James Knapp - State of Decay

The inventory had come in for the arsenal recovered from Tai’s base of operations. It included explosives that easily could have caused the kind of damage that occurred downtown. The bomb that killed all those people had come through Tai; I was sure of it. Whoever killed him was behind it.

I sat at my desk and watched the footage I had recorded from the interrogation earlier, the window floating behind my closed eyelids. Off to one side I kept a smaller window tapped into a camera that watched from the wall behind me, in case anyone came by.

“ Answer her questions ,” I heard myself say. Zoe was staring at the suspect, which I had pretty much expected. What color she had drained out of her face. If she was any paler, she could have been mistaken for a revivor.

Given the circumstances, I had switched off the camera in the interrogation room, and I didn’t disclose the POV recording I’d made myself either, but I wanted a record of the interview for my own use. When I first found out why she had really left the note, I had almost turned it off and sent her home. I was glad I hadn’t.

“ Are you okay? ” she asked in a small voice.

I remember taking a small amount of satisfaction in that. Honestly, I figured once she got a look at the guy, she’d turn around and that would be that. She did better than I expected, though.

“ Who are you? ” the guy asked.

I scanned forward, looking for the moment when she did whatever it was she did. When I saw her arms go down by her sides and her head start to drift forward, I stopped.

“— lax.”

“ Screw you, you ugly little bitch!”

He spit and a glob of red squirted out at caught her right in the face. The camera rose as I knocked the chair back and moved toward him.

I wasn’t looking at her when it happened; I was looking at him. He was glaring at me with a defiant smirk, when all of a sudden his face changed. The smirk disappeared and his eyelids drooped.

“ Sleep ,” I heard her say, and his eyelids fluttered. They stayed open, but his eyes went out of focus. It was as if he suddenly had gone blind or something. I had scanned him, getting a bead on his vitals; his heartbeat had slowed, and he was totally relaxed. He seemed, in fact, to be very close to sleep.

The camera moved back to Zoe, my hand moving into frame with a paper towel. I froze the image.

She was staring at the guy, her pupils almost completely dilated, like she was loaded on amphetamines. Her face had changed dramatically. I remember thinking that at the time, too. When she first came in, she was nervous, shy almost to the point of paralysis, despite the fact that she had clearly been drinking. Her eyes were always cast downward at the floor, at her shoes, or at her hands. Now she was staring right at someone she knew to be a killer, looking him right in the eyes. It was like a pair of invisible beams connected her eyes to his and neither one could look away, but looking at her face again now, I could see who was in control. She could have looked away at any time, but he couldn’t have. Not until she let him. It was like a completely different personality had emerged from inside her, and the expression in her eyes as she stared at him from over that beaky nose was something that didn’t seem to belong there.

Was it real?

Having done some research on the type of device used to kill him, I found out that it typically monitored for two things: a loosening of the inhibitions caused by prolonged, extreme pain, and a brain- wave state indicative of drug-induced mind control or hypnosis.

He wasn’t in any pain. After the beating he took and the surgery that followed, he was on enough painkillers that he wasn’t feeling much of anything. He wasn’t coerced with drugs at any point.

“ Can you hear me? ” she asked, as I resumed the recording.

“ Yes.”

I wondered whether she had known him previously, if somehow this whole meeting was a setup of some kind. The image of the revivor heart signature she had scrawled on the card she left wasn’t just an uncanny representation; when I compared it to the one I had recorded from the female I encountered in the bathroom at Tai’s place, it was an exact match. Every revivor’s signature was unique. She had to have seen it somewhere.

“ What’s your name? ” she asked.

I’d seen hypnosis before, but never anything like that. I knew his type, and he was ex-military. He was trained on how to behave if he was ever captured, and he could endure a lot of pain and interrogation. It didn’t make sense that a ninety-pound woman could walk in and make him give everything up in less than a minute, but that’s what it looked like he was about to do.

The kill switch implanted in his head seemed to believe so too.

The more I watched her, the more interesting the strange woman became. I needed to get her back, but I didn’t know if after what happened, I wanted to risk bringing her back in. Maybe I could set something up off the premises….

Backing up the recording, I watched as the man reversed out of his stupefied state and the smirk returned. The spit jumped in reverse through the space between his teeth and Zoe backed away; then the camera did as well as we both moved back down the hallway.

If I had known what was going to happen, I’d have watched her more closely, but as it was, I was focused initially on the suspect and, I had to admit, the message from Faye I had gotten earlier. The only other time we were alone was when Zoe first came in and I met her in the conference room. That had been a short introduction, but it was better than nothing. I kept backing up, looking for the moment when I first walked in and saw her.

The camera turned as we backed into the conference room and then sat at the table. For a while I focused on her face as she spoke, glancing down self-consciously; then I saw her pupils dilate. They dilated completely, just as they had in the interrogation room.

I stopped rewinding and let the footage play.

“ …and take me to him. When we get there, do what I say and I’ll prove it to you ,” she said.

My eyes had been fixed on hers, just staring, with her staring up at me.

“ Do you understand? ” she asked.

“ Yes, ” I heard myself say, and I froze the image.

As sure as I was of anything, that had not happened. I would have remembered it. Frantically, I searched my memory for any trace of that conversation, but it wasn’t there.

Stunned, I scanned back until her pupils returned to normal a few seconds prior.

“ …can help you ,” she said.

“ How?”

That I remembered. I watched as she pushed the paper, her skill list, across to me. I remembered the exasperation and annoyance I had felt when I first realized what I was looking at.

“ I’m serious.”

“ You know, I can see that you are.”

Her face changed, and then her eyes.

“ Wait ,” she said.

“ Okay.”

“ You need to give me a chance ,” she said in a low voice. “ If you could know one thing right now that you don’t, what would it be?”

“ Did she love me? ” I heard myself ask. It was barely a whisper.

Zoe’s eyes narrowed dangerously.

“ Something to do with your case ,” she snipped.

“ We have a suspect in custody ,” I told her. “ I need him to talk.”

“ Good ,” she said. “ I can make him do that. Don’t think about it. Just trust your instincts and take me to him. When we get there, do what I say and I’ll prove it to you. Do you understand?”