"Your visitors are here."

James LaRue stuck his hands through the small rectangular opening in the cell so the guard could slip a pair of handcuffs around his wrists. The heavy cage door was unlocked, the sound of metal against metal reverberating hollowly.

LaRue shuffled out, his slippers making a shushing sound against the glossy cement floor. He was led through a series of locked doors to a small, brightly lit room with surveillance cameras high on three walls and an inner observation window of reinforced glass.

Sitting at the table was Detective Elise Sandburg. With her was a guy with dark hair and an angry face.

They were both dressed like they were ready for a funeral.

An omen?

He sat down across from them, annoyed to find that the chair was difficult to get into gracefully because of the short chain used to anchor it to the floor.

So. There she was. The woman he'd drugged.

For a moment he found himself distracted by her strange eyes. They were multicolored, with dark lines going through them.

She was attractive, something he didn't recall because he'd been so fucked-up at the time. She was also very cool. Very together. Just like you'd think a detective would be, only prettier.

The guy… he was rougher around the edges. With the look of someone who needed some kind of fix. Maybe alcohol. Maybe drugs. Maybe even legal medication prescribed by a doctor who liked to keep his patients happy.

LaRue experienced a wave of panic.

He'd been panicking a lot lately.

What a stupid thing for him to do. A stupid, stupid thing. But it had seemed so logical at the time. Funny how that kind of thing worked. The guy-he would surely understand that. He'd surely done some stupid things while under the influence.

Now there was a good chance LaRue himself might end up in prison with murderers. With pedophiles. Where beasts with shaved heads and tattoos raped guys like him.

He looked from one to the other, hoping he didn't appear as desperate as he felt.

"Hey-" He glanced up at the guard.

She was a large, tough-looking woman he'd managed to coax a smile out of a few times. "Would it be possible to get something to drink?" he asked. To his visitors, Tie said, "Would you like something? Soda? My treat."

Detective Sandburg shook her head and, with a twist of her lip, said, "I'll pass."

LaRue inwardly cringed. Oh, shit. Last time he'd offered her something to drink, it had been laced with tetrodotoxin.

"Me too," said the guy.

She was pissed. Of course she was pissed. They were both pissed. Why wouldn't they be? But it wasn't as if he'd killed her. It wasn't as if he'd meant her any harm.

"Okay."

He waved his linked hands nervously in the air, as if to shoo away his bad idea and the time he'd already wasted. These were important people. Busy people.

"Stop wasting our time, LaRue."

Wow. Apparently the guy was a mind reader.

"I'm sorry," LaRue said. "And you are?"

"Detective Gould."

"Nice to meet you." He slid his hands across the table, cuffs jingling.

Gould leaned deeper into his chair. "I don't shake hands with people who poison my partner."

Double shit. "I don't know what you're talking about." LaRue pulled back his hands.

"You don't remember giving my partner a glass of water laced with tetrodotoxin?"

LaRue shook his head.

"But aren't you an expert on the stuff?" Gould asked.

"Well, yeah."

"Don't you sometimes have it in your house?"

"Hey, I can't help it if she somehow came upon some when she was snooping around my place."

"You mean, a glass laced with TTX just happened to bump into her mouth? Didn't you in fact offer her a drink? Didn't you in fact hand her the glass?"

This was bad. Really bad. Whatever happened, LaRue had to make this convincing. The rest of his life could depend on it…

"You have no proof of anything."

"I collected pieces of broken glass," Elise said. "Took them to the lab. Guess what they found?"

He let out a long breath. Shit, shit, shit.

"Tetrodotoxin," she said. "On a glass from your house. A glass you handed to me."

"Don't lie to us," Gould said. "Because we already know all the answers."

"Not everything. You can't know everything."

"We'll see about that."

They interrogated him for three hours.

Thank God nobody smoked. That would have been bad, because the room was small, and something like that could have really gotten LaRue's asthma stirred up.

The interrogation was pretty much what you'd expect. They bullied him. Especially the guy. LaRue could feel the hatred coming from him.

He was asked the why, where, who.

As the hours progressed, he could sense their growing frustration. They'd entered the room hoping to find him guilty of the tetrodotoxin murders, and he'd given them nothing to substantiate their theory. They were disappointed.

Sorry to let you down, peeps.

The interview shifted.

"What can you tell us about tetrodotoxin?" Detective Sandburg asked.

