Waking Lazarus (20 page)

28

QUESTIONING

Jude felt his heart lurch for a long moment, staggering out of its normal rhythm. This was danger territory. Jude knew himself, knew his capabilities. No way he was going to stand up to ten minutes of intense questioning, let alone a couple of hours. And if the police wanted to bring him to the station, that probably meant they’d been digging. He hadn’t covered his tracks carefully, and it would be easy to discover Ron Gress was an apparition, a nonperson without any real past.

Jude pushed these jumbled thoughts aside and forced his mouth to move. ‘‘Can I ask why?’’

‘‘Let’s just talk at the station, Mr. Gress.’’

Okay, he knew he couldn’t handle it. But he would have to anyway. And maybe, just maybe, this wasn’t about him. Maybe it was about Sohler. Maybe the little girl at the kidnapper’s house—Tiffany— had told the police something about his being there. He’d expected that, on some level. He’d told the girl he was a janitor; if she remembered, she’d say something about it to the police. That wouldn’t add up, of course.
Why would a janitor be there?
the police would ask themselves. Next they would say,
Beats the snot out of us,
but didn’t we talk to a janitor last week who was part of that accident
with Sohler? Why, yes we did, and isn’t it funny to think these two have
met before? Why don’t we find that janitor and get him down here to tell
us about it?

Sure, that could be it. Probably was it, now that he thought about it. With any luck they’d be digging for information about Sohler rather than digging for information about himself. That, he could handle.

That was the way it would be, then. He’d go with Officer Grant to answer a few questions. ‘‘Okay,’’ Jude said to Grant. ‘‘Let’s go.’’ He waited for Grant to step away from the door, then went out himself, pulled his keychain from his pocket and locked it, dead bolts and all. Now wasn’t the time to get sloppy about home security.

Officer Grant’s car was a basic Crown Victoria. Jude wasn’t sure if he was supposed to sit up front or in back, but Grant motioned him to the front, started the car, and headed toward the downtown police station. Jude didn’t live far away; they would be there in five minutes or so.

At the first turn Jude turned to look at Officer Grant, who kept his eyes on the road. Grant wasn’t much of a conversationalist, obviously. Not that he himself was, but Jude somehow expected police officers would always try a bit of chatter when they were bringing in people for questioning. Loosen ’em up a bit, get ’em to let down their guard, oil the jaw joints so they’d feel warm and fuzzy and trusting enough to spill their secrets.

Grant pulled into the parking lot, and a few minutes later they stood inside the building.

At the desk they took a left turn and walked down a hallway lined with offices. Except, Jude found out, one of the doors on that hallway wasn’t an office at all. It was something he recognized from cop shows he’d watched as a kid: the interrogation room. Grant escorted him into the room, then retreated.

The room put no effort into breaking from the mold of your standard interrogation chamber. Its walls, floor, and ceiling were stark and plain. A heavy metal table loomed in the middle of the room with chairs on both sides.

Jude sat down and tried to clear his head. He took a few deep breaths, willed his heart to stop sledgehammering the cavity of his chest, and did his best to appear calm and relaxed. Looking nervous in here would do him no good; he knew full well someone, maybe even a few someones, would be staring at him from behind that large mirrored wall in front of him right now.

Jude thought he’d been handling it all pretty well, keeping up that veneer of serenity, until Chief Odum opened the door of the room and walked in.

Instantly Jude felt his internal circuit breaker trip. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen. The chief was supposed to stay on the other side of the mirror while one of his officers questioned him. Jude’s gaze fell to the table as Chief Odum sat down across from him, and he could not bear to look up.

Jude continued looking at the smooth surface of the table, but in his peripheral vision he could see Odum smiling. Probably noting Jude’s all-too-obvious reactions and feeling as if he had a nice fish on the line.

‘‘Mr. Gress,’’ Odum said, ‘‘thanks for coming down. We have a few things we were hoping you could clear up for us.’’

Standard boiler plate cop talk. Nothing too dangerous. ‘‘Okay,’’ Jude answered.

‘‘All right, then. You have any idea what this is about?’’ Odum asked.

Jude shrugged. Of course he had an idea what this was all about, a very good idea. But he wasn’t about to admit that. Least of all to Odum.

Odum held up a photo of Tiffany, the girl who had been locked in Sohler’s home. ‘‘Have you seen her before?’’

