A picture of the break room came into focus on the screen. Lovely. She’d have to remember to eat at her desk in the future.
She slid the DVD into the player. She’d been surprised the videos were on disc and not computer files; the Kincaid group was cutting edge in every other way. On screen, an image resolved of the same little boy whose picture had been clipped to her files. He sat at a huge table in what seemed to be a police interrogation room.
His skinny legs swung from the adult-sized chair, his sneakered feet dangling inches above the floor. He glanced up at the camera. Even in black and white, those eyes struck her. So feral, so angry, so—lost.
A twinge of compassion squeezed her heart. This video, no doubt taken from a tape, had probably been made when he’d been questioned about his foster father’s death.
He looked so young, so vulnerable.
She’d been sheltered at that age. The pampered only child, oldest of the cousins, catered to by her extensive family.
She swallowed. Maybe he’d been the lucky one. He’d had nothing to lose. She lifted her hand to her forehead as if she could rub away the mean-spirited thought. It’d been years. When would the grief no longer hover over her like a shadow, tainting every action, every thought?
On the screen, two policemen entered, along with a slender, suited, athletic woman Anjali assumed was a social worker.
“We want to hear your side, Jake,” one of the officers said. Stocky and graying, he put a heavy, paternal hand on Jake’s thin shoulder.
Jake shrugged it off. “He touched me. I didn’t like it, so I hit him.” He glanced back at the man, then down at the floor, as if something in the pattern of the tiles could rise up and rescue him.
“What’d you hit him with? It’s OK. You’re not in trouble.” The older man’s tone was soothing, but Anjali could hear the tension in it. Whatever Jake had done had been bad enough to shake a veteran officer.
Jake skewered the man with his gaze. “You’re lying.”
The officer started, bushy brows lifting. “Why do you say that?” He moved in closer.
Jake had turned his attention back to the floor. “You smell funny.”
What? Frowning, Anjali leaned forward, pointed the remote at the player and repeated that last section before pausing it.
Why had he made a connection between the man’s smell and, what—his words?
Anjali started the video again, leaning in to catch every nuance of body language, every micro-expression.
The police officer stared at Jake and backed away, body stiff, arms crossed over his broad chest, either unnerved or offended by what the boy said. “I’m telling you the truth, son. We just want to know exactly what happened.”
Jake examined his dangling feet.
Anjali ached for him. The social worker should have offered support, but even she sat as far from him as the table allowed, as if he might attack at any moment.
He swiped at his nose with his skinny wrist and the stupid woman flinched. “I hit him with my claws.”
The two officers exchanged a questioning glance before turning their gazes back to the boy.
“Your—claws?” the graying officer continued. His brows pulled down. “Is that something you made?”
Jake’s youthful mouth twisted. His gaze focused on something in the middle distance as if he knew he wasn’t going to be believed and he was just waiting for the outcry. “The claws on my hand.”
The man sighed, then slid his hands to his belt. “Ah, you mean your nails.”
“No.” Jake’s voice was low and hard. “I didn’t have fingernails when I hit him.” He set his small chin. “I had claws.”
The men exchanged a pointed glance, gestured to the woman, and they all headed toward the door, leaving Jake in his chair. The adults huddled together, their conversation muffled except for one word, schizophrenia.
Anjali froze the image. She’d had the same thought. Schizophrenia could certainly explain his delusion. He’d been very young for schizophrenia to manifest, but it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. Neither was a tumor. She made a note to check Jake’s brain scans more closely. It was highly unlikely his doctors could have missed a tumor, and it would have had to be extremely slow growing, but stranger things had happened.
She started the video again and watched the men leave. After the door closed, Jake jumped from his seat and went to the door. He twisted the knob, but it didn’t budge.
He yanked a little harder and to her surprise it opened with a sharp click. He peered around the doorjamb, then disappeared out the door.
Anjali realized her mouth was hanging open and closed it with a snap.
A musical note sounded from her pocket, and she grabbed her phone before it could finish the melody.
“Are you finding the recordings informative?”
“Uhh, very, Mr. Kincaid. Thank you.”
“Good, good. But my intention wasn’t for you to closet yourself away with them all day.”
Jolted by the undeserved reprimand, Anjali checked the time on the clock. No more than a half an hour had passed. She swallowed the urge to defend herself. “Of course. I’ll study the rest later.”
“Excellent.”
Anjali’s forehead creased as she hung up.
Why’d he made such a point of giving her the DVD this morning, if he didn’t want her to study it?
Anjali massaged the stiff muscles in the back of her neck and made her way down the row of massive cells. Breathe, she reminded herself.
Jake lay on the bed, reading again, dressed as he’d been yesterday. The green scrub bottoms exposing more beautiful man than any murderer had a right to be. Damn, so much for hoping he’d be less—well, less, on second sight.
“Dr. Mehta.” His deep voice rumbled up from his large chest and stroked over her like a caressing hand, raising the tiny hairs at her nape and her arms.
She peeled her tongue off the roof of her mouth, gripping her tablet like a vise. A subject. He’s just a subject.
All that man stood and moved to the wide bars. Shadows glided over his honeyed skin, dappling him like the sun through a forest canopy. She blinked at the poetic thought. Where had that come from?
