He gave me a sheepish look. “Did you have to wear one of those gowns with your butt hanging out?”
“Um, I don’t-”
“Do you mind if I say butt? I think butt is a funny word, but my dad says I shouldn’t say it.”
“How did you know-”
“This.” He grabbed my arm-a little too roughly, but of course he didn’t know I’d recently punctured myself. At least, I don’t think he knew. “See?” He turned my left arm around so the crook of the elbow faced up. There was a red pinprick where they had drawn blood and now that I noticed it, a couple of faint bruises above and below. “I bet you have small veins. I have small veins, and it took them three times to get the needle into me.”
“Could I possibly see your father?” I assumed O’Bannon was the previously mentioned dad and I was speaking to his twenty-something boomerang boy.
“Do you have a dog?” he asked.
“Not currently. Why?”
“I don’t like dogs. Do you like dogs?” With each new remark, I became increasingly aware of the oddness of his voice. He talked too loudly, for starters, given that we were only about a foot apart. And the inflections were all wrong. It was almost like one of those computer-generated voices that are assembled by syllables, so the intonation goes up and down with no relation to what is being said.
“Well… some dogs. I used to have German shepherds-”
“If you have a dog, I can’t let you in the house.”
“That’s cool. No dog.”
“Did you know that dogs were first domesticated around fourteen thousand years ago near Israel?”
“No…”
“I think it was a mistake.”
I stared at him, but not as intently as he was staring at me. He never actually made eye contact. Every time my eyes came near his, he averted them. I tried to get a fix on who I was talking to, without success. There was something odd about his expression, a certain vacancy behind the eyes. Almost as if he wasn’t really there. Like his body was on the front patio with me but he wasn’t. Like he was gazing out through an invisible acrylic barrier-he could see through it, but he couldn’t make contact. It disturbed me.
One of my chief assets has always been my hyper-empathy. I’ve had it since I was a child. I don’t know why. And I can’t really explain what it is. But I’ve had this ability to tune into what other people are feeling. It isn’t a mind-reading trick. But it’s real. Of course, it’s always been a great asset to me in my work as a behaviorist. One of the reasons I’ve been able to create useful profiles is that I’ve had this talent for understanding what motivates people, what impels them to take action. But it wasn’t doing me any good with this guy. When I put out my feelers toward him, I got nothing.
“So… is your dad home?”
“He’s in his study.” No movement.
“Can I talk to him?”
And the kid disappeared. Didn’t say yes, no, or go to hell-just turned around and dived back into the house.
So what was I supposed to do? I decided that I’d been invited in, so I stepped into the foyer and closed the door behind me.
And nothing happened. After a minute or so of waiting, I escorted myself down the front hallway in the direction I’d seen the boy go.
I found O’Bannon’s study. It was a gorgeous room, with walls of dark wood paneling and hundreds if not thousands of books. Two of the walls were completely covered with bookshelves stuffed to capacity. Beautiful books, leather-bound editions with gilt-embossed lettering on the spines. Some of them were police-related-criminology texts and such. But most were fiction, literature I was supposed to read in college but never did: WutheringHeights , In Search of Lost Time, Ivanhoe, Bleak House, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Chief O’Bannon sat in a plush recliner, obviously designed to be a reading chair. The spine of his book faced me. He was perusing Jane Eyre. Yes, you heard me correctly. My tough-guy supercop boss was reading Jane Eyre.
And he was drinking. There was a crystal snifter on the table beside him, and an open decanter of brandy beside that.
I could smell it, even across the room. It smelled good.
The kid who had opened the door was sprawled across the carpet. He was reading something, too.
I guess this room was far enough back that O’Bannon was insulated from the noise at the front of the house. Neither of them appeared to have heard me approach. Neither realized that I was standing in the doorway staring at them.
“Chief?” I said quietly.
He jumped, actually jumped, out of his chair, slamming his book shut. His elbow knocked over the brandy snifter. It spilled onto the table and soaked some papers. One of them caught my eye. It was a photocopy of a page torn from a spiral-bound notebook, filled with block lettering and symbols.
“Damn it.” O’Bannon tried to wipe the mess up with his sleeve. Fortunately, there had not been much left in the snifter. Once he had the mess contained, he focused his attention on me. “What are you doing here?”
I pointed. “Your son let me in.”
He looked down at the kid, frowned, nodded. “Well, what do you want?”
“You know what I want.”
“It isn’t going to happen.”
“Just listen to me for a moment.”
“No.”
“Come on. We can help each other.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I need work.”
“And that’s why you came here?”
“I want to help.”
“I don’t need help. I need peace and quiet.”
“Chief, listen to me!”
“Go home.”
“A-A-Are you guys fighting?”
It was the kid, still lying on the floor, but now twisted around and watching us like a spectator at a tennis match.
“No,” O’Bannon snapped. “We are not fighting.”
“ ’Cause it sounds like you’re fighting. Do you need to go to time out?”
“Darcy…”
The boy looked at me. “Do you know that if you make him mad, you will have to go to time out? Or maybe military school.”
“Darcy!” O’Bannon barked. “We are not fighting!”