to use the washroom?” the man said as soon as he opened the door.
“No, sir. No, I’m fine,” Crane replied, keeping his hands on the table surface. He wanted them to see that he was fully cooperative.
“Has someone given you food?”
“No, sir. Not yet.”
The man craned his head around the door, and Crane heard him say the word “sandwich”. Then he pulled up the chair opposite and sat down. He stared at Crane, his expression neutral. It felt like minutes passed, Crane getting more and more uncomfortable with the silent scrutiny the longer it lasted. Finally, there was a knock. A young man opened the door and handed a wrapped sandwich and a bottle of water to the seated officer. Without a word, the older man slid them across the table towards Crane and sat back in his chair, arms crossed.
“Thank you, sir.” With shaking hands, Crane unwrapped the egg-salad sandwich, but when he took a bite, he realized his appetite had fled. Slowly, he set it back down on the plastic wrap.
“Not hungry?”
“I’m… afraid I’m too stressed to eat.”
“Hmm,” said the man. Then he opened the blue folder and peered down at it. His greying hair was short and stood up from his scalp like a wire brush. He had the darker complexion of a man who spent a lot of time outdoors, and when he looked up at Crane, his dark-brown eyes flinty, Crane could see that the crow’s-feet radiated out from their corners in paler lines. “Dr. Crane, do you know why you’re here?”
“Yes. Well, at least yes, I know what you told me last night… um… this morning? You think I’ve kidnapped someone.”
“Hmm.” The man nodded and shuffled through some of the papers until he found a page with a photograph paper clipped to it. He turned it around so that Crane could see it.
Max was a few years younger in the picture, his hair shorter and parted neatly. The white shirt and striped tie he wore gave Crane the impression of a private school uniform. The blemish on his cheek nearly made Crane smile, imagining Max as a pimply teen, but then he reminded himself: not Max… Édouard.
“You recognize him.”
“Yes, I recognize him. But I knew him as Max,” Crane said a touch impatiently. “Sir.”
“That’s interesting, because I have his insurance sheets from the clinic where you were employed. He’s registered there under the name Édouard Duvernay… Look, right here.”
“The clinic… Dr. Bélanger… Debra the receptionist. They knew him as Max,” Crane tried, grasping at straws.
“Yes, but only because you referred to him as ‘Max’ in your meetings with Dr. Bélanger. She was under the impression that he’d asked to go by an alias, given who his stepfather is. He was signed up at the clinic under his real name. You should have known that.”
“I didn’t handle the paperwork—that’s taken care of by someone else at the clinic! I wouldn’t even know where to look. He was only my fifth patient… All I had to go on was the sheet I had him fill out that first day, and he wrote down ‘Max’.”
“But, according to Duvernay’s statement, you knew exactly who he was.”
“No, I didn’t. If you look in my notebook, you’ll see he told me ‘Eddie’ was his imaginary friend.”
“This notebook?” The police officer held up an evidence bag. Inside was Crane’s red notebook.
“Yes! Just read it. You’ll see.”
“We have. There are twenty-seven entries in all, and most of them go something like: today Eddie was a bad boy and I had to punish him.”
“I didn’t write that… Max must have…” Crane said in a hoarse voice. He raked his fingers through his hair with a curse.
Staring down at Max in the photograph, with his slightly smug expression, finally woke Crane’s brain up and stiffened his spine. He stared at the officer.
“I want to see my lawyer.”
The man sighed and rubbed his face. Clicking his pen open, he turned over a sheet of paper and held the pen above it. “What’s your lawyer’s name?”
Crane clenched his jaw. The only lawyer he’d ever used was Mary’s brother Brian, and he figured that bridge was almost definitely burned. “I don’t have one… at the moment.”
In response, the man shuffled through some more pages. “Can you afford a lawyer?”
“No,” Crane had to admit.
“Hmm.” The officer scribbled a few things on the piece of paper. “I’ll get you the numbers for Legal Aid in a few minutes—and a phonebook, if you want to seek out a free consultation