Eyes of a Child (39 page)

Terri blinked. Something changed, like the breaking of a current. Her body beneath him was still.

‘Listen,' she whispered.

He heard it now. A knocking on the door. Slow and insistent, almost like the tolling of a bell.

They looked at each other. The knocking, unvarying and inexorable, seemed louder now. They did not speak their thoughts aloud.

Terri shook her head.

‘I have to,' Paget said. Sliding from inside her, he stopped for a moment, looking into her face again.

The knocking kept on.

Gently, Paget kissed Terri's mouth and got up from the bed. She watched him as he dressed – a sweater and jeans and moccasins – taking his time.

By now they knew that the knocking would not stop.

And then, quite suddenly, it did.

Silence. There was a cracking sound, like wood snapping. Terri pulled the sheet above her breasts.

Footsteps now. In the doorway, Paget glanced back at Terri. ‘Lock the door,' he said. ‘And call Caroline.'

Slowly, Paget walked down the winding stairs, hand grazing the rail.

The front door was broken open. Monk and Lynch were in the alcove, waiting with the young policeman who had searched Paget's home.

‘Three of you?' Paget asked, and then the young cop took the handcuffs off his belt.

Monk raised a hand, motioning the cop to wait. His gaze at Paget was steady, and without pleasure. ‘You have been indicted by the grand jury,' he said with grave formality. ‘We have a warrant for your arrest in the murder of Ricardo Arias.'

Monk began reading his rights.

Paget felt a moment's lightness, like an oxygen shortage. As if by reflex, he nodded when Monk was finished, and then Monk took his arm. When Paget heard the bedroom door open, he did not look back. Monk guided him past the splintered entryway.

The street was cool and quiet. A neighbor, walking her basset, turned to watch them.

There was an unmarked car in the driveway. Monk and Lynch steered him to the car and pushed Paget into the back seat. Then the young cop got in next to him, snapping the cuffs on his wrists. He sat next to Paget with a narrow look of authority and pleasure.

Lynch and Monk got in front, and then Monk turned over the engine. As they pulled from the driveway, Paget saw Carlo's car.

Carlo braked abruptly. Monk turned into the street, and Paget looked through the side window into the stricken face of his son.

‘I'm all right,' Paget tried to mouth. The car kept moving; Paget saw Carlo calling out to him, and then his son's face vanished like a mirage.

The next several minutes were a blur. A collage of half-noticed images, ending in the bowels of an underground garage. The car drove into a steel cage and stopped.

They were at the Hall of Justice, and all that Paget could think about was the look on his son's face.

The cage shut behind him.

The young cop jerked Paget out of the car, and then Monk opened the front of the cage to take them into a smaller mantrap surrounding an elevator. As the elevator enclosed them, Paget leaned his back against the wall.

With a shudder, the elevator creaked slowly upward. Then it opened at the sixth floor, into another cage, and Paget's mind reentered the moment.

A thick-bodied sheriff's deputy in tinted glasses was waiting on the other side of the cage. He unlocked the bars, then steered Paget and his escorts down a hallway and through a steel door into a cacophony of sounds: a room filled with deputies herding the dregs of the urban underclass newly busted for felonies, some of them yipping or moaning from the rise or fall of drugs taken in their last moments of freedom. At the far side of the room, more deputies at three tellerlike stations booked whoever stood in front of them, shouting to be heard above the din, entering crimes as coded numbers on a computer screen. In one corner, a black tranvestite sat with his legs spread, crying to no one and urinating on himself; Paget smelled urine everywhere, as if it had seeped into the concrete. The young cop unlocked Paget's cuffs.

‘In here,' the deputy snapped, and pushed Paget into an empty concrete room with a steel toilet. ‘Strip,' the man ordered in an indifferent voice: Paget was merely another body in a nameless parade that had no past or future, no faces or lives or souls.

As the man watched, Paget took off his clothes.

‘Bend over,' the man said.

Paget knew what this was about: some of the human traffic had drugs or handguns secreted in their rectums. Bending, Paget tried to think ahead.

