Clara’s mouth trembled. “I’d never heard of Twaron before. I’ve only ever heard of Kevlar. If the report had said it was Kevlar, I could have made that connection. Hey! Come on, you can’t blame me for some girl’s death just because I didn’t know what Twaron was. Come on!”
“I don’t blame you. I blame myself. You told me you weren’t trained for forensics work. I should have listened to you.”
Clara jumped up and wrapped her arms around her chest. Her face was a neutral mask. Caxton had been with her long enough to know what that meant—she felt like she was being attacked.
“All I’m saying, Clara, is that you could have Googled it. What I needed from you, when I put you in charge of this stuff, was information. Fetlock’s experts are smart people and they do a certain job very well, but all they can give you is raw data. They were going to send me their report anyway, but I needed somebody to actually read it and give me the key points. You could have gone that extra distance. Next time—”
“Next time? So you’re not firing me? Oh, thank you so much.” Clara stomped over to the window and stared out at the snow. “I can’t believe this, Laura. You really got me this time, didn’t you? It used to just be guilt you held over my head. Now you need to make me feel stupid, too.”
“What are you talking about? Guilt?”
“Jesus! Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. Our relationship is falling apart. I should have dumped you a long time ago. But how could I? I keep asking for more time together, for more intimacy. But no, you’re too busy saving the world. I can’t exactly compete with that, and I feel guilty about wanting to. So I hang in there, I keep being patient and loving and making your fucking breakfast every morning. Then you come along with this job offer and I think hey, maybe you actually do care. Maybe you understand. So I jump into something I have no training for, something I’d never even considered. Now you’re laying some girl’s death on me, too? Jesus!”
“It’s not like that,” Caxton said, but Clara was already storming out of the room. She hurried to the bedroom and slammed the door behind her.
For a time Caxton just sat at the table, hoping her girlfriend would come back. She didn’t. There was too much to do, too many lives at stake to wait for very much longer, she decided. She would try to patch things up later. Before she left, though, she picked up the book Clara had been reading. It was a thick hardcover with the title on the cover in big block letters: FUNDAMENTALS OF CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION, SEVENTH EDITION.
She laid it gently back on the table and returned to her car.
Her next stop was Mechanicsburg, and the local jail there. The cops and corrections officers that ran the place were surprised to see her, but when she flashed her silver star they fell into line. One grabbed up a heavy key ring and led her down into the basement, to the secure cells.
“He screamed every time we tried to put him in a cell with a window,” the CO explained, sorting through his keys. “These are our solitary confinement units, which we save for the worst kind. Padded walls, no furniture but a suicide-?proof toilet. Electric lights we keep on twenty-?four/seven so we can see what they’re up to.”
“What has he been doing?” Caxton asked.
The CO shrugged. “At night he sits staring into space, or sometimes he’ll pace back and forth. The cell’s only three paces wide, but he’ll do that for hours. During the day—from dawn until sundown, every time—he just sleeps. It’s funny.”
“What is?” Caxton asked.
“Down here,” the CO said, “there’s really no way for him to see whether the sun is up or down. But somehow, he knows. He’ll be sleeping now, of course, but I can wake him up if you want.”
“I do,” Caxton said.
The CO unlocked a heavy reinforced door and opened it wide. Inside Dylan Carboy lay stretched out on the floor, his head turned to one side, looking like nothing so much as a lifeless corpse. His hands were secured behind his back with nylon restraints and his feet were bare.
“Come on, kid. Come on. You got a visitor.”
The boy didn’t move.
“This might take a while,” the CO said, then grabbed Carboy under the arms and grunted and strained to get him sitting upright. “You’re a U.S. Marshal, huh? You come to transfer him?”
She understood why he would think that—prisoner transport across state lines was one of the primary functions of the USMS. “No,” she said. “I just want to talk to him. It’s pertinent to an open investigation.”
The CO shrugged. “Hell, I was hoping we were going to get rid of him. Little bastard creeps me out. You want to talk, feel free. I don’t know if he’ll answer.”