He stops speaking, pauses for any questions or comments, making sure curiosity has peaked. Then he reaches once again into the satchel and withdraws a tape recorder. He places it next to the brain model and the bubble, adjusts a volume knob, then hits a button. The cassette inside starts turning and there’s a hiss of noise from a small speaker.
First, Woo’s own voice is heard, in a whisper, saying, “Tape three. Two-fifteen p.m.”
Then there’s a moment of quiet with the exception of some vague rumbling noise, caused, most likely, by the recorder being moved around. There’s some coughing, followed by the slightly echoing sound of a metal door being opened and closed.
Woo says, “James Lee Partridge, age twenty-four, scoring for the WAIS-R — verbal, eighty-one; performance, eighty-four; full scale, eighty-two. Scoring for the WRAT — reading, grade three-point-two; arithmetic, grade four-point-eight; spelling, grade three-point-nine. ”
There’s a pause, then Woo’s voice, quietly.
“All right, now, are you feeling okay, Jimmy Lee?”
A new voice, young, nervous, says, “Just the headache is all.”
“Do you think you can read this? Here, just take a look … Yes, that page there, fine.”
Jimmy Lee Partridge goes through some awful, phlegmy throat-clearing, takes a deep breath in through a clogged nose and reads: “When … the … day … of …”
He reads in small, short blasts, word by word, as if they were meant to stand separately from one another. He reads them without any accent or intonation, in the manner that a sobbing, breath-grabbing child tries to speak.
On the tape, Woo’s voice whispers, “Start over, and concentrate, Jimmy Lee.”
There’s another pause and Lenore imagines the convict is trying to read the words to himself, before saying them aloud. She doesn’t like listening to the tape. For one reason or another, it makes her uncomfortable. But she makes herself, tells herself that, like a lot of uncomfortable things, it’s an important part of her job.
Jimmy Lee Partridge starts again, and this time the words flow together without any noticeable pause or effort: “When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly a sound came from heaven …”
Jimmy Lee breaks off into something of a cackle, his voice gets loud and thrilled and surprised and he says, “Pretty goddamn good, huh, Doc?”
Woo just says, “Once again, Jimmy Lee.”
And he reads: “When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them tonguesasoffiredistributedandrestingoneachoneofthemandtheywereallfilledwiththeholyspiritandbegantospeakinothertonguesasthespiritgavethemutterancenow …”
Something happens. Lenore listens and stares at the recorder. She thinks something must be wrong with the recorder. But then she notices the same expression on all the other faces at the table.
Jimmy Lee is reading so fast that it seems like a joke, like those TV ads where the pitchman tries to cram as many words of salesmanship into thirty seconds as is humanly possible. And then some. Jimmy Lee’s voice is going so fast he’s starting to sound like one of the Chipmunks from that cartoon.
“AndresidmtsofmesopotamiajudemndmppadociapmtusandasiaphrygiaandpamphyliaegyptandpartsoflibyabelongingtocyreneandvisitorsfromromebothjewsandproselytescretansandarabianswehearthemtellinginurowntonguesthemightyWorksofgodandallwwereamazezzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz …”
And the voice turns into something like the sound of a common summer insect recorded at a loud volume with a sensitive microphone. Something you’d hear on a nature show as you switched the channels on the TV on a lazy weekend. It’s just an ongoing buzz, a harsh, nervous-making, buzzing sound, and after a while Lenore can’t tell whether it’s really out there or just in her ear, in her head, a product of her own sinuses and faulty eustachian tube.
Woo punches the recorder off and looks around the table at the troubled faces. He’s enjoying the reaction, Lenore thinks. It allows him to feel both essential to our work and a cut above us. In that moment of watching Woo’s face watching her own, she understands that the doctor has an ego that towers over the mayor’s, and Lehmann’s and Zarelli’s combined.
“He was reading from a Bible that we happened to have handy,” Woo says. “But it could have been any book and the results would have been the same. Let me add to your amazement, all right? If I could go back to the prison today and ask him what he’d read for me, he would repeat it verbatim, at the same speed. And our tests show that his comprehension was one hundred percent.”
He pauses, then says, “Before I answer any of your questions, let me risk poisoning your amazement with fear.”
He ejects the cassette from the machine, flips it over, and inserts the reverse side into the bed. He hits the rewind button until the tape stops, then presses Play.
His whispered, theatrical tape voice comes on, saying, “Tape six, four forty-five p.m. Conversational flow between James Lee Partridge and William Robbins.”
There are two voices talking at once. They’re both speaking extremely rapidly and Lenore can’t separate them or follow the topic of their discussion. She thinks it has to do with women and/or sex, but she’s not sure. She thinks she’s pulled out the words grab, bra, leg, kiss, Carrie, fifteen, Mustang, rubber and screw. But she’s not sure of any of them and the longer the tape goes on the more difficult it gets to distinguish any of it until finally all the language blurs once again into that amplified fly-noise, an endless buzz that makes the hairs on Lenore’s neck stand up.
When it’s clear the buzzing is driving everyone at the table crazy, Woo punches the recorder off.
Peirce is the first to speak. “You’re telling us that those two people on the tape, those two convicts, were speaking just then. Having a conversation, right?”
Woo nods. “That’s absolutely right, Detective. In excess of fifteen hundred words per minute passed back and forth between each of them. And that’s not all of it. There was a level of contact, a level of understanding, passing between them that’s difficult to relay to you. They were completely conscious of and continually integrating body language, changes in musculature, eye signals. There was a degree of speed and comprehension present in that dialogue that you or I …”
Lenore can’t help herself. She blurts out, “Why are we involved?”
Mayor Welby says, “We’ll be getting to that, Detective.”
There’s an awkward beat, then Woo, staring at Lenore, says, “No time like the present, I suppose.”
From the bottomless satchel he withdraws two of his own 8 x 10 black-and-white photos, places them flat on the table, and slides them to Lenore. She picks them up, knowing already what they are. She’s seen too many of this type of photo. She knows this because it’s lost the ability to shock her. The first picture is labeled Partridge. The second is labeled Robbins. They’re both morgue shots, taken from directly above the subject, under the harsh white light of powerful fluorescents. The photos show the subjects from the shoulders up, their heads resting on plain white sheets that Lenore knows are covering stainless-steel slab tables. The subjects’ heads are both shaved. In both photos, there are bullet holes in the head and face. In Partridge’s case, the upper left-hand portion of his forehead has been blown away entirely.