"What?" It came out of me like a chicken's squawk.
She leaned in toward me confidentially. "Well… you know."
I stared at her. "No, I don't know. What are you talking about?"
"You know, Jason," she said out of one sly corner of her mouth. "I don't mean you and her were, like, doing anything together, obviously. But… well, I mean, I know you, Jason. I mean, you have to admit: You can get up to some shenanigans yourself when you're in the mood."
I opened my mouth to answer her, but I didn't answer, and I shut my mouth again.
We were close together in that small room, face to face. I could see the eyeliner around her eyes and the eyes themselves, the true feelings in them. I could see the micro-expressions at the corners of her lips, the little giveaways. It was all there, I just hadn't noticed it before. I had been too busy thinking about the cops watching me behind the mirror. I had been too worried that I might seem guilty to them, that I might somehow reveal to them my private sins and peccadilloes. I had been so fearful that they might come to suspect me of some wrongdoing in Serena's disappearance that the whole, awful truth of the situation hadn't really struck me. But now I saw it. Now I thought: Of course. This was what had been bothering me all morning, what had caused that sense of foreboding in me when I looked through the cruiser window at the roiling clouds.
The truth was: The police suspected me already. It was just as I imagined it, just as I worried, exactly as I feared. They already knew my private sins and failings-whatever Lauren could tell them, and no doubt she'd told them all with relish and malicious glee. And then she had come in here. They had sent her in here, to catch me off guard, to get me talking, to get me to confess to… what? To what? What the hell could they suspect me of?
I didn't know-I had no idea-and I was afraid. I felt cold sweat gathering on the back of my neck. I felt the fear show itself plainly in my expression, in my eyes. Lauren saw it. I could tell she did. I could tell she liked it, too. She had to fight down a smile.
"Something," she said with a horrible knowingness. "You got up to something, didn't you, Jason?"
I turned my back on her.
"What was it?" she said.
I stepped to the mirror. I glowered into my own frightened eyes, at my own battered face. Lauren's leering image was at my shoulder.
"What was it, Jason?" she said behind me.
"Get the hell in here," I said to the mirror. "This game is over."
I'd hardly finished speaking-I was still looking at the mirror-when the door to the interrogation room opened and Detective Curtis came in. He held the door ajar with his shoulder while he worked the sleeve of his jacket over his other arm. There were no apologies from him, no pretenses.
"Mr. Harrow" was all he said, slipping his jacket on. "Would you come with me, please?"
Of course, it wasn't really a question at all.
Downtown
Detective Curtis walked rapidly down the cinder-block hallway. I had to hurry to keep up with him. "What the hell's going on?" I said.
He didn't answer me-didn't say a word-just walked on, straightening the sleeves of his jacket, shooting his cuffs as he went.
"Excuse me," I said a little more sharply.
"I'll explain on the way," he said. And he just walked on. I followed, irritated-and sick with fear.
We came into another room. It was bigger than the interrogation room, but still small. There was a gunmetal desk in each of the four corners, all of them chaotic with papers and coffee cups and files. Three of the desks were unoccupied, as if their residents had been overwhelmed and fled. At another, a harried man sat bent almost double in his chair, leaning urgently into a cell phone as if he were talking a possible suicide off a bridge. There were lots of cheaply printed flyers papering the walls, cheerful pastel pages, some covering the messages on others. DO YOU HAVE INFORMATION ABOUT… PROTECT YOUR CHILD… PATROL YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD…Somewhere the city was paying someone to print up more flyers to cover over even these. On one wall, an open door led into a connecting office. A dapper, silver-haired man was sitting at the desk in there, signing papers with a mournful expression on his face. He looked as if he'd been signing papers forever, and would go on signing them, always with the conviction that they were no more useful than the unreadable flyers on the wall.
The place had a strange embattled atmosphere. I couldn't quite pinpoint it at first, but after a while it occurred to me: It felt like an imperial outpost in some rebellious tribal backwater.
Curtis crossed to one of the empty desks. He snapped a clipboard from the mess on it. Handed the clipboard to me.
"Read that and sign it."
I stared at the page on the clipboard.
"It's your rights," he went on in a monotone. "You can remain silent. You can have a lawyer. It's all there."
I looked up from the page into his pale, passionless eyes. "Do you suspect me of something?"
"We have to inform you of your rights," he said. "It's routine." He didn't even try to sound convincing.
There was a pen wedged in the clip. I pulled it out and signed the paper. It didn't even occur to me to demand an attorney. Why should I? I hadn't done anything wrong.
I handed the clipboard back to him. He tossed it down onto the desktop as if it held no more interest for him. Then he grabbed a set of keys off a hook on the wall and walked out, leaving me to hurry after him again.
There was an unmarked car parked among the squad cars out front, a dark blue Dodge. We drove downtown in that. I sat in the front seat next to Curtis. The Dodge merged with a thick current of cabs and delivery trucks, moving slowly along the edge of the university campus. The campus and the street formed a corridor running to the low, churning gray-black sky ahead: classical buildings to the left of us, amidst lawns and pathways; scarred brownstones and ragged awnings to the right. Curtis kept his hard face forward as he drove, his hard eyes on the windshield. He still wasn't saying anything. I got the feeling he wouldn't say anything unless I badgered it out of him.
"Where are we going?" I asked. Angry as I was, worried as I was, I was still gauging my tone, gauging my words, just as I had when he was watching me through the one-way glass. I was trying to sound forceful now, but without sounding hostile. I thought I deserved some information but I still wanted to come across as one of the good guys, ready to cooperate in every way.
It was a long time before Curtis answered me. We drove another block in the stuttering flow. When he did finally speak, it was in a slow, reluctant drawl, as if he were doing me a favor. "Downtown. There's something I think you should see."
"Is this about Serena?"
"That's what I'm trying to find out."
"Look, could you tell me what's going on, please?"
"We're investigating your daughter's disappearance."
My daughter. That had to have come from Lauren. I was about to tell him Serena wasn't my daughter, but I didn't. What if she was? Would he think I had lied?
Instead I said, "You sent Lauren into that room to question me, didn't you?"
I thought I saw the faintest hint of a smile play at the corner of the detective's thin lips. "There wouldn't be any point to that. You hadn't been Mirandized. We wouldn't have been able to use any of your answers in court." He rolled his tongue around his cheek. "We just asked her if she wanted to see you-that's all."
It took a moment but then I got the joke. I managed a short, bitter laugh. I could picture that scene, all right. I could just imagine Lauren in the detectives' office, that chaotic little outpost of the empire with the four gunmetal desks. I could see her with a tall mocha latte the cops would've brought her from Starbucks. Slouched in a chair beside Curtis's desk, laughing off my ideas about some sort of-get this!-terrorist conspiracy involving Serena. The other detectives would've tilted back in their own chairs with their hands behind their heads, listening, laughing along. I could see that, too. And I could hear Lauren describing me as if I were some sort of puritan evangelist, some sort of pinched, intolerant hypocrite, raining fire and brimstone down on her because she was a poor single mom doing the best she could. As the chuckling cops encouraged her, she would've grown more expansive, favoring them with detailed descriptions of our sex lives more than a decade and a half ago. That Night in Bedford-that never-ending night. He could get up to some shenanigans, that Jason, when he was in the mood. Then, when they thought she was really primed, the cops would've brought her into the observation room, the room on the other side of the one-way glass. They would've stood around her, snickering with her, as she watched me pace and drum my fingers and stew. Hey, y'know, you're welcome to go in and talk to him if you want-for old times' sake or whatever. They wouldn't have had to spell it out. She'd have known what they wanted her to do. She would have jumped at the chance to get me to confess…