Agent Henne directed a last frustrated look after Charlie's dad as he walked away, and then smiled wryly at Charlie. "It's good to finally meet you, Dr. Eppes."
Charlie gave him a shallow nod, and twitched his mouth into something like a smile. Henne wore a gun on his hip. He was big, easily two inches taller than Charlie's dad and young and strong, broad-shouldered in his gray suit.
He could kill Charlie as easily as look at him, but he'd let Charlie scrutinize his badge and he didn't try to move between Charlie and the door. Charlie's father--for all he'd apparently been hiding Charlie from this man for nearly a week--seemed to trust him not to actually harm Charlie. Henne was one of the good guys: an FBI agent, like Don had been. But Don had always made him feel safe, and Don was gone, and Henne was just watching him.
Henne's smile disappeared. "Have you heard from Don lately? Do you know where he went?"
Charlie swallowed hard and tried not to hear Williamson's voice echoing behind Henne's words, asking him about Mac.
"No," he whispered, and the words only stuck in his throat because they were true, because there had been no word, because Don had left him here all alone. "Not a clue. I don't want to talk about Don."
Henne nodded shallowly. "We don't have to talk about Don right now."
Charlie had no trouble hearing the unspoken but we will. The threat was clear. Still, Henne stayed where he was, leaning back in a comfortable chair.
"I understand you want to tell me what happened."
Charlie shrugged. There was plenty that had happened to him that he had no intention of talking about, but he could tell this much. He needed to tell this much.
"There were four men," Charlie said quietly. "I was on my bike and they grabbed me. I saw one of them raise his gun, I saw him kill those two kids."
Henne leaned in, and Charlie flinched away automatically. Henne winced and raised both hands, palms out placatingly.
"Can you describe them, Charlie? If I bring a sketch artist over, could you help us identify them?"
Charlie nodded hesitantly, fingernails digging into his palms, forcing himself not to pull away from this. This was what he wanted, this was why he told his father to make the call.
"Yeah," he whispered. "Yeah, I can do that."
He couldn't tell Henne the rest. He couldn't tell Henne that he knew they'd gotten what they deserved, that they were all dead somewhere with Williamson's bullets in their heads--because Williamson hadn't been one of those four. He hadn't seen Williamson until the very end, when everyone else had failed to get the answers they wanted from him; Williamson had asked him an entirely different question. Williamson had driven him away with his fingers in splints and said All you're leaving behind you is a trail of bodies.
If Charlie mentioned Williamson, Henne would want to know what had happened to him, how Charlie had gotten away. Charlie could still feel the kick of the gun in his hand, could still see Williamson's head flying back with the impact of Don's bullet.
Charlie had no intention of talking about Don.
Henne was watching him closely, but when Charlie met his eyes directly he just nodded. "Why don't we stop there for today. I'll come back tomorrow with the sketch artist."
Charlie nodded, but it was just like being back in that dirt-floored room, back in that basement. When the man in charge walked away there was never enough relief at his departure to drown the dread of his return.
Charlie paced restlessly from one door to another, all around the house, for nearly an hour after Henne left. He needed someone to make him stop, to tell him to take a break and rest, to come and play a game, he needed...
He stopped near a telephone and stared at the keypad, and a string of numbers popped into his head. Larry's phone number. Larry had never made him feel afraid, not once, not for an instant, and Larry would distract him. It wouldn't be the same, but it would be something, it might be enough for now. Charlie picked up the phone and dialed before he could second-guess himself.
Larry answered on the fourth ring. "Hello?"
"Hi," Charlie said, and suddenly realized he didn't know what to say.
"Charles!" Larry said, before the silence could become noticeable. "Hello! How are you feeling?"
Charlie rubbed his forehead and wondered how he could possibly answer that question.
"I'm starting to remember things," he said instead. "I was wondering if you might--"
Charlie glanced up and found his father standing in the doorway.
"Larry?" he said softly, and Charlie nodded.
"Ask him to dinner," his father said. "I made brisket."
"Dinner?" Charlie said, to his father and into the phone.
Larry said, "I'll be right over," and that was that.
He really was right over; Charlie barely had time to set three places at the table before Larry appeared. Charlie listened to his father and his friend talking over dinner, and it was different from the first time he'd listened to them: half the things they said woke contexts in his brain, fragments of memory or just an understanding of what they meant.
When his father said, "How's Amita doing?" Charlie could see her, long dark hair and a shy pretty smile. He felt a dizzy rush of emotion and clutched at the edge of the table to keep upright.
When he looked up, Larry was watching him.
"Amita's out at Harvard now," Larry said gently. "With you gone, and Don gone, she... she just wanted to start over."
Charlie nodded, trying to push the thought of her away--there seemed to be too much there, more than he could remember or begin to understand. "Did you tell her I'm home?"
Larry nodded, just once, and didn't elaborate.
"Tell her I said hi?" Charlie asked hesitantly, and Larry said he would.
Charlie went back to eating while conversation turned sideways, to people whose names he didn't recognize at all. Terry. David. Maybe they would come back to him later, or maybe he'd never known them at all.
After dinner, Larry asked Charlie if he remembered how to play chess. Charlie's fingers longed for chalk suddenly, in a visceral, desperate way. He nodded quickly, unable to speak. He was so eager to play, to slip into that piece of familiarity, even if there would be no wager, no kisses at the end, no lingering hugs...
