4:12

"His voice," said Briona Lang.

She said it softly. She had come to stand at my elbow, a tall, grave woman in a gray suit, and she had not taken her eyes from the telephone. A thread of silver light from the screen lay along her cheek. Her mouth was slightly open.

"Dr. Vaughn. Did you hear that?"

"I heard it."

"It's not distorted."

I had heard it. I had heard it as one hears the first note of a piece of music one has known all one's life, without recognition, and then all at once with a shock. The voice that had come out of the telephone was low, and quiet, and a little hoarse, and tired beyond expression. It had no rasp in it. It had no metal. There was nothing in it of the dry civil courtesy that had hung in my ears for weeks. It was a young man's voice. It had a trace of the north in it, a soft flat Pennsylvania vowel, and a faint huskiness at the bottom, as of a man who has not spoken for a very long time.

It was the voice of someone twenty-six years old.

"Go on, Doctor," it said. "I'm listening."

…

The room was dead still.

I have often tried to describe what it was like, and I have found that I cannot. There were thirty people in that long room, and every one of them was standing as if turned to wood. The air was thick with the smell of sweat and burned coffee. The lights had been dimmed, and the great screen filled the end of the room with a trembling pale glow, the green of the cellar, the glitter of the glass, and in the corner the red digits, perfectly still. 4:12.

I could hear a breath.

It came from the speaker of the telephone. It was a heavy, ragged, unsteady sound, a slow intake and a slow release, with a catch at the top of each. It was the breathing of a man who has been running, or crying, or both. It went on and on, small and regular, filling the room like the tick of a clock. I had never in my life been so conscious of anything.

He is there, I thought. He is in a room, somewhere, alone, with his hand on a switch.

And he is waiting for me to speak.

I had two cards.

…

I want to tell you about them.

I had been holding them for days. I had carried them against my chest since the afternoon in Germantown, in the red light, on a patch of brick paving, with a telephone in my hand and a dead man's folder in my case. I had turned them over, both of them, in the dark, a hundred times. I knew every edge. I knew exactly what each would do.

The first was a knife.

It was a small, cold, exact fact, such as a surgeon might hold in the palm of his hand. It was this. There was a hair clip. It was a yellow plastic one, in the shape of a flower. A child of nine had worn it in her hair on the night she died. And when the police arrived, and made their list of her effects, and signed their form, there was no clip in it. The old woman in Germantown had found it, next morning, in the gravel outside the cellar door.

Outside.

It had not fallen in a struggle in the dark of the cellar. It had come off at the head of the stone steps, as a child was dragged down, and lain in the wet gravel at the top. And someone, that same morning, in the gray light, in the rain, had picked it up.

Someone had been standing at the top of those steps.

I had known it for days. I had known it, I think, from the moment I read the scan. It was a thing that Arlo Wren had never told anyone. It was the thing at the bottom of the well. It was the reason, if there was one, for the grief and the rage and the rooms: that on the night his only friend was shut in the dark with three dogs, a boy of eleven with a fever of a hundred and three had been out of his bed. He had been there. He had stood in the dark of a Quaker yard, in his nightshirt, in the cold, and he had heard.

And he had run.

It was a very bright, very sharp, very terrible card. If I played it, it would go through the armor of that carefully constructed mind like an awl through a plate. It would shatter the pretense. It would show him to himself. It would, I thought, break him; and a man who has been broken will say anything, do anything, give up everything he has.

But I could not tell what else it would do.

…

The second card was a hand.

It was an old woman's voice, in a clean small room, saying: I heard it through the wall. Three taps. Slow. Slow. It was the sound of a pipe at nine o'clock at night. It was a child's way of saying good night. It was this. I'm here.

It was not a weapon. It was not a fact. It was a gesture, which could be refused. It said: I know what you carry, and I know where it began, and I do not hate you for it. It said: there was someone listening. It said, to a boy who had stood alone for fifteen years in the dark, that he had not, after all, been quite alone.

