CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It wasn’t her first time inside a police station interrogation room. In high school, she’d been picked up for trespassing after dark at a swimming pool. The other kids had been let go with a warning, but she and a Latina girl were taken to the station. The police had called her mother, who’d chosen to leave her there all weekend to help cure her daughter of her wild ways. This room wasn’t much different from that one. There was no clock and no windows, so Con had no way to gauge how long she’d been here. Part of her wanted to hammer on the door and demand they return her LFD, but she didn’t want to give them the satisfaction. And what if they wouldn’t? Then all she’d accomplished in calling the police was to trade one potential captor for another.
Up above, an archaic surveillance camera watched silently from the corner of the room.
The cops had descended on the farm like an army. Once Clarke had seen the body inside the farmhouse, he’d escorted Con to a squad car that had transported her to this station, where she’d been locked inside this airless interrogation room. Someone had taken pity on her and brought her a stale Danish and a bottle of water. She’d drunk the water gratefully but only picked at the pastry before pushing it away. Each time she took a bite, her memory offered reminders of what she’d seen inside the farmhouse. A jumble of lurid, flickering images that she couldn’t shut out. Opening and reopening the bedroom door at the end of the hall. Her nose and mouth flooding with rot.
But she wasn’t in mourning, she was angry. All those images gave her plenty to think through. Like how the body might have been lying peacefully in that bed, but there’d been nothing peaceful about how she’d died. Con hadn’t thought about it at the time, but now she realized how undisturbed the room had been. The careful footprints in the dust. No blood anywhere. Whatever had happened, it hadn’t happened there. The farmhouse was only the stage. That meant her original had been moved after she’d been murdered. But the last thirty-six hours that the GPS had stored didn’t show that. It said she’d been there the whole time. So what did that tell her? How many people would know how to fool Palingenesis’s chip? Two names sprang immediately to mind.
She felt so na?ve for clinging to the hope that what happened to her original had been an accident. She didn’t know whether it was Vernon Gaddis or Brooke Fenton, but one of them had taken an enormous risk sneaking her out of Palingenesis. Why stop there? They wouldn’t then wait around for a healthy twenty-four-year-old to die of natural causes. They would’ve snatched up her original and murdered her, knowing it would trigger her clone’s revival. She meant to find out which and make them pay for it. But first, she needed to get out of this room.
The electronic lock deactivated with a mechanical thwonk. Detective Darius Clarke let himself in and took a seat across the table. Her savior. Without acknowledging her, he set to arranging his notebooks and recorder on the table, along with a single cup of coffee that reminded her exactly why she disliked him so much. He looked beat although even that didn’t begin to cover it. What he looked like was a man who’d been up too long and seen too much—face unshaved, eyes hooded. He moved in the slow, deliberate way that true exhaustion required. Despite all that, he still seemed strangely alert and focused. She couldn’t tell if he was on something or not. No, she decided, he just loved his job. That was his high.
“You going to eat that?” he asked, meaning the Danish.
She pushed it across the table to him. “Sure, help yourself.”
He finished it in three lupine bites. “Haven’t eaten since breakfast yesterday.”
Neither had she, but she wasn’t sure she’d ever eat again. Clarke wiped his fingers on his sleeve and cued his recorder. He recited both their names along with his badge number, the date, and the time.
“Is it really four in the morning?” she asked. She’d arrived at the farm before noon. That left a lot of time unaccounted for. How long had she slept?
“It’s been a day,” he said.
“Where am I?”
“We’re at the station in Glen Allen. Virginia State Police, area eight.”
She didn’t know Virginia well enough for that to narrow it down any. “Can I get my LFD back?”
“Let’s get through this first,” he said, lifting the lid of his coffee to blow on it. “Then we’ll see.”
“Get through what? I gave you what you asked for. What else is there?”