Charlie forced himself not to think of that. They could put up another board in the garage, and he would--he would have to draw the set himself. He gritted his teeth at the thought, pushing away memories, because he couldn't, not now, not in front of his father and Larry. He wasn't alone, that had to be enough.
His father set down a shining, worn wooden box on the table, and Charlie blinked at it, baffled. Then the board appeared beside it, and the world snapped into place. Real people did not play chess on chalkboards.
Charlie hid his embarrassment at the near misstep in motion, setting up the pieces, taking black by habit; Larry took white without comment. Charlie wondered whether they'd done this before, whether he'd given Don white that day because he was used to giving the first turn to Larry, or to his father--or to his--
Charlie shook his head and focused on the game as Larry made his first move. It was strange to play someone who wasn't Don, who had different (better) strategies and habits. Charlie found the whole mode of the game distracting, anyway, lacquered wooden pieces under his fingers instead of chalk and slate. It took him twenty-eight moves to beat Larry, and then his father took a turn.
Charlie was on better form there, and beat him in sixteen. His father grumbled about Charlie beating him, and Charlie wanted to say, I beat Don in ten the first time, but the words choked him, memories pushing to the fore no matter how he tried to hold them back.
That had been after the first time they had sex; they'd been playing for a kiss. He remembered the closeness of Don's body beside his as they played, Don's mouth on his after he won, the warmth and the promise of every game of chess they'd played thereafter. He couldn't say a word.
Larry cleared his throat and Charlie looked up, feeling caught out. Larry had been going to take another turn against him, but now he and Charlie's father were both looking down at Charlie, worried. Charlie manufactured a smile.
"Maybe we should play something else," Charlie suggested, letting his hands close into fists in his lap, longing for chalk, longing for things he must not think of now, must not want. "Do you have Scrabble?"
This made his father laugh for some reason, loud and startled.
Larry was squinting at Charlie, baffled. Charlie kept still, waiting for an answer or a question.
His father said, "It might be missing a piece, but we'll give it a try."
He took the chess set away and came back with another box.
Don had grumbled sometimes about how difficult it was to do Scrabble on a chalkboard, and Charlie stared down at the multicolored grid and truly believed, for the first time, that he hadn't been making the game more than necessarily elaborate for his own amusement.
Larry held out a rattling bag, and Charlie reached into it to select tiles (much easier than closing his eyes, spinning around, and putting his finger on the section of the board with letters written on it seven times; that part obviously had been for Don's amusement, and Don's hands had guided him around and around and he couldn't think about it). The tiles were cool and hard and silky-smooth between his fingers. Charlie had to reach in twice to get his total of seven.
He laid them down on the table and began arranging them into order according to their point values: A, E, E, C, G...
Charlie stopped, staring down at the tiles, but he hadn't misread. There was a tiny 3 printed as subscript to the C, and a tiny 2 on the G.
"These are wrong," he said, even though he knew his father would have told him if the set were faulty rather than incomplete. His own voice seemed to come from a long way away. He knew there was nothing wrong with the game, but a C was worth two points, and a G was worth three. He looked up and his father was frowning, Larry watching him with an expression he couldn't read.
"They're wrong," Charlie repeated. "These values on the tiles."
"It's a regulation set, Charlie," his father said. "Look, the rules are right here, they print all the letters for you."
Charlie noticed his hand was shaking when he took the old, brittle sheet of paper and tried to read it. But his eyes weren't focusing right, so the page was blurry, and kept moving because his hand was shaking. He could hear it rattle, like an echo of the wooden tiles.
"He lied to me," Charlie whispered. Don had set up the board, and set it up wrong. He had told Charlie a C was worth two and a G was worth three, and it had been the other way around all along.
Softly, Larry said, "I'm sure it was an honest mi--"
"No," Charlie snapped impatiently, dropping the rules sheet and picking up the offending tiles, closing his fist around them as it shook.
"You don't understand. He could have found out, he could have said he didn't know, but he just told me--this is so, that is so. It matters, things have values, you can't go changing them just because it's convenient, just to entertain yourself, just--"
The tiles rattled off the glass in the picture frames, and he could feel the force of his throw in his shoulder. The rest of the bag had a more pleasing heft, and tiles rattled on and on, off the wall and across the floor.
"He lied to me and I wouldn't even have known--"
His throat hurt a little, as though he was shouting, and he had to try a few times to pick up the board; his hands were shaking. It flew through the air and landed with a slap, and after that sound Charlie heard himself saying, "He lied, he fucking lied and where is he now--" and plastered both hands over his mouth to make himself stop.
Charlie kept his hands pressed to his mouth as he looked down; his father and Larry were both staring up at him. Charlie didn't remember standing up. He turned and looked, and his chair was knocked over behind him, and when he turned back he noticed a tile caught in the collar of his father's shirt. Where it had landed.
Charlie felt his face heat abruptly, saliva running in his mouth and his stomach heaving.
"I'm--" he whispered behind his hands, and then turned and fled on shaky legs, only letting go of his mouth to grab the railing and haul himself faster up the stairs.
