"So, just to clarify, you're going to shoot me in my own police station?"
"No."
"No?"
"No. I'm going to shoot you in the face," Clarissa told him, barely hiding a smirk that was fighting through. Billy felt a strange urge to laugh. "You're this keen to lie to me and try all your fancy tricks. Well, in equal measures, I would like to see your face with a hole in it. I'd like to see pieces of your brain splattering out onto your desk. It would amuse me."
"
I'll make you a deal."
"I don't want a deal."
"Well, I'd quite like a deal," Billy near shouted through his sense of panic. "As much fun as it would be to die and never, you know, breathe again, I'd really prefer to make a deal with you."
Clarissa offered him a smile filled with pity. "Billy, you don't have anything I could possibly want."
That was a rather creepy moment for Billy. He head heard a lot of women say something very similar. "Well, maybe you could tell me something I could give you, then I could give it to you."
The smile made entirely of pity came back. "I'll make you a deal," she offered calmly, "but I'm still going to shoot you."
"That deal doesn't exactly suit me," said Billy.
"You get to live for an extra ten minutes," Clarissa added to their makeshift arrangement. "I'd say it's the best deal you're going to hear in your lifetime."
Optionless, and aware of it, Billy considered the choices available to him. Clarissa had never shot anybody, which gave Billy a clear advantage. He might be able to get to his abandoned weapon before she could hit him, but the window of opportunity would be severely limited. Whatever deal was on the cards would give him time to think. That was more than enough reasoning to convince him.
"Tell me about this deal," he permitted his would be assailant.
To his surprise, Clarissa spent a moment perching herself on the end of one of the other desks and crossing her legs, while making sure that Billy was always in her sights. The fire alarm had been stopped, leaving something of a ringing in Billy's ears, but Clarissa didn't seem at all concerned that people were going to be coming into the building soon. She seemed completely at ease. Too much so, in fact.
"Obviously, you know the man you had here wasn't really called Dirk Fletcher," she began, laying out her point slowly as though speaking with a child. "Robin likes to create a stack of different identities well before he has to use them, and he gives them traits and tricks and things they do. I've met a few. It's been funny, but as we speak Dirk fletcher is in the process of vanishing forever, and I'll never get to meet him. I keep a diary, just to keep track."
She stopped there, leaving a gap that Billy struggled to fill. "You want to know what I know?"
"I want to know what you know."
Billy didn't quite believe her reasoning. "Are you supposed to do this?"
"Do what?" she asked, puzzled.
It was his turn to offer a smile conveying only pity. "Find out what I know," replied Billy. "That's what you're after, isn't it? You need to know how deep I went into your little spiralling maze of lies, deceit and complete and utter mental. I can't keep up. Whatever his name is is missing chunks here and there because he's not thinking himself. You're a spectator instead of being involved. How are you supposed to keep track?"
"Pretty much, yeah," admitted Clarissa, without either shame or remorse. "We've monitored your files and your board for a while. You're fairly easy to mark."
"So, you can't shoot me until you have all the details I didn't write down?"
"No, I can shoot you whenever I want," Clarified Clarissa. "I just want a few more details, for Robin."
"Do you have any idea how disturbing that is?" demanded Billy. He could almost hear his life trickling away from him, panic bouncing around his skull and adrenaline completely failing to boost his nerves, senses and reflexes. He almost felt sleepy, and tired, and oddly hungry. This was not how a person was supposed to react to a life or death situation. A cheeseburger would have been fantastic right now. "You're acting like this man is the centre of your world, when he's hardly a role model worth pursuing. You're talking about a murderer, a cold blooded killer, and you're trying to turn into him. He kidnapped you, and took you away from parents that loved you. You can't-"
"No. We're not letting this play out," Clarissa cut off. "I don't want to hear all of this. It's pointless. I wasn't kidnapped, I was rescued."
"You were a kid, you don't know any-"
"Enough of the stockholm syndrome bullshit. Yes, I was young, but I was aware of what was going on around me. Robin Harris is my hero. He was my salvation. I can never repay him for everything he did for me. He saved me from everything, and he's saved so many people since. So there are a few casualties. So a few people lost something or someone along the way. That's not my decision, or your decision. Some people are always going to die. Some people have to die. Some people should die, but somehow they end up escaping everything they should pay for. You're in that. You're in it so deep you don't know what's your life and what's other peoples. How can't you understand?"
