Peter Levy eyed Amy from across the tiny conference-room table. Perspiration darkened the armpits of his brown-on-brown security uniform. His fingers tapped the cheap woodgrain.
“Should I, uh, call my union rep?” Levy swallowed hard and looked from Amy to Jake, who stood leaning against the wall behind her. “Or a lawyer?”
“That’s up to you, Peter,” Amy said, her voice soft, her expression warm, “but understand that it’ll change the tenor of our conversation. Right now, we’re just talking—one law enforcement agent to another.”
“Pete,” Levy said, flashing a smile that came off pained. “My friends call me Pete.” He placed one hand atop the other and his tapping ceased. Beneath the table, his knee began to bounce.
Levy worked for Cerberus Correctional Services, the private security firm that managed the Park City encampment. As CCS’s name implied, prisons and juvenile detention centers comprised the bulk of its business.
According to his file, Levy had been with CCS for fourteen months. In that time, he’d proven himself to be an adequate, if undistinguished, employee. He’d been a C student in high school and had twice failed his NYPD entrance exam before going the rent-a-cop route. Amy had seen his type a thousand times—and been resented by at least half of them. The only remarkable thing about him was that he wasn’t dead, given that he was stationed at Park City’s southwest gate at the time of last night’s incursion.
Forty-five minutes ago, Levy was found wandering the camp in a daze, his face and clothes caked with ash. Once he’d been photographed, swabbed, and disinfected, a pair of unis escorted him back to the administrative building for questioning. For sanitary reasons, guards were forbidden from wearing their work clothes off premises, so the facility was well stocked with uniforms. Levy was given a clean one to change into.
His gun, however, was not returned.
Amy responded to Levy’s smile with one of her own. “Pete it is. Why don’t you walk us through what happened last night, Pete?”
“There’s not much to tell,” he said. “For the most part, my shift was pretty quiet.”
“If your shift was quiet, Pete, then why the hell did you abandon your post?” Jake used his name as if it were an epithet.
“I didn’t abandon anything! I was, uh, reconnoitering the perimeter.”
“Reconnoitering the perimeter?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?” Jake asked.
“I… thought I saw somebody slinking around inside the park.”
Amy struggled to maintain a benign expression. She was sorely tempted to roll her eyes. Levy was an artless liar. She could practically hear the gears turning in his head.
Jake, beside her, scoffed. “Didn’t you just say your shift was pretty quiet?”
“I did! I mean, it was.” Levy sighed, collected himself, and tried again. “Look, tenants aren’t supposed to be out after curfew, but the fact is, they sneak out all the time. Usually, we let it go, but last week, management sent out a memo saying they wanted to crack down on people smuggling contraband into the park.”
“What kind of contraband?”
“All kinds of stuff,” Levy replied. “Drugs. Twinkies. Handheld gaming systems. These people get bored, you know? So when I saw, or thought I saw, somebody walking around, I figured I’d better go check it out.”
“Protocol dictates you radio your superior before leaving the booth, right?”
“That’s right.”
“So, did you?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I dunno. I guess I didn’t want to look stupid if it turned out to be nothing.”
Jake frowned. “Tell me you remembered to lock the booth behind you, at least.”
Levy feigned indignance, poorly. “Of course!”
“Pete,” Amy said gently, “why don’t you tell us what happened after you left the guard booth?”
“I… I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember?”
“Believe me,” Levy said, “I wish I did. Best I can figure it, somebody must’ve jumped me from behind and choked me out.”
“Here’s the thing, Pete. I don’t believe you. See, we’ve got footage that proves you’re full of shit.”
For the briefest moment, Amy held her breath. This was the moment they’d been building toward. A bluff, of course, but Levy had no way of knowing that.
“What? How? I thought the cameras—”
“Went dark? Yeah, they did, although I’d be very interested to hear how you know that, since we sure as hell didn’t tell you. Thing is, while your friends managed to blank all the cameras in the park, they failed to account for the CCTV feeds of the buildings across the street.”
Levy’s face fell. “I… I didn’t—”
“Didn’t what? Didn’t know what you were signing on for when you agreed to let them in? Didn’t think that you’d get caught? At least a hundred people died horribly thanks to you. It turns my stomach that I still don’t know the exact number—it feels, I dunno, disrespectful—but they were so badly burned, we’ve been forced to count the skulls as we collect them. You wanna hear something funny? For a while, we thought we’d find you in the pile too. That you died trying to protect the people in your charge. But you’re no hero, are you, Pete? You’re just a venal little shit who looked the other way to line his pockets.”
“It wasn’t like that.” Levy’s voice was small and childlike. His gaze never left the surface of the table.
Amy placed her hand on his forearm reassuringly. “Then tell us, Pete. What was it like?”
“For starters, I had no idea… I mean, they never told me they were gonna…”
Tears spilled down Levy’s cheeks. His body was racked with sobs. Amy let the moment stretch and then uttered one careful, quiet syllable, as gentle as a lullaby: “Who?”
Levy’s eyes went wide, as if he hadn’t realized until just that moment what he’d let slip. “No one,” he said. “I mean, I don’t know.”
“It’s a little late to walk that back now, Pete.”
Amy flashed Jake a warning look. He eased off. Gave her space to do her thing.
“You know what I think?” This from Amy. “I think you do know, but you’re too frightened of what they’ll do to you if you tell us.”
“It’s not just me I’m worried about,” Levy said.
“What do you mean? Did they threaten someone close to you?”
Levy nodded. Teardrops smacked against the laminate table.
“My mother.”
“Imagine what it will do to her when she finds out her son is an accessory to mass murder.”
Amy hadn’t changed her tone, but her words detonated inside Levy’s head regardless.
“Mass murder? But all I did was leave a door open!”
“That’s more than enough for a jury to convict,” Amy said. “But it’s not too late for you to make this right.”
“How?”
“By telling us everything you know about the people who hired you.”
Levy licked his lips. Beads of sweat ran down his face and mingled with his tears. He nodded toward the conference room door, toward the uniformed officers standing just outside the double panes of crosshatched safety glass. “Could I, uh, get a glass of water first?”
“Of course,” Amy replied. She and Jake exchanged a glance, after which he opened the door a crack and relayed Levy’s request to the officers outside.
A few moments later, one of the officers entered the room with a paper cup of water in his hand. When he saw it, Levy—hoping, Amy later realized, for real glass—deflated. Then he tensed and lunged.
Amy had to give it to him: Levy might not be the brightest bulb, but he was fast. A human blur, he slid across the table, grabbed the officer by the throat with his right hand, and removed the young man’s sidearm from its holster with his left.
Amy kicked back her chair and drew her service weapon. Jake, beside her, drew his too. Both were Glock 17s, identical to the one the uni carried, the one in Levy’s hand.
They too were fast, but not quite fast enough; Levy ducked behind his hostage, robbing them of a clean shot.
“Tell my mother that I’m sorry,” he said.
Then—Jake and Amy screaming “NO!”—Levy put the gun to his own temple and pulled the trigger.