He hesitated at the bathroom door, but the first wash of sickness was receding, replaced by the need to hide. He stumbled on to his bedroom, stopping on the threshold to look across the hall. The door there was still closed, and it was the only door Charlie hadn't seen opened, in this house where two brothers had grown up. Charlie stared at the door, a door he must have seen thousands of times in his life, but nothing came to him, no memory, no flash of understanding.
Charlie heard the low sound of his father's voice downstairs, and turned inside, slamming his door and bolting to the furthest corner of his room to sit on the floor and shake.
Agent Henne showed up the next morning with the sketch artist in tow. Charlie had been worried about how that would go--he didn't think there was any place in the house with enough doors and windows to let him feel comfortable with two of Agent Henne in the room--but the sketch artist was a woman named Ang, shorter and smaller than Charlie himself. She smiled brightly and let Charlie admire her tablet PC before they got started.
Charlie could almost forget Agent Henne was there, sitting at the head of the dining room table while Charlie and Ang sat on one side, with their backs to the photos on the wall--one of them had been prominently absent when Charlie came downstairs, and all of the Scrabble tiles had vanished like they'd never been.
Charlie started out saying things like, "He had wavy hair and a round nose," and every time he glanced up Henne was watching him.
Ang tilted the tablet toward him and said, "How's that?"
Charlie flinched at the sudden memory of having his left ring finger broken, the sound it made and that face looming close, the smell of his breath. Charlie looked down and nodded, gritting his teeth.
After that he got increasingly inarticulate, forcing Ang to ask a series of yes-or-no questions. She was patient and adept, and Charlie was rewarded with the same awful shock of recognition (that was the man who told him his disappearance hadn't even made the news; that was the man who held a cup of water in front of his face and asked him the same impossible question over and over, then poured it out on the ground when Charlie failed to answer correctly; that one had tied him down spread-eagled on the floor and questioned him that way, standing over him) three more times.
Ang packed up her things as Henne stood, and Charlie stood too, unable to bear being looked down at though he was so exhausted he was weaving on his feet.
Henne said, "Charlie, I just want to ask--" and Charlie shook his head.
"Can't," he mumbled, and, "Sorry," though he wasn't. He navigated to the living room by holding onto the backs of chairs and fell onto the couch, and then nothing.
Charlie was still wide awake when his father went to bed that night, after sleeping through most of the day. Alone in the warm comfortable house, the TV still murmuring and most of the lights still on, Charlie wandered toward the kitchen. The missing photograph on the dining room wall caught his eye, and Charlie hesitated, and then steeled himself and looked straight at the pictures for the first time.
One of the photographs was instantly familiar: his mother, on her wedding day. Charlie came around the table to get closer, reached out and touched the glass. He had a few other distinct memories now, her face as he had known it, decades older than the solemn young woman looking into the camera's lens. He looked back until he couldn't meet her gaze anymore, and his eye fell on the next photo, bordering the empty space. A family portrait.
There it was, the irrefutable proof he hadn't wanted and didn't need: his father and his mother and Charlie and Don, all grouped comfortably together, all smiling brightly. His own face looked as young as his mother's on her wedding day, surrounded by long curly hair, and Don looked...
He looked younger, certainly, but that wasn't enough to describe how different he seemed. Charlie thought he had surprised an expression of happiness like that on Don's face once or twice, for an instant, but here it was, captured and fixed for anyone to see.
He'd thought it would be awful to see Don in photographs, to know with certainty that they were (had been, used to be) brothers, but Charlie felt nothing at all, remembered nothing of what the photograph showed him. The framed picture was right in front of him, but it seemed oddly insubstantial, like an optical illusion or an image on a television screen. He knew his mother's face as it had been almost forty years ago, long before he was born, but this picture of his family, which couldn't be more than five years old, woke no memory at all.
Charlie closed his eyes and thought Don, and his memories of the last month and a half were there like physical things, the way Don smelled and the way he felt, his body under Charlie's hands, his eyes bright with a smile or dark with worry, his voice whispering Charlie's name, the sight of blood on his hands, the gash on his thigh, the touch of his fingers. The last words he'd said to Charlie, distant and fuzzy and overlaid with panic. None of this was your fault. No one will ever hurt you again. Not even me.
Charlie opened his eyes again, his heart racing, and stared at the photograph. The Don there, the Don who had been that smiling young Charlie's brother, was a dim, frozen ghost compared to the Don he did remember, the one who had been his.
Charlie turned his back on the pictures and retreated to the living room. He wrapped an afghan tightly around himself, but he still felt cold, and rubbed his hands over his arms and legs until the friction raised a little warmth, and made him forget that there was no one else to touch him, to keep him warm, to sit with him in the night. Don was gone, and his brother was nothing but a photograph, a photograph that left a careful (normal) space between himself and his brother.
Charlie stared blindly at the television until he fell asleep in front of it.
Now that he wasn't spending all his time asleep, Charlie was starting to miss working. He kept looking through the files on his computer, but everything he could bring himself to look at trailed off into silence, all dead ends or lost threads. None of it struck him as important, as a job to do. There was the work on the boards, out in the garage, but he only had half the input he needed for that job: he needed Larry, and Larry hadn't said a word about resuming work on it since Charlie had been back.
He'd found a battered old textbook on Quantum Physics in his bedroom. It had notes scattered through its margins, some sections crossed out and others highlighted; he recognized most of the handwriting as his own, evolving gently over most of his adult life, and it was obvious he'd reread the book several times.
