None Shall Sleep

by Ellie Marney

  She flicks the switch on the lamp on the nightstand, throws off the bedclothes, and goes to change her shirt and collect her robe.

  Downstairs, the kitchen of her parents’ house is lit up like always. Emma fixes herself a glass of milk with one of her mother’s choc-chip cookies. She’s just sat down at the kitchen island when her older sister, Roberta, shuffles in.

  “Don’t eat all the cookies.”

  “It’s after midnight,” Emma points out. “Teen magazine says I can eat as many cookies as I want after midnight.”

  “Teen magazine…” Roberta humphs, opening the fridge for the milk. She’s pulled a quilted nylon dressing gown over her men’s flannel pajama pants and Blondie T-shirt. “Fine, but you’ve gotta help me bake replacements tomorrow.”

  “I can do that.”

  “I’m bummed you’re not staying the whole week.”

  “Eh, summer classes.”

  “Eh.”

  Emma eats her cookie. Robbie pours milk into a glass and returns the carton, careful not to bang the fridge door closed. If the door bangs, it jostles the Boston fern their mother has balanced in a saucer on top of the fridge.

  “You’re not gonna tell Mom and Dad about the fed guy, are you?” Robbie finally says.

  “It’s not worth freaking them out.” Emma goes to the sink, takes an empty glass from the draining board, and half fills it with water. “He just wanted to ask me something.”

  “New set of questions?”

  “No, weirdly enough.” Emma walks to the fridge and balances on tiptoe to pour the water from the glass into the soil around the fern. “It was more like… a job interview.”

  “No shit.” Robbie leans against the counter and sips her milk. “That’s different.”

  “Right?”

  “I still wouldn’t tell Mom and Dad. They will most definitely freak.”

  Emma places the glass in the sink. “It was just a conversation. I said no.”

  “Is that why you’re down in the kitchen after midnight, eating cookies?”

  “Hey, you’re here with me.”

  Robbie grins. “I’m providing moral support.”

  Emma knows this is only partially true. Her sister developed insomnia when Emma went missing. Even two and a half years after her return, Robbie’s sleep problems have lingered. The toll hasn’t just been on Emma. For a while there, it was like the whole family needed therapy.

  “I said no,” Emma repeats gently.

  Robbie nods. She picks up her glass and heads toward the hall. “They flew a fed guy from Virginia to speak with you? Can’t fault them for effort.”

  “He drove.” Emma picks at the crumbs from her cookie. “He drove from Virginia, he didn’t fly.”

  “Man, that’s a drive.” Robbie pushes back her mass of dark hair with one hand. Emma had hair like that once. “He must’ve really wanted that conversation.”

  Her sister waves, then wanders back to her room along the hall. Emma sits on her stool, staring at the cookie crumbs, the Boston fern, the pendant light above the kitchen island. Cooper drove from Virginia. Suddenly she knows what it signifies. I will go the extra mile for you, it says. I wouldn’t ask a recruit to do anything I wouldn’t do myself.

  He expects her to drive back in return. He was telling her the way is open.

  On Saturday morning, Emma helps Robbie bake replacement cookies and helps her mother plant seedlings—petunias, mostly—in flower boxes around the house. Then she goes to the barn, where her father is cleaning the air filter on the tractor.

  “How’s it going, Emma Anne?”

  She’s careful to reply without hesitation. “All good, Dad.”

  “The Rabbit’s running okay? It’s probably due for a new carburetor.”

  “The carburetor’s fine, Dad. The car’s holding up.”

  “Glad to hear it. You wanna pass me that can of Dust-Off on the bench?”

  She passes him the Dust-Off, and later, there’s a family dinner. Everything about being home is comfortable and safe. Except for the fervency of her mother’s mealtime grace blessing, it’s like the world never changed.

  Hours later, when Emma’s wrenched up in bed, choking, she realizes the thin, high tinnitus in her head is not tinnitus. And it’s not just going to go away.