When Paget had dressed again, the man pushed him into a bare concrete holding tank to the side of the room and ordered him to wait.

The twenty or so inmates of the holding tank, blacks and Latinos and a few Asians, seemed to study him with the lassitude that comes from the shock of arrest. Paget knew that it was on the other side of the booking process, in the cells where they would put him, that assaults and rapes waited in the middle of the night. He did not look at anyone.

Paget had to keep his thoughts focused, and clear. Once he got out, he could think about Carlo again, and Terri.

Monk opened the door and walked over to Paget. ‘I'm going to walk you through this,' he said. ‘Express check-in.'

Another series of images: Monk shoving through the crowd to the booking window. A mustached Latin deputy booking Paget for the murder of Ricardo Arias – name and address, fingerprints and photo. More fingerprints in a concrete room that smelled like a latrine; another photograph in a wooden seat that looked like an electric chair. Through a bulletproof window, Paget could see his comrades in the holding tank, still waiting to be booked; from the other side of the glass, a muscled young black man stared back at him, resentful and unblinking, as if to tell Paget that he would remember his special treatment.

‘I'm checking with my lawyer,' Paget told Monk.

Monk shrugged. Paget went to a telephone on the concrete wall and tried to call Caroline. No answer; only Caroline's voice on tape, elegant and a little dry, soliciting a message.

‘This is Chris,' Paget said to the tape. ‘I'm at the county jail. I need a security cell.'

When he turned, Monk was holding out an orange jumpsuit. Paget stared at him. ‘I want my own cell,' he said.

Monk shoved the jumpsuit in Paget's hands. ‘Put this on,' he said.

‘Look –' Paget began, and then the telephone rang.

‘It's for you,' a deputy said to Monk. Monk took it, listened for a moment, and said a few terse words. Hanging up, he turned to Paget and repeated, ‘Put that on.'

Paget did. A deputy put his clothes in a bag and took them away to a storeroom.

‘All right,' Monk said. ‘Let's go.'

A few steps later, Paget found himself standing in front of the barred door to the county jail, flanked by Monk and the deputy who had watched him strip. Through the bars was a two-hundred-foot-long corridor with cells on either side and sheriff's deputies spaced in front of them. The sound of inmates shouting at each other echoed off the walls. The light was a sickly yellow.

Someone pushed a buzzer, and the door opened. Monk steered Paget through the door. He heard it shut behind them: a whisper, then the soft metallic click.

Paget felt frightened and alert at once: he was like a piece of meat on a conveyor belt, moving into the belly of the criminal justice system without any way to stop. On both sides of him were cells full of milling, stinking prisoners – blacks on his left, Hispanics and Asians on his right, separated so that they would not attack each other. A few steps further were the cells for the insane, with a psychiatric tech stationed in front, the inmates babbling or staring at him as if in catatonia. A pool of urine glistened on the floor.

‘Where am I going?' Paget asked.

Monk stopped moving. ‘Shopping,' he said. ‘Your assignment is to pick out five guys who look like you. If you can find that many.'

Paget turned to him in surprise. ‘A lineup?'

Monk nodded. ‘Pick your prospects. Of course, they have to be volunteers.'

Think,
Paget ordered himself.

Slowly, Paget and Monk made their way down the corridor, staring through the bars of the next communal cell. The inmates, hostile or bored or curious, gazed back at him or shouted like captives in a zoo. The pockmarked Latino with a beard and marine tattoos came to the bars and put his face as close to Paget's as he could manage. ‘Oh,
sweet meat
,' he said in a caressing voice, ‘I can hardly wait for
you
.' The man's torso began to undulate.

Paget looked past him. About twenty prisoners stood around or lay on bunk beds; none of them were Caucasians. ‘Great material,' he murmured to Monk. ‘Think whoever your witness is will be able to figure out I'm white?'

Monk grunted; to Paget, the sound was halfway between agreement and disgust. ‘Let's go,' Monk said.

They went to the next cell.

