“The truth.”
“The truth?”
Bob took the device from the inside pocket of his coat and put it down in front of her. “Radica 20Q,” he said before she had time to ask. “It can read your thoughts.”
“Right. And if I prefer to keep my thoughts to myself?”
“I’m thinking not so much of your thoughts as of your son’s. He’s going to love this.”
Liza raised an eyebrow. “What makes you so sure about that?”
“All intelligent children are curious about things that are intelligent.”
She lifted the ball and studied it skeptically. “Well, I must say, it looks as if it’s been used a lot.”
“It was my daughter’s.”
“You’vegot a daughter?”
“Had. Frankie. She died. She’d be happy if another child had the pleasure of using her favorite toy. She was like that.”
Liza’s mouth opened slightly. For a moment her eyes went blank. And Bob saw how her face, how the way she was standing, the way she held her hands, how everything about her was changed. Of course, he’d seen the effect before on the few occasions when he’d told someone he’d lost his daughter, how the other person always searched for some kind of adequate response. But never like this. It was as though the words had struck a chord inside Liza Hummels, as though they opened the door to a person Bob hadn’t yet met. She became, thought Bob—for want of a better word—beautiful. And her voice was thicker when, after a few seconds’ silence, she said, very clearly:
“Hillary Clinton for Prison.”
“Sorry?”
“The password. Not my idea. I hope you like your coffee black?”
—
Bob talked about Frankie and their family of three without the dam bursting. Liza was the one who now and then dried a tear.
“It was Alice’s idea to call her Frankie. It means ‘free man.’ She wanted every door to be open to her.”
Liza nodded. “That’s the same reason I called my son Johan.”
“Johan?”
“It’s what people call a high-income name. It doesn’t make the child any more intelligent, but it gives them an edge when they apply for high-income jobs after college.”
“So Johan’s going to college?”
She shrugged. “Why do you think I work twelve-hour shifts?”
“And if he doesn’t want to?”
“Then he won’t have to. It’s about keeping as many doors as possible open for them, isn’t it? So what happened after Frankie’s death?”
Bob spoke of the depression, his problems with anger, the separation and his current situation as a detective suspended from duty. And finally, halfway down the third cup of coffee, of his strictly unofficial hunt for Tomás Gomez. By this time two more customers had arrived. One sat quietly reading a newspaper in the corner, while the other was apparently drawing the two of them, now and then looking up from his sketch pad.
“So you have absolutely no personal information about him at all?” asked Liza.
“Nope,” said Bob. “But we know the story of how his family was killed, and we have these images from various security cameras.”
Bob turned the laptop screen so that she could see it. To his relief, not to say surprise, it was obvious no one had thought of blocking his access to MPD’s databases.
“How old would you say this guy was?” he asked.
