is rather amusing. Like something out of Lord of the Flies.”
Trevor Stackhouse came around the desk. He saw Wilholm—a troublesome little shit if ever there was one—on one side of a chessboard that was all set up and ready to go. The new intake was sitting on the other side. The girls were standing by, most of their attention fixed, as usual, on Wilholm—handsome, sullen, rebellious, a latter-day James Dean. He would be gone soon; Stackhouse couldn’t wait for Hendricks to sign off on him.
“How many people work here in all, do you think?” the new boy was asking.
Iris and Kalisha (also known as the Chicken Pox Chick) looked at each other. It was Iris who answered. “Fifty? I think at least that many. There’s the doctors . . . techs and caretakers . . . the cafeteria staff . . . um . . .”
“Two or three janitors,” Wilholm said, “and the housekeepers. Just Maureen right now, because there’s only the five of us, but when there’s more kids, they add another couple of housekeepers. They might come over from Back Half, not sure about that.”
“With that many people, how can they keep the place a secret?” Ellis asked. “For one thing, where do they even park their cars?”
Mrs. Sigsby nodded. “This one’s very smart, and not just book-smart, it looks like. Now hush. I want to hear this.”
“. . . must stay,” Luke was saying. “You see the logic? Like a tour of duty. Which would mean this is actually a government installation. Like one of those black sites, where they take terrorists to interrogate them.”
“Plus the old bag-over-the-head water cure,” Wilholm said. “I never heard of them doing that to any of the kids here, but I wouldn’t put it past them.”
“They’ve got the tank,” Iris said. “That’s their water cure. They put a cap on you and duck you under and take notes. It’s actually better than the shots.” She paused. “At least it was for me.”
“They must swap out the employees in groups,” Ellis said. Mrs. Sigsby thought he was talking more to himself than the others. I bet he does that a lot, she thought. “It’s the only way it would work.”
Stackhouse was nodding. “Good deductions. Damn good. What is he, twelve?”
“Read your report, Trevor.” She pushed a button on her computer and the screen saver appeared: a picture of her twin daughters in their double stroller, taken years before they acquired breasts, smart mouths, and bad boyfriends. Also a bad drug habit, in Judy’s case. “Ruby Red’s been debriefed?”
“By me personally. And when the cops check the kid’s computer, they are going to find he’s been looking at some stories about kids who kill their parents. Not a lot, just two or three.”
“Standard operating procedure, in other words.”
“Yes, ma’am. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Stackhouse gave her a grin she thought almost as charming as Wilholm’s when he turned it on at full wattage. Not quite, though. Their Nicky was a true babe magnet. For now, at least. “Do you want to see the team, or just the operation report? Denny Williams is writing it, so it should be fairly readable.”
“If it all went smoothly, just the report. I’ll have Rosalind get it to me.”
“Fine. What about Alvorson? Any intel from her lately?”
“Do you mean are Wilholm and Kalisha canoodling yet?” Sigsby raised an eyebrow. “Is that germane to your security mission, Trevor?”
“I could give Shit One if those two are canoodling. In fact, I’m rooting for them to go ahead and lose their virginity, assuming they still have it, while they’ve got a chance. But from time to time Alvorson does pick up things that are germane to my mission. Like her conversation with the Washington boy.”
Maureen Alvorson, the housekeeper who actually seemed to like and sympathize with the Institute’s young subjects, was in reality a stool pigeon. (Given the little bits of tittle-tattle she brought in, Mrs. Sigsby thought spy too grand a term.) Neither Kalisha nor any of the other TPs had tipped to this, because Maureen was extremely good at keeping her way of making a little extra money far below the surface.
What made her especially valuable was the carefully planted idea that certain areas of the Institute—the south corner of the caff and a small area near the vending machines in the canteen, to name just a couple—were audio surveillance dead zones. Those were the places