Broken Connections, Chapter Two: Splinters
The sprinklers had run their course. Amanda was wet and miserable, shivering under the dry blanket the police woman, or detective, or government agent, or whatever had brought her. The woman was blonde and young-looking on first glance, but Amanda had noticed Audrey Hanson had lines around her eyes and a way of holding herself that wasn't 'young' at all. "None of it was my fault," Amanda said defensively from under her blanket. Maybe if she said it often enough, they'd believe her and let her go.
"You're going to have to explain it to me - all of it," Audrey told her. "That's the only way this can work. I've already spoken with several others who were there, so I know a lot of it."
"None of us would talk with you! You're one of them!"
Audrey tilted her head slightly. "Mrs. Comey talked with me. About you, in fact. She's concerned about you, and about Jennie, too. With her immunity to heat, she was able to pull two police officers out of the fires you started, saving their lives. She's a hero - and she doesn't see a distinction between 'them' and 'us'."
Amanda scowled, but she couldn't keep up the angry act. In the face of the implied disapproval of Mrs. Comey, she sighed and let her shoulders slump. Mrs. Comey was one of the nicest and mildest of the carnies. Every morning, she cooked such delicious blueberry pancakes for everyone. If she had thought it was okay to talk to the police, then … then maybe it was. And Audrey was right about how the breakfast lady had tried to stop the fighting.
"It all started when those frat boys stole some of the teddy bear prizes. That was after the hero guy teleported us back."
"What did they look like?"
"They were pink and purple and about three feet tall," Amanda said. "They were the big ones."
Audrey blinked a couple times. "No, I meant the frat boys, not the … bears."
Amanda gave her a confused look, like she was crazy for asking. "I don't know! They were frat boys!" She rolled her eyes at how unimportant they were. Getting the bears back mattered a lot more. "Besides, I didn't see them."
"Oh." She looked disappointed.
"But I know what happened," Amanda jumped in, not wanting to seem out of the loop. "Ian and Keith went over to the police to get them to do something about the stolen bears, but the cops were all busy asking what we were doing having a carnival in the middle of Central Park, like we didn't have a right to be there," she said indignantly. "It's a public place, right?" Audrey gave her a half-hearted nod, like she wanted to disagree, but couldn't quite do it. "So Ian and Keith were trying to get the cops to get the bears back - they could see still see the frat guys walking off with them, flipping them off and being rude, but the police wouldn't. They wouldn't do anything!"
Amanda hadn't been there herself, but she was reporting what she'd been told, hurriedly by Ian, and doing a little extrapolating of her own. "When Ian and Keith said 'then fine, we'll just go get the bears ourselves,' the cops told them that would be stealing, and how did they know the frat guys hadn't won those bears as prizes? Hello?" she said in exasperation at the stupidity of some people. "We'd been gone for over an hour! No one was there running the games while that Japanese guy had his bloody nose and whatever. They stole those bears and the cops knew it, but when it came down to taking our side or theirs, they took theirs, because you cops don't care about us at all!"
Audrey exhaled heavily and gave an ambivalent shrug that Amanda interpreted as an admission of defeat.
"Yeah," Amanda said harshly. "So when Keith said he didn't care what the cops were going to do, or something … I'm not sure what exactly happened, but the cops pushed him down and put handcuffs on him and were yelling at Ian and going to do the same thing to him, but he ran off and got me and some of the rest of us. When we came back, they'd put Keith in a cop car and when we told them they had to let him go, he hadn't done anything wrong, they basically told us to stick it - they were cops, they could do what they wanted, and we needed to get the carnival out of Central Park before they had trucks show up and impound everything." Amanda grimaced and pursed her lips, brows pulling together. In a shaky voice, she said, "But without Samuel, we couldn't get it out of there. I mean, we just couldn't. There … there aren't enough trucks. We don't have trucks- that's not how we moved the carnival around. We, we always used his power. But without him … so we were stuck. And I … I got mad. I told them they had to let Keith go and they couldn't take away our home, and then when they just laughed at me, I set one of their cars on fire to show them I wasn't messing around."
"And that's how it started." It wasn't really a question.
Amanda nodded. "Except they started it by not going after the people who stole the bears!" She glared at Audrey until the other woman nodded in agreement. Only then did Amanda continue the tale. "After I set the police car on fire, the cops pulled guns and everyone started yelling and they started shooting and John caught the bullets but I didn't see that at first - the bullets, I just thought they'd missed me - so I set another car on fire that had people in it who had just pulled up. I thought they'd get out or leave or something, but for some reason they didn't. Maybe, like, they couldn't, because I could see them trying to open the doors but they wouldn't open."
