Forests of the Night (2 page)

Charlotte Monroe had sixty seconds to act.

Starting now.

She watched the red-haired boy raise the handgun and adjust his aim. He had bangs and was heavily freckled. Dennis the Menace hits puberty. Fuzz darkened his upper lip, and a single red pimple festered in the middle of his forehead like a tiny bullet wound.

Charlotte had a long-standing bias against redheaded boys. Blame it on Jake Calvin from her childhood, a gawky kid with maroon freckles so dense he looked like he'd been splashed with acid. He taunted her. Mocked her ratty shoes, her hand-me-downs. Reminded her that her older sister, Marlene, wore the same flowered dress two years before, and how Marlene used to lift that very skirt and flash her panties, sometimes even pull her panties aside. He dared Charlotte to do the same. Show him what she had.

Thirty-five seconds, thirty-four.

The boy she was watching brought back Jake Calvin's face, causing a ghostly interference. This redheaded kid had the same sneer, the same heckling tone as he aimed his cheap automatic at the black cat humped in the corner of the bare room.

“Here, kitty,” he called. “Here, kitty kitty.”

The cat hunched tighter, as if it heard the same tone Charlotte did—a whine of deceit and hatefulness. The boy's lips were mashed flat, straining to hold back his glee.

Twenty seconds left, nineteen.

One of Charlotte's cats, Max, had the same white spats and tuxedo shirt. She told herself Jake Calvin wasn't the boy before her now and it wasn't Max cowering. No reason to be so worked up. Her job was to see clearly, make a decision and act. She'd been batting a thousand—now this simple situation without even a human life at stake was bedeviling her.

She had no doubt the boy was capable of murdering an animal. An emergent torturer. Serial killer in training. Buried beneath his flattened gaze was a cold, fuming rage.

But for the first time she doubted herself. It felt like a trick, too obvious. She was exhausted, ready for this whole awful scene to be finished. Five seconds left. Four, three.

So, just to be done with it, she pressed the No button and a soft ping sounded behind the mirrored glass.

No was her official decision. No, the little shit wouldn't fire. But this time she wasn't certain. She truly didn't know if the kid would or not. A helpless cat exploding against a wall? It was possible. She'd seen worse in the last two weeks. Much worse.

Pressing the button didn't stop the videotape. The scene played to the end, as they all had. So she could discover how accurate her forecast was. And, of course, seeing all the previous scenarios affected her subsequent votes. Like life on the street, learning from each episode, constantly modifying.

Every video she'd seen for the last two weeks was authentic, real people, real violence. News footage, or grainy, homemade tapes confiscated after arrests, trophies from self-absorbed sickos, or taped confessions. Earlier in the week she'd spent eight hours watching people speaking into the camera. No sound—just their faces, mouths moving. Charlotte's assignment was to pick out the ones who were lying. Then there were the dozens of soundless videos shot from the dashboard cameras of patrol cars doing roadside stops. Is this driver dangerous or not? First thing this morning, with breakfast still warm in her belly, she'd watched a Georgia state trooper
get out of his car, walk to the white Toyota he'd pulled over, confront a heavyset man in loose clothes—the man, out of the car, acting passive, head slumped forward, but doing something with his jaw, a nearly invisible grinding of teeth—then, seconds after Charlotte had pressed the Yes button, the attack she'd predicted occurred.

The trooper was off guard. Misreading the danger. Charlotte mashed the button several more times. She felt the scream rise to her throat:
Draw your weapon, step back, you idiot, watch out, goddamn it!

With dreadful speed, the motorist produced a machete from behind his baggy trousers and hacked the trooper in the upper arm, and when the cop fell to the pavement, the motorist hacked him again. She'd known it would happen. She'd read the approaching spew of rage, an extra blink, a dark twinkle, the subtle grind of jaw. She knew, damn it, she saw it coming. An early-warning system probably instilled by the string of ducktailed men that flowed through her mother's double-wide when she was a kid. More than one of them had eyed her with a slanting smile, and stumbled her way. Jim Beam in one hand, lust in the other. But by then she'd positioned herself near the door and had always managed to escape. Even at that age she could sense some seismic jiggle, see the change of light in their eyes, a spasm in their lips, some clue that came and went so fast she doubted a camera could catch it.

On the screen the redheaded boy fired and the cat screeched and jumped a yard in the air. Plaster exploded. Incredibly, the boy missed. He fired again, then a third time, swinging wildly, shooting in a blind panic, blowing gashes in the drywall.

The cat must have escaped, because when the shooter staggered into camera view again, his arrogance had crumpled into misery. He stared at the lens, shoulders weighted with doom, bitter tears muddying his eyes, and he jammed the pistol against his temple.

“You worthless punk,” he snarled at the camera. “Jerry Cox can't even kill a freaking cat. A freaking alley cat. Jerry's a scum-sucking dumb-ass bastard shit-for-brains. Can't even kill a freaking freaking cat.”

Charlotte knew he wasn't going to shoot himself. The kid was spent. His eyes were dark vacuums, mouth slack, disgusted by his own grim appetites, his abject failure to accomplish a simple chore. For two or three
seconds the boy struggled to pull the trigger, then he lowered the pistol and trudged to the camera and switched it off.

Maybe the kid had wanted to be a voyeur of his own cruelty, or perhaps the tape was meant to win him admission into some ruthless cult of juveniles. Either way, the event turned out to be merely a testament to the boy's utter ineptitude.

The screen went black and Charlotte sagged in the padded chair.

In the observation room, she heard voices, then the door between the rooms opened.

“I should get fifty percent for the last one,” she said without turning from the empty screen. “He shot at the cat, but didn't shoot himself.”