He was curled up on the couch with it now, and each page woke understanding in his head: the text, the notes, the associations all bringing him back to someplace he'd been long ago, going to classes, applying mathematics to nothing more immediately practical than theories of the universe.
"Charlie," his father said, and Charlie looked up. His father was standing over him, looking down with an expression both exasperated and fond. Charlie suspected he'd been repeating himself, but he didn't look angry.
"I just spoke to Agent Henne," he said, and Charlie's hands tightened on the book. His father gave him a sad smile, and went on quickly, "He said they're working with the sketches, and you were a big help, but it'll be a few days before they're ready to have you try to identify photos."
"Oh," Charlie said, and remembered to breathe. It occurred to him that it had to be possible to run comparisons of facial characteristics faster than that--hadn't he seen something like that in one of his files?--but he said only, "Okay." That had been one of the files he didn't want to look at, and nobody was asking him to do anything more than recognize a few faces he couldn't forget.
His father nodded, turning away even as he spoke. "All right."
They'd barely spoken since Charlie had thrown his fit over Scrabble. His father had been meticulous about leaving him to his own devices.
"Dad," Charlie said, and his father quickly turned back to face him. Charlie hesitated, mustering his words, but his father waited patiently.
"I'm sorry," he said, and nodded past his father toward the dining room wall. The empty space among the photographs had been filled by a framed picture of two smiling boys; Charlie didn't want to look any closer than that.
His father gave him another sad smile and said, "Don had a hard time of it when you were missing, too."
Charlie nodded, looking down as his eyes prickled. Because Don was his brother, and an FBI agent, and maybe therefore doubly determined to find Charlie and bring him back safely. That Don who he could remember had wanted to save that Charlie who Charlie wasn't anymore, and instead he'd gotten... this. And disappeared, leaving him alone, leaving him needing something he was never supposed to have.
Charlie felt more than saw his father sitting down on the couch. "You know, Charlie, you haven't really mentioned your brother at all, except for the other night."
Charlie shrugged and said nothing. There was nothing he could say, even if there had been anyone he could safely say it to; he didn't have words for this. It was a physical thing, the way he woke up in the night missing a body against his own, the creeping anxiety of not knowing where Don was, not having Don between him and the door. The way there was no one to reach out and touch, reach out and kiss, no one who gave him the simple certainty he'd had in Don's presence, that he was in this with someone, that there was someone on his side.
No matter how near his father or Larry came, they couldn't get to the inside of this thing, couldn't share this with Charlie; only Don could, and Don was gone. Charlie tried to remind himself that the ordeal was over, that he was safe now, that he didn't need anyone to be on his side of anything, or in it with him--he tried to remind himself that if Don were here, he'd be getting questioned by Henne, maybe be in jail, that Don was safer anywhere but here.
He'd have been safer anywhere but that basement, too, but Charlie wouldn't have given him up and gone back to being alone. He couldn't. But Don had left him, and now Charlie was alone again, except for his father, who was trying to understand even though Charlie couldn't put any of it into words.
"I don't remember much."
"Mmm," his father said, and Charlie knew he didn't believe it and braced himself to resist whatever question came next. But his father said only, "If you wanted to talk--even if it was something you didn't think I wanted to hear--you could talk to me, Charlie. Or to Larry, or... there are people you could talk to."
Charlie shuddered at the thought of talking to anyone about this--sitting in a little room and spilling his most intimate secrets, Don's secrets. He could almost feel the cuffs on his wrists, the water covering his face. And there would be no one to go back to after, no one to lean against, no one to warm him up.
"No," he said, as steadily as he could. "I don't want to talk about it."
"You don't have to," his father said, and shifted his weight, starting to get up, to walk away again, to leave Charlie entirely alone.
"Wait," Charlie said, and his father waited, looking at him questioningly.
"I can't," Charlie said. "But I--could you talk? To me?"
His father frowned a little, looking confused, but he seemed pleased by the clumsy request. "Would you like me to talk about anything in particular?"
Charlie shrugged, settling into the couch, resting his head against the cushions. Anything that wasn't Don, anything that wasn't him being left all alone again, anything he could get. "Tell me about... about you and mom. Something I wouldn't remember anyway."
His father studied him for a few long seconds, long enough for Charlie to second-guess, to wonder if he'd asked for the wrong thing, if his father would be angry. But then his father settled back against the cushions and said, "You know, I never told you this story when you were younger, because I didn't want to be a bad example, but your mother and I got arrested together on our third date."
"Terry told me you have strong opinions about the way we conduct lineups," Agent Henne said. He was sitting across the table from Charlie, taking four stacks of photos from a file and laying them facedown. "So I'm going to show these to you one at a time, and you just tell me yes or no for each one, all right?"
Charlie's hands were in fists under the table. Terry? He thought his father had mentioned that name--or Larry had, maybe. Was this Terry an agent, too? Someone who had worked with Don, and known Charlie through him?
No time to puzzle it out now, and no need to damage whatever credibility he had with Henne by asking him who Terry was. Charlie cleared his throat and said, "Okay."
He forced himself to lean in and look closely as Henne flipped the first picture up.
He took a deep, relieved breath. The photograph was just a photograph, a flat distant face framed by Henne's fingers.
