Cerny cut in. “The tapes Cecelia and I made of him when he was a boy. Our research. When he lived here with us at Baskens. He brought you here because he wanted you to understand what he is. Why he is.”
My gut twisted. I could still taste a trace of the vomit in my mouth from earlier. Cerny reached for his iPad from a nearby table. Held it out to me. I didn’t move.
“I don’t want to watch them,” I said. My voice was shaking, and I realized I was afraid. Afraid in a way I’d never been before.
“Heath wants you to know who he is,” the doctor said. “He needs it.”
I took the iPad, swiped the screen, and the keypad came up. I met Cerny’s gaze.
“Cecelia’s birthday,” I said. “5-3-53.”
“Clever.” His eyebrows lifted. “Like I said, a perfect match.”
I tapped in the code with trembling fingers. I found a file labeled “Sam O’Hearn” and opened it, and the screen filled with folders. Each was labeled an age, beginning with four all the way to sixteen.
I clicked on a folder at the top of the screen labeled Age 4. Another window opened then, this one stacked with video files. I selected one on the top row, and a video player filled the screen. A wide shot of one of the rooms in the apartment—the one on the end with the kitchenette, chalkboard, and gilt-framed mirror. Only, in the video, the room was fully furnished with a gleaming table and chairs, lamps, and scattered vases of hydrangea. A rich Persian rug covering the scratched wood, and the walls hung with paintings. The room looked elegant and lived in. It looked like a home.
A small boy ran around the perimeter of the room under the watchful eye of a woman, seated in one of the chairs at the table. She was dressed in a light blouse and slim dark skirt, her hair gathered neatly into a twist. She held a yellow dump truck. The boy, motoring around the room like a battery-powered toy, was a blur of stocky legs and floppy black hair.
“Sam,” the woman said. “Would you like to play with the truck in the sand?”
He continued to run.
“Sam, if you’ll sit down with me—quietly, for a few minutes—I’ll give you the truck and let you take it outside.”
The boy let out a shriek as he dodged the table and chairs.
“Sam—”
The shriek rose to a steady scream. I paused the tape and closed the file. I was shaking, and my scalp prickled in creeping horror. What was this?
“Open another one,” Heath said.
I did, one labeled Age 5.
The camera showed the sitting room—the space between the dining room and bedroom. Music played in the background, and Dr. Cerny and Cecelia danced in the center. The little boy—Sam—sat on the sofa and watched, stone faced. He looked bored. I closed it and moved on to the next file.
The boy, slightly taller and thinner now, sat in the sitting room beside the coffee table. He and Dr. Cerny were playing cards. Cerny’s hair was a rich golden brown, with only a hint of silver, his face unlined and handsome. He dealt the cards slowly and methodically, across the table, his eye all the while on the boy. There was no music in the background, no drone of a TV, only the scrape of the cards and Cerny’s low instructions.
The camera was positioned perfectly to capture the boy. The messy shock of black hair crowning a delicate, sallow face. A pair of wide, thickly lashed brown eyes, slender nose over full lips. A fine spray of freckles across his cheeks.
Heath. My Heath.
It was the strangest thing, seeing him this way. As a child. Especially since I’d never seen so much as a snapshot of him as a baby. But here he was, more than just a badly lit school photo in a scrapbook. He was a living, breathing human being—the same person I knew and loved. The man who sat before me now.
But this wasn’t just a record of a birthday party, a picnic, a random spontaneous moment of his childhood. This was a carefully planned-out experiment. The card game was beside the point. The doctor and Cecelia had positioned Heath in front of the camera for optimum study. So every gesture he made could be catalogued. Every expression as it flickered across his face. Every tone of voice.
The psychopath’s every move was of the utmost interest.
On the iPad there was a wail and a scraping sound as Boy Heath’s chair flew out from under him. He doubled over, his body going rigid, fingers fanning wide beside his head. He screamed at the floor, the veins in his temple popping, the cords lining his neck standing out. The sound was chilling.
Heath upended the table, the cards spinning across the room. Dr. Cerny stepped neatly out of the way, then moved slowly in the direction of the kitchen. He stood in the doorway for a beat, erect, expressionless, then backed into the kitchen and pulled the pocket door closed behind him. In his absence, the destruction amped up. A lamp flew. A vase. A book. A spread of newspapers covered with sticky pieces of painted wood. The chair Heath had been sitting on shot across the floor.
Heath flung himself against a wall, then ran to the door that led to the bedroom on the far side of the room. He opened and slammed it repeatedly, with all of his strength, the door bouncing back, doorknob punching a hole in the opposite wall.
Eventually, he wound down and began to stagger around the room, finally collapsing on the bare wood floor. After several seconds, the kitchen door slid open and Cerny emerged. He calmly walked across the room—stepping over the boy’s inert body—and switched off the lamps and lowered the blinds.
He left, shutting the hallway door quietly behind him. I didn’t know where he went—upstairs to the surveillance room to confer with Cecelia or downstairs to his office—but no one else entered the apartment. No one helped the boy lying on the floor into pajamas or guided him to brush his teeth and into bed. No one tucked him in, smoothed his hair back, or kissed his forehead. He was left to fend for himself.
I felt a wave of sorrow rise and begin to overtake the earlier shock and horror I’d felt. I lowered my head and wept into the crook of my arm. No one said a word; then, after a minute or two, I felt Heath’s hand on my back.
He doesn’t mean it, I thought. It’s not real.
Nevertheless, his hand was there, radiating warmth into my skin. Even if he was doing it because in his cold, analytical brain, he knew that he was supposed to comfort me when I cried, I didn’t wish it away. It was comforting. It was what I wanted, and maybe I didn’t care why.
Could I honestly say I’d be able to go on with a normal life after discovering who Heath really was? Was it possible to live a full, satisfying life with a man who didn’t feel emotions the way I did? I truly didn’t know the answers to those questions. What I did know was that I wasn’t ready to say no to the firm, warm, reassuring pressure of Heath’s hand on my back.
Heath wasn’t a diagnosis. He was a flesh-and-blood person. The man I loved.
I turned to him. He was staring at me with those same dark eyes, that same stillness. He was the same man I’d come to know. The same man I’d fallen in love with when I first saw him standing in the glare of the lights. For now, that was enough.
I caught his hand. “I want to go back upstairs,” I said. “I want to see your home.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
It was surreal—standing where Heath had played and eaten and slept as a child.
Twelve years. All spent in these three small rooms.
He’d been isolated from other people, but he hadn’t been held prisoner, not technically. He’d been allowed to roam the grounds, hike into the forest and up the mountain to the overlook. He’d been educated in a broad range of subjects and encouraged to expand his knowledge with books. It wasn’t the confinement that was the problem—plenty of kids were raised in apartments tinier than this one in cities all over the world. It was that he’d been considered a specimen. An object to be observed rather than loved.