  She changes her shirt in the dark, pads downstairs. Slips a fresh cookie from the tin and encourages herself to consider the problem from all angles.

  Cooper talked about a partner, a unit. The idea of being part of a team is tempting. It’s the isolation of the thing that eats away at you: being alone on the island of the mind. The number of people who have brushed up against what she’s experienced and are still breathing, still functioning, is almost infinitesimal.

  So the concept is appealing: a team of other people to bounce ideas off, to share misgivings, to share the load. But Emma has no sense of what such a team might look like.

  And that horseshit about saving lives… Emma used to think she could’ve saved the others—the other girls—if only she’d run faster, gotten help quicker. But on her therapist’s suggestion she read the police report on Huxton, and she doesn’t believe that anymore. She’s wary of that response in herself now. She’s alert to guilt. Guilt doesn’t help anybody.

  So it’s not guilt tugging at her with tiny hooks, she tells herself, but rather the idea of the research. New information is the key. If she could play a part in gathering that information, if they could spot these guys more accurately, find them more quickly… then yes, other potential victims might be spared.

  Emma sits under the pendant light for some time. Then she uses the phone in the kitchen, with the long curly cord. The call picks up after two rings.

  “Cooper.” His voice is raspy but he sounds alert.

  “I’m in.”

  “Miss Lewis?”

  “I’m in,” she says. “I’ll join the project, the unit, whatever it’s called. But I won’t join the bureau. I want to go back to OSU once the interviews are done.”

  She hangs up, not waiting for his reply. Immediately, she feels a sensation like her soul is flying out of her chest.

  Only when she catches sight of the digital clock on the microwave does she realize it’s three thirty in the morning.

  CHAPTER THREE

  After some initial fretting, Emma wears jeans and a white T-shirt and running shoes for her first visit to Quantico, because that’s what she’ll feel normal in.

  There are lots of oak and maple trees around the parking area on the base. She slows her car for runners, training groups of guys in black gym shorts and regulation gray sweatshirts. It’s been three days since she herself ran, and she feels it like a twitch in her thighs and the balls of her feet.

  Once she’s parked, she sits in the car thinking about Robbie’s parting hug, and going through the instruction notes from the second phone call with Cooper. MPs at checkpoints have your name. Park outside Jefferson. Ask at the desk for Behavioral Science. Yesterday she drove six and a half hours to reach Virginia, and she’s still not sure she really wants to be here. She stares at the buildings until the heat gathering between the windshield and the dash forces her out.

  The Jefferson building is much cooler. Lots of people in khakis and dark polo shirts in the foyer. The man at the desk directs her to a bank of elevators, and the basement offices.

  The basement, she thinks. Of course it has to be in the goddamn basement.

  The elevator door opens onto low ceilings with concrete coffers, pipes for heating, pipes for air-conditioning, cable chases. The corridors are disconcertingly similar and anonymous. Lots of white and gray cinder block, fluorescent lighting, like a nuclear bunker or a morgue.

  There are a few people in suits in the corridors, all moving with purpose. At the end of a hallway, behind a glass door, a woman at another desk.

  “Please wait. An agent will be with you shortly.” The receptionist extends a hand to the other side of the tiny foyer, which is the entry to the suite
of offices beyond.

  There are no chairs, but the opposite wall is decorated with a board of FBI Most Wanted posters. A guy stands facing them, hands on hips, pushing back the fall of his windbreaker.

  Emma stands nearby and checks her watch. Cooper said ten, and it’s edging toward ten past. She could’ve come at ten thirty, slept in an extra half hour.

  Last night’s motel off Route 1 turned out to be seedier than she would’ve liked, but the woman in the diner poured her extra coffee. It was probably on account of her hair, Emma thinks. She wears a scarf over it occasionally, which makes her look like a cancer patient. She’s found that it’s sometimes better to look like a cancer patient than to deal with random strangers sneering at her.

