"But you gave it all up to work retail."
"I gave it up," he said simply. "I was unhappy in my work. I was unhappy in my life."
"Therapy didn't help."
He met her eyes again, though it seemed to cost him. "It didn't hurt. Please sit down. I'll answer your questions."
"She can't make you go through this, Chas." Isis slipped into the room like smoke. Her gown was gray today, the color of storm clouds, and swirled around her ankles as she moved to him. "You're entitled to your privacy, under any law."
"I can insist that he answer my questions," Eve corrected. "I'm investigating murder here. He is, of course, entitled to counsel."
"It isn't a lawyer he needs, but peace." Isis whirled, her eyes alive with emotion, and Chas took her hands, lifted them to his lips, pressed his face to them.
"I have peace," he said quietly. "I have you. Don't worry so. You have to go down and open, and I have to do this."
"Let me stay."
He shook his head, and the look they exchanged had Eve staring in surprise. It was baffling enough to speculate on their physical relationship, but what she saw pass between them wasn't sex. It was love. It was devotion.
It should have been laughable, the way Isis had to lean down, bend that goddess body to reach his lips with hers. Instead, it was poignant.
"You have only to call," she told him. "Only to wish for me."
"I know." He gave her hand a quick, intimate pat to send her off. She shot Eve one last look of barely controlled rage and swept out.
"I doubt I would have survived without her," Chas said as he stared at the door. "You're a strong woman, Lieutenant. It would be difficult for you to understand that kind of need, that kind of dependence."
Once she would have agreed. Now she wasn't so sure. "I'd like to record this conversation, Mr. Forte."
"Yes, of course." He sat, and as Peabody engaged her recorder, mechanically poured the tea. He listened without glancing up as Eve recited the traditional caution.
"Do you understand your rights and obligations?"
"Yes. Would you care for sweetener?"
She looked down at her tea with some impatience. It smelled suspiciously like what Mira insisted on serving her. "No."
"I've added a bit of honey to yours, Officer." He sent Peabody a sweet smile. "And a bit of… something else. I think you'll find it soothing."
"Smells pretty good." Cautious, Peabody sipped, tasted home, and smiled back. "Thanks."
"When's the last time you saw your father?"
Caught off guard by the abruptness of Eve's question, Chas looked up quickly. The hand holding his cup shook once, violently. "The day he was sentenced. I went to the hearing and I watched them take him away. They kept him in full restraints and they closed and locked the door on his life."
"And how did you feel about that?"
"Ashamed. Relieved. Desperately unhappy. Or perhaps just desperate. He was my father." Chas took a deep gulp of tea, as some men might take a gulp of whiskey. "I hated him with all of my heart, all of my soul."
"Because he killed?"
"Because he was my father. I hurt my mother deeply by insisting on attending his trial. But she was too battered emotionally to stop me from doing as I chose. She could never stop him, either. Though she did leave him eventually. She took me and left him, which was, I think, a surprise to all of us."
He stared down into his cup, as if contemplating the pattern of the leaves skimming the bottom. "I hated her, too, for a very, very long time. Hate can define a person, can't it, Lieutenant? It can twist them into an ugly shape."
"Is that what happened to you?''
"Nearly. Ours was not a happy home. You wouldn't expect that it could be with a man like my father dominating it. You suspect I could be like him." Chas's sensual voice remained calm. But his eyes were swirling with emotions.
It was the eyes you watched during interview, Eve thought. The words often meant nothing. "Are you?"
" 'Blood will tell.' Is that Shakespeare?" He shook his head a little. "I'm not quite sure. But isn't that what all children live with, and fear no matter what their parents, that blood will tell?"
She lived with it, she feared it, but she couldn't allow herself to be swayed by it. "How strong an influence was he on your life?"
"There couldn't have been a stronger one. You're an efficient investigator, Lieutenant. I'm sure you've studied the records by now, run the discs, watched them. You would have seen a charismatic man, terrifyingly so. A man who considered himself above the law – any and all laws. That kind of steely arrogance is in itself compelling."
"Evil can be compelling to some."
"Yes." His lips curved without humor. "You'd know that, in your line of work. He wasn't a man you could… fight, on a physical or emotional level. He's strong. Very strong."
Chas closed his eyes a moment, reliving what he was constantly struggling to put to death. "I was afraid I could be like him, considered giving back the most precious gift I'd been given. Life."
"You attempted self-termination?"
"I never got as far as the attempt, just the plan. The first time, I was ten." He sipped tea again, determined to soothe himself. "Can you imagine a child of ten pondering suicide?"
Yes, she could, all too well. She'd been younger yet when she had pondered it. "He abused you?"
"Abuse is such a weak term, don't you think? He beat me. He never seemed to be in a rage when he did. He just struck out at unexpected moments, snapping a bone, raising a fist, with the absent calm another man might display while flicking away a fly."
His fist was clenched on his knee. Deliberately, Chas opened his hand, spread his fingers. "He struck like a shark, fast and in utter silence. There was never a warning, never a gauge. My life, my pain, was totally dependent on his whim. I've had my time in Hell," he said softly, almost as a prayer.
"No one helped you?" Eve asked. "Attempted to intervene?"
"We never stayed in one place very long, and were allowed to form no attachments or friendships. He claimed he needed to spread the word. And he would snap a bone, raise a fist, then take me into a treatment center himself. A concerned father."
"You told no one?"
"He was my father, it was my life." Chas lifted his hands, let them fall. "Who was I to tell?"
Neither had she told anyone, Eve thought. Neither had she had anyone to tell.
"And for quite a while, I believed him when he said it was just." Chas's eyes flickered. "And I certainly believed him when he told me there would be terrible pain and terrible punishment if I said anything. I was thirteen when he sodomized me for the first time. It was a ritual, he told me, when he bound my hands and I wept. A rite of passage. Sex was life. It was necessary to take it. He would take me on the journey as was his duty and his right."
He picked up the tea pot, poured, set it neatly aside. "I don't know if it was rape. I didn't struggle. I didn't beg him to stop. I simply cried without sound and submitted."
"It was rape," Peabody said, and her voice was very quiet.
"Well…" He found he couldn't drink the tea he'd just poured but lifted the cup, held it. "I told no one. Even years later when they had him in a cage, I didn't tell the police. I didn't believe they would hold him. I simply didn't believe they could. He was too strong, too powerful, and all the blood on his hands seemed to add to it. Oddly enough, it was the sex that pushed my mother to run, and take me. Not the violence, not the little boy with broken bones or even the deaths I think she knew he'd caused. It was the sight of him kneeling over me on his altar, with the black candles lit. He didn't see her, but I did. I saw her face when she stepped into the room. She left me there, let him finish with me, and that night when he went out, we ran."
"And still she didn't go to the police."
"No." He looked at Eve. "I know you believe if she had, lives might have been saved. But fear is a very personal emotion. Survival was her only goal. When they arrested him, I went to the trial, every day. I was sure he would stop it somehow. Even when they said they would lock him away, I still didn't believe. I erased his name, and I tried to slip into normality. I took a job that interested me, that I had some talent for. And I allowed myself to get close to no one. There was a rage in me. I would look at a face and hate it because it was happy. Or it was sad. I hated them all for their unshadowed existence. And like my father, I didn't stay in one place very long. And when I found myself considering suicide again with great calm and great seriousness, I was frightened enough to seek help."