“Mr. Finn,” she said in what she prayed was a normal voice, shaking her head inwardly. The odd thought had popped up because there was something, so wild, so animal, about him. That’s all.
“Call me Jake.” He smiled. The expression lit the eyes that almost, but not quite, met her gaze before sliding to the side, and down.
Was his refusal to look her in the eye an internal expression of shame? She made a quick note, then, skeptical of this sudden overture, tilted her head and viewed him from the corner of her eye. “That’s very . . . friendly of you.”
He shrugged, reminding her of the little boy shrugging off the heavy hand of the policeman. “You’re the only entertainment around.”
She snagged the chair from behind the desk against the wall and perched on the end. “I want to talk about your childhood.”
“So do I.”
She’d been readying her files. Her head flew up at that, and she checked to see if her mouth was hanging open again. It was.
Her teeth rattled as she snapped it shut. She raised her eyebrows. A tiny huff preceded her words. “You do?”
The cell next to his seemed to hold his attention. Only one high cheekbone and part of his lean jaw were available for inspection behind his veil of inky hair. “But I think it’s only fair that you go first.”
Flustered, Anjali shoved back in her seat and crossed her arms, considering. If it got him talking, what could it hurt? One of her old professors had been fond of the saying, ‘give a little, to get a little.’
She sucked her lower lip. “What do you want to know?”
He shrugged, leaning one shoulder against the bars, chin tucked into his chest, arms crossed, his face still mostly hidden. “Tell me about your family.”
OK. That could hurt. “There’s
nothing to tell.”
“You’re alone like—” he hesitated. “—me?”
She sighed. You can do this, Anjali. You can talk about them as if it doesn’t hurt anymore.
She moistened her lips and stared past him across his cell at the empty cement-block wall stretching from his sink and mirror to the utilitarian metal desk and folding chair in the right-hand corner. “I was born in Bombay. Mumbai,” she corrected. “I was an only child, but I had several cousin brothers and sisters, grandparents, uncles, aunts, great-grandparents . . .” She recited the list in a droning voice, hoping he’d get bored, hoping he couldn’t hear the tears that always threatened when she thought of her family. Damn. She blinked hard. She wouldn’t cry in front of a stranger, and certainly not one who was a subject.
“Cousin brothers?”
“Cousins are close in India.” Eyes almost dry, she lifted her chin and found his dark shape with her gaze. There you go, Anjali. Suck it up.
“Sounds pretty nice.” He turned his head and she could almost see his magnetic eyes.
“They died, all right?” Anjali stared down at her unpolished fingernails and bit the words out like if she said them fast enough they couldn’t linger long enough to hurt.
“What? All of them?” Those golden eyes were dead on her now, pinning her in place, refusing to let her stop, to retreat into her sorrow, forcing her to repeat words that she didn’t want to believe even now that so many years had passed.
“They were at a wedding in the city in Gujarat my grandparents come from. There was an earthquake.” She folded her hands in her lap, and her bangles jingled beneath her lab coat. She slipped a hand under her sleeve to finger the row of bracelets warmed by her body heat. “They were crushed.” Why had she said that? Wasn’t it enough to say there’d been an earthquake? After two years she supposed a stranger might find her grief surprising in its ferocity. But it was what it was. She couldn’t defend it to herself, let alone him.
She should have moved on. Her friends back home had, why hadn’t she? There’d been enough funerals, enough tributes, enough lawyers.
She inhaled, fighting for composure. “So like I said, there’s nothing to tell.”
“Hmm.” He made a noncommittal sound as if he were the psychiatrist. “Where were you?”
“Boston. I had exams. Thankfully, my mother hadn’t wanted to leave me. She said she was afraid I’d starve if she left. Too busy studying to eat properly. But in the end I lost her, too.” That summation was totally inadequate to describe how her mother had been ripped from her, but it would have to do. A shaft of pain coursed through her in the wake of the memory. “Look, I did my part. Was I ‘entertaining’ enough?”
She forced down the lump in her throat, hoping he wouldn’t probe more, and cast a glance at Jake. He’d turned. All she could see was the side of his face again. He shrugged once more.
She took that as a ‘yes.’ In any case, she couldn’t talk about her family anymore, not without breaking down.
A scroll through her records gave her a moment to collect her thoughts. “I saw a video today. Your interview after Guy Thomas’ death.”
He turned back to her and wrapped his strong hands around the bars, but rested his forehead on his fingers, his hair obscuring his expression. Part of her wanted him to look up, to let her examine again the color of his irises, yet it was almost a relief not to have to face those strange and wonderful eyes.
Unsure if he would reply at all, she waited, her heart tripping at a breakneck pace, as if the answer were more personal than just a clue in a clinical study. What was going on with that? Finally, she couldn’t help prodding. “The interview?”
“What about it?”
Relieved to get a response, she leaned toward him, resting her elbows on her knees. “You accused the police officer of lying, and when he asked why you thought that, you said he smelled funny. What did you mean?”
He hesitated, stalked over to the bed and back, gripped the bars again, clearly torn. She could see the conflict in his rigid posture. “Just what it sounds like.”
