Lucy, who looked like she'd never had to count a calorie or gram of fat in her life, laughed. Then she said, "I heard they caught him. The officer guarding my house told me. But he didn't have any details."
The agent explained about Gerald Duncan, how he was innocent all along, and about the corruption scandal at an NYPD precinct.
Lucy shook her head at the news. Then she was looking around the small room. She made some pointless comments about framed prints and the view out the window. Soot, snow and an air shaft were the essential elements of the landscape. "I just came by to say thanks."
No, you didn't, thought Dance. But she said, "You don't need to thank me. It's our job."
She observed that Lucy's arms were uncrossed and the woman was sitting comfortably now, slightly back, shoulders relaxed, but not slumped. A confession, of some sort, was coming.
Dance let the silence unravel. Lucy said, "Are you a counselor?"
"No. Just a cop."
During her interviews, though, it wasn't unusual for suspects to keep right on going after the confession, sharing stories of other moral lapses, hated parents, jealousy of siblings, cheating wives and husbands, anger, joy, hopes. Confiding, seeking advice. No, she wasn't a counselor. But she was a cop and a mother and a kinesics expert, and all three of those roles required her to be an expert at the largely forgotten art of listening.
"Well, you're real easy to talk to. I thought maybe I could ask your opinion about something."
"Go on," Dance encouraged.
The soldier said, "I don't know what to do. I'm getting this commendation today, the one I was telling you about. But there's a problem." She explained more about her job overseas, running fuel and supply trucks.
Dance opened the minibar, extracted two $6 bottles of Perrier. Lifted an eyebrow.
The soldier hesitated. "Oh, sure."
She opened them and handed one to Lucy. Keeping hands busy frees up the mind to think and the voice to speak.
"Okay, this corporal was on my team, Pete. A reservist from South Dakota. Funny guy. Very funny. Coached soccer back home, worked in construction. He was a big help when I first got there. One day, about a month ago, he and I had to do an inventory of damaged vehicles. Some of them get shipped back to Fort Hood for repairs, some we can fix ourselves, some just are scrapped.
"I was in the office and he'd gone to the mess hall. I was going to pick him up at thirteen hundred hours and we were going to drive to the bone lot. I went to get him in a Humvee. I saw Petey there, waiting for me. Just then an IED went off. That's a bomb."
Dance knew this, of course.
"I was about thirty, forty feet away when it blew. Petey was waving and then there was this flash and the whole scene changed. It was like you blinked and the square became a different place." She looked out the window. "The front of the mess hall was gone, palm trees--they just vanished. Some soldiers and a couple of civilians who'd been standing there . . . One instant there, then they were gone."
Her voice was eerily calm. Dance recognized the tone; she heard it often in witnesses who'd lost loved ones in crimes. (The hardest interviews to do, worse than sitting across from the most amoral killer.)
"Petey's body was shattered. That's the only way to describe it." Her voice caught. "He was all red and black, broken. . . . I've seen a lot over there. But this was so terrible." She sipped the water and then clutched the bottle like a child with a doll.
Dance offered no words of sympathy--they'd be useless. She nodded for the woman to continue. A deep breath. Lucy's fingers intertwined tightly. In her work, Dance characterized this gesture--a common one--of trying to strangle the unbearable tension arising from guilt or pain or shame.
"The thing is . . . I was late. I was in the office. I looked up at the clock. It was about twelve fifty-five but I had a half cup of soda left. I thought about throwing it out and leaving--it'd take five minutes to get to the mess hall--but I wanted to finish the soda. I just wanted to sit and finish it. I was late getting to the mess hall. If I'd been on time he wouldn't've died. I would've picked him up and we'd have been a half mile away when the IED blew."
"Were you injured?"
"A little." She pulled up her sleeve and displayed a large leathery scar on her forearm. "Nothing serious." She stared at the scar and then drank more water. Her eyes were hollow. "Even if I'd been just one minute late at least he'd've been in the vehicle. He probably would have survived. Sixty seconds . . . That would've made the difference between him living and dying. And all because of a soda. All I wanted was to finish my goddamn soda." A sad laugh escaped her dry lips. "And then who shows up and tries to kill me? Somebody calling himself the Watchmaker, leaving a big-ass clock in my bathroom. For weeks all I can think about is how a single minute, one way or the other, makes the difference between life and death. And here's this freak throwing it in my face."
Dance asked, "What else? There's something more, isn't there?"
A faint laugh. "Yep, here's the problem. See, my tour was scheduled to be up next month. But I felt so guilty about Pete that I told my CO I'd reenlist."
Dance was nodding.
"That's what this ceremony's about. It's not about getting wounded. We're wounded every day. It's about reenlisting. The army's having a tough time getting new recruits. They're going to use the reenlisters as poster children for the new army. We like it so much we want to go back. That sort of thing."
"And you're having second thoughts?"
She nodded. "It's driving me crazy. I can't sleep. I can't make love to my husband. I can't do anything. . . . I'm lonely, I'm afraid. I miss my family. But I also know we're doing something important over there, something good for a lot of people. I can't decide. I simply can't decide."