69 hours
This time when she entered the lab, the lights were already on, and there were two armed guards—one by the door to her quarters and one by the door leading outside. Fallon wasn’t sure if they were a result of her near-lapse on the phone last night, or if she would have woken to find them babysitting her regardless of how circumspect she’d been. She supposed it didn’t really matter; they were here now. So she might as well put them to good use.
“You,” she said to the soldier by the far door. “What’s your name?”
“Davidson, ma’am.”
“Davidson. Can you poke your head outside and ask your counterpart on the other side of the door to have Hank Light brought here? I need to run his scans.” Davidson looked a little nonplussed, as if being ordered about by a civilian was something he wasn’t entirely used to. Which was going to have to change in a big hurry if he was going to be assigned to watch her. She was shorthanded, and no one got to just stand around in her lab, gun or no gun. “Oh, and make sure he’s cuffed with zip ties—nothing metal. I’m going to need to do an MRI, and I’m sure none of us wants him loose for that.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, likely responding more to her assumption of authority than to any orders he might have been issued to put himself at her disposal while on guard duty. Fallon didn’t much care why he listened; she was just glad he did.
As he stuck his head out the door and conversed in low tones with someone Fallon couldn’t see, she turned to the other guard.
“And you?”
“Ma’am?” This one was older than Davidson, probably no green recruit. Though she doubted anyone who was truly that inexperienced would get called in for the task of cordoning off a major U.S. city. She was pretty sure there was no—what had Briggs called it? MOS?—for that particular task.
And it wasn’t as if even the high-ranking officers would have seen action quite like this before. Coupled with the fact that the military was all-volunteer now, and maybe green was as good as it got.
“What’s your name?”
“Romero, ma’am.”
“Okay, Romero, I don’t know if they’re going to send guards over with Light or if they’re going to expect you and Davidson to pull double duty, watching him and me, but if it comes down to it, and you have to choose one of us to shoot? Just make sure it’s him.”
Romero was no scarlet-clad bearskin-wearing British guard; he actually cracked a smile.
“I’ll take it under advisement, ma’am,” he said, and Fallon nodded. That was probably the best she was likely to get. She’d take it.
As she waited for Light to be brought over from the infield garages, or wherever Robbins might have him stowed now, she got the MRI scanner up and running. She’d fired it up last night, just to make sure she could handle it on her own since it was a much newer machine than the one in her old lab, and the help Robbins had promised her had thus far failed to materialize.
Not that she needed them. She wasn’t generally the one who ran the tests—that fell to one of many research assistants—but she prided herself on being able to use every piece of equipment under her roof, and if someone was out sick or on vacation, she didn’t hesitate to step in. Elliott had often joked she was a one-woman lab, and only needed the rest of them for more grant money—the bigger the lab, the bigger the check. But considering what Elliott had done with the fruits of the research that money had paid for, she sometimes wished she really had been doing all the work alone. At least then she wouldn’t have to worry about a renegade partner running around doing God knew what with their only prototype.
Satisfied that she’d be able to get Light’s scans even without any help, Fallon sat back in the chair on the other side of the RF-shielded window, marveling at how quickly the Army had managed to put together the MRI room. Magnetic Resonance Imaging units not only employed a strong magnetic field but also a specific radio frequency that transmitted the images to the computer on her side of the window. An MRI enclosure had to be constructed so that not only was there no magnetic material inside the room, but also so that no outside radio signals could get in to interfere with the signal from the unit. Fallon knew it usually involved copper and plastic and concrete, though she didn’t see how they could have used concrete this time around, since it wouldn’t have had enough time to cure.
But whatever they’d used, she had to assume it was up to specs. All she really knew was that she had a state-of-the-art fMRI machine at her disposal, and she sure as hell wasn’t complaining.
Well, not about that, anyway.
The door opened, and Light entered, followed by another armed soldier, who nudged the former EMT along with the barrel of his M4, and not gently.
Fallon spun her chair all the way around so she was facing them.
“Good morning, Mr. Light, and congratulations.”
His eyes narrowed suspiciously.
“For what?”
Fallon smiled.
“You get to be my first guinea pig.”
Light scoffed, and Fallon raised her eyebrows, then shrugged.
