In the second hour I sat on the mattress, determined not to exhaust myself with the pacing and trying to keep track of time. On occasion I still gave the camera my finger, usually without even bothering to look up while I delivered it. I started thinking about interview room stories to pass the time. I remembered one about a guy we had brought in as a suspect in a double bagger involving a drug rip-off. Our plan was to sweat him a little before we went into the room and tried to break him down. But soon after being placed in the room he took his pants off, tied the legs around his neck and tried to hang himself from the overhead light fixture. They got to him in time and the man was saved. He protested that he would rather kill himself than spend another hour in the room. He had only been in there twenty minutes.

I started laughing to myself and then remembered another story, one that wasn’t so funny. A man who was a peripheral witness to a strong-arm robbery was brought into the box and questioned about what he saw. It was late on a Friday. He was an illegal and he was scared shitless, but he wasn’t a suspect and it would mean too many phone calls and too much paperwork to send him back to Mexico. All that the detective wanted was his information. But before he got it the detective was called out of the interview room. He told the man to sit tight, that he’d be back. Only he never came back. Breaking events on the case took him out into the field and soon he forgot about the witness. On Sunday morning another detective who had come in to try to catch up on his paperwork heard a knocking sound and opened the interview room door to find the witness still there. He had taken empty coffee cups out of the trash can and filled them with urine during the weekend. But as instructed he had never left the unlocked interview room.

Remembering that one made me feel morose. After a while I took off my jacket and lay back on the mattress. I put the jacket over my face to try to block out the light. I tried to give the impression I was sleeping, that I didn’t care what they were doing to me. But I wasn’t sleeping and they probably knew it. I’d seen it all before when I had been on the other side of the glass.

Finally, I tried to concentrate on the case, running all of the latest occurrences through my head, trying to see how they fit. Why had the bureau stepped in? Because I was getting a copy of Lawton Cross’s file? It seemed unlikely. I decided that I had struck the nerve in the library when I had looked up the reports on Mousouwa Aziz. They had talked to the librarian or checked the computer-new laws allowed them to. That was what brought them out. That was what they wanted to know about.

After what I estimated to be about four hours in the cube the door snapped open with an electronic release. I pulled the jacket off my face and sat up just as an agent I had not seen before stepped in. He was carrying a file and a cup of coffee. The agent I knew as Parenting Today stood behind him with a steel chair.

“Don’t get up,” the first agent said.

I stood up anyway.

“What the hell is -”

“I said don’t get up. You sit back down or I’m out of here and we’ll try again tomorrow.”

I hesitated a moment, holding my pose as an angry man and then sat down on the mattress. Parenting Today put the chair down just inside the door and then stepped out of the cell and closed the door. The remaining agent sat down and lowered his steaming coffee to the floor. The smell of it filled the room.

“I’m Special Agent John Peoples with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

“Good for you. What am I doing here?”

“You are here because you do not listen.”

He brought his eyes to mine to make sure I was doing what he just said I do not do. He was my age, maybe a little older. He had all of his hair and it was a little too long for the bureau. I guessed that it wasn’t a style choice. He was just too busy to get it properly cut.

His eyes were the thing. Every face has a magnetic feature, the thing that draws you in. A nose, a scar, a cleft chin. With Peoples everything was drawn to the eyes. They were deeply set and dark. They were worried. They carried a secret burden.

“You were told to stand down, Mr. Bosch,” he said. “You were told rather explicitly to leave things alone and yet here we are.”

“Can you answer a question?”

“I can try. If it’s not classified.”

“Is my watch classified? Where’s my watch? It was given to me when I retired and I want it back.”

“Mr. Bosch, forget about your watch for now. I am trying to get something through that thick skull of yours but you don’t want it to get through, do you?”

He reached down for his coffee and took a sip. He grimaced as he burned his mouth. He put the cup back down on the floor.

“More important things are at work here than your private investigation and your hundred-dollar retirement watch.”

I put a look of surprise on my face.

“You really think that’s all they spent on me after all those years?”

Peoples frowned and shook his head.

“You are not helping yourself here, Mr. Bosch. You are compromising an investigation that is vitally significant to this country and here all you want to do is show how clever you are.”

“This is the national security rap, right? It is, isn’t it? Well, Special Agent Peoples, you can hang on to it for next time. I don’t consider a murder investigation to be unimportant. There are no compromises when it comes to murder.”

Peoples stood up and stepped toward me until he was looking directly down at me. He leaned over the bed, putting his hand against the wall for support.

“Hieronymus Bosch,” he yelled, actually pronouncing it correctly. “You are trespassing! You are driving the wrong way down a one-way street! Do you understand!”

He then turned and went back to his chair. I almost laughed at the theatrics and for a moment thought that he did not realize that I had spent twenty-five years working in rooms like these.

“Am I getting through to you at all?” Peoples said, his voice calm once again. “You are not a cop. You carry no badge. You have no provenance, no case. You have no standing.”

“It used to be a free country. That used to be enough standing.”

“It’s not the same country it used to be. Things have changed.”

He proffered the file held in his hand.

“The murder of this woman is important. Of course it is. But there are other things at play here. More important matters. You must step back from it, Mr. Bosch. This is the final warning. Stand down. Or we will stand you down. And you won’t like it.”

“I bet I’ll end up back here? Right? With Mouse and the others? The other enemy combatants. Isn’t that what you call them? Does anyone even know about this place, Agent Peoples? Anyone outside your own little BAM squad?”

He seemed momentarily taken aback by my knowledge and use of the term.

“I recognized Mouse when they brought me in. I was window shopping.”

“And from that you think you know what goes on here?”

“You’re working the guy. It’s obvious and that’s fine. But what if he’s the one who killed Angella Benton? What if he killed the bank security man? And what if he killed an FBI agent, too? Don’t you care about what happened to Martha Gessler? She was one of your own. Has the world changed that much? Is a special agent no longer special under these new rules of yours? Or does the line change according to convenience? Am I an enemy combatant, Agent Peoples?”

I could see it hurt. My words opened an old wound if not an old debate. But then a resolve came across his face. He opened the file in his hands and took out the printout I had made at the library. I could see the mugshot of Aziz.

“How did you know about this? How did you make this connection?”

“You people.”

“What are you talking about? No one here would tell you -”