chapter thirty-five

When I first saw Michaela, it was through prison bars.

“Ah,” she said, spotting me. “Right on time, too. Excellent.”

I waited while the guards took the chains off her but left the handcuffs on. They were both men in their late twenties, strong, fit, and in their prime, but they were very, very careful with the woman almost old enough to be their mother. She looked surprisingly good in (1) orange and (2) a jumpsuit. She took a seat across from me and they left us in the interview room, though I could see at least one guard standing just outside the door.

“We could have rescheduled,” I told this older woman in her early forties, who looked like a socialite and was under arrest for a brutal homicide. (Yes, I know, all homicides by definition are brutal. This one particularly so.) “The Minneapolis Star isn’t going anywhere.” (I had no way of knowing that the newspaper was in fact about to be swallowed by a merger, and was indeed going somewhere.)

“I loathe postponements.”

“That would explain why you waived your—”

“We aren’t here to talk about me, young lady.”

“We aren’t?” Since I was the journalist, and she was the subject, that came as a surprise.

“After you graduate, what are your plans?”

“Ah…” This was a complicated question for anyone, never mind my sisters and me. Of course we wanted to work. We wanted to get a home of our own, something not affiliated with the hospital where we’d lived most of our lives. That was not easily done when a third of us was psychotic and a third of us was a coward. That left the bulk of responsibility on me, and frankly I resented it. Wouldn’t anyone? “I hope to—”

“Freelance for a variety of papers? Work as an independent contractor for various companies in the hopes none of them tumbles to the fact that you’re a multiple?”

It was said with such matter-of-fact dryness that I did not bother to muster a protest. It was unlikely to be a random guess; there were only some forty thousand diagnosed multiples on the planet. “How do you know that?”

“The study you and your ‘sisters’ participated in last year, the one testing the new drug for multiples.”

“Hailmaridol,” I remembered. “Like the Hail Mary pass. The doctors described it as the long bomb made in desperation.” I managed a thin smile. “That amused us enough to sign up. But we ended up with the placebos.”

“Yes. My husband and I funded the study. He was … a complicated man.”

“Was?” Complicated? Is that code for multiple? That would be interesting.

“I’m a widow now.” She made a gesture with her cuffed hands as if sweeping her dead spouse off the table. “And onto a new project. Have you ever heard of BOFFO?”

“No.”

“Good. We’re supposed to be a secret.” She smiled at me. “You’re a black belt, yes? And a certified sniper, and a designated markswoman? You’re fluent in Mandarin as well as—”

“If you’ve seen all our paperwork from the study, you know I am.”

“Meaning Cadence is the one with the near-perfect test scores—”

“She reads a lot,” I conceded.

“—and high empathy quotient, and Adrienne is the one with the genius for getting you two out of trouble.”

“Almost as often as she gets us into trouble.” Was I really discussing my other selves with a stranger? I was!

“We could use you. In fact, we need you. Do you know how many FBI agents there are in the country?”

“If I did, I have forgotten.” This was the oddest interview I’d ever conducted.

“About thirty-five thousand. Do you know how many of those are special agents? About fourteen thousand. Do you know how many violent crimes are committed each year?”

That I did know, thanks to some journalism classes and my part-time job. “It averages to one and a half million. But the FBI isn’t a national police force. It’s more of a national security org.”

“Yes. And they’re still wildly outnumbered. My late husband and I had an idea about that. You joined our research study, so you’ve got a taste for adventure. I think we can help each other.”

“You’re saying that as if you will have your freedom sooner rather than later.”

She just smiled.

“Why did you kill him?”

“Whom? Oh.” She raised her hands again, displaying the cuffs. “Mr. Lavik.”

“Yes. You do not deny the killing. Why did you become a vigilante?”

She threw back her head and gurgled laughter. In all other respects she was a dignified, chilly, polished older woman, but she had the giggle of a toddler who has successfully swiped a cookie. “Don’t pretty it up, Ms. Jones! I shot him because he revolted me.”

“Surely you should have left it to law enforcement. You were alone in the house—your neighbor’s house, the paper said. You could have been hurt.”

“Yes. Well. That will teach me to knock on someone’s door for the clichéd cup of sugar.” She shrugged. “I was craving homemade fudge.”

It was almost a minute before I realized that was the last she would say about any possible danger to herself. Questions crowded my mind and I tried not to show my excitement. I had not met her before; I would have remembered. She had called me for an interview, ostensibly about her trust’s new shelter. Then she had been arrested. Then she had declined to reschedule. Was she using the failed research study as a way to find people with particular psychiatric “quirks”? To form some … some elite police force peopled by the clinically insane?

Is this really happening?

“Why didn’t you call the police? Before you killed him,” I corrected myself. Because she had called them, after. “So they could come s—” Save you, I had been about to blurt, then reconsidered. “Help you.”

“I didn’t trust them to get it done.” She made another shooing motion, as if there were a fly in the room. “You’re appalled, of course. I did a Bad Thing. Man’s inhumanity to man and all that. I wasn’t happy about having to do it, and in a perfect world he and I would never have met. But it’s not a perfect world, and we did meet. I recognized him, of course. Even if I hadn’t walked in on what he was doing to that poor child, may she rest in peace, I would have recognized him.

“I saw him, I knew him … and I recalled that the DA in Los Angeles had to suspend the grand jury because of contaminated evidence. I recalled the judge two years later in New York who threw the case out because of an illegal search, and then I stuck a screwdriver in Mr. Lavik’s ear.” She glanced at her watch and smiled at me. “But I was terribly conflicted the whole time. I could barely choke down that four-course meal later.”

This is really happening.

There was more, of course. Not just that day, not just that year. But that was the moment I decided to follow Michaela to BOFFO.