Dr. Fedderman was silent. She could feel him looking at her. When he spoke, his voice was huskier than it had been earlier in the day.

“When you voted no, you were reacting to the scene with the cat. You had no way to know the young man was going to consider suicide. This will count as an incorrect result.”

“Hey, relax, Doc. I'm just kidding around with you.”

“Oh,” Fedderman said. “I see.”

“Why're you so upset? Am I making you mad for some reason?”

She swiveled her chair to catch his face. The room was still dim. Only the weak glow of the blank screen. Fedderman was a short, sleek man with a shaved head and a goatee. For two weeks he'd worn black turtlenecks and sharply creased blue jeans. Nobody in Miami wore black turtlenecks. Like he'd been time-warped in from a fifties Bleecker Street coffeehouse. Him and his bongo drums.

“And why would I be angry at you, Officer Monroe?”

“Maybe because I'm doing too well. Beating the averages.”

“It's research. I have no vested interest in any particular outcome.”

“What about the software you're peddling?”

“You're participating in a clinical trial. All data is useful.”

“But if I keep beating your program, then your system isn't as amazing as you say. Some ordinary patrol officer can do better, why should a department shell out the cash? Isn't that why you're pissed?”

He stared at the empty screen and spoke with what was probably meant to sound like scientific detachment.

“Ms. Monroe, so far you've produced fine results. They may turn out to be a statistical anomaly or they may not. If you continue to score this well over a longer period, then we'll seek to explain how you accomplish these feats, and that information will help us refine our program. That's the purpose of these experiments. Data collection. It is certainly not my intent to try to prove the superiority of my software over ordinary people.”

“Your throat's tight. There's a squeak in your voice. You're pissed.”

He shifted his gaze and gave her a bleak appraisal. This was a man who knew the name and function of every muscle strand in the face and had learned through arduous practice how to tighten or relax them in every possible combination to signal the entire range of human emotions. Thousands upon thousands of expressions with only the subtlest differences among them.

Facial coding, it was called, anatomical analysis of facial actions. This man knew his infraorbital triangle from his nasolabial furrow, and he was trying to fine-tune his computer program in facial recognition so it could sort out lies from truth, dangerous men from harmless ones. Charlotte had read up on him. Fedderman was renowned in his circle of scholars and researchers. Now he was trying to cash in, it seemed to her, make the jump from academia to where the serious money was, real-life applications.

But at that moment there was no artifice in the good doctor's face. He was so furious he was forced to swallow twice before he could speak again.

“After lunch we'll be doing faces alone,” Fedderman said. “Head shots. No body language, no other clues to put the expressions in context. Significantly more challenging than the scenarios you've been watching. More subtle and far more complex. This has just been the warm-up.”

“No offense, Doc, but I'm out of gas. Two weeks of this is plenty. There's real-life felons that need attending to.”

Fedderman squeezed his lips into a smile that even a blind man could tell was insincere.

“Lieutenant Rodriguez has volunteered your services for as long as I might need them. So we'll see you at one o'clock on the dot. Faces in isolation. Have a lovely lunch, Monroe.”

“May I?”

The short man with a rigid crew cut held a cafeteria tray and nodded at the empty seat beside Charlotte.

She said, “Sure,” and the man sat.

A Caesar salad on his tray and a mug of coffee. He wore a blue shirt and dark trousers and a smile that was a little too twitchy.

“Charlie Mears,” he said. “Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

He slid his business card across the table and she took it. Only his name and a cell number.

“Officer Charlotte Monroe,” she said, and held out a hand. He took it and for an awkward second he seemed to consider bringing it to his lips. Then he squeezed it and let it go.

She had that effect on some men, bringing out their latent gallantry. Though she'd never understood why. The woman she saw in the mirror was no stunner. Brown hair worn in a no-fuss straight cut that brushed her shoulders. Her eyes were hazel and on first glance appeared gentle, even vulnerable, but with a closer look, people usually caught the metallic flash of the woman she was. Focused, stubborn, with a low tolerance for bullshit. At five-foot-six, she was ten pounds too heavy to be called willowy. Most of those ten she'd earned in the gym, low weight, lots of reps. She'd inherited her mother's jutting cheekbones and bronze complexion. Her mouth was a size larger than the fashion magazines endorsed. She'd been told it was her father's mouth, though she'd never met the man.

Across the table, Mears looked at his watch, then speared a few leaves of lettuce and munched thoughtfully.

“To come to the point, Monroe. We've been following your progress with Dr. Fedderman. You've done quite well.”

“Thanks.”

When he'd swallowed, he said, “Actually, ‘quite well' is a gross understatement. You've had remarkable results. So remarkable that I came down from D.C. especially to meet you.”

She had a sip of tea and looked around at the bare walls of the cafeteria.

“It's just instincts,” she said. “Intuition and a little luck, no big deal.”

She took a bite of her turkey sandwich, then laid it aside. Tried one of the potato chips. Stale.

“Oh, no. It is a big deal, Monroe. A very big deal.”

“Not to me it isn't.”

“Reason I'm here is, I'm heading up a new, somewhat unorthodox task force at the bureau. By traditional criminal science standards what we're doing might be considered experimental. It's forensics, but not the tweezers, microscope, black light variety.”

“Forensic pathology.”

“In that general area. But more specialized. Profiling serial killers, that's still important, but we're pioneering some new territory.”

“If this is a recruiting pep talk, you wasted your trip. I'm a police officer, plain and simple street cop. I have no other professional aspirations.”

He gave her an empty smile.

“My team's responsible for everything from forensic archaeology to the paranormal.”

“Oh, come on. ESP? You guys believe in that horseshit?”