"No," Charlie said, and didn't look away from Henne's hands as they laid the picture down and flipped up another.
"No." Another picture, and Charlie felt a twinge of unease, but not recognition--just the certain knowledge that the man in the photograph could and would hurt him, given the chance.
"No," he said, keeping his eyes steady on Henne's hands as the photo was set down and the next came up. Charlie only saw the face for an instant before he shut his eyes and turned his face away.
"Yes," he said, and his voice was almost steady even if his palms were wet and his fingers ached and there was no one beside him to tell him he was safe, no one on his side at all. "That one."
"Okay," Henne said after a long time. "Charlie, the picture's gone, I need you to look at the one I'm holding now. I need you to tell me if this guy here is someone you can identify as being present when you were grabbed."
Charlie opened his eyes and looked up, at Henne's face. Henne looked back at him with a calm, neutral expression and Charlie abruptly understood that this was Henne's job. He didn't like this, wasn't getting off on this--this was the job someone had given him to do, closing this case.
Charlie looked down to Henne's hands and the photo. "No," he said, and Henne flipped up another. "No."
Henne's hands set the photos aside--five in a stack and one by itself, face down--and reached for more. He flipped up the first, and Charlie jerked back.
"Yes," he said, ducking his head and clutching his knees.
He didn't look up until Henne said, "Charlie," and there was a new photo in Henne's hand.
"No," Charlie said, and Henne's hands seemed to move slowly as he put the picture down and picked up the next.
"Charlie," Henne said, before Charlie could respond. "We need to talk about Don."
"No," Charlie said, to the photo, and then looked up to meet Henne's gaze. Henne was smiling a little, and Charlie said, "And no, we don't. I don't know anything."
Don had told him that, once. You don't know anything. And then he'd been gone, and Charlie had waited, and waited, and waited, until the explosion, the roar of it and the vibration a half second behind. When Charlie scrambled out of the car there was orange firelight glowing against the sky, and Don had limped out of the trees with dirt on his face and blood on his hands. One of them was still alive.
Henne was watching Charlie's face, but if he saw anything there it wasn't reflected in his eyes. Charlie looked down to Henne's hands, holding the next photo up. "No," Charlie said.
Henne set the photo down and flipped up the next. "Charlie, Don resigned from the FBI, you know that?"
Charlie glanced up at Henne's face but didn't nod. He wasn't going to give any affirmative answers; he wasn't going to be tricked into agreeing to anything. He knew those tactics.
Henne twitched a short smile and continued. "If Don had resigned in the normal way, he would have been debriefed extensively. He would have been interviewed by several other agents and his superiors. That's all we're trying to do, bring him in and talk to him."
Charlie smiled. "Oh, you just want to talk to him?"
Henne smiled too, charming and cheerful, and Charlie felt his own mouth twist into something like a sneer.
"I want to talk to him, too," Charlie said, glancing down at Henne's hands, even if talking was about the last thing he could imagine doing if he could get to Don. He wouldn't stop to talk if he could just touch, just get close. Just grab hold and never let go, never let Don walk away from him again.
"But I don't know where he is, and I don't know how to get in touch with him." He wouldn't be here, looking at mug shots, if he did. The face in the photo was no one to him. "No."
Henne sighed, setting the photo down a little forcefully, and Charlie flinched. But Henne wouldn't hurt him, he didn't think; this was Henne's job, and Henne wasn't allowed to hurt Charlie. Charlie was a real person, here; he had rights. His father was just upstairs. That wasn't so far, not really, not when there were no locked doors between, no guards with guns. It wasn't an impossible distance now.
Henne turned up the last picture on the stack, and Charlie repeated, "No."
Henne set the pictures aside, and reached for the next stack. "Charlie," he said. "We at least need to know what happened. We need to know how you got away. Where are these guys? Are they going to come after you again?"
Charlie kept his gaze steady on Henne's hands, though Henne hadn't picked up another photo yet, didn't give him an opportunity to say no. "I don't know where they are," Charlie said finally. He really didn't know; he didn't know where they'd been holding him, and maybe Williamson had left them alive after all. "These men here took me from CalSci, they stuck me in a little room, and they kept me there. I lost track of time and pretty much everything else. Beyond that, I don't know anything."
Henne didn't say anything more, though, just flipped up one picture after another, and Charlie said, "No," and, "No," and then flinched. "Yes."
Henne set the Yes carefully aside with the other two, giving Charlie a few seconds to breathe before he presented the next one, and Charlie said "No," three more times and got it over with.
It was the last guy in the fourth set, and Charlie stared a long time at the photo, trying to be sure he wasn't feeling this hammering fear just because he'd been anticipating it through the first five, just because Don wasn't here and Henne was staring at him. But the longer he stared at that face staring back at him, the harder his heart raced, and his mouth was so dry he barely made a sound when he finally said, "Yes."
Henne set the photo down and gathered up all the rejects, returning them to the file. Then, one by one, he flipped the pictures Charlie had identified face up. Charlie gritted his teeth and lifted his chin, refusing to look, refusing to be cowed. He fixed his eyes on Henne's face, but Henne was looking down this time, moving the photos around on the table.
"You know," Henne said, glancing up to briefly meet Charlie's eyes before looking down again. "My partner and I were assigned to your case right away, as soon as Terry called in and said she and Don thought you'd been taken."