Her braid slid heavily against her back as she shook her head, struggling to decipher his meaning. “You thought he was lying because of the way he smelled? How does lying smell?” Again, that surge in her heart rate. She resisted the urge to take her own pulse.
“A little sour, somewhat bitter. Exactly how you’d think it would smell.”
She let that go. “And when they asked you what you’d hit your foster father with, you said your claws.”
He stiffened for a moment. “That’s right.” His head came up. He held her with his leonine gaze, as if daring her to look away. As if she could. “He put his hands on me. Tried to get me to touch him. I was afraid, ashamed—angry. I tried to run away, but he caught me, and suddenly my hand wasn’t a hand anymore. It was a paw with huge, hooked claws.” He examined his palm as if it might transform in front of their eyes. “I hit him and tore out his throat.”
Anjali sighed, acknowledging the accuracy of the social worker’s diagnosis. They’d known he was sick from the time he was eleven years old. Why had he remained untreated?
She cleared the blockage from her throat. Was it her heart? Couldn’t be. For some reason, she felt it was falling. “At the end of the interview, they left you alone. Where did you go?”
His gaze had dipped and Anjali got the impression he’d forgotten she was there until she’d spoken. The stark emptiness in his expression made her ache as she had when she’d seen the tape.
“Away.”
Kneading her pleated forehead with her finger, she lifted her eyebrows. “Away?”
“I spent the next four years on the street.”
Anjali gasped. An eleven-year-old boy on the streets without food or a safe place to sleep? She could hardly bear to imagine how he’d managed to survive. “My God.” Her eyelashes swept down to shield the sudden tears distorting her vision. She cleared her throat, hiding her unprofessional reaction.
“I know what you’re thinking.” His voice was thick, rough with anger or accusation.
Anjali blinked rapidly before meeting his eyes.
“You think I had to sell myself to survive.” His pupils seemed pitch black against the brilliant topaz of his irises.
Anjali opened her mouth to lie.
His nostrils flared. “There’s that smell. Don’t lie. It doesn’t suit you.”
Anjali closed her eyes. His emotions seemed poised to swamp her. God, this was difficult. “All right. Yes, that’s exactly what I thought.”
A fierce tension rippled across his features. “You’re wrong. But what I did wasn’t much better.”
Her pulse spiked. She was afraid to ask, but it slipped out anyway, the words barely more than a whisper. “What did you do?”
“I stole.”
Some of the awful apprehension seeped away. No matter what he had become, she didn’t want to hear about a child degraded.
But his shame at being forced to steal was evident in the tight line of his mouth and knuckles bleached white by the force of his grip on the bars. Her chest ached. She wanted to back off, to give him space, but she couldn’t; she needed him talking too badly. “What did you steal?”
“Jewels.”
He gestured to her gaping mouth. “You’ll catch flies.”
She shut her mouth and shook her head. “An eleven-year-old jewel thief?”
Why the hell was he sharing this information with her? Jake grimaced.
None of the other doctors had inspired him to babble like a sixteen-year-old boy in the presence of a super model.
She didn’t even believe him. He could smell more emotions than just deceit. Her disbelief flooded over him in a wave of tart lemons.
He knew this ability to smell emotions was probably part of his illness, but he’d never been wrong. And the dark wings of her raised eyebrows and lowered chin told him he wasn’t wrong this time.
Just like that morning as a child when he’d
broken the lock on the interrogation room door and taken off into the nightmare streets.
He’d known then, if he’d stayed, they would have locked him up forever, no matter what the policeman had claimed. Maybe not for killing his foster father, but certainly for how he’d killed him.
The illusion he’d had claws that night might have been a function of his illness, but he’d seen the photographs. Somehow, he’d not only ripped out Guy Thomas’ throat, he’d nearly decapitated the man.
He didn’t know how much of his memory was true and how much was a product of his imagination, but he would never forget his foster father’s scream, the coppery stench of blood, the hot, sticky spray on his face and neck.
Some had gotten in his mouth. His stomach lurched at the memory of the metallic, acrid taste.
He remembered stumbling to the dank, windowless bathroom, and puking until his knotted stomach couldn’t wring out one more ounce of vomit, then retching for several minutes more.
He’d finally collapsed exhausted onto the cold, dirty tile. That’s when his foster mother found her husband.
Her screams were forever etched in his mind.
He’d tried to run, wrenching his sweating body to his feet and skidding for the door, but he’d been too weak. She’d shoved him back into the smelly bathroom and locked him inside.
The pain and terror of his past swelled over him, rocking him with tidal force. Jake slid down the bars to his knees. Life hadn’t been easy before that night. His foster parents had been alternately neglectful and abusive, but after . . .
Though he hadn’t been forced to sell his body for money, hunger, cold and fear had shadowed his every step.
An air current brought a scent to his nose, spicy and sweet, breaking the ugly grip of memory. A gentle hand touched his hair. Dr. Mehta—Anjali—crouched in front of him on the other side of the bars. He froze. How long had it been since anyone had touched him so tenderly without any strings attached?
In Like a Lion (The Chimera Chronicles) Page 4