Make Me

“Honey, if you’re sleeping together, make it a nine for sure. Always safer. But no higher. Ten gives them performance anxiety. But right now between the two of you we have a swing from either three or four at the low end to a pair of nines at the high end, even though one of the nines is really an eight, but we’re too polite to say so. But you get my drift. You’re normal people. If you swung from two to seven you’d still be normal, but you’d be seen as a little dour and reserved. Understand?”

Chang nodded.

“Now suppose your needle is jammed on zero. Doesn’t move at all. Zero at the bottom and zero at the top. That’s Michael. He was born unhappy. Born without the capacity to be happy. Born without any concept even of what happiness is. He doesn’t know it’s there.”

Chang said, “Is there a name for that?”

“They have names for everything now. Peter and I discuss them endlessly. None of them really fits. I like an old-fashioned vocabulary. I think of it as melancholy. But that sounds too weak and passive. Michael has depth of emotion. Just not range. You feel joy or passion, and he feels the same intensity, but it’s all hammering away down at the zero level. And he’s intelligent. He knows exactly what’s happening to him. The result is endless torment.”

“How old is he now?”

“He’s thirty-five.”

“What are the outward signs? Is he hard to get along with?”

“The opposite. You hardly know he’s there. He’s very quiet. He does what you tell him. He hardly speaks. He sits for days staring into space, chewing his lip, his eyes darting around. Or else he’s on his computer, or fiddling with his phone. There’s no aggression. He never gets upset. Upset would imply an emotional range.”

“Can he work?”

“That’s been part of the problem. He has to work, to qualify for housing. It’s part of the deal. And he can work. There are things he’s good at. But people find him draining. They don’t like to be with him. Productivity goes down. Usually he’s asked to leave. So he’s in and out of the programs.”

“Where does he live now?”

“Right now, nowhere. He went missing.”

At that point the bride-to-be came in, looking for her mother. A thin shirt over her bikini. Peter McCann’s niece. Michael McCann’s cousin. Up close she was still luminous. She glowed. She was close to perfect. Pre-natal care, perinatal care, post-natal care, pediatrics, nutrition, education, orthodontics, vacations, college, postgrad, a fiancé, the whole nine yards. Her assembly line had worked just fine. The American dream. A spectacular result. And she looked happy. Not silly, not giggly, not hyped up, and not an airhead. Just deeply and serenely content. With room at the top for ecstasy. Her needle ran from maybe six to ten. She had gotten everything her cousin hadn’t.

McCann’s sister went back out to the pool with her. She promised to return as soon as she could. Reacher and Chang sat quiet in the darkened den. They heard the sounds of the party, muted by walls and distance. Splashes and yelps and the clink of glasses, and the rolling murmur of conversation. Chang said, “We should call Westwood in LA. We should update him. A deal’s a deal. Plus we’re going to need another hotel.”

Reacher said, “Tell him we need everything he has on the Deep Web. All his notes. Or maybe tell him to come out here to explain it all in person. We might not understand his notes. He can get on a plane. He’s getting the book deal.”

Chang put her phone on speaker and dialed, and she gave the guy the play-by-play, everything that had happened since she last called, from the West Hollywood motel. She mentioned Chicago, the library, the mom-and-pop pharmacy, McCann’s street, McCann’s house, Hackett, the neighbor, the Lincoln Park homicide, the flight to Phoenix, and finally the sister. And then the son, in the long term trapped between zero and zero, and in the short term missing.

Westwood said, “They call it anhedonia. The inability to experience pleasure.”

“The sister makes it sound worse than that.”

“And Keever’s job was to find him and bring him home?”

“We assume so. We didn’t get that far in the story. We were interrupted.”

“I don’t see how the Deep Web or two hundred deaths are involved. This feels like the crime desk, not the science desk. Or one of those human tragedy stories.”

“It could be all three. We don’t know yet.”

“Where are you staying?”

“We haven’t figured that out.”

“OK, I’ll call you when I land.”

The line went dead.

Reacher said, “Apparently Michael spends time on his computer, or fiddling with his phone. Maybe that’s the Deep Web connection. Maybe he’s in some weird kind of chat room all the time. Maybe he has a whole life no one else knows about.”

“He’s depressed, not weird.”

“Depressed means what it says, which is pushed down below the normal position. Which implies a range. Which Michael doesn’t have. Which is weird. Or unusual, to be polite. But he’s intelligent, she said. Maybe there are support groups on-line. Maybe he started one.”

“Why would it need to be secret?”