It was a soft card. It was an extremely soft card. And I knew that it could be played in the wrong tone, at the wrong moment, to the wrong man, and be read for what a certain kind of mind would most despise: a weakness. A plea. A trick. The tender, sentimental, contemptible trick of the manipulator who thinks to reach him by his heart.

I might say it, and he might laugh.

Or I might say it, and he might turn off the pump.

Or I might say it, and he might reach for the switch.

…

"Pick one."

It was Leo.

He had come up beside me on the other side, and I had not heard him. He stood close, almost touching, a large, heavy, trembling man with the shreds of a dead cigar in his teeth. His eyes were fixed on the screen. He did not look at me.

"I don't know what you've got," he said. "I don't know what you're thinking. But you've got something, Doc. I can see it. You've been standing there with that look on your face for the last two minutes like a man who's holding his breath." His voice cracked. "Whatever it is. Pick one. Just pick one and say it."

"It is not as simple as that."

"It never is."

"Leo—"

"I know." He swallowed. "I know it isn't. I'm just saying. That guy in there"—he jerked his head at the screen—"he's got about eight minutes. And I don't give a damn who he is. I want to see him breathe."

I looked at the glass box.

Dominic Hargrove had crawled to the wall. He was kneeling upright, with his back against the steel frame, and his face was turned toward the lens. His mouth was open. His chest rose and fell. His eyes had cleared a little, and he seemed to see us, or to see something, through the camera and across a hundred thousand miles of wire. Slowly, with infinite effort, he lifted his right hand, the one without the ring, and laid it flat against the glass. The fingers spread. They trembled.

He was asking.

I could not tell for what.

…

I thought of a lift.

I do not know why. It came into my head, quite suddenly, with the force of a hand on my shoulder: a polished box, five feet by six, in the white glare of a portable lamp. A woman in a slip dress. Ten fingers, broken. And in the air, so faint that I might have imagined it, a smell. Sweet and sharp, dry and bitter. The smell of almonds.

It does not kill, I had said. It only pushes.

I had said it, in that lift, to a roomful of people who could not smell it. I had said: there is a family of compounds that act in very small quantities on the part of the brain that decides how frightened to be. I had said: they are gentle agitants. I had said it with confidence. I had said it with the dry assurance of a man who has the facts.

I stood there, with the clock stopped at 4:12, and thought: this is a man who did not use a knife.

He had not used a gun. He had not used a rope. In five killings he had never once put a hand on his victim. He had never struck a blow, or fired a shot, or spilled a drop of blood that was not spilled by the victim himself. He had built a room, and put a person in it, and stepped back, and let the person's own heart do the rest. There was a sort of purity in it. There was a strange, awful, crippled kind of scruple. A man who has been made to stand outside a door while a child dies does not, I thought, ever again want to stand at a door.

He wanted them to know, I thought.

He wanted them to feel what she felt.

And in the next moment, with a dreadful clarity: and he wanted someone to stop him.

…

I looked at the telephone.

It lay on the table, under the green light of the screen, a plain black instrument with a cord. Out of it came a sound of breathing, hoarse and slow. I had a sense, which I cannot justify, that the man at the other end could see me. That he was looking at my face, on a screen in a dark room, with his chin on his fist, and his eyes very bright, and his mouth a little open.

I thought of the two cards.

I thought of a knife and a hand.

I thought: whichever I play, I cannot take it back.

I thought: and whichever I choose will tell him what kind of man I am.

Behind me, in the stillness, Ryder whispered something. Briona touched my sleeve. Vera, at the end of the table, had risen to her feet, and stood with her fingers pressed hard to her lips.

The clock said 4:12.

The voice said, very quietly, in the dark:

"Doctor?"

WHAT DO YOU DO?

The countdown is frozen at 4:12 and the killer is listening. You hold two truths, and he will hear only one. The first is a blade: the hair clip was never in the cellar, so a boy of eleven stood outside the door. It will shatter his armor, and you cannot know what will rise from the wreckage. The second is a hand: three slow knocks on a pipe, and a child who was never answered. It might reach what is left of the boy, or he might despise it as weakness.