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the supply in the room. Probably inmates didn’t usually meet with six cops all at once, even in rooms like this. The domestic terrorism threat had forged a nexus of law enforcement.
    All of the chairs faced the back wall. The one chair for the inmate faced the door. It was just one more prison precaution: keep the prisoner as far from the exit as possible.
    Everyone took their seats, no one talked. Jennifer tried to keep her heart rate down; she took long, deep breaths. She envisioned Grimm on the other side of the one-way mirror at the end of the rectangular shaped room watching her, but she didn’t look that way. She didn’t want to see her reflection.
    She rested her eyes, straight ahead, at the back wall. The walls were painted darker than the rest of the prison. The enclosed space smelled of disinfectant, which did not entirely mask the other odors lingering beneath. The acrid tinge of sweat. The stink of bad breath and old coffee. But mostly the smell of concrete, that cool, dank aroma of a cave.
    She put her hands in front of her on the table and enfolded the fingers. She was just about to say something to Rascher, break the awkward silence which had descended, when the keys hit the lock behind her. Her heart jumped. The door opened and she was suddenly gripped with fear. Here she’d been thinking that she knew prisons, she felt she understood Healy, yet in that moment one thought crystallized out of all others: she knew nothing.
    She wondered if she should turn to look behind her, but she waited. She heard the shuffling of feet and the rattle of chains. These sounds moved around to her right side and then he came into view in her peripheral vision. She turned her head to watch as Brendan Healy shuffled around the table and sat down. His eyes were on her the whole time.

CHAPTER FOUR / WEDNESDAY 1:03 PM
    Healy was wearing jail fatigues, institutional green, with INMATE 909896 stenciled on the front and back. He looked bigger than she’d envisioned, more muscular. She’d conjured his appearance from pictures, a few shots gleaned from the media during the Rebecca Heilshorn case, where Healy, appearing reluctant, would be partially hidden behind Lawrence Taber and Ambrose Delaney, the lead investigator. She’d seen earlier pictures taken during his graduate study at NYU Langone in Manhattan, publicity photos for the medical center. In those, Healy had been thin, his eyes often hangover red. He’d dressed in decent suits. Though his ties revealed that he was a bachelor, no wife would choose those colors. Now, his dark hair had been cut short, and he was at least ten pounds heavier than she’d expected, solid on his tall frame. There was a faded purple bruise around his left eye and yellow discoloration along his jaw.
    He looked at her across the table, unblinking, his lips pressed into a straight line. He seemed to be waiting for her to make the first move. They all were.
    “Hello,” she said. Her voice sounded funny to her ears and she cleared her throat. “I’m Jennifer Aiken.”
    “I know.”
    Of course he knew. But what other way was there to begin? On the drive to the Island, on the flight in — hell, from the moment she’d first decided to meet with him — Jennifer had thought about what she would say. Any sense of preparedness deserted her now.
    “How are you?” she asked.
    She watched him calculate a response. It was just something in his eyes, alive and alert, which suggested he was going through some rubric in his mind. He was guarded, of that there was no doubt; but there was more. She felt a renewed pang of guilt. Surely he questioned why it had taken her all this time to come. Or was that self-centered? Maybe he hadn’t been thinking about it at all.
    “I’m good.” His voice was rather toneless. “What can I do for you, Agent Aiken?”
    “Well,” she began. At the same time she pulled her fingers apart. She realized she had lost feeling in her hands, a strange sensation, and she