When two St. Paul police sergeants picked up 19-year-old dancer Jade Larson at an Inver Grove Heights strip club in September, they said they wanted to talk to her about a murder.

The officers needed information and insisted Larson knew the answers. So they took her from the King of Diamonds Gentlemen’s Club to headquarters.

The way the subsequent interrogation unfolded is now the subject of a dispute between the prosecution and defense in the case of Larson, who was later charged with two counts of aiding an offender.

As the detectives and Larson sat down in the interview room Sept. 29, just seven hours had passed since the shooting that left 24-year-old Dekota Galtney dead. Witnesses had identified her boyfriend, Adrian Flowers, 22, as the man who shot Galtney in the Dayton’s Bluff area after a dispute. Police said they believed Larson had been in a vehicle with Flowers and two other men shortly before the killing.

But Flowers was nowhere to be found. It was not until more than two months later that he was arrested. He was charged with murder and pleaded guilty.

Both sides agree the two sergeants who questioned Larson on Sept. 29 did not give her a Miranda warning — advising her of her rights to remain silent and ask for an attorney — at any point during their initial interview.

Instead, they played good cop/bad cop, with Sgt. Jake Peterson assuring her that they had her best interests at heart and Sgt. John Wright threatening her with jail and warning her to stop lying.

“You lie to us, you don’t get up and walk outta here. You get up and you go over there,” Wright said, referring to the adjacent Ramsey County Jail, minutes into the interrogation. “Somebody comes in here and lies to us — they get charged with murder, too.”

Defense attorney Brian Marsden argues that failure to give a Miranda warning should make the interrogation session inadmissible in court and that one of the charges of aiding an offender should be dismissed. He has asked Ramsey County District Judge Gary Bastian to decide the issue.

Prosecutors disagree, saying Larson was not “in custody” at the time of the initial questioning. She was free to go at any time, they say, and consequently the Miranda requirement does not apply to her.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Larson repeatedly told her interrogators. “I told you I took a cab here and there. If that’s all you want to know, I’m done. I don’t got nothing else to say.”

She followed that, at various points in the session, with these questions:

— “I don’t know what I have to do with this, but when can I go home?”

— “Can I leave?”

— “Can I leave? I have nothing to do with this. Can I leave? Do I have to be here? Am I under arrest?”

— “Can I leave now?”

— “May I leave? That’s a problem?”

— “I don’t know anything about this … so why am I here?”

— “I don’t want to be here. I want to go while you guys are interrupting me from my makin’ money.”

— “If you guys are gonna arrest me, then do it. If not, can I go?”

Larson asked six more times if the investigators were going to arrest her. Wright and Peterson never answered directly.

“Well, what about this: Can I get a lawyer?” Larson asked. “How about that? Does that work?”

The questioning continued.

Not only did police ignore her comment about an attorney, defense attorney Marsden argues, they told her it was illegal not to answer their questions.

“Never during the course of the interview is (Larson) told she is free to leave, nor advised of her rights against self-incrimination or her right to an attorney,” Marsden said in his motion to suppress the interview and dismiss one of the charges.

Sgt. Paul Paulos, a spokesman for the department, said police would defer comment until after the judge makes his ruling, which is due Sept. 7.

In a two-day hearing last month, Wright testified that he and Peterson wanted to know who was in the car with Larson just before the slaying. He said she was not in custody.

But Larson was “less than truthful,” Wright said. Among other things, she insisted there were only two men in the car when she was there, not three.

Police were certain she was lying.

In fact, Larson lied dozens of times in the 86-minute interrogation, leading the detectives to warn her that she would be charged for obstructing the investigation.

When police concluded the initial session, they put Larson to a different room. Unlike the first room, it was locked, and when a third detective entered to begin a new round of questioning, he promptly gave Larson the Miranda warning. She agreed to talk and became more straightforward, revising some of her previous answers.

William Mitchell College of Law professor Bradford Colbert said that, under Minnesota law, even if someone makes an ambiguous requests for a lawyer, police must stop questioning except to clarify that issue.

“I think you could make the argument that (Larson’s statement) is a clear request, or at least an equivocal request (for an attorney),” Colbert said. “Their job under the Minnesota Constitution is to clarify whether she wants counsel.”

The second charge of aiding an offender pertains to Larson’s alleged rental of an Extended Stay America hotel room in Bloomington, where she, Flowers and another man, Christopher Bruce, were found by police Dec. 10. Flowers had eluded police to that point.

Bruce and Nicholas John Kruse were believed to be with Flowers when the shooting occurred. They were arrested but have not been charged.

Galtney died of a gunshot wound to the chest shortly after friends brought him to Regions Hospital in St. Paul.

Flowers pleaded guilty April 20 to second-degree unintentional murder and is to be sentenced June 25.

Emily Gurnon can be reached at 651-228-5522. Follow her at twitter.com/emilygurnon.