“What’s he talking about?” George Burkett asked.
“Luke!” Tim said. “You’re okay, you were having a dre—”
“Kill them!” Luke shouted, and in the station’s small holding annex, the doors of all four cells clashed shut. “Obliterate those motherfuckers!”
Papers flew up from the dispatch desk like a flock of startled birds. Tim felt a gust of wind buffet past him, real enough to ruffle his hair. Wendy gave a little cry, not quite a scream. Sheriff John was on his feet.
Tim gave the boy a single hard shake. “Wake up, Luke, wake up!”
The papers fluttering around the room fell to the floor. The assembled cops, Sheriff John included, were staring at Luke with their mouths open.
Luke was pawing at the air. “Go away,” he muttered. “Go away.”
“Okay,” Tim said, and let go of Luke’s shoulder.
“Not you, the dots. The Stasi Li…” He blew out a breath and ran a hand through his dirty hair. “Okay. They’re gone.”
“You did that?” Wendy asked. She gestured at the fallen paperwork. “You really did that?”
“Something sure did it,” Bill Wicklow said. He was looking at the night knocker’s time clock. “The hands on this thing were going around… whizzing around… but now they’ve stopped.”
“They’re doing something,” Luke said. “My friends are doing something. I felt it, even way down here. How could that happen? Jesus, my head.”
Ashworth approached Luke and held out a hand. Tim noticed he kept the other on the butt of his holstered gun. “I’m Sheriff Ashworth, son. Want to give me a shake?”
Luke shook his hand.
“Good. Good start. Now I want the truth. Did you do that just now?”
“I don’t know if it was me or them,” Luke said. “I don’t know how it could be them, they’re so far away, but I don’t know how it could be me, either. I never did anything like that in my life.”
“You specialize in pizza pans,” Wendy said. “Empty ones.”
Luke smiled faintly. “Yeah. You didn’t see the lights? Any of you? A bunch of colored dots?”
“I didn’t see anything but flying papers,” Sheriff John said. “And heard those cell doors slam shut. Frank, George, pick that stuff up, would you? Wendy, get this boy an aspirin. Then we’re going to see what’s on that little computer widget.”
Luke said, “This afternoon all your mother could talk about was her barrettes. She said someone stole her barrettes.”
Sheriff John’s mouth fell open. “How do you know that?”
Luke shook his head. “I don’t know. I mean, I’m not even trying. Christ, I wish I knew what they were doing. And I wish I was with them.”
Tag said, “I’m thinking there might be something to this kid’s story, after all.”
“I want to look at that flash drive, and I want to look at it right now,” Sheriff Ashworth said.
20
What they saw first was an empty chair, an old-fashioned wingback placed in front of a wall with a framed Currier & Ives sailing ship on it. Then a woman’s face poked into the frame, staring at the lens.
“That’s her,” Luke said. “That’s Maureen, the lady who helped me get out.”
“Is this on?” Maureen said. “The little light’s on, so I guess it is. I hope so, because I don’t think I have the strength to do this twice.” Her face left the screen of the laptop computer the officers were watching. Tim found that something of a relief. The extreme closeup was like looking at a woman trapped inside a fishbowl.
Her voice faded a bit, but was still audible. “But if I have to, I will.” She sat down in the chair and adjusted the hem of her floral skirt over her knees. She wore a red blouse above it. Luke, who had never seen her out of her uniform, thought it was a pretty combination, but bright colors couldn’t conceal how thin her face was, or how haggard.
“Max the audio,” Frank Potter said. “She should have been wearing a lav mike.”
Meanwhile, she was talking. Tag reversed the video, turned up the sound, and hit play again. Maureen once more returned to the wingback chair and once more adjusted the hem of her skirt. Then she looked directly into the camera’s lens.
“Luke?”
He was so startled by his name out of her mouth that he almost answered, but she went on before he could, and what she said next put a dagger of ice into his heart. Although he had known, hadn’t he? Just as he hadn’t needed the Star Tribune to give him the news about his parents.
“If you’re looking at this, then you’re out and I’m dead.”
The deputy named Potter said something to the one named Faraday, but Luke paid no attention. He was completely focused on the woman who’d been his only grownup friend in the Institute.
“I’m not going to tell you my life story,” the dead woman in the wingback chair said. “There’s no time for that, and I’m glad, because I’m ashamed of a lot of it. Not of my boy, though. I’m proud of the way he turned out. He’s going to college. He’ll never know I’m the one who gave him the money, but that’s all right. That’s good, the way it should be, because I gave him up. And Luke, without you to help me, I might have lost that money and that chance to do right by him. I only hope I did right by you.”
She paused, seeming to gather herself.
“I will tell one part of my story, because it’s important. I was in Iraq during the second Gulf war, and I was in Afghanistan, and I was involved in what was called enhanced interrogation.”
To Luke, her calm fluency—no uhs, no you-knows, no kinda or sorta—was a revelation. It made him feel embarrassment as well as grief. She sounded so much more intelligent than she had during their whispered conversations near the ice machine. Because she had been playing dumb? Maybe, but maybe—probably—he had seen a woman in a brown housekeeper’s uniform and just assumed she didn’t have a lot going on upstairs.
Not like me, in other words, Luke thought, and realized embarrassment didn’t accurately describe what he was feeling. The right word for that was shame.
“I saw waterboarding, and I saw men—women, too, a couple—standing in basins of water with electrodes on their fingers or up their rectums. I saw toenails pulled out with pliers. I saw a man shot in the kneecap when he spit in an interrogator’s face. I was shocked at first, but after awhile I wasn’t. Sometimes, when it was men who’d planted IEDs on our boys or sent suicide bombers into crowded markets, I was glad. Mostly I got… I know the word…”
“Desensitized,” Tim said.
“Desensitized,” Maureen said.
“Christ, like she heard you,” Deputy Burkett said.
“Hush,” Wendy said, and something about that word made Luke shiver. It was as if someone else had said it just before her. He turned his attention back to the video.
“—never took part after the first two or three, because they gave me another job. When they wouldn’t talk, I was the kindly noncom who came in and gave them a drink or snuck them something to eat out of my pocket, a Quest Bar or a couple of Oreos. I told them the interrogators had all gone off on a break or to eat a meal, and the microphones were turned off. I said I felt sorry for them and wanted to help them. I said that if they didn’t talk, they would be killed, even though it was against the rules. I never said against the Geneva Convention, because most of them didn’t know what that was. I said if they didn’t talk, their families would be killed, and I really didn’t want that. Usually it didn’t work—they suspected—but sometimes when the interrogators came back, the prisoners told them what they wanted to hear, either because they believed me or wanted to. Sometimes they said things to me, because they were confused… disoriented… and because they trusted me. God help me, I had a very trustworthy face.”