“Can you tell us what he looked like, Tanzi?” said Reilly. Paz could hear the excitement in her voice, under the professional drone.
Tanzi opened her eyes. She looked directly at Paz. Her right arm rose slowly, until the extended index finger pointed straight at him. Mrs. Meagher let out a small cry.
Reilly said, “You mean he looks like Detective Paz?”
“Yes.” The eyes shut again. The arm dropped.
“Tanzi, do you know who he is?” asked Reilly.
“Yes.”
“Who is he?”
The child’s eyes opened again. Paz heard Reilly’s gasp, and then the eyes looked at him, and it was not any fourteen-year-old girl who gazed out through them either. A voice far too deep and rumbling ever to have come out of the larynx of a Tanzi Franklin said, “Me.”
It came in a long extended syllable, striking them all with the nauseating effect of an earthquake’s first tremors. Mrs. Meagher screamed. Tanzi rolled her eyes back in her head, twisted off the couch, and went into a back-arching, teeth-chattering, foaming convulsion. Randolph P. Franklin leaped from his chair and onto Paz, tearing at his face and clothes, trying to get at Paz’s pistol. He was shouting something like “I’ll get him, I’ll get him!” Paz stood up, the boy clinging to him with his legs, holding on with one hand and grabbing for the gun with the other. He seemed to have an unnatural energy. Paz himself felt blurry, as if he, too, had been somewhat hypnotized. He saw Reilly drop down to attend to the convulsing girl. Mrs. Meagher was yelling something that Paz couldn’t make out. He had just pinned Randolph P. Franklin’s arms when something smacked heavily against the back of his head. He looked around and saw Mrs. Meagher holding the handle of a big saucepan in a two-handed grip, getting ready to whale him again.
“Ma’am, please put down the pot …” he began. She swung at his head, but he twisted away and this time the pot hit his shoulder. He tripped over the writhing Randolph and fell down. Mrs. Meagher couldn’t bend over very well and so she could only pound him in a grandmotherly way, but managed all the same to sprinkle him with the contents of the pot.
After a while Mrs. Meagher became exhausted and dropped her weapon. She sat down on a chair, looking gray, and cried. The boy extricated himself and embraced his grandmother. He was crying, too. Tanzi’s convulsions had stopped. Lisa Reilly had moved her so that she was lying flat on the couch. She was holding the girl’s hand, talking softly, but eliciting no apparent response. Paz stood and brushed white gobbets from his clothes. He walked over to the couch. The girl looked destroyed; her mouth was flecked with blood and foam.
“How is she?”
“Jesus, Jimmy, I don’t know,” Reilly said in a frightened whisper. “She’s breathing okay. She’s not convulsing. But I’m not a doctor. I think I’m over my head here. What do we do now?”
“I don’t know,” Paz whispered back. “I think we should offer to get the kid to a hospital and then get out of here. Why don’t you talk to the old lady, smooth things over?”
Reilly gave him a sharp look but did as he suggested. She spoke softly. Paz saw the old woman shake her head emphatically, her sparse hair flying. Reilly came back to him and said, “She doesn’t want any more help. Not from us. We should get out of here. I left my card, in the unlikely event …”
They left. Randolph P. Franklin had the last word. Glaring at Paz, he said, “I see you around here again, nigger, I’m gonna bust a cap on your sorry black ass.”
In the car, Paz looked at Reilly and said, “What can I say? I didn’t expect that. It came out of left field.”
“Farther off than that, I think. Good Christ!” She shuddered. “You still have some stuff in your hair.”
“Mashed potatoes,” he said, picking at himself. She brushed at him, annoyingly. “Leave it!” he snapped, and slammed the car into gear. They drove in silence.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to snarl. I’m a little shook.”
“A little? Jesus! I’m jelly. Jimmy, what the hell was going on there?”
“You’re asking me? You’re the shrink.”
“No, I have a doctorate from the Barry College School of Social Work. I talk to Gables teens about their body image. I don’t fucking do exorcisms!”
“You did great with Cassie Bumpers.”
“Oh, Cassie Bumpers! All she wanted was someone to tell her she wasn’t the spawn of Satan and didn’t deserve to have the devil fucked out of her by her daddy’s holy prick. I can deal with frightened little kids. Back there … back there, that was something else entirely. I don’t know what the hell that was. No, I do know, I think …”
“What?”
“Possession,” she said, and he looked over at her to see if she were joking, but her face was grim and pale.
“What do you mean, possession? Like with the head turned around backward and the green vomit?”
“Yeah, right. Go to a library sometime. There’s yards of documentation on it from nearly every culture in the world, from nuns with stigmata to snake handlers in the Ozarks to Siberian shamans. I won’t even mention Africa or what goes on right down the street in Miami fucking Florida. Santeria. Christ, you should know more about that than I do.”
“Yeah, that’s what everybody says,” said Paz sourly. “So … what? The hypnosis, like, triggered this … thing?”
“I guess. You saw the girl. She went under like a lead sinker. Hence suggestible in the extreme. She pointed at you.” She paused and looked at him appraisingly. “You know, it’s possible that the killer really did look like you.”
“Come on.”
“Why not? Both times she freaked out it was when you were around. It’s no crime. One of my brothers-in-law looks like Ted Bundy. Of course, a lot of us think he actually is a serial killer …”
“I take your point. Say more about suggestible.”
“Okay, I’m a pro, so I was very careful not to make any suggestions. That’s the big confusion factor when you work with hypnosis, especially with kids. Tiffany, are you sure Mr. Jones didn’t put his hands up your panties? Didn’t Mr. Jones dress up as a devil and sacrifice to Satan? Oh, yes, he did, the kid agrees, and then he made me eat poo-poo. You can get people to say anything, you can implant all kinds of false memories, even without meaning to, and the subjects will swear themselves blue that the shit really happened. I know I didn’t suggest anything of the kind to her, and then, when I ask her who the guy was, out comes this voice two octaves lower. Did you see her eyes?”
“Yeah, I saw.”
She shuddered. “Jimmy,” she said, “buy me a drink. Buy me two drinks.”
They stopped on a bar on West Flagler east of the freeway, a neon-lit, beer-smelling place with a night game from Atlanta on the TV and a mixed crowd of boat bums and genial rummies in it. They got a couple of dirty looks, but no one made any trouble and the service was fine. He ordered a Bud, she a double scotch. She inhaled it and immediately flagged the barmaid for a refill.
When he thought she was ready, he spoke. “You said she was real suggestible. But somebody had to plant that suggestion in her head. Somebody who knew she was a potential witness.” He thought for a moment. “That means somebody knew I was going to question her. So they grabbed her and, I don’t know, hypnotized her so she would block what she saw.”
Reilly took a sip of her new drink. Her face was flushed now and her eyes were showing white around the blue iris. “I thought you said she went nuts the first time you talked to her.”
“Yeah, but they still could have …” His voice trailed off.
“Right. How did they know to grab that particular kid? Unless you’re proposing that a crack team of homicidal hypnotists fanned out and did everyone on that side of the building. Come to think of it, the boy and the granny weren’t acting all that tightly wrapped either. Why the hell should they get homicidal all of a sudden? Maybe we’re dealing with induced mass hallucination here.”
“There’s such a thing?”
“Oh, yeah. Flying saucers. Thousands of people think they’ve been abducted by aliens. That’s now, in a materialist age. In other cultures, in the past, the sky’s the limit. My point … did I have a point? Oh, yeah, my point
