She stared up at him expectantly.
‘Have you ever met Ernest Andrew Cooper?’
‘No.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘Am I?’
Suppressing all the sympathy and compassion he felt for her, he made his voice even colder, and he raised one fist over her, although he had no intention of using it. ‘Do you know Cooper?’
She didn’t answer, but her eyes focused on his big fist with an unholy adoration that he couldn’t bear to contemplate.
With sudden inspiration, he feigned an anger that he didn’t feel and said, ‘Answer me, you bitch!’
She flinched at the derogatory address, but not because it hurt or surprised her. She flinched, instead, as if a shock of delight had passed through her. Even that meager verbal abuse had been a key that unlocked her.
Gazing at his fist, she said, ‘Please.’
‘Maybe.’
‘You’d like to.’
‘Maybe … if you tell me what I want to know. Cooper.’
‘They don’t tell me their last names. I knew an Ernie somebody, but I don’t know if it was Cooper.’
He described the dead millionaire.
‘Yeah,’ she said, her gaze shifting between his fist and his eyes. ‘That was him.’
‘You met him through Willy?’
‘Yes.’
‘And Joseph Scaldone?’
‘Willy … introduced me to this guy named Joe, but I never knew his last name, either.’
Dan described Joseph Scaldone.
She nodded. ‘That was him.’
‘And Ned Rink?’
‘I don’t think I ever met him.’
‘A short, stocky, rather ugly man.’
As he fleshed out that description, she began to shake her head. ‘No. I never met that one.’
‘You’ve seen the gray room?’
‘Yes. I dream of it sometimes. Of sitting in that chair, and they do it to me, the shocks, the electricity.’
‘When did you see it? The room, the chair?’
‘Oh, a few years ago, when they were first painting the room, putting in the equipment, getting it ready …’
‘What were they doing with Melanie McCaffrey?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Don’t lie to me, damn it. You are what you’re expected to be, and you do what’s wanted of you, always what’s wanted of you, so cut the shit and answer me.’
‘No, really. I don’t know,’ she said meekly. ‘Willy never told me. It was secret. An important secret. It’d change the world, he said. That’s all I know. He didn’t include me in those things very much. His life with me was separate from his work with those other men.’
Dan continued to stand over her, and she continued to cower in a corner of the sofa, and although the threat he posed to her was entirely theatrical, he nevertheless felt uncomfortably like a bully. ‘What did the occult have to do with their experiments?’
‘I haven’t any idea.’
‘Did Willy believe in the supernatural?’
‘No.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Well … because Dylan McCaffrey believed indiscriminately in it — all of it, ghosts and seances and even goblins for all I know — and Willy used to make fun of him, said he was gullible.’
‘Then why was he working with McCaffrey?’
‘Willy thought Dylan was a genius.’
‘In spite of his superstitions?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Who was funding them, Regine?’
‘I don’t know.’
She moved in such a way that her robe parted further, revealing more cleavage, most of one full breast.
‘Come on,’ he said impatiently. ‘Who’s been paying their bills? Who, Regine?’
‘I swear, I don’t know.’
He sat on the couch beside her. He took her by the chin, held her face, not gently, not with erotic intention, but as an extension of the threat first embodied by his raised fist.
Meaningless as the threat was, she nevertheless responded to it. This was what she wanted: to be intimidated, to be commanded, and to obey.
‘Who?’ he repeated.
She said, ‘I don’t know. I really, really don’t. I’d tell you if I did. I swear. Anything you want, I’d tell you.’
This time he believed her. But he didn’t let go of her face. ‘I know Melanie McCaffrey endured a lot of mental and physical abuse in that gray room. But I want to know … Christ, I don’t want to know, but I’ve got to know … was there sexual abuse too?’