Charlie nodded stiffly, though Henne wasn't looking at him. He wrapped his arms around himself, his stomach churning and heart pounding, and didn't look down. They were just pictures, they couldn't hurt him if he didn't look.
"There were plenty of plausible theories of what had happened to you," Henne continued. "And most of them, Preston and I ran down together. Co-workers, friends, family members, people who'd had some other reason to go after you. But there were two that neither of us wanted to touch, so we flipped for 'em, and each of us took one. Pres got the theory that Don abducted you or orchestrated your abduction."
Charlie kept his face blank. It wasn't true. He knew it wasn't. Don had been his, had always been his. Don had come to save him. Don had been in it with him, in just as much danger--in more danger, now.
Henne glanced up, taking in his lack of response, and looked down again. "I need you to sign," Henne said. "Each photo, to show that you're testifying that these are the men who took you."
Charlie nodded and finally looked down at all four blank faces staring up at him. He felt cold, and he wanted Don, but he couldn't ask for Don. "Do you have a pen?"
Henne set one down with a click on the table, and Charlie picked it up and pulled the first photo toward him to sign his name across the bottom.
"Pres actually won the toss, there, investigating a fellow agent. I got the really bad one, the one we didn't let your brother see when he asked to look at our files."
Charlie glanced up at Henne, who was watching him intently, and then looked down and signed the next photo, his signature a shaky scrawl. "You had to investigate the possibility that I'd done it."
"Bingo," Henne said, pushing the next photo toward Charlie. "You could have killed those two kids and then faked being kidnapped to cover your tracks. We never found physical evidence of anyone but you anywhere, so maybe you weren't taken by super-criminals, maybe you were just the only one there."
Charlie signed the third photo and the fourth, and his hands were shaking and he remembered these men, they'd had guns. They'd taken him, they'd killed the kids, and he knew it wasn't his fault. Don had said it wasn't Charlie's fault.
Henne gathered up all four photos and kept them on the table, under his hand. "Pres figured that if Don did it, sooner or later he'd display some kind of behavior that tipped us off. Maybe he'd take leave, maybe he'd resign, maybe he'd disappear. And if it was you, I figured you would pop back up after a while, tell us some story about somebody taking you and have some vague explanation about how you got away. No details we could check."
Charlie met Henne's gaze and waited. Henne was wrong, but Charlie wouldn't correct him, not when the truth would send them searching for Don, calling Don a killer for what he'd done. Even if Don wasn't on Charlie's side anymore, Charlie still had to be on Don's; he owed Don that much, couldn't do any less for him.
"So here you are," Henne said. "Later than I'd have thought. And these four guys you've identified have all been off the map since July, way off, so either they're dead or they scored big in July and disappeared with the cash. And Don's taken leave, resigned, and disappeared. So maybe they did take you, and Don took care of the problem, or maybe you orchestrated this whole thing and Don found out and doesn't want to flip on you. Maybe you and Don pulled this together, huh?"
Charlie kept waiting. This was all just talk. Henne hadn't touched him yet.
Henne leaned in over the table. "So you could straighten me out and tell me what really happened," Henne said. "Or I could arrest you as a suspect in six murders, haul you in and let you sit in a cell for a while and then have this discussion."
There.
Charlie smiled, and the least little bit of uncertainty flickered in Henne's eyes. And though the curve of his mouth was taut as a bowstring and his whole body was vibrating with tension, Charlie made himself laugh.
"That's the threat, huh? Handcuffs? A cell? I don't know anything, Agent Henne. If you had a shred of evidence against me or Don you wouldn't be wasting your time sitting here playing these games."
Henne tilted his head to the side. "It doesn't make much sense, as a theory, and we don't have evidence to support it, let alone prove it," Henne agreed easily. "Those are the drawbacks. But it's what I've got to go on right now, and it's enough to bring you in."
"So take me in," Charlie said, forcing his hands to unclench from their fists, raising his wrists together for the cuffs like he had so goddamn many times, for Williamson, for a succession of Williamson's thugs, for Don. "Arrest me. It won't jog my memory, I promise you. I can't tell you anything."
Henne smiled grimly. "I can be persuasive. Pres can be really persuasive. And if we don't get you to talk, the Bureau will find someone who can."
Charlie rolled his eyes, lowered his hands into his lap so Henne couldn't watch them shaking. "Sure, you do that, get me to talk. Of course I still won't know anything, so I'll tell you that little green men took me. Elvis was there, too. They kept me next to Jimmy Hoffa's body. What are you going to do? Break my fingers?"
Charlie waved his left hand at Henne, and Henne's gaze broke from Charlie's, looking, and Charlie had him.
"You going to leave me in that cell for five days without sleep or food? You going to bring my dad in, too, take him in another room and break his fingers while I listen?"
Henne raised an eyebrow, and Charlie choked back more suggestions.
"It won't matter what you do." Charlie heard his voice straining upward, and fought to control it. "I still won't know anything."
Charlie wouldn't tell, he wouldn't, and they couldn't go that far anyway, he was almost positive they couldn't, not the good guys. He'd kept secrets before, to protect himself and Don. He could do it again. Henne wasn't Williamson, he wasn't even Randy, not by a damn sight--they were both dead now, and Charlie wouldn't be afraid of Henne or Preston or the whole damn FBI. They hadn't been able to find him. They wouldn't find out what he knew. They couldn't use Don against him as long as they didn't have Don, and they wouldn't have Don as long as Charlie kept his mouth shut.
