"Ms. Grey-Mrs. Grey-I feel you're keeping something from me."
"I'm not. I'm really not. Why would I?"
"Are you certain Conor never said anything to you? About why he came here? Why he came to this city?"
"For the work, that's all. He said he came for the work."
"All that time you talked to him, and your father talked to him, and your son, that's all he told you." He couldn't stop himself. He couldn't let go of it. Something didn't make sense.
"Look… Henry didn't murder anyone," she answered. "He wouldn't do that."
"That isn't what I'm asking you."
"I know, but…"
"He never mentioned Patterson? Or Skyles? Or me?"
"No. I don't think so. No. I'm almost sure."
"I find that difficult to believe," he said, looking hard into her eyes, his doubt mixed with anger now because she reminded him so much of his wife.
A bell rang in the big old cathedral-like building, a long, loud rattling bell. The laughter and shouting of the children came back to Ramsey as if it had been gone, as if the volume of it had dropped to nothing while he talked to Teresa Grey.
"I-I have to go," she said. "Recess is over. I have to go back to work. You're wrong about Henry."
But he could see she was uncertain as she turned away-uncertain enough, he thought, that she would have told him what she knew. Or was it all a performance? Was she hiding Conor? Protecting him? Was she that good a liar? She could have been. No one lies better than a good girl in love. And Conor would've said something to her. He must've. It didn't make sense.
Ramsey stood there another moment, aware of the woman's peculiar valence-the way she touched on his personal sorrows-and yet unable to distinguish it from that lingering suspicion of a shadow zone outside the zone of his understanding, that strange darkness sheltering nemesis and disaster.
He stood there and watched her walk back into the building, her skirt swishing as the children rushed past on either side of her, as they crowded before her through the schoolhouse door.
For the first time, he felt afraid of what he was about to do. "ALL RIGHT," said Shannon. "Tell me."
They were in the green Crown Victoria now. The bald guy was driving. The bald guy's name was Foster, it turned out. Foster glanced over at Shannon and laughed.
"Where'd you think you came from, dog? Your mama's tummy? You think the stork brought you? You think you were born again through water and the spirit? Or maybe someone told you one time that dirt-bag thieves get brand-new lives for free."
Shannon faced forward, expressionless, looking out the windshield at the miserable boulevard. Stores boarded up. Hollow-eyed whores. Predators slouched so deep they were shaped like question marks. All this on a bright spring Monday afternoon.
"I guess I wondered…" he said glumly.
"Yeah, I'll bet you did. I'll just bet you did. But you're all alike, you bottom feeders, every one of you. You think someone's gonna hand you the moon on a platter. You think someone should, like they owe it to you. Oh, I'm so poor. Oh, I'm so put upon. Where's my money? Like you earned it somehow by virtue of being a worthless piece of shit. Every time I wanna round up a fresh batch of dumb-ass bail jumpers, all I gotta do is tell them somebody's giving them something for nothing. Free tickets to the Super Bowl. Free house. A new car. Never did shit for nobody nohow, but out of the woodwork they come like it's only their due."
Shannon could've said it wasn't like that for him. He could've said he had been desperate, on the run, wanted for murders he hadn't committed and a break-in that he had. He could've said a lot of things, but he just said: "So this whole new identity thing was-what? Like, a setup?"
"Of course it was a setup! Why should anybody give you even the smell of his ass?" Foster shook his head and snorted. "I don't know whether to be amazed or amazed that I am still amazed."
The car turned a corner onto a side street of shattered houses, some no more than dust and lumber piled on dead grass. Shannon stared out at them but hardly saw them, immersed in what the man was telling him, still all murk and confusion. His sluggish effort to work out the truth of the matter was getting him nowhere. This was way beyond his powers.
"So what was it then?" he said. "What was it-some kind of scam to steal money?"
Foster let out a big guffaw. "A scam to steal money? Son, I work for the federal government. We don't need a scam to steal money. We are a scam to steal money. Look up 'scam to steal money' in the dictionary, there's a picture of the federal government right there. Scam to steal money! God save me from an uneducated public."
Slowly, Shannon turned to face him. Close up, Foster's aura of seediness was even more apparent, the threadbare shine of his suit and the wasted-junkie thinness of his frame even more painful to look upon. Close up, he had a fidgety, watchful junkie demeanor, too, something frantically alert in the smart, bright eyes.
"That cop," said Shannon. "Gutterson…"
"Gutterson!" Foster spat back the name as if the dead detective had been a bill for back taxes.
"He was never after me, was he?"
"Ah!" Foster took one hand off the steering wheel and tapped a finger against the side of his own head. "Now the clock is beginning to tick."
"He was after Henry Conor."
"The mist is parting. Finally."
The fields of rubble and dead grass fell away as the car turned another corner. Here was a long side street of antique office buildings with elaborate cast-iron facades. Between their tiers of pillars, arched windows, some broken, some just dark, exuded emptiness like a vapor, an atmosphere of abandonment coiling above the entire block. Vaguely, Shannon recognized where they were, realized they were not that far from his own brownstone.
"Who is he then?" said Shannon. "Who's Henry Conor?"
"Henry Conor is you," Foster answered, turning the wheel. The Crown Victoria slid to the curb, into the shadow of a building bleak with ruin. "Least, he's you-or he's no one."
Shannon waited for more. Foster shut the car down with swift, jerky movements, scoping the area all the while, his head turning back and forth, his sharp eyes darting here and there. He pulled the car keys out of the ignition and fiddled with them nervously.
"I made Henry Conor up," he said with a quick, mirthless smile. "I invented him, dog. And then I got you to take his place."
Into the louring building. Up four flights of dark stairs. Graffiti on the gray, abandoned walls and chips and scars in the paint where the plaster showed through like an exposed nerve. Down the gutted hallway to a carved wooden door where Foster knocked out a quick code, then used a key.
Shannon followed him across the threshold. Inside: a loft stripped bare. Chairs and card tables and a cot under the exposed heating pipes and fluorescent bulbs. There were three laptops, two playing various squares of video footage, one showing a series of oscillators. Shannon saw images of his apartment, Gutterson's outline traced in chalk on the floor.
Two men were here, both in shirtsleeves, both wearing guns, one weaselly, playing Patience at a table, one slick and handsome, lying on the cot, reading a magazine about pretty girls in their underwear.
Foster shut the door.
"You were watching me," Shannon said to him. It made him feel sick to see it.
"Listening, too," said Foster flatly.
"Don't worry," muttered the slick guy on the cot, turning a page. "We covered our eyes when you jerked off."
"I didn't cover my eyes," muttered the weasel dealing cards. "I dug it."
"We were watching out for you, boy," Foster said. "You were our guy in place. You were Henry Conor. We knew they'd come for you."
"You invented this guy…"
"A follower of Reverend Jesse Skyles, a friend of Peter Patterson, a man who knew what Patterson knew, a man on a mission."