"Ah," Audrey said softly. "Do you think John, who caught the bullets, might have also jammed the doors?"
"Why would he do that?"
Audrey shrugged. "Maybe he didn't understand that you weren't trying to kill them. Maybe he thought, when you threw a ball of fire at an occupied car and engulfed it, that you were trying to hurt or kill the people inside." She added understandingly, "You were just trying to scare them, right?"
"Well … yeah, I guess. I wasn't thinking. There was just … so much going on. Then Mrs. Comey went over and pulled them out, and the other cops had shot someone - I didn't see who - and Teddy showed up with a gun from somewhere and the cops ran off, the cowards."
Audrey frowned at Amanda's slander of the rational response of the police. "But that wasn't the end of it." Again, it wasn't a question.
"No. We were, um ..." Amanda shrugged. They'd been excited, elated at their 'victory', and still angry about the police misbehavior, the theft of the bears, and the threat to impound and/or destroy their homes. At least they'd been able to get Keith out of the cop car he'd been abandoned in. "We thought, maybe, if they saw they couldn't push us around, that they'd leave us alone. Samuel had said this would be the night when we showed everyone what we could do, after all, so maybe he'd seen this? Different groups had different ideas and without anyone there who was in charge, we sort of all went off to do our own thing. So we burned some stuff, some buildings and cars, whatever we found in the street. We thought maybe all the cops and firemen would be busy dealing with that and we could just cloak the carnival again and stay that way until we figured out what to do." She frowned at how mistaken they had been. "It didn't work out."
Audrey nodded at the understatement.
"There are a lot more police out there than I knew," Amanda said. She knew New York City had a big police force, but it hadn't prepared her for how cops and agents and SWAT teams and fire trucks and all sorts of emergency responders had come swarming out of nowhere less than half an hour from the initial fracas. Once she and the Bowman family, who were the other firestarters of the carnival, had been doused with a fire hose, things had gone really badly for them. It was how she had ended up here in an interrogation room. And the Bowmans - Gail had been shot, maybe killed and she was pretty sure the police had Chris, too. She didn't even know what had happened to Jennie, a few years younger than herself - they'd been separated during one of the waves of tear gas. It sounded like Mrs. Comey didn't know what had happened to her either. Jennie had been her best friend. Now neither one of them had a family.
"The carnival is over, isn't it?" Amanda asked sadly with a hiccup in her voice. Another home, another family, lost because she couldn't control her ability. It was all her fault after all.
Audrey nodded slowly. "I'm sorry."
XXX
"You have no right to hold me. I haven't done anything wrong." Claire threw back her head in defiance after Audrey made her introductions and offered her a coffee Claire wasn't about to drink.
Audrey sat down opposite her at the table. "Of course not. That's why you're here."
Claire looked dubious, as that wasn't her understanding of how the legal process worked. "If you already know, then why are you questioning me?"
"I didn't say I already knew anything. What do you think I need to know?"
"That there are people with abilities out there."
Audrey nodded. "Yep. I knew that."
"You did?"
"Yes. Maybe not as long as you have or as personally, but for the last four years, I've been living and breathing stuff about these 'abilities'. I spend all my time chasing down criminal cases involving them. That's my job."
Claire wondered if Audrey didn't remember interviewing her in Texas all those years ago. Maybe she didn't, or had lost her memory of it. Claire didn't know and so decided to pretend it hadn't happened. "Having an ability doesn't make a person a criminal."
"Of course not. But committing crimes does. And sometimes, people with abilities do that. Just like people who don't have abilities."
Claire's brows drew down in a suspicious scowl. That was true. Sylar and Samuel came to mind - there were definitely villains among those gifted with powers. "So … you're like the Company? What happened to the Homeland Security thing?"
"The 'Homeland Security thing' didn't pan out. We're trying to be more selective these days, which is why I need all the information you can give me."
"'These days'? You had me on round-the-clock surveillance just a few months ago. I don't have to give you any information. You probably know more than I do!"
"Maybe." Audrey shrugged like it didn't matter, which Claire found irritating. "I recognize that you're a US citizen and you have rights. But I'll let you know, there are a lot of other people I've been talking to tonight, and a bunch of them are not happy with you."
"Me?" Claire was outraged. "What did I do?"
