She walked through the lobby that looked impossibly luxurious to her eyes, took the elevator to ten, walked down the hall, and entered her apartment. She heaved a big sigh of relief as she snapped the last lock home—she was exhausted, and it was good to be home.
Strange noises were coming from the living room: feet thumping and sliding against the floor, and fast, rhythmic, deep breathing. Betsy sidled down the short hall toward the apartment’s one common room, which served as living, dining, and kitchen.
Her roommate of one week, Cassie, was dressed in tights and some kind of athlete’s brassiere. Her painstakingly cornrowed hair was pulled back into a tight bun, Walkman headphones clamped over the top, and she was sweating hard as she worked her way through an aerobics routine. Betsy had been taught not to stare, but she forgot herself for a few moments. She had heard of low-impact aerobics and high-impact aerobics, and she was pretty sure that she was watching the latter, and that Cassie wasn’t doing it for the first time. Her jog bra left her midriff bare, so if she had had an ounce of fat on her body, it would have shown.
Betsy was partly fascinated and partly intimidated to be sharing an apartment with this exotic person. Young, single government employees in Washington had to get used to playing the roommate game; this was Betsy’s third apartment, and Cassie was her seventh roommate, in five years. The previous one had been TDY’d to Munich on short notice, so Betsy had placed an ad on a computer bulletin board, and they had sent her Cassie. Betsy’s employer was picky about whom she lived with. It was best to live alone, and if that didn’t work, they didn’t want her trolling for roommates in public venues.
What it came down to was that Betsy had to live with people who, like her, had been pretty carefully checked out by Uncle Sam. The wallet sitting on Cassie’s bedside table, containing an FBI badge and ID card, proved she was clean enough to share an apartment with Betsy.
She backed stealthily out of the living room, as if she’d intruded on some private act, and retreated to th ebathroom. She took off her clothes, hanging them on the back of the door, and turned on the shower. Then she faced the mirror, raised her left elbow over her head, and gently hefted her left breast in her right hand. She leaned toward the mirror.
The door flew open; Betsy’s clothes fell off the hook into a heap on the floor. Cassie was a long stride into the room before she stopped herself. “Oh! Pardon me,” she said. She said it sincerely. But she wasn’t really embarrassed, which fascinated and somewhat irritated Betsy—who, if she had made the same mistake, would have spent the rest of the month apologizing for it.
Cassie had planted herself on the bathroom floor now and was staring fixedly at Betsy’s breast, her brow furrowed, her big brown eyes burning like coals. She reached up and stripped the headphones off, then took another step toward Betsy. “What the hell is that?” she said, as if she were busting some criminal who’d been caught flat-footed with a bale of sinsemilla in his arms.
Betsy was so stunned by this frank intrusion that she didn’t have a chance to get embarrassed. She stared at her breast in the mirror as if it were a piece of frozen evidence in a crime lab. She wasn’t sure how to answer Cassie’s question: she knew the answer perfectly well, but she was afraid that if she told the story, she might start blubbering. She pointed to a long, narrow bruise on the side of her breast. “Thumb,” she said. Then she pointed to another one, at an angle to the first. “Index finger.” A third, parallel to the second. “Third finger. Ring finger, just a shadow—no trace of the pinkie.”
“Well!” Cassie said. “I could run and get a fingerprint kit. But I suppose you already know who did it.”
Howard King. But Betsy didn’t say anything, just heaved a big sigh, trying to head off the crying urge.
“How about the one on your back? It’s straight and angular.”
“Filing cabinet,” Betsy said.
“Those bruises are a few hours old,” Cassie said with professional certainty, “so it happened at work, not on the way home. Musta been your su-per-vi-sor.” She was watching Betsy’s face in the mirror as she said this, and Betsy’s face answered the question for her.
“I bruise easy.” Betsy dropped her elbow to her side, the examination complete.
Suddenly Cassie was excited again. “And what the fuck is this? What are these people doing to you,anyway?”
Cassie was pointing to a wide bruise that encircled Betsy’s upper arm. Then she recognized it and calmed down. “Oh. Polygraph.” Unself-consciously, she pulled her tights down and sat on the toilet. Betsy marveled at this woman, who could do things like peeing in front of a near stranger while seeming as poised as if she were sitting at a sidewalk café sipping cappuccino.