Some of my confidence began to slip as we went through three separate bar enclosures to get to the interview room. Double guards were stationed at each level. We had to surrender all of our belongings, even the pen and pad I’d brought for taking notes. I’d never been this deep before, but this seemed extreme. Like beyond high security, designed to keep people out as much as in. After all, Laguardia would want to get inside if he could. To kill this guy before he could tell us what he knew. The bars and protocols protected the people inside as much as the ones out.
The final door was an extra-wide metal door with a small square window too high for me to see through in my low heels. The guard stationed beside it moved to open the handle, but Hennessey held up his hand.
He spoke low, for my ears only. “When we’re in there, no talking. No smiling. Don’t react to what he says in any way.”
“Ah,” I said with exaggerated understanding. “You want to play good cop/bad cop.”
He frowned. “No, absolutely not. I said—”
“Kidding, Hennessey. Still and silent, got it.”
One eyebrow rose. “This isn’t a game.”
“Then stop treating me like I’m on my first police ride along. I was top of my class at Quantico. I may not be The Great Ian Hennessey, but I’m not going to fuck this up.”
He stared at me, his expression inscrutable. Then his face eased just a fraction. Something shifted in the air between us, trust falling into its groove the way it should between partners. Real partners.
“It was funny, the good cop/bad cop thing,” he conceded. Then he nodded to the guard and stepped into the room.
I snorted to myself. It was funny, he’d said with a totally straight face. What would it take to make him crack a smile? Or make him laugh? It shouldn’t have mattered, but I resolved to find out. Like picking up clues and uncovering a person’s secrets, I would solve the puzzle of Ian Hennessy.
The door closed behind me with an ominous clang. Locked in. We didn’t just visit the prisoners; we became them for these few minutes, closed in, guarded against escape. It was a mindset encouraged by the bare walls and metal table. By the temperature dropping ten degrees, passing comfortably cool and going straight to chilled. The fluorescent lights flickered almost imperceptibly, making it seem as if we were underwater, a cave with strangely-shaped fish that carried little lanterns in front of their faces, the better to eat you with.
A windblown Santa Claus sat on a metal chair, his snow-colored beard long and crinkly. That was my first impression, and the orange jumpsuit did little to dispel his genial appearance. It was only when he turned to me that I saw his face, the way the scar tissue furled in on his eyes, threatening to close them. It wouldn’t have made any difference if it had; his eyes were a glassy blue, unseeing.
Daniel Fuentes was blind.
One of the only men in custody who’d ever seen Laguardia, and he wouldn’t be able to describe him. A coincidence? I couldn’t believe that. I suspected he was still alive, not because of the twenty guards we’d passed between the entrance and here, but because he couldn’t identify Laguardia.
Fuck.
Hennessey didn’t seem fazed by this new development. He’d probably already known about the man’s blindness when he set up the interview.
“Who’s the bitch?” Fuentes grunted.
Charming. And creepy, considering he couldn’t see me. Sharpened sense of hearing, I guessed. Hennessy smoothly pulled out a chair and nodded, directing me to sit. I sat.
“Agent Holmes will be attending this interview. I’m Agent Ian Hennessey.”
“And I’m Mother Fucking Theresa. What do you want from me?”
Hennessy didn’t even blink. The other man couldn’t see him, but his expression was smooth as silk, as if he sat in front of a busy courtroom, a poker face. Now I understood why he’d told me not to smile. The urge to laugh bubbled up in me from some previously untapped spring, a combination of nerves and latent appreciation of the absurdity of the situation.
A blind coke-head Santa Clause in an orange suit sitting across from the crisply-starched renowned Ian Hennessey. My life was surreal, but then what else was new? When I was seven years old, I’d woken up from a bad dream and gone looking for my father. He’d been washing blood off his hands in the sink, and he’d steered me back to bed.
He’d touched my shoulder with the blood of another child, and I’d fallen into a kind of terrified trance. I’d never woken up, not even when he’d been put in jail, not even when he attacked me there. Everything had always felt wavering and unreal, and the shuddering lights in this room only emphasized it. This is my life. I’ll never wake up.
Hennessey asked him the standard questions. Where were you on this date or that? Do you have any knowledge of drug activity, of shipments? Bullshit answers. Curse words. Fuentes called Hennessey’s mom a fat slut pig who he fucked in the skull, and Hennessey asked, in a voice so casual and smooth, if he’d ever met a man known as Carlos Laguardia.
Fuentes stiffened. He tried to hide his reaction, but I saw it.
Hennessey did too. He leaned forward. “When?”