Henne nodded, and then rubbed a hand over his face, looking away, and Charlie didn't relax, wouldn't relax, wouldn't drop his guard. But Henne just said, "Okay," and blew out a breath, and when he lowered his hand Charlie could have sworn he looked relieved.
"Okay," he repeated. "You don't know anything, I hear what you're saying. I'm sorry if I upset you. I just had to be sure, you know?"
Henne met Charlie's eyes, and Charlie frowned. If Henne wanted to be sure, that had been a clumsy way to do it--and he should have followed through, he should be putting those handcuffs on Charlie and taking him to that cell. He had no way of being sure that Charlie could hold out as well as he said he could.
Unless Henne really was relieved, because Henne didn't want to hear what Charlie might have to say.
Charlie tilted his head, squinting at Henne. "Aren't there supposed to be two of you, to do good-cop-bad-cop?"
Henne smiled suddenly, widely. "Yeah, but we're being sensitive. You're the victim, right?"
"Right," Charlie said slowly. Henne didn't want to catch Charlie lying. He didn't want to catch Don, but--but this was his job. And maybe he would blow it on purpose as surely as Charlie had blown his, to protect people he wanted to protect. Charlie looked down, confused, rubbing a hand against the back of his neck.
"You're going to need to talk to one more person," Henne added. "Just somebody to back up my observations of you, assure the Bureau that you don't have any further testimony to give that we want to be worried about.
Charlie looked up sharply, but Henne was already on his feet, gathering things into the file he'd brought.
"I'll give you a call when it's set up," he said. "You can do it here."
Charlie nodded, staring up at Henne.
Henne reached out a hand to shake. "Thanks, Dr. Eppes, really. You've been a big help. I know this is hard for you, and I really appreciate your cooperation."
Charlie stared until Henne took his hand back. He watched Henne all the way out of the house, and then he put his head down on his arms and let himself shake. Don was safe. Don was gone, Charlie was alone, but he was safe, Don was safe, and that was all that mattered now. That was all Charlie could do.
There were two things that Coop had liked to say that Don had never doubted, and now he was finding they were both absolutely true.
One was that working fugitive recovery in the Bureau didn't pay a dime on the dollar of fair market value for the work. Don had pulled down as much in four days working freelance as he'd earned his first month working with Coop.
Coop's other truism was that Don would always have better luck tracking down the kind of fugitive who wanted to be stopped, because Don understood them. Coop, now, Coop had a knack for the kind who made final desperate last stands, the kind who wouldn't be taken alive, who wouldn't stop fighting even after the cuffs were on. But Don's specialty had been the ones who just needed to be talked down, to know it was over.
Don was hunkering behind a half-broken-down wall in an abandoned house, listening to his bail-jumper pacing in the room beyond. There were already a dozen bullet holes in the wall, some fresh and some not. Don could have used Coop--or any backup at all--on this one. He kept getting distracted from planning his takedown because couldn't shake the irritated sense that the guy should just give in already. It was over. He'd been on the run for months, but Don had found him and Don was taking him in today, one way or another.
Don scrubbed his face against his sleeve and knew why he didn't get it, why he wouldn't ever understand this. He just had to take his shot and finish this job and move on to the next one.
Because Coop had always been right about him. Don would have gone quietly, if only anyone would come and bring him in.
"Knock knock."
Charlie looked up from his work--tentative and mostly consisting of erasing as it was--to the woman standing silhouetted in the open garage door. He blinked a couple of times; the light behind her was bright, and it was hard to see her.
Belatedly, he answered, "Who's there?"
She laughed a little and came inside, revealing herself to be his own height, slender, dressed in jeans and a soft green sweater.
"Kelley Bloom," she said, holding out a hand to shake.
Charlie took it; her grip was firm, and she held his gaze steadily. Charlie didn't let himself look away. First Ang, now Kelley--two data points wasn't enough to say for certain that Henne was trying to avoid intimidating Charlie more than he had to, but it was enough to be interesting. Charlie cleared his throat and let go of Kelley's hand.
"That's not a very good joke," he said when she stayed silent, watching him.
"Yeah," Kelley said, smiling but still not breaking eye contact. Her eyes were blue with yellow flecks, and he could see himself faintly reflected in her pupils. "I'm still working on it. Do you know any?"
How do you know a mathematician is extroverted? He'd been smiling at Don as they showered together, Don's hands washing him clean under the warm spray, Don keeping him safe.
"No good ones," he muttered, looking down as he turned the chalk over in his hand.
He half-turned back toward the board, knowing he should face her, knowing he should get this over with. His palms were sweating and he just wanted to work. Larry had brought him some notes to work from the other day, and Charlie's first impression of where he'd been going wrong had been confirmed. Figuring out how to go right was taking longer.
"What are you working on?"
Charlie frowned and looked back at Kelley. "Supergravity."
She tilted her head and raised her eyebrows, smiling. "Is that better than regular gravity?"
"It's a field theory," Charlie replied. Kelley just went on looking curious, so he reached for a better explanation, in small words. "Supergravity theory combines supersymmetry with general relativity to arrive at..."
