“I didn’t say a thing.”

“You don’t have to. Everything you are—everything you think and feel is in the way you move, the way you breathe, the way you blink.”

The balance had shifted, like a ship listing from starboard to port. Without moving an inch, without flexing a muscle, Dillon had seized control of the interrogation. It angered the profiler how easily he was able to do it.

Dillon’s eyes probed him again, this time even deeper than before, as if he were reading a biography in his clothes and body language, in the care lines of the profiler’s face. “You took early retirement,” Dillon divined, “but you were called back for this one last interrogation. You didn’t want to come—but you did it as a favor.”

The profiler lifted his arms from the armrests, just to assure himself that he wasn’t the one shackled to the chair. “There are a dozen ways you could have known that. You could have heard someone talking—"

Dillon wasn’t listening. “What I’m wondering is why you were called in, and not someone else?”

Again, the invasive look: a radar scan that left the profiler feeling naked and vulnerable. “We’re here to talk about you,” he said impotently.

Then all at once Dillon drew a breath, and beamed as if suddenly infused with a powerful new awareness. “You’re not well!” he said, excitedly. “Worse than that—you’re dying, aren’t you?!”

The profiler threw a sudden gaze at the two-way mirror on the right wall. He regretted it instantly. It was on par with an actor looking at the camera. Entirely unprofessional, but his subject had chewed through his professionalism like a chainsaw. Dillon never took his eyes off of him—gray, unreadable eyes except that they seemed charged both with youth and weariness, as of an in­nocent who has seen too much evil in the world for his own good.