the agent that had kicked and shoved me was on the other side looking at me. I nodded to him, sending the message that I would not forget him. He was probably on the other side laughing back at me.
The light in the room stayed on. I eventually stepped away from the door and looked around. There was a one-inch-thick mattress on a shelflike outcropping from the wall. Built into the opposite wall was a sink-and-toilet combination. There was nothing else except a steel box in one of the upper corners with a two-inch-square window behind which I could see a camera lens. I was being watched. Even if I used the toilet I was being watched.
I checked my watch but there was no watch. They had somehow taken it, probably when they took off the cuffs and my wrists were so numb I could not feel the theft.
I spent what I thought was the first hour of my incarceration pacing in the small space and trying to keep my anger sharp but controlled. I walked without pattern other than that I used the entire space, and when I came to the corner where the camera was located I raised the middle finger of my left hand to the lens. Every time.
In the second hour I sat on the mattress, determined not to exhaust myself with the pacing and trying to keep track of time. On occasion I still gave the camera my finger, usually without even bothering to look up while I delivered it. I started thinking about interview room stories to pass the time. I remembered one about a guy we had brought in as a suspect in a double bagger involving a drug rip-off. Our plan was to sweat him a little before we went into the room and tried to break him down. But soon after being placed in the room he took his pants off, tied the legs around his neck and tried to hang himself from the overhead light fixture. They got to him in time and the man was saved. He protested that he would rather kill himself than spend another hour in the room. He had only been in there twenty minutes.
I started laughing to myself and then remembered another story, one that wasn’t so funny. A man who was a peripheral witness to a strong-arm robbery was brought into the box and questioned about what he saw. It was late on a Friday. He was an illegal and he was scared shitless, but he wasn’t a suspect and it would mean too many phone calls and too much paperwork to send him back to Mexico. All that the detective wanted was his information. But before he got it the detective was called out of the interview room. He told the man to sit tight, that he’d be back. Only he never came back. Breaking events on the case took him out into the field and soon he forgot about the witness. On Sunday morning another detective who had come in to try to catch up on his paperwork heard a knocking sound and opened the interview room door to find the witness still there. He had taken empty coffee cups out of the trash can and filled them with urine during the weekend. But as instructed he had never left the unlocked interview room.
Remembering that one made me feel morose. After a while I took off my jacket and lay back on the mattress. I put the jacket over my face to try to block out the light. I tried to give the impression I was sleeping, that I didn’t care what they were doing to me. But I wasn’t sleeping and they probably knew it. I’d seen it all before when I had been on the other side of the glass.
Finally, I tried to concentrate on the case, running all of the latest occurrences through my head, trying to see how they fit. Why had the bureau stepped in? Because I was getting a copy of Lawton Cross’s file? It seemed unlikely. I decided that I had struck the nerve in the library when I had looked up the reports on Mousouwa Aziz. They had talked to the librarian or checked the computer—new laws allowed them to. That was what brought them out. That was what they wanted to know about.
After what I estimated to be about four hours in the cube the door snapped open with an electronic release.