Kelley's head tilted back to the vertical, and her smile widened a little. "At a field?"
Charlie felt himself smile, felt the lecture unspooling in his mind, his fingers already tightening on the chalk to draw a diagram, the analogies flashing through his mind--he would and could talk to Kelley about Larry's 11-dimensional theory of supergravity until she'd either glazed over entirely or begun to understand it. And if Kelley had the slightest idea what she was doing here, she'd start slipping in questions about other things while he was distracted. He might say anything while he was thinking about compactification and how to reduce the cosmological constant in four dimensions.
"At a theory of everything," Charlie corrected, turning his back just long enough to set his chalk down firmly in the tray. He was alone now, he had to watch his own back. He had to be careful.
"I don't want to talk about it," he added, turning back and wiping his hands on his pants.
Kelley nodded, her smile dimming a little. "Is there anything you do want to talk about?"
"I'm not much of a talker," Charlie said, watching her carefully. She'd moved away from the door, leaving his path clear, but she was watching him closely, keeping her weight on the balls of her feet: she'd catch him before he went far. Charlie shoved his hands into his pockets and held his ground.
"Yeah," Kelley said, abruptly looking away, walking over to another chalkboard. "Your dad said you've been really quiet since you got home. He's worried about you."
"I know," Charlie said, trying not to flinch. Kelley looked up as he spoke, and Charlie added, "I really don't have anything to say, though. Aren't you supposed to be evaluating me?"
"What makes you think I'm not?" Kelley's smile was a little hard-edged, and Charlie smiled back reflexively, trying not to show fear.
"Agent Henne explained this to you, right? I'm here to psychologically evaluate you on behalf of the FBI, and I'll file a report with them giving my professional opinion of whether there is any value in pressing you for further testimony on the events of the past six months."
Charlie nodded shortly. Agent Henne had explained that all very carefully over the phone the day before. "Aren't there questionnaires? Pictures to look at? Something like that?"
"Mm, I left my bag of tricks in the house. We could do word association," Kelley said. "You know how that works?"
Charlie nodded.
"So, for instance, I could say brother, and then you would say..."
Brother was still a blank, more and more obvious as other memories drifted in. He'd even looked at those files he didn't remember yesterday. He'd worked out from his notes that he'd been working with Don on this stuff, consulting with the FBI; a casual remark to Larry had confirmed it. But he couldn't remember that, or anything else relating to his brother. It was just a lot of empty space, filling up the house, surrounding Charlie on every side.
"Nothing," Charlie said.
Kelley nodded, looking unsurprised.
"I know you don't like this, Charlie, and I know you think I'm the enemy, and Agent Henne is the enemy. I know that until you can stop thinking that you're not going to cooperate with the FBI and they're not going to accomplish much by questioning you, except to scare you."
Charlie blinked. "Is that your professional opinion?"
"It is," Kelley said. "You can have it in writing if you want. The FBI will be getting it in writing tomorrow morning. But I don't just work for the FBI, Charlie. I'm a licensed therapist. I'm trained to help people who've been through things like you have."
Charlie looked down at his feet. Don had told him, No one will hurt you, but it kept taking him by surprise, every time they didn't. More than surprise: it set him on edge, raised his hackles almost literally, because it had to be coming.
"You don't know what I've been through."
"You could tell me," Kelley said. "No one would have to know. I'm not an FBI agent, I'm not going to report back any particulars you share with me to Agent Henne or anyone else."
Charlie looked up at her. She seemed sincere; she didn't set off the usual alarms, didn't seem actively threatening no matter how he looked for a threat. But there were other ways a person could hurt him, maybe not even intentionally. She could do awful things thinking she was helping. Don had--
Charlie looked away, his throat too tight to speak, and shook his head.
Kelley sighed; she sounded tired. Charlie looked up to see her scrubbing both hands through her short dark hair. She quirked a smile when he met her eyes, and lowered her hands. "They hurt you? Broke your fingers?"
Charlie swallowed and nodded. He'd as much as admitted that to Henne. It couldn't make anything worse to confirm it now.
"And the scar on your head is new," she added. Charlie restrained the pointless urge to hide it, tightening his hand to a fist to keep it still. "And they had you for... months?"
Charlie nodded again cautiously. That was vague enough not to give them any information about Don.
"And your dad gets offended when I ask him if he's worried you might do something to hurt yourself or someone else," Kelley continued.
Charlie thought of the picture that disappeared, the Scrabble tile on his father's shirt, and gritted his teeth.
"Okay," Kelley said. "So I think we're just about done here, Charlie."
Charlie nodded, waiting for her to go, to leave him alone again.
"Six two six four three nine one four one one," Kelley said abruptly.
Charlie frowned, automatically looking for a pattern in the string of digits.
Kelley smiled. "That means, call me when you decide you need to talk to somebody. It doesn't have to be me, but you're going to need to talk eventually, and strangers can be easier than friends."
Kelley knew he had an eidetic memory for numbers. 626-439-1411.
"You did your homework," Charlie said, even as Kelly turned toward the door.
She looked back over her shoulder and smiled. "And now I'll let you get back to yours, Dr. Eppes. Good luck with that field theory."
"Thank you," he whispered, but Kelley was already gone.
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