‘‘Yes. Tiffany.’’ Jude decided he would only talk in short sentences, give only the information asked. That was the way it was done. Of course he had already offered more information than was asked by giving Odum the girl’s name, but he was new at this thing. Gotta expect a few stumbles just out of the gate.

‘‘And this boy?’’ Odum held a photo of the boy in the cage.

‘‘Yes.’’ This time he didn’t offer a name, partly because he didn’t know the boy’s name.

‘‘How about this man?’’ A photo of Ken Sohler.

‘‘Yes.’’

‘‘Of course you know this man,’’ Odum said. ‘‘We all met just a few days ago at that vehicular accident, didn’t we? You were there.’’ Odum waved Sohler’s photo. ‘‘He was there.’’ He paused. ‘‘I was there.’’

Odum paused. Jude decided he wouldn’t speak; Odum hadn’t asked him a direct question. After a few moments Odum smiled again and lined up the photos of Sohler and the two kids. ‘‘We’ve got three pictures here, Mr. Gress. But we don’t have the whole picture, if you can see what I mean.’’

Jude shrugged.

Odum continued. ‘‘The whole picture includes you, now, doesn’t it? You showed up at that accident with Sohler last week. Then last night, you were at Sohler’s house.’’

It was a statement, not a question. Okay, maybe if he talked a bit about last night, that would give Odum the information he needed to follow a new trail—a trail that led away from his own background. He closed his eyes for a moment. Time to step off the cliff. ‘‘What do you want to know?’’

Odum smiled again. ‘‘Oh, how you know them, for starters. What you were doing in Sohler’s house.’’

‘‘How’d you know I was there?’’ Jude asked, although he had a pretty good idea.

‘‘Let’s call it a professional secret.’’

Jude sighed. He was pretty sure he knew, anyway. ‘‘The boy, I’d never seen before I got into the house. And the man—Ken Sohler— well, I had a bad feeling about him when I first saw him.’’

‘‘A bad feeling?’’

Jude nodded. He knew he was starting weak, very weak. But lead- ing with ‘‘I had some psychic visions’’ didn’t seem like the best opening line.

‘‘When you first saw him, you say,’’ Odum said. ‘‘That was at the accident?’’

‘‘Well, no. I mean yes. The first time I saw him was at the accident. But then I saw him last night at the Red Lodge Cafe. That’s when I got the bad feeling.’’

Odum offered the knowing nod of a man who’s had a few meals at the Red Lodge Cafe. ‘‘So what happened?’’

‘‘I saw him, and I just felt like something was wrong. Really wrong. So I . . . kind of followed him to his home.’’

‘‘And?’’

‘‘Well, you probably know. I needed to get him out of the house, so I called and said I was . . . you.’’ He expected Odum to be quite mad about this, but he wasn’t. Or, more likely, he’d already boiled about it and had now cooled down.

‘‘So you got Sohler out of the house. Then what?’’

‘‘Well, I went into the house—’’

‘‘He left the door unlocked?’’

‘‘No, the door was locked. I, uh, busted out a window in the door.’’ Surely Odum already knew that. He just wanted to make Jude uncomfortable. ‘‘Anyway, once I got inside, I heard a thumping noise. Like metal, you know? And I discovered the boy—I still don’t know his name.’’

‘‘Joey.’’

‘‘Joey. I found Joey locked in a cage just behind the basement door.’’ Jude felt tears starting to form in his eyes, but he forced them to open wider, dry a bit. He wasn’t about to cry in front of Chief Odum. That would be a bad move, akin to flopping on his back and showing a weak underbelly.

‘‘The basement? Did you go into the basement?’’

Jude was a bit surprised by the question. ‘‘No. Why? Was there something important in the basement?’’ A thought crossed his mind—a particularly nasty thought he wished had never come. ‘‘Were there . . . other kids?’’

Odum leaned back in his chair, ignoring Jude’s question. ‘‘So tell me about the girl,’’ he said.

‘‘After I got the boy, um, Joey, out of the cage, we found her in the bedroom. She was chained to the bedpost, so I kind of knocked the bedpost loose. Then we slipped out of the back window when Sohler was chasing us with an ax. I . . . well, I hit him with the bedpost.’’ Again, he was pretty sure Odum knew this already.

Odum stared into Jude’s eyes. ‘‘Mr. Gress, that sounds like a pretty good story. But why do I get the feeling you’re not telling me everything that happened.’’

Jude winced. ‘‘I don’t know—.’’