“Or lab rat, if you prefer. Either way, you’re about to get strapped down and shoved into a metal tube, so I can take pictures of your brain. I hope you’re not claustrophobic.” Her smile widened a bit at the thought. She knew she should be playing the dispassionate scientist, but she didn’t like Light, and she felt no particular urge to hide the fact. Every time she looked at him, she saw the woman and child he’d run down with that ambulance, and her own face, and Jason’s, superimposed over theirs.
“I suppose I don’t have any say in the matter,” he said dryly, clearly amused.
No more than your victims had, Fallon thought, but didn’t say. Light was a psychopath and a master manipulator. She’d already given him too much ammunition by letting him see her distaste; that had been a mistake. She didn’t intend to compound it.
“Not really, no,” she said, and the guard behind him jabbed him in the back with his rifle for emphasis, eliciting a pained oof.
“Look at it this way, Light,” she added. “It’ll be good practice for the next time you’re strapped down.”
“What are you talking about?” he asked, suddenly wary.
Fallon smiled again, and despite her best intentions, she couldn’t keep just a trace of smugness out of it.
“Well, isn’t it obvious? When they give you the needle.”
The hard part was that Light had to keep his head still for the scan. Most psychopaths she had worked with were volunteers, willing to cooperate because they had been promised privileges of some kind at whatever maximum-security prison they’d been sentenced to. Light was no volunteer, and he let Fallon know it by pretending to comply, then jerking his head around at key moments, spoiling the scans. She was eating up data storage space on nothing.
After his third such stunt, Fallon brought him out and spoke to Romero, where Light could hear them. “I was told that the prisoner could be more . . . comprehensively restrained, if need be. Can you handle that?”
“I can truss him up like a Thanksgiving turkey, Doctor. That what you want?”
“That would probably do. As long as you can get his head into some kind of nonmetallic brace that’ll hold it absolutely motionless.”
Unfortunately, his hands had to remain free. Because this was a functional MRI, he would have a series of tasks to perform, which would require use of a device he could hold but not lift to where he could see it or do anything else with it.
“It wouldn’t hurt,” she added, “if you left him that way for several hours after I’m finished, too. Just in case.”
“In case of what?” Light wanted to know.
“Just . . . in case.”
His voice took on a menacing tone. Psychopaths could be charmers, but they could also be bluntly threatening. Sometimes in the same sentence. “You really don’t want to do that. You already told me I have something you—or they—want. You tie me up, you’re not going to get it.”
Fallon decided that honesty was the way to approach him—as long as that honesty met threat with threat. “Well, here’s the thing, Light. I won’t actually know if you do have it until I run these scans. Maybe then you’ll be in a position to bargain. Right now, you’re not. I don’t necessarily want to strap you down like a mummy, but I will. In fact, I’ll leave you wrapped up for forty-eight hours straight and not lose a minute’s sleep over it. Is that what you want? To be lashed to a cot for two days and nights, lying in your own waste, without food or water?”
“You can’t—”
“The hell I can’t,” she interrupted. “You haven’t forgotten the most basic fact of your life already, have you? You have no rights. None. I can do whatever I want with you. If I want to put a bullet in your skull and leave you in the desert for carrion eaters, I can.”
The start of a smile snaked across his lips. “You couldn’t kill anyone.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” she said. “Whether I’d pull the trigger is irrelevant. There are plenty of soldiers here with plenty of experience killing people. And nobody here would shed a tear for you.”
“Just say the word, Doctor,” Romero said. “I’d be happy to do the deed.”
Light’s smile faded. His eyes were wide, fixed. No doubt thinking, trying to find some other angle to play. But he was strapped prone on a high platform, and two armed soldiers were standing just far enough away to shoot him before he could reach them.
She could see the moment resignation set in. His eyelids closed the slightest bit, his jaw relaxed. “Okay, I’ll play your game. This time. What do you need me to do, again?”
She repeated the instructions she had given him the first time . . . and the second. First he would see a high-resolution video of a peaceful scene—prairie grasses undulating in a gentle breeze. That would not only help with any sense of claustrophobia but would focus his eyes on the screen, where she needed them. After a couple of minutes, the testing would start. First he’d view a variety of images and catalogue them according to how immoral the scenes they showed were, then he’d try to memorize a long list of words—the ones he could remember would tell Fallon a lot about him. But the cameras recording eye movement and the fMRI scanners measuring blood flow to the different parts of his brain would tell her so much more.