LaRue would have crossed his arms if it had been possible. Instead, he leaned back in his chair, hands in his lap. He stared from one to the other. "Nothing."

"Nothing?" Detective Gould asked in mock disbelief.

"I don't want to talk about tetrodotoxin."

Gould tensed up again. He leaned forward. "What you want has nothing to do with this conversation."

"I'm not going to talk about tetrodotoxin," LaRue said, shrugging his shoulders.

"What would I have to do to convince you?" Gould asked.

"Is that a threat?"

"Of course not," the guy lied, glancing up at a corner camera. "I would never threaten someone who poisoned my partner."

"My expertise has a price," LaRue said.

Gould made an impatient sound.

"I'm the most knowledgeable person in the country when it comes to tetrodotoxin," LaRue said smoothly. "And you should be taking advantage of such expansive knowledge. My education wasn't cheap. This is the U.S. We thrive on capitalism. I have a product. I sell the product. You buy the product."

"You want money?" Gould asked incredulously. "People are being murdered, and you want money?"

"Oh, and I suppose you're a volunteer detective."

Elise crossed her arms. "He wants the felony charge dropped."

LaRue smiled at her. She was a doll. A complete doll.

"Your ego is awe-inspiring," Gould said. "But you aren't the only tetrodotoxin expert in the country. Don't you think we've been in touch with other specialists? You have no bargaining power. Nothing to stand on. You can't tell us anything we don't already know or can't find out from someone else."

He was bluffing. Either that, or misinformed. Nobody knew as much about tetrodotoxin as LaRue. He looked up at Gould through his lashes. "You don't know anything about tetrodotoxin. Nothing. You think you do, but you don't. There's a secret society, a huge underground network of people who are addicted to TTX."

"Why would someone take poison for entertainment?" Detective Sandburg asked.

"At first, it's for the thrill. Like somebody else might go skydiving, or drive too fast. But then…"

He ran his tongue over his lips, then inwardly berated himself. They would think he wanted out because of his own addiction.

"It's not a physical addiction," he quickly said. "It's a mental one. It's a high like nothing else, because it is one step away from death. I understand that. I know all of the sweet corners, the stages TTX takes a person through."

He shifted in the slick chair. "You know what it's like. You know what I'm talking about," he said, addressing Detective Sandburg. "Don't you feel as if you've cheated death? You've mastered death? Doesn't it give you a feeling of power in a world where so much is beyond our control?"

"You know, Mr. LaRue, I wouldn't have described it as a pleasant experience. But maybe it's because it didn't involve free will."

Would she ever let that go? "I was a mess that day. A total mess."

"That should never be an excuse," Detective Sandburg said.

He was losing them.

"I have an idea," Gould said. "Why don't you stay here, and if we need your help, we'll know where to find you?"

This wasn't working. Not working!

Tears of fear and frustration welled in his eyes and everything got blurry. He couldn't end up in prison with creeps watching as if he were some tasty morsel they hadn't yet sampled. Or worse, had sampled. Why had he turned himself in? Why hadn't he seen where such action would lead? God, he was as naive as a ten-year-old.

He leaned close and whispered, staring directly into Detective Sandburg's eyes-because he felt that was where any chance of sympathy lay. "Can you imagine what it would be like for me if I go to prison? Where the animals are running the zoo? Look at me! I'm a scientist! I'm a geek! I haven't any street smarts."

Did they want him to beg? At this point, he didn't have a shred of pride left. He'd beg, if that's what they wanted. Fucking cops.

His nose was running. He had no choice but to lift his parallel hands and wipe mucus on the orange sleeve of his jumpsuit.

Using some spooky, silent form of communication, the detectives nodded to each other and got to their feet.

Detective Sandburg leaned forward, hands braced on the table. "This is what we're proposing," she said. "If you cooperate with us, if you answer all of our questions, then I'll consider dropping the felony charge." She pushed away from the table. "We're going to leave you alone for a couple of minutes. Give you a chance to think about it."

"He could still be involved in the killings," Elise said once they'd stepped into the hall, and the interrogation room door had closed firmly behind them. "He could even be working with somebody else." "That's a possibility," David said. "We could have him released and put a tail on him," Elise suggested. "If he is involved, well find out fairly quickly while he leads us to his accomplices. If he isn't involved, he could actually help us with the case."