‘‘See, that’s just it,’’ Odum interrupted. ‘‘There’s so much of this big picture
I
still don’t know. Like your real name.’’

Uh-oh. This was headed into dangerous territory. Jude swallowed, and he knew Odum wouldn’t speak again until he gave an answer. He backpedaled, mostly so he could avoid answering the question about his identity. ‘‘If you talk to the kids, Tiffany and Joey, they can tell you they haven’t seen me before. They can tell you—’’

‘‘Oh, they’ve told me everything I need, Mr.
Gress
,’’ he said, leaning on the name. He sat a few moments, saying nothing, then: ‘‘Would you be willing to submit to a polygraph test?’’

Jude blinked, stared down at the table. He wouldn’t have a prayer of passing a lie detector test, even telling the truth; he was a jumble of paranoid tendencies and nervous tics.

Jude’s mouth was dry, and he wasn’t sure what to say, so he muttered a quiet ‘‘Maybe I’d better call an attorney.’’

‘‘Maybe you should. If you’d like to do that, I’ll be more than happy to provide your lodging for the evening right here. Your attorney can come talk to you in the morning, and I’ll let you out in twenty-four hours. We can play the game that way.’’ Odum licked his lips. ‘‘Or, we can just make a gentleman’s agreement right now that you’ll be down here bright and early tomorrow, and I’ll let you go home and snuggle into your own bed for the evening. Your choice, of course.’’

Jude noticed he’d been unconsciously itching at the inside of his forearm; he stopped, glancing at the red mark he’d left. Odum had pried open his mind already, figured out there was no way he’d choose a jail cell over the safety of his home. At home he could lock out
them
, keep the bad out. Maybe Odum was even one of
them
, and if he stayed here, he’d be locked in with . . .

Jude shook his head. This was no time to let his paranoia rise to the surface and take over. But he was trapped. Odum knew it. He knew it.

‘‘I’ll . . . I’ll be here tomorrow morning.’’

‘‘Good, good. Officer Grant will escort you back, keep an eye on your home for the night—’’ Odum flashed another grin—‘‘for your safety, of course, Mr.
Gress
.’’

29

CONNECTING

Jude closed the door behind him, went through the familiar locking ritual. A cold skewer of steel rode inside his intestines, and his head felt sweaty, itchy. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.

He walked into the kitchen, opened his refrigerator, and looked for something to drink. Orange juice. He shook it and drank it as he stood in the kitchen. The juice helped, calming his roiling stomach. He sat in the single chair at the kitchen table, running the recent events through his mind.

He hadn’t counted on anything like this being part of the deal. Talk to a few people, tell them to straighten out their lives. Sure, fine. Rescue kids in danger, also fine. But now it seemed the carefully constructed cocoon he’d built for himself was going to be burned away, charring him in the process. He didn’t want to help others if it meant exposing himself in the process.

If he took that lie detector test in the morning, Chief Odum would be well on his way to figuring out that Ron Gress wasn’t really Ron Gress. He’d already said as much. And it wouldn’t take a whole lot of digging for Chief Odum to find out who he really was.

He closed his eyes, sighed, forced thoughts of being discovered out of his mind.

The worst part was, this was a giant leap backward just after he’d taken a few small steps forward. He’d been paranoid for a long, long time, and in these last few days he’d felt himself coming out of that cloud cover. He didn’t hear footsteps walking down the street behind him. He didn’t feel eyes watching him while he worked. Last night he hadn’t even armed his alarm system. That was all good, and in his mind he knew it had something to do with . . . well, Nathan. And his father in some odd way. And yes, Rachel. For the first time in a long time, he was thinking about other people, and their happiness. And that was part of what had let him go along with this ‘‘looking for signs’’ stuff from Kristina. There was something nice about rising above the self-centeredness.

He took another drink of the orange juice. But here was the other question:
had
he been getting better, or were all these events of the last few days mere delusions themselves? He tried to be soberly analytical, examining the evidence. Paranoia, repressed memories, blackouts. Rachel had suggested epileptic seizures, a real possibility. Mix it all together, and he wasn’t exactly a poster child for mental fitness. Wouldn’t delusions fit that pattern? Couldn’t his mind have imagined all of it?

He shook his head, another unconscious effort to clear it. No matter. He would just ignore it. This incident, he decided, would bring the Kristina experiments to a dead end. He didn’t fit her superhero image, and she’d just have to die without doing her own good deed.