Death Benefits by Thomas Perry

dishonest? No. Can I prove it? No. I just have no reason to think she would, and quite a few to think she wouldn’t.”
    “I got that far on my own,” said Stillman. “She has a good record, and when she was hired, nothing got into her personnel file that was faked . . . . unlike a few other people.”
    “You’re saying there’s something wrong in my file?”
    “I’m not investigating you. I didn’t check everything in your file.”
    “You want to give me a lie detector test?”
    Stillman rolled his eyes and then blew out a breath in displeasure. “You are not the problem. You are helping me analyze the problem. And by the way, don’t ever volunteer to take a lie detector test.”
    “Why not—because people will just think I beat the machine?”
    “You hear about that more than it happens. Most of the people who can do it are nuts, and you don’t need a machine to know that you met one. What you don’t hear about is—HAH!” His shout was sudden and deafening. “How’s your pulse, kid?”
    It took Walker a second to settle back into his seat. His shirt collar suddenly felt tight. The arteries in his neck were pounding, and a faint film of moisture had materialized on his forehead. He fought down the anger. “That wasn’t funny.”
    “It wasn’t supposed to be funny,” said Stillman. “It was instructive. Your heartbeat, blood pressure, and breathing just took a big jump all at the same time. You’re lying.”
    “You’re saying the lie detector people are going to scream in my ear?”
    “They don’t have to. Any six-year-old on a playground knows how to piss off the kid beside him enough to get a reading.”
    “Then I’ll stay away from playgrounds, too.”
    “Good. Now, back to Ellen. You fucked her, right?”
    Walker sucked in a deep breath. “Are you still trying to be irritating?”
    “No, it’s a natural by-product of the search for knowledge,” said Stillman. “Didn’t you?”
    “No. I didn’t.” He tried to detect whether the tone of his voice had betrayed him, and judged that the genuine anger in it had masked the lie. He tested a suspicion. “Did somebody tell you I did?”
    “I don’t remember who told me. Cardarelli, maybe. Or it could have been Marcy Wang.”
    Walker smoldered. The idea that they would express outrage to him that Stillman was spying on employees, and then tell Stillman all the personal information he wanted on other people, was incredible. How had they even known? The revelation that any of them had known enough about what had passed between him and Ellen to make any conjecture was a shock. It had begun and ended in training, when they had all been almost strangers. “I can’t believe it,” he muttered.
    “Then don’t. Maybe I made it up and forgot. I heard you took her out during training. You didn’t?”
    Walker was tense and angry. What right did this guy have to ask these prying questions? This had nothing to do with his job or Ellen’s. He said with feigned patience, “I asked her out to dinner once. Then I asked her to go someplace with me another time, and she said no. A concert. That was it. She wasn’t interested, so I dropped it.”
    “What do you mean she wasn’t interested?”
    Walker sighed to convey his weariness of the topic. “She went out with me once. It was a nice place. We were both pleasant and smiled a lot. I liked her, and I wanted her to like me. A couple of days later, I got tickets to a concert, because she’d said she played the piano when she was a kid and still loved music. But when I asked, she gave me one of those excuses they have that tells you to forget it.”
    “Like what?”
    “Like they have to wash their hair. It was better than that, but it was still—I remember—she had to study for an exam we were having the day after the concert.” He glared. “Satisfied?”
    “You were twenty-two, and so was she, and neither of you was married,” said Stillman. “Jesus, I don’t know about people in