“Serves you right,” she sniffed.
Like all the rooms at Sensory Resources, the one that held me was windowless. It could have been noon outside, or midnight, I’d have never known the difference. A person could be wide awake in here for two weeks and not be able to give a proper accounting of the time he’d spent, so it made sense there would be a period of disorientation. But I was more than disoriented, I was in shock. Based on my timeline, in a handful of minutes I’d lost the face I was born with, and more than three years of my life! There were no instruction books to tell me how I was supposed to react.
But it’s not what I’d seen and heard that led me to the bourbon. Bad as it was, I knew things were about to get much worse. Th e proof was in Nadine’s eyes and Lou Kelly’s voice. And the fact that Darwin kept Nadine working here at Sensory all these years just to prepare me for what Lou was about to say.
Chapter 43
“You died,” Lou said.
I paused a moment. “You mean I died on the table and they brought me back to life?”
He shook his head. “No, I mean we killed Harry.”
Harry Weathers had been my body double.
“We didn’t have a choice,” Lou said.
I said nothing.
He continued, “You were here, completely unresponsive, barely alive. Days went by. The doctors
A thousand thoughts raced through my brain, competing to make sense.
Lou continued: “Tara Siegel had a lot of friends who heard you came to Boston looking for her. A few hours later she went missing, and no one ever heard from her again.”
I shouldn’t have had the drink. Or maybe I should have had more. I had to force my mind not to get too far ahead of his words. Otherwise it would take longer to find out what I needed to know about Kathleen and Addie, and where things stood in the present.
“Go on,” I finally heard myself say.
“Well, there were two problems. First, Tara’s friends—picture what Callie and Quinn would do if Tara showed up and you’d gone missing. Anyway, her friends demanded answers from Darwin, said if he didn’t tell them, they’d beat the truth out of Kathleen.”
I set my new jaw, clenched my fists, but said nothing.
“The second problem, quite frankly, was Kathleen.”
“How so?”
“When she didn’t hear from you, didn’t get her calls returned, she went into a panic. She knew just enough to be dangerous.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “She knows—
“She knew Sal Bonadello,” Lou said, “and Victor.”
“So?”
“She also knew—or thought she knew—that you worked for Homeland Security.”
“She started making calls?”
“She did.”
“And?”
“She got stonewalled. And didn’t like it.”
I let a small, proud smile play around the corners of my mouth.
Lou saw it, said, “Yeah, I know. But she contacted the press, started demanding an inquiry.”
