Petra’s pout and a tremor at one corner of her mouth suggested less fear than self-pity.
Jane said, “When, through Simon, I get at Booth, which I will, and when I get from Booth what I need to know, which I will, these people are going to be in a desperate cover-their-ass mode. Simon’s going to think you didn’t do enough to resist me. More important, he’s going to realize, because of me, you know too much. If he doesn’t slit your throat, kid, he’ll pay the guy who does.”
“Things are so damn good, the best ever, ever-ever, and then you come along. It’s not right. It’s not fair. What is it with you, you’re so hateful?”
“My husband was a fine man. Nick. My Nick was the best. These power-crazy people killed him.”
Although Petra clung to denial, the weight of detail in Jane’s story seemed to have loosened the knot of her disbelief. Eyes still closed, she shook her head. “I don’t want to know. What good does knowing do me?”
“My little boy’s in hiding. They’ll kill him if they find him.”
“Unless you’re as crazy as you sound and none of this is true.”
“It’s true. Open your eyes and look at me. It’s true.”
Petra opened her eyes. If there was anything to be read in them other than self-pity and hatred and anger, Jane couldn’t see it.
“Whoever you are, you’re a liar. And if you aren’t, which you are, but if you aren’t, shit, then whether I spill to you or don’t, I’m dead.”
In other words, she had just said, Show me a way out, give me hope, and maybe I’ll help you.
“Simon keeps big money in the house, in a safe somewhere,” Jane said. “His kind always do.”
“I don’t know about any big-money safe.”
Jane waited a beat and let a note of tenderness into her voice. “There’ve been times I’ve been lost, there seemed no obvious road ahead. But a lost girl, any lost girl, she doesn’t need to be lost forever. I’ll make him tell me where the money is. I don’t need it. After I’m done here, you take the money and go.”
“Go where? I got nowhere to go.”
“A couple hundred thousand, maybe more. With that, you can go anywhere you want, somewhere you’ve never been and nobody knows you. Stop being Petra Quist. You changed your name before. Change it again. And stay the hell away from men like him. Find a new way.”
“What new way?”
Jane leaned forward on the padded bench and put her left hand over one of the child-woman’s zip-tied hands. “A new way to be. The way you are, even if I’d never shown up, chances are you’d be dead by thirty. You said Simon’s good to you, gives you everything, he’s sweet. But you’ve had moments—haven’t you?—moments when you sensed real evil in him, violence.”
After a hesitation, Petra broke eye contact. She tipped her head back and gazed up at the trompe l’oeil cloud forms, through which a colorful dawn broke perpetually.
Even in an interrogation more intense than this one, even when physical threats and worse were involved, the objective was always to persuade the subject rather than to force submission by fear of brute force. In nearly every inquest of this nature, there came a point when the examinee was ready to cooperate but hadn’t said so, when in fact the decision to provide the information remained as yet more subconscious than fully realized. The interrogator needed to be able to recognize such a moment and not step on it with additional questions or, worst of all, with intimidation, because until the subject had come all the way into the light, she could so easily change her mind and stay on the dark side.
Still searching the faux clouds, Petra said, “Sometimes he hurts me, but he doesn’t mean to.”
35
The candle flames twisted and unfurled and fluttered in the cheap glassware, the soft amber light ceaselessly ebbing and flowing in waveforms across the table in the church kitchen, their pale reflections quivering in the brushed stainless steel of the nearby refrigerator, like a trio of spirits writhing in some visible but inaccessible dimension parallel to the one in which Tanuja and Sanjay lived.
The twins sat catercorner to each other as they ate ham-and-cheese sandwiches slathered with mayonnaise—two each, for they were ravenous—and potato chips. Their flight from a nightmare posse had been bizarre and terrifying as they’d raced from the eastern canyons into the heavily populated cities of mid-county and the coast. But now that they had found sanctuary, however temporary, the experience seemed less terrifying than fairy-tale spooky, less bizarre than fantastic, like some adventure concocted by a modern equivalent of the Brothers Grimm—or at least so it seemed to Tanuja. As in all such tales of fantasy, they had come to that moment of respite in which the most humble circumstances seemed all the warmer for being unpretentious and in contrast to the extraordinary drama that had preceded it, when homely food seemed to be the most delicious meal ever put before them because it had been earned by their cleverness and bravery.
During the first sandwich, such was their extreme hunger and their desire to steep in the coziness of this haven that they barely talked. As they ate the second sandwiches more slowly, they could hardly stop talking. Rehashing what they’d been through. Speculating on the meaning of it. Considering their options.
Throughout their conversation, on the table lay the two ampules that Tanuja had scooped up after she had felled Linc Crossley and his two henchmen with insecticide. Within those glass containers, in the candlelight, the cloudy amber fluid glimmered like some magical elixir that would grant them extramundane powers.
The pulsing candle flames created an illusion of shifting currents within that elixir, but there was real movement as well. The tiny particles clouding the fluid were falling out of suspension and adhering to one another in tangled threadlike formations that kept slowly dissolving and re-forming in new configurations. Here and there along the threads were what at first appeared to be knots but that, on closer inspection, almost seemed to resemble elements on a silicon microchip. These, too, dissolved even as others similar to them began to accrete elsewhere in the web of threads.
Sanjay pondered the ampules. “Maybe this stuff was stored in that container of dry ice to keep it stable. When it warms up, it starts doing this.”
Leaning into the candle glow, Tanuja said, “Yeah, but what exactly is it doing? Turning putrid or something?”
“It kind of looks like all the tiny particles are trying to come together to form something. Though how could they do that undirected?”
“Form what?”
Sanjay frowned. “They were going to inject me with this.”
“Form what?” Tanuja repeated.
“Something. I don’t know. Nothing good.”
While making the sandwiches, they had found a bar of dark chocolate and had at once determined to save some of the champagne to have with it.
When Tanuja had eaten her share of the candy, as her brother poured the last of the champagne in her glass, the aromatic bubbles fizzing, she said, “I need to use the ladies’ room.”
He pushed his chair back from the table to accompany her.
“No, no,” she said. “Not unless you need the men’s. I remember the way. Enjoy your chocolate, chotti bhai.” She rose from her chair and picked up one of the tumblers that contained a candle. “When I get back, we absolutely have to decide what we do in the morning. I won’t sleep tonight if we don’t have a plan.”
“We could have the plan of all plans,” Sanjay said, “and I doubt I’d sleep, anyway.”
At the doorway to the hall, she glanced back and saw her brother leaning over the ampules, peering intently at the contents. By some trick of candlelight, the tangled threads within the amber fluid appeared to cast the faintest web of trembling shadows across his sweet brown face.
36
“Hurts you?” Jane said. “How does he hurt you?”