2
Monday morning, seven o’clock. Holly Gold flung out a bare arm and slapped the alarm clock into silence. I’m back in my own bed, she told herself-it was a little game she liked to play some mornings. Laurel is still alive, the rest was all a dream. If I listen closely I can hear the waves crashing against the rocks at Big Sur, and when I open my eyes and look out the window, the trees I see will be windblown cypresses and Monterey pines, and beyond them the sky will be cool and gray.
Then the mosquito netting rustled, a small warm body crawled into bed beside Holly, and she was reminded again that her new life on St. Luke had its compensations too.
“Good morning, baby doll,” said Holly.
“Mmmm.”
“Is your brother up yet?”
“Marley say he ain’ goin’ a no school today.”
“Well you tell Marley…” Holly hardly had to raise her voice to be heard in the other bedroom of the cabin. “… that Auntie Holly says not only is he going to school today, but if he hasn’t gotten dressed and eaten breakfast by the time I’m ready to leave, he is going to school hungry, in his pajamas.” She was bluffing, of course, but then, so was her nephew.
“Ain’ wearin’ none,” piped a voice from the kids’ bedroom.
“Bare-butt naked, then-suit yourself,” said Holly, sending the six-year-old girl beside her into a paroxysm of giggles.
The island of St. Luke is shaped like the drumstick of a turkey, with a neat round bite known as Frederikshavn Harbor (a redundancy:
The higher the city of Frederikshavn rises from the harbor, the more expensive the dwellings. At sea level, in the quarter known as Sugar Town, the houses are mostly shanties constructed of tin and unmatched lumber, roofed with sheets of corrugated green plastic. Above Sugar Town rises Dansker Hill, where the buildings are Danish colonial style, their tiled rooftops hanging out over the porticoed sidewalks, and their thick masonry walls arched, colonnaded, covered with lime-and-molasses stucco, and painted pastel pinks and blues and yellows. Above Dansker Hill, on the ridgetop to the east of town, safe from even the highest of hurricane tides, tastefully modern castles with cantilevered walls of timber and tinted glass look out over the harbor.
Holly herself lived eight miles to the east of Frederikshavn, in a little village known as the Core, tucked into a fold of the rain forest ridge. (Everybody called it the rain forest-technically it was a secondary dry tropical, as the island received less than fifty inches of rain per annum.)
Monday morning, as she did every weekday when school was in session, Holly drove the kids into town in her late sister’s old VW bus, a classic hippie ride, with psychedelic daisies painted on the side, and dropped them off at Apgard Elementary School, at the foot of Dansker Hill. She then wrestled the balky clutch into first gear and held on to the juddering wheel for dear life as the bus buckety-bucketed past the old Danish quarter up to the ridgetop where the real money lived.
There was a new man standing guard at the entrance to the gated community. He eyed the psychedelic bus dubiously, then broke into a grin when he peered in and saw the driver. “Miss Holly!”
“Oh, hi there.” She recognized him now. He was a customer, but not quite a regular, at Busy Hands, where she still worked two nights a week. He was a down-islander, but she couldn’t remember his name, or which island he came from. “I almost didn’t recognize you with your clothes on. It’s been a while.”
“Been savin’ up for a nex’ visit.” The grin widened as he waved her through. He had good teeth, strong and white-whichever island he was from, they didn’t grow sugarcane there.
Holly’s first appointment every Monday was a wealthy, forty-five-year-old hemiplegic named Helen Chapman, who received a full-body, deep-tissue massage with special attention to her stroke-devastated left side. This was the kind of job Holly, a certified, Esalen-trained massage therapist, had had in mind when she chose her career. She set up her table in the solarium, and with a Steven Halpern/Georgia Kelly CD playing softly in the background, worked with a deft, sure touch for over an hour, kneading and stroking to bring blood to wasted muscles, until even the dystonal flesh was suffused with a healthy pink glow.
The rest of the morning was blank on Holly’s schedule. After dropping off her dirty laundry at the washhouse in Sugar Town (where it would be washed, dried, fluffed, and folded by down-island women for no more than it would cost her to do it herself), Holly stopped by the Sunset, an open-air bar just outside of town. There Vincent, the bartender and proprietor, not only made what was reputedly the tastiest, most lethal Bloody Mary on the island (Holly wouldn’t know: she didn’t drink), but also sold the finest weed (her only vice) at reasonable, or at least nonruinous, prices.
The circular bar in the middle of the raised cement dance floor was shaded by a round tin roof. Holly sat down facing the ocean. “What’s new and good, Vincent?”
The Trinidadian leaned over the bar and beckoned her closer. “High-altitude, sout’-slope, two-toke rain forest chronic. Local grown, shade-dried, mellow as mudder’s milk, fifty an eight’.”
“What’s old and cheap?”
“Dirty Colombian for twenty-five. But I’ll make ya a deal-you work dis damn kink out of me neck, I’ll sell ya de chronic, same price.”
“Take your shirt off,” said Holly. “And no extras.”
3
“Back in the day-waaay back in the day-when I was a sheriff’s deputy in upstate New York, my boss used to boast that there was no murder he couldn’t solve.”
At the lectern, Special Agent E. L. Pender, FBI, Ret., paused dramatically; the red- and blue-shirted students waited with their pens poised.
“What he’d do, he told me, he’d take the first person to find the body and the last one to see the vic alive, then beat the crap out of both of ’em until one of ’em confessed.”
Muted consternation in the auditorium. The red shirts were the best and brightest of the nation’s law enforcement officers, attending the FBI’s eleven-week National Academy training course at Quantico; the blue shirts were FBI trainees.
“Right,” said Pender. “Judging from your response, I can see I don’t have to tell you that those days are gone. I’m not saying it’s a good thing, and I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, I’m just saying it’s over. And that is why I’m in front of you today to spread the gospel of the affective interview.
“As you already know, when two interrogators team up for good cop, bad cop, it’s almost always good cop who ends up inside the interrogation room taking the confession, if any, while bad cop watches through the one- way glass. What you may not know, however, is that unless bad cop has the freedom to ratchet up to a realistic threat level, the game isn’t worth the candle.
“For every perp who comes clean, you’ll get five who either clam up or lawyer up or have their confessions thrown out on the grounds of coercion-and that’s not even taking into account witnesses slash suspects who turn out to be innocent, but have information of probative value that they’re not going to share with an interrogator who’s been threatening or frightening them, or who reminds them even subconsciously of the schoolyard bully who terrorized them when they were itty-bitty citizens.
“And to anticipate your next question: what if the person you’re interviewing
“The answer, surprisingly, is no. Why? Because as any psychiatrist will tell you, it is a fact of life, a psychological home truth, that every human being from Mother Teresa to Jack the Ripper operates from the same basic needs, using the same basic defenses, and accessing the same basic pool of emotions as every other human being. Deep down below the surface, we all want to be safe, we all want to be loved, and we all want to be
