Studying the young officer a moment there in the bright light, hairless, baby-faced, I could see how with the right makeup and clothes he’d look feminine enough to fool another woman even at close quarters.

“Officer Carney,” I began.

He looked over at me with disdain, said, “Wrong name.”

“Okay,” I replied. “Who am I talking to?”

Carney laughed, said, “Bang. Bang. As if you don’t know.”

Then I got it and said, “Oh, hello, Kevin.”

Carney smiled, nodded, said, “See, I told ’em you’d know who I was.”

Chapter

84

I cleared my throat, said, “Told who? Kenny-Two? Kelli? Your brother and sister?”

“Who else? Officer Goody Two-Shoes?” Carney asked agreeably, then paused and gave me a suspicious look. “Why you asking about Kelli and Junior? Pay attention. You talking to me now, asshole!”

I held up my palms to him, said, “Just trying to understand the—”

Carney’s agitated face became a sea of minor tics and palsies. His eyes quivered, got glassy, and then fluttered up toward their sockets, while his head arched and the muscles in his neck strained, making his veins bulge. For a second, fearing that he was going into an epileptic fit, I almost went to him.

But as suddenly as the attack had come on, in less than five seconds, Carney’s neck relaxed and his head lolled. He blinked lazily at me and then said in that raspy southern feminine voice I’d heard back inside the root cellar: “You’ll have to excuse Kevin. My baby brother’s faculties just aren’t quite right.”

I studied Carney, wondering whether this was an act or a genuine case of multiple personalities. If it was an act, it was a good one, because my experience and research have shown that people with real multiple personality disorder usually “switch” from one to another quite rapidly. The fluttering eyes and the facial tics fit as well. But the arching of his neck, I’d never seen before. In any case, I decided to indulge him.

“Well, Kelli,” I said, “when you consider what Kevin did in the massage parlor and the brothel, I’d tend to agree with you.”

Carney shook his head, added pity to Kelli’s voice, and said, “Horrible thing what war can do to a young man, isn’t it? The violence just twists them all up inside, spits them out. Makes you kind of understand when they come home and go off like that, you know, just killing everything that moves?”

The fit took him again, and when he rolled his head forward the second time, he wore a tough, knowing expression.

“Don’t listen to that psychobabble crap,” he said in a voice much closer to his own. “Kevin likes to kill, pure and simple. Always has. Always will. And Kelli’s a bit delusional, always out to save someone if I let her.”

“Big brother Kenny-Two?” I asked.

“In the flesh,” Carney replied, coughed, and then his left eye squinted as if it pained him.

“Your brother and sister look up to you,” I said.

“They better look up to the first one out the chute,” he said, chuckled, and then his left eye squinted in pain again.

“You hurting?”

“Lingering migraines,” he said. “We all get ’em. Curse of the Carneys.”

Thinking back to what I’d heard in the root cellar, and what Sampson had dug up, I hesitated fifteen, maybe twenty seconds before saying, “So tell me about the IED that got you in Afghanistan.”

He squinted again, but this time as if he considered me a fool, and said, “How the Christ should I know? Ask the man in charge. He was there, not me.”

Before I could reply to that, Carney’s face sagged, his eyes drifted and shut. His head rocked forward and then up like the head of a passenger drowsing on a plane.

Eyes open and incredulous, as if he’d been shaken from a deep sleep, he looked at me as if I were part of a lingering dream and then took in the bare room, the restraints, the hospital gown, and the bandages on his shoulder and wrist.

He seemed to startle fully awake then, acting bewildered and then agitated, struggling against the restraints for several seconds be

Tags: James Patterson Alex Cross Mystery
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