“We’d still like to try.”
Ms. Kachinski reluctantly agreed. Dr.Reeves, despite his injuries, was still a grown man, after all. The rules regarding interviewing an adult of diminished capacity were sketchy. Because you couldn’t Mirandize a man who didn’t understand, it was unlikely that anything Dr.Reeves told them here today would be admissible.
But if he gave them something that could set them on the right path, that was a different story.
He won’t. He can’t speak. Doesn’t understand.
“You’re wasting your time,” Sarah muttered under her breath.
She navigated the hallways, stopped in front of a door before opening it for them.
They found Dr.Reeves sitting on a chair in the center of the small, boxy apartment, his back to them. He didn’t react to his door being opened. The man’s mangled right hand—comprised of fingers that were unnaturally short and lacked fingernails—was gripping a chess piece. A rook.
He moved it straight across a small, thin chessboard resting on a table. Placed it on the other side. It was the only piece on the board.
Dr.Reeves starts the fire, plunks Neely on the head. Don’t know for sure with what, but if I had to guess, it was this giant paperweight shaped like a chess piece.
“Dr.Reeves?” Darnell said.
No response.
They walked around to Dr.Reeves’s front.
Darnell stopped abruptly when they got a clear view of his face. Vaughn had already seen the strange peach mask that Dr.Reeves wore, but it was only marginally less unsettling now.
It smoothed all his features, like the thick nylon stockings that bank robbers always wore in the movies. Only in this case, his nose jutted from a hole, and there were additional openings for his eyes and lips.
The man’s eyes appeared more or less normal, and even his nose, pink and smooth, seemed only slightly unusual. In fairness, his nose looked better than retired Detective Howe’s. But the color of Dr.Reeves’s lips was wrong, and they lacked defined borders.
“I—I—” Darnell was too flustered to form sentences.
As petty as it was, Vaughn relished seeing his partner, who always had an insult or quip at the ready, at a loss for words. He let the awkwardness settle for a moment before taking over.
Vaughn also mentally rescinded roughly half of his scathing remarks about Delaney from last night. Coming across Dr.Reeves in this mask in the middle of a field, after just seeing another person dead to gas, must have been a shocking sight.
“Dr.Reeves, my name is Detective Vaughn Ryan, and this is Detective Darnell Sacker. Mind if we ask you a few questions?”
No response.
“Can you tell us what you were doing in the field last night?” Vaughn asked.
Nothing.
“Dr.Reeves, are you familiar with the 100 prisoners problem or the prisoner’s dilemma?” Vaughn asked, thinking that appealing to the mathematical part of the man’s brain might trigger something. If anything clicked with him, it would be this.
Still nothing.
“Dr.Reeves—”
“Tell us about your daughter, Dr.Reeves. Tell us about Ivy.”
Darnell had found his tongue. Vaughn wasn’t positive, but he thought Dr.Reeves cocked his head, just a little. Then he grabbed the rook and squeezed it in his mangled hand.
“Dr.Reeves? Tell us about Ivy.”
No movement this time.
“Dr.Reeves—”