When he indicated that he understood, Fallon and the soldiers left the MRI room for the fourth time, moving into the control room so they could see and hear everything Light did. The door to the MRI room locked with a loud thunk that reminded most psychopaths she’d scanned of prison doors. So far, Light had never spent time in prison.
That, she was sure, would soon change.
The guards left with Light, and Fallon made some observations while the scan was in progress, but comprehensive analysis would have to wait until high-powered computers had crunched the data from the thousands of images the machine had amassed. While she perused what she could, her mind raced down different avenues, working toward a destination of its own design.
Finally, she left the computers to do their thing. She wanted to check in on Randy Wayne Warga. By now, if he was going to show signs of infection, they should have manifested. Davidson escorted her to the building where the murderer was held—not the garage where she’d first observed Light, but yet another of the new buildings popping up in the infield like weeds after a monsoon. He had a bunk and combination sink and toilet, and that was all. There were other cells, too, on either side of him. They were empty, but there were others farther down she couldn’t see into; she imagined that Light was now residing in one of those, but didn’t care enough to ask.
Warga was dressed in prison orange, but in spite of that sartorial disadvantage, he was a good-looking man. His blue eyes were clear and bright, his jaw was square, his brown hair cut short and as neatly finger-combed as he could manage in here, with no mirror. He had a muscular build, broad-shouldered and deep-chested. His prison tats had been kept to a minimum—a snake coiled out from under his collar and wrapped partway around his neck, and he had a series of eleven black dots on his right temple that Fallon didn’t want to speculate about. Those looks, she knew, were part of how he earned the trust of his victims . . . right before he brutalized them, raped them, and strangled the life from them with his powerful hands. She took a good look, focusing particularly on his cheeks and eyes, but saw no signs of illness. His hand was still bandaged, but the scratches and bruises he’d received fighting the Infected seemed to be healing quickly.
“Didn’t get enough yesterday, Doc? I can take my shirt off, you want to see more? Hell, why stop there?”
“I’m not here to admire you, Randy.”
“You always say that. But you always come back for more.”
“Scientific curiosity,” Fallon said. “About your twisted brain, not your physique or any imagined sexual prowess.”
“You’d have to have a pretty wild imagination,” he said. “Or you’d sell me short.”
“I doubt that.”
“Live and learn.”
“I intend to. But not about that.”
“What, then? I can tell by lookin’ at you, you ain’t getting enough at home.”
That stung, but she kept her expression flat. Having plenty of experience with psychopaths, she ignored most of what they said—in her line of work, it was crucial. Sure, maybe he could tell, but more likely he was just fishing.
She wasn’t biting.
“I’m doing just fine. Thanks for your concern.”
“You know I’ve always thought you were a looker, Doc. I’d give you a good pounding.”
“Pass,” Fallon said. “I just wanted to see if you’re infected yet.”
“With what?”
“You don’t remember being attacked by three people who wanted to eat your brain yesterday?”
Warga chuckled. “I just figured that was another of your crazy tests. You’re always showin’ up, wantin’ to probe something or other. About the only thing you ain’t done is hook electrodes up to my junk.”
“Anyway, you appear to be fine.”
“Damn straight. Better than fine.”
Fallon turned her back on him and headed for the door. He wouldn’t quit—never had, in her experience. She had learned that a summary dismissal was the best way to deal with him.
Halfway back to her lab, she could still hear him shouting after her, rattling off a series of suggestions so lewd she would have blushed if she hadn’t spent time with him before.
“That one’s got quite a mouth on him,” Davidson said.
“He lives for sex. His idea of it, anyway, which is different from most people’s.”
“Different how?”
“Ever heard about the mating habits of praying mantises?”
“The bugs? Can’t say I have.”
“During copulation, or right after, the female typically bites the head off the male. Warga’s a little like that, only he can’t finish unless he’s got his hands around the woman’s throat. If he climaxes while she’s dying, that’s fine with him, but he likes it better if she’s already dead.”
Davidson stopped in his tracks and stared at her. “Really? That guy you just talked to does that?”
“Whenever he can.”
“Doctor, you sure know some strange characters.”
“That I do, Davidson. That I do.”