Tag said, “I’m thinking there might be something to this kid’s story, after all.”
“I want to look at that flash drive, and I want to look at it right now,” Sheriff Ashworth said.
20
What they saw first was an empty chair, an old-fashioned wingback placed in front of a wall with a framed Currier & Ives sailing ship on it. Then a woman’s face poked into the frame, staring at the lens.
“That’s her,” Luke said. “That’s Maureen, the lady who helped me get out.”
“Is this on?” Maureen said. “The little light’s on, so I guess it is. I hope so, because I don’t think I have the strength to do this twice.” Her face left the screen of the laptop computer the officers were watching. Tim found that something of a relief. The extreme closeup was like looking at a woman trapped inside a fishbowl.
Her voice faded a bit, but was still audible. “But if I have to, I will.” She sat down in the chair and adjusted the hem of her floral skirt over her knees. She wore a red blouse above it. Luke, who had never seen her out of her uniform, thought it was a pretty combination, but bright colors couldn’t conceal how thin her face was, or how haggard.
“Max the audio,” Frank Potter said. “She should have been wearing a lav mike.”
Meanwhile, she was talking. Tag reversed the video, turned up the sound, and hit play again. Maureen once more returned to the wingback chair and once more adjusted the hem of her skirt. Then she looked directly into the camera’s lens.
“Luke?”
He was so startled by his name out of her mouth that he almost answered, but she went on before he could, and what she said next put a dagger of ice into his heart. Although he had known, hadn’t he? Just as he hadn’t needed the Star Tribune to give him the news about his parents.
“If you’re looking at this, then you’re out and I’m dead.”
The deputy named Potter said something to the one named Faraday, but Luke paid no attention. He was completely focused on the woman who’d been his only grownup friend in the Institute.
“I’m not going to tell you my life story,” the dead woman in the wingback chair said. “There’s no time for that, and I’m glad, because I’m ashamed of a lot of it. Not of my boy, though. I’m proud of the way he turned out. He’s going to college. He’ll never know I’m the one who gave him the money, but that’s all right. That’s good, the way it should be, because I gave him up. And Luke, without you to help me, I might have lost that money and that chance to do right by him. I only hope I did right by you.”
She paused, seeming to gather herself.
“I will tell one part of my story, because it’s important. I was in Iraq during the second Gulf war, and I was in Afghanistan, and I was involved in what was called enhanced interrogation.”
To Luke, her calm fluency—no uhs, no you-knows, no kinda or sorta—was a revelation. It made him feel embarrassment as well as grief. She sounded so much more intelligent than she had during their whispered conversations near the ice machine. Because she had been playing dumb? Maybe, but maybe—probably—he had seen a woman in a brown housekeeper’s uniform and just assumed she didn’t have a lot going on upstairs.
Not like me, in other words, Luke thought, and realized embarrassment didn’t accurately describe what he was feeling. The right word for that was shame.
“I saw waterboarding, and I saw men—women, too, a couple—standing in basins of water with electrodes on their fingers or up their rectums. I saw toenails pulled out with pliers. I saw a man shot in the kneecap when he spit in an interrogator’s face. I was shocked at first, but after awhile I wasn’t. Sometimes, when it was men who’d planted IEDs on our boys or sent suicide bombers into crowded markets, I was glad. Mostly I got . . . I know the word . . .”
“Desensitized,” Tim said.
“Desensitized,” Maureen said.
“Christ, like she heard you,” Deputy Burkett said.
“Hush,” Wendy said, and something about that word made Luke shiver. It was as if someone else had said it just before her. He turned his attention back to the video.
“—never took part after the first two or three, because they gave me another job. When they