‘I know,’ Earl said.
Flash said, ‘We’re heading back to the office, check this out, see if the Bureau employs agents with those names.’
‘You’ll find the names, even if these guys aren’t legit,’ Earl said. ‘What you’ve got to do is get photos of the real agents and see if they look like these guys.’
‘That’s what we figure to do,’ Flash said.
‘Get back to me as soon as you can,’ Earl said, and the other two turned toward the door.
Laura said, ‘Wait.’
Everyone looked at her.
She said, ‘What did they tell you? What reason did they give for watching my house?’
‘Bureau doesn’t talk about its operations unless it wants to,’ Earl told Laura.
‘And these guys didn’t want to,’ Flash said. ‘They’d no sooner tell us their reasons for watching you than they’d kiss us and ask us to dance.’
The tall man nodded agreement.
Laura said, ‘If they were here to protect Melanie and me, they’d tell us, wouldn’t they? So that means they must be here to snatch her back.’
‘Not necessarily,’ Flash said.
Earl put his revolver back in his shoulder holster. ‘Laura, see, the situation may be just as unclear and confusing to the Bureau as it is to us. For instance, suppose your husband was working on an important Pentagon project when he disappeared with Melanie. Suppose the FBI’s been looking for him ever since. Now he turns up, dead, in peculiar circumstances. Maybe it hasn’t been our government funding him these last six years, in which case they’re bound to wonder where he’s been getting his money.’
Again, Laura felt as if the floor were tilting under her, as if the real world that she’d always taken for granted were an illusion. It almost seemed as though true reality might be the paranoid’s nightmare world of unseen enemies and complex conspiracies.
She said, ‘Then you’re telling me they’re out in that telephone-company van, watching my house, because they think someone else may come for Melanie, and they want to nab them in the act? But I still don’t understand why they didn’t come to me and tell me they were going to be watching.’
‘They don’t trust you,’ Flash said.
‘They were angry with us for revealing their presence not just to anyone who might’ve been watching out there,’ Earl said, ‘but to you as well.’
Puzzled, she said, ‘Why?’
Earl looked uncomfortable. ‘Because, as far as they know, maybe you’ve always been in this thing with your husband.’
‘He stole Melanie from me.’
Earl cleared his throat and looked unhappy at having to explain this to her. ‘From the Bureau’s point of view, could be that you let your husband take your daughter, so he’d be able to experiment on her with no notice or interference from family or friends.’
Shocked, Laura said, ‘That’s insane! You see what’s been done to Melanie. How could I be a party to that?’
‘People do strange things.’
‘I love her. She’s my little girl. Dylan was disturbed, maybe crazy, okay, so he was too unbalanced to see or even care how he was hurting her, destroying her. But I’m not unbalanced too! I’m not like Dylan.’
‘I know,’ Earl said soothingly. ‘I know you’re not.’
She saw belief in Earl Benton’s eyes, trust and compassion, but when she looked at the other two men, she saw an element of doubt and suspicion.
They were working for her, but they didn’t entirely believe that she had told them the truth.
Madness.
She was caught in a whirlpool that was carrying her down into a nightmare world of suspicion, deception, and violence, into an alien landscape where nothing was what it appeared to be.
* * *
Surprised, Dan said, ‘Nut? I didn’t know psychologists used words like that.’
Marge smiled ruefully. ‘Oh, not in the classroom, and not in published papers, and certainly not in a courtroom if we’re ever asked for testimony in a sanity hearing. But this is in the privacy of my office, just between almost-strangers, and I tell you, Dan, he was a nut. Not certifiable, mind you. Not close. But not merely eccentric, either. His primary area of research was supposed to be the development and application of behavior-modification techniques that would reform the criminal personality. But he was always off on a tangent, riding one odd hobbyhorse or another. He regularly announced a deep commitment — “obsessed” is the right word — to some new line of research, but after six months or so, he would completely lose interest in it.