"You weren't old enough to be making those decisions," countered Billy. He was on a roll now, considering how likely it was that he would die anyway. Perhaps filling in a few of his own gaps would be nice. "He forced you to leave with him, or coerced you. Whatever happened, it shouldn't have, and he's obviously convinced you since then that you're essentially his property."
Without warning, Clarissa squeezed the trigger of her gun, forcing a bullet out of the cylinder to smash into the leg of the desk that Billy was leaning on. In shock, he jumped out of his skin, before his weight shifted the desk to one side, making the damaged leg give way and Billy and the desk tumbled to the floor.
Clarissa laughed while Billy fought to get back up and ensure that she was in his line of sight. Okay, she was a good shot. A tremendous shot in fact. Billy wasn't hungry any more.
"I'm not property anymore," she said through gritted teeth. The optimism had vanished. She wasn't happy with him anymore. Her favourite toy was being a prick. "You sound like my father. I don't like my father. I'd like to shoot my father, and I'd like to shoot you."
And yet, she wasn't. Well, this was certainly something that Billy had experienced before. Maybe, with a little luck, this terrifying young lady was such a fantastic actor that he couldn't notice the fear bubbling beneath the surface.
Staying on the floor, Billy looked up at her, happily surrending what she would think of as 'the power'. "Okay, simple question," he began, moving a plan into motion, "how do you know he didn't change how your brain works to make you think that?"
"Don't be ridiculous," she answered. "He learned that afterwards. He was only fifteen when we met. He learned all of that later on when he picked up Jess."
"So that's where he connected with Jess Matthews then?"
"You're pumping me for information, inspector."
"I'm trying. I've seen the files on Senator Heathholm you know."
Her mask broke and, for just a moment, Billy could see the fear he had created. If his files were being monitored, then she knew that Billy had read everything on her father, Senator Heathholm, a man who had more blood on his hands than anybody currently in prison. Unfortunately, no officer in history had been able to prove any of it.
"When I first took the lead on your disappearance I did all the necessary research. I know your history. I know why you might see it as a rescue that somebody took you away from all that."
In a moment, she became a little girl in front of him, her eyes downcast and nervousness evident in her every motion. "He's my hero," she repeated quietly, as though unsure of her words. "He lost his mum in the same accident we were in. People died, but it was my perfect opportunity. I met the one and only best man in the world, and he talked to me. He couldn't protect her, but he could protect me. My nanny had to suffer for it, but she had to go. She was in the way. It's a shame really. She was nice, but she didn't want me to go, and Robin couldn't hide her too. He could probably hide her now, but that's not when we are, is it? I had to turn my back and pretend I didn't know about the affairs, and the murders and the tortures. I knew about ties with the families, and he'd been hiring dishonourable discharges as enforcers. None of you could do anything. None of you even tried. I got all the evidence I could, but only Robin would listen to me. Only Robin promised to find a way to stop him. He's not there yet, but that's why he's doing all this. He's going to save so many lives using what I learned. We just need the files."
"That's why you're here."
"That's why we're here," continued Clarissa, quiet once again. "By now, Jess will have the file she wants, and Robin will have killed Dirk Fletcher. There is no Dirk Fletcher anymore."
"And you have the wrong file," lied Billy. Clarissa bared her teeth, but Billy held his ground before she could react. "He has people on the inside who monitor that file here. There's another file I only found out about when I was put onto your case. All the gathered evidence and the examples is in one place and it's not here. It's under lock and key."
"Then what's stopping me from having you punished and tortured and burned until you give me the right information?" asked Clarissa calmly.
"Death is quick, and relieving," responded Billy with absolute confidence. "Torture is something your father does. You don't want to hurt people. In a way, you feel like you're helping everybody you kill. You could try to do things that way, or there's an easy alternative. I could help you. I could put a stop to this. I could put him behind bars, with your help, and make sure that nobody else has to die. You could give me the last piece of the puzzle and I could make sure that nobody ever comes after you again."
There was a long silence. Clarissa's aim wavered, and her spare hand began to wander around her pocket. "You can't do it."
"I came close enough to look you in the eye. I can take him down."
From her pocket, Clarissa retrieved a tiny flash drive and let it drop to the table beside her. "Close your eyes," she told him.
"What?"
"Close your eyes."
A new jolt of fear ran through him, but Billy closed his eyes anyway.
It was over a minute before he opened his eyes again. Clarissa Heathholm was gone, vanished as quickly as she had appeared. Left over on the desk was the flash drive, sitting there like an intruder. He rose from the floor to collect it and put it in his pocket.
It wasn't time yet. There was something else to do first.
