In the Unit 8 visitation center Hood was searched, and surrendered his wallet, badge, keys, change, digital recorder and penknife.
He was then led downstairs to a narrow hallway. The orderly unlocked a door and stood back so he could enter.
The room was small. It had a wooden chair and a stainless steel table. One wall was a thick plate of clear plastic, with a round speaker grille about mouth level. A small video camera was fastened to the ceiling behind Hood. On the other side of the plastic window was an identical room, as if a reflection of the one that he was in.
Eichrodt was ushered in by two big men in navy scrubs. He wore a pale blue jumpsuit and slip-on canvas shoes. His hands were cuffed behind him and secured by a waist restraint. He wore ankle irons. He was nearly a head taller than his handlers, and much heavier. His head and face were shaved and his skin was white and his eyes were brown, with a distant glitter. A tattooed serpent’s head stared out from the hollow beneath his larynx.
The orderlies backed out of the room and Hood heard the lock clank into place.
Eichrodt sat and stared at him.
“Thanks for seeing me,” Hood said.
He kept staring. Some time went by.
“The deputy who arrested you, the big one-he was murdered last week. A gangsta shot him down. I’m one of the investigators.”
Eichrodt’s lips parted. He inhaled. He tried to say something but no sound came forth. He exhaled, and tried again. “Strong.”
“Yes. Terry Laws was strong.”
Again, Eichrodt’s lips parted and he seemed to be concentrating on controlling his breathing. It looked like he was waiting for just the right moment to begin forming a sound.
“They used. Clubs.”
“You put up quite a fight.”
Eichrodt looked at Hood for a long time. Hood saw blankness. If there were wheels turning, they were turning slowly. Something on the wall caught Eichrodt’s attention and he fixed his gaze on it, but Hood saw nothing. So he looked at the thick plastic window between them, the scratches and dull sheen, and thought about the thin line between the sane and the mad, and the way that line can vanish so quickly.
Then Eichrodt shifted and turned and squinted at him and his breathing accelerated. Wheels turning, Hood could see it. Eichrodt opened his mouth and in the tension of his neck and jaw Hood saw the great effort it took for him to raise a memory and say something about it.
“No. Reason.”
“No reason for what?”
“For the thing I told you about. The word went away from me just now.”
“Clubs?”
“Yes. No reason for clubs.”
“You’re a big man, Shay. They were afraid of you. When you swept the deputy off his feet, they knew you had tricked them. So they used force.”
He lowered his gaze. His mouth fell open again and his lips moved but no sound came out. He shook his head very slowly-bewildered, stymied, disbelieving-it was hard for Hood to tell what he was feeling. Then he inhaled very deeply, as before, and looked up, eyes narrow, mouth open, lips moving.
“There was no…”
“No what, Shay?”
“No… shit, the word again. The words go away when I go to say them.”
“No fight?”
“No! There was no…”
Eichrodt jumped out of his seat, raised his face to the ceiling and roared. Hood stood. Eichrodt banged his forehead against the window. Up that close Hood could see that his teeth were man-made, large and very white.
He tried again. “No reason…”
He looked down at Hood, growled, then shook his head violently and banged it against the window again.
Then Hood got it.
“No reason for the fight,” he said.
He stared at Hood for a long beat, then very slowly nodded. His mouth hung open and he slumped back into the chair. Again Hood could see the wheels of Shay Eichrodt’s mind slow. Again he turned to the wall and stared. Minutes passed and Hood waited. He believed that Eichrodt wanted him to wait.
“Cuffed. Then clubs.”
“Cuffed, then clubs? What, you were cuffed when they beat you?”
He nodded again.
“That’s not in the transcript,” Hood said. “Did you tell your lawyer that?”
Eichrodt stared off at nothing for a moment. Then at Hood. “I couldn’t remember that, back then. It comes back. The words come back. The worst is when I have a memory but no words to describe it. But I used to have the words.”
“You had no memory, then.”
He shook his head, looking down at the steel counter before him. It took Hood a minute to fully absorb what Eichrodt was claiming. Of course it was his word against that of a sworn deputy and a sworn reserve, Hood thought. And Eichrodt could be faking a memory, and lying.
Then Hood realized something.
“Shay, did you hide some money?”
Eichrodt stared at him with a blankness that looked eternal. But then he blinked and frowned and his dramatically refurbished mouth hung open again and Hood could see him straining to get at another memory.
“There was no money.”
“You took money from the men in the van. Vasquez and Lopes. You had four thousand in the toolbox of your truck. But they were carrying more, weren’t they?”
His breath came fast again and he struggled to slow it down, inhaling and exhaling as he stared at Hood.
“No van. No men except cops. No money.”
“You never saw a van, or Vasquez and Lopes, or any money?”
He looked at Hood with fury. “No.”
Hood remembered the court transcript. Eichrodt had been unable to remember a van, or murder victims, or money.
But now, Hood realized, he was saying that he never saw them.
Hood sat for a moment, listening to the restless thump of his heart. He took a deep breath and told it to slow down but it didn’t.
He had the black thought that Laws and Draper had killed the two couriers and taken the real money. Eichrodt was the fall guy. All they had to do was cuff him, beat him back into the dark ages of his own consciousness, plant some evidence and cover the rest in their official report.
It would account for Laws and Draper not calling backup.
It would account for Vasquez and Lopes pulling over on the shoulder of the off-ramp, right out in the open-they’d seen the law enforcement car behind them and done what anybody would do.
It would account for the fact that they had not drawn the weapons that were so close at hand.
It would account for Terry Laws’s sudden fortune.
It would account for the something that had died inside him after the arrest.
“Shay, do you understand that if you tell this story to your doctors, and to the court, that you can be tried for murder?”
He looked at Hood blankly. Then his expression changed to curiosity. He smiled at Hood with his large, perfectly white teeth.
“Let them.”
Hood had just come back upstairs when Dr. Rosen pulled him back into his office.
Rosen closed the door behind them, but he didn’t sit. His expression was intense and his words came fast. “I’m very encouraged by what I saw. He broke through to things he couldn’t recall-right before our eyes. It’s very unusual. We rarely see such recovery after so long a time. I’ve never seen anything quite like this.”
“I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t that,” Hood said.
The doctor looked at him. “That’s a big accusation he’s making.”
“You don’t know how big.”
“Do you hope he’s lying?”
“What does my hope have to do with anything?”
“No. I apologize.” He went to his desk and sat. “I’m tempted to move the evaluation up to next week. I want to run a CAT scan and an MRI. See what’s really going on in that brain of his.”
“I’d like to know, too.”
“It would be a capital case, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t he be eligible for a death penalty?”
“Very eligible.”
“Did you believe what he said?”