  Yesterday she wore her scarf. Now she’s here without it, in the foyer of Behavioral Science, as the boy to her right continues his contemplation of the Most Wanted posters. He has pressed cargo pants and his collar is stiff and neat. He checks his watch, and Emma realizes they are both waiting. This is a waiting area, though. There are many offices. She wonders why Cooper didn’t have her directed to wait in his.

  Emma anchors herself in the solid press of her feet on the concrete floor, her hands in her pockets, shoulders square. She’s relieved to find herself steady, holding firm.

  Then she rubs a hand across her head and it arrives: She has not seen anyone in this building so far who is younger than their midtwenties. She is young. The guy beside her is young. They could be the only young people in the building, and they are both waiting here.

  When she turns, he is already looking at her.

  “I’m thinking… I’m thinking maybe we should introduce ourselves,” he says.

  He has very dark hair and eyes, olive skin. He holds out his hand.

  “Bell, Travis J.” He doesn’t squeeze her fingers out of existence. It’s a short, professional handshake. “I’m waiting on Special Agent Cooper and I believe you might be, too.”

  “I am. I mean, yes. I’m Emma Lewis.”

  “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Likewise.”

  She absorbs his accent: southern, probably Texas with that laconic delivery, and if she had to guess she’d say army brat or law enforcement trainee. After the handshake, they return to standing side by side, like a pair of trout who’ve somehow found themselves swimming together against the current. Through the glass door, Emma sees a figure approaching. When she straightens, Bell does the same and speaks out of the corner of his mouth.

  “Were you told about a unit? I was told there was going to be a unit.”

  Emma presses her lips. “I think we’re the unit.”

  Cooper has already breached the door.

  “Miss Lewis, Mr. Bell.” He shifts the folders he’s carrying and shakes their hands in turn. Emma finds it easier to take his hand here, in a formal setting. “You’ve already been introduced? Thank you both for coming. There’s a place for us to talk—please follow me.”

  He leads them, not toward the offices as Emma had anticipated, but back out to the hallway. Cooper’s walk is brisk, military; otherwise, he is just a slight, Caucasian man in a regulation suit who looks more like an accountant than an FBI agent. He steers their course farther along and then around a corner into another corridor.

  “Why aren’t we talking in your office about this?” Emma asks.

  Cooper stops at the door to a room. He unlocks it, opens it, gestures for them to enter. “Because my office—like every office in Behavioral Science—is covered in paperwork about active cases, which is something you’re not allowed to see.”

  The room they’ve entered is large, gray, and dim. There’s a wooden desk, four folded metal chairs with cushioned seats, an office lamp on the desk, two large filing cabinets. More than a dozen cardboard file boxes are stacked on the floor and against two walls.

  “We can only see information on cold cases,” Bell says. It’s not a question. Emma notices how straight his posture is and wonders if upright translates to uptight.

  Cooper nods. “This unit is not concerned with active cases. That’s a bureau directive, by the way. You’re only researching perpetrators who’ve been convicted and are serving sentences.”

  “And we’re the unit, aren’t we?” Emma wants to know for sure.

  “Yes,” Cooper confirms.

  Bell, Travis J., turns his head and looks at Emma, and Emma finds something she wasn’t expecting in that look. You were right, his eyes say. Unusual to meet a guy who’ll admit that.

  “Okay.” Cooper points to the groupings of file boxes. “Subject one, Clarence McMurtry. Subject two, Michael Gesak. Subjects three, four, five… I’ve made up a summary for each subject so you won’t need to review all these files, although they’re here for extra research. But I think it’s better if you relate to the subjects as teenagers. I’d like you to go in with an open mind.”

  “When do we go in?” Bell asks.

  “Your first interview is scheduled for tomorrow.”

  Fuck, Emma thinks, but what she says is “That’s soon.”

  “Yes.” Cooper makes no apology for it, and Emma liked him better when he was pussyfooting around her during his first approach at OSU. “Grab a chair, that’s it, any of those chairs is fine. Here’s the summary for McMurtry. These folders have the questionnaires—the pink one is for the interviewer, the blue one is for the subject, if he consents to fill it out.”

