So what Soledad was about to do wasn't about compassion, she told and told and told herself in the span of a couple of seconds. It was about, it was just a bone being tossed.
What Soledad tossed: "Mrs. Hall, if you cooperate with us, we can make your cooperation known to the right people."
Soledad got eyebrow from Raddatz.
Diane asked: "The right people? What does, what does that-"
"People with authority. People who could get you back with your son."
"O'Roark."
"I can't make guarantees. But if you help us, I will talk to somebody. Just so you know, my word carries weight."
Raddatz's hand worked his jaw, rubbed all around it, wiped down his mouth. Maybe he was suppressing a scream. Maybe he was trying to keep from saying anything because Soledad seemed to be on to something.
"Help you how?" Diane's voice was no longer flat. It was raised just slightly by hope.
"We've got reason to think your husband was murdered."
Raddatz stepped back in, took over again before Soledad could hand out any more freebies.
Soledad was wordless. That Raddatz was openly backing a murder theory was news to her. For the minute she was just listening.
"It'd take a hell of a lot to kill a man like your husband. We need to try and find out exactly what."
"I don't know what I can tell you."
"You can tell us the names of the other freaks he hung around with." Raddatz was direct with that, sure in tone. For him there wasn't any doubt Anson consorted with others of his own kind, no matter Diane said otherwise.
"He didn't-"
"You want to see your kid again or not?"
Like a knife to Soledad's gut. That Raddatz had taken the hand she'd extended Diane and was using it to slap her…
"He didn't talk with other metanormals. He wouldn't take a chance like that."
"Like that?"
"A chance letting anybody know he was different.
Even others like him. When you people arrest them, when you torture them-"
"'We don't torture-" Soledad started to say.
Regardless of the bridge of fidelity Soledad was trying to build, Diane didn't care about Soledad's POV of the world. "When you do whatever you do. When you do to them what you're doing to me now, he didn't want to take the chance his name would ever be given, or that he would name names. Mostly, he didn't want to take the chance you people would take Danny from us."
"Danny," Soledad said. "Your son?" she asked.
Diane said: "Do you know what…" She had to take a couple of seconds, get herself back together. "Anson used to wear bandages. Every three or four months or so he'd put a little bandage on the back of his hand or a finger or one on his neck. Never made a big deal out of it. But he wanted people… he wanted it in their minds they'd seen him cut, hurt. He never wanted people to suspect he couldn't be hurt. He was that careful. I know there are other metanormals in the city. Everybody knows it. If Anson ever talked with them, that I don't know about."
If Diane was a liar, she was a helluva one. But knowing you could close the separation from your child with a lie well told could give any mother a tongue of gold.
"All I can tell you," Diane continued, "I think he knew."
"Knew?" Soledad asked.
"That he'd been found out. Or… or something bad was going to happen."
"Why? Why do you say that?"
"Maybe I'm just using hindsight. But Anson had been carrying… concern. For weeks it seemed. It seems. And more than what I'd come to accept as normal."
"What" Raddatz asked, "were his normal concerns?"
"That he'd he exposed, hunted down by the police. You see on TV every other month, somewhere someone is being exposed as a metanormal, assaulted by police-"
"They can turn themselves in." Maybe she had some compassion, but for Soledad it stopped short of allowing for police-bashing. "How many years after San Francisco, they can still do what's right. If they don't…"
Yeah. If they don't. Diane nodded. Didn't rejoin the argument. She wasn't going to win hearts and minds in an interrogation room. Why bother trying?
Diane went on with: "All those were his usual concerns. He had his brighter days. Always he was bright with Danny. But mostly, he lived in fear. But these last few weeks, month… he was quiet, distant. But I guess I'd say serene also. Like he'd accepted… whatever. Whatever there was for him to accept."
Acceptance.
Soledad thought: the last stage of death. Anson knew there was a chance he was going to die. Was he aware of the other murders? Does that kind of chatter bleed through the underground freak community? Had he seen Death in his mind? In his heart? Had he seen Death watching him, following him? To a freak, to an unkillable freak, how does Death appeal-?
Soledad looked to Raddatz.
"He tried to hide it from me," Diane said. "But in the quiet moments, in the moments he thought I wasn't watching him… you know the regard of someone you care for. You know when it's wrong."
Raddatz came forward in his chair, leaned on the table. "Do you remember how long he'd been feeling that way?"
"I think, really, since Israel Fernandez was assassinated."
"He died in a car accident," Soledad pointed out.
She didn't laugh, but Diane had a sick humor to her. "Sure. One of those accidents where a man loses control of his car on a dry road in good weather and crashes into a tree."
Raddatz: "Happens all the time."
Diane agreed. "It does happen all the time. It happens to political leaders, people who want change. An accident. A lone gunman. A hightech lynching because the people who don't-"
Raddatz was up out of the chair moving for the door.
"The people who don't want change make accidents-" "Guard!"
"They make them happen!"
For a minute Raddatz's hand slamming on the metal door, Diane's voice nail-on-chalkboard screeching in the air, fought each other to a draw.
A CO opened the door.
Raddatz bulled his way out of the room. Soledad merely followed.
Diane, alone, wanted to cry. Was too spent for tears. She just sat. Until a CO took her back to her cell.
Soledad and Raddatz made their way through the lockup, through sliding steel doors and partitions and past guards and surveillance cameras… All that to keep normal people incarcerated.
She'd never been to the SPA.
She'd bagged a lot of freaks, but Soledad was thinking right then she'd never been to the spot in the desert with the sweet-sounding acronym that housed freaks brought in off the streets. How you keep them from getting back on the streets… it must boggle the mind. Soledad figured at some point she ought to take the trip.
Her mind could stand to get blown every now and then. Or at least reassured.
Panama wasn't around. Soledad and Raddatz would run into him sooner or later. The later, for Soledad, the better.
As they walked, to Raddatz: "Who would he have called attention to?"
"What's that?"
"if Kail wasn't consorting with other freaks, if this guy felt like he was in for some trouble, the trouble didn't come from nowhere. He must have at least felt like he'd caught somebody's eye. Whose?"
"People who want freaks dead."
Feeling Raddatz out: "A hate group?"
"Enough of them around."
"My experience is they're full of talk. They march, they bum their symbols, but what yokels in White Trashville don't do is go after vies that might actually fight back."
" 'Yokels in White Trashville.' But you're not biased."