“What? For the rest of their lives?” I almost laughed. But Shumacher just looked at me, matter-of-factly, as though the suggestion wasn’t outlandish.
Then I realized that maybe she wanted to keep them locked up for the rest of their lives. Not for their own good, but for hers.
“Do you even see them as people? As patients? Or just as an experiment?” I said.
“That’s not fair—I’m trying to do good work here.”
“You can’t keep them locked up forever. They’re not guilty of murder.”
She spoke with passion—desperation, almost. “We’ve never had a chance to study the long-term effects of lycanthropy like this. I’ve never had subjects I could study this closely. It’s too good an opportunity—”
“At the cost of their sanity?” I said calmly. “They’re people, Doctor.”
She looked away.
She’d seemed so different than her predecessor at the NIH, but maybe there wasn’t any difference at all. The only results she wanted were raw data.
“Doctor, you have Vanderman. I’m not going to argue with you about letting him loose. But you have to let the others go. Please.”
She leaned forward, resting on her elbows. “I’ve been to see Vanderman. He hasn’t spoken in days. He paces, sleeps. If we try to confront him, he shape-shifts. He throws himself against the walls of his cell. I don’t know how to bring him back. My only option is to keep him sedated. That’s not a good baseline, even for a werewolf.”
Tyler and Walters I could help. Vanderman . . . I didn’t even want to see him. “I’ve heard stories of werewolves going so far that they don’t come back. I wondered s
ometimes if it was just stories. The way shifting feels, the way it gnaws at you—it’s easy to believe it could take over.”
“Nobody knows how to deal with him,” she said, shaking her head.
“This is where the bounty hunters usually come in,” I said.
“That’s terrible.”
“Yes.”
She sighed, seeming resigned. “I don’t suppose it’s that much worse than any other violent, mentally ill patient who has to remain confined.”
I said, “Most violent mental illnesses aren’t contagious.” By her frown I could tell that I wasn’t helping. “Can I go ahead and talk to Tyler and Walters? We can help them, I’m sure of it.”
She took me down the corridor to their room, opening doors with her pass key. I straightened, readjusting my mood to leave the grimness of the conversation outside. I didn’t want them to see me frustrated or upset.
The men actually seemed to perk up when they saw me. Walters was sitting on his bed and looked up, interested. Tyler had been at the table, reading a dogeared paperback. He set the book aside and stood, almost at attention, when I came through the door.
“Kitty. How are you?”
“I’m fine,” I said, smiling. “And you?”
He shrugged, Walters glowered, and I had to smile. Those were perfectly reasonable, human reactions to being locked up in a cell. Another step toward normality achieved. Shumacher left us, but I knew she was watching on her closed-circuit camera. My skin prickled at the scrutiny.
The normal thing to do would have been to pull up a chair to talk. But I remained standing to keep myself taller. And I wanted to let these guys out on the full moon?
“So,” I said. “Did you guys get a chance to listen to the show Friday?”
Tyler donned a crooked grin. “Shumacher let us have a radio. You do that every week?”
“Yeah. It’s kind of fun.”
He shook his head and seemed amused. “It’s kind of crazy.”
“I didn’t know there were so many of us out there,” Walters said, from the bed. “So many people called in saying they’re werewolves. Are there really that many?”