  Bell hunkers forward on his chair, lifts the cover on the folder holding the pink pages. “So we go to the facility, follow the admission processes, and we get, what, an interview room?”

  Cooper nods. “You’ll be provided with identification—the interview times are already set up. You go in, conduct the interview, write up your report, and submit it with your travel receipts. It should be pretty straightforward.”

  This is all happening very fast. Emma thought there would be more preamble.

  “Back up a little,” she says. “These interviews… This is the second run at them, is that right?”

  “That’s correct,” Cooper says.

  “What went wrong the first time?”

  “The subjects… I explained this with you. They don’t talk to us.”

  “They refuse to speak? They clam up?”

  Cooper grimaces, undoes the button on his suit jacket. “Sometimes it’s like that. They withdraw. You can see the shutters roll down. Other times they reply in monosyllables. Swear. Whine. Last time we tried to interview McMurtry, he gave us a long diatribe about his treatment in prison—everything up to and including the quality of the toilet paper.”

  “But nothing about the murders,” Emma says.

  “That’s right.”

  “And that’s the information you need.”

  “We need details. What was their state of mind prior to each crime, what were they thinking about. How did they select their victims, what preparations did they make, if any. We don’t really expect any useful insight into motive from teenage subjects. Half the time they don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing. But information about preparation, process, aftermath… that’s all stuff we can use.”

  Emma watches Cooper’s face as he speaks and notices the cold in her fingertips. The room itself is cold, and in its emptiness she can hear the humming echo of the air-conditioning. Her chest feels tight. She’s about to go into prisons and talk to people like Huxton. No—Huxton was forty-two. She’ll be talking to teenage versions of Huxton, then.

  It occurs to her again that she has almost no understanding of her own motive in this situation. Why is she doing this?

  Bell fills the silence. “We’ll do our best, sir. What time should we—”

  A knock on the door before it opens. The woman from Behavioral Science—the receptionist from the foyer—walks in and hands Cooper a folded note on yellow memo paper.

  Cooper scans the note, rises, re-buttoning his jacket. “Excuse me, I’ve been called away. Tomorrow’s interview is at Beckley. That’s a four-and
-a-half-hour drive, and you’ll need to report here at oh eight thirty tomorrow morning and collect materials before you leave. Don’t forget to keep your receipts.”

  “Wait, what?” Emma starts to lift from her chair. “My suitcase is still in the trunk of my car—”

  Cooper turns to the receptionist. “Betty, would you mind, with these two?” The woman nods. She is a white woman, about sixty, her hair blue-rinsed and perfectly coiffed. Cooper glances at Emma and Bell again as he walks toward the door. “Talk to Betty about photo IDs and dorm allocations. Unpack, get settled. I’ll speak to you again tomorrow, after the interview.”

  He and Betty leave. Emma stares.

  Bell gathers the folders, straightens them carefully. “He’s under the gun. There’s an active case in Pennsylvania—”

  “Are you apologizing for him?” When Bell doesn’t reply, Emma sits back in her chair. “How do you know about active cases?”

  “It’s been in the news. Don’t you read the news?”

  “No.”

  “You need to get out more.”

  She turns to shoot back, before realizing his eyes are amused, his lips twitching. A sense of humor. Maybe this guy isn’t a zero-personality FBI cipher after all. “I just drove four hundred miles to interview a bunch of teenage crazy folk. You don’t think that qualifies?”

  He looks at the folders and smiles. “Sounds like you’re just getting warmed up.”

  He is one of those people whose entire face and demeanor are transformed by smiling, Emma discovers. Then he sobers and taps the folders.

  “You thought we’d be eased into this,” he says, “but that’s not how it works. I’ve got a law enforcement background, I know the life—they throw you into the deep end. And I’d lay fifty dollars on Cooper wanting to get these interviews done before this Pennsylvania thing blows up, and the manpower and budget are transferred.”

  She sighs. “So he’s not being an asshole on purpose, he’s just under pressure.”