Part 60 (2/2)

She didn't acknowledge him overtly, but Todd saw the dip of her eyelashes as her gaze slipped sideways. The antipsychotics were having some effect, and so was the Reyes charisma.

Her right hand jittered faster.

”Melanie,” Reyes said, ”do you understand me?”

Her mouth opened, and she made a sound that wasn't quite a wordless complaint, and also wasn't quite glossolalia. And then she said, with soft absolute clarity, ”It's the rats.”

”Melanie?”

”I can hear the rats underground. It smells like a ghost train. Can you smell it? And then there were cigarettes.”

Not exactly word salad, either. But when Reyes gave Todd a tight sharp glance over his shoulder, Todd nodded. Disorganized thinking, loose or disa.s.sociated chains of speech. As if the subject were having difficulty stringing together coherent logic.

A check mark in the box.

In the meantime, Melanie was staring at Reyes as if she were absolutely captivated by whatever he might choose to impart.

Reyes looked her calmly in the eye and asked, ”What are the rats saying?”

Melanie shook her head, jerky as a broken toy. ”Baker, baker,” she said, voice unresonant. A crushed guitar. ”Is that your girl? Think she'll wait? We'll get you home. Hang on. Hang on.”

Todd put his fingers to his mouth. Again-or still-with her hand. The motion, distressingly familiar.

”The rats are saying, 'baker?'” Reyes reached out and lifted her left hand, which was not moving in sympathy with the right. She looked at where he touched her-stared at it -but did not draw her hand away.

Todd was reminded of a seductive cult leader he'd known once, among whose disciples he'd lived, briefly and under cover. Reyes had that same charisma when he wanted it, that way of looking at you like you were the only important person on earth and the center of his world.

”I don't understand rat,” she said. ”It's a language I don't know. But they're talking about me down there. They got baker. They got clement. The ghosts need me. To tell their stories. n.o.body cares about the ghosts. n.o.body wants to tell their stories. They have to hear. It's for their own good.”

Reyes rocked back, allowing her hand to drop back to her knee. Hallucinating schizophrenics not infrequently heard voices, or received strange instructions in code.

Todd hadn't heard of one hallucinating languages she didn't understand. Usually, under schizophrenic patterning, everything made sense. Too much sense, terrible towering inescapable inexorable sense.

”There's more death than on the wall,” she said. ”Plenty came home dead, just walking. The kids ran through fire. Right through it. And kept running. Burning. Baker, clement, mack. I fell off the wall. And all the King's horses.”

Speaking of sense. She made sense, after a fas.h.i.+on. That was a terribly consistent stream of consciousness, when you got right down to it. And okay, she was medicated; she should be able to pull it together. But there was something about the pattern of what she was saying.

”If you crawl in a grave,” Melanie said, ”you come out dead the other side.”

Todd concentrated on the motions of her hand, trying to isolate. No. It wasn't the motion of the hand. It was the motion of the fingers.

”Reyes,” he said. ”Look at her hand.”

Reyes looked. ”Give her your pen.”

”Great,” Todd said. ”Let's provide the psychotic with a weapon.” He pulled the green disposable roller ball from his jacket pocket and added his reporter's notebook, from the same supply that Brady had recently started filching from. In a moment, they had set up Melanie with both the writing implement and the writing surface, and she was staring at the page as if she meant to eat it. Then she looked away, eyes snapped up as if sighting on the horizon. And her hand began to move as if she had no idea it was tracing letters. Baker, she wrote painstakingly. Clemente. Mac.

”Automatic writing,” Todd said.

”Names,” Reyes said, looking at him. ”Names.”

When it struck Todd, it hit like a lightning bolt, so hot and shocking he could not believe it had taken him that long. His hands went cold; the four walls of the room wobbled woozily as he pushed himself to his feet.

”Names on a wall,” he said, and shook his head. ”Names on the Wall.”

”The Vietnam Memorial.” Reyes scrubbed a hand across the tight curls of his receding hair. ”And one that fell off it.”

”Rats in tunnels.” Todd bit off the words. ”Speaking a language you don't know.”

”Jesus.” Reyes rubbed his mouth. ”So why is a teenaged girl having post-traumatic flashbacks to Vietnam?”

”I don't know.”

She looked up at Todd and blinked, clear hazel eyes, affectless expression. ”Don't you remember?” she said. ”You were there.”

Todd could still taste that bile in the hall, ten minutes later. ”Do we check the rest?” Reyes nodded. ”Make sure of the pattern. Oh, and get on the horn to Hafidha-”

”Baker, Clemente, Mac.” Todd couldn't help but contrast the tenderness Reyes showed the victim with his current brusqueness, and wonder which was the lie. ”MacDonald? MacAllister? MacLeod? Four Marines on a fireteam.”

”Who's the fourth one?”

”Yeah,” Todd answered. ”I was wondering that myself.”

”Right,” Hafidha said into the phone, grateful that Reyes could not see her roll her eyes. ”Yeah, two and a half names, all maybe in the same squad in the 'Nam. All maybe KIA. You need the other name and a half? Well, Kemo Sabe, I'm afraid we have a little problem here. No, the campus network is down. Yes, even a miracle worker needs a network. I'll call Worth and get Quantico on it, though. It's Friday night, Il Professore, how long do you think it's going to take?”

Nikki Lau was really good at the part with the grieving friends and families. She had a knack for it, a gift as absolute as Falkner's perfect pitch or Madeline Frost's time sense accurate to the second.

Being good at it, doing it all the time, didn't make it any less awful.

When she walked back into Hafidha's appropriated office, toting a short ton of Chinese takeout, she must have been showing it, because Reyes, of all people, grunted a greeting and pulled the box out of her arms. Lau stood inside the doorway, chafing her arms, trying to shake off an unseasonable chill. ”I hope I didn't get too much,” she said. ”No Chaz.”

”You have me,” Hafidha answered brightly, snagging a tray of General Tso's chicken and a carton of rice right-handed while she grabbed up chopsticks with the left. ”Paper plate?”

Reyes ducked out into the lounge and came back with Todd while Lau pulled plates from under the pile. She watched Hafidha and the other two sc.r.a.ping food out of containers and folded her arms across her chest. She didn't have any appet.i.te of her own, though Hafidha was already on her second helping.

Lau startled when Todd put a plate of rice and Buddha's Delight in her hands, the partially-missing fingers folded under automatically. He hid it better than James Doohan: she'd known him six months before she'd realized he was maimed, and when she asked about it he'd told some improbable Vonnegutesque story about following a girl who didn't love him to a communal farm in New Hamps.h.i.+re, and nearly freezing and/or starving to death the first and only winter. ”Mangia,” he said. ”Tea?”

”Yikes, yes,” she said. He spun a chair for her; she sank into it, and balanced the plate on her knees. Once she started shoveling rice and bean sprouts and bamboo shoots and bell pepper and tofu and cornstarch sauce into her mouth, she almost couldn't stop to accept the tea cup. She realized she was s.h.i.+vering, cold as if she'd managed to get sunburned, but the tea helped.

”You know,” Hafidha said, around a mouthful of fried animal protein, ”we have an excuse for the blood sugar cras.h.i.+es. What happened to you?”

”Three victim family interviews and four friends in six hours,” Lau answered. She realized she was talking with her mouth full, chewed, and swallowed. ”I couldn't eat.”

”It's easier when they're dead,” Reyes said, between bites of spring roll. ”What did you learn?”

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