‘But your husband wasn’t using this just to relax.’
‘I doubt it,’ she agreed.
‘Then what was he after, specifically?’
‘I really have no way of knowing.’ Anguish returned to her face, her eyes.
Dan said, ‘I think this wasn’t just his lab, I think it was your daughter’s room too. I think she was a virtual prisoner in here. And I think she slept in this tank every night and maybe spent days at a time in it.’
‘Days? No. That’s not … possible.’
‘Why isn’t it?’
‘The potential for psychological damage, the risks—’
‘Maybe your husband didn’t care about the risks.’
‘But she was his daughter. He loved Melanie. I’ll give him that much. He genuinely loved her.’
‘We’ve found a journal in which your husband seems to account for every minute of your daughter’s time during the past five and a half years.’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘I want to see it.’
‘In a minute. I haven’t studied it closely yet, but I don’t think your daughter was ever out of this house in five and a half years. Not to school. Not to a doctor. Not to a movie or the zoo or anywhere. And even if you say it’s not possible, I think, from what I’ve seen, that she sometimes spent as much as three or four days in the tank without coming out.’
‘But food—’
‘I don’t think she was fed in that time.’
‘Water—’
‘Maybe she drank a little of what she was floating in.’
‘She’d have to relieve herself—’
‘From what I’ve seen, there were times when she might have been taken out for only ten or fifteen minutes, long enough to use the bathroom. But in other cases, I think he catheterized her, so she could urinate into a sealed specimen jar without being taken out of the tank and without contaminating the water she was floating in.’
The woman looked stricken.
Wanting to get this over with for her sake and also because he was sick of this place, Dan led her away from the tank, to another piece of equipment.
‘A biofeedback machine,’ she told him. ‘It includes an EEG, an electroencephalograph to monitor brain waves. It supposedly helps you learn to control the patterns of your brain waves and, therefore, your state of mind.’
‘I know about biofeedback.’ He pointed past that machine. ‘And this?’
It was a chair, from which dangled leather straps and wires that ended in electrodes.
Laura McCaffrey examined it, and Dan could sense her growing disgust — and terror.
At last she said,’An aversion-therapy device.’
‘Looks like an electric chair to me.’
‘It is. Not one that kills. The current comes from those batteries, not from a wall socket. And this’ — she touched a lever on the side of the chair — ‘regulates the voltage. You can deliver anything from a tingle to a painful shock.’
‘This is a standard psychological research device?’
‘Good heavens, no!’
‘You ever see one of these in a lab before?’
‘Once. Well … twice.’
‘Where?’
‘A rather unscrupulous animal psychologist I once knew. He used electric-shock aversion training with monkeys.’
‘Tortured them?’
‘I’m sure he didn’t see it that way.’
‘All animal psychologists don’t do that?’
‘I said he was unscrupulous. Listen, I hope you’re not one of those new Luddites who think all scientists are fools or monsters.’
‘Not me. When I was a kid, I never missed Mr. Wizard on TV.’
She managed a faint smile. ‘Didn’t mean to snap at you.’
‘It’s understandable. Now, you said you’ve seen one of these devices twice before. What about the second time?’
The meager glow of her weak smile was suddenly extinguished. ‘I saw the second one in a photograph.’
‘Oh?’
‘In a book about … scientific experimentation in Nazi Germany.’
‘I see.’
‘They used it on people.’
He hesitated. But it had to be said. ‘So did your husband.’
Laura McCaffrey regarded him not with disbelief as much as with an ardent desire to disbelieve. Her face was the color of cold ashes, burnt out.
Dan said, ‘I think he put your daughter in this chair—’
‘No.’
‘—and I think he and Hoffritz and God knows who else—’