got nothing better to do." Then he sat down in the chair on his side of the glass.
    Vince nodded to Holly. She just looked at him for a moment. He held her eyes, tried to send silent encouragement to her without words. They were here now. She might as well go through with this. After a brief hesitation, she sat down in the chair, clearly thrown by Welles's behavior.
    "So what did you bring me,
Detective?
Mm? A little treat for good behavior?"
    "Just shut up and listen to what the lady has to say," Vince snapped.
    "Yeah, I'll listen. Come on in here, little girl, and I'll give you something to remember me by."
    She stiffened. Vince thought she would surge to her feet and run from the room. Instead, her face hardened by degrees. She raised her chin, met his eyes. "I'm a little bit old for your tastes, Mr. Welles. By about twenty years or so."
    The convict spit with laughter, his head tipping back with it. His teeth were even and white. "That's a good one," he said. "She's good, your girlfriend. She this quick in bed, Detective?"
    "Shut up, Welles." It was Holly who said it, jumping in before Vince could say a word. And her voice had taken on a harshness that surprised Vince. "I'm the one you're here to talk to, so pay attention. Eighteen years ago you confessed to the abduction and murder of my sister. Ivy Newman."
    "So what?" His gaze kept jumping from Holly to Vince and back again.
    "So, I want to know if you really killed her."
    Now the man seemed shaken. He tried to cover it, but Vince saw through that. The man was nervous. "Hey, I said I did, right?"
    She stared at him. "You
said
you did a lot of things."
    Vince placed a hand on her shoulder, squeezed gently. She wasn't pale or fading now. Her color had risen in her cheeks. She looked as if she could kill the man on the other side of the glass without a second thought.
    Vince spoke because she didn't. "I was thinking some of those confessions might have been made just to keep you off death row, Welles. I was thinking you might have confessed to anything they wanted just to save yourself from lethal injection."
    He shrugged. "What if I did?"
    "Then we need to know. Did you kill Ivy Newman?"
    The man leaned back in his seat, taking his time. "There were so many, you know. I didn't get their names."
    Welles leaned forward suddenly, spearing Holly with his eyes. "They liked what I did to them, all my little ones did. They liked it. Asked for it."
    She sat utterly still for a moment, then she shot to her feet and drove her fist into the window so fiercely Welles jerked backward in reaction. He fell over in his chair on the other side. Guards moved forward even as Vince grabbed Holly. "It's okay, I've got her, I've got her," he told the officers quickly. Welles got up, laughing at her. Vince turned her away, so she wouldn't see that.
    She didn't fight him. Her knees gave, and she would have fallen over if he hadn't been holding her. He managed to turn her toward him, held her against his body.
    "It wasn't him," she whispered. Her voice was strained and hurting. Her head was against his shoulder so when she spoke, her breath fanned his neck.
    "You can't go by anything he said."
    "It wasn't him, Vince. It wasn't him."
    He closed his eyes for a long moment before nodding to a guard to let them