THE BLACKEST, RICHEST COFFEE that she had ever tasted got Jane through the next hour and a half. Dougal Derwent Trahern was only slightly less of a bee-stung bear than he had been when she first entered his shabby office. Blunt, gruff, often rude, grumbling when he wasn’t growling, his stare like surgical steel, he had a drill-into-it interrogation technique straight out of Quantico. He made notes, looped back to issues she had already discussed, to see if she contradicted herself, and sweated her through her story as if he must be convinced she was a serial killer rather than a hunter of them. He read Emily Rossman’s autopsy report and listened to Jane’s account of what the pathologist had told her at the animal hospital.
She watched over Trahern’s shoulder as he used Overton’s smartphone—and the forty-four-character Web address Jane had found on it—to plunge into the Dark Web and review the messages that Aspasia presented to a visitor. She had not seen this before, and she was chilled when Jimmy Radburn’s description of the experience proved to be spot-on. After getting to the screen that promised beautiful girls who were incapable of disobedience and whose permanent silence was assured, Trahern issued a colorful curse.
“The world is zombified,” he said. “They’re just sleazeballs and freaks instead of the walking dead, but more of them than us.”
Jane returned to her folding chair. “What now?”
Trahern switched off Overton’s smartphone. “Why don’t you go out to the dining room for a while. I need to talk to some people.”
“What people?”
“You’ve made a convincing case. I’m not going to rat you out.”
“What people?” she repeated. “You make a mistake, talk to the wrong one, I’m finished. I’m dust. And my boy.”
“I may look deranged, but I’m not. You either trust me or you don’t. If you don’t, just leave and we’ll forget each other.”
She stared at him. He returned the stare.
After a silence, she said, “You’re one hard-nosed bastard.”
“What do you want—someone who breaks the grindstone or someone who’s broken by it?”
She got to her feet but didn’t move toward the door. “One big question. On Monday, at the library, you were looking at porno.”
“Not for pleasure. As a citizen activist.”
“That sounds real to you?”
“Look, I work with various concerned groups in the city. We try to set things right where we can. It took a while to get libraries to block the nasty websites so kids couldn’t get on them. Now and then a librarian or somebody decides it’s a free-speech issue and opens the lid on the sewer. I was told that branch was backsliding. I had to see for myself. Today, the lid’s back on, kids are safe.”
She remembered how he had considered the pornography on the computer screen with a combination of boredom and puzzlement, not with lascivious interest. And he had soon switched to dog videos.
“Good,” she said. “I’m glad I asked.”
“You want to ask if I bathed this morning?”
“I know you did. When I was looking over your shoulder, I could smell your shampoo.”
7
* * *
DURING THE HOUR and a half she had spent in Trahern’s office, the lunch rush had subsided. Two men, five women, and three children were finishing their meals at the long tables. For just a moment, when the kids looked at Jane, they all seemed to have Travis’s face.
Charlene, Rosa, and two other women were cleaning the serving side of the cafeteria line. As Jane approached them, Charlene said, “Goodness be, look at this, Rosa. Her eyebrows aren’t even singed.”
“Seems to still have all her teeth, too,” Rosa said.
Jane said, “He’s all growl, no bite. How long’s he been here?”
“Since he bought the building. What is it, Rosa? Five years?”
“Closer six.”
Since he bought the building. Those five words revised Jane’s understanding of the situation.
“A girl like you,” Charlene said, “can’t be lookin’ for a job in this place. Are you wantin’ to volunteer?”
“Never enough volunteers,” Rosa said.
“Actually,” Jane said, “I’m trying to persuade him to volunteer for something.”
“He’ll do it, whatever it is,” Charlene assured her. “Our Mr. Bigfoot doesn’t know how to say no. He has a finger in everything from veterans’ needs to no-kill animal shelters to Toys for Tots.”
“After-school programs for kids, scholarships,” Rosa added.
“He spends so much time spreadin’ his money around,” Charlene said, “I don’t know when he has the time to make more of it.”
“Just the one thing,” Rosa said, and gave her coworker a meaningful look.
Charlene said, “If sometime he goes pale and breaks into a sweat and seems not himself for just a minute, pay him no mind.”
“Is he ill?” Jane asked.
“No, no, no. It’s just a bad memory, maybe from one of his wars. He works his way through it quick. It doesn’t mean nothin’, child.” Charlene and Rosa returned to their work, subject closed.
8
* * *
WHEN JANE RETURNED from the women’s lavatory, Charlene waved her over to the cafeteria counter. “The boss said, ‘Send that young lady back in here.’ If he forgot your name, child, don’t take offense. He’s got a lot on his mind, and he remembers everybody’s name after a while. By the way, what is your name?”
“Alice Liddell,” Jane said.
“I hope we’ll be seein’ a lot more of you, Alice. Now, do you remember how to get to his office?”
“I do. Thank you.”
In Trahern’s office, Jane closed the door and regarded the man hulking over his desk, wearing his homeless-guy clothes, behind his lightning-shot beard. Her respect for what he had done in the past was corroded by suspicion, by the apprehension that the country was afflicted by a pandemic of corruption. She thought about David James Michael, who was widely viewed as a generous do-gooder, cover that allowed him to back Shenneck and use the girls at Aspasia. Suddenly it was possible to see Trahern’s clothes as a costume, his unruly hair and Moses beard as part of a crafted image.
She said, “So you’re rich, huh?”
He raised his untrimmed eyebrows, which were as lush as a pair of mustaches. “Is being rich a strike against me?”
“Depends on how you made it. You spent twelve years in the Army, which isn’t known for big salaries.”
Trahern watched steam wisp from his coffee. He picked up the mug and blew on the coffee and cautiously took a sip. He might have been striving to control his temper, which he had indulged before. Or maybe he was buying time to spin a convincing lie.
“When I left the service,” he said, “I had an inheritance waiting from my father, who died the year before.”
“How did he earn it?”
Trahern’s face knotted like a gnarled scrub oak. “Someone in as much trouble as you are shouldn’t ask for help and then throw stones with both hands.”
Self-righteous indignation was not an answer.
“In case you’ve forgotten,” she said, “I’ve recently had my life knocked out from under me by some rich people who think they can own anyone they want and kill anyone they don’t own.”
“Painting all rich people as villains is purest bigotry.”
She was keenly aware that a charge of bigotry was a popular technique used to shut up an adversary who was no more a bigot than she was a blue giraffe, to make her doubt herself and misdirect her, while implying the moral superiority of the accuser.
Whatever Trahern’s motivation, benign or sinister, she wouldn’t be manipulated. “Do you hang out with a bunch of rich people? Seems to me like they hang out with each other and no one else.”
Rising from his chair, standing perhaps six feet four, chest describing an arc like that of a fifty-gallon wine barrel, face now red with displeasure, he said, “I hang out with millionaires and paupers and near saints and certain sinners and anyone I damn well want to hang out with. Now, why don’t you sit down?”
“I’m waiting for the answer.”
“What answer?”