Inside, a twentyish olive-skinned Latin with reddish hair leaned against a bed. He shrugged when Paget pointed at him; he was bored, the shrug said – why not. The sheriff's deputy unlocked the cell, beckoning, and the man stepped into the corridor.

Cell by cell, Paget added prospects. A thin-bearded man with brown hair. A saturnine Latin of about Paget's height and age. A much shorter man with brown hair but blue eyes. They trailed sullenly after Paget and the cops, silently shuffling to wherever they might go. No one spoke; none of them were as fair as Paget.

At the last cell, Paget stopped, gazing at a Caucasian prisoner.

The man was younger than he, perhaps thirty-five, and his hair was redder than Paget's copper-blond. But their height was similar, their skin tone the same, and the man's eyes were as blue as Paget's. The two men watched each other, the bars between them.

Silent, Paget beckoned. The man was still, gazing at Paget, and then walked over.

‘What's happening?' he asked.

A faint Southern accent. ‘I need you in a lineup,' Paget said.

The man shrugged. ‘Why should I?'

Paget angled his head toward the line of prospects. ‘Man,' he said slowly, ‘
you
are my only ticket out of here.'

The man surveyed the prisoners with narrowed eyes, a faint sardonic recognition that no one looked like Paget. ‘All right,' he said, and stuck his hand through the bars. ‘My name's Ray.'

‘Chris,' Paget answered, and shook his hand, clammy and cold to the touch. It was all that they seemed to have to say to each other.

Monk and the deputy let Ray out of the cell.

Paget and the five prisoners filed back down the corridor, Monk to one side, the deputy behind them. The jail door swung open; two other deputies waited to escort them down one corridor, then another, and into a barred mantrap that faced a metal door.

‘There had better be a lawyer,' Paget said to Monk, ‘on the other side of the door.'

The metal door opened, and Paget and the others stepped through.

They were standing on the stage of an auditorium. The stage itself was lit from above, but the theater seats were shrouded in darkness: gazing out, Paget could see shadows moving, hear people whisper whom he could not see.

‘Christopher,' a voice called from the shadows. ‘I'm over here.'

Silent, Paget nodded. The fact that Caroline had spoken to him meant that, for whatever reason, the witness was not yet there.

‘All right,' Monk said. ‘Spread out.'

The six men formed a line. Monk gave them each a numbered card: Ray was three, Paget five. The men stared into space.

A flash cube went off. Paget blinked: it was the photo of the line-up, to be used in court. And then more flash cubes flickered in the darkness, as pictures were taken of each participant, one by one.

There was silence, then a reshuffling of the unseen bodies who watched them. It was as if the atmosphere had a new density; Paget sensed that the witness had been brought in.

From the darkness, a cop's bored voice began reading: ‘The person charged with the crime may not be here. You don't have to pick anyone. Don't pick anyone to please us. You don't have to pick anyone unless you're sure . . .'

Somewhere in the darkness, the witness watched them.

‘Number one,' the cop's voice called out.

The short dark-haired man stepped forward from the line.

More silence, then whispers. ‘That's fine,' the cop called out. ‘Number two.'

The same: silence, whispers, a dismissal.

‘Number three.'

Ray stepped forward. He squared his shoulders, gazing out at the audience.

‘Turn right,' the cop's voice said.

Ray did so; Paget felt himself grip the card he held.

‘Turn left.'

Ray turned again. Paget started counting the seconds that passed. He was at twenty-one when the cop called out, ‘Step back. Next is number four..'

Number four passed quickly. Swallowing, Paget hardly listened.

‘Number five,' the voice called out.

Paget stepped forward.

He gazed out at the darkness. In the silence, he felt the unknown witness. The absence of sound was oppressive.

‘Turn right,' the cop called out.

Paget did that. It was thirty seconds, with muffled voices talking in the dark, before the cop called out, ‘Turn left.'

Paget's palms were sweating. He had stopped counting; he only knew that it seemed too long before the cop told him to step back.

Number six went quickly.

The six men stood there, facing their unseen audience.