"Your name keeps coming up. They tell me you conspired with your father to infiltrate them and then sell them out so the Company could abduct Samuel Sullivan and allow the government to swoop in and dismantle the carnival for good."
"That's ..." Claire huffed in disbelief. "No!" She jangled at the chains that cuffed her hands to the heavy, fire-scorched table. "That's not it at all!" None of that was supposed to happen. But she'd overheard the media between interviews earlier this night. Apparently there'd been a riot or something after she'd left. What had happened while she was closeted with the reporters for all those hours, showing them her ability and talking about the government's secret programs? And where was Noah during all of this? Was he okay? After her jump off the Ferris Wheel, the reporters had quickly talked her into walking the few blocks to an insulated local sound stage where they began to take turns getting their own private air time with her, the others spending the time in between calling up experts on biology and medicine and coming back with better questions, some of which had puzzled even her. It had been very distracting, ended only by whatever agency Audrey Hanson worked for showing up and virtually arresting her - which was how she'd gotten here, in an interrogation room which had, from the looks of it, already seen a lot of odd traffic tonight.
"Well," Audrey shrugged, "That's what they tell me." Audrey shrugged again, this time with only one shoulder, sort of ambivalently. Claire was getting really tired of her shrugging. It reminded her of Jackie Wilcox, all those years ago. "Their story hangs together. It kind of looks like it might be true."
"It isn't!" Claire hissed, alarmed by the accusation and provoked by what she was thinking had to be a deliberately annoying affectation on Audrey's part.
"Okay." Audrey looked at her expectantly.
Claire sighed heavily and leaned back. It was obvious that Audrey expected her to spill the beans and tell her side of the story. She knew she was being played, but she had to say something. "I was invited to the carnival. I went several times. I was welcomed each time. They wanted me to join. I told them I'd consider it. So it wasn't like I was 'infiltrating' them. They sought me out."
"Were you invited last night?"
It still felt like 'tonight' to Claire, but given that it was somewhere past four in the morning, she assumed 'last night' was correct. "Yes."
After a long pause, Audrey said, "So, about the part where you conspired to make Samuel powerless so the Company could abduct him …?"
"That's … not … really true. I mean, it sort of is, but you make it sound awful. It's not! Samuel was going to do something really bad, like open up another of those sinkholes or tear down buildings. Right here in New York!"
Audrey nodded. "Big earthquake. Yeah, that's a big deal in a major city like this. 9/11 only took down a few buildings. A big enough earthquake right here could take down the whole island. We're lucky it didn't do more damage than it did, but people still died - at least two on the docks, and I wouldn't be surprised if we hear of more as news trickles in."
Claire nodded in return and was silent. She was afraid of getting herself in deep trouble here, but she couldn't see where the line was between safe and unsafe information to share. She wished she could just leave, but she was chained to the table and wasn't sure if anyone who cared about her even knew where she was. It wasn't like the government had told the press where they were taking her. Last she'd seen her father was at the carnival, escorting Doyle away.
"So that's your side of it," Audrey said. "But the people I've talked to felt betrayed - by you in particular."
"They shouldn't!" Claire burst out. "I saved them!"
"What about taking them away from the carnival? Suddenly everyone could see it. Police were called. It was a mess. They lost their homes!"
"What?"
Audrey looked innocent and shrugged.
Claire ground her teeth. "They lost their homes? What do you mean?"
"What did you think was going to happen if you took everyone away from the carnival all at once? They couldn't hide it anymore."
Claire blinked, thinking about that. "But … they came back, right? Hiro brought them back … right?"
"Eventually." Audrey shrugged and stood up. "I guess you were off with the reporters during all of that. I was just hoping you could shed a little more light on it."
Claire didn't know what to say. She was still reeling from the idea that she'd ruined the lives of everyone in the carnival. Had she?
Audrey stopped at the door. "You know, it's funny. Four years ago, one of my first cases was this serial killer named Sylar. You and I met in Odessa, Texas, remember?" Claire nodded, realizing Audrey had known they'd met before and her ignorance was an act designed to extract more information from her. "You said you didn't know him then." Audrey chewed her lip slowly. "But you were there a couple months ago when he tried to kill the president at the Stanton Hotel. You were standing right beside him when he signed in as Nathan Petrelli. Apparently, he's been at the carnival a lot since then." Claire's eyes widened as she met the icy blue ones of Agent Hanson. "Which is pretty much the same time frame that you've been going there, too." She opened the door. "Until I get